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<p>Motherhood has fallen prey to the psycho-pharmaceutical complex. If new legislation known as the Mother’s Act becomes law, the drugging of infants through pregnant and nursing mothers will no doubt increase. Congress has rightfully refused to pass this bill for eight years. The official title is currently the “Melanie Blocker Stokes Mom’s Opportunity to Access Health, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act of 2009.”</p>
<p>The legislation was introduced in the House during the 110th Congress on January 4, 2007, by Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush and later reintroduced into both bodies of the new Congress in January 2009, after the bill died in the Senate last year.</p>
<p>Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey, home to a large number of drug companies, and Richard Durbin (D-IL) are the main sponsors of the bill in the Senate.</p>
<p>In a March 30, 2009 speech on the House floor, Congressman Rush identified the target of this piece of legislation when he claimed that, “60 to 80 percent of new mothers experience symptoms of postpartum depression while the more serious condition, postpartum psychosis, affects up to 20 percent of women who have recently given birth.”</p>
<p>After the House voted to pass the legislation on that day, the Congressman stated: “H. R. 20 will finally put significant money and attention into research, screening, treatment and education for mothers suffering from this disease.”</p>
<p>However, he only mentions screening and treatment for postpartum depression. The true goal of the promoters of this Act is to transform women of child bearing age into life-long consumers of psychiatric treatment by screening women for a whole list of “mood” and “anxiety” disorders and not simply postpartum depression.</p>
<p>Enough cannot be said about the ability of anyone with a white coat and a medical title to convince vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers that the thoughts and feelings they experience on any given day might be abnormal.</p>
<p>The constant watching and barrage of questions such as are you depressed, are you anxious, are you moody, are you fearful of motherhood, are you sleeping well, are there changes in your eating habits, will predictably have the net effect of convincing many women that normal thoughts and emotions are a sign of mental disorders.</p>
<p>In the March 13, 2008 NewsWithViews article, “Branding Pregnancy as a Mental Illness,” Byron Richards writes:</p>
<p>“The Mothers Act has the net affect of reclassifying the natural process of pregnancy and birth as a mental disorder that requires the use of unproven and extremely dangerous psychotropic medications (which can also easily harm the child). The bill was obviously written by the Big Pharma lobby and its passage into law would be considered laughable except that it is actually happening.”</p>
<p>While mania, psychosis, agitation, hostility, anxiety, confusion, depression and suicidality are often cited as “symptoms” of mental illness, many of the same exact “symptoms” are listed as side effects on the warning labels for antidepressants, antipsychotics and anticonvulsants.</p>
<p>All of these drugs are now being prescribed to treat the “mood” and “anxiety” disorders that women will be screened for if the Act becomes law. In the case of pregnant women, no psychiatric drug has been FDA approved as safe for use.</p>
<p>The newly recruited customers will be stigmatized for life with labels of the most serious forms of mental illness simply because they are unlucky enough to become pregnant in the United States, where serious disorders lead to major profits from the prescribing of multiple classes of psychotropic drugs.</p>
<p>On September 1, 2008, Medical News Today ran a headline for a study that stated: “Americans Show Little Tolerance For Mental Illness Despite Growing Belief In Genetic Cause.” The study by University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Jason Schnittker showed that while more Americans believe that mental illness has genetic causes, the country is no more tolerant of the mentally ill than it was 10 years ago.</p>
<p>The study explored tolerance in terms of: unwillingness to live next door to a mentally ill person, having a group home for the mentally ill in the neighborhood, spending an evening socializing with a mentally ill person, working closely with such a person on the job, making friends with someone with a mental illness or having a mentally ill person marry into the family.</p>
<p>Multi-billion dollar industry</p>
<p>In an article for AlterNet on June 18, 2008, Dr Bruce Levine, author of the book, “Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic,” explains how the psycho-pharmaceutical cartel works.&#160; “Mental health treatment in the United States is now a multibillion-dollar industry,” he reports, “and all the rules of industrial complexes apply.”</p>
<p>“Not only does Big Pharma have influential psychiatrists… in their pocket, virtually every mental health institution from which doctors, the press, and the general public receive their mental health information is financially interconnected with Big Pharma.”</p>
<p>“The American Psychiatric Association, psychiatry’s professional organization, is hugely dependent on drug company grants, and this is also true for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other so-called consumer organizations.”</p>
<p>“Harvard and other prestigious university psychiatry departments take millions of dollars from drug companies, and the National Institute of Mental Health funds researchers who are financially connected with drug companies.”</p>
<p>More Democrats than Republicans are supporting the Mother’s Act. The increased campaign funding to Democrats may well explain this turn of events. For the last eight election cycles the pharmaceutical industry has contributed far more to Republicans than Democrats. In the 2006 cycle the percentage was 28% to Democrats and 70% to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks political funding.</p>
<p>But the Democrats were close to matching the Republicans for the 2008 cycle with $5,099,942 to Democrats compared to $5,680,871 to Republicans, which is probably why the Democrats would allow such an obvious drug marketing scheme to be implemented.</p>
<p>“The Mothers Act, while appearing like an Act of benevolence, is a dangerous and unnecessary measure that will result in the further over-prescription of drugs that are already grotesquely over-prescribed,” says Kate Gillespie, one of the lead attorneys handling SSRI birth defect lawsuits and Paxil suicide cases at the Los Angeles based Baum, Hedlund, Aristei &amp; Goldman law firm.</p>
<p>“The Act is a slippery slope,” she warns, “toward the forced drugging of women of childbearing years with drugs of questionable efficacy and serious safety issues effecting mothers and their innocent children – drugs that can cause horrific side effects, including, suicidal behavior, violence and devastating birth defects.”</p>
<p>“Of course, mothers who truly cannot cope should be helped,” Ms Gillespie says, “but do we really need legislation requiring mothers to be screened and drugged?”</p>
<p>“Take out politics and Big Pharma and the push for this legislation just doesn’t make sense,” she states.</p>
<p>“For politicians, a much safer issue than pushing drugs for pregnant mothers is promoting the expansion of medical treatment for postpartum depression,” according to Dr Levine.</p>
<p>He says the Mother’s Act “omits relevant truths” about Melanie Blocker-Stokes, the woman the bill is named after, and the following information about her suicide should be made known:</p>
<p>“Blocker-Stokes… did in fact receive extensive psychiatric treatment. She was hospitalized three times in seven weeks, given four combinations of anti-psychotic, anti-anxiety, and antidepressant medications, and underwent electroconvulsive therapy (electroshock). But despite her psychiatric treatment — or because of it — Melanie Blocker-Stokes jumped to her death from the twelfth floor of a Chicago hotel.”</p>
<p>“There is no evidence that antidepressant use by depressed mothers lowers their likelihood of suicide,” Dr Levine says, “and there is a great deal of evidence that antidepressant use can make some people manic, agitated, and violent.”</p>
<p>Money-making promoters behind the Act</p>
<p>Katherine Stone runs an internet website called “Postpartum Progress” and posts a daily blog. She also serves on the board of Postpartum Support International as the public relations outreach chairwoman. Her Bio says she “is a nationally-recognized, award-winning advocate for women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.”</p>
<p>“In 2001,” Katherine reports on her website, that “she suffered postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder after the birth of her first child. The feeling of isolation and shame she suffered inspired her to create Postpartum Progress, which has become the most widely-read blog in the United States on postpartum depression, postpartum OCD, antepartum depression, postpartum PTSD and postpartum psychosis.”</p>
<p>On another page titled, “The Art of Psychiatric Medication,” Katherine tells women to hang in there if a medication does not work because for her diagnosis of OCD, she states:</p>
<p>“I’ve taken many medications, including Effexor, Celexa, Seroquel, Risperdal, Wellbutrin, Luvox, Cymbalta, etc.&#160; Throughout all of them, I was on the road to recovery.&#160; Some just worked better than others at treating my symptoms.”</p>
<p>She ends the commentary by telling women: “You will find the right medication for you, and you will get better.”</p>
<p>The prescribing of seven drugs, including two antipsychotics and five antidepressants, to treat OCD is a typical example of the profit-driven drugging that women snagged by the Mother’s Act will face, but it’s a far cry from the description Katherine wrote about regarding the comparatively minor treatment she received, when she stated in the June 7, 2004 issue of Newsweek, “in my case, that meant taking an antidepressant and going for weekly therapy sessions.”</p>
<p>Aside from all the serious health risks now known to be associated with these drugs, most women could not afford the 7-drug “cure” that Katherine ingested. According to DrugStore.com in December 2008, from first to last, at a middle dose for a 30-day supply, the drugs would cost: Effexor $197.86, Celexa $279.92, Seroquel $388.38, Risperdal $652.07, Wellbutrin XI $202.08, Luvox CR $135.99, and Cymbalta $366.62. The cost of “etc” is impossible to calculate without knowing how many more drugs she took.</p>
<p>In a March 11, 2009 Postpartum Progress blog, Katherine plugs herself for speaking jobs, along with a study that concluded “the Internet is a viable and feasible tool to screen for PPD.”</p>
<p>“I’ll be adding this study to the speech I give on how women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders use the Internet,” she reports, and then adds:</p>
<p>“If you’re interested in having&#160;me speak at your event, let me know!” On March 10, 2009, Katherine’s headline read:&#160; “It’s Petition Signing Time!&#160; Get Out Your Virtual Pen &amp; Support Women with PPD”, and reported “that Susan Stone over at Perinatal Pro is alerting everyone to the new petition created by the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to support the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act.&#160; She states that last year’s petition generated more than 24,000 signatures.&#160; The petition has been reintroduced this year to try and get this legislation passed once again.”</p>
<p>The blog carried a live link to a page where “you can scroll down, enter your zip code and generate letters of support in a matter of seconds for the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act that will be sent to your local Congresspeople and Senators.”</p>
<p>Katherine further told readers: “I know you’re thinking ‘but I already did that last year.’&#160; Well that was then and this is now.&#160; Do it again.” The 2007 Annual Report for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance shows this Big Pharma front group received between $150,000 and $499,000 from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Wyeth. Abbott Labs, Cyberonics, Eli Lilly, Forest Labs, GlaxoSmithKline, Organon, and Otsuka American Pharmaceuticals each gave between $10,000 and $149,999.</p>
<p>The 2006 Annual Report shows that AstraZeneca gave the group more than $500,000. Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Wyeth gave between $150,000 and $499,000, and Forest Labs, Glaxo, Janssen, Pfizer, and Shire Pharmaceuticals each gave between $10,000 and $149,000. The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance in Baltimore also received $5,000 from Eli Lilly in the first quarter of 2008, according to Lilly’s grant report.</p>
<p>In the section of the 2007 Annual report “at a Glance: How We Met Our Mission,” among the things accomplished by the group, it states:</p>
<p>“Promoted Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research &amp; Care Act at invitation of Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.)</p>
<p>“Promoted MOTHER’s Act at invitation of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)” After writing letters to Congress through the link established by the industry funded Alliance, those visiting Postpartum Progress will hopefully click on the link to Amazon and buy the book “Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders: Perspectives and Treatment Guide for the Health Care Practitioner” by none other than the Perinatal Pro “expert,” Susan (Dowd) Stone, and Alexis Menkin, at a special price of $43.20, for a savings of $10.80.</p>
<p>Katherine also provides a link to the PerinatalPro website, where women can find treatment for all the “mood” and “anxiety” disorders diagnosed with internet screenings at “Blue Skye Consulting,” where Susan is listed as the Managing Director and Owner.</p>
<p>She also served as president of&#160;Postpartum Support International from 2006 – 2008, as vice-president and Conference Chair in 2005 – 2006, and will chair the group’s President’s Advisory Council through 2010. This group brags of being the leading proponent of the Mother’s Act. On March 2, 2009, Susan’s PerinatalPro Blog announced: “The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act moves forward!” and stated:</p>
<p>“Thank you to Congressman Bobby L. Rush, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez and Senator Richard Durbin for your unceasing efforts on behalf of America’s mothers!”</p>
<p>She should have thanked these members of Congress for boosting her career status and yearly income from her treatment center, speaking fees and book sales.</p>
<p>On PerinatalPro, Susan posts a running list of supporters for the Mother’s Act. On March 27, 2009, the list included many drug company funded groups. For instance, the American Psychiatric Association is listed as a supporter. In 2006, the pharmaceutical industry provided close to 30% of the Association’s $62.5 million in financing, according to the July 12, 2008 New York Times.</p>
<p>In the first quarter of 2007, Eli Lilly gave the Association grants worth more than $412,000, according to Lilly’s grant report. The group also received $623,190 from Lilly in the first quarter of 2008.</p>
<p>In her PerinatalPro blogs, Susan has nothing but praise for Katherine’s website and directs visitors back to Postpartum Progress with a live link. On March 16, 2009, Katherine posted a “Quick Survey on Postpartum Anxiety,” and wrote:</p>
<p>“The fabulous Karen Kleiman has asked me to ask you to participate in a short, five-question online survey on anxiety.&#160; She says ANYONE can answer it, regardless of the age of their baby(s) and regardless of diagnosis or lack thereof.&#160; ANY mother should answer the questions.&#160; It’s super quick — I know because I took it myself.”</p>
<p>Kleiman must be fabulous because she has three books for sale on Postpartum Progress with links to purchase them on Amazon.&#160; In fact, there are a total of fourteen books for sale on Katherine’s site from which she most likely gets a kick-back with every sale.</p>
<p>Kleiman’s survey is an excellent example of the methods used to con women into suspecting they are mentally ill via the “expert” blogs. The preface states: “The questions on this survey can be answered by a new mother of an infant or an empty-nester with good recall of the early days with her baby. Please answer as honestly as you can.”</p>
<p>The question, capital letters and all, reads: “When you were carrying your baby down a flight of stairs, did you EVER, at ANY time, have ANY thought, image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby?” The survey further tells women:</p>
<p>If you answered YES to the first question, please describe the type of worry you had: Scary thoughts about dropping the baby, Scary images about dropping the baby, Both thoughts and images, Other.</p>
<p>How much distress did this cause you? A Great deal of distress, Some distress but I quickly got over it, Some distress that seemed to linger, Not much stress</p>
<p>Did this thought or image occur once or did it recur? Only once, It recurred frequently, It recurred persistently, It occurred off and on, Did you ever tell anyone about the fear of dropping the baby? (Please describe why you chose to tell someone or why you chose not to) As a mother with good recall, the “honest” answer is yes, with two babies born 4 years apart, every single night as I stumbled out of bed half asleep for a nightly feeding, my normal fear instinct kicked in and warned me to be careful not to trip and fall down the stairs or drop the baby.</p>
<p>Women who take the survey are told nothing about what the results mean; but clearly the seed is planted that something is wrong if you “EVER, at ANY time, have ANY thought, image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby”.</p>
<p>Katherine’s website also provides links to the “Top Women’s PPMD Treatment Programs &amp; Specialists.”&#160; The first link on the list takes women to the “Emory Women’s Mental Health Program” that primarily focuses on “the evaluation and treatment of emotional disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period,” according to Emory University’s website. Lilly’s 2008 first quarter grant report shows Emory’s Department of Psychiatry received $25,000.</p>
<p>The “experts” at Emory include some top pharmaceutical industry shills. For example, a link to “Articles” brings up roughly 90 studies and papers that include the co-author Dr Charles Nemeroff. Nemeroff is on an ever-growing list of academic researchers in the field of psychiatry under investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee for not disclosing millions of dollars of income from the makers of psychotropic drugs.</p>
<p>Emory’s investigation found he was paid more than $960,000 by Paxil maker, GlaxoSmithKline, from 2000 through 2006, but listed less than $35,000 on his Emory disclosure forms.&#160; All totaled, Nemeroff had earnings of $2.8 million from speaking and consulting arrangements with drug companies between 2000 and 2007, but only disclosed a fraction of that amount, according to the Senate Finance Committee reports.</p>
<p>On July 23, 2008, Medscape Psychiatry &amp; Mental Health posted an article by Nemeroff titled: “Weighing Risk and Benefit for Treatment of Depression in Pregnancy and Post Partum”. On March 17, 2009, the Medscape website stated: “This article is temporarily unavailable.”</p>
<p>Maybe that’s because the “top expert,” Dr Nemeroff, recently stepped down as chairman of Emory’s psychiatry department.</p>
<p>EVELYN PRINGLE is an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America. She can be reached at: <a href="" type="internal">epringle05@yahoo.cm</a></p>
<p>This article sponsored by the Baum, Hedlund, Aristei &amp; Goldman law firm <a href="http://www.baumhedlundlaw.com" type="external">www.baumhedlundlaw.com</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/04/07/motherhood-and-the-psycho-pharmaceutical-complex/ | 2009-04-07 | 4left
| 3,047 | Motherhood has fallen prey to the psychopharmaceutical complex If new legislation known as the Mother8217s Act becomes law the drugging of infants through pregnant and nursing mothers will no doubt increase Congress has rightfully refused to pass this bill for eight years The official title is currently the 8220Melanie Blocker Stokes Mom8217s Opportunity to Access Health Education Research and Support for Postpartum Depression Act of 20098221 The legislation was introduced in the House during the 110th Congress on January 4 2007 by Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush and later reintroduced into both bodies of the new Congress in January 2009 after the bill died in the Senate last year Democratic Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey home to a large number of drug companies and Richard Durbin DIL are the main sponsors of the bill in the Senate In a March 30 2009 speech on the House floor Congressman Rush identified the target of this piece of legislation when he claimed that 822060 to 80 percent of new mothers experience symptoms of postpartum depression while the more serious condition postpartum psychosis affects up to 20 percent of women who have recently given birth8221 After the House voted to pass the legislation on that day the Congressman stated 8220H R 20 will finally put significant money and attention into research screening treatment and education for mothers suffering from this disease8221 However he only mentions screening and treatment for postpartum depression The true goal of the promoters of this Act is to transform women of child bearing age into lifelong consumers of psychiatric treatment by screening women for a whole list of 8220mood8221 and 8220anxiety8221 disorders and not simply postpartum depression Enough cannot be said about the ability of anyone with a white coat and a medical title to convince vulnerable pregnant women and new mothers that the thoughts and feelings they experience on any given day might be abnormal The constant watching and barrage of questions such as are you depressed are you anxious are you moody are you fearful of motherhood are you sleeping well are there changes in your eating habits will predictably have the net effect of convincing many women that normal thoughts and emotions are a sign of mental disorders In the March 13 2008 NewsWithViews article 8220Branding Pregnancy as a Mental Illness8221 Byron Richards writes 8220The Mothers Act has the net affect of reclassifying the natural process of pregnancy and birth as a mental disorder that requires the use of unproven and extremely dangerous psychotropic medications which can also easily harm the child The bill was obviously written by the Big Pharma lobby and its passage into law would be considered laughable except that it is actually happening8221 While mania psychosis agitation hostility anxiety confusion depression and suicidality are often cited as 8220symptoms8221 of mental illness many of the same exact 8220symptoms8221 are listed as side effects on the warning labels for antidepressants antipsychotics and anticonvulsants All of these drugs are now being prescribed to treat the 8220mood8221 and 8220anxiety8221 disorders that women will be screened for if the Act becomes law In the case of pregnant women no psychiatric drug has been FDA approved as safe for use The newly recruited customers will be stigmatized for life with labels of the most serious forms of mental illness simply because they are unlucky enough to become pregnant in the United States where serious disorders lead to major profits from the prescribing of multiple classes of psychotropic drugs On September 1 2008 Medical News Today ran a headline for a study that stated 8220Americans Show Little Tolerance For Mental Illness Despite Growing Belief In Genetic Cause8221 The study by University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Jason Schnittker showed that while more Americans believe that mental illness has genetic causes the country is no more tolerant of the mentally ill than it was 10 years ago The study explored tolerance in terms of unwillingness to live next door to a mentally ill person having a group home for the mentally ill in the neighborhood spending an evening socializing with a mentally ill person working closely with such a person on the job making friends with someone with a mental illness or having a mentally ill person marry into the family Multibillion dollar industry In an article for AlterNet on June 18 2008 Dr Bruce Levine author of the book 8220Surviving America8217s Depression Epidemic8221 explains how the psychopharmaceutical cartel worksamp160 8220Mental health treatment in the United States is now a multibilliondollar industry8221 he reports 8220and all the rules of industrial complexes apply8221 8220Not only does Big Pharma have influential psychiatrists8230 in their pocket virtually every mental health institution from which doctors the press and the general public receive their mental health information is financially interconnected with Big Pharma8221 8220The American Psychiatric Association psychiatry8217s professional organization is hugely dependent on drug company grants and this is also true for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other socalled consumer organizations8221 8220Harvard and other prestigious university psychiatry departments take millions of dollars from drug companies and the National Institute of Mental Health funds researchers who are financially connected with drug companies8221 More Democrats than Republicans are supporting the Mother8217s Act The increased campaign funding to Democrats may well explain this turn of events For the last eight election cycles the pharmaceutical industry has contributed far more to Republicans than Democrats In the 2006 cycle the percentage was 28 to Democrats and 70 to Republicans according to the Center for Responsive Politics a nonprofit group that tracks political funding But the Democrats were close to matching the Republicans for the 2008 cycle with 5099942 to Democrats compared to 5680871 to Republicans which is probably why the Democrats would allow such an obvious drug marketing scheme to be implemented 8220The Mothers Act while appearing like an Act of benevolence is a dangerous and unnecessary measure that will result in the further overprescription of drugs that are already grotesquely overprescribed8221 says Kate Gillespie one of the lead attorneys handling SSRI birth defect lawsuits and Paxil suicide cases at the Los Angeles based Baum Hedlund Aristei ampamp Goldman law firm 8220The Act is a slippery slope8221 she warns 8220toward the forced drugging of women of childbearing years with drugs of questionable efficacy and serious safety issues effecting mothers and their innocent children 8211 drugs that can cause horrific side effects including suicidal behavior violence and devastating birth defects8221 8220Of course mothers who truly cannot cope should be helped8221 Ms Gillespie says 8220but do we really need legislation requiring mothers to be screened and drugged8221 8220Take out politics and Big Pharma and the push for this legislation just doesn8217t make sense8221 she states 8220For politicians a much safer issue than pushing drugs for pregnant mothers is promoting the expansion of medical treatment for postpartum depression8221 according to Dr Levine He says the Mother8217s Act 8220omits relevant truths8221 about Melanie BlockerStokes the woman the bill is named after and the following information about her suicide should be made known 8220BlockerStokes8230 did in fact receive extensive psychiatric treatment She was hospitalized three times in seven weeks given four combinations of antipsychotic antianxiety and antidepressant medications and underwent electroconvulsive therapy electroshock But despite her psychiatric treatment 8212 or because of it 8212 Melanie BlockerStokes jumped to her death from the twelfth floor of a Chicago hotel8221 8220There is no evidence that antidepressant use by depressed mothers lowers their likelihood of suicide8221 Dr Levine says 8220and there is a great deal of evidence that antidepressant use can make some people manic agitated and violent8221 Moneymaking promoters behind the Act Katherine Stone runs an internet website called 8220Postpartum Progress8221 and posts a daily blog She also serves on the board of Postpartum Support International as the public relations outreach chairwoman Her Bio says she 8220is a nationallyrecognized awardwinning advocate for women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders8221 8220In 20018221 Katherine reports on her website that 8220she suffered postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder after the birth of her first child The feeling of isolation and shame she suffered inspired her to create Postpartum Progress which has become the most widelyread blog in the United States on postpartum depression postpartum OCD antepartum depression postpartum PTSD and postpartum psychosis8221 On another page titled 8220The Art of Psychiatric Medication8221 Katherine tells women to hang in there if a medication does not work because for her diagnosis of OCD she states 8220I8217ve taken many medications including Effexor Celexa Seroquel Risperdal Wellbutrin Luvox Cymbalta etcamp160 Throughout all of them I was on the road to recoveryamp160 Some just worked better than others at treating my symptoms8221 She ends the commentary by telling women 8220You will find the right medication for you and you will get better8221 The prescribing of seven drugs including two antipsychotics and five antidepressants to treat OCD is a typical example of the profitdriven drugging that women snagged by the Mother8217s Act will face but it8217s a far cry from the description Katherine wrote about regarding the comparatively minor treatment she received when she stated in the June 7 2004 issue of Newsweek 8220in my case that meant taking an antidepressant and going for weekly therapy sessions8221 Aside from all the serious health risks now known to be associated with these drugs most women could not afford the 7drug 8220cure8221 that Katherine ingested According to DrugStorecom in December 2008 from first to last at a middle dose for a 30day supply the drugs would cost Effexor 19786 Celexa 27992 Seroquel 38838 Risperdal 65207 Wellbutrin XI 20208 Luvox CR 13599 and Cymbalta 36662 The cost of 8220etc8221 is impossible to calculate without knowing how many more drugs she took In a March 11 2009 Postpartum Progress blog Katherine plugs herself for speaking jobs along with a study that concluded 8220the Internet is a viable and feasible tool to screen for PPD8221 8220I8217ll be adding this study to the speech I give on how women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders use the Internet8221 she reports and then adds 8220If you8217re interested in havingamp160me speak at your event let me know8221 On March 10 2009 Katherine8217s headline readamp160 8220It8217s Petition Signing Timeamp160 Get Out Your Virtual Pen ampamp Support Women with PPD8221 and reported 8220that Susan Stone over at Perinatal Pro is alerting everyone to the new petition created by the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance to support the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Actamp160 She states that last year8217s petition generated more than 24000 signaturesamp160 The petition has been reintroduced this year to try and get this legislation passed once again8221 The blog carried a live link to a page where 8220you can scroll down enter your zip code and generate letters of support in a matter of seconds for the Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act that will be sent to your local Congresspeople and Senators8221 Katherine further told readers 8220I know you8217re thinking 8216but I already did that last year8217amp160 Well that was then and this is nowamp160 Do it again8221 The 2007 Annual Report for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance shows this Big Pharma front group received between 150000 and 499000 from AstraZeneca Pfizer and Wyeth Abbott Labs Cyberonics Eli Lilly Forest Labs GlaxoSmithKline Organon and Otsuka American Pharmaceuticals each gave between 10000 and 149999 The 2006 Annual Report shows that AstraZeneca gave the group more than 500000 Abbott Labs BristolMyers Squibb and Wyeth gave between 150000 and 499000 and Forest Labs Glaxo Janssen Pfizer and Shire Pharmaceuticals each gave between 10000 and 149000 The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance in Baltimore also received 5000 from Eli Lilly in the first quarter of 2008 according to Lilly8217s grant report In the section of the 2007 Annual report 8220at a Glance How We Met Our Mission8221 among the things accomplished by the group it states 8220Promoted Melanie BlockerStokes Postpartum Depression Research ampamp Care Act at invitation of Rep Bobby Rush DIll 8220Promoted MOTHER8217s Act at invitation of Sen Dick Durbin DIll8221 After writing letters to Congress through the link established by the industry funded Alliance those visiting Postpartum Progress will hopefully click on the link to Amazon and buy the book 8220Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders Perspectives and Treatment Guide for the Health Care Practitioner8221 by none other than the Perinatal Pro 8220expert8221 Susan Dowd Stone and Alexis Menkin at a special price of 4320 for a savings of 1080 Katherine also provides a link to the PerinatalPro website where women can find treatment for all the 8220mood8221 and 8220anxiety8221 disorders diagnosed with internet screenings at 8220Blue Skye Consulting8221 where Susan is listed as the Managing Director and Owner She also served as president ofamp160Postpartum Support International from 2006 8211 2008 as vicepresident and Conference Chair in 2005 8211 2006 and will chair the group8217s President8217s Advisory Council through 2010 This group brags of being the leading proponent of the Mother8217s Act On March 2 2009 Susan8217s PerinatalPro Blog announced 8220The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act moves forward8221 and stated 8220Thank you to Congressman Bobby L Rush US Senator Robert Menendez and Senator Richard Durbin for your unceasing efforts on behalf of America8217s mothers8221 She should have thanked these members of Congress for boosting her career status and yearly income from her treatment center speaking fees and book sales On PerinatalPro Susan posts a running list of supporters for the Mother8217s Act On March 27 2009 the list included many drug company funded groups For instance the American Psychiatric Association is listed as a supporter In 2006 the pharmaceutical industry provided close to 30 of the Association8217s 625 million in financing according to the July 12 2008 New York Times In the first quarter of 2007 Eli Lilly gave the Association grants worth more than 412000 according to Lilly8217s grant report The group also received 623190 from Lilly in the first quarter of 2008 In her PerinatalPro blogs Susan has nothing but praise for Katherine8217s website and directs visitors back to Postpartum Progress with a live link On March 16 2009 Katherine posted a 8220Quick Survey on Postpartum Anxiety8221 and wrote 8220The fabulous Karen Kleiman has asked me to ask you to participate in a short fivequestion online survey on anxietyamp160 She says ANYONE can answer it regardless of the age of their babys and regardless of diagnosis or lack thereofamp160 ANY mother should answer the questionsamp160 It8217s super quick 8212 I know because I took it myself8221 Kleiman must be fabulous because she has three books for sale on Postpartum Progress with links to purchase them on Amazonamp160 In fact there are a total of fourteen books for sale on Katherine8217s site from which she most likely gets a kickback with every sale Kleiman8217s survey is an excellent example of the methods used to con women into suspecting they are mentally ill via the 8220expert8221 blogs The preface states 8220The questions on this survey can be answered by a new mother of an infant or an emptynester with good recall of the early days with her baby Please answer as honestly as you can8221 The question capital letters and all reads 8220When you were carrying your baby down a flight of stairs did you EVER at ANY time have ANY thought image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby8221 The survey further tells women If you answered YES to the first question please describe the type of worry you had Scary thoughts about dropping the baby Scary images about dropping the baby Both thoughts and images Other How much distress did this cause you A Great deal of distress Some distress but I quickly got over it Some distress that seemed to linger Not much stress Did this thought or image occur once or did it recur Only once It recurred frequently It recurred persistently It occurred off and on Did you ever tell anyone about the fear of dropping the baby Please describe why you chose to tell someone or why you chose not to As a mother with good recall the 8220honest8221 answer is yes with two babies born 4 years apart every single night as I stumbled out of bed half asleep for a nightly feeding my normal fear instinct kicked in and warned me to be careful not to trip and fall down the stairs or drop the baby Women who take the survey are told nothing about what the results mean but clearly the seed is planted that something is wrong if you 8220EVER at ANY time have ANY thought image or concern that you could accidentally drop your baby8221 Katherine8217s website also provides links to the 8220Top Women8217s PPMD Treatment Programs ampamp Specialists8221amp160 The first link on the list takes women to the 8220Emory Women8217s Mental Health Program8221 that primarily focuses on 8220the evaluation and treatment of emotional disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period8221 according to Emory University8217s website Lilly8217s 2008 first quarter grant report shows Emory8217s Department of Psychiatry received 25000 The 8220experts8221 at Emory include some top pharmaceutical industry shills For example a link to 8220Articles8221 brings up roughly 90 studies and papers that include the coauthor Dr Charles Nemeroff Nemeroff is on an evergrowing list of academic researchers in the field of psychiatry under investigation by the US Senate Finance Committee for not disclosing millions of dollars of income from the makers of psychotropic drugs Emory8217s investigation found he was paid more than 960000 by Paxil maker GlaxoSmithKline from 2000 through 2006 but listed less than 35000 on his Emory disclosure formsamp160 All totaled Nemeroff had earnings of 28 million from speaking and consulting arrangements with drug companies between 2000 and 2007 but only disclosed a fraction of that amount according to the Senate Finance Committee reports On July 23 2008 Medscape Psychiatry ampamp Mental Health posted an article by Nemeroff titled 8220Weighing Risk and Benefit for Treatment of Depression in Pregnancy and Post Partum8221 On March 17 2009 the Medscape website stated 8220This article is temporarily unavailable8221 Maybe that8217s because the 8220top expert8221 Dr Nemeroff recently stepped down as chairman of Emory8217s psychiatry department EVELYN PRINGLE is an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America She can be reached at epringle05yahoocm This article sponsored by the Baum Hedlund Aristei ampamp Goldman law firm wwwbaumhedlundlawcom amp160 | Motherhood/PROPN has/AUX fallen/VERB prey/NOUN to/ADP the/DET psychopharmaceutical/ADJ complex/NOUN If/SCONJ new/ADJ legislation/NOUN known/VERB as/ADP the/DET Mother8217s/PROPN Act/PROPN becomes/VERB law/NOUN the/DET drugging/NOUN of/ADP infants/NOUN through/ADP pregnant/ADJ and/CCONJ nursing/NOUN mothers/NOUN will/AUX no/ADV doubt/ADV increase/VERB Congress/PROPN has/AUX rightfully/ADV refused/VERB to/PART pass/VERB this/DET bill/NOUN for/ADP eight/NUM 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<p>On the day I arrived in Peshawar a few weeks ago, the evening stillness was broken by nine loud explosions, each preceded by the sucking sound of a projectile as it arced into Hayatabad, the suburban sprawl west of the city. Their target was a Frontier Constabulary post guarding the fence that separates the city from the tribal region of Khyber.</p>
<p>When I lived here seven years ago, Hayatabad hosted many Afghan refugees; those with fewer resources lived in the slums of Kacha Garhi, along the Jamrud Road to the Khyber Pass. Many established businesses here, and dominated commerce and transport in parts of the city. Some temporarily migrated in summer to Afghanistan, where it was cooler. But Peshawar was a sanctuary, as Afghanistan was perpetually at war. Now, many Afghans are leaving because Afghanistan feels safer. There are checkpoints all over the city, many kidnappings, and in the past month, there have been at least three suicide bombings and four rocket attacks, most targeting Hayatabad.</p>
<p>This war began in 2002 under intense US pressure, with piecemeal military action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a semi-autonomous region of seven agencies along Pakistan’s north-western border. The Afghan Taliban were using the region to regroup after their earlier rout: veteran anti-Soviet commander Jalaluddin Haqqani headquartered his network in North Waziristan; Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami had a presence in Bajaur. However, the military, reluctant to take on pro-Pakistan Afghans, whom the government sees as assets against growing Indian influence in Afghanistan, instead marched into South Waziristan to apprehend “foreigners” (mainly Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs). Following the regional code of honor, the tribes refused to surrender the guests and were subjected to collective punishment that soon united them against the government. Disparate militant groups coalesced into the Pakistani Taliban, distinct from and less disciplined than its Afghan counterpart. Ineffectual tribal elders were marginalized or assassinated. The leadership shifted to individuals such as Nek Muhammad, 27, a charismatic veteran of the Afghan war, a sworn enemy of the US presence in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Although FATA had been a transit base for rebels and weaponry during the anti-Soviet struggle, this did not undermine the tribal structures or the political administration. There were no insurgents, according to Rustam Shah Mohmand, an astute analyst of frontier politics, “because the policy of the government and the aspirations of the people converged”. He suggests three causes for the present impasse: President Pervaiz Musharraf’s decision in 2001 to join the US “war on terror”; the use of indiscriminate force to support what was seen as an American war; and the disappearances and rendition of suspects, many innocents among them, given into US custody for money.</p>
<p>These combined to create a gulf between public opinion and government policy, and in 2002 led to the protest vote that brought the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA, an alliance of religious parties opposed to the “war on terror”) to power in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The evisceration of established institutions, particularly the office of the Political Agent, which since the days of the Raj had served as the federal government’s liaison with the tribal maliks (chiefs), worsened the insecurity. Traditional tribal structures and the concept of regional responsibility also suffered.</p>
<p>In 2004, after two attempts on Musharraf’s life, the government ordered 5,000&#160;troops supported by helicopter gunships into South Waziristan. The military suffered heavy losses and the government was forced to sign a peace treaty with Nek Mohammad that briefly ended hostilities. The ceasefire broke when, on 18&#160;June 2004, the young amir was assassinated in a US drone strike for which, in the first of many such incidents, the Pakistani government claimed responsibility, rather than admit its sovereignty had been breached by the US. Two more peace deals followed, but both ended when in August 2007 Pakistani forces stormed a mosque in Islamabad held by militants sympathetic to the Taliban, an operation that killed many innocents. A sustained terrorist campaign followed, and the blowback began to hit Pakistan’s major cities. In response, the military expanded its operations into other agencies including Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber. The fighting was intense, and neither side gave quarter. Millions were displaced, and anger against the government grew.</p>
<p>Phantom enemy</p>
<p>On the bus to Peshawar I’d met a youth, studying English literature at the University of Punjab, who was returning home to evacuate his family from the Khyber Agency. I asked him who the Taliban were, and he replied dryly “we all are”. A taxi driver showed me the flood of refugees from Khyber’s Bara region, and said the Taliban were a “phantom enemy” invented by the Pakistani establishment to justify foreign aid. He warned the government’s actions were actually creating the enemy that it claims it is at war with.</p>
<p>Around the time of the mosque siege the war also spilled into the mainland. Tensions had simmered since 2007 in Malakand’s Swat valley and culminated in the Pakistan army’s incursion this year into the region. The operation followed the failure of a peace settlement, the Nizam-e-Adl, that the government had signed with the Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), a local movement committed to the restoration of the region’s old legal order. Until the early 1970s, the three districts of Malakand – Swat, Dir and Chitral — were independent princely states, each with its own legal system — in Swat, a variant of sharia. Following Swat’s accession to Pakistan, the old system was superseded by Pakistan’s legal framework; however, no legal infrastructure evolved to cope with the change. Cases languished in district courts and justice was often indefinitely postponed. From the late 1970s on, this led to calls for the restoration of the old order, and in 1989 Sufi Muhammad established TNSM to formally pursue this cause.</p>
<p>The movement twice took up arms in the 1990s, but the governments of Benazir Bhutto (1994) and Nawaz Sharif (1999) made concessions to defuse hostilities. However, by 2002 the TNSM had all but disappeared after Sufi Muhammad led a contingent of 10,000&#160;men into Afghanistan to fight US forces, most of whom were killed or captured. Sufi Muhammad’s credibility suffered and on his return he was whisked off to a prison in Dera Ismail Khan.</p>
<p>In 2005 Muhammad’s son-in-law, Mullah Fazlullah, was able to revive TNSM, with a more radical edge. The group was further strengthened by the arrival of militants fleeing US drone attacks in FATA. After the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan, TTP) was established in December 2007 with Baitullah Mehsud as its leader, Mullah Fazlullah changed his organization into a local chapter of the movement. With its populist rhetoric, its swift justice and opposition to the old feudal elite, it found favor with the underclass and attracted many disaffected youths. This, observed Asif Ezdi, a political analyst, was “because the state has failed [the youth], massively and comprehensively: the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite that has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges, pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness”.</p>
<p>Rule of justice</p>
<p>With unemployment, easy access to weaponry and training, and rising political consciousness because of a vibrant private media, there was no shortage of angry young men to swell the Taliban ranks, especially when the war was also seen as a struggle against the entrenched elite. “In some areas at least, it has pitted landless tenants against wealthy landlords,” Ezdi notes. This, he says, was “in a country where ordinary people have little chance of overcoming status barriers, with the government, the political system and the elite all arrayed against them. It is this combination of revolutionary and religious zeal which makes the Taliban such a formidable force”.</p>
<p>However, as more power accrued to the TTP, petty criminals also joined. This not only granted them immunity from the Taliban’s brutal justice, but access to weapons and a powerful support network. They used these immediately, terrorizing rivals and ordinary people alike. Following their own narrow interpretation of Islam, they banned female education; more than a hundred schools were bombed. Whatever initial support the Swat Taliban had enjoyed evaporated quickly; even the TTP dissented when its spokesman Maulvi Omar urged Fazlullah to reconsider the decision to ban girls’ education.</p>
<p>Eager to check the growing power of the TTP, in 2008 the Pashtun nationalist government of NWFP released Sufi Muhammad, who had renounced violence, to negotiate peace with the militants. These efforts culminated in the Nizam-e-Adl (rule of justice) legislation of February 2009, which briefly ended hostilities after the government agreed to establish sharia courts and the militants agreed to disarm. After much delay, the legislation was ratified by the central government on April 14, 2009 and, although both sides failed fully to meet obligations, some normalcy briefly returned to the valley.</p>
<p>Western commentators and their local allies were quick to denounce the legislation as Pakistan’s “surrender to the Taliban”. The country, they said, was on the verge of collapse, its nuclear arsenal about to land into the hands of the Taliban, who were within 60 miles of the capital. Pressure mounted on the Pakistani government and in May, when a group of TTP militants rode motorbikes into the neighbouring Buner valley, the incident was presented by the media as a prelude to a march on the capital. The tanks rolled.</p>
<p>While the operation succeeded in dislodging the militants, nearly three million citizens were displaced, and of those who remained, many were killed in the bombing of civilian neighborhoods. The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) declared it the worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, and the capacity of the international aid organizations was seriously stretched. More than 80 per cent&#160; of the refugees were absorbed by families, friends and well-wishers; the UNHCR conceded it was only able to provide 33 per cent of the relief assistance needed for the rest. The Pakistani government failed to provide assistance and much of the foreign aid money lined the pockets of corrupt officials. The unaffected eastern provinces of Sindh and Punjab restricted entry to the refugees; this highlighted the ethnic dimension of the conflict, since the Pashtuns see themselves as primary targets.</p>
<p>Yet, unlike the military operations in FATA, the operation enjoyed relatively high popular support among Pakistanis (41 per cent). It was hailed as a success by politicians, the military and the media.</p>
<p>Everybody recognized that it was imperative to counter militancy and criminality in Malakand but not all agreed that force was the only way to do it. “I think [the war] was avoidable,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a veteran journalist and the most respected analyst of frontier politics, “but Pakistan is not a free and independent player. There was much pressure from the US and other countries, and for a variety of reasons the government couldn’t resist.”</p>
<p>Yusufzai dismisses the idea that the militants were a threat to the country or its nuclear assets. “The government itself is saying that there were no more than 5,000 Taliban; they were controlling Swat, they had entered Buner — how many men could they have spared to march on the capital?” Pakistan is a country of 173&#160;million, with a million under arms and an advanced air force. “The Taliban had neither the capacity nor the intention to invade the capital. They were only interested in the Malakand division, and even there their influence was limited to three of its seven districts.” The Nizam-e-Adl encompassed the same concessions that two previous, secular governments had made, and Sufi Muhammad’s influence could have defused hostilities and marginalized the radicals.</p>
<p>Roedad Khan, a former federal secretary and political commentator, queries whether all political options had been exhausted. “There never was a more unnecessary war… a war more difficult to justify and harder to win. No one can be bombed into moderation and, given the unconventional methods of the insurgents, force alone has a slim chance of success since the militant doesn’t have to win, he just has to keep fighting.”</p>
<p>Mohmand has questions. “If the aim of the operation was to confront the elements challenging the writ of the state, it should have targeted only them. Why did the government have to invade the whole territory? By using air power and indiscriminate bombardment the government ensured that common people would suffer.” Although the government has declared victory in Swat, he argued, the success could prove pyrrhic if “the social, economic and political causes that led to the emergence of the Taliban are not addressed and comprehensive reconstruction doesn’t follow”.</p>
<p>Tribe against tribe</p>
<p>In yet another act of political myopia, Pakistan diminished its options when in September it invited members of the Taliban shura (advisory committee) for negotiations and then arrested them. The policy of arming militias to counter the Taliban (along the lines of the Iraqi “awakening councils”) is equally dangerous. In a region where blood feuds last for generations, Yusufzai points out, this means perpetual violence, pitting tribe against tribe. The government’s policy of home demolitions ignores the fact that in the frontier region a single house is shared by an extended family, and when a home is demolished for the sins of an errant son, the state creates more recruits for the insurgency.</p>
<p>An uneasy peace prevails in Swat today, and militant violence has declined. However, more than 200&#160;suspected militants and sympathizers have been killed in extra-judicial executions by security forces and local vigilantes since the end of major combat operations. The population remains in a permanent state of fear: “If, earlier, people were terrorized by the Taliban, today they live in fear of the army,” says Yusufzai. “Anybody can be labelled a Talib”, he notes; some locals have chosen to settle scores by falsely accusing rivals of being Taliban sympathizers. “Your house is then demolished, you are taken into custody, and next day your body is found dumped in a field. People are very scared, they are afraid to talk, and the media” — which mostly cheered on the military — “is compromised.”</p>
<p>The Taliban attacks continued, accelerating in October in anticipation of the new military incursion in South Waziristan. Under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud, 28, a campaign of bombings began which, with calculated cruelty, hit targets in Hangu, Kohat, Shangla and Peshawar, killing mostly civilians. The attacks got more audacious as the government escalated the aerial bombing ahead of the ground invasion. Punjabi allies of the Taliban even managed a successful attack on military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Pakistan’s vulnerability became even clearer when a wave of attacks hit the heavily fortified capital.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the US drone attacks in the FATA region continue. Of 701&#160;citizens killed in 60&#160;strikes between January 29&#160;, 2008 and&#160;April 8, 2009, only 14 were suspected militants according to one investigation; the brunt is borne by civilians. Public opinion is incensed: according to an August 2009 Gallup poll, 59 per cent of Pakistanis see the US as the biggest threat, compared with 18 per cent for traditional rival India. Only 11 per cent see the Taliban as the biggest threat (although that number is growing). While the poll also revealed 41 per cent support for the military operation in Swat, a higher number (43 per cent) favored a political resolution. The insecurities of the Pakistani defense establishment are worsened by US assistance to India, including the transfer of advanced military and nuclear technology.</p>
<p>With the inducement of aid dollars, Pakistan with its poorly equipped army is trying to achieve what the US and Nato have failed to accomplish in Afghanistan. But the longer the military operations continue the more regions are likely to slip from under its control as the numbers of the aggrieved multiply, the military stretches thin and vulnerabilities increase. Already the insurgency has spread to parts of Punjab. Yet a form of military metaphysics prevails among the Pakistani elite and western commentators, who continue to hope that militancy can be bombed out of existence. Anti-war voices are denounced as Taliban sympathisers.</p>
<p>The recent entry of 28,000&#160;Pakistani&#160;troops into South Waziristan has precipitated yet another mass exodus; a third of the population has been displaced. Though the Pakistani Taliban have few supporters left, Associated Press (AP) found refugees venting their anger at the government with chants of “Long live the Taliban”. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the government is delivering them to the enemy. If the Pakistani Taliban are disliked, the government is disliked more. Despite the best efforts of the elite to take ownership of the war, the notion persists that Pakistan is fighting an American war, a view that will be harder to dispute following reports that the attack on Waziristan is being assisted by US drone surveillance.</p>
<p>According to the journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, the military has again taken a gamble marching into South Waziristan “as it is highly unlikely to eliminate the militant threat. Indeed, the past seven or so years have shown that after any operation against militants, the militants have always gained from the situation”. Already the Taliban are regrouping in Swat, and “it is likely that by the time the snow chokes major supply routes, the Taliban will have seized all lost ground”&#160;. Yet the media and western commentators remain sanguine.</p>
<p>The day the rockets hit Hayatabad the featured article on Foreign Policy magazine’s AfPak Channel was headlined “Everything’s coming up roses in Pakistan”. The attack was attributed to Mangal Bagh Afridi, leader of the banned Lashkar-e-Islam and a former ally of the government who not long ago was credited with driving out fugitives and petty criminals and providing protection to Nato convoys. Alliances remain transient, yet another reason to refrain from arming militias to fight proxy wars. The morning after the rockets I walked to the local market to buy tandoori bread. Once sold for Rs&#160;2, it now sells for Rs&#160;15. Wages have stagnated and inflation and unemployment are high. On the street there was no talk of the threat to lives. Everyone complained about the impossible cost of living.</p>
<p>MUHAMMAD IDREES AHMAD is the co-founder of Pulsemedia.org</p>
<p>This article appears in the current&#160;edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at <a href="http://www.mondediplo.com/" type="external">mondediplo.com.</a> This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features one or two articles from LMD every month.</p>
<p /> | Pakistan Creates Its Own Enemy | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/12/04/pakistan-creates-its-own-enemy/ | 2009-12-04 | 4left
| 3,047 | On the day I arrived in Peshawar a few weeks ago the evening stillness was broken by nine loud explosions each preceded by the sucking sound of a projectile as it arced into Hayatabad the suburban sprawl west of the city Their target was a Frontier Constabulary post guarding the fence that separates the city from the tribal region of Khyber When I lived here seven years ago Hayatabad hosted many Afghan refugees those with fewer resources lived in the slums of Kacha Garhi along the Jamrud Road to the Khyber Pass Many established businesses here and dominated commerce and transport in parts of the city Some temporarily migrated in summer to Afghanistan where it was cooler But Peshawar was a sanctuary as Afghanistan was perpetually at war Now many Afghans are leaving because Afghanistan feels safer There are checkpoints all over the city many kidnappings and in the past month there have been at least three suicide bombings and four rocket attacks most targeting Hayatabad This war began in 2002 under intense US pressure with piecemeal military action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas FATA a semiautonomous region of seven agencies along Pakistan8217s northwestern border The Afghan Taliban were using the region to regroup after their earlier rout veteran antiSoviet commander Jalaluddin Haqqani headquartered his network in North Waziristan Gulbuddin Hikmatyar8217s HizbeIslami had a presence in Bajaur However the military reluctant to take on proPakistan Afghans whom the government sees as assets against growing Indian influence in Afghanistan instead marched into South Waziristan to apprehend 8220foreigners8221 mainly Uzbeks Chechens and Arabs Following the regional code of honor the tribes refused to surrender the guests and were subjected to collective punishment that soon united them against the government Disparate militant groups coalesced into the Pakistani Taliban distinct from and less disciplined than its Afghan counterpart Ineffectual tribal elders were marginalized or assassinated The leadership shifted to individuals such as Nek Muhammad 27 a charismatic veteran of the Afghan war a sworn enemy of the US presence in Afghanistan Although FATA had been a transit base for rebels and weaponry during the antiSoviet struggle this did not undermine the tribal structures or the political administration There were no insurgents according to Rustam Shah Mohmand an astute analyst of frontier politics 8220because the policy of the government and the aspirations of the people converged8221 He suggests three causes for the present impasse President Pervaiz Musharraf8217s decision in 2001 to join the US 8220war on terror8221 the use of indiscriminate force to support what was seen as an American war and the disappearances and rendition of suspects many innocents among them given into US custody for money These combined to create a gulf between public opinion and government policy and in 2002 led to the protest vote that brought the Muttahida MajliseAmal MMA an alliance of religious parties opposed to the 8220war on terror8221 to power in the North West Frontier Province NWFP The evisceration of established institutions particularly the office of the Political Agent which since the days of the Raj had served as the federal government8217s liaison with the tribal maliks chiefs worsened the insecurity Traditional tribal structures and the concept of regional responsibility also suffered In 2004 after two attempts on Musharraf8217s life the government ordered 5000amp160troops supported by helicopter gunships into South Waziristan The military suffered heavy losses and the government was forced to sign a peace treaty with Nek Mohammad that briefly ended hostilities The ceasefire broke when on 18amp160June 2004 the young amir was assassinated in a US drone strike for which in the first of many such incidents the Pakistani government claimed responsibility rather than admit its sovereignty had been breached by the US Two more peace deals followed but both ended when in August 2007 Pakistani forces stormed a mosque in Islamabad held by militants sympathetic to the Taliban an operation that killed many innocents A sustained terrorist campaign followed and the blowback began to hit Pakistan8217s major cities In response the military expanded its operations into other agencies including Bajaur Mohmand and Khyber The fighting was intense and neither side gave quarter Millions were displaced and anger against the government grew Phantom enemy On the bus to Peshawar I8217d met a youth studying English literature at the University of Punjab who was returning home to evacuate his family from the Khyber Agency I asked him who the Taliban were and he replied dryly 8220we all are8221 A taxi driver showed me the flood of refugees from Khyber8217s Bara region and said the Taliban were a 8220phantom enemy8221 invented by the Pakistani establishment to justify foreign aid He warned the government8217s actions were actually creating the enemy that it claims it is at war with Around the time of the mosque siege the war also spilled into the mainland Tensions had simmered since 2007 in Malakand8217s Swat valley and culminated in the Pakistan army8217s incursion this year into the region The operation followed the failure of a peace settlement the NizameAdl that the government had signed with the Tehreek NifazeShariateMuhammadi TNSM a local movement committed to the restoration of the region8217s old legal order Until the early 1970s the three districts of Malakand 8211 Swat Dir and Chitral 8212 were independent princely states each with its own legal system 8212 in Swat a variant of sharia Following Swat8217s accession to Pakistan the old system was superseded by Pakistan8217s legal framework however no legal infrastructure evolved to cope with the change Cases languished in district courts and justice was often indefinitely postponed From the late 1970s on this led to calls for the restoration of the old order and in 1989 Sufi Muhammad established TNSM to formally pursue this cause The movement twice took up arms in the 1990s but the governments of Benazir Bhutto 1994 and Nawaz Sharif 1999 made concessions to defuse hostilities However by 2002 the TNSM had all but disappeared after Sufi Muhammad led a contingent of 10000amp160men into Afghanistan to fight US forces most of whom were killed or captured Sufi Muhammad8217s credibility suffered and on his return he was whisked off to a prison in Dera Ismail Khan In 2005 Muhammad8217s soninlaw Mullah Fazlullah was able to revive TNSM with a more radical edge The group was further strengthened by the arrival of militants fleeing US drone attacks in FATA After the TehreekeTaliban Pakistan Taliban Movement of Pakistan TTP was established in December 2007 with Baitullah Mehsud as its leader Mullah Fazlullah changed his organization into a local chapter of the movement With its populist rhetoric its swift justice and opposition to the old feudal elite it found favor with the underclass and attracted many disaffected youths This observed Asif Ezdi a political analyst was 8220because the state has failed the youth massively and comprehensively the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite that has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness8221 Rule of justice With unemployment easy access to weaponry and training and rising political consciousness because of a vibrant private media there was no shortage of angry young men to swell the Taliban ranks especially when the war was also seen as a struggle against the entrenched elite 8220In some areas at least it has pitted landless tenants against wealthy landlords8221 Ezdi notes This he says was 8220in a country where ordinary people have little chance of overcoming status barriers with the government the political system and the elite all arrayed against them It is this combination of revolutionary and religious zeal which makes the Taliban such a formidable force8221 However as more power accrued to the TTP petty criminals also joined This not only granted them immunity from the Taliban8217s brutal justice but access to weapons and a powerful support network They used these immediately terrorizing rivals and ordinary people alike Following their own narrow interpretation of Islam they banned female education more than a hundred schools were bombed Whatever initial support the Swat Taliban had enjoyed evaporated quickly even the TTP dissented when its spokesman Maulvi Omar urged Fazlullah to reconsider the decision to ban girls8217 education Eager to check the growing power of the TTP in 2008 the Pashtun nationalist government of NWFP released Sufi Muhammad who had renounced violence to negotiate peace with the militants These efforts culminated in the NizameAdl rule of justice legislation of February 2009 which briefly ended hostilities after the government agreed to establish sharia courts and the militants agreed to disarm After much delay the legislation was ratified by the central government on April 14 2009 and although both sides failed fully to meet obligations some normalcy briefly returned to the valley Western commentators and their local allies were quick to denounce the legislation as Pakistan8217s 8220surrender to the Taliban8221 The country they said was on the verge of collapse its nuclear arsenal about to land into the hands of the Taliban who were within 60 miles of the capital Pressure mounted on the Pakistani government and in May when a group of TTP militants rode motorbikes into the neighbouring Buner valley the incident was presented by the media as a prelude to a march on the capital The tanks rolled While the operation succeeded in dislodging the militants nearly three million citizens were displaced and of those who remained many were killed in the bombing of civilian neighborhoods The UN High Commission for Refugees UNHCR declared it the worst refugee crisis since Rwanda and the capacity of the international aid organizations was seriously stretched More than 80 per centamp160 of the refugees were absorbed by families friends and wellwishers the UNHCR conceded it was only able to provide 33 per cent of the relief assistance needed for the rest The Pakistani government failed to provide assistance and much of the foreign aid money lined the pockets of corrupt officials The unaffected eastern provinces of Sindh and Punjab restricted entry to the refugees this highlighted the ethnic dimension of the conflict since the Pashtuns see themselves as primary targets Yet unlike the military operations in FATA the operation enjoyed relatively high popular support among Pakistanis 41 per cent It was hailed as a success by politicians the military and the media Everybody recognized that it was imperative to counter militancy and criminality in Malakand but not all agreed that force was the only way to do it 8220I think the war was avoidable8221 said Rahimullah Yusufzai a veteran journalist and the most respected analyst of frontier politics 8220but Pakistan is not a free and independent player There was much pressure from the US and other countries and for a variety of reasons the government couldn8217t resist8221 Yusufzai dismisses the idea that the militants were a threat to the country or its nuclear assets 8220The government itself is saying that there were no more than 5000 Taliban they were controlling Swat they had entered Buner 8212 how many men could they have spared to march on the capital8221 Pakistan is a country of 173amp160million with a million under arms and an advanced air force 8220The Taliban had neither the capacity nor the intention to invade the capital They were only interested in the Malakand division and even there their influence was limited to three of its seven districts8221 The NizameAdl encompassed the same concessions that two previous secular governments had made and Sufi Muhammad8217s influence could have defused hostilities and marginalized the radicals Roedad Khan a former federal secretary and political commentator queries whether all political options had been exhausted 8220There never was a more unnecessary war8230 a war more difficult to justify and harder to win No one can be bombed into moderation and given the unconventional methods of the insurgents force alone has a slim chance of success since the militant doesn8217t have to win he just has to keep fighting8221 Mohmand has questions 8220If the aim of the operation was to confront the elements challenging the writ of the state it should have targeted only them Why did the government have to invade the whole territory By using air power and indiscriminate bombardment the government ensured that common people would suffer8221 Although the government has declared victory in Swat he argued the success could prove pyrrhic if 8220the social economic and political causes that led to the emergence of the Taliban are not addressed and comprehensive reconstruction doesn8217t follow8221 Tribe against tribe In yet another act of political myopia Pakistan diminished its options when in September it invited members of the Taliban shura advisory committee for negotiations and then arrested them The policy of arming militias to counter the Taliban along the lines of the Iraqi 8220awakening councils8221 is equally dangerous In a region where blood feuds last for generations Yusufzai points out this means perpetual violence pitting tribe against tribe The government8217s policy of home demolitions ignores the fact that in the frontier region a single house is shared by an extended family and when a home is demolished for the sins of an errant son the state creates more recruits for the insurgency An uneasy peace prevails in Swat today and militant violence has declined However more than 200amp160suspected militants and sympathizers have been killed in extrajudicial executions by security forces and local vigilantes since the end of major combat operations The population remains in a permanent state of fear 8220If earlier people were terrorized by the Taliban today they live in fear of the army8221 says Yusufzai 8220Anybody can be labelled a Talib8221 he notes some locals have chosen to settle scores by falsely accusing rivals of being Taliban sympathizers 8220Your house is then demolished you are taken into custody and next day your body is found dumped in a field People are very scared they are afraid to talk and the media8221 8212 which mostly cheered on the military 8212 8220is compromised8221 The Taliban attacks continued accelerating in October in anticipation of the new military incursion in South Waziristan Under the leadership of Hakimullah Mehsud 28 a campaign of bombings began which with calculated cruelty hit targets in Hangu Kohat Shangla and Peshawar killing mostly civilians The attacks got more audacious as the government escalated the aerial bombing ahead of the ground invasion Punjabi allies of the Taliban even managed a successful attack on military headquarters in Rawalpindi Pakistan8217s vulnerability became even clearer when a wave of attacks hit the heavily fortified capital Meanwhile the US drone attacks in the FATA region continue Of 701amp160citizens killed in 60amp160strikes between January 29amp160 2008 andamp160April 8 2009 only 14 were suspected militants according to one investigation the brunt is borne by civilians Public opinion is incensed according to an August 2009 Gallup poll 59 per cent of Pakistanis see the US as the biggest threat compared with 18 per cent for traditional rival India Only 11 per cent see the Taliban as the biggest threat although that number is growing While the poll also revealed 41 per cent support for the military operation in Swat a higher number 43 per cent favored a political resolution The insecurities of the Pakistani defense establishment are worsened by US assistance to India including the transfer of advanced military and nuclear technology With the inducement of aid dollars Pakistan with its poorly equipped army is trying to achieve what the US and Nato have failed to accomplish in Afghanistan But the longer the military operations continue the more regions are likely to slip from under its control as the numbers of the aggrieved multiply the military stretches thin and vulnerabilities increase Already the insurgency has spread to parts of Punjab Yet a form of military metaphysics prevails among the Pakistani elite and western commentators who continue to hope that militancy can be bombed out of existence Antiwar voices are denounced as Taliban sympathisers The recent entry of 28000amp160Pakistaniamp160troops into South Waziristan has precipitated yet another mass exodus a third of the population has been displaced Though the Pakistani Taliban have few supporters left Associated Press AP found refugees venting their anger at the government with chants of 8220Long live the Taliban8221 Instead of winning hearts and minds the government is delivering them to the enemy If the Pakistani Taliban are disliked the government is disliked more Despite the best efforts of the elite to take ownership of the war the notion persists that Pakistan is fighting an American war a view that will be harder to dispute following reports that the attack on Waziristan is being assisted by US drone surveillance According to the journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad the military has again taken a gamble marching into South Waziristan 8220as it is highly unlikely to eliminate the militant threat Indeed the past seven or so years have shown that after any operation against militants the militants have always gained from the situation8221 Already the Taliban are regrouping in Swat and 8220it is likely that by the time the snow chokes major supply routes the Taliban will have seized all lost ground8221amp160 Yet the media and western commentators remain sanguine The day the rockets hit Hayatabad the featured article on Foreign Policy magazine8217s AfPak Channel was headlined 8220Everything8217s coming up roses in Pakistan8221 The attack was attributed to Mangal Bagh Afridi leader of the banned LashkareIslam and a former ally of the government who not long ago was credited with driving out fugitives and petty criminals and providing protection to Nato convoys Alliances remain transient yet another reason to refrain from arming militias to fight proxy wars The morning after the rockets I walked to the local market to buy tandoori bread Once sold for Rsamp1602 it now sells for Rsamp16015 Wages have stagnated and inflation and unemployment are high On the street there was no talk of the threat to lives Everyone complained about the impossible cost of living MUHAMMAD IDREES AHMAD is the cofounder of Pulsemediaorg This article appears in the currentamp160edition of Le Monde Diplomatique whose English language edition can be found at mondediplocom This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique CounterPunch features one or two articles from LMD every month | On/ADP the/DET day/NOUN I/PRON arrived/VERB in/ADP Peshawar/PROPN a/DET few/ADJ weeks/NOUN ago/ADV the/DET evening/NOUN stillness/NOUN was/AUX broken/VERB by/ADP nine/NUM loud/ADJ explosions/NOUN each/PRON preceded/VERB by/ADP the/DET sucking/ADJ sound/NOUN of/ADP a/DET projectile/NOUN as/SCONJ it/PRON arced/VERB into/ADP Hayatabad/PROPN the/DET suburban/ADJ sprawl/NOUN west/ADV of/ADP the/DET city/NOUN Their/PRON target/NOUN was/AUX a/DET Frontier/PROPN Constabulary/PROPN post/NOUN guarding/VERB the/DET fence/NOUN that/PRON separates/VERB the/DET city/NOUN from/ADP the/DET tribal/ADJ region/NOUN of/ADP Khyber/PROPN When/SCONJ I/PRON lived/VERB here/ADV seven/NUM years/NOUN ago/ADV Hayatabad/PROPN hosted/VERB many/ADJ Afghan/ADJ refugees/NOUN those/PRON with/ADP fewer/ADJ resources/NOUN lived/VERB in/ADP the/DET slums/NOUN of/ADP Kacha/PROPN Garhi/PROPN along/ADP the/DET Jamrud/PROPN Road/PROPN to/ADP the/DET Khyber/PROPN Pass/PROPN Many/ADJ established/VERB businesses/NOUN here/ADV and/CCONJ dominated/VERB commerce/NOUN and/CCONJ transport/NOUN in/ADP parts/NOUN of/ADP the/DET city/NOUN Some/PRON temporarily/ADV migrated/VERB in/ADP summer/NOUN to/ADP Afghanistan/PROPN where/SCONJ it/PRON was/AUX cooler/ADJ But/CCONJ Peshawar/PROPN was/AUX a/DET sanctuary/NOUN as/SCONJ Afghanistan/PROPN was/AUX perpetually/ADV at/ADP war/NOUN Now/ADV many/ADJ Afghans/PROPN are/AUX leaving/VERB because/SCONJ Afghanistan/PROPN feels/VERB safer/ADJ There/PRON are/VERB checkpoints/NOUN all/ADV over/ADP the/DET city/NOUN many/ADJ kidnappings/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP the/DET past/ADJ month/NOUN there/PRON have/AUX been/AUX at/ADV least/ADV three/NUM suicide/NOUN bombings/NOUN and/CCONJ four/NUM rocket/NOUN attacks/NOUN most/ADV targeting/VERB Hayatabad/PROPN This/DET war/NOUN began/VERB in/ADP 2002/NUM under/ADP intense/ADJ US/PROPN pressure/NOUN with/ADP piecemeal/ADJ military/ADJ action/NOUN in/ADP the/DET Federally/ADV Administered/VERB Tribal/PROPN Areas/PROPN FATA/PROPN a/DET semiautonomous/ADJ region/NOUN of/ADP seven/NUM agencies/NOUN along/ADP Pakistan8217s/PROPN northwestern/ADJ border/NOUN The/DET Afghan/PROPN Taliban/PROPN were/AUX using/VERB the/DET region/NOUN to/PART regroup/VERB after/SCONJ their/PRON earlier/ADJ rout/NOUN veteran/NOUN antiSoviet/PROPN commander/NOUN Jalaluddin/PROPN Haqqani/PROPN headquartered/VERB his/PRON network/NOUN in/ADP North/PROPN Waziristan/PROPN Gulbuddin/PROPN Hikmatyar8217s/PROPN HizbeIslami/PROPN had/VERB a/DET presence/NOUN in/ADP Bajaur/PROPN However/ADV the/DET military/ADJ reluctant/NOUN to/PART take/VERB on/ADP proPakistan/PROPN Afghans/PROPN whom/PRON the/DET government/NOUN sees/VERB as/ADP assets/NOUN against/ADP growing/VERB Indian/ADJ influence/NOUN in/ADP Afghanistan/PROPN instead/ADV marched/VERB into/ADP South/PROPN Waziristan/PROPN to/PART apprehend/VERB 8220foreigners8221/PRON mainly/ADV Uzbeks/PROPN Chechens/PROPN and/CCONJ Arabs/PROPN Following/VERB the/DET regional/ADJ code/NOUN of/ADP honor/NOUN the/DET tribes/NOUN refused/VERB to/PART surrender/VERB the/DET guests/NOUN and/CCONJ were/AUX subjected/VERB to/ADP collective/ADJ punishment/NOUN that/PRON soon/ADV united/VERB them/PRON against/ADP the/DET government/NOUN Disparate/PROPN militant/ADJ groups/NOUN coalesced/VERB into/ADP the/DET Pakistani/ADJ Taliban/PROPN distinct/NOUN from/ADP and/CCONJ less/ADV disciplined/ADJ than/ADP its/PRON Afghan/ADJ counterpart/NOUN Ineffectual/PROPN tribal/ADJ elders/NOUN were/AUX marginalized/VERB or/CCONJ assassinated/VERB The/DET leadership/NOUN shifted/VERB to/ADP individuals/NOUN such/ADJ as/ADP Nek/PROPN Muhammad/PROPN 27/NUM a/DET charismatic/ADJ veteran/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Afghan/ADJ war/NOUN a/DET sworn/VERB enemy/NOUN of/ADP the/DET US/PROPN presence/NOUN in/ADP Afghanistan/PROPN Although/SCONJ FATA/PROPN had/AUX been/AUX a/DET transit/NOUN base/NOUN for/ADP rebels/NOUN and/CCONJ weaponry/VERB during/ADP the/DET antiSoviet/ADJ struggle/NOUN this/PRON did/AUX not/PART undermine/VERB the/DET tribal/ADJ structures/NOUN or/CCONJ the/DET political/ADJ administration/NOUN There/PRON were/VERB no/DET insurgents/NOUN according/VERB to/ADP Rustam/PROPN Shah/PROPN Mohmand/PROPN an/DET astute/ADJ analyst/NOUN of/ADP frontier/NOUN politics/NOUN 8220because/VERB the/DET policy/NOUN of/ADP the/DET government/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET aspirations/NOUN of/ADP the/DET people/NOUN converged8221/NOUN He/PRON suggests/VERB three/NUM causes/NOUN for/ADP the/DET present/ADJ impasse/NOUN President/PROPN Pervaiz/PROPN Musharraf8217s/PROPN decision/NOUN in/ADP 2001/NUM to/PART join/VERB the/DET US/PROPN 8220war/NOUN on/ADP terror8221/PROPN the/DET use/NOUN of/ADP indiscriminate/ADJ force/NOUN to/PART support/VERB what/PRON was/AUX seen/VERB as/ADP an/DET American/ADJ war/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET disappearances/NOUN and/CCONJ rendition/NOUN of/ADP suspects/NOUN many/ADJ innocents/NOUN among/ADP them/PRON given/VERB into/ADP US/PROPN custody/NOUN for/ADP money/NOUN These/PRON combined/VERB to/PART create/VERB a/DET gulf/NOUN between/ADP public/ADJ opinion/NOUN and/CCONJ government/NOUN policy/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP 2002/NUM led/VERB to/ADP the/DET protest/NOUN vote/NOUN that/PRON brought/VERB the/DET Muttahida/PROPN MajliseAmal/PROPN MMA/PROPN an/DET alliance/NOUN of/ADP religious/ADJ parties/NOUN opposed/VERB to/ADP the/DET 8220war/NOUN on/ADP terror8221/PROPN to/PART power/VERB in/ADP the/DET North/PROPN West/PROPN Frontier/PROPN Province/PROPN NWFP/PROPN The/DET evisceration/NOUN of/ADP established/VERB institutions/NOUN particularly/ADV the/DET office/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Political/PROPN Agent/PROPN which/PRON since/SCONJ the/DET days/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Raj/PROPN had/AUX served/VERB as/ADP the/DET federal/ADJ government8217s/PROPN liaison/NOUN with/ADP the/DET tribal/ADJ maliks/NOUN chiefs/NOUN worsened/VERB the/DET insecurity/NOUN Traditional/ADJ tribal/ADJ structures/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET concept/NOUN of/ADP regional/ADJ responsibility/NOUN also/ADV suffered/VERB In/ADP 2004/NUM after/SCONJ two/NUM attempts/NOUN on/ADP Musharraf8217s/PROPN life/NOUN the/DET government/NOUN ordered/VERB 5000amp160troops/NOUN supported/VERB by/ADP helicopter/NOUN gunships/NOUN into/ADP South/PROPN Waziristan/PROPN The/DET military/NOUN suffered/VERB heavy/ADJ losses/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET government/NOUN was/AUX forced/VERB to/PART sign/VERB a/DET peace/NOUN treaty/NOUN with/ADP Nek/PROPN Mohammad/PROPN that/PRON briefly/ADV ended/VERB hostilities/NOUN The/DET ceasefire/NOUN broke/VERB when/SCONJ on/ADP 18amp160June/NUM 2004/NUM the/DET young/ADJ amir/NOUN was/AUX assassinated/VERB in/ADP a/DET US/PROPN drone/NOUN strike/NOUN for/ADP which/PRON in/ADP the/DET first/ADJ of/ADP many/ADJ such/ADJ incidents/NOUN the/DET Pakistani/ADJ government/NOUN claimed/VERB responsibility/NOUN rather/ADV than/ADP admit/VERB its/PRON sovereignty/NOUN had/AUX been/AUX breached/VERB by/ADP the/DET US/PROPN Two/NUM more/ADJ peace/NOUN deals/NOUN followed/VERB but/CCONJ both/PRON ended/VERB when/SCONJ in/ADP August/PROPN 2007/NUM Pakistani/ADJ forces/NOUN stormed/VERB a/DET mosque/NOUN in/ADP Islamabad/PROPN held/VERB by/ADP militants/NOUN sympathetic/ADJ to/ADP the/DET Taliban/PROPN an/DET operation/NOUN that/PRON killed/VERB many/ADJ innocents/NOUN A/DET sustained/ADJ terrorist/ADJ campaign/NOUN followed/VERB and/CCONJ the/DET blowback/NOUN began/VERB to/PART hit/VERB Pakistan8217s/ADJ major/ADJ cities/NOUN In/ADP response/NOUN the/DET military/NOUN expanded/VERB its/PRON operations/NOUN into/ADP other/ADJ agencies/NOUN including/VERB Bajaur/PROPN Mohmand/PROPN and/CCONJ Khyber/PROPN The/DET fighting/NOUN was/AUX intense/ADJ and/CCONJ neither/DET side/NOUN gave/VERB quarter/NOUN Millions/NOUN were/AUX displaced/VERB and/CCONJ anger/NOUN against/ADP the/DET government/NOUN grew/VERB Phantom/PROPN enemy/NOUN On/ADP the/DET bus/NOUN to/ADP Peshawar/PROPN I8217d/NOUN met/VERB a/DET youth/NOUN studying/VERB English/PROPN literature/NOUN at/ADP the/DET University/PROPN of/ADP Punjab/PROPN who/PRON was/AUX returning/VERB home/ADV to/PART evacuate/VERB his/PRON family/NOUN from/ADP the/DET Khyber/PROPN Agency/PROPN I/PRON asked/VERB him/PRON who/PRON the/DET Taliban/PROPN were/AUX and/CCONJ he/PRON replied/VERB dryly/ADV 8220we/NOUN all/DET are8221/ADJ A/DET taxi/NOUN driver/NOUN showed/VERB me/PRON the/DET flood/NOUN of/ADP refugees/NOUN from/ADP Khyber8217s/PROPN Bara/PROPN region/NOUN and/CCONJ said/VERB the/DET Taliban/PROPN were/AUX a/DET 8220phantom/NOUN enemy8221/PROPN invented/VERB by/ADP the/DET Pakistani/ADJ establishment/NOUN to/PART justify/VERB foreign/ADJ aid/NOUN He/PRON warned/VERB the/DET government8217s/NOUN actions/NOUN were/AUX actually/ADV creating/VERB the/DET enemy/NOUN that/SCONJ it/PRON claims/VERB it/PRON is/AUX at/ADP war/NOUN with/ADP Around/ADP the/DET time/NOUN of/ADP the/DET mosque/NOUN siege/NOUN the/DET war/NOUN also/ADV spilled/VERB into/ADP the/DET mainland/NOUN Tensions/PROPN had/AUX simmered/VERB since/SCONJ 2007/NUM in/ADP Malakand8217s/PROPN Swat/PROPN valley/NOUN and/CCONJ culminated/VERB in/ADP the/DET Pakistan/PROPN army8217s/PROPN incursion/NOUN this/DET year/NOUN into/ADP the/DET region/NOUN The/DET operation/NOUN followed/VERB the/DET failure/NOUN of/ADP a/DET peace/NOUN settlement/NOUN the/DET NizameAdl/PROPN that/SCONJ the/DET government/NOUN had/AUX signed/VERB with/ADP the/DET Tehreek/PROPN NifazeShariateMuhammadi/NOUN TNSM/NOUN a/DET local/ADJ movement/NOUN committed/VERB to/ADP the/DET restoration/NOUN of/ADP the/DET region8217s/PROPN old/ADJ legal/ADJ order/NOUN Until/ADP the/DET early/ADJ 1970s/NOUN the/DET three/NUM districts/NOUN of/ADP Malakand/PROPN 8211/NUM Swat/PROPN Dir/PROPN and/CCONJ Chitral/PROPN 8212/NUM were/AUX independent/ADJ princely/ADV states/NOUN each/PRON with/ADP its/PRON own/ADJ legal/ADJ system/NOUN 8212/NUM in/ADP Swat/PROPN a/DET variant/NOUN of/ADP sharia/NOUN Following/VERB Swat8217s/PROPN accession/NOUN to/ADP Pakistan/PROPN the/DET old/ADJ system/NOUN was/AUX superseded/VERB by/ADP Pakistan8217s/PROPN legal/ADJ framework/NOUN however/ADV no/DET legal/ADJ infrastructure/NOUN evolved/VERB to/PART cope/VERB with/ADP the/DET change/NOUN Cases/NOUN languished/VERB in/ADP district/NOUN courts/NOUN and/CCONJ justice/NOUN was/AUX often/ADV indefinitely/ADV postponed/VERB From/ADP the/DET late/ADJ 1970s/NOUN on/ADP this/PRON led/VERB to/ADP calls/NOUN for/ADP the/DET restoration/NOUN of/ADP the/DET old/ADJ order/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP 1989/NUM Sufi/PROPN Muhammad/PROPN established/VERB TNSM/PROPN to/PART formally/ADV pursue/VERB this/PRON cause/SCONJ The/DET movement/NOUN twice/ADV took/VERB up/ADP arms/NOUN in/ADP the/DET 1990s/NOUN but/CCONJ the/DET governments/NOUN of/ADP Benazir/PROPN Bhutto/PROPN 1994/NUM and/CCONJ Nawaz/PROPN Sharif/PROPN 1999/NUM made/VERB concessions/NOUN to/PART defuse/VERB hostilities/NOUN However/ADV by/ADP 2002/NUM the/DET TNSM/NOUN had/AUX all/PRON but/CCONJ disappeared/VERB after/SCONJ Sufi/PROPN Muhammad/PROPN led/VERB a/DET contingent/NOUN of/ADP 10000amp160men/NOUN into/ADP Afghanistan/PROPN to/PART fight/VERB US/PROPN forces/NOUN most/ADJ of/ADP whom/PRON were/AUX killed/VERB or/CCONJ captured/VERB Sufi/PROPN Muhammad8217s/PROPN credibility/NOUN suffered/VERB and/CCONJ on/ADP his/PRON return/NOUN he/PRON was/AUX whisked/VERB off/ADP to/ADP a/DET prison/NOUN in/ADP Dera/PROPN Ismail/PROPN Khan/PROPN In/ADP 2005/NUM Muhammad8217s/PROPN soninlaw/NOUN Mullah/PROPN Fazlullah/PROPN was/AUX able/ADJ to/PART revive/VERB TNSM/NOUN with/ADP a/DET more/ADV radical/ADJ edge/NOUN The/DET group/NOUN was/AUX further/ADV strengthened/VERB by/ADP the/DET arrival/NOUN of/ADP militants/NOUN fleeing/VERB US/PROPN drone/NOUN attacks/NOUN in/ADP FATA/PROPN After/SCONJ the/DET TehreekeTaliban/PROPN Pakistan/PROPN Taliban/PROPN Movement/PROPN of/ADP Pakistan/PROPN TTP/PROPN was/AUX established/VERB in/ADP December/PROPN 2007/NUM with/ADP Baitullah/PROPN Mehsud/PROPN as/SCONJ its/PRON leader/NOUN Mullah/PROPN Fazlullah/PROPN changed/VERB his/PRON organization/NOUN into/ADP a/DET local/ADJ chapter/NOUN of/ADP the/DET movement/NOUN With/ADP its/PRON populist/ADJ rhetoric/NOUN its/PRON swift/ADJ justice/NOUN and/CCONJ opposition/NOUN to/ADP the/DET old/ADJ feudal/ADJ elite/NOUN it/PRON found/VERB favor/NOUN with/ADP the/DET underclass/NOUN and/CCONJ attracted/VERB many/ADJ disaffected/VERB youths/NOUN This/PRON observed/VERB Asif/PROPN Ezdi/PROPN a/DET political/ADJ analyst/NOUN was/AUX 8220because/NOUN the/DET state/NOUN has/AUX failed/VERB the/DET youth/NOUN massively/ADV and/CCONJ comprehensively/ADV the/DET wellspring/NOUN of/ADP Islamic/ADJ militancy/NOUN in/ADP Pakistan/PROPN is/AUX to/PART be/AUX found/VERB in/ADP the/DET alienation/NOUN of/ADP the/DET mass/NOUN of/ADP the/DET population/NOUN by/ADP a/DET ruling/VERB elite/NOUN that/PRON has/AUX used/VERB the/DET state/NOUN to/PART protect/VERB and/CCONJ expand/VERB its/PRON own/ADJ privileges/NOUN pushing/VERB the/DET common/ADJ man/NOUN into/ADP deeper/ADJ and/CCONJ deeper/ADJ poverty/NOUN and/CCONJ hopelessness8221/NOUN Rule/PROPN of/ADP justice/NOUN With/ADP unemployment/NOUN easy/ADJ access/NOUN to/ADP weaponry/NOUN and/CCONJ training/NOUN and/CCONJ rising/VERB political/ADJ consciousness/NOUN because/SCONJ of/ADP a/DET vibrant/ADJ private/ADJ media/NOUN there/PRON was/VERB no/DET shortage/NOUN of/ADP angry/ADJ young/ADJ men/NOUN to/PART swell/VERB the/DET Taliban/PROPN ranks/VERB especially/ADV when/SCONJ the/DET war/NOUN was/AUX also/ADV seen/VERB as/ADP a/DET struggle/NOUN against/ADP the/DET entrenched/ADJ elite/ADJ 8220In/NUM some/DET areas/NOUN at/ADP least/ADJ it/PRON has/AUX pitted/VERB landless/ADJ tenants/NOUN against/ADP wealthy/ADJ landlords8221/PROPN Ezdi/PROPN notes/VERB This/PRON he/PRON says/VERB was/AUX 8220/NUM in/ADP a/DET country/NOUN where/SCONJ ordinary/ADJ people/NOUN have/VERB little/ADJ chance/NOUN of/ADP overcoming/VERB status/NOUN barriers/NOUN with/ADP the/DET government/NOUN the/DET political/ADJ system/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET elite/NOUN all/PRON arrayed/VERB against/ADP them/PRON It/PRON is/AUX this/DET combination/NOUN of/ADP revolutionary/ADJ and/CCONJ religious/ADJ zeal/NOUN which/PRON makes/VERB the/DET Taliban/PROPN such/DET a/DET formidable/ADJ force8221/NOUN However/ADV as/SCONJ more/ADJ power/NOUN accrued/VERB to/ADP the/DET TTP/PROPN petty/ADJ criminals/NOUN also/ADV joined/VERB This/PRON not/PART only/ADV granted/VERB them/PRON immunity/NOUN from/ADP the/DET Taliban8217s/PROPN brutal/PROPN justice/NOUN but/CCONJ access/NOUN to/ADP weapons/NOUN and/CCONJ a/DET powerful/ADJ support/NOUN network/NOUN They/PRON used/VERB these/DET immediately/ADV terrorizing/VERB 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rule/NOUN of/ADP justice/NOUN legislation/NOUN of/ADP February/PROPN 2009/NUM which/PRON briefly/ADV ended/VERB hostilities/NOUN after/SCONJ the/DET government/NOUN agreed/VERB to/PART establish/VERB sharia/ADJ courts/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET militants/NOUN agreed/VERB to/PART disarm/VERB After/ADP much/ADJ delay/NOUN the/DET legislation/NOUN was/AUX ratified/VERB by/ADP the/DET central/ADJ government/NOUN on/ADP April/PROPN 14/NUM 2009/NUM and/CCONJ although/SCONJ both/DET sides/NOUN failed/VERB fully/ADV to/PART meet/VERB obligations/NOUN some/DET normalcy/NOUN briefly/ADV returned/VERB to/ADP the/DET valley/NOUN Western/ADJ commentators/NOUN and/CCONJ their/PRON local/ADJ allies/NOUN were/AUX quick/ADJ to/PART denounce/VERB the/DET legislation/NOUN as/ADP Pakistan8217s/PROPN 8220surrender/NUM to/ADP the/DET Taliban8221/PROPN The/DET country/NOUN they/PRON said/VERB was/AUX on/ADP the/DET verge/NOUN of/ADP collapse/VERB its/PRON nuclear/ADJ arsenal/NOUN about/ADP to/PART land/VERB into/ADP the/DET hands/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Taliban/PROPN who/PRON were/AUX within/ADP 60/NUM miles/NOUN of/ADP the/DET capital/NOUN Pressure/PROPN mounted/VERB on/ADP the/DET Pakistani/ADJ government/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP May/PROPN when/SCONJ a/DET group/NOUN of/ADP TTP/PROPN militants/NOUN rode/VERB motorbikes/NOUN into/ADP the/DET neighbouring/ADJ Buner/PROPN valley/NOUN the/DET incident/NOUN was/AUX presented/VERB by/ADP the/DET media/NOUN as/ADP a/DET prelude/NOUN to/ADP a/DET march/NOUN on/ADP the/DET capital/NOUN The/DET tanks/NOUN rolled/VERB While/SCONJ the/DET operation/NOUN succeeded/VERB in/ADP dislodging/VERB the/DET militants/NOUN nearly/ADV three/NUM million/NUM citizens/NOUN were/AUX displaced/VERB and/CCONJ of/ADP those/PRON who/PRON remained/VERB many/ADJ were/AUX killed/VERB in/ADP the/DET bombing/NOUN of/ADP civilian/ADJ neighborhoods/NOUN The/DET UN/PROPN High/PROPN Commission/PROPN for/ADP Refugees/PROPN UNHCR/PROPN declared/VERB it/PRON the/DET worst/ADJ 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and/CCONJ independent/ADJ player/NOUN There/PRON was/VERB much/ADJ pressure/NOUN from/ADP the/DET US/PROPN and/CCONJ other/ADJ countries/NOUN and/CCONJ for/ADP a/DET variety/NOUN of/ADP reasons/NOUN the/DET government/NOUN couldn8217/NOUN t/NOUN resist8221/PROPN Yusufzai/PROPN dismisses/VERB the/DET idea/NOUN that/SCONJ the/DET militants/NOUN were/AUX a/DET threat/NOUN to/ADP the/DET country/NOUN or/CCONJ its/PRON nuclear/ADJ assets/NOUN 8220The/NUM government/NOUN itself/PRON is/AUX saying/VERB that/SCONJ there/PRON were/VERB no/DET more/ADJ than/ADP 5000/NUM Taliban/PROPN they/PRON were/AUX controlling/VERB Swat/PROPN they/PRON had/AUX entered/VERB Buner/PROPN 8212/NUM how/SCONJ many/ADJ men/NOUN could/AUX they/PRON have/AUX spared/VERB to/ADP march/NOUN on/ADP the/DET capital8221/PROPN Pakistan/PROPN is/AUX a/DET country/NOUN of/ADP 173amp160million/NUM with/ADP a/DET million/NUM under/ADP arms/NOUN and/CCONJ an/DET advanced/ADJ air/NOUN force/NOUN 8220The/NUM Taliban/PROPN had/AUX 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dangerous/ADJ In/ADP a/DET region/NOUN where/SCONJ blood/NOUN feuds/NOUN last/ADJ for/ADP generations/NOUN Yusufzai/PROPN points/VERB out/ADP this/PRON means/VERB perpetual/ADJ violence/NOUN pitting/VERB tribe/NOUN against/ADP tribe/NOUN The/DET government8217s/NOUN policy/NOUN of/ADP home/NOUN demolitions/NOUN ignores/VERB the/DET fact/NOUN that/SCONJ in/ADP the/DET frontier/NOUN region/NOUN a/DET single/ADJ house/NOUN is/AUX shared/VERB by/ADP an/DET extended/ADJ family/NOUN and/CCONJ when/SCONJ a/DET home/NOUN is/AUX demolished/VERB for/ADP the/DET sins/NOUN of/ADP an/DET errant/NOUN son/NOUN the/DET state/NOUN creates/VERB more/ADJ recruits/NOUN for/ADP the/DET insurgency/NOUN An/DET uneasy/ADJ peace/NOUN prevails/NOUN in/ADP Swat/PROPN today/NOUN and/CCONJ militant/ADJ violence/NOUN has/AUX declined/VERB However/ADV more/ADJ than/ADP 200amp160suspected/NUM militants/NOUN and/CCONJ sympathizers/NOUN have/AUX been/AUX killed/VERB in/ADP extrajudicial/ADJ executions/NOUN by/ADP security/NOUN forces/NOUN and/CCONJ local/ADJ vigilantes/NOUN since/SCONJ the/DET end/NOUN of/ADP major/ADJ combat/NOUN operations/NOUN The/DET population/NOUN remains/VERB in/ADP a/DET permanent/ADJ state/NOUN of/ADP fear/NOUN 8220If/NUM earlier/ADJ people/NOUN were/AUX terrorized/VERB by/ADP the/DET Taliban/PROPN today/NOUN they/PRON live/VERB in/ADP fear/NOUN of/ADP the/DET army8221/PROPN says/VERB Yusufzai/PROPN 8220Anybody/PRON can/AUX be/AUX labelled/VERB a/DET Talib8221/PROPN he/PRON notes/VERB some/DET locals/NOUN have/AUX chosen/VERB to/PART settle/VERB scores/NOUN by/ADP falsely/ADV accusing/VERB rivals/NOUN of/ADP being/AUX Taliban/PROPN sympathizers/NOUN 8220Your/NUM house/NOUN is/AUX then/ADV demolished/VERB you/PRON are/AUX taken/VERB into/ADP custody/NOUN and/CCONJ next/ADJ day/NOUN your/PRON body/NOUN is/AUX found/VERB dumped/VERB in/ADP a/DET field/NOUN People/NOUN are/AUX very/ADV scared/ADJ they/PRON are/AUX afraid/ADJ to/PART talk/VERB and/CCONJ the/DET 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tandoori/NOUN bread/NOUN Once/ADV sold/VERB for/ADP Rsamp1602/PROPN it/PRON now/ADV sells/VERB for/SCONJ Rsamp16015/PROPN Wages/PROPN have/AUX stagnated/VERB and/CCONJ inflation/NOUN and/CCONJ unemployment/NOUN are/AUX high/ADJ On/ADP the/DET street/NOUN there/PRON was/VERB no/DET talk/NOUN of/ADP the/DET threat/NOUN to/AUX lives/NOUN Everyone/PRON complained/VERB about/ADP the/DET impossible/ADJ cost/NOUN of/ADP living/VERB MUHAMMAD/PROPN IDREES/PROPN AHMAD/PROPN is/AUX the/DET cofounder/NOUN of/ADP Pulsemediaorg/PROPN This/DET article/NOUN appears/VERB in/ADP the/DET currentamp160edition/NOUN of/ADP Le/PROPN Monde/PROPN Diplomatique/PROPN whose/DET English/PROPN language/NOUN edition/NOUN can/AUX be/AUX found/VERB at/ADP mondediplocom/PROPN This/DET full/ADJ text/NOUN appears/VERB by/ADP agreement/NOUN with/ADP Le/PROPN Monde/PROPN Diplomatique/PROPN CounterPunch/PROPN features/VERB one/NUM or/CCONJ two/NUM articles/NOUN from/ADP LMD/PROPN every/DET month/NOUN |
<p>Jan 18 (Reuters) - Capital Finance Holdings Ltd:</p>
<p>* ‍LAM FEI SUI APPOINTED AS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER​ Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Western powers said on Saturday their missile attacks struck at the heart of Syria’s chemical weapons program, but the restrained assault appeared unlikely to halt Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s progress in the 7-year-old civil war.</p>
<p>The United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles overnight in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in Syria a week ago, targeting what the Pentagon said were three chemical weapons facilities, including a research and development center in Damascus’ Barzeh district and two installations near Homs.</p>
<p>The bombing was the biggest intervention by Western countries against Assad and his superpower ally Russia, but the three countries said the strikes were limited to Syria’s chemical weapons capabilities and not aimed at toppling Assad or intervening in the civil war.</p>
<p>The air attack, denounced by Damascus and its allies as an illegal act of aggression, was unlikely to alter the course of a multisided war that has killed at least half a million people.</p>
<p>U.S. President Donald Trump called the operation a success.</p>
<p>He proclaimed on Twitter: “Mission accomplished,” echoing former President George W. Bush, whose use of the same phrase in 2003 to describe the U.S. invasion of Iraq was widely ridiculed as violence there dragged on for years.</p>
<p>“We believe that by hitting Barzeh in particular we’ve attacked the heart of the Syrian chemicals weapon program,” U.S. Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie said at the Pentagon.</p>
<p>However, McKenzie acknowledged elements of the program remain and he could not guarantee that Syria would be unable to conduct a chemical attack in the future.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-sarin/u-s-official-says-information-points-to-sarin-chlorine-use-in-syria-attack-idUSKBN1HL172" type="external">U.S. official says 'information' points to sarin, chlorine use in Syria attack</a>
<a href="/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-trump/trump-mission-accomplished-on-perfectly-executed-syria-strike-idUSKBN1HL0TW" type="external">Trump: 'mission accomplished' on 'perfectly executed' Syria strike</a>
<a href="/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idlib/france-warns-of-humanitarian-disaster-in-syrian-city-idlib-idUSKBN1HL1C2" type="external">France warns of humanitarian disaster in Syrian city Idlib</a>
<p>The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said at an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that Trump told her that if Syria uses poisonous gas again, “The United States is locked and loaded.”</p>
<p>The Western countries said the strikes were aimed at preventing more Syrian chemical weapons attacks after a suspected poison gas attack in Douma on April 7 killed up to 75 people. They blame Assad’s government for the attack.</p>
<p>In Washington, a senior administration official said on Saturday that “while the available information is much greater on the chlorine use, we do have significant information that also points to sarin use” in the attack.</p>
<p>Speaking at a summit in Peru, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence seemed less sure of the use of sarin, saying that Washington may well determine that it was used along with chlorine.</p> ASSAD ‘RESILIENCE’
<p>Ten hours after the missiles hit, smoke was still rising from the remains of five destroyed buildings of the Syrian Scientific Research Center in Barzeh, where a Syrian employee said medical components were developed.</p>
<p>There were no immediate reports of casualties.</p>
<p>Syria released video of the wreckage of a bombed-out research lab, but also of Assad arriving at work as usual, with the caption “Morning of resilience”.</p>
<p>Late on Saturday Syria time, a large explosion was heard in a Syrian government-controlled area in a rural region south of Aleppo, according to the Britain-based war monitor The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Observatory said the cause of the explosion was unknown, as well as its target.</p>
<p>Russian and Iranian military help over the past three years has allowed Assad to crush the rebel threat to topple him.</p>
<p>The United States, Britain and France have all participated in the Syrian conflict for years, arming rebels, bombing Islamic State fighters and deploying troops on the ground to fight that group. But they have refrained from targeting Assad’s government, apart from a volley of U.S. missiles last year.</p>
<p>Although the Western countries have all said for seven years that Assad must leave power, they held back in the past from striking his government, lacking a wider strategy to defeat him.</p>
<p>Syria and its allies also made clear that they considered the attack a one-off, unlikely to do meaningful harm to Assad.</p>
<p>A senior official in a regional alliance that backs Damascus told Reuters the sites that were targeted had been evacuated days ago thanks to a warning from Russia.</p>
<p>Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the strikes were “unacceptable and lawless.”</p>
<p>Syrian state media called them a “flagrant violation of international law,” while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called it a crime and the Western leaders criminals.</p>
<p>Russia had promised to respond to any attack on its ally, but the Pentagon said no Russian air defense systems were used. Syria fired 40 unguided surface-to-air missiles - but only after the Western strikes had ended, the Pentagon said.</p>
<p>“We are confident that all of our missiles reached their targets,” McKenzie said.</p>
<p>British Prime Minister Theresa May described the strike as “limited and targeted,” with no intention of toppling Assad or intervening more widely in the war.</p>
<p>Washington described the strike targets as a center near Damascus for the research, development, production and testing of chemical and biological weapons; a chemical weapons storage site near the city of Homs; and another site near Homs that stored chemical weapons equipment and housed a command post.</p>
<p>The Pentagon said there had been chemical weapons agents at one of the targets, and that the strikes had significantly crippled Syria’s ability to produce such weapons.</p>
<p>Trump spoke to May and French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss results of the strikes, the leaders’ offices said.</p> A U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer, deployed to Al Udeid Air Base, launches a strike as part of the multinational response to Syria's use of chemical weapons is seen in this image from Al Udeid Air Base, Doha, Qatar released on April 14, 2018. U.S. Air Force/Handout via REUTERS
<p>U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged all Security Council members to exercise restraint and avoid escalation in Syria, but said allegations of chemical weapons use demand an investigation.</p> WEAPONS INSPECTIONS
<p>Inspectors from the global chemical weapons watchdog OPCW were due to try to visit Douma on Saturday to inspect the site of the suspected gas attack. Moscow condemned the Western states for refusing to wait for their findings.</p>
<p>Russia, whose relations with the West have deteriorated to levels of Cold War-era hostility, has denied any gas attack took place in Douma and even accused Britain of staging it to whip up anti-Russian hysteria.</p>
<p>The Western countries took precautions to avoid unexpected conflict with Russia. French Defence Minister Florence Parly said Russians was warned beforehand to avert conflict.</p>
<p>Dmitry Belik, a Russian member of parliament who was in Damascus and witnessed the strikes, told Reuters: “The attack was more of a psychological nature rather than practical. Luckily there are no substantial losses or damages.”</p>
<p>In Douma, site of the suspected gas attack, the last buses were due on Saturday to transport out rebels and their families who agreed to surrender the town, state TV reported. That effectively ends all resistance in the suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta, marking one of the biggest victories for Assad’s government of the war.</p>
<p>The Western assault involved more missiles than a U.S. attack last year but struck targets limited to Syria’s chemical weapons facilities. The U.S. intervention last year had effectively no impact on the war.</p> Slideshow (18 Images)
<p>Syria agreed in 2013 to give up its chemical weapons after a nerve gas attack killed hundreds of people in Douma. Damascus is still permitted to have chlorine for civilian use, although its use as a weapon is banned. Allegations of Assad’s chlorine use have been frequent during the war although, unlike nerve agents, chlorine did not produce mass casualties as seen last week.</p>
<p>Reporting by Phil Stewart and Tom Perry; additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland, Idrees Ali, Yara Bayoumy, Matt Spetalnick and Joel Schectman in Washington; Michelle Nichols in New York; Samia Nakhoul, Tom Perry, Laila Bassam, Ellen Francis and Angus McDowall in Beirut; Kinda Makieh in Barzeh; Michael Holden and Guy Faulconbridge in London; and Jean-Baptiste Vey, Geert de Clerq and Matthias Blamont in Paris; Polina Ivanova in Moscow; writing by Doina Chiacu; editing by Yara Bayoumy, Alistair Bell and Jonathan Oatis</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) - Britain’s foreign minister and United Nations human rights rapporteurs separately called on Thursday for the release of two Reuters reporters detained in Myanmar, after a judge rejected a request for their case to be dismissed.</p> Detained Reuters journalist Wa Lone gestures to the media as he is escorted by police after a court hearing in Yangon, Myanmar April 11, 2018. REUTERS/Ann Wang
<p>Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Twitter that Myanmar must show its “commitment to media freedom” while the U.N. special rapporteurs said in a joint statement that the pursuit of the case against Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, gave rise to “grave concern for investigative journalism”.</p>
<p>A Myanmar government spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.</p>
<p>A court in Yangon has been holding preliminary hearings since January to decide whether the journalists will be charged for possessing secret government papers under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.</p>
<p>Judge Ye Lwin rejected on Wednesday a defence request to dismiss the case against the two reporters, who have been held since December, for lack of evidence. The judge said he wanted to hear the eight remaining prosecution witnesses out of the 25 listed, according to defence lawyer Khin Maung Zaw.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, seven Myanmar soldiers were sentenced to 10 years “with hard labor in a remote area” for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in northwestern Rakhine state last September, the army said.</p>
<p>Yanghee Lee, U.N. special rapporteur on Myanmar, and David Kaye, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, noted the journalists could be sentenced to longer terms if found guilty.</p>
<p>“The perpetrators of a massacre that was, in part, the subject of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s reporting have been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. And yet these two reporters face a possible 14 years imprisonment. The absurdity of this trial and the wrongfulness of their detention and prosecution are clear,” they said in a joint statement.</p>
<p>Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the U.N..</p>
<p>The country’s ambassador to the U.N., Hau Do Suan, said last month that the journalists were not arrested for reporting a story, but were accused of “illegally possessing confidential government documents”.</p> Detained Reuters journalist Kyaw Soe Oo is escorted by police before a court hearing in Yangon, Myanmar April 11, 2018. REUTERS/Ann Wang ARMY CRACKDOWN
<p>An army crackdown, unleashed in response to Rohingya militant attacks on security forces in August, has been beset by allegations of murder, rape, arson and looting. The U.N. and United States described it as ethnic cleansing - an accusation which Myanmar denies.</p>
<p>Nearly 700,000 Muslim Rohingya have fled Rakhine state and crossed into southern Bangladesh since then.</p>
<p>After the U.N. experts made their comments, Johnson took to Twitter on the case. “Very disappointed to hear Burmese @Reuters journalists Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone are now to face trial,” he said. “Reiterate my calls for their release: Burmese authorities must show their commitment to media freedom.”</p>
<p>At this stage the prosecutor is trying to persuade the court to file charges. The preliminary proceedings are still underway and only after they are completed is the court expected to decide whether to send the two reporters to trial.</p>
<p>Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and William James; editing by David Stamp</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Chinese senior diplomat Song Tao, and feted a Chinese art troupe led by Song, North Korean state media said on Sunday, indicating closer ties with China following Kim’s surprise visit to Beijing last month.</p> North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads a party meeting in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang April 9, 2018. KCNA/via Reuters
<p>The North Korean leader on Saturday “warmly” greeted Song Tao and the Chinese delegation visiting Pyongyang to perform and also expressed his greetings to Chinese President Xi Jinping after Song conveyed Xi’s greetings to Kim, the North’s official Korea Central News Agency said.</p>
<p>“He said with deep emotion that the Chinese comrades accorded cordial hospitality to him with utmost sincerity in token of warm comradely friendship during his recent unforgettable visit to China,” the KCNA said.</p>
<p>In late March, Kim made a rare visit to Beijing and met Xi, Kim’s first known journey abroad since he took power in 2011.</p>
<p>The Chinese art troupe, led by Song, the head of the Communist Party’s International Department, left for North Korea on Friday for an April Spring Friendship Art Festival.</p>
<p>The art troupe performed on Saturday at the Mansudae Art Theatre, and the North Korean leader Kim’s wife Ri Sol Ju watched a ballet “Giselle,” performed by the National Ballet of China, but Kim was not present, the KCNA said.</p>
<p>At the meeting with Song, Kim also said the warm welcome was “due obligation and behavior of the host and close friend for him,” and would offer “all conditions for the Chinese art troupe at the highest level and on a top-priority basis,” according to the KCNA.</p>
<p>That contrasts with Song’s last visit to Pyongyang last November, when he was sent as Xi’s special enjoy to discuss the outcome of China’s 19th Party Congress. Song returned to Beijing without meeting Kim.</p>
<p>North Korea’s ties with China, its sole ally, had become strained over the past couple of years over the North’s contentious missile and nuclear tests.</p>
<p>Kim and Song also exchanged their views on deepening the bilateral relations, the KCNA said. Kim said he would develop their friendship into a “fresh phase of development as required by a new era by further strengthening of the bilateral relations.”</p>
<p>Reporting By Jane Chung; editing by Jonathan Oatis</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Martin Sorrell, who built WPP into the world’s biggest advertising agency through 33 years of dealmaking, quit on Saturday after an allegation of personal misconduct.</p> FILE PHOTO: Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive Officer of WPP, attends the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
<p>The departure of the CEO who built a two-man outfit into one of Britain’s biggest companies with 200,000 staff in 112 countries leaves WPP without a boss at a pivotal time for the industry and when the group is under great strain.</p>
<p>WPP stunned the market last week when it said it had appointed lawyers to investigate alleged misconduct by Sorrell. He denied the allegations but in a letter to WPP staff published late on Saturday he said the “current disruption” was “putting too much unnecessary pressure on the business”.</p>
<p>He said he had decided that “in your interest, in the interest of our clients, in the interest of all shareowners, both big and small, and in the interest of all our other stakeholders, it is best for me to step aside”.</p>
<p>Chairman Roberto Quarta will become executive chairman until a new chief executive is found, while Mark Read, a WPP digital executive, and Andrew Scott, chief operating officer, Europe, have been appointed as joint chief operating officers.</p>
<p>Read, who previously sat on WPP’s main board, is well regarded in the industry while Scott was involved in its acquisition strategy and was not involved with clients.</p>
<p>The company will consider internal and external candidates for the top job in a process that could take several months.</p>
<p>“Obviously I am sad to leave WPP after 33 years,” Sorrell said in a statement. “It has been a passion, focus and source of energy for so long. However, I believe it is in the best interests of the business if I step down now.”</p>
<p>WPP said the investigation, which regarded financial impropriety, had concluded. It made no further comment but repeated a previous statement that the allegation did not involve amounts that were material to the company.</p>
<p>A source close to Sorrell said he had been unhappy with how the investigation was handled, leaving him uncertain whether he could work with the board again.</p>
<p>Analysts have speculated that the sprawling group, which was being restructured after a year of lower spending from some clients, could now sell off some assets if led by different management.</p> PASSION AND FOCUS
<p>The longest-serving CEO on the FTSE 100 blue chip index, Sorrell built WPP into one of Britain’s biggest companies by three decades of relentless dealmaking. He is one of the most high profile, and best paid, executives in the country.</p>
<p>In his time the group expanded to own top creative agencies including J. Walter Thompson and Young &amp; Rubicam, as well as media planners and buyers, market-research firms and public relations groups such as Finsbury.</p>
<p>Present in 112 countries, WPP serves clients including Ford, Unilever, P&amp;G and a string of major corporations around the world.</p>
<p>It largely outperformed its peers Omnicom, Publicis and IPG in the years that followed the financial crisis as the group pitched aggressively for new work. But it has been hit in the last 18 months by a downturn in spending from consumer goods groups Unilever and P&amp;G, and the loss of some big accounts.</p>
<p>The migration of advertising online and the encroachment into market research of consultancies such as Accenture have compounded the pressures. Its shares are down around 30 percent this year.</p>
<p>The company said Sorrell would be available to assist with the transition, and the man synonymous with the British marketing group told the staff they would come through this difficult time.</p>
<p>“As a founder, I can say that WPP is not just a matter of life or death, it was, is and will be more important than that,” Sorrell said. “Good fortune and Godspeed to all of you. Now back to the future.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Kate Holton; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Alistair Bell and Daniel Wallis</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | BRIEF-Capital Finance Holdings Appoints Lam Fei Sui As Chief Financial Officer U.S. says air strikes cripple Syria chemical weapons program U.N. experts, Britain demand release of Reuters reporters in Myanmar North Korean leader meets Chinese senior official, fetes Chinese art troupe Martin Sorrell quits as head of world's biggest ad group WPP | false | https://reuters.com/article/brief-capital-finance-holdings-appoints/brief-capital-finance-holdings-appoints-lam-fei-sui-as-chief-financial-officer-idUSFWN1PD0OC | 2018-01-18 | 2least
| 3,048 | Jan 18 Reuters Capital Finance Holdings Ltd 8205LAM FEI SUI APPOINTED AS CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER8203 Source text for Eikon Further company coverage Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles WASHINGTONBEIRUT Reuters Western powers said on Saturday their missile attacks struck at the heart of Syria8217s chemical weapons program but the restrained assault appeared unlikely to halt Syrian President Bashar alAssad8217s progress in the 7yearold civil war The United States France and Britain launched 105 missiles overnight in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in Syria a week ago targeting what the Pentagon said were three chemical weapons facilities including a research and development center in Damascus8217 Barzeh district and two installations near Homs The bombing was the biggest intervention by Western countries against Assad and his superpower ally Russia but the three countries said the strikes were limited to Syria8217s chemical weapons capabilities and not aimed at toppling Assad or intervening in the civil war The air attack denounced by Damascus and its allies as an illegal act of aggression was unlikely to alter the course of a multisided war that has killed at least half a million people US President Donald Trump called the operation a success He proclaimed on Twitter 8220Mission accomplished8221 echoing former President George W Bush whose use of the same phrase in 2003 to describe the US invasion of Iraq was widely ridiculed as violence there dragged on for years 8220We believe that by hitting Barzeh in particular we8217ve attacked the heart of the Syrian chemicals weapon program8221 US Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie said at the Pentagon However McKenzie acknowledged elements of the program remain and he could not guarantee that Syria would be unable to conduct a chemical attack in the future Related Coverage US official says information points to sarin chlorine use in Syria attack Trump mission accomplished on perfectly executed Syria strike France warns of humanitarian disaster in Syrian city Idlib The US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that Trump told her that if Syria uses poisonous gas again 8220The United States is locked and loaded8221 The Western countries said the strikes were aimed at preventing more Syrian chemical weapons attacks after a suspected poison gas attack in Douma on April 7 killed up to 75 people They blame Assad8217s government for the attack In Washington a senior administration official said on Saturday that 8220while the available information is much greater on the chlorine use we do have significant information that also points to sarin use8221 in the attack Speaking at a summit in Peru US Vice President Mike Pence seemed less sure of the use of sarin saying that Washington may well determine that it was used along with chlorine ASSAD 8216RESILIENCE8217 Ten hours after the missiles hit smoke was still rising from the remains of five destroyed buildings of the Syrian Scientific Research Center in Barzeh where a Syrian employee said medical components were developed There were no immediate reports of casualties Syria released video of the wreckage of a bombedout research lab but also of Assad arriving at work as usual with the caption 8220Morning of resilience8221 Late on Saturday Syria time a large explosion was heard in a Syrian governmentcontrolled area in a rural region south of Aleppo according to the Britainbased war monitor The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights The Observatory said the cause of the explosion was unknown as well as its target Russian and Iranian military help over the past three years has allowed Assad to crush the rebel threat to topple him The United States Britain and France have all participated in the Syrian conflict for years arming rebels bombing Islamic State fighters and deploying troops on the ground to fight that group But they have refrained from targeting Assad8217s government apart from a volley of US missiles last year Although the Western countries have all said for seven years that Assad must leave power they held back in the past from striking his government lacking a wider strategy to defeat him Syria and its allies also made clear that they considered the attack a oneoff unlikely to do meaningful harm to Assad A senior official in a regional alliance that backs Damascus told Reuters the sites that were targeted had been evacuated days ago thanks to a warning from Russia Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the strikes were 8220unacceptable and lawless8221 Syrian state media called them a 8220flagrant violation of international law8221 while Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called it a crime and the Western leaders criminals Russia had promised to respond to any attack on its ally but the Pentagon said no Russian air defense systems were used Syria fired 40 unguided surfacetoair missiles but only after the Western strikes had ended the Pentagon said 8220We are confident that all of our missiles reached their targets8221 McKenzie said British Prime Minister Theresa May described the strike as 8220limited and targeted8221 with no intention of toppling Assad or intervening more widely in the war Washington described the strike targets as a center near Damascus for the research development production and testing of chemical and biological weapons a chemical weapons storage site near the city of Homs and another site near Homs that stored chemical weapons equipment and housed a command post The Pentagon said there had been chemical weapons agents at one of the targets and that the strikes had significantly crippled Syria8217s ability to produce such weapons Trump spoke to May and French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss results of the strikes the leaders8217 offices said A US Air Force B1B Lancer deployed to Al Udeid Air Base launches a strike as part of the multinational response to Syrias use of chemical weapons is seen in this image from Al Udeid Air Base Doha Qatar released on April 14 2018 US Air ForceHandout via REUTERS UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres urged all Security Council members to exercise restraint and avoid escalation in Syria but said allegations of chemical weapons use demand an investigation WEAPONS INSPECTIONS Inspectors from the global chemical weapons watchdog OPCW were due to try to visit Douma on Saturday to inspect the site of the suspected gas attack Moscow condemned the Western states for refusing to wait for their findings Russia whose relations with the West have deteriorated to levels of Cold Warera hostility has denied any gas attack took place in Douma and even accused Britain of staging it to whip up antiRussian hysteria The Western countries took precautions to avoid unexpected conflict with Russia French Defence Minister Florence Parly said Russians was warned beforehand to avert conflict Dmitry Belik a Russian member of parliament who was in Damascus and witnessed the strikes told Reuters 8220The attack was more of a psychological nature rather than practical Luckily there are no substantial losses or damages8221 In Douma site of the suspected gas attack the last buses were due on Saturday to transport out rebels and their families who agreed to surrender the town state TV reported That effectively ends all resistance in the suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta marking one of the biggest victories for Assad8217s government of the war The Western assault involved more missiles than a US attack last year but struck targets limited to Syria8217s chemical weapons facilities The US intervention last year had effectively no impact on the war Slideshow 18 Images Syria agreed in 2013 to give up its chemical weapons after a nerve gas attack killed hundreds of people in Douma Damascus is still permitted to have chlorine for civilian use although its use as a weapon is banned Allegations of Assad8217s chlorine use have been frequent during the war although unlike nerve agents chlorine did not produce mass casualties as seen last week Reporting by Phil Stewart and Tom Perry additional reporting by Jeff Mason Steve Holland Idrees Ali Yara Bayoumy Matt Spetalnick and Joel Schectman in Washington Michelle Nichols in New York Samia Nakhoul Tom Perry Laila Bassam Ellen Francis and Angus McDowall in Beirut Kinda Makieh in Barzeh Michael Holden and Guy Faulconbridge in London and JeanBaptiste Vey Geert de Clerq and Matthias Blamont in Paris Polina Ivanova in Moscow writing by Doina Chiacu editing by Yara Bayoumy Alistair Bell and Jonathan Oatis Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles LONDONGENEVA Reuters Britain8217s foreign minister and United Nations human rights rapporteurs separately called on Thursday for the release of two Reuters reporters detained in Myanmar after a judge rejected a request for their case to be dismissed Detained Reuters journalist Wa Lone gestures to the media as he is escorted by police after a court hearing in Yangon Myanmar April 11 2018 REUTERSAnn Wang Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Twitter that Myanmar must show its 8220commitment to media freedom8221 while the UN special rapporteurs said in a joint statement that the pursuit of the case against Wa Lone 32 and Kyaw Soe Oo 28 gave rise to 8220grave concern for investigative journalism8221 A Myanmar government spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment A court in Yangon has been holding preliminary hearings since January to decide whether the journalists will be charged for possessing secret government papers under the colonialera Official Secrets Act which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison Judge Ye Lwin rejected on Wednesday a defence request to dismiss the case against the two reporters who have been held since December for lack of evidence The judge said he wanted to hear the eight remaining prosecution witnesses out of the 25 listed according to defence lawyer Khin Maung Zaw On Tuesday seven Myanmar soldiers were sentenced to 10 years 8220with hard labor in a remote area8221 for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in northwestern Rakhine state last September the army said Yanghee Lee UN special rapporteur on Myanmar and David Kaye UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression noted the journalists could be sentenced to longer terms if found guilty 8220The perpetrators of a massacre that was in part the subject of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo8217s reporting have been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment And yet these two reporters face a possible 14 years imprisonment The absurdity of this trial and the wrongfulness of their detention and prosecution are clear8221 they said in a joint statement Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the UN The country8217s ambassador to the UN Hau Do Suan said last month that the journalists were not arrested for reporting a story but were accused of 8220illegally possessing confidential government documents8221 Detained Reuters journalist Kyaw Soe Oo is escorted by police before a court hearing in Yangon Myanmar April 11 2018 REUTERSAnn Wang ARMY CRACKDOWN An army crackdown unleashed in response to Rohingya militant attacks on security forces in August has been beset by allegations of murder rape arson and looting The UN and United States described it as ethnic cleansing an accusation which Myanmar denies Nearly 700000 Muslim Rohingya have fled Rakhine state and crossed into southern Bangladesh since then After the UN experts made their comments Johnson took to Twitter on the case 8220Very disappointed to hear Burmese Reuters journalists Kyaw Soe Oo and Wa Lone are now to face trial8221 he said 8220Reiterate my calls for their release Burmese authorities must show their commitment to media freedom8221 At this stage the prosecutor is trying to persuade the court to file charges The preliminary proceedings are still underway and only after they are completed is the court expected to decide whether to send the two reporters to trial Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay and William James editing by David Stamp Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles SEOUL Reuters North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met Chinese senior diplomat Song Tao and feted a Chinese art troupe led by Song North Korean state media said on Sunday indicating closer ties with China following Kim8217s surprise visit to Beijing last month North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads a party meeting in this photo released by North Koreas Korean Central News Agency KCNA in Pyongyang April 9 2018 KCNAvia Reuters The North Korean leader on Saturday 8220warmly8221 greeted Song Tao and the Chinese delegation visiting Pyongyang to perform and also expressed his greetings to Chinese President Xi Jinping after Song conveyed Xi8217s greetings to Kim the North8217s official Korea Central News Agency said 8220He said with deep emotion that the Chinese comrades accorded cordial hospitality to him with utmost sincerity in token of warm comradely friendship during his recent unforgettable visit to China8221 the KCNA said In late March Kim made a rare visit to Beijing and met Xi Kim8217s first known journey abroad since he took power in 2011 The Chinese art troupe led by Song the head of the Communist Party8217s International Department left for North Korea on Friday for an April Spring Friendship Art Festival The art troupe performed on Saturday at the Mansudae Art Theatre and the North Korean leader Kim8217s wife Ri Sol Ju watched a ballet 8220Giselle8221 performed by the National Ballet of China but Kim was not present the KCNA said At the meeting with Song Kim also said the warm welcome was 8220due obligation and behavior of the host and close friend for him8221 and would offer 8220all conditions for the Chinese art troupe at the highest level and on a toppriority basis8221 according to the KCNA That contrasts with Song8217s last visit to Pyongyang last November when he was sent as Xi8217s special enjoy to discuss the outcome of China8217s 19th Party Congress Song returned to Beijing without meeting Kim North Korea8217s ties with China its sole ally had become strained over the past couple of years over the North8217s contentious missile and nuclear tests Kim and Song also exchanged their views on deepening the bilateral relations the KCNA said Kim said he would develop their friendship into a 8220fresh phase of development as required by a new era by further strengthening of the bilateral relations8221 Reporting By Jane Chung editing by Jonathan Oatis Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles LONDON Reuters Martin Sorrell who built WPP into the world8217s biggest advertising agency through 33 years of dealmaking quit on Saturday after an allegation of personal misconduct FILE PHOTO Sir Martin Sorrell Chief Executive Officer of WPP attends the World Economic Forum WEF annual meeting in Davos Switzerland January 23 2018 REUTERSDenis BalibouseFile Photo The departure of the CEO who built a twoman outfit into one of Britain8217s biggest companies with 200000 staff in 112 countries leaves WPP without a boss at a pivotal time for the industry and when the group is under great strain WPP stunned the market last week when it said it had appointed lawyers to investigate alleged misconduct by Sorrell He denied the allegations but in a letter to WPP staff published late on Saturday he said the 8220current disruption8221 was 8220putting too much unnecessary pressure on the business8221 He said he had decided that 8220in your interest in the interest of our clients in the interest of all shareowners both big and small and in the interest of all our other stakeholders it is best for me to step aside8221 Chairman Roberto Quarta will become executive chairman until a new chief executive is found while Mark Read a WPP digital executive and Andrew Scott chief operating officer Europe have been appointed as joint chief operating officers Read who previously sat on WPP8217s main board is well regarded in the industry while Scott was involved in its acquisition strategy and was not involved with clients The company will consider internal and external candidates for the top job in a process that could take several months 8220Obviously I am sad to leave WPP after 33 years8221 Sorrell said in a statement 8220It has been a passion focus and source of energy for so long However I believe it is in the best interests of the business if I step down now8221 WPP said the investigation which regarded financial impropriety had concluded It made no further comment but repeated a previous statement that the allegation did not involve amounts that were material to the company A source close to Sorrell said he had been unhappy with how the investigation was handled leaving him uncertain whether he could work with the board again Analysts have speculated that the sprawling group which was being restructured after a year of lower spending from some clients could now sell off some assets if led by different management PASSION AND FOCUS The longestserving CEO on the FTSE 100 blue chip index Sorrell built WPP into one of Britain8217s biggest companies by three decades of relentless dealmaking He is one of the most high profile and best paid executives in the country In his time the group expanded to own top creative agencies including J Walter Thompson and Young ampamp Rubicam as well as media planners and buyers marketresearch firms and public relations groups such as Finsbury Present in 112 countries WPP serves clients including Ford Unilever PampampG and a string of major corporations around the world It largely outperformed its peers Omnicom Publicis and IPG in the years that followed the financial crisis as the group pitched aggressively for new work But it has been hit in the last 18 months by a downturn in spending from consumer goods groups Unilever and PampampG and the loss of some big accounts The migration of advertising online and the encroachment into market research of consultancies such as Accenture have compounded the pressures Its shares are down around 30 percent this year The company said Sorrell would be available to assist with the transition and the man synonymous with the British marketing group told the staff they would come through this difficult time 8220As a founder I can say that WPP is not just a matter of life or death it was is and will be more important than that8221 Sorrell said 8220Good fortune and Godspeed to all of you Now back to the future8221 Reporting by Kate Holton Editing by Kevin Liffey Alistair Bell and Daniel Wallis Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles | Jan/PROPN 18/NUM Reuters/PROPN Capital/PROPN Finance/PROPN Holdings/PROPN Ltd/PROPN 8205LAM/PROPN FEI/PROPN SUI/PROPN APPOINTED/VERB AS/ADP CHIEF/PROPN FINANCIAL/PROPN OFFICER8203/PROPN Source/PROPN text/NOUN 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<p>The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.</p>
<p>–George Orwell, Animal Farm.</p>
<p>Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!</p>
<p>–Sir Walter Scott, &#160;Marmion.</p>
<p>A rich irony betwixt the conjunction of title this small article and&#160; introductory quotation.</p>
<p>Putting aside more insightful interpretations of ‘wealth’ &#160;such as&#160; intimated by&#160; genius of ‘tiger burning bright’; not so many years ago a savage&#160; and polemical indictment of ‘free market orthodoxy’ as prevailed in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher as mere ‘reflection’ of the United States under Ronald Reagan, (then as now; such be the spectrum of ‘ wad stuffed full’ – aka ‘take the money and run’ – and as such mirror become the more tarnished?) was written by a ‘man’ with whom I once was proud to share a sense of ‘Statehood’, of Nationality; indeed&#160; of ‘Blood’&#160; as ‘Freedom!’ so seen as oft in cause spilled become against&#160; ‘yoke of oppression’ as would be.</p>
<p>Given ‘prostitute efforts’ recent; &#160;accordant the&#160; ‘blue eyed and&#160; white’ as stated by President of Brazil –&#160; ‘pride’&#160; referred to laurels as humiliation, and question as to ‘fall’ &#160;inevitable?</p>
<p>‘Where There’s Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the betrayal of Britain’s future’ is a magnificent polemic penned by the now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Gordon Brown.</p>
<p>What I am about to write grieves me, in as much as ‘belief in man’ can be experienced as ‘betrayal double edged’- and as is to be paralleled by ordinary American as body of humanity concerning Barack Obama as fellow countryman – and in which similar hope was placed by way of vote?</p>
<p>‘Hoping’ not – such be the audacity?</p>
<p>‘Elaboration by pragmatism’&#160;&#160; occurring in due course –&#160; as&#160; ‘truth will out’?</p>
<p>Lots of water under the bridge (‘troubled’ as per Simon and Garfunkel – ‘reality’ as per ‘experienced’) since Gordon Brown wrote beautiful and wondrous concerning the ways of &#160;the ‘free market’; of the savage injustice of poverty and immiseration in order that few may benefit; of the destruction of communities and the turning of man against man so that the ways of ‘profit inordinately dominant’ may come to prevail as reflection of the primacy of ‘Greed’?</p>
<p>‘No such thing as Society’ as was the statement then as ‘abrogation hegemonious’, or &#160;as ‘mantra of the Stateless’, by Margaret Thatcher, &#160;now indeed ‘Baroness’, such be the honor&#160; as can be given&#160; where there be absence of &#160;‘Citizen’?</p>
<p>‘Absence of society’ &#160;&#160;being as abhorrent a concept as that infamous statement made by Madeline Albright concerning half a million children dying being ‘worth it’?</p>
<p>There be ‘Payne’ in the brotherhood as indeed memories standing unto forgiving- as lead to the saying as by that great American author, Kurt Vonnegut, concerning obscenity: ‘So it goes’?</p>
<p>Foremost, Gordon Brown is no longer in opposition, so to speak, being now the leader of the party in power in Britain, aka ‘Prime Minister’. For many years prior&#160; to assuming such mantle Gordon was&#160; subject to the ‘privy’ of ‘money men’, being&#160; Chancellor of the Exchequer of &#160;Britain; daily his ear being whispered into, as bent unto, by the voices of ‘free trade’ and ‘business’ as pragmatism so founded, whilst nurturing&#160; ambition of being the leader of ‘party’; the big man of little Country; such bend as being of by Henry Paulson unto Nancy Pelosi; whence ‘bailout’ first proposed – and same ‘master’ served apropos of ‘sellout’?</p>
<p>Such the ‘eminence grise’ as would be ‘grey’; such the misnomer of ‘leader’ as would be;&#160; as beyond mere ‘puppet’?</p>
<p>As in the choice made of spinmeister:&#160; ‘This puppet or that puppet’?</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>In such course as concerns gradualism of Gordon’s metamorphosis from ‘Socialist’ to supporter of ‘private public partnership’ and ‘private finance initiative’; and even self confessed ‘admirer’ of Margaret Thatcher; &#160;as rock must be changed by drip &#160;constant; &#160;or as variant of the Chinese water torture concerning ‘brain’; &#160;‘change’ being introduced by wilful deliberation of the Stateless; those whom require reference as to Bunyan and&#160; ‘Grace Abounding’ as would&#160; be characterised as constituent of&#160; ‘body of humanity’ – or indeed as&#160; Rabbie Burns put&#160; it: ‘ a Man’s a Man for A’ that’?</p>
<p>The change as Metamorphosis of man into insect;&#160; as written of by Kafka; Gregor Samsa being as Gordon Brown such be the awakening the morn of G20?</p>
<p>For it is by the very same criteria as ‘petard’ which Gordon Brown deployed in polemic against ‘free market regime’ concerning the distribution of wealth and the absence of ‘Social Justice’ prevailing under the ramifications of ideology implemented pragmatically as ‘Moral Economics’ aka&#160; ‘Politics’,&#160; as that Gordon himself could be hoisted, or&#160; ‘indicted’ now?- Or should that be ‘inducted’?</p>
<p>The particularities of such open to debate – what is being expressed here is opinion.</p>
<p>One may look from ‘Thatcher to Brown’ indeed, and, but for gender, find it difficult to say ‘which is which’ – on the ‘farm of animals political’?</p>
<p>This, despite&#160; ‘massage of the media’ as message, wilful distortion&#160; by way of ‘corporate line’ in what goes by way of ‘news’ these days; as ‘words speak louder than actions’ – and&#160; ‘form transcends substance’?</p>
<p>‘Things can only get better’, indeed.</p>
<p>Part of the greatness of Democracy is that; in allowing for ‘voice of humanity’ as rich as variant; there is thereby ‘allowance’ for the potential for substance to be represented despite form as would be cast? – As in: ‘Stick it to ‘the man’, Counterpunch!’?</p>
<p>But : &#160;‘digression’!</p>
<p>The subject of this small article: ‘deconstruction’ of the G20 meeting and Gordon Brown’s role in same as stands to ‘voice in wilderness’, as wolf howling may state ‘Truth’, or ‘out of the mouth of babes’ as may be and within which Democracy as yet lives and breathes and as aspiration in the respiration – and as ‘Only in America’ can yet&#160; be allowed the expression thereof?</p>
<p>First. A &#160;small ‘confession’.</p>
<p>Goodness knows there is enough ‘bad news’ around concerning the consequences of human depravity without adding another ‘two cents worth’ – but &#160;this as must be measured against the freedom of expression and interpretation,&#160; which&#160; ‘Democracy’&#160; as understood to be; and as which such as&#160; this&#160; Organ stands as to ‘liberate’?</p>
<p>Not so much the ‘fifth amendment’ – as&#160; first?</p>
<p>Being said –&#160; let’s get down to ‘brass tack’ by way of exercise of human rights -as has propensity to precipitate label of ‘paranoia’ in the joining of the dots made and &#160;‘Payneful’ as&#160; can be seen to form?</p>
<p>When ‘Hail to the Chief!’ stated herein, it meaning thanks be for the ability to speculate metaphysical and political, and to ‘air’ same? ‘Chief’’ in the synonymy&#160; being as without the extra ‘l’ as to proclamation of the ‘Stateless’; real belief of humanity being in ‘God’ as expression of humility humane – and knowing&#160; where the Stateless put the ‘l’ &#160;thereby? Humanity&#160; ‘eternal’,&#160; Stateless ‘ephemeral’ –&#160; as ‘dynamic’ being ‘worked out’ form of Dialectic?</p>
<p>The point being ‘change’ indeed.</p>
<p>This G20 meeting&#160; the ‘logical’, i.e. cold and heartless ‘ reality’; as of sentential or propositional calculus;&#160; result of&#160; ‘dark event detailed’ through investigation by an as yet unrecognised American brilliant as humane; G. Edward Griffin?</p>
<p>For we so contemplate a &#160;‘bitch’ in the beholding a beast of proportion of Brecht –&#160; and ‘Jekyll’ as would be in nature turned to ‘Hyde’ as per tale of Stevenson from such Island of Treasure&#160; as ‘Federal Reserve’ originates?</p>
<p>The reality as ‘nightmare’ we are living within&#160; that of the title of this small article-&#160; for greed&#160; indeed present’ as ‘wherein’, as &#160;when &#160;‘l’ &#160;&#160;be placed within word of ‘God’, &#160;such that depravity can prevail?</p>
<p>Stateless Bastards worshipping ‘gold’ with best laid plans;&#160; ‘given a inch’ – they have ‘taken a yard.’ – in their ‘sometime’ as ‘great notion’ – &#160;as one ‘Wolfe’ American so howled?</p>
<p>‘Men’ being to such bastards – &#160;as&#160; mere ‘ mice on the farm’ – when ‘Eric Arthur’ meets ‘John’?</p>
<p>‘Great notion’ being that of the ‘feeding off’ of all humanity in the expropriation of energy deemed as ‘surplus’ and categorised within scheme as profit;&#160; rationale being as Jefferson so acutely perceptive detailed concerning ‘hazardous moral pursuit’? ( see <a href="" type="internal">here</a>&#160; for a&#160; ‘deconstruction’?).</p>
<p>Plus ca change?</p>
<p>– The curious thing being that the dog did not bark.</p>
<p>Dogs as would now howl at&#160; G20 – say nought of jackal?</p>
<p>As &#160;Mr Griffin details concerning origins of ‘Federal Reserve’ , the strategy&#160; to gain ‘control’ – but not to be seen to do so?</p>
<p>Also as per Mr Griffin, the Federal Reserve a&#160; ‘Cartel’ – but operated in the ‘Public Interest’?</p>
<p>In colloquial vernacular, ‘put your trust in a Banker – and you will be ‘screwed’’?</p>
<p>Or should that last word, in light of ‘Gaussian Copula Function’ as underlying CDS ‘pump and dump’,&#160; be &#160;‘copulated?’</p>
<p>(Note: author of same function applied as ‘misinterpreted’ now back in China, working for ‘investment corporation’)</p>
<p>– Could have been as of ‘Mossad’, such the inscrutability?</p>
<p>For we all ‘live’ now in the shadow of&#160;&#160; ‘hazardous moral pursuit’; &#160;as in ‘of&#160; Capital having been withdrawn?</p>
<p>Say nought of flea riding elephant?</p>
<p>Where has all the money gone – indeed where is it going?</p>
<p>Silly, not&#160; to say stupid, question.</p>
<p>– From the poor to the rich!</p>
<p>Reading Griffin’s brilliant investigative work is as cataract being surgically removed from eye.</p>
<p>The dark secrecy all those years ago peeled back as layer of onion; the comprehension of the transition, as of leverage from gold standard to fiat; from regulation to de regulation, the understanding that ‘paper money’ is only as to ‘belief unfounded’&#160; – as per the value of &#160;such ‘leverage’&#160; rated as ‘triple A’ can be;&#160; ‘first wave’ being handled by Roosevelt and second wave ‘yet to come’ – it’s all there.</p>
<p>The ‘Bitch as bore Bastard’ being back in ‘heat’ – and hoping to give birth at the G20&#160; in a&#160; ‘Yo!’&#160;&#160; to ‘Herr. Brecht’s prescience?</p>
<p>The ‘redux’- such be the cunning,&#160; that Gold standard once more again be adopted, only this time around the currency&#160; to be ‘Global’;&#160; same power base prevailing now as all transferred to same dark party – courtesy of whore as would be humane?</p>
<p>Before ‘let’s go round again’?</p>
<p>All that remains being the names?</p>
<p>All done&#160; bar the ‘carving’?</p>
<p>All that remains the ’shuffle of soft shoe’- because Federal Reserve control subsumes IMF and World Bank?</p>
<p>(Ask not of ‘Comex Securities’ such context, &#160;lest a tower &#160;such as WTC7 fall upon your head, or you be pissed upon from great height; ‘paranoid’ as label being but mild form of ‘repression?’)</p>
<p>This; an economic war name of ‘Globalisation’ and the future, of ‘you and yours’ being ‘turned over’ – as in gates of concentration camp economic being opened?</p>
<p>Abandoning hope – being as ‘work shall set you free’?</p>
<p>What bankers American realised years ago, in a railway carriage named ‘Greed’; whence trust put in stranger, &#160;is that real money is substance;&#160; it is ‘Gold’ or similar&#160; ‘precious metal’, mere paper, as mere ‘promise; and that ‘the game’, as of domination, full spectrum, can become ‘really dirty’ thereby?</p>
<p>Currency as&#160; ‘toilet paper’&#160; indeed…</p>
<p>Tell it to the Chinese as about to be ‘stiffed’?</p>
<p>Irony as in they serve also, i.e., the God with an extra ‘l’ – and hell for the rest of us?</p>
<p>So here one ‘take’ on what is going down at the G20. ‘Some folks are born, made to wave the flag’, indeed.</p>
<p>That is ‘some’, not ‘all’, &#160;Nota bene.</p>
<p>Cannons of Economic Warfare as pointing at you,&#160;&#160; as about to go off? – Give this interpretation any chance of ‘credence’,&#160;&#160; and find ‘revival’ in the ‘water’ as ‘aqua vita’ seen ‘clear’ – you ‘fortunate son’?</p>
<p>At least &#160;one party to the Global Economic War being played out sitting on a mountain of gold, truth be told.</p>
<p>The very same standard as whence removed from, as in when currency became ‘fiat’, about to be ‘reintroduced’. After the ‘fiat’ has been ‘leveraged’ of course –&#160; after everyone else has bought into &#160;illusion of ‘too big to fail’.</p>
<p>As in when&#160; all the credit is taken up; as a belief of others given, thence become..</p>
<p>Want to know what the G20 is all about?</p>
<p>It is about the dollar being ‘too big to fail’, or rather those bankers and financiers behind it who have leveraged it ‘to the max’ as a fiat currency, aka hidden from of taxation as expropriation, being ‘too big to fail’ as irony rich.</p>
<p>It is about the ‘negotiation’ of&#160; ‘globalisation’ in which the IMF and World Bank serves the interest of small coterie of bankers who have taken over America, lock stock and barrel, who care not a jot about the suffering of ordinary Americans in this Depression- as wilfully and with calculating cunning scheme of greed unrestrained and rampant brought about.</p>
<p>It is about the financial ‘lebensraum’ of this small coterie of corrupt Bankers as despised by Jefferson, who have used ‘credit’ as in belief given to machinate situation where there can be ‘takeover’ by way of ‘Economic Warfare;&#160; in a&#160; ‘Theatre Global’&#160; as would be ‘The New American Century’ of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’.</p>
<p>This time&#160; around not just ‘America’, but ‘ The World’!</p>
<p>Now being as these scheming bastards financial are ‘American’ in the pretension, and yourself as an American in the reality, you may think this could be good for ‘America’– ‘could ’ being the operative term..</p>
<p>These bastards Stateless are inhumane, callous psychopaths whose only allegiance is to profit; form of gold.</p>
<p>If you are not one of the ‘two percent or thereabouts’ of ‘inner party fascistic’ as benefit from this Depression as transfer of wealth from poor to rich then the bad news is yet set to get worse; such be the scheme as ‘best laid plan’.</p>
<p>What these Stateless Bastards have in mind is as much good for America as is ‘Guantanamo’, to be re named as&#160; ‘ School of the Americas’ was; &#160;as benign as&#160; the ‘philanthropic altruism’ of the IMF as experienced by countries such as Chile and Brazil &#160;– and was good for them as seen then.</p>
<p>The mechanics of the G20 ‘shakedown’ being:</p>
<p>Move away from the gold standard, expand the credit.</p>
<p>Leverage the fiat.</p>
<p>‘Suck them in’</p>
<p>‘Too big to fail’.</p>
<p>Destroy through ‘pump and dump’.</p>
<p>Move back to the gold standard having ensured transition of all the wealth by ‘bailout’&#160; – and ‘globalise currency’. Expand the power base through takeover.</p>
<p>For ‘American Coterie of Bankers’ read ‘IMF and World Bank’ ; and the same ‘proscriptions’ apply as build power in reflection of&#160; the dominance of free market ideology….</p>
<p>Bailout of the wealthy, &#160;&#160;&#160;the poor to pay.</p>
<p>The foxes as in charge of &#160;&#160;‘chicken run American’ seeking to be in charge of&#160; ‘chicken run Global’</p>
<p>Well here’s the news for Stateless Bastard: Life ain’t no ‘chicken run’.</p>
<p>Humanity&#160; no ‘chicken’ to fowl play , as Democracy no ‘sham’; as the Constitution of the United States&#160; not to be shredded – and pissed upon. As life ain’t no illusion ‘babe’, albeit&#160; &#160;‘pigs in the city’&#160; have snouts buried deep at the&#160; trough at the moment.</p>
<p>Mine own sadness this debacle – other than greatest being one of the ‘screwed’ alongside progeny – there is old Gordon Brown, running like a stooge&#160; around the world as ‘Statesman’&#160; or&#160; ‘Scatman’ as would be, ‘cap in hand’ as some variant of Quisling, preaching the gospel of the Stateless as would claim not to be ‘American’ such spectrum seen as Global in aspiration.</p>
<p>No prejudice here!</p>
<p>A stateless bastard is a stateless bastard&#160; – as it matters not whether&#160; ‘Vampire’ as per Stoker&#160; comes from Transylvania , Kentucky or Katmandu,&#160; or indeed whether he or she&#160; be blue or brown eyed. Or &#160;indeed a fellow countryman.</p>
<p>A Vampire will suck the life out of you if you let it.</p>
<p>The fact is indeed as Gordon wrote;&#160; all about ‘Where There’s&#160; Greed’, and the things that will be done to satisfy same,&#160; regardless of the consequences to humanity.</p>
<p>And that is the division of the much greater unity as would please God?</p>
<p>What would be going down at the G20&#160; ‘prolegomena’ to the vision of the future, whether as the way American as has become under deception; with no health care or welfare for ‘the poor’ as vast majority, with no caring or compassion evident in&#160; triumph of the Stateless, or as to another way; where there are the seeds of compassion; where life isn’t all ‘dollar and dime’ to new global currency as become, or indeed abandoned as concept unworthy;&#160; whence there become some meaning to the word ‘State’ – as in ‘United States of America’?</p>
<p>What would be going down at the G20 is ‘Statelessness’ – when the people know it as a lie – as Gordon Brown once knew truth afore ‘metamorphosis’ when he wrote ‘Where There’s Greed’?</p>
<p>‘Angry American’ still playing resonant mine small world – as indeed &#160;is ‘Fortunate Son’.</p>
<p>The only answer being ‘ more, more!’ – &#160;where there’s Greed?</p>
<p>It ain’t me – I ain’t no fortunate one?</p>
<p>But that the G20 be the point, such the discord. as refusal to ‘sing from same hymn sheet’; &#160;and &#160;as ‘enough is enough’ is stated? ‘Where There’s Greed’?</p>
<p>Read those words you wrote not so many years ago and weep Gordon- as others have cried a river over belief misplaced?</p>
<p>As in hope be audacity..</p>
<p>Or;</p>
<p>‘Too big to fail’ &#160;as illusion – ‘Too small to succeed’ as reality.</p>
<p>So it goes.</p>
<p>And there Gordon Brown went; &#160;more the pity as is the scorn befitting &#160;‘Quisling’ as collaborator to the Stateless, traitor to humanity.</p>
<p>This small article no pleasure to write.</p>
<p>Pleasure is a personal freedom such as business would take away; and as would be removed &#160;by ‘extraordinary rendition’</p>
<p>My Hero as once was Countryman, or ‘Brother in Arms’ concerning the struggle of humanity, bade ‘fare thee well’.</p>
<p>The audacity of mine hope concerning those&#160; who &#160;believe in ‘gold’ rather than ‘God’ being so ‘strangled’ as to lead unto: ‘No more Heroes’?</p>
<p>– Maybe Barack &#160;Obama has the answer – such indeed, be the audacity of hope body of humanity as State American?</p>
<p>STEPHEN MARTIN can be reached at: <a href="mailto:stephenmarti@yahoo.com" type="external">stephenmarti@yahoo.com</a></p> | Gordon Brown’s Chicken Run at the G20 | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/04/03/gordon-brown-s-chicken-run-at-the-g20/ | 2009-04-03 | 4left
| 3,048 | The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which 8211George Orwell Animal Farm Oh what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive 8211Sir Walter Scott amp160Marmion A rich irony betwixt the conjunction of title this small article andamp160 introductory quotation Putting aside more insightful interpretations of 8216wealth8217 amp160such asamp160 intimated byamp160 genius of 8216tiger burning bright8217 not so many years ago a savageamp160 and polemical indictment of 8216free market orthodoxy8217 as prevailed in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher as mere 8216reflection8217 of the United States under Ronald Reagan then as now such be the spectrum of 8216 wad stuffed full8217 8211 aka 8216take the money and run8217 8211 and as such mirror become the more tarnished was written by a 8216man8217 with whom I once was proud to share a sense of 8216Statehood8217 of Nationality indeedamp160 of 8216Blood8217amp160 as 8216Freedom8217 so seen as oft in cause spilled become againstamp160 8216yoke of oppression8217 as would be Given 8216prostitute efforts8217 recent amp160accordant theamp160 8216blue eyed andamp160 white8217 as stated by President of Brazil 8211amp160 8216pride8217amp160 referred to laurels as humiliation and question as to 8216fall8217 amp160inevitable 8216Where There8217s Greed Margaret Thatcher and the betrayal of Britain8217s future8217 is a magnificent polemic penned by the now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown What I am about to write grieves me in as much as 8216belief in man8217 can be experienced as 8216betrayal double edged8217 and as is to be paralleled by ordinary American as body of humanity concerning Barack Obama as fellow countryman 8211 and in which similar hope was placed by way of vote 8216Hoping8217 not 8211 such be the audacity 8216Elaboration by pragmatism8217amp160amp160 occurring in due course 8211amp160 asamp160 8216truth will out8217 Lots of water under the bridge 8216troubled8217 as per Simon and Garfunkel 8211 8216reality8217 as per 8216experienced8217 since Gordon Brown wrote beautiful and wondrous concerning the ways of amp160the 8216free market8217 of the savage injustice of poverty and immiseration in order that few may benefit of the destruction of communities and the turning of man against man so that the ways of 8216profit inordinately dominant8217 may come to prevail as reflection of the primacy of 8216Greed8217 8216No such thing as Society8217 as was the statement then as 8216abrogation hegemonious8217 or amp160as 8216mantra of the Stateless8217 by Margaret Thatcher amp160now indeed 8216Baroness8217 such be the honoramp160 as can be givenamp160 where there be absence of amp1608216Citizen8217 8216Absence of society8217 amp160amp160being as abhorrent a concept as that infamous statement made by Madeline Albright concerning half a million children dying being 8216worth it8217 There be 8216Payne8217 in the brotherhood as indeed memories standing unto forgiving as lead to the saying as by that great American author Kurt Vonnegut concerning obscenity 8216So it goes8217 Foremost Gordon Brown is no longer in opposition so to speak being now the leader of the party in power in Britain aka 8216Prime Minister8217 For many years prioramp160 to assuming such mantle Gordon wasamp160 subject to the 8216privy8217 of 8216money men8217 beingamp160 Chancellor of the Exchequer of amp160Britain daily his ear being whispered into as bent unto by the voices of 8216free trade8217 and 8216business8217 as pragmatism so founded whilst nurturingamp160 ambition of being the leader of 8216party8217 the big man of little Country such bend as being of by Henry Paulson unto Nancy Pelosi whence 8216bailout8217 first proposed 8211 and same 8216master8217 served apropos of 8216sellout8217 Such the 8216eminence grise8217 as would be 8216grey8217 such the misnomer of 8216leader8217 as would beamp160 as beyond mere 8216puppet8217 As in the choice made of spinmeisteramp160 8216This puppet or that puppet8217 amp160 In such course as concerns gradualism of Gordon8217s metamorphosis from 8216Socialist8217 to supporter of 8216private public partnership8217 and 8216private finance initiative8217 and even self confessed 8216admirer8217 of Margaret Thatcher amp160as rock must be changed by drip amp160constant amp160or as variant of the Chinese water torture concerning 8216brain8217 amp1608216change8217 being introduced by wilful deliberation of the Stateless those whom require reference as to Bunyan andamp160 8216Grace Abounding8217 as wouldamp160 be characterised as constituent ofamp160 8216body of humanity8217 8211 or indeed asamp160 Rabbie Burns putamp160 it 8216 a Man8217s a Man for A8217 that8217 The change as Metamorphosis of man into insectamp160 as written of by Kafka Gregor Samsa being as Gordon Brown such be the awakening the morn of G20 For it is by the very same criteria as 8216petard8217 which Gordon Brown deployed in polemic against 8216free market regime8217 concerning the distribution of wealth and the absence of 8216Social Justice8217 prevailing under the ramifications of ideology implemented pragmatically as 8216Moral Economics8217 akaamp160 8216Politics8217amp160 as that Gordon himself could be hoisted oramp160 8216indicted8217 now Or should that be 8216inducted8217 The particularities of such open to debate 8211 what is being expressed here is opinion One may look from 8216Thatcher to Brown8217 indeed and but for gender find it difficult to say 8216which is which8217 8211 on the 8216farm of animals political8217 This despiteamp160 8216massage of the media8217 as message wilful distortionamp160 by way of 8216corporate line8217 in what goes by way of 8216news8217 these days as 8216words speak louder than actions8217 8211 andamp160 8216form transcends substance8217 8216Things can only get better8217 indeed Part of the greatness of Democracy is that in allowing for 8216voice of humanity8217 as rich as variant there is thereby 8216allowance8217 for the potential for substance to be represented despite form as would be cast 8211 As in 8216Stick it to 8216the man8217 Counterpunch8217 But amp1608216digression8217 The subject of this small article 8216deconstruction8217 of the G20 meeting and Gordon Brown8217s role in same as stands to 8216voice in wilderness8217 as wolf howling may state 8216Truth8217 or 8216out of the mouth of babes8217 as may be and within which Democracy as yet lives and breathes and as aspiration in the respiration 8211 and as 8216Only in America8217 can yetamp160 be allowed the expression thereof First A amp160small 8216confession8217 Goodness knows there is enough 8216bad news8217 around concerning the consequences of human depravity without adding another 8216two cents worth8217 8211 but amp160this as must be measured against the freedom of expression and interpretationamp160 whichamp160 8216Democracy8217amp160 as understood to be and as which such asamp160 thisamp160 Organ stands as to 8216liberate8217 Not so much the 8216fifth amendment8217 8211 asamp160 first Being said 8211amp160 let8217s get down to 8216brass tack8217 by way of exercise of human rights as has propensity to precipitate label of 8216paranoia8217 in the joining of the dots made and amp1608216Payneful8217 asamp160 can be seen to form When 8216Hail to the Chief8217 stated herein it meaning thanks be for the ability to speculate metaphysical and political and to 8216air8217 same 8216Chief82178217 in the synonymyamp160 being as without the extra 8216l8217 as to proclamation of the 8216Stateless8217 real belief of humanity being in 8216God8217 as expression of humility humane 8211 and knowingamp160 where the Stateless put the 8216l8217 amp160thereby Humanityamp160 8216eternal8217amp160 Stateless 8216ephemeral8217 8211amp160 as 8216dynamic8217 being 8216worked out8217 form of Dialectic The point being 8216change8217 indeed This G20 meetingamp160 the 8216logical8217 ie cold and heartless 8216 reality8217 as of sentential or propositional calculusamp160 result ofamp160 8216dark event detailed8217 through investigation by an as yet unrecognised American brilliant as humane G Edward Griffin For we so contemplate a amp1608216bitch8217 in the beholding a beast of proportion of Brecht 8211amp160 and 8216Jekyll8217 as would be in nature turned to 8216Hyde8217 as per tale of Stevenson from such Island of Treasureamp160 as 8216Federal Reserve8217 originates The reality as 8216nightmare8217 we are living withinamp160 that of the title of this small articleamp160 for greedamp160 indeed present8217 as 8216wherein8217 as amp160when amp1608216l8217 amp160amp160be placed within word of 8216God8217 amp160such that depravity can prevail Stateless Bastards worshipping 8216gold8217 with best laid plansamp160 8216given a inch8217 8211 they have 8216taken a yard8217 8211 in their 8216sometime8217 as 8216great notion8217 8211 amp160as one 8216Wolfe8217 American so howled 8216Men8217 being to such bastards 8211 amp160asamp160 mere 8216 mice on the farm8217 8211 when 8216Eric Arthur8217 meets 8216John8217 8216Great notion8217 being that of the 8216feeding off8217 of all humanity in the expropriation of energy deemed as 8216surplus8217 and categorised within scheme as profitamp160 rationale being as Jefferson so acutely perceptive detailed concerning 8216hazardous moral pursuit8217 see hereamp160 for aamp160 8216deconstruction8217 Plus ca change 8211 The curious thing being that the dog did not bark Dogs as would now howl atamp160 G20 8211 say nought of jackal As amp160Mr Griffin details concerning origins of 8216Federal Reserve8217 the strategyamp160 to gain 8216control8217 8211 but not to be seen to do so Also as per Mr Griffin the Federal Reserve aamp160 8216Cartel8217 8211 but operated in the 8216Public Interest8217 In colloquial vernacular 8216put your trust in a Banker 8211 and you will be 8216screwed82178217 Or should that last word in light of 8216Gaussian Copula Function8217 as underlying CDS 8216pump and dump8217amp160 be amp1608216copulated8217 Note author of same function applied as 8216misinterpreted8217 now back in China working for 8216investment corporation8217 8211 Could have been as of 8216Mossad8217 such the inscrutability For we all 8216live8217 now in the shadow ofamp160amp160 8216hazardous moral pursuit8217 amp160as in 8216ofamp160 Capital having been withdrawn Say nought of flea riding elephant Where has all the money gone 8211 indeed where is it going Silly notamp160 to say stupid question 8211 From the poor to the rich Reading Griffin8217s brilliant investigative work is as cataract being surgically removed from eye The dark secrecy all those years ago peeled back as layer of onion the comprehension of the transition as of leverage from gold standard to fiat from regulation to de regulation the understanding that 8216paper money8217 is only as to 8216belief unfounded8217amp160 8211 as per the value of amp160such 8216leverage8217amp160 rated as 8216triple A8217 can beamp160 8216first wave8217 being handled by Roosevelt and second wave 8216yet to come8217 8211 it8217s all there The 8216Bitch as bore Bastard8217 being back in 8216heat8217 8211 and hoping to give birth at the G20amp160 in aamp160 8216Yo8217amp160amp160 to 8216Herr Brecht8217s prescience The 8216redux8217 such be the cunningamp160 that Gold standard once more again be adopted only this time around the currencyamp160 to be 8216Global8217amp160 same power base prevailing now as all transferred to same dark party 8211 courtesy of whore as would be humane Before 8216let8217s go round again8217 All that remains being the names All doneamp160 bar the 8216carving8217 All that remains the 8217shuffle of soft shoe8217 because Federal Reserve control subsumes IMF and World Bank Ask not of 8216Comex Securities8217 such context amp160lest a tower amp160such as WTC7 fall upon your head or you be pissed upon from great height 8216paranoid8217 as label being but mild form of 8216repression8217 This an economic war name of 8216Globalisation8217 and the future of 8216you and yours8217 being 8216turned over8217 8211 as in gates of concentration camp economic being opened Abandoning hope 8211 being as 8216work shall set you free8217 What bankers American realised years ago in a railway carriage named 8216Greed8217 whence trust put in stranger amp160is that real money is substanceamp160 it is 8216Gold8217 or similaramp160 8216precious metal8217 mere paper as mere 8216promise and that 8216the game8217 as of domination full spectrum can become 8216really dirty8217 thereby Currency asamp160 8216toilet paper8217amp160 indeed8230 Tell it to the Chinese as about to be 8216stiffed8217 Irony as in they serve also ie the God with an extra 8216l8217 8211 and hell for the rest of us So here one 8216take8217 on what is going down at the G20 8216Some folks are born made to wave the flag8217 indeed That is 8216some8217 not 8216all8217 amp160Nota bene Cannons of Economic Warfare as pointing at youamp160amp160 as about to go off 8211 Give this interpretation any chance of 8216credence8217amp160amp160 and find 8216revival8217 in the 8216water8217 as 8216aqua vita8217 seen 8216clear8217 8211 you 8216fortunate son8217 At least amp160one party to the Global Economic War being played out sitting on a mountain of gold truth be told The very same standard as whence removed from as in when currency became 8216fiat8217 about to be 8216reintroduced8217 After the 8216fiat8217 has been 8216leveraged8217 of course 8211amp160 after everyone else has bought into amp160illusion of 8216too big to fail8217 As in whenamp160 all the credit is taken up as a belief of others given thence become Want to know what the G20 is all about It is about the dollar being 8216too big to fail8217 or rather those bankers and financiers behind it who have leveraged it 8216to the max8217 as a fiat currency aka hidden from of taxation as expropriation being 8216too big to fail8217 as irony rich It is about the 8216negotiation8217 ofamp160 8216globalisation8217 in which the IMF and World Bank serves the interest of small coterie of bankers who have taken over America lock stock and barrel who care not a jot about the suffering of ordinary Americans in this Depression as wilfully and with calculating cunning scheme of greed unrestrained and rampant brought about It is about the financial 8216lebensraum8217 of this small coterie of corrupt Bankers as despised by Jefferson who have used 8216credit8217 as in belief given to machinate situation where there can be 8216takeover8217 by way of 8216Economic Warfareamp160 in aamp160 8216Theatre Global8217amp160 as would be 8216The New American Century8217 of 8216Full Spectrum Dominance8217 This timeamp160 around not just 8216America8217 but 8216 The World8217 Now being as these scheming bastards financial are 8216American8217 in the pretension and yourself as an American in the reality you may think this could be good for 8216America82178211 8216could 8217 being the operative term These bastards Stateless are inhumane callous psychopaths whose only allegiance is to profit form of gold If you are not one of the 8216two percent or thereabouts8217 of 8216inner party fascistic8217 as benefit from this Depression as transfer of wealth from poor to rich then the bad news is yet set to get worse such be the scheme as 8216best laid plan8217 What these Stateless Bastards have in mind is as much good for America as is 8216Guantanamo8217 to be re named asamp160 8216 School of the Americas8217 was amp160as benign asamp160 the 8216philanthropic altruism8217 of the IMF as experienced by countries such as Chile and Brazil amp1608211 and was good for them as seen then The mechanics of the G20 8216shakedown8217 being Move away from the gold standard expand the credit Leverage the fiat 8216Suck them in8217 8216Too big to fail8217 Destroy through 8216pump and dump8217 Move back to the gold standard having ensured transition of all the wealth by 8216bailout8217amp160 8211 and 8216globalise currency8217 Expand the power base through takeover For 8216American Coterie of Bankers8217 read 8216IMF and World Bank8217 and the same 8216proscriptions8217 apply as build power in reflection ofamp160 the dominance of free market ideology8230 Bailout of the wealthy amp160amp160amp160the poor to pay The foxes as in charge of amp160amp1608216chicken run American8217 seeking to be in charge ofamp160 8216chicken run Global8217 Well here8217s the news for Stateless Bastard Life ain8217t no 8216chicken run8217 Humanityamp160 no 8216chicken8217 to fowl play as Democracy no 8216sham8217 as the Constitution of the United Statesamp160 not to be shredded 8211 and pissed upon As life ain8217t no illusion 8216babe8217 albeitamp160 amp1608216pigs in the city8217amp160 have snouts buried deep at theamp160 trough at the moment Mine own sadness this debacle 8211 other than greatest being one of the 8216screwed8217 alongside progeny 8211 there is old Gordon Brown running like a stoogeamp160 around the world as 8216Statesman8217amp160 oramp160 8216Scatman8217 as would be 8216cap in hand8217 as some variant of Quisling preaching the gospel of the Stateless as would claim not to be 8216American8217 such spectrum seen as Global in aspiration No prejudice here A stateless bastard is a stateless bastardamp160 8211 as it matters not whetheramp160 8216Vampire8217 as per Stokeramp160 comes from Transylvania Kentucky or Katmanduamp160 or indeed whether he or sheamp160 be blue or brown eyed Or amp160indeed a fellow countryman A Vampire will suck the life out of you if you let it The fact is indeed as Gordon wroteamp160 all about 8216Where There8217samp160 Greed8217 and the things that will be done to satisfy sameamp160 regardless of the consequences to humanity And that is the division of the much greater unity as would please God What would be going down at the G20amp160 8216prolegomena8217 to the vision of the future whether as the way American as has become under deception with no health care or welfare for 8216the poor8217 as vast majority with no caring or compassion evident inamp160 triumph of the Stateless or as to another way where there are the seeds of compassion where life isn8217t all 8216dollar and dime8217 to new global currency as become or indeed abandoned as concept unworthyamp160 whence there become some meaning to the word 8216State8217 8211 as in 8216United States of America8217 What would be going down at the G20 is 8216Statelessness8217 8211 when the people know it as a lie 8211 as Gordon Brown once knew truth afore 8216metamorphosis8217 when he wrote 8216Where There8217s Greed8217 8216Angry American8217 still playing resonant mine small world 8211 as indeed amp160is 8216Fortunate Son8217 The only answer being 8216 more more8217 8211 amp160where there8217s Greed It ain8217t me 8211 I ain8217t no fortunate one But that the G20 be the point such the discord as refusal to 8216sing from same hymn sheet8217 amp160and amp160as 8216enough is enough8217 is stated 8216Where There8217s Greed8217 Read those words you wrote not so many years ago and weep Gordon as others have cried a river over belief misplaced As in hope be audacity Or 8216Too big to fail8217 amp160as illusion 8211 8216Too small to succeed8217 as reality So it goes And there Gordon Brown went amp160more the pity as is the scorn befitting amp1608216Quisling8217 as collaborator to the Stateless traitor to humanity This small article no pleasure to write Pleasure is a personal freedom such as business would take away and as would be removed amp160by 8216extraordinary rendition8217 My Hero as once was Countryman or 8216Brother in Arms8217 concerning the struggle of humanity bade 8216fare thee well8217 The audacity of mine hope concerning thoseamp160 who amp160believe in 8216gold8217 rather than 8216God8217 being so 8216strangled8217 as to lead unto 8216No more Heroes8217 8211 Maybe Barack amp160Obama has the answer 8211 such indeed be the audacity of hope body of humanity as State American STEPHEN MARTIN can be reached at stephenmartiyahoocom | The/DET creatures/NOUN outside/ADV looked/VERB from/ADP pig/NOUN to/ADP man/NOUN and/CCONJ from/ADP man/NOUN to/ADP pig/NOUN and/CCONJ from/ADP pig/NOUN to/AUX man/VERB again/ADV but/CCONJ already/ADV it/PRON was/AUX impossible/ADJ to/PART say/VERB which/PRON was/AUX which/DET 8211George/NUM Orwell/PROPN Animal/PROPN Farm/PROPN Oh/INTJ what/PRON a/DET tangled/VERB web/NOUN we/PRON weave/VERB When/SCONJ first/ADV we/PRON practise/VERB to/PART deceive/VERB 8211Sir/NUM Walter/PROPN Scott/PROPN amp160Marmion/NOUN A/DET rich/ADJ irony/NOUN betwixt/VERB the/DET conjunction/NOUN of/ADP title/NOUN this/DET small/ADJ article/NOUN andamp160/NUM introductory/ADJ quotation/NOUN Putting/VERB aside/ADV more/ADV insightful/ADJ 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<p>It was a sign of the times last week (March 27) when House Armed Services Committee Staff Director Erin Conaton declared in a memo to committee staffers that the powerful committee was scrapping the Bush Administration shop worn phrase, Global War of Terrorism. Conaton’s boss, Rep. Ike Skelton,( D-Mo) the new Chairman of the Committee commented that “the overused label had become an embarrassment and had lost its meaning”.</p>
<p>Recent research in Lebanon has turned up information previously unavailable which sheds light of the misapplication of the Terrorism label by the Bush administration.</p>
<p>The” T word” is often misapplied as former National Security Advisor Brzezinski reminds us as he tours the country promoting his new book, Second Chance and focusing on the “catastrophic leadership” crisis caused by the Bush administration’s foreign policy.</p>
<p>Another area that would benefit from discarding the “terrorist label” is the Bush administration’s ongoing campaign against Hezbollah. There is considerable doubt among international lawyers whether Hezbollah should ever have been classified as a terrorist organization.</p>
<p>At the urging of U.S. and Israel, Canada classifies Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which limits the group’s ability to raise funds and travel internationally. . A Canadian peace coalition called Tadamon Montreal is working to remove Hezbollah from the Terrorism list in Canada.</p>
<p>Australia and the UK distinguish between Hezbollah’s security and political wings, and other countries like China, Russia, and member states of the European Union and the United Nations have refused US/Israel demands to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization at all.</p>
<p>The process for putting an organization on the “Terrorism list” is as follows: The Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism in the U.S. State Department (S/CT) monitors the activities of groups active around the world considered potentially terrorist to identify potential targets for designation. When reviewing potential targets, S/CT looks not only at the actual terrorist attacks that a group has carried out, but also at “whether the group may be inclined toward future acts of terrorism or retains the capability to carry out such acts”.</p>
<p>As of April 2007, a plurality (39%) of the organizations on the US Terrorism list represent Muslim groups recommended for inclusion by, among others, AIPAC and their friends in Congress. According to former AIPAC Director of Congressional Relations, Steve Rosen, soon to start his trial for passing classified information to Israel, “AIPAC owns the ‘T’ list!”</p>
<p>The US State Department definition of terror is a broad one: “the deliberate and systematic murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends</p>
<p>Suspected terrorist groups are thereby defined as such by the means they use to pursue their objectives. To describe an organization as terrorist is not a comment on its political goal or ends, which may be laudable ones such as national liberation or resistance to occupation.</p>
<p>The common saying that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ is rejected by this student of the subject because it is simplistic and even nonsensical. To whit, a terrorist can also be a freedom fighter struggling for justice and a freedom fighter can fight for freedom by using terrorist means.</p>
<p>Placed on the “T” list in 1999, Hezbollah was taken off the list a couple of years later following Hezbollah’s strong condemnation of the 9/11 attack on America. Hezbollah was returned to the list when Dick Cheney opined that a “presumed Hezbollah operative” probably met with an Al Qaeda representative in South America in 2001. Similar to Cheney’s Saadam Hussein-Al Qaeda ‘contacts’ claim.</p>
<p>Lebanese officials including Lebanese President Emil Lahoud contemptuously dismissed reports of such a meeting as Israeli-sponsored propaganda. According to Lahoud: “The media campaign, which is conducted by Israeli circles, seeks to exploit the September 11 attacks to slander the Lebanese resistance by stigmatizing it with the image of terrorism”. Lebanon continues to reject US/Israeli demands that they freeze Hezbollah’s back accounts and force it stop providing social services.</p>
<p>A study undertaken at the American University of Beirut in January- February 2007, benefiting from research and surveys from a variety of international and Israeli human rights organizations, tabulated no fewer than 6,672 acts of Israeli state terrorism directed against Lebanon and Palestine between the years 1967-2007. Not only is Israel absent from the US State Department Terrorism list, Israel appears to determines who is on it.</p>
<p>The case against Hezbollah presented in a draft by AIPAC for the State Department is virtually identical to the one finally issued by the State Department. It claims that Hezbollah bombed Americans at the US Embassy, the Marine barracks in 1983 and held a number of Americans hostages during the 1980’s. Or as Hezbollah’s rap sheet currently appears on US and Israeli government computers:</p>
<p>“Hezbollah (as of April 3, 2007): Suicide bombings, hijacked 1985 TWA Flight 847; rocket attacks against Israel in 2006.”</p>
<p>(The latter item re the “rocket attacks against Israel in 2006”, is examined in the just released volume, The Price We Pay: A Quarter Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons against Lebanon.)</p>
<p>Hezbollah is accused by Israel and the Bush administration of a type of Islamist Terrorism similar to Al Qaeda but used in the context of National Liberation, just like Hamas. Both of which have fought Israel in the Lebanese and Palestinian contexts, respectively.</p>
<p>However, unlike al Qaeda, their enemy, Hezbollah and Hamas are complex social and political movements. They use different types of force, including guerrilla tactics which are legitimate under international law. They are also different from al Qaeda in that their alleged terrorist activity aims to liberate Palestine and Lebanon, as opposed to being part of a ‘global struggle’ against the United States with undefined objectives.</p>
<p>Was Hezbollah involved in the attacks against Americans a quarter century ago? Hezbollah has consistently denied these charges ever since it published its “open letter” announcing its foundation in 1985, years after the first attacks.</p>
<p>The results of an investigation conducted entirely in Lebanon including interviews with some who claim to have been personally involved with the “rap sheet” events do not credit Bush administration claims.</p>
<p>What the record to date shows, pending the Bush administration release of claimed evidence to the contrary, is the following:</p>
<p>1) When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and quickly routed much of the PLO resistance, more than 30 local resistance groups formed. Some were no doubt inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution three years earlier and took advantage of available political and physical training. Arms were available from the soon to depart PLO, and other sources, sometimes as gifts and sometimes for cash.</p>
<p>For example, in late August 1982, as Fateh was preparing to depart Beirut for Greece and goodbyes were being said, two American researchers in Beirut were given (‘for safe keeping’) 250 brand new Chinese made Ak-47’s wrapped in thick grease and heavy plastic. Not knowing exactly what to do with the gifts in the ‘wild west’ atmosphere of the time, the Americans, doing what came naturally, hastily buried them at night. The weapons were never found by the advancing Israelis but were discovered 15 years later when the Commodore Hotel in Hamra was enlarged and workers dug up that vacant lot to its south! Who has them now is anybody’s guess!</p>
<p>The goal of these new groups in the 1980’s was to drive Israel and its foreign sponsors from Lebanon. The local and regional political situation of the early 1980’s was very tolerant of militant modes of actions and many groups adapted and acted because no single force, power or obstacle stood in their way.</p>
<p>‘Operations’ were sometimes carried out by part of a group without the knowledge, participation or liability or the particular organizations command.</p>
<p>Teams of foreign assassins were active those days including one traced to Israel which tried to assassinate one of America’s most competent Ambassadors to Lebanon, John Guenther Dean on August 27, 1980. The weapons used in the failed attempt were traced to a shipment made from the US to Israel. Dean’s crime was getting too chummy with Yassir Arafat and his deputy Abu Jihad, who were helping Dean to get the American Embassy hostages released from Iran.</p>
<p>Another “operation” during this period was the CIA funded attempt of March 8, 1985 to assassinate Sheik Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. The car bomb killed eighty, mostly women and children and wounded 256. As Bob Woodward points out in his book, Veil, the CIA’s William Casey mistakenly thought Fadlallah was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. To this day Fadlallah is quite independent of Hezbollah although he is probably Lebanon’s most revered cleric due in no small measure to his scholarship, his three decades of social service work as well as his passionate defense of human rights.</p>
<p>2) An exhaustive review, by American researchers, of the nearly 80 Western kidnapping cases, organized by a staggering variety of groups in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 concluded that more than 100 Western detainees were taken, released, killed or exchanged. As for the Lebanese themselves, thousands were kidnapped; many by Israel and their allies and hundreds are still unaccounted for.</p>
<p>According to some who claim to have participated in one way or another, in some of these kidnappings, active groups sometimes declared responsibility and sometimes were silent. Among the groups admitting their actions at various times were: The Organization of Socialist Revolutionary Work, the Armed Revolutionary Factions in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad, the Organization of the Oppressed in the World, the Revolutionary Justice Organization, Holy Warriors for Freedom, the Khaibar Brigade, the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, the Blessed Resistance, the Islamic Liberation Organization, the Organization of the Mujhahideen for Freedom, the Revolutionary Cells, The Organization of the Islamic Dawn, The Organization of Militant Revolutionary Cells.</p>
<p>These were some of the ‘main stream’ groups, there were others, some for whom kidnapping was a cottage industry. Some functioned much like the current US and the UK hired mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. In some cases contracts were drawn up with individuals willing to “hire out” for certain specific abduction projects. Given the available labor pool there was sometimes intense competition for a contract. For some groups, westerners were snatched for no other reason than the ransom money was good. Often those involved would use the ransom money to start a legitimate business, pay for family needs such as medical care or their children’s tuition fees. Sometimes Western companies paid for the release of their employees and in other cases governments would pay.</p>
<p>The largest payment for hostages during this period was the Arms for Hostages deal worked out by the Reagan administration when it provided missiles and spare parts to Iran to use against Saadam Hussein’s army after the same administration had supplied the Iraqi regime with chemical weapons to use against Iraqi Kurd, Shiites and Iranians.</p>
<p>Lebanese Islamist groups, and others, who in the 1980’s were resisting Israel’s attacks did not feel that their acts were nearly as reprehensible as the US responsibility for what Israel was doing to their people and country.</p>
<p>For example, once it became clear to them that the US Marines had abandoned their initially claimed neutrality as ‘peace keepers’ and instead began the shelling of Lebanon with 2,700-lb shells from the USS New Jersey most of these groups felt it their duty to repulse the US attacks.</p>
<p>Interviews with some of these now middle aged resistance fighters in Lebanon who were active in this period make plain that these groups, felt that their military actions against the foreign forces constituted legitimate self defense, protecting Lebanon’s population from attacks by foreign forces.</p>
<p>While the military legitimacy of fighting the American and French forces was clear to the Lebanese during the early 1980’s what about bombing the American Embassy? International law has protected Embassies since the 1815 Congress of Vienna extend protection to foreign plenipotentiaries.</p>
<p>Safe passage for diplomats is not always honored and as recently as February 2007 the United States government has been accused by Iraq and Iran of unlawfully kidnapping Iranian diplomats</p>
<p>The evidence from the 1980’s suggests that Hezbollah stayed out of the kidnapping game and concentrated on building its organization which they formally announced in an ‘open letter’ on Feb. 14, 1985.</p>
<p>Would the founders of Hezbollah have heard of something on the street, village or family level of who may have been responsible for some of the high profile western kidnapping cases? One assumes so. Did neighborhood gossip attach an obligation to get involved on behalf of their viewed oppressors, including the US, and rescue their hostages? In order to avoid some future ‘terrorism’ list?</p>
<p>The evidence suggests that Hezbollah is on a “political list” called the “terrorism list” because Israel wants it there not because there is proof that it engaged in terrorism against Americans 25 years ago.</p>
<p>Using the scare tactic of ‘kidnapping Americans’ and ‘terrorism’ without proof, adds to the international ridicule of Bush’s policies.</p>
<p>In the nearly empty Lebanese Parliament building these days the gossip is that the Bush administration wants to bargain with Hezbollah to remove it from the ‘T’ list if Hezbollah gives up its objective of liberating Palestine and cancels its opposition to the Bush/Olmert backed Siniora government</p>
<p>Given this kind of Bush administration offer, many view Hezbollah’s spot on the ‘T list’ as a badge of honor . Yet, respect for international law would suggest that the Bush Administration ought to show their ‘evidence’ or remove Hezbollah from the list.</p>
<p>When pressed in early April, 2007 by a former House Judiciary Committee staffer, one lawyer in the State Department Office of the General Counsel commented, “Its not that Hezbollah is terrorist per say, actually we know they are pretty clean-they are ok- but you must realize that they do associate with shady characters to their East, if you know what I mean.”</p>
<p>Hezbollah’s view of the April 17, 1983 Embassy bombing is different from some militia operating during this period. Hezbollah has consistently opposed attacks on foreign civilians. It was one of the first to condemn the 9/11 operation as well as the 1997 attack at the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor, Egypt which killed 58 civilians as “bloody and terrible, calling them crimes against Islam. Hezbollah also condemned the Cairo attacks on the Greek tourists, and the Algerian killing of 7 trappist monks in Algerian by claimed Islamists.</p>
<p>Despite Hezbollah’s view, which is based on the Koran’s prohibitions against harming innocent civilians, was the 1983 US Embassy attack terrorism against an internationally protected structure or had the Embassy become a legitimate military target? In the assertion of one individual, a former member of Islamic Jihad, interviewed by American researchers during the spring of 2007 his group had nothing to do with Hezbollah during the Embassy operation or at any other time. He claims his associates knew in advance (soviet intelligence passed to Lebanon via Syria) that the eight CIA operatives assigned to Lebanon were holding meetings in the Embassy and using its diplomatic protection for cover for plotting assassinations and attacks on Lebanon. The entire CIA contingent was indeed meeting on the 6th floor of the Embassy at the time of the attack. The same source claims that the Embassy was also being used for feeding targeting information to the USS New Jersey, visible offshore from the upper floors of the Chancery.</p>
<p>The view that the American Embassy was a legitimate target on April 17, 1983 cannot be summarily dismissed without careful review because principles of International law tend to support it. Once an Embassy’s is used for aggressive military purposes its protection collapses and it becomes what Donald Rumsfeld calls a “legitimate target of opportunity”.</p>
<p>Where is the proof that has been demanded for more than two decades? Is the only reason Hezbollah is on the ‘terrorism list’ is because Israel wants it there and a desire by some in the Bush administration to settle old scores without proof of who was responsible?</p>
<p>Organizations such as Islamic Jihad, Organization of the Oppressed on Earth and the Revolutionary Justice Organization are considered by the Bush administration and Israel to be synonymous with Hezbollah. That grouping appears to be a clumsy and inaccurate conclusion designed to support political objectives. No proof has ever been offered to establish that these groups were part of Hezbollah during this period rather than adversaries or competitors.</p>
<p>As one Hezbollah supporter commented:</p>
<p>“In America as you built a resistance to the British invaders and occupiers were all the groups neatly organized? Were some ‘terrorists’? Did the ones who did operations such as the Boston Tea Party’ give their names and address to the occupiers? Or did some hide their identity and even dress like natives? Did George Washington and his staff know everything that was going on or did some groups just form and decided it was better to work on their own liberation project? That is what it was like here in Lebanon during this period. We should leave that period and concentrate on working together to solve today’s problems in Lebanon and the Middle East. All parties talking and meeting”</p>
<p>In denying Hezbollah involvement in operations targeting American civilians, their leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has stated:</p>
<p>“The truth of the matter is that there was something other than Hezbollah, called the Islamic Jihad, who kidnapped the hostages. There exist videocassettes, communiqués that bear the signature of the Islamic Jihad. It is independent form the party. It is absolutely incorrect that the Islamic Jihad is a cover name for Hezbollah.</p>
<p>Hezbollah remains on the US and Israel ‘terrorism’ list for purely political reasons and to punish the organization for its resistance to Israeli aggressions against Lebanon and Bush administration plans for the region.”</p>
<p>It is time for the Bush administration to present its case and prove what terrorism Hezbollah has actually used against the American people in the 1980’s in light of US government admissions that since 1999 there is no evidence that Hezbollah has engaged in ‘Terrorism’.</p>
<p>It’s time for the poker players to reveal their cards, or as they say down in Crawford.. ‘ y’all show ’em er fold ’em!</p>
<p>FRANKLIN LAMB has been in Lebanon researching a book for the past nine months. Hezbollah: a brief Guide for Beginners in expected in early summer, 2007. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:fplamb@gmail.com" type="external">fplamb@gmail.com</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Why is Hezbollah on the Terrorism List? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/04/06/why-is-hezbollah-on-the-terrorism-list/ | 2007-04-06 | 4left
| 3,048 | It was a sign of the times last week March 27 when House Armed Services Committee Staff Director Erin Conaton declared in a memo to committee staffers that the powerful committee was scrapping the Bush Administration shop worn phrase Global War of Terrorism Conaton8217s boss Rep Ike Skelton DMo the new Chairman of the Committee commented that 8220the overused label had become an embarrassment and had lost its meaning8221 Recent research in Lebanon has turned up information previously unavailable which sheds light of the misapplication of the Terrorism label by the Bush administration The8221 T word8221 is often misapplied as former National Security Advisor Brzezinski reminds us as he tours the country promoting his new book Second Chance and focusing on the 8220catastrophic leadership8221 crisis caused by the Bush administration8217s foreign policy Another area that would benefit from discarding the 8220terrorist label8221 is the Bush administration8217s ongoing campaign against Hezbollah There is considerable doubt among international lawyers whether Hezbollah should ever have been classified as a terrorist organization At the urging of US and Israel Canada classifies Hezbollah as a terrorist organization which limits the group8217s ability to raise funds and travel internationally A Canadian peace coalition called Tadamon Montreal is working to remove Hezbollah from the Terrorism list in Canada Australia and the UK distinguish between Hezbollah8217s security and political wings and other countries like China Russia and member states of the European Union and the United Nations have refused USIsrael demands to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization at all The process for putting an organization on the 8220Terrorism list8221 is as follows The Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism in the US State Department SCT monitors the activities of groups active around the world considered potentially terrorist to identify potential targets for designation When reviewing potential targets SCT looks not only at the actual terrorist attacks that a group has carried out but also at 8220whether the group may be inclined toward future acts of terrorism or retains the capability to carry out such acts8221 As of April 2007 a plurality 39 of the organizations on the US Terrorism list represent Muslim groups recommended for inclusion by among others AIPAC and their friends in Congress According to former AIPAC Director of Congressional Relations Steve Rosen soon to start his trial for passing classified information to Israel 8220AIPAC owns the 8216T8217 list8221 The US State Department definition of terror is a broad one 8220the deliberate and systematic murder maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends Suspected terrorist groups are thereby defined as such by the means they use to pursue their objectives To describe an organization as terrorist is not a comment on its political goal or ends which may be laudable ones such as national liberation or resistance to occupation The common saying that 8216one man8217s terrorist is another man8217s freedom fighter8217 is rejected by this student of the subject because it is simplistic and even nonsensical To whit a terrorist can also be a freedom fighter struggling for justice and a freedom fighter can fight for freedom by using terrorist means Placed on the 8220T8221 list in 1999 Hezbollah was taken off the list a couple of years later following Hezbollah8217s strong condemnation of the 911 attack on America Hezbollah was returned to the list when Dick Cheney opined that a 8220presumed Hezbollah operative8221 probably met with an Al Qaeda representative in South America in 2001 Similar to Cheney8217s Saadam HusseinAl Qaeda 8216contacts8217 claim Lebanese officials including Lebanese President Emil Lahoud contemptuously dismissed reports of such a meeting as Israelisponsored propaganda According to Lahoud 8220The media campaign which is conducted by Israeli circles seeks to exploit the September 11 attacks to slander the Lebanese resistance by stigmatizing it with the image of terrorism8221 Lebanon continues to reject USIsraeli demands that they freeze Hezbollah8217s back accounts and force it stop providing social services A study undertaken at the American University of Beirut in January February 2007 benefiting from research and surveys from a variety of international and Israeli human rights organizations tabulated no fewer than 6672 acts of Israeli state terrorism directed against Lebanon and Palestine between the years 19672007 Not only is Israel absent from the US State Department Terrorism list Israel appears to determines who is on it The case against Hezbollah presented in a draft by AIPAC for the State Department is virtually identical to the one finally issued by the State Department It claims that Hezbollah bombed Americans at the US Embassy the Marine barracks in 1983 and held a number of Americans hostages during the 19808217s Or as Hezbollah8217s rap sheet currently appears on US and Israeli government computers 8220Hezbollah as of April 3 2007 Suicide bombings hijacked 1985 TWA Flight 847 rocket attacks against Israel in 20068221 The latter item re the 8220rocket attacks against Israel in 20068221 is examined in the just released volume The Price We Pay A Quarter Century of Israel8217s Use of American Weapons against Lebanon Hezbollah is accused by Israel and the Bush administration of a type of Islamist Terrorism similar to Al Qaeda but used in the context of National Liberation just like Hamas Both of which have fought Israel in the Lebanese and Palestinian contexts respectively However unlike al Qaeda their enemy Hezbollah and Hamas are complex social and political movements They use different types of force including guerrilla tactics which are legitimate under international law They are also different from al Qaeda in that their alleged terrorist activity aims to liberate Palestine and Lebanon as opposed to being part of a 8216global struggle8217 against the United States with undefined objectives Was Hezbollah involved in the attacks against Americans a quarter century ago Hezbollah has consistently denied these charges ever since it published its 8220open letter8221 announcing its foundation in 1985 years after the first attacks The results of an investigation conducted entirely in Lebanon including interviews with some who claim to have been personally involved with the 8220rap sheet8221 events do not credit Bush administration claims What the record to date shows pending the Bush administration release of claimed evidence to the contrary is the following 1 When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and quickly routed much of the PLO resistance more than 30 local resistance groups formed Some were no doubt inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution three years earlier and took advantage of available political and physical training Arms were available from the soon to depart PLO and other sources sometimes as gifts and sometimes for cash For example in late August 1982 as Fateh was preparing to depart Beirut for Greece and goodbyes were being said two American researchers in Beirut were given 8216for safe keeping8217 250 brand new Chinese made Ak478217s wrapped in thick grease and heavy plastic Not knowing exactly what to do with the gifts in the 8216wild west8217 atmosphere of the time the Americans doing what came naturally hastily buried them at night The weapons were never found by the advancing Israelis but were discovered 15 years later when the Commodore Hotel in Hamra was enlarged and workers dug up that vacant lot to its south Who has them now is anybody8217s guess The goal of these new groups in the 19808217s was to drive Israel and its foreign sponsors from Lebanon The local and regional political situation of the early 19808217s was very tolerant of militant modes of actions and many groups adapted and acted because no single force power or obstacle stood in their way 8216Operations8217 were sometimes carried out by part of a group without the knowledge participation or liability or the particular organizations command Teams of foreign assassins were active those days including one traced to Israel which tried to assassinate one of America8217s most competent Ambassadors to Lebanon John Guenther Dean on August 27 1980 The weapons used in the failed attempt were traced to a shipment made from the US to Israel Dean8217s crime was getting too chummy with Yassir Arafat and his deputy Abu Jihad who were helping Dean to get the American Embassy hostages released from Iran Another 8220operation8221 during this period was the CIA funded attempt of March 8 1985 to assassinate Sheik Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah The car bomb killed eighty mostly women and children and wounded 256 As Bob Woodward points out in his book Veil the CIA8217s William Casey mistakenly thought Fadlallah was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah To this day Fadlallah is quite independent of Hezbollah although he is probably Lebanon8217s most revered cleric due in no small measure to his scholarship his three decades of social service work as well as his passionate defense of human rights 2 An exhaustive review by American researchers of the nearly 80 Western kidnapping cases organized by a staggering variety of groups in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990 concluded that more than 100 Western detainees were taken released killed or exchanged As for the Lebanese themselves thousands were kidnapped many by Israel and their allies and hundreds are still unaccounted for According to some who claim to have participated in one way or another in some of these kidnappings active groups sometimes declared responsibility and sometimes were silent Among the groups admitting their actions at various times were The Organization of Socialist Revolutionary Work the Armed Revolutionary Factions in Lebanon Islamic Jihad the Organization of the Oppressed in the World the Revolutionary Justice Organization Holy Warriors for Freedom the Khaibar Brigade the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine the Blessed Resistance the Islamic Liberation Organization the Organization of the Mujhahideen for Freedom the Revolutionary Cells The Organization of the Islamic Dawn The Organization of Militant Revolutionary Cells These were some of the 8216main stream8217 groups there were others some for whom kidnapping was a cottage industry Some functioned much like the current US and the UK hired mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan In some cases contracts were drawn up with individuals willing to 8220hire out8221 for certain specific abduction projects Given the available labor pool there was sometimes intense competition for a contract For some groups westerners were snatched for no other reason than the ransom money was good Often those involved would use the ransom money to start a legitimate business pay for family needs such as medical care or their children8217s tuition fees Sometimes Western companies paid for the release of their employees and in other cases governments would pay The largest payment for hostages during this period was the Arms for Hostages deal worked out by the Reagan administration when it provided missiles and spare parts to Iran to use against Saadam Hussein8217s army after the same administration had supplied the Iraqi regime with chemical weapons to use against Iraqi Kurd Shiites and Iranians Lebanese Islamist groups and others who in the 19808217s were resisting Israel8217s attacks did not feel that their acts were nearly as reprehensible as the US responsibility for what Israel was doing to their people and country For example once it became clear to them that the US Marines had abandoned their initially claimed neutrality as 8216peace keepers8217 and instead began the shelling of Lebanon with 2700lb shells from the USS New Jersey most of these groups felt it their duty to repulse the US attacks Interviews with some of these now middle aged resistance fighters in Lebanon who were active in this period make plain that these groups felt that their military actions against the foreign forces constituted legitimate self defense protecting Lebanon8217s population from attacks by foreign forces While the military legitimacy of fighting the American and French forces was clear to the Lebanese during the early 19808217s what about bombing the American Embassy International law has protected Embassies since the 1815 Congress of Vienna extend protection to foreign plenipotentiaries Safe passage for diplomats is not always honored and as recently as February 2007 the United States government has been accused by Iraq and Iran of unlawfully kidnapping Iranian diplomats The evidence from the 19808217s suggests that Hezbollah stayed out of the kidnapping game and concentrated on building its organization which they formally announced in an 8216open letter8217 on Feb 14 1985 Would the founders of Hezbollah have heard of something on the street village or family level of who may have been responsible for some of the high profile western kidnapping cases One assumes so Did neighborhood gossip attach an obligation to get involved on behalf of their viewed oppressors including the US and rescue their hostages In order to avoid some future 8216terrorism8217 list The evidence suggests that Hezbollah is on a 8220political list8221 called the 8220terrorism list8221 because Israel wants it there not because there is proof that it engaged in terrorism against Americans 25 years ago Using the scare tactic of 8216kidnapping Americans8217 and 8216terrorism8217 without proof adds to the international ridicule of Bush8217s policies In the nearly empty Lebanese Parliament building these days the gossip is that the Bush administration wants to bargain with Hezbollah to remove it from the 8216T8217 list if Hezbollah gives up its objective of liberating Palestine and cancels its opposition to the BushOlmert backed Siniora government Given this kind of Bush administration offer many view Hezbollah8217s spot on the 8216T list8217 as a badge of honor Yet respect for international law would suggest that the Bush Administration ought to show their 8216evidence8217 or remove Hezbollah from the list When pressed in early April 2007 by a former House Judiciary Committee staffer one lawyer in the State Department Office of the General Counsel commented 8220Its not that Hezbollah is terrorist per say actually we know they are pretty cleanthey are ok but you must realize that they do associate with shady characters to their East if you know what I mean8221 Hezbollah8217s view of the April 17 1983 Embassy bombing is different from some militia operating during this period Hezbollah has consistently opposed attacks on foreign civilians It was one of the first to condemn the 911 operation as well as the 1997 attack at the Temple of Hatshepsut at Luxor Egypt which killed 58 civilians as 8220bloody and terrible calling them crimes against Islam Hezbollah also condemned the Cairo attacks on the Greek tourists and the Algerian killing of 7 trappist monks in Algerian by claimed Islamists Despite Hezbollah8217s view which is based on the Koran8217s prohibitions against harming innocent civilians was the 1983 US Embassy attack terrorism against an internationally protected structure or had the Embassy become a legitimate military target In the assertion of one individual a former member of Islamic Jihad interviewed by American researchers during the spring of 2007 his group had nothing to do with Hezbollah during the Embassy operation or at any other time He claims his associates knew in advance soviet intelligence passed to Lebanon via Syria that the eight CIA operatives assigned to Lebanon were holding meetings in the Embassy and using its diplomatic protection for cover for plotting assassinations and attacks on Lebanon The entire CIA contingent was indeed meeting on the 6th floor of the Embassy at the time of the attack The same source claims that the Embassy was also being used for feeding targeting information to the USS New Jersey visible offshore from the upper floors of the Chancery The view that the American Embassy was a legitimate target on April 17 1983 cannot be summarily dismissed without careful review because principles of International law tend to support it Once an Embassy8217s is used for aggressive military purposes its protection collapses and it becomes what Donald Rumsfeld calls a 8220legitimate target of opportunity8221 Where is the proof that has been demanded for more than two decades Is the only reason Hezbollah is on the 8216terrorism list8217 is because Israel wants it there and a desire by some in the Bush administration to settle old scores without proof of who was responsible Organizations such as Islamic Jihad Organization of the Oppressed on Earth and the Revolutionary Justice Organization are considered by the Bush administration and Israel to be synonymous with Hezbollah That grouping appears to be a clumsy and inaccurate conclusion designed to support political objectives No proof has ever been offered to establish that these groups were part of Hezbollah during this period rather than adversaries or competitors As one Hezbollah supporter commented 8220In America as you built a resistance to the British invaders and occupiers were all the groups neatly organized Were some 8216terrorists8217 Did the ones who did operations such as the Boston Tea Party8217 give their names and address to the occupiers Or did some hide their identity and even dress like natives Did George Washington and his staff know everything that was going on or did some groups just form and decided it was better to work on their own liberation project That is what it was like here in Lebanon during this period We should leave that period and concentrate on working together to solve today8217s problems in Lebanon and the Middle East All parties talking and meeting8221 In denying Hezbollah involvement in operations targeting American civilians their leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has stated 8220The truth of the matter is that there was something other than Hezbollah called the Islamic Jihad who kidnapped the hostages There exist videocassettes communiqu233s that bear the signature of the Islamic Jihad It is independent form the party It is absolutely incorrect that the Islamic Jihad is a cover name for Hezbollah Hezbollah remains on the US and Israel 8216terrorism8217 list for purely political reasons and to punish the organization for its resistance to Israeli aggressions against Lebanon and Bush administration plans for the region8221 It is time for the Bush administration to present its case and prove what terrorism Hezbollah has actually used against the American people in the 19808217s in light of US government admissions that since 1999 there is no evidence that Hezbollah has engaged in 8216Terrorism8217 It8217s time for the poker players to reveal their cards or as they say down in Crawford 8216 y8217all show 8217em er fold 8217em FRANKLIN LAMB has been in Lebanon researching a book for the past nine months Hezbollah a brief Guide for Beginners in expected in early summer 2007 He can be reached at fplambgmailcom amp160 | It/PRON was/AUX a/DET sign/NOUN of/ADP the/DET times/NOUN last/ADJ week/NOUN March/PROPN 27/NUM when/SCONJ House/PROPN Armed/PROPN Services/PROPN Committee/PROPN Staff/PROPN Director/PROPN Erin/PROPN Conaton/PROPN declared/VERB in/ADP a/DET memo/NOUN to/ADP committee/VERB staffers/NOUN that/SCONJ the/DET powerful/ADJ committee/NOUN was/AUX scrapping/VERB the/DET Bush/PROPN Administration/PROPN shop/NOUN worn/VERB phrase/NOUN Global/PROPN War/PROPN of/ADP Terrorism/PROPN Conaton8217s/PROPN boss/NOUN Rep/PROPN Ike/PROPN Skelton/PROPN DMo/VERB the/DET new/ADJ Chairman/PROPN of/ADP the/DET Committee/PROPN commented/VERB that/SCONJ 8220the/DET 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<p>[Editors’ Note: This essay is an excerpt from the excellent new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/158322579X/counterpunchmaga" type="external">PowerTrip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11</a>, part of the Open Media series published by <a href="http://www.sevenstories.com/" type="external">Seven Stories Press</a>. The book is edited by John Feffer and includes essays by writers and scholars from <a href="http://www.fpif.org/" type="external">Foreign Policy in Focus</a>, including William Hartung, Martha Honey and Ahmed Rashid.]</p>
<p>One week after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the press corps, “This isn’t Pearl Harbor.” No, it was worse. Sixty years ago, the United States did not have a director of central intelligence or thirteen intelligence agencies or a combined intelligence budget of more than $30 billion to provide early warning of enemy attack.</p>
<p>There is another significant and telling difference between Pearl Harbor and September 11. Less than two weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a high-level military and civilian commission to determine the causes of the intelligence failure. Following the September attacks, however, President Bush, CIA director George Tenet, and the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees were adamantly opposed to any investigation or postmortem. The president’s failure to appoint a statutory inspector general at the CIA from January 2001 to April 2002 deprived the agency of the one individual who could have started an investigation regardless of the director’s opposition. Overall, the unwillingness to begin a congressional inquiry for nearly eight months increased the suspicion that indicators of an attack had gone unheeded.</p>
<p>The eventual Senate and House intelligence committee investigation of the September 11 failure, which began in June 2002, was mishandled from the beginning. The original staff director for the investigation, former CIA inspector general Britt Snider, had the stature and experience for the job, but he was soon pushed out by former Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Shelby (R-GA), a staunch critic of CIA Director Tenet but never an advocate for reform of the intelligence community. The staff itself is too small and inexperienced to do the job seriously. The August 2002 decision of the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees to order an aggressive FBI investigation of the joint committee, ostensibly to uncover leaks of classified information, marked a blatant violation of the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches. The move was designed to placate the Bush administration, which has consistently established roadblocks to an independent investigation of the intelligence community.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the preliminary report of the joint intelligence committee has done an excellent job of ferreting out evidence documenting the failures at the CIA and the FBI. The report describes a director of central intelligence who declared a war on terrorism in 1998 but allocated no additional funding or personnel to the task force on terrorism; an intelligence community that never catalogued information on the use of airplanes as weapons; and a CIA that refused to acknowledge the possibility of weaponizing commercial aircraft for terrorism until two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Two days after the report was published, the Bush administration reversed itself and endorsed the creation of a separate, independent investigation to study the intelligence failure.</p>
<p>FAILURES OF INTELLIGENCE</p>
<p>The failure to anticipate the September 11 attack-and the reluctance to thoroughly investigate this failure-is merely the latest in a long series of CIA blunders. Over the past half century, U.S. presidents have accepted the poor performance of the CIA, presumably because the agency represents a clandestine and relatively inexpensive instrument of American foreign policy. President Dwight Eisenhower employed the CIA in a series of covert actions in Guatemala, Iran, and Cuba that contributed to instability in these countries and complicated U.S. bilateral relations in the Caribbean and Southwest Asia. Subsequent covert operations in Indonesia, Congo, Angola, and Chile followed a similar pattern. In the 1980s, CIA Director William Casey politicized the intelligence analysis of the CIA and orchestrated the Iran-contra scheme that eventually embarrassed the Reagan administration. Deputy Director Robert Gates failed to receive confirmation as CIA director in 1987 because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence did not believe his denials of knowledge of the Iran-contra affair. Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA’s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s, from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decade-the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001.</p>
<p>The performance of the intelligence community did not improve in the 1990s. When the CIA missed India’s underground nuclear testing in 1998, Tenet stated, “We didn’t have a clue.” This failure to monitor Indian testing and Tenet’s inexplicable testimony that the CIA could not guarantee verification of the treaty led to the Senate’s unwillingness to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The CIA also failed to anticipate the third-stage capability of North Korea’s Taepodong missile, which was tested in August 1998, leading to bipartisan calls in the United States for more funding for national missile defense and Japanese suspension of talks to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea.139 Since 1998, CIA analysis of Third World missile programs has taken on a worst-case flavor, exaggerating the national security threat to the United States and politicizing the intelligence data in the process.</p>
<p>The CIA has been particularly weak on the terrorism issue. In 1986, Casey and Gates created the conceptually flawed Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC). They believed that the Soviet Union was responsible for every act of international terrorism (it wasn’t), that intelligence analysts and secret agents should work together in one office (they shouldn’t), and that the CIA and other intelligence agencies would share sensitive information (they didn’t). The CIA and FBI provided no warning of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000. Presumably there were intelligence successes during this period that may have prevented other acts of terrorism. Nevertheless, the CTC never understood the connection between Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the coordinator of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and the al-Qaeda organization until it was too late. And the CTC expected an attack abroad, not at home.</p>
<p>The September 11 attack exposed the inability of analysts and agents to perform strategic analysis, challenge flawed assumptions, and share sensitive secrets. No agency in the intelligence community could imagine a terrorist operation conducted inside the United States, using commercial airplanes as weapons, although al-Qaeda had planned such operations in the mid-1990s in Europe and Asia. The CIA was tracking al-Qaeda operatives but never placed them on the immigration service watch list; the FBI failed to track Arab men attending flight schools who were behaving in a suspicious fashion. Nevertheless, the Congressional Research Service and University of Pennsylvania professor of political science Stephen Gale did anticipate hijacking of commercial aircraft and warned both the CIA and the Department of Transportation.</p>
<p>Since September 11, the Bush administration’s global policy of unilateralism has involved the CIA in controversial covert operations, including political assassinations, despite the ban since 1975 on such actions by presidential executive order. U.S. unilateralism and fear of the CIA are major components of the anti-Americanism that is intensifying in Europe, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia. The current CIA director, George Tenet, is serving the policy interests of the Bush administration in other ways as well, resorting to worst-case analysis to describe the threats that confront the United States in order to justify the deployment of a national missile defense and the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of U.S. arms control policy since 1972. Without new data, CIA analysts have begun asserting that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are moving closer to a nuclear capability that would threaten the United States. The administration’s pressure on the CIA to produce intelligence data to justify a war against Iraq will lead to greater politicization of intelligence, and the emphasis on preemptive attack will lead to dubious demands on the CIA to produce intelligence justification for warfare. Tenet’s unprecedented diplomatic role in the Middle East peace process revives the suspicion that a CIA director has put the nation’s strategic intelligence at the service of a political agenda. His intense involvement with both Palestinian and Israeli security forces places him at the center of the policy process in the Middle East and compromises the collection of unbiased intelligence.</p>
<p>STRUCTURAL FLAWS</p>
<p>One reason for the consistent failures of the intelligence community is the organizational overload at both the CIA and FBI. The CIA has an operational mission to collect human intelligence and analyze and publish national intelligence estimates. It is also responsible for covert action. The agency cannot perform both missions well. The FBI also suffers from a bipolar mission. Its traditional law enforcement mission involves reacting to crimes that have already occurred. Its counterterrorism mission, by contrast, requires a proactive role-ferreting out threats to national security before they occur. Walter Lippmann reminded us seventy years ago that it is essential to “separate as absolutely as it is possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates.”</p>
<p>Turf issues abound. The protection of “sources and methods” has been an obstacle to information sharing, with the CIA and the FBI having a long history of poor communication. As critical, intelligence agencies and the Pentagon often lock horns. The director of central intelligence (DCI) is responsible for foreign intelligence but lacks control and authority over 90 percent of the intelligence community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which are staffed and funded by the Department of Defense. The priorities of the DCI and those of the Pentagon are quite different. Previous DCIs, particularly Gates and John Deutch, harmed the CIA by de-emphasizing strategic intelligence for policy makers and catering instead to the tactical demands of the Pentagon. The CIA produced fewer intelligence assessments that dealt with strategic matters and emphasized instead intelligence support for the war fighter. Gates ended CIA analysis on key order-of-battle issues in order to avoid tendentious analytical struggles with the Pentagon; Deutch’s creation of NIMA at the Department of Defense enabled the Pentagon to be the sole interpreter of satellite photography. The Pentagon uses imagery analysis to justify the defense budget, to gauge the likelihood of military conflict around the world, and to verify arms control agreements. In creating NIMA, Deutch abolished the CIA’s Office of Imagery Analysis and the joint Department of Defense­CIA National Photographic Interpretation Center, which often challenged the analytical views of the Pentagon. Worst of all, the Bush administration has referred to a “marriage” between the Pentagon and the CIA, which suggests that intelligence continues to be subordinated to Pentagon priorities. The CIA’s worst-case analysis is being used to justify the highest peacetime increases in defense spending since the record-level hikes during the Reagan administration.</p>
<p>The CIA’s second major mission, covert action, remains a dangerously unregulated activity. There are no political and ethical guidelines delineating when to engage in covert action, and previous covert actions have harmed U.S. strategic interests, placing on the CIA payroll such criminals as Panama’s General Manuel Noriega, Guatemala’s Colonel Julio Alpirez, Peru’s intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos, and Chile’s General Manuel Contreras. Although President Bush, like every other president since Gerald Ford, has signed an executive order banning political assassination, exceptions have been made in the covert pursuit of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and former Afghanistan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar-both of whom also, ironically, received CIA assistance in the 1980s. In November 2002, the CIA killed six al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, an action immediately condemned by Amnesty International as a violation of international law prohibiting summary executions.</p>
<p>In 1998, the United States and the CIA used the cover of the UN and the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to conduct a secret operation to spy on Iraqi military communications as part of a covert action to topple Saddam Hussein. Neither the UN nor UNSCOM had authorized the U.S. surveillance, which Saddam Hussein cited as justification for expelling the UN monitors. As a result, the United States and the UN lost its most successful program to monitor and verify Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological programs, compromising the credibility of multilateral inspection of weapons of mass destruction. In that same year, the CIA produced spurious intelligence data to justify the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, one of the few countries willing to help the Clinton administration arrest Osama bin Laden.</p>
<p>Finally, a comparison of the CIA and the State Department reveals skewed U.S. priorities. Today, the CIA has approximately sixteen thousand employees, more than four times the number at the State Department, and the intelligence community budget is ten times that of the State Department. As a result of cutbacks, the State Department has had to close important posts in South America, the Balkans, Southwest Asia, and Africa, and has had to post political amateurs with deep pockets to key ambassadorships. It is no wonder that the role of the State Department has significantly diminished in such key functional areas as arms control and disarmament and such key regional areas as the Middle East and South Asia. The CIA, meanwhile, doesn’t need so many resources. One of the CIA’s first directors, Allen Dulles, emphasized that “the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels” and that if the agency got to be a “great big octopus it would not function well.”</p>
<p>WHAT IS TO BE DONE?</p>
<p>What the CIA and the intelligence community should be, what it should do, and what it should prepare to do is less clear now than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War, the need to count and characterize Soviet weapons systems and the search for indications of surprise attack focused the efforts of the CIA. These goals disappeared with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Major steps must be taken to design an intelligence infrastructure to deal with terrorism, the major security threat in the twenty-first century. The ongoing contentious debate over the proposed new Department of Homeland Security masks the far greater need to reform the intelligence community. Such reforms include demilitarizing the intelligence community, resolution of key turf issues, and reform of covert operations.</p>
<p>Retired general Brent Scowcroft has conducted a comprehensive review of the intelligence community for President Bush and favors transferring budgetary and collection authority from the Pentagon to a new office that reports directly to the DCI.144 These agencies include NSA, which conducts worldwide electronic eavesdropping; NRO, which designs spy satellites; and NIMA, which analyzes satellite pictures and data and produces maps.145 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opposes this transfer and has created a new position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence to preempt such reform. Congressional approval of this new position would preserve the status quo and close the narrow window of opportunity for more extensive reform proposals under consideration by the joint intelligence committees of the House and Senate.</p>
<p>It is crucial that the CIA strengthen links across the intelligence community in order to share intelligence. Unfortunately, the agency places too much emphasis on the compartmentalization of intelligence and the “need to know,” which are obstacles to intelligence sharing. The failures at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attacks in 2001 could have been prevented with genuine sharing of sensitive intelligence information. But this information tends to move vertically within each of the thirteen intelligence agencies instead of horizontally across them. The FBI and the CIA have never been effective in sharing information with each other or with such key agencies as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Aviation Agency, the Border Guards, and the Coast Guard, which will be on the front lines in the war against terrorism. There is no guarantee that the CIA and FBI will share raw reporting on terrorism with the new Office of Homeland Security.</p>
<p>To minimize the politicization of intelligence work, covert operations and intelligence gathering should be separated. The CIA’s directorate of operations is responsible for clandestine activities. Relying on secrecy, hierarchy, and the strict enforcement of information on a need-to-know basis, it is involved in the policy-making process. The directorate of intelligence, on the other hand, helps set the context for people who formulate policy, but it should not be involved in the making of policy. The FBI should likewise be split into two agencies, with a domestic counterterrorism service reporting directly to the director of central intelligence.</p>
<p>The Bush administration and Congress have responded in classic bureaucratic fashion to the September 11 failure, throwing lots of money at the problem to find a solution. The defense budget for 2003 will be close to $400 billion, an increase of nearly 30 percent since 2000. The intelligence budget will increase by 20 percent in 2003, climbing to more than $35 billion. The defense budget protects the current force structure and ongoing weapons modernization programs, and assigns top priority to deploying a national missile defense. Most of the intelligence budget pays for collection resources-including a profusion of electronic data and images from planes, ships, ground stations, and satellites, along with clandestine human intelligence collection. These increases have little to do with countering terrorism and are reminiscent of President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex in 1961.</p>
<p>The intelligence community, particularly the CIA, faces a situation comparable to that of fifty-five years ago, when President Harry S. Truman created the CIA and the National Security Council. As in 1947­48, the international environment has now been recast, the threats have been altered, and as a result the institutions created to fight the Cold War must be redesigned. If steps are not taken to improve the intelligence community, we can certainly expect more terrorist operations against the United States.</p>
<p>MEL GOODMAN has taught national security issues at the National War College, Johns Hopkins and the American University. He is an analyst at the Center for International Policty. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:goodmanm@ndu.edu" type="external">goodmanm@ndu.edu</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | What is to be Done with the CIA? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2003/07/17/what-is-to-be-done-with-the-cia/ | 2003-07-17 | 4left
| 3,050 | Editors8217 Note This essay is an excerpt from the excellent new book PowerTrip US Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11 part of the Open Media series published by Seven Stories Press The book is edited by John Feffer and includes essays by writers and scholars from Foreign Policy in Focus including William Hartung Martha Honey and Ahmed Rashid One week after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the press corps 8220This isn8217t Pearl Harbor8221 No it was worse Sixty years ago the United States did not have a director of central intelligence or thirteen intelligence agencies or a combined intelligence budget of more than 30 billion to provide early warning of enemy attack There is another significant and telling difference between Pearl Harbor and September 11 Less than two weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor President Franklin D Roosevelt appointed a highlevel military and civilian commission to determine the causes of the intelligence failure Following the September attacks however President Bush CIA director George Tenet and the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees were adamantly opposed to any investigation or postmortem The president8217s failure to appoint a statutory inspector general at the CIA from January 2001 to April 2002 deprived the agency of the one individual who could have started an investigation regardless of the director8217s opposition Overall the unwillingness to begin a congressional inquiry for nearly eight months increased the suspicion that indicators of an attack had gone unheeded The eventual Senate and House intelligence committee investigation of the September 11 failure which began in June 2002 was mishandled from the beginning The original staff director for the investigation former CIA inspector general Britt Snider had the stature and experience for the job but he was soon pushed out by former Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Shelby RGA a staunch critic of CIA Director Tenet but never an advocate for reform of the intelligence community The staff itself is too small and inexperienced to do the job seriously The August 2002 decision of the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees to order an aggressive FBI investigation of the joint committee ostensibly to uncover leaks of classified information marked a blatant violation of the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches The move was designed to placate the Bush administration which has consistently established roadblocks to an independent investigation of the intelligence community Nevertheless the preliminary report of the joint intelligence committee has done an excellent job of ferreting out evidence documenting the failures at the CIA and the FBI The report describes a director of central intelligence who declared a war on terrorism in 1998 but allocated no additional funding or personnel to the task force on terrorism an intelligence community that never catalogued information on the use of airplanes as weapons and a CIA that refused to acknowledge the possibility of weaponizing commercial aircraft for terrorism until two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Two days after the report was published the Bush administration reversed itself and endorsed the creation of a separate independent investigation to study the intelligence failure FAILURES OF INTELLIGENCE The failure to anticipate the September 11 attackand the reluctance to thoroughly investigate this failureis merely the latest in a long series of CIA blunders Over the past half century US presidents have accepted the poor performance of the CIA presumably because the agency represents a clandestine and relatively inexpensive instrument of American foreign policy President Dwight Eisenhower employed the CIA in a series of covert actions in Guatemala Iran and Cuba that contributed to instability in these countries and complicated US bilateral relations in the Caribbean and Southwest Asia Subsequent covert operations in Indonesia Congo Angola and Chile followed a similar pattern In the 1980s CIA Director William Casey politicized the intelligence analysis of the CIA and orchestrated the Irancontra scheme that eventually embarrassed the Reagan administration Deputy Director Robert Gates failed to receive confirmation as CIA director in 1987 because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence did not believe his denials of knowledge of the Irancontra affair Casey and Gates were directly responsible for the CIA8217s poor analytical record in dealing with Soviet issues throughout the 1980s from the failure to foresee the Soviet collapse to the revelation that CIA clandestine officer Aldrich Ames had been a Soviet spy for nearly a decadethe greatest intelligence failure in the history of the agency until the terrorist attacks in 2001 The performance of the intelligence community did not improve in the 1990s When the CIA missed India8217s underground nuclear testing in 1998 Tenet stated 8220We didn8217t have a clue8221 This failure to monitor Indian testing and Tenet8217s inexplicable testimony that the CIA could not guarantee verification of the treaty led to the Senate8217s unwillingness to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty The CIA also failed to anticipate the thirdstage capability of North Korea8217s Taepodong missile which was tested in August 1998 leading to bipartisan calls in the United States for more funding for national missile defense and Japanese suspension of talks to establish diplomatic relations with North Korea139 Since 1998 CIA analysis of Third World missile programs has taken on a worstcase flavor exaggerating the national security threat to the United States and politicizing the intelligence data in the process The CIA has been particularly weak on the terrorism issue In 1986 Casey and Gates created the conceptually flawed CounterTerrorism Center CTC They believed that the Soviet Union was responsible for every act of international terrorism it wasn8217t that intelligence analysts and secret agents should work together in one office they shouldn8217t and that the CIA and other intelligence agencies would share sensitive information they didn8217t The CIA and FBI provided no warning of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996 US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000 Presumably there were intelligence successes during this period that may have prevented other acts of terrorism Nevertheless the CTC never understood the connection between Ramzi Ahmed Yousef the coordinator of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the alQaeda organization until it was too late And the CTC expected an attack abroad not at home The September 11 attack exposed the inability of analysts and agents to perform strategic analysis challenge flawed assumptions and share sensitive secrets No agency in the intelligence community could imagine a terrorist operation conducted inside the United States using commercial airplanes as weapons although alQaeda had planned such operations in the mid1990s in Europe and Asia The CIA was tracking alQaeda operatives but never placed them on the immigration service watch list the FBI failed to track Arab men attending flight schools who were behaving in a suspicious fashion Nevertheless the Congressional Research Service and University of Pennsylvania professor of political science Stephen Gale did anticipate hijacking of commercial aircraft and warned both the CIA and the Department of Transportation Since September 11 the Bush administration8217s global policy of unilateralism has involved the CIA in controversial covert operations including political assassinations despite the ban since 1975 on such actions by presidential executive order US unilateralism and fear of the CIA are major components of the antiAmericanism that is intensifying in Europe the Middle East and Southwest Asia The current CIA director George Tenet is serving the policy interests of the Bush administration in other ways as well resorting to worstcase analysis to describe the threats that confront the United States in order to justify the deployment of a national missile defense and the US withdrawal from the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty a cornerstone of US arms control policy since 1972 Without new data CIA analysts have begun asserting that Iran Iraq and North Korea are moving closer to a nuclear capability that would threaten the United States The administration8217s pressure on the CIA to produce intelligence data to justify a war against Iraq will lead to greater politicization of intelligence and the emphasis on preemptive attack will lead to dubious demands on the CIA to produce intelligence justification for warfare Tenet8217s unprecedented diplomatic role in the Middle East peace process revives the suspicion that a CIA director has put the nation8217s strategic intelligence at the service of a political agenda His intense involvement with both Palestinian and Israeli security forces places him at the center of the policy process in the Middle East and compromises the collection of unbiased intelligence STRUCTURAL FLAWS One reason for the consistent failures of the intelligence community is the organizational overload at both the CIA and FBI The CIA has an operational mission to collect human intelligence and analyze and publish national intelligence estimates It is also responsible for covert action The agency cannot perform both missions well The FBI also suffers from a bipolar mission Its traditional law enforcement mission involves reacting to crimes that have already occurred Its counterterrorism mission by contrast requires a proactive roleferreting out threats to national security before they occur Walter Lippmann reminded us seventy years ago that it is essential to 8220separate as absolutely as it is possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates8221 Turf issues abound The protection of 8220sources and methods8221 has been an obstacle to information sharing with the CIA and the FBI having a long history of poor communication As critical intelligence agencies and the Pentagon often lock horns The director of central intelligence DCI is responsible for foreign intelligence but lacks control and authority over 90 percent of the intelligence community including the National Security Agency NSA the National Imagery and Mapping Agency NIMA and the National Reconnaissance Office NRO which are staffed and funded by the Department of Defense The priorities of the DCI and those of the Pentagon are quite different Previous DCIs particularly Gates and John Deutch harmed the CIA by deemphasizing strategic intelligence for policy makers and catering instead to the tactical demands of the Pentagon The CIA produced fewer intelligence assessments that dealt with strategic matters and emphasized instead intelligence support for the war fighter Gates ended CIA analysis on key orderofbattle issues in order to avoid tendentious analytical struggles with the Pentagon Deutch8217s creation of NIMA at the Department of Defense enabled the Pentagon to be the sole interpreter of satellite photography The Pentagon uses imagery analysis to justify the defense budget to gauge the likelihood of military conflict around the world and to verify arms control agreements In creating NIMA Deutch abolished the CIA8217s Office of Imagery Analysis and the joint Department of Defense173CIA National Photographic Interpretation Center which often challenged the analytical views of the Pentagon Worst of all the Bush administration has referred to a 8220marriage8221 between the Pentagon and the CIA which suggests that intelligence continues to be subordinated to Pentagon priorities The CIA8217s worstcase analysis is being used to justify the highest peacetime increases in defense spending since the recordlevel hikes during the Reagan administration The CIA8217s second major mission covert action remains a dangerously unregulated activity There are no political and ethical guidelines delineating when to engage in covert action and previous covert actions have harmed US strategic interests placing on the CIA payroll such criminals as Panama8217s General Manuel Noriega Guatemala8217s Colonel Julio Alpirez Peru8217s intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos and Chile8217s General Manuel Contreras Although President Bush like every other president since Gerald Ford has signed an executive order banning political assassination exceptions have been made in the covert pursuit of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and former Afghanistan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyarboth of whom also ironically received CIA assistance in the 1980s In November 2002 the CIA killed six alQaeda operatives in Yemen an action immediately condemned by Amnesty International as a violation of international law prohibiting summary executions In 1998 the United States and the CIA used the cover of the UN and the UN Special Commission UNSCOM to conduct a secret operation to spy on Iraqi military communications as part of a covert action to topple Saddam Hussein Neither the UN nor UNSCOM had authorized the US surveillance which Saddam Hussein cited as justification for expelling the UN monitors As a result the United States and the UN lost its most successful program to monitor and verify Iraq8217s nuclear chemical and biological programs compromising the credibility of multilateral inspection of weapons of mass destruction In that same year the CIA produced spurious intelligence data to justify the US bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan one of the few countries willing to help the Clinton administration arrest Osama bin Laden Finally a comparison of the CIA and the State Department reveals skewed US priorities Today the CIA has approximately sixteen thousand employees more than four times the number at the State Department and the intelligence community budget is ten times that of the State Department As a result of cutbacks the State Department has had to close important posts in South America the Balkans Southwest Asia and Africa and has had to post political amateurs with deep pockets to key ambassadorships It is no wonder that the role of the State Department has significantly diminished in such key functional areas as arms control and disarmament and such key regional areas as the Middle East and South Asia The CIA meanwhile doesn8217t need so many resources One of the CIA8217s first directors Allen Dulles emphasized that 8220the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels8221 and that if the agency got to be a 8220great big octopus it would not function well8221 WHAT IS TO BE DONE What the CIA and the intelligence community should be what it should do and what it should prepare to do is less clear now than at any time since the beginning of the Cold War Throughout the Cold War the need to count and characterize Soviet weapons systems and the search for indications of surprise attack focused the efforts of the CIA These goals disappeared with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 Major steps must be taken to design an intelligence infrastructure to deal with terrorism the major security threat in the twentyfirst century The ongoing contentious debate over the proposed new Department of Homeland Security masks the far greater need to reform the intelligence community Such reforms include demilitarizing the intelligence community resolution of key turf issues and reform of covert operations Retired general Brent Scowcroft has conducted a comprehensive review of the intelligence community for President Bush and favors transferring budgetary and collection authority from the Pentagon to a new office that reports directly to the DCI144 These agencies include NSA which conducts worldwide electronic eavesdropping NRO which designs spy satellites and NIMA which analyzes satellite pictures and data and produces maps145 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld opposes this transfer and has created a new position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence to preempt such reform Congressional approval of this new position would preserve the status quo and close the narrow window of opportunity for more extensive reform proposals under consideration by the joint intelligence committees of the House and Senate It is crucial that the CIA strengthen links across the intelligence community in order to share intelligence Unfortunately the agency places too much emphasis on the compartmentalization of intelligence and the 8220need to know8221 which are obstacles to intelligence sharing The failures at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attacks in 2001 could have been prevented with genuine sharing of sensitive intelligence information But this information tends to move vertically within each of the thirteen intelligence agencies instead of horizontally across them The FBI and the CIA have never been effective in sharing information with each other or with such key agencies as the Immigration and Naturalization Service the Federal Aviation Agency the Border Guards and the Coast Guard which will be on the front lines in the war against terrorism There is no guarantee that the CIA and FBI will share raw reporting on terrorism with the new Office of Homeland Security To minimize the politicization of intelligence work covert operations and intelligence gathering should be separated The CIA8217s directorate of operations is responsible for clandestine activities Relying on secrecy hierarchy and the strict enforcement of information on a needtoknow basis it is involved in the policymaking process The directorate of intelligence on the other hand helps set the context for people who formulate policy but it should not be involved in the making of policy The FBI should likewise be split into two agencies with a domestic counterterrorism service reporting directly to the director of central intelligence The Bush administration and Congress have responded in classic bureaucratic fashion to the September 11 failure throwing lots of money at the problem to find a solution The defense budget for 2003 will be close to 400 billion an increase of nearly 30 percent since 2000 The intelligence budget will increase by 20 percent in 2003 climbing to more than 35 billion The defense budget protects the current force structure and ongoing weapons modernization programs and assigns top priority to deploying a national missile defense Most of the intelligence budget pays for collection resourcesincluding a profusion of electronic data and images from planes ships ground stations and satellites along with clandestine human intelligence collection These increases have little to do with countering terrorism and are reminiscent of President Dwight Eisenhower8217s warning against the militaryindustrial complex in 1961 The intelligence community particularly the CIA faces a situation comparable to that of fiftyfive years ago when President Harry S Truman created the CIA and the National Security Council As in 194717348 the international environment has now been recast the threats have been altered and as a result the institutions created to fight the Cold War must be redesigned If steps are not taken to improve the intelligence community we can certainly expect more terrorist operations against the United States MEL GOODMAN has taught national security issues at the National War College Johns Hopkins and the American University He is an analyst at the Center for International Policty He can be reached at goodmanmnduedu amp160 | Editors8217/NOUN Note/INTJ This/DET essay/NOUN is/AUX an/DET excerpt/NOUN from/ADP the/DET excellent/ADJ new/ADJ book/NOUN 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<p>The revolutionary days of December 19 and 20 have ushered in a revolutionary phase in Argentina. A series of three revolutionary events shattered the country to its foundations back then, bringing down De la R??a's government in a revolutionary fashion. These bore the marks that Lenin highlighted as the hallmark for such situations:</p>
<p>&#160;an exceptional situation in which the ruling classes are no longer able to rule as they did, thus having to change their "normal" ways of domination for exceptional ones.</p>
<p>&#160;an exceptional situation fuelled by an "extraordinary aggravation" of the hardships and "the plight of the oppressed classes", which in turn leads to:</p>
<p>&#160;"a considerable intensification, due to such causes, of the activity of the masses that in times of "peace" let themselves be exploited peacefully, but in times of turmoil are driven to historically independent actions -by both the crisis itself as well as those at the top.</p>
<p>However, there are many different kinds of revolutionary phases or situations ushered in by "historically independent actions". In previous articles we defined the events of December 19 and 20 as "revolutionary days", pointing at their revolutionary nature (i.e., actions that brought down De la R??a's government going beyond the framework of bourgeois legality), while at the same time we differentiated them from superior forms of revolutionary developments, such as the 1917 February revolution in Russia that smashed the army and nourished dual power bodies, or the so-called "Cordobazo". The latter was a mass semi-insurrection (both the workers and the students participated) that inflicted a partial defeat on the repressive forces. (see below) That is why, regardless of the merely descriptive use of the term, we do not share the view of most left wing parties that claim the December events were a so-called "Argentinazo" . Such term, given the Argentine political tradition, can only mean a re-run of the "Cordobazo" -i.e., a semi-insurrection led by the workers that defeat the police through street fights-, this time on the national arena. Last but not least, we do not share in the least the view of those superficially claiming that what we have seen is a "victorious revolution".</p>
<p>How can one ponder the events from a Marxist angle while not taking heed of the fact that the working class was by and large absent from the December events? How can one overlook the fact that, unlike the "Cordobazo", the repressive forces were not militarily defeated this time? They gloss over the fact that the industrial workers are today in disarray in the face of both the unions' support for the government and increased unemployment, thus "forgetting" all about the main advantage playing in the hands of the ruling class, one that enables them to buy time and also rebuild their weakened domination.</p>
<p>The lack of any serious appraisal by the left means they cast aside all the sequels that the lack of a distinct working class intervention have for the new opening phase. But it also means they cannot accurately gauge the intervention of the middle classes -which did intervene to an unprecedented extent for Argentine standards. No matter how progressive and innovative their actions have been so far (the pot banging has rapidly become a symbol of struggle worldwide), these have yet lagged far behind revolutionary actions like the ones staged by the Albanian masses back in 1997 when the "financial pyramids" came tumbling down. Back then, the proletariat also failed to gain the upper hand, but the masses nevertheless stormed the barracks and armed themselves in the south of the country, building rebels' committees and momentarily breaking down state power. The whole series of subsequent pot bangings and their impact on the population have mesmerized many people, making them forget that the December events broke the limits of bourgeois legality because they combined the massive pot banging in the morning of December 20 against the siege, with the lootings of the urban poor in the big cities in search for food, along with the long violent clashes with the police in the so-called Battle of Plaza de Mayo. It was not the pot banging alone that ousted De la R??a's government.</p>
<p>The tempo of the new phase</p>
<p>This first comparison will enable us to chart the likely tempo of the ongoing process. In Trotsky's words, "accurately charting the tempo of revolution is of utmost importance, if not to trace the fundamental strategic line, but to shape the tactics. Now then, without a just tactic, the best strategic line might lead to bankruptcy. Naturally, foreseeing the tempo for a protracted period is impossible. The tempo must be tested in the course of the struggle, picking up on the most variegated symptoms. Furthermore, the tempo might suddenly change as the events are unfolding. But, nevertheless, one should always bear in mind a given perspective, so that one will be able to make any necessary corrections to it through experience."</p>
<p>It is unlikely that the revolutionary phase in Argentina will come to a quick denouement. Its tempo is more in tune with those processes where the revolutionary phase goes through many changing situations or phases. We might draw a certain analogy with the Spanish events in the 30s here - a process sparked off by the downfall of the king that culminated in the civil war.</p>
<p>In the work quoted above -when the Spanish events were still in the making- Trotsky set out the difference between the latter and the dynamics of Russia 1917: "The 1917 Russian revolution was preceded by the 1905 Revolution, which was branded by Lenin as a dress rehearsal. All the elements of the second and the third revolutions were prepared beforehand, in such a way that the forces participating of the struggle were walking down a road familiar to them. This sped up the upswing of the revolution extraordinarily until it reached its climax. But all things considered, we deem the war was a decisive factor when it came to the tempo in 1917. The question of the land could still be postponed for some months, even years. But the question of dying in the trenches could not wait. The soldiers said: "What do I need the land for if I'm not going to be there?" The pressure exerted by the mass of 12 million soldiers was a factor that sped up the revolution extraordinarily. Without the war, no matter the 1905 "dress rehearsal" and the existence of the Bolshevik party, the preparatory, pre-Bolshevik period of the revolution could have lasted longer than eight months, maybe one or two years, or even longer than that.</p>
<p>The [Spanish] Communist Party has come into the fray in a state of extreme weakness. Spain is not at war; the Spanish peasants are not rallied in the barracks and the trenches in their millions, nor are they facing the immediate danger of extermination. All these circumstances speak in favour of a longer period of time available to build the party and seize power."</p>
<p>Trotsky's approach of the Spanish events is relevant for present-day Argentina, bearing in mind that the recent revolutionary experience of the Argentine working class is a far cry from that of the Spanish workers back then. The combination of a deep-going slump, the weakening of the ruling classes, the lack of a central working class intervention, the revolutionary immaturity of the masses in general and the great weakness of revolutionary Marxists- all these tell us that we "might foresee that we shall have more time to build the party and seize power". As it happened in Spain back then, it is least likely that the Argentine process will come to a quick denouement. We can state, as Nin did when referring to the Spanish events in the 30s that we are in for "a protracted and painstaking process, during which the masses try to find a way forward in a struggle fraught with difficulties, "chaotic" actions, partial offensives, victories and defeats." (The General Strike in Barcelona, October 1931)</p>
<p>The class dynamics at the onset of the revolutionary phase</p>
<p>Having said that, what is the class dynamics at work at the onset of the phase?</p>
<p>Given the non-intervention of the working class as such in the revolutionary days, the very beginning of the revolutionary phase bears the mark of the middle layers. These sectors nourish a "February coalition" styled atmosphere (or else "December bloc" as we call it somewhere else), in the sense that Marx spoke of the equivocal "union of all the classes" that commonly mobilized against the finance aristocracy headed by Louis Phillip in France 1848. Never mind the struggle is aimed against a government led by the so-called "productive sector" that in the past used to voice opposition "against the model" under De la R??a's government. Such predominance of the middle classes accounts for the strong tendencies to a sort of "citizens" and "neighbours" styled representation, a non-class one, and also the "anti-party" mood. This reflects a contradictory phenomenon -similar to that of the so-called "rage vote" in the last October elections-, with a progressive strand whenever it reflects a mass hatred against the bourgeois parties, but rather reactionary when aimed at the left. This is true to the extent that it also encompasses sectors likely to provide the basis for future reactionary solutions, coexisting with others who seek an alliance with the working class, as shown by their participation in a march with the unemployed. This reflects a phase in which the inevitable split in the middle classes has not yet taken place openly and also the absence of the working class movement.</p>
<p>The working class is responding to the crisis unevenly. The unemployed have mobilized much faster, demanding the job schemes they were promised. The government might try and incorporate some of its sectors. They may succeed in this endeavour by implementing the already announced increase in job schemes, although a tug of war as to their distribution might ensue also. More than ever before, the progressive nature of the picketers' movements lie in their ability to fight for genuine jobs and not merely demanding "workfare schemes".</p>
<p>State workers in general, particularly municipal workers, are more likely to come out and fight, rather than those in the industrial sector and the big service companies, given the fact that their jobs are much more stable than those of the "private sector" and also suffer chronic wage arrears. The actions undertaken by municipal workers in the cities of C??rdoba, Santiago del Estero, Mendoza or Villa Constituci??n -or else the formation of the "Intergremial" in La Plata- are all symptoms of this.</p>
<p>Although we witness partial fights in response to closures and wage arrears, and if inflation rises we shall see fights against wage loss, the industrial working class is being held back by both sky-rocketing unemployment and the collaboration of the unions with the government. The bosses are profiting from having 30 or 40% of casual workers in the factories -this percentage being higher in some cases. It is them who are bearing the full brunt of the bosses' offensive. The union bureaucracy refuses time and again to defend all temporary workers, and so far, the response by the workers has been a rather conservative one, given their fear of losing their jobs. In the short term, they are paying a high price for not having got rid of the union bureaucracy as a whole, and also for their trust both in Peronism and the so-called "productive" and "national" bosses -never mind their trust in Peronism has decreased a lot in the last few years. Two possible ways to outmanoeuvre the union bureaucracy that will allow workers to be at the center of the scene could be a response to an all-out onslaught or else hard strikes becoming an example. This is a key aspect for the future unfolding of the class struggle. It goes with a saying that the middle class protests exposing the banks and forming people's assemblies, along with their sympathy for the picketers and their actions in common with them, all herald the possibility of welding a far-reaching popular and working class alliance no sooner the working class enters the fray. But this will not be the outcome of just making the pickets come together with the pot bangings, as some put it. Unless the main contingents of the working class come out in struggle, thus giving the proletariat the leading role in the people's and workers' alliance, the tasks posed by the December events will not be duly accomplished. Getting ready for this likely upsurge of the working class in the next period ahead is precisely the main task for revolutionary Marxists. Our bet is for a revolutionary leadership up to the task of leading new coming "Cordobazos" to victory.</p>
<p>The hindrances blocking the working class</p>
<p>We deem, however, that the working class does not have a few obstacles to overcome if it is to become a revolutionary actor. 1) The working class has not waged major revolutionary combats worldwide after the 1968 revolutionary upswing, which came to a close with the failed Polish revolution in 1980-81. With the sole exception of Bolivia in 1985, it has not been in the spotlight ever since, but quite otherwise, has been put on the defensive by the "neoliberal" imperialist offensive. The French state workers strike back in 1995 marked the beginning of the decline of the "neoliberal" agenda and also showed the reinvigoration of the working class, which ever since staged major fightbacks. In Argentina, there have been more than ten general strikes since 1996. This went hand in hand with more revolutionary fights being waged by the unemployed. But the working class has not been the main actor, either in Argentina or worldwide, in the revolutionary events we have witnessed in the last few years. Other sectors of the exploited classes have instead being at the forefront, as it happened with great mass revolutionary actions that brought down the governments in Albania, Ecuador, Indonesia or Serbia -all the more so in the more contradictory upheavals which provoked the demise of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.</p>
<p>2) Both the masses and the vanguard now fighting in Argentina have no revolutionary experience whatsoever, contrariwise to those in the 70s that had participated in radicalized (and sometimes revolutionary) actions, from the 1955 coup onwards -a protracted experience in the workers' and youth vanguard. They had fought back both military dictatorships and bogus democratic administration, and even challenged the union bureaucracy. Although the 1969-76 period was a sort of revolutionary "dress rehearsal" in our country, the lessons to be drawn from it are not incarnated in the vanguard, and the generation that took part in it was either annihilated or else became part of the bourgeois regime. The 18 year-long bourgeois democratic regime, along with the nefarious experience of the guerrilla in the previous period, have nourished strong pacifist prejudices in the masses and the vanguard alike. Although there were tendencies to an embryonic civil war in the struggles waged by the unemployed from 1996 onwards (if we understand it in a broad sense, as Trotsky put it , only on rare occasions did the clashes with the repressive forces go beyond spontaneous stone-hurling, and these did not take place in the main economic and political centres of the country.</p>
<p>3) Although the union bureaucrats are massively discredited, no anti-bureaucratic fights have yet unfolded within the working class challenging the rule of the union bureaucracy in main working class battalions. There exist hundreds of "fighting" shop stewards, dozens of internal commissions and shop stewards committees, but there are few independent and anti-bureaucratic unions. Furthermore, the workers have hardly any experience at all in building inter-union bodies, coordinating forums or else other bodies of their own going beyond the narrow union framework which might thus become a mass united front of the fighting masses as an embryo of a new working class and popular power. The revolutionaries should do their best to encourage every step taken in this direction.</p>
<p>4) The lack of "socialist horizon" for the working class movement and the masses is another additional factor hindering the political ripening of the vanguard and the revolutionary process in general. People have taken bold steps and identified all those responsible for the "neoliberal" agenda -the banks, the privatized companies, the IMF, the politicians of the establishment, the judiciary, the police, the unions bureaucrats- as their enemies, but there are some sector that still have expectations in the so-called "productive and national" bourgeoisie, and the workers have not still made their final experience with Peronism, either. The middle classes, on their part, even those far left-leaning sectors within it, might provide the basis for a "new regime" -one that while doing away with most of the old political caste, props up the capitalist system and prevents the realization of the workers' and people's alliance.</p>
<p>5) Last but not least, there is no revolutionary Marxist leadership with mass influence (such as the Bolsheviks in Russia) that could be able to accelerate the process, and also a key element so that the mass mobilization culminates in a people's and workers' government. The conquest of political independence by the workers in a revolutionary fashion is a key task ahead of us. So far, we have carefully described all the limits holding back the working class movement from intervening decisively in the ongoing revolutionary process. However, we conclude that no matter how big such obstacles can be, the colossal economic, social and political crisis today along with the social weight of the proletariat make a revolutionary intervention by the Argentine working class all the more likely. To these we should add the crisis of the reformist misleaderships, both the fighting and organizational experiences done by the unemployed, and also sectors of state workers and the workers' vanguard (such as the ceramic workers in Neuqu??n or else the miners in R??o Turbio), and also the influence of several left tendencies on hundreds or perhaps thousands of working class activists nationwide. Such elements have developed more in Argentina than in those countries going through revolutionary or acute pre-revolutionary situations in the last few years. They are dealt with in the article "The Argentine working class is confronted with a new "historical turn"".</p> | Reflections about the class dynamics and the tempo of the revolutionary phase | true | https://leftvoice.org/Reflections-about-the-class-dynamics-and-the-tempo-of-the-revolutionary-phase | 2009-06-08 | 4left
| 3,050 | The revolutionary days of December 19 and 20 have ushered in a revolutionary phase in Argentina A series of three revolutionary events shattered the country to its foundations back then bringing down De la Ras government in a revolutionary fashion These bore the marks that Lenin highlighted as the hallmark for such situations amp160an exceptional situation in which the ruling classes are no longer able to rule as they did thus having to change their normal ways of domination for exceptional ones amp160an exceptional situation fuelled by an extraordinary aggravation of the hardships and the plight of the oppressed classes which in turn leads to amp160a considerable intensification due to such causes of the activity of the masses that in times of peace let themselves be exploited peacefully but in times of turmoil are driven to historically independent actions by both the crisis itself as well as those at the top However there are many different kinds of revolutionary phases or situations ushered in by historically independent actions In previous articles we defined the events of December 19 and 20 as revolutionary days pointing at their revolutionary nature ie actions that brought down De la Ras government going beyond the framework of bourgeois legality while at the same time we differentiated them from superior forms of revolutionary developments such as the 1917 February revolution in Russia that smashed the army and nourished dual power bodies or the socalled Cordobazo The latter was a mass semiinsurrection both the workers and the students participated that inflicted a partial defeat on the repressive forces see below That is why regardless of the merely descriptive use of the term we do not share the view of most left wing parties that claim the December events were a socalled Argentinazo Such term given the Argentine political tradition can only mean a rerun of the Cordobazo ie a semiinsurrection led by the workers that defeat the police through street fights this time on the national arena Last but not least we do not share in the least the view of those superficially claiming that what we have seen is a victorious revolution How can one ponder the events from a Marxist angle while not taking heed of the fact that the working class was by and large absent from the December events How can one overlook the fact that unlike the Cordobazo the repressive forces were not militarily defeated this time They gloss over the fact that the industrial workers are today in disarray in the face of both the unions support for the government and increased unemployment thus forgetting all about the main advantage playing in the hands of the ruling class one that enables them to buy time and also rebuild their weakened domination The lack of any serious appraisal by the left means they cast aside all the sequels that the lack of a distinct working class intervention have for the new opening phase But it also means they cannot accurately gauge the intervention of the middle classes which did intervene to an unprecedented extent for Argentine standards No matter how progressive and innovative their actions have been so far the pot banging has rapidly become a symbol of struggle worldwide these have yet lagged far behind revolutionary actions like the ones staged by the Albanian masses back in 1997 when the financial pyramids came tumbling down Back then the proletariat also failed to gain the upper hand but the masses nevertheless stormed the barracks and armed themselves in the south of the country building rebels committees and momentarily breaking down state power The whole series of subsequent pot bangings and their impact on the population have mesmerized many people making them forget that the December events broke the limits of bourgeois legality because they combined the massive pot banging in the morning of December 20 against the siege with the lootings of the urban poor in the big cities in search for food along with the long violent clashes with the police in the socalled Battle of Plaza de Mayo It was not the pot banging alone that ousted De la Ras government The tempo of the new phase This first comparison will enable us to chart the likely tempo of the ongoing process In Trotskys words accurately charting the tempo of revolution is of utmost importance if not to trace the fundamental strategic line but to shape the tactics Now then without a just tactic the best strategic line might lead to bankruptcy Naturally foreseeing the tempo for a protracted period is impossible The tempo must be tested in the course of the struggle picking up on the most variegated symptoms Furthermore the tempo might suddenly change as the events are unfolding But nevertheless one should always bear in mind a given perspective so that one will be able to make any necessary corrections to it through experience It is unlikely that the revolutionary phase in Argentina will come to a quick denouement Its tempo is more in tune with those processes where the revolutionary phase goes through many changing situations or phases We might draw a certain analogy with the Spanish events in the 30s here a process sparked off by the downfall of the king that culminated in the civil war In the work quoted above when the Spanish events were still in the making Trotsky set out the difference between the latter and the dynamics of Russia 1917 The 1917 Russian revolution was preceded by the 1905 Revolution which was branded by Lenin as a dress rehearsal All the elements of the second and the third revolutions were prepared beforehand in such a way that the forces participating of the struggle were walking down a road familiar to them This sped up the upswing of the revolution extraordinarily until it reached its climax But all things considered we deem the war was a decisive factor when it came to the tempo in 1917 The question of the land could still be postponed for some months even years But the question of dying in the trenches could not wait The soldiers said What do I need the land for if Im not going to be there The pressure exerted by the mass of 12 million soldiers was a factor that sped up the revolution extraordinarily Without the war no matter the 1905 dress rehearsal and the existence of the Bolshevik party the preparatory preBolshevik period of the revolution could have lasted longer than eight months maybe one or two years or even longer than that The Spanish Communist Party has come into the fray in a state of extreme weakness Spain is not at war the Spanish peasants are not rallied in the barracks and the trenches in their millions nor are they facing the immediate danger of extermination All these circumstances speak in favour of a longer period of time available to build the party and seize power Trotskys approach of the Spanish events is relevant for presentday Argentina bearing in mind that the recent revolutionary experience of the Argentine working class is a far cry from that of the Spanish workers back then The combination of a deepgoing slump the weakening of the ruling classes the lack of a central working class intervention the revolutionary immaturity of the masses in general and the great weakness of revolutionary Marxists all these tell us that we might foresee that we shall have more time to build the party and seize power As it happened in Spain back then it is least likely that the Argentine process will come to a quick denouement We can state as Nin did when referring to the Spanish events in the 30s that we are in for a protracted and painstaking process during which the masses try to find a way forward in a struggle fraught with difficulties chaotic actions partial offensives victories and defeats The General Strike in Barcelona October 1931 The class dynamics at the onset of the revolutionary phase Having said that what is the class dynamics at work at the onset of the phase Given the nonintervention of the working class as such in the revolutionary days the very beginning of the revolutionary phase bears the mark of the middle layers These sectors nourish a February coalition styled atmosphere or else December bloc as we call it somewhere else in the sense that Marx spoke of the equivocal union of all the classes that commonly mobilized against the finance aristocracy headed by Louis Phillip in France 1848 Never mind the struggle is aimed against a government led by the socalled productive sector that in the past used to voice opposition against the model under De la Ras government Such predominance of the middle classes accounts for the strong tendencies to a sort of citizens and neighbours styled representation a nonclass one and also the antiparty mood This reflects a contradictory phenomenon similar to that of the socalled rage vote in the last October elections with a progressive strand whenever it reflects a mass hatred against the bourgeois parties but rather reactionary when aimed at the left This is true to the extent that it also encompasses sectors likely to provide the basis for future reactionary solutions coexisting with others who seek an alliance with the working class as shown by their participation in a march with the unemployed This reflects a phase in which the inevitable split in the middle classes has not yet taken place openly and also the absence of the working class movement The working class is responding to the crisis unevenly The unemployed have mobilized much faster demanding the job schemes they were promised The government might try and incorporate some of its sectors They may succeed in this endeavour by implementing the already announced increase in job schemes although a tug of war as to their distribution might ensue also More than ever before the progressive nature of the picketers movements lie in their ability to fight for genuine jobs and not merely demanding workfare schemes State workers in general particularly municipal workers are more likely to come out and fight rather than those in the industrial sector and the big service companies given the fact that their jobs are much more stable than those of the private sector and also suffer chronic wage arrears The actions undertaken by municipal workers in the cities of Crdoba Santiago del Estero Mendoza or Villa Constitucin or else the formation of the Intergremial in La Plata are all symptoms of this Although we witness partial fights in response to closures and wage arrears and if inflation rises we shall see fights against wage loss the industrial working class is being held back by both skyrocketing unemployment and the collaboration of the unions with the government The bosses are profiting from having 30 or 40 of casual workers in the factories this percentage being higher in some cases It is them who are bearing the full brunt of the bosses offensive The union bureaucracy refuses time and again to defend all temporary workers and so far the response by the workers has been a rather conservative one given their fear of losing their jobs In the short term they are paying a high price for not having got rid of the union bureaucracy as a whole and also for their trust both in Peronism and the socalled productive and national bosses never mind their trust in Peronism has decreased a lot in the last few years Two possible ways to outmanoeuvre the union bureaucracy that will allow workers to be at the center of the scene could be a response to an allout onslaught or else hard strikes becoming an example This is a key aspect for the future unfolding of the class struggle It goes with a saying that the middle class protests exposing the banks and forming peoples assemblies along with their sympathy for the picketers and their actions in common with them all herald the possibility of welding a farreaching popular and working class alliance no sooner the working class enters the fray But this will not be the outcome of just making the pickets come together with the pot bangings as some put it Unless the main contingents of the working class come out in struggle thus giving the proletariat the leading role in the peoples and workers alliance the tasks posed by the December events will not be duly accomplished Getting ready for this likely upsurge of the working class in the next period ahead is precisely the main task for revolutionary Marxists Our bet is for a revolutionary leadership up to the task of leading new coming Cordobazos to victory The hindrances blocking the working class We deem however that the working class does not have a few obstacles to overcome if it is to become a revolutionary actor 1 The working class has not waged major revolutionary combats worldwide after the 1968 revolutionary upswing which came to a close with the failed Polish revolution in 198081 With the sole exception of Bolivia in 1985 it has not been in the spotlight ever since but quite otherwise has been put on the defensive by the neoliberal imperialist offensive The French state workers strike back in 1995 marked the beginning of the decline of the neoliberal agenda and also showed the reinvigoration of the working class which ever since staged major fightbacks In Argentina there have been more than ten general strikes since 1996 This went hand in hand with more revolutionary fights being waged by the unemployed But the working class has not been the main actor either in Argentina or worldwide in the revolutionary events we have witnessed in the last few years Other sectors of the exploited classes have instead being at the forefront as it happened with great mass revolutionary actions that brought down the governments in Albania Ecuador Indonesia or Serbia all the more so in the more contradictory upheavals which provoked the demise of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR 2 Both the masses and the vanguard now fighting in Argentina have no revolutionary experience whatsoever contrariwise to those in the 70s that had participated in radicalized and sometimes revolutionary actions from the 1955 coup onwards a protracted experience in the workers and youth vanguard They had fought back both military dictatorships and bogus democratic administration and even challenged the union bureaucracy Although the 196976 period was a sort of revolutionary dress rehearsal in our country the lessons to be drawn from it are not incarnated in the vanguard and the generation that took part in it was either annihilated or else became part of the bourgeois regime The 18 yearlong bourgeois democratic regime along with the nefarious experience of the guerrilla in the previous period have nourished strong pacifist prejudices in the masses and the vanguard alike Although there were tendencies to an embryonic civil war in the struggles waged by the unemployed from 1996 onwards if we understand it in a broad sense as Trotsky put it only on rare occasions did the clashes with the repressive forces go beyond spontaneous stonehurling and these did not take place in the main economic and political centres of the country 3 Although the union bureaucrats are massively discredited no antibureaucratic fights have yet unfolded within the working class challenging the rule of the union bureaucracy in main working class battalions There exist hundreds of fighting shop stewards dozens of internal commissions and shop stewards committees but there are few independent and antibureaucratic unions Furthermore the workers have hardly any experience at all in building interunion bodies coordinating forums or else other bodies of their own going beyond the narrow union framework which might thus become a mass united front of the fighting masses as an embryo of a new working class and popular power The revolutionaries should do their best to encourage every step taken in this direction 4 The lack of socialist horizon for the working class movement and the masses is another additional factor hindering the political ripening of the vanguard and the revolutionary process in general People have taken bold steps and identified all those responsible for the neoliberal agenda the banks the privatized companies the IMF the politicians of the establishment the judiciary the police the unions bureaucrats as their enemies but there are some sector that still have expectations in the socalled productive and national bourgeoisie and the workers have not still made their final experience with Peronism either The middle classes on their part even those far leftleaning sectors within it might provide the basis for a new regime one that while doing away with most of the old political caste props up the capitalist system and prevents the realization of the workers and peoples alliance 5 Last but not least there is no revolutionary Marxist leadership with mass influence such as the Bolsheviks in Russia that could be able to accelerate the process and also a key element so that the mass mobilization culminates in a peoples and workers government The conquest of political independence by the workers in a revolutionary fashion is a key task ahead of us So far we have carefully described all the limits holding back the working class movement from intervening decisively in the ongoing revolutionary process However we conclude that no matter how big such obstacles can be the colossal economic social and political crisis today along with the social weight of the proletariat make a revolutionary intervention by the Argentine working class all the more likely To these we should add the crisis of the reformist misleaderships both the fighting and organizational experiences done by the unemployed and also sectors of state workers and the workers vanguard such as the ceramic workers in Neuqun or else the miners in Ro Turbio and also the influence of several left tendencies on hundreds or perhaps thousands of working class activists nationwide Such elements have developed more in Argentina than in those countries going through revolutionary or acute prerevolutionary situations in the last few years They are dealt with in the article The Argentine working class is confronted with a new historical turn | The/DET revolutionary/ADJ days/NOUN of/ADP December/PROPN 19/NUM and/CCONJ 20/NUM have/AUX ushered/VERB in/ADP a/DET revolutionary/ADJ phase/NOUN in/ADP Argentina/PROPN A/DET series/NOUN of/ADP three/NUM revolutionary/ADJ events/NOUN shattered/VERB the/DET country/NOUN to/ADP its/PRON foundations/NOUN back/ADV then/ADV bringing/VERB down/ADP De/PROPN la/PROPN Ras/PROPN government/NOUN in/ADP a/DET revolutionary/ADJ fashion/NOUN These/PRON bore/VERB the/DET marks/NOUN that/PRON Lenin/PROPN highlighted/VERB as/ADP the/DET hallmark/NOUN for/ADP such/ADJ situations/NOUN amp160an/VERB exceptional/ADJ situation/NOUN in/ADP which/PRON the/DET ruling/VERB classes/NOUN are/AUX no/ADV longer/ADV able/ADJ to/PART rule/VERB as/SCONJ they/PRON did/AUX thus/ADV having/VERB to/PART 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<p>Lily Tomlin said it best: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” Despite two solid years of progressive media tracking the billionaire Koch brothers’ funding of right wing front groups, new details have emerged which show a more sophisticated and ominous network than previously understood.</p>
<p>One of the key organizations funded by a Koch-controlled foundation is Americans for Prosperity (AFP).&#160; While it has been widely documented and publicized that the group is orchestrating the Tea Party, AFP is also a veritable smorgasbord of other “grassroots” personalities.&#160; The AFP or the AFP Foundation have&#160; spawned the following identities:</p>
<p>DefendingtheDream.org (August 27-28 D.C. summit for right wing strategizing and rally);</p>
<p>SayNoCapandTrade.org (kill tax on production of greenhouse gases);</p>
<p>NoInternetTakeover.com (attacks on the Federal Communications Commission);</p>
<p>SickofSpending.com (“…how to recruit, educate, organize, and mobilize fed up Americans to stop the radical left-wing agenda…”);</p>
<p>RegulationReality.com (“…educate citizens about the EPA’s attempt to implement radical global warming regulations…”);</p>
<p>NovemberIsComing.com (phone bank; go door to door to beat back those liberals);</p>
<p>TaxCutsForAll.com (don’t raise taxes on the rich);</p>
<p>SpendingCrisis.org (shrink the Federal government);</p>
<p>CaliforniaSoS.com (cut spending in California);</p>
<p>United4NoOn4.com (kill Amendment 4 in Florida that would give voters more say in local legislative decisions; an ironic position for people who say they want to promote more liberty).</p>
<p>Americans for Prosperity also created PatientsUnitedNow.com and orchestrated hundreds of rallies to help kill the public option in health care reform.</p>
<p>Americans for Prosperity now has chapters in 30 states, including those with the largest number of voters.&#160; As part of the focus on state level efforts, key right wing foundations are funding another nonprofit, the State Policy Network, which says it has free market think tanks in every state. The work of most of the groups is to push for privatization of public services and public schools. The State Policy Network is fueling a new, rapidly growing&#160; movement: right wing funded groups posing as independent investigative media outlets. So far, there is West Virginia Watchdog, Old Dominion Watchdog in Virginia, Texas Watchdog, Illinois Statehouse News, Missouri News Horizon, Capital Report New Mexico, Idaho Reporter, the Commonwealth Foundation’s Pennsylvania Independent, TNReport of Tennessee, the Pelican Institute’s Capital Reporter in Louisiana, Pacific Research Institute’s Cal Watch Dog in California, Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Idaho Reporter, the Cowboy State Free Press in Wyoming, and others in various stages of getting up and running.</p>
<p>Doing the recruiting for investigative reporters for a number of these right wing news sites is Claire Kittle, the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. &#160;The State Policy Network publishes strategic planning articles on how these newly anointed investigative reporters can network with each other and get stories they pen to dominate the internet and be picked up by mainstream media.</p>
<p>Tactically using its state chapters and YouTube,&#160; Americans for Prosperity was able to blanket the internet with a McCarthyesque video depicting the progressive One Nation Working Together rally in Washington D.C. on October 2 as a communist-inspired, Socialist Party march.&#160; Despite a coalition of 400 organizations involved in the March, including the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, UAW, NAACP, Rainbow Push Coalition, the video exclusively highlights the contingent of Socialists, making it appear that they dominated the march.&#160; The clip runs with the headline: “Proud Socialists March at Left-Wing Protest in DC.”&#160;&#160; The video clip plays the Russian Anthem in the background (while calling it the Soviet Anthem) and, at one point on the video, shows a young woman portrayed as if she is&#160; singing the lyrics.&#160; People commenting on-line clearly believe this music was playing at the progressive march.&#160; At TeaPartyPatriots.org, a poster commented: &#160;“Any comments on the One Nation rally? … hard to believe people in this country would disgrace their own country by playing the Soviet Anthem.” At JoeTote1.blogspot.com, a person using the moniker Joe Tote said: “For God’s Sake! They were marching to and singing the old Soviet anthem!”&#160; I contacted people in the know who were at the march in the vicinity of the Socialist contingent.&#160; I was told that no such music was played.</p>
<p>The use of the music by Alexander Alexandrov suggests evil genius at work.&#160; The music, although it now has new lyrics, is associated with the murderous Stalinist regime and evoked a firestorm of criticism in Russia when it was reintroduced as the National Anthem in 2000.&#160; At the time, Russian historian Leonid A. Sedov was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in opposition to the reintroduction, stating: “A national anthem must not disgust even some part of the population. We know too well that there are a lot of people in this country who can’t hear this anthem without shuddering.”</p>
<p>If you put the title of the video in the Google search engine inside double quotes (“Proud Socialists March at Left-Wing Protest”) it brings up 232,000 links, as of this writing.&#160; This is McCarthyism on steroids.</p>
<p>Charles and David Koch, who tied for 5th place in the 2010 Forbes list of the richest Americans with $21.5 billion each, are the controlling shareholders of Koch Industries Inc., a private global conglomerate with a presence in over 60 countries, including interests in oil, refining, pipelines, paper products, chemicals, and fertilizer.&#160; Its commodities trading operation stretches from New York to London, Geneva, Singapore, Mumbai, and Rotterdam. Koch Industries has revenues of $100 billion, according to the Koch Industries, Inc. web site.&#160; Despite the full throttle push for “free markets,” the Koch brothers have never allowed their company’s stock to trade in those “free markets.”&#160; Georgia-Pacific was immediately delisted from the New York Stock Exchange following its purchase by Koch Industries, Inc.</p>
<p>In 2000, 60 Minutes did a story on Koch Industries, revealing the details of what one of the dissident brothers, Bill Koch, was alleging in Court documents.&#160; “Bill Koch filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that much of the oil collected by Koch Industries was stolen from federal lands. At the trial, 50 former Koch gaugers testified against the company, some in video depositions. They said Koch employees had a name for cheating on the measurements.”&#160; It was called the Koch Method.&#160; “The company used the Koch method with virtually all its customers.&#160; In the 1980’s alone, Koch records show those so-called adjustments brought the company 300 million gallons of oil it never paid for. And it was pure profit.&#160; Bill Koch says that profits from that oil were a minimum of $230 million…In December 1999, the jury found that Koch Industries did steal oil from the public and lied about its purchases – 24 thousand times.”</p>
<p>The brothers refer to their philanthropic work as the “Koch Family Foundations.” Listed on the Koch Industries Inc. web site are the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundations (the deceased parents of Charles and David); the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Kansas Cultural Trust, renamed the Koch Cultural Trust in 2008. The web site does not list the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation which is controlled by Charles Koch.</p>
<p>Claude Lambe was a real estate developer and insurance broker in Kansas.&#160; He invested in a company formed by Fred Koch in 1934, the Buffalo Oil Corporation. &#160;&#160;Lambe’s wife, Pauline, died in 1976;&#160; Lambe died in 1981.&#160; According to a Koch Industries publication, Charles Koch was left in charge of&#160; Lambe’s estate. Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, serve as Directors on the Foundation’s board.&#160; Hopefully,&#160; Lambe wanted to fund all of these right wing causes because that’s what his foundation has been doing since his death.</p>
<p>A click to the foundation section of the Koch Industries web sites brings up clean, wholesome images: beautiful, migrating white pelicans in various stages of flight at a Koch funded wetlands; an ethereal cluster of snow-dotted ballerinas in fluffy white tutus&#160; performing at Lincoln Center.&#160; But beyond white-feathered pelicans and tulle-feathered ballerinas, there is the deep sense that Koch is out to feather its own nest.</p>
<p>The Free State Project</p>
<p>We have a right wing “grassroots” group of our own here in New Hampshire with ties to Koch money.&#160; Called the Free State Project, it was the creation of Jason Sorens.&#160; (While the group advocates for the elimination of tax-funded public education, Dr. Sorens teaches political science at the taxpayer funded State University of New York at Buffalo.)</p>
<p>Dr. Sorens is an example of a core strategy of the right wing funding network.&#160; Taking a cue from corporate research that teaches if you want to create brand loyalty for life, you must reach your target market at an early age, many of the right wing nonprofits offer internships and associate programs for promising undergraduates and grad students.&#160; They look for two things in particular: writing skills and computer/internet savvy.&#160; These individuals are called the “talent” and are viewed in the same light as Merck views its “thought leaders” in the launch of a new drug.&#160; In many cases, they are funded and nurtured for life.&#160; The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation has at least six staff members with the word “Talent” in their title, for example, Manager of Talent, Director of Talent, Coordinator of Talent.&#160; It explains on its web site that over 700 individuals have gone through its paid Summer Fellow program and have gone on to work at places like Cato, the Wall Street Journal, Department of Justice, World Bank, and Council of Economic Advisors.</p>
<p>Dr. Sorens was funded by two Koch funded organizations: the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies.&#160; When he was ready to launch his audacious plan to convert New Hampshire into a free markets stronghold, he was assisted on the morning of February 27, 2004 with a big-wig press conference at the Washington D.C. headquarters of the wealthy and well connected American Enterprise Institute, also funded with Koch money as well as the rest of the A-list of conservative foundations.&#160; According to its most recent 990 tax filing, available to the public at www.guidestar.org, the American Enterprise Institute had assets of $104 million in 2008 and received grants and contributions of $59 million that year.</p>
<p>The concept was a bit far fetched even for the conservative reporters at the event.&#160; Dr. Sorens proposal was, via coaxing on the internet, to &#160;get 20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire and take over state and local politics by being hyper activists.&#160; To potential recruits, Dr. Sorens pitched the gambit as creating a migration and sanctuary for freedom-loving people.&#160; To the American Enterprise Institute, he pitched it as a means of leveraging an anti-regulatory agenda to benefit business, not just in New Hampshire but in other states as well. “Once New Hampshire moves dramatically in a free market direction, we are going to continue to attract individuals and businesses from other states.&#160; And other states are going to have to reform their own laws in order to avoid losing their tax base to our state,” Dr. Sorens told the audience.</p>
<p>Dr. Sorens and Mercatus had a plan to move that theory along.&#160; Dr. Sorens and William P. Ruger, an Assistant Professor at the Texas State University, San Marcos co-authored a study with the Koch-funded Mercatus Center on Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom.&#160; The study ranks the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedoms.&#160; Exactly 13 days after the study on Freedom in the 50 States was released, the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions in Ohio, another free markets nonprofit, used the document in testimony on a House Bill in Ohio threatening to “initiate legal action” if the bill was signed into law. The testimony noted, from the report, that “Ohio recently ranked 38th in an index of economic freedom amongst the 50 states.” The bill the Center was against would have eased mortgage loan modifications to prevent foreclosures.&#160; Koch foundation money provides support to the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.</p>
<p>Dr.&#160; Sorens’ belief in the individual’s pursuit of freedom and democracy has been called into question with this post he made at the Cato Institute:&#160; “The ‘collective action problem’ helps to explain why only narrow interests will successfully organize and achieve policy victories, and why these will come at the expense of the citizenry.&#160; Interest groups can achieve these victories only because voters are deeply, irremediably ignorant of philosophy, politics, economics, and public policy. Trying to educate voters is hopeless because they lack the proper incentives to learn and employ political knowledge.”</p>
<p>One hard-learned lesson for the big money funders is that frequently when you get some real grass in your grassroots movement, the corporate script is not followed as neatly as in&#160; pure astroturfing. (Astroturfing refers to campaigns or movements that are orchestrated by special interests but masquerade as spontaneous grassroots uprisings.) The first offshoot of the Free State Project effort was in Grafton, New Hampshire and was as subtle as a Wall Street hostile takeover.&#160; Locals say about $1 million was spent buying up properties and recording the names in limited liability corporations so the real money behind the purchase could not be discovered. But the Free Staters living in the homes were quite visible and vocal.&#160; One man set up a web site to harass local officials, declaring: “This is a list of New Hampsters who have oppressed libertarians…Don’t vote for them, don’t hire them, don’t buy from them, don’t sell to them.”&#160; The list, titled “Blood Bath and Beyond”&#160; named a Judge, the Selectmen, the Selectmen’s Clerk, an attorney, a police chief, and various police officers. The web site has not been taken down.</p>
<p>The brazenness of the takeover talk rankled the local residents; a heated town meeting ensued, with unfavorable national press for the Free State Project. The Boston Globe called it “Grafton’s Messy Liberation.”</p>
<p>Things have since quieted down in Grafton while heating up in the tolerant town of Keene.&#160; A handful of Free Staters, most of whom advocate a totally voluntary society and no government regulation on any business, have engaged in the following stunts: standing topless in the quaint town square; holding a bag of marijuana in front of the police with the intent of getting arrested, to challenge drug laws; pretending to drink alcohol in city council meetings to press for drinking in public places; holding “School Sucks” signs at the public middle school to challenge taxation for “government” education; chanting outside of the private homes of a police officer and sitting judge who are not popular with the Free Staters.&#160; Public opinion in Keene has now turned decidedly against the Free Staters.</p>
<p>Another individual who has spent time in Keene, New Hampshire and helped the Free State Project movement along is Peter Eyre.&#160;&#160; Eyre interned at the right wing Cato Institute (which received funding from Koch); then became a Fellow at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.&#160; Next&#160; Eyre spent two and one half years at the Institute for Humane Studies (also supported by Koch money and the same Institute that supported the work of Dr. Sorens).&#160; In early 2009,&#160; Eyre moved on to Bureaucrash, a project affiliated with another right wing think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).&#160; (CEI ran TV ads in a dozen cities on “global warming alarmism” one week before Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” premiered.)&#160; The Institute for Humane Studies links Bureaucrash as a previous internship partner with the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program.&#160; Exxon and Koch charitable funds have supported the Competitive Enterprise Institute.&#160;&#160; Eyre’s&#160; more recent pursuit was to travel around the country promoting libertarian ideas in a motor home named Marv with colleagues Jason Talley and Adam Mueller.</p>
<p>What could possibly explain all this right wing and deregulatory attention on a state of 1.3 million people?&#160; For one, New Hampshire hosts the first Presidential primary.&#160; For another, Koch Industries, Inc.&#160; purchased Georgia-Pacific Corp. for $21 billion in 2005, paying a 39 percent premium over its share price on the New York Stock Exchange at the time.&#160; Georgia-Pacific is one of the world’s largest paper companies.&#160; Its household consumer brands include&#160; Angel Soft, Brawny, Quilted Northern, Sparkle, Vanity Fair, and Dixie.&#160; Georgia- Pacific owns no timberland.&#160; Its Wood and Fiber Supply division must seek out sources of wood from industrial, institutional or individual landowners.&#160;&#160; New Hampshire is 84 per cent forest land according to the New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development.&#160; But there is a growing environmental and land conservation movement in New Hampshire.&#160; That could pose a problem for lumber interests.</p>
<p>Are the Koch brothers alone in outsized funding of right wing groups?&#160; No; but they are among the most proactive and sophisticated in exerting rightward political pressure on&#160; universities, media, state legislatures, Congress, and the town halls of America.</p>
<p>A check of tax filings at GuideStar.org shows there is currently over $6 billion in assets in foundations that promote the free market mantra.&#160; Where did the money come from? Some of the largest pro-corporate agenda foundations include old wealth from big consumer brands like Coors, Vicks, Borden, Gulf Oil, F.W. Woolworth, Amway; and new money from John Templeton and Walmart.&#160; The tycoons of yesteryear handed down an axe to grind against government interference in big business and that has been carefully nurtured by a labyrinth of modern tycoons and front groups.&#160; These are masterful tacticians who understand image is everything; who understand that if you plow enough money into marketing and public relations and advertising, you can build an invincible brand.&#160; You can even turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse by rehabilitating the deregulatory/free markets brand that fleeced the public, took their homes, left the financial system of the country in ruins and then used taxpayer money to attempt to bail itself out.&#160; But don’t think about that; think about the new and improved “freedom” brand.</p>
<p>A week from today we’ll take an in-depth look at the new kid on the block: a mysterious right-wing nonprofit that won’t reveal where its mega bucks are coming from.</p>
<p>PAM MARTENS worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article.&#160; She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire.&#160; She can be reached at <a href="mailto:pamk741@aol.com" type="external">pamk741@aol.com</a></p> | The Koch Empire and Americans for Prosperity | true | https://counterpunch.org/2010/10/19/the-koch-empire-and-americans-for-prosperity/ | 2010-10-19 | 4left
| 3,050 | Lily Tomlin said it best 8220No matter how cynical you become it8217s never enough to keep up8221 Despite two solid years of progressive media tracking the billionaire Koch brothers8217 funding of right wing front groups new details have emerged which show a more sophisticated and ominous network than previously understood One of the key organizations funded by a Kochcontrolled foundation is Americans for Prosperity AFPamp160 While it has been widely documented and publicized that the group is orchestrating the Tea Party AFP is also a veritable smorgasbord of other 8220grassroots8221 personalitiesamp160 The AFP or the AFP Foundation haveamp160 spawned the following identities DefendingtheDreamorg August 2728 DC summit for right wing strategizing and rally SayNoCapandTradeorg kill tax on production of greenhouse gases NoInternetTakeovercom attacks on the Federal Communications Commission SickofSpendingcom 82208230how to recruit educate organize and mobilize fed up Americans to stop the radical leftwing agenda82308221 RegulationRealitycom 82208230educate citizens about the EPA8217s attempt to implement radical global warming regulations82308221 NovemberIsComingcom phone bank go door to door to beat back those liberals TaxCutsForAllcom don8217t raise taxes on the rich SpendingCrisisorg shrink the Federal government CaliforniaSoScom cut spending in California United4NoOn4com kill Amendment 4 in Florida that would give voters more say in local legislative decisions an ironic position for people who say they want to promote more liberty Americans for Prosperity also created PatientsUnitedNowcom and orchestrated hundreds of rallies to help kill the public option in health care reform Americans for Prosperity now has chapters in 30 states including those with the largest number of votersamp160 As part of the focus on state level efforts key right wing foundations are funding another nonprofit the State Policy Network which says it has free market think tanks in every state The work of most of the groups is to push for privatization of public services and public schools The State Policy Network is fueling a new rapidly growingamp160 movement right wing funded groups posing as independent investigative media outlets So far there is West Virginia Watchdog Old Dominion Watchdog in Virginia Texas Watchdog Illinois Statehouse News Missouri News Horizon Capital Report New Mexico Idaho Reporter the Commonwealth Foundation8217s Pennsylvania Independent TNReport of Tennessee the Pelican Institute8217s Capital Reporter in Louisiana Pacific Research Institute8217s Cal Watch Dog in California Idaho Freedom Foundation8217s Idaho Reporter the Cowboy State Free Press in Wyoming and others in various stages of getting up and running Doing the recruiting for investigative reporters for a number of these right wing news sites is Claire Kittle the former Program Officer for Leadership and Talent Development at the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation amp160The State Policy Network publishes strategic planning articles on how these newly anointed investigative reporters can network with each other and get stories they pen to dominate the internet and be picked up by mainstream media Tactically using its state chapters and YouTubeamp160 Americans for Prosperity was able to blanket the internet with a McCarthyesque video depicting the progressive One Nation Working Together rally in Washington DC on October 2 as a communistinspired Socialist Party marchamp160 Despite a coalition of 400 organizations involved in the March including the AFLCIO American Federation of Teachers UAW NAACP Rainbow Push Coalition the video exclusively highlights the contingent of Socialists making it appear that they dominated the marchamp160 The clip runs with the headline 8220Proud Socialists March at LeftWing Protest in DC8221amp160amp160 The video clip plays the Russian Anthem in the background while calling it the Soviet Anthem and at one point on the video shows a young woman portrayed as if she isamp160 singing the lyricsamp160 People commenting online clearly believe this music was playing at the progressive marchamp160 At TeaPartyPatriotsorg a poster commented amp1608220Any comments on the One Nation rally 8230 hard to believe people in this country would disgrace their own country by playing the Soviet Anthem8221 At JoeTote1blogspotcom a person using the moniker Joe Tote said 8220For God8217s Sake They were marching to and singing the old Soviet anthem8221amp160 I contacted people in the know who were at the march in the vicinity of the Socialist contingentamp160 I was told that no such music was played The use of the music by Alexander Alexandrov suggests evil genius at workamp160 The music although it now has new lyrics is associated with the murderous Stalinist regime and evoked a firestorm of criticism in Russia when it was reintroduced as the National Anthem in 2000amp160 At the time Russian historian Leonid A Sedov was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in opposition to the reintroduction stating 8220A national anthem must not disgust even some part of the population We know too well that there are a lot of people in this country who can8217t hear this anthem without shuddering8221 If you put the title of the video in the Google search engine inside double quotes 8220Proud Socialists March at LeftWing Protest8221 it brings up 232000 links as of this writingamp160 This is McCarthyism on steroids Charles and David Koch who tied for 5th place in the 2010 Forbes list of the richest Americans with 215 billion each are the controlling shareholders of Koch Industries Inc a private global conglomerate with a presence in over 60 countries including interests in oil refining pipelines paper products chemicals and fertilizeramp160 Its commodities trading operation stretches from New York to London Geneva Singapore Mumbai and Rotterdam Koch Industries has revenues of 100 billion according to the Koch Industries Inc web siteamp160 Despite the full throttle push for 8220free markets8221 the Koch brothers have never allowed their company8217s stock to trade in those 8220free markets8221amp160 GeorgiaPacific was immediately delisted from the New York Stock Exchange following its purchase by Koch Industries Inc In 2000 60 Minutes did a story on Koch Industries revealing the details of what one of the dissident brothers Bill Koch was alleging in Court documentsamp160 8220Bill Koch filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that much of the oil collected by Koch Industries was stolen from federal lands At the trial 50 former Koch gaugers testified against the company some in video depositions They said Koch employees had a name for cheating on the measurements8221amp160 It was called the Koch Methodamp160 8220The company used the Koch method with virtually all its customersamp160 In the 19808217s alone Koch records show those socalled adjustments brought the company 300 million gallons of oil it never paid for And it was pure profitamp160 Bill Koch says that profits from that oil were a minimum of 230 million8230In December 1999 the jury found that Koch Industries did steal oil from the public and lied about its purchases 8211 24 thousand times8221 The brothers refer to their philanthropic work as the 8220Koch Family Foundations8221 Listed on the Koch Industries Inc web site are the Fred C and Mary R Koch Foundations the deceased parents of Charles and David the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation the David H Koch Charitable Foundation and the Kansas Cultural Trust renamed the Koch Cultural Trust in 2008 The web site does not list the Claude R Lambe Charitable Foundation which is controlled by Charles Koch Claude Lambe was a real estate developer and insurance broker in Kansasamp160 He invested in a company formed by Fred Koch in 1934 the Buffalo Oil Corporation amp160amp160Lambe8217s wife Pauline died in 1976amp160 Lambe died in 1981amp160 According to a Koch Industries publication Charles Koch was left in charge ofamp160 Lambe8217s estate Charles Koch and his wife Elizabeth serve as Directors on the Foundation8217s boardamp160 Hopefullyamp160 Lambe wanted to fund all of these right wing causes because that8217s what his foundation has been doing since his death A click to the foundation section of the Koch Industries web sites brings up clean wholesome images beautiful migrating white pelicans in various stages of flight at a Koch funded wetlands an ethereal cluster of snowdotted ballerinas in fluffy white tutusamp160 performing at Lincoln Centeramp160 But beyond whitefeathered pelicans and tullefeathered ballerinas there is the deep sense that Koch is out to feather its own nest The Free State Project We have a right wing 8220grassroots8221 group of our own here in New Hampshire with ties to Koch moneyamp160 Called the Free State Project it was the creation of Jason Sorensamp160 While the group advocates for the elimination of taxfunded public education Dr Sorens teaches political science at the taxpayer funded State University of New York at Buffalo Dr Sorens is an example of a core strategy of the right wing funding networkamp160 Taking a cue from corporate research that teaches if you want to create brand loyalty for life you must reach your target market at an early age many of the right wing nonprofits offer internships and associate programs for promising undergraduates and grad studentsamp160 They look for two things in particular writing skills and computerinternet savvyamp160 These individuals are called the 8220talent8221 and are viewed in the same light as Merck views its 8220thought leaders8221 in the launch of a new drugamp160 In many cases they are funded and nurtured for lifeamp160 The Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation has at least six staff members with the word 8220Talent8221 in their title for example Manager of Talent Director of Talent Coordinator of Talentamp160 It explains on its web site that over 700 individuals have gone through its paid Summer Fellow program and have gone on to work at places like Cato the Wall Street Journal Department of Justice World Bank and Council of Economic Advisors Dr Sorens was funded by two Koch funded organizations the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studiesamp160 When he was ready to launch his audacious plan to convert New Hampshire into a free markets stronghold he was assisted on the morning of February 27 2004 with a bigwig press conference at the Washington DC headquarters of the wealthy and well connected American Enterprise Institute also funded with Koch money as well as the rest of the Alist of conservative foundationsamp160 According to its most recent 990 tax filing available to the public at wwwguidestarorg the American Enterprise Institute had assets of 104 million in 2008 and received grants and contributions of 59 million that year The concept was a bit far fetched even for the conservative reporters at the eventamp160 Dr Sorens proposal was via coaxing on the internet to amp160get 20000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire and take over state and local politics by being hyper activistsamp160 To potential recruits Dr Sorens pitched the gambit as creating a migration and sanctuary for freedomloving peopleamp160 To the American Enterprise Institute he pitched it as a means of leveraging an antiregulatory agenda to benefit business not just in New Hampshire but in other states as well 8220Once New Hampshire moves dramatically in a free market direction we are going to continue to attract individuals and businesses from other statesamp160 And other states are going to have to reform their own laws in order to avoid losing their tax base to our state8221 Dr Sorens told the audience Dr Sorens and Mercatus had a plan to move that theory alongamp160 Dr Sorens and William P Ruger an Assistant Professor at the Texas State University San Marcos coauthored a study with the Kochfunded Mercatus Center on Freedom in the 50 States An Index of Personal and Economic Freedomamp160 The study ranks the 50 states in terms of personal and economic freedomsamp160 Exactly 13 days after the study on Freedom in the 50 States was released the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions in Ohio another free markets nonprofit used the document in testimony on a House Bill in Ohio threatening to 8220initiate legal action8221 if the bill was signed into law The testimony noted from the report that 8220Ohio recently ranked 38th in an index of economic freedom amongst the 50 states8221 The bill the Center was against would have eased mortgage loan modifications to prevent foreclosuresamp160 Koch foundation money provides support to the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions Dramp160 Sorens8217 belief in the individual8217s pursuit of freedom and democracy has been called into question with this post he made at the Cato Instituteamp160 8220The 8216collective action problem8217 helps to explain why only narrow interests will successfully organize and achieve policy victories and why these will come at the expense of the citizenryamp160 Interest groups can achieve these victories only because voters are deeply irremediably ignorant of philosophy politics economics and public policy Trying to educate voters is hopeless because they lack the proper incentives to learn and employ political knowledge8221 One hardlearned lesson for the big money funders is that frequently when you get some real grass in your grassroots movement the corporate script is not followed as neatly as inamp160 pure astroturfing Astroturfing refers to campaigns or movements that are orchestrated by special interests but masquerade as spontaneous grassroots uprisings The first offshoot of the Free State Project effort was in Grafton New Hampshire and was as subtle as a Wall Street hostile takeoveramp160 Locals say about 1 million was spent buying up properties and recording the names in limited liability corporations so the real money behind the purchase could not be discovered But the Free Staters living in the homes were quite visible and vocalamp160 One man set up a web site to harass local officials declaring 8220This is a list of New Hampsters who have oppressed libertarians8230Don8217t vote for them don8217t hire them don8217t buy from them don8217t sell to them8221amp160 The list titled 8220Blood Bath and Beyond8221amp160 named a Judge the Selectmen the Selectmen8217s Clerk an attorney a police chief and various police officers The web site has not been taken down The brazenness of the takeover talk rankled the local residents a heated town meeting ensued with unfavorable national press for the Free State Project The Boston Globe called it 8220Grafton8217s Messy Liberation8221 Things have since quieted down in Grafton while heating up in the tolerant town of Keeneamp160 A handful of Free Staters most of whom advocate a totally voluntary society and no government regulation on any business have engaged in the following stunts standing topless in the quaint town square holding a bag of marijuana in front of the police with the intent of getting arrested to challenge drug laws pretending to drink alcohol in city council meetings to press for drinking in public places holding 8220School Sucks8221 signs at the public middle school to challenge taxation for 8220government8221 education chanting outside of the private homes of a police officer and sitting judge who are not popular with the Free Statersamp160 Public opinion in Keene has now turned decidedly against the Free Staters Another individual who has spent time in Keene New Hampshire and helped the Free State Project movement along is Peter Eyreamp160amp160 Eyre interned at the right wing Cato Institute which received funding from Koch then became a Fellow at the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundationamp160 Nextamp160 Eyre spent two and one half years at the Institute for Humane Studies also supported by Koch money and the same Institute that supported the work of Dr Sorensamp160 In early 2009amp160 Eyre moved on to Bureaucrash a project affiliated with another right wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute CEIamp160 CEI ran TV ads in a dozen cities on 8220global warming alarmism8221 one week before Al Gore8217s documentary 8220An Inconvenient Truth8221 premieredamp160 The Institute for Humane Studies links Bureaucrash as a previous internship partner with the Charles G Koch Summer Fellow Programamp160 Exxon and Koch charitable funds have supported the Competitive Enterprise Instituteamp160amp160 Eyre8217samp160 more recent pursuit was to travel around the country promoting libertarian ideas in a motor home named Marv with colleagues Jason Talley and Adam Mueller What could possibly explain all this right wing and deregulatory attention on a state of 13 million peopleamp160 For one New Hampshire hosts the first Presidential primaryamp160 For another Koch Industries Incamp160 purchased GeorgiaPacific Corp for 21 billion in 2005 paying a 39 percent premium over its share price on the New York Stock Exchange at the timeamp160 GeorgiaPacific is one of the world8217s largest paper companiesamp160 Its household consumer brands includeamp160 Angel Soft Brawny Quilted Northern Sparkle Vanity Fair and Dixieamp160 Georgia Pacific owns no timberlandamp160 Its Wood and Fiber Supply division must seek out sources of wood from industrial institutional or individual landownersamp160amp160 New Hampshire is 84 per cent forest land according to the New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Developmentamp160 But there is a growing environmental and land conservation movement in New Hampshireamp160 That could pose a problem for lumber interests Are the Koch brothers alone in outsized funding of right wing groupsamp160 No but they are among the most proactive and sophisticated in exerting rightward political pressure onamp160 universities media state legislatures Congress and the town halls of America A check of tax filings at GuideStarorg shows there is currently over 6 billion in assets in foundations that promote the free market mantraamp160 Where did the money come from Some of the largest procorporate agenda foundations include old wealth from big consumer brands like Coors Vicks Borden Gulf Oil FW Woolworth Amway and new money from John Templeton and Walmartamp160 The tycoons of yesteryear handed down an axe to grind against government interference in big business and that has been carefully nurtured by a labyrinth of modern tycoons and front groupsamp160 These are masterful tacticians who understand image is everything who understand that if you plow enough money into marketing and public relations and advertising you can build an invincible brandamp160 You can even turn a sow8217s ear into a silk purse by rehabilitating the deregulatoryfree markets brand that fleeced the public took their homes left the financial system of the country in ruins and then used taxpayer money to attempt to bail itself outamp160 But don8217t think about that think about the new and improved 8220freedom8221 brand A week from today we8217ll take an indepth look at the new kid on the block a mysterious rightwing nonprofit that won8217t reveal where its mega bucks are coming from PAM MARTENS worked on Wall Street for 21 years she has no security position long or short in any company mentioned in this articleamp160 She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshireamp160 She can be reached at pamk741aolcom | Lily/PROPN Tomlin/PROPN said/VERB it/PRON best/ADV 8220No/NUM matter/NOUN how/SCONJ cynical/ADJ you/PRON become/VERB it8217s/NOUN never/ADV enough/ADJ to/PART keep/VERB up8221/NOUN Despite/SCONJ two/NUM solid/ADJ years/NOUN of/ADP progressive/ADJ media/NOUN tracking/VERB the/DET billionaire/NOUN Koch/PROPN brothers8217/PROPN funding/NOUN of/ADP right/ADJ wing/NOUN front/ADJ groups/NOUN new/ADJ 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<p>GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - A military tribunal investigating a wave of massacres in eastern Congo blamed on Ugandan rebels has convicted 134 people, a senior army prosecutor and a human rights group said on Wednesday.</p>
<p>More than 800 people were killed — often hacked to death with machetes during the night — around the town of Beni, near Democratic Republic of Congo’s border with Uganda, between 2014 and 2016.</p>
<p>Congolese authorities say the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group active in the area, were behind the killings, but Congolese army officers have also been accused of involvement.</p>
<p>Rebel and militia attacks are on the rise again in central and eastern Congo and the latest violence coincides with a political crisis brought on by President Joseph Kabila’s decision to overstay his mandate, which expired in December 2016.</p>
<p>Congolese troops are currently battling the ADF in the eastern border zones in coordination with the Ugandan military.</p>
<p>General Timothee Mukutu, the Congolese army’s First Advocate-General, said a portion of the earlier massacres were committed by ADF fighters during supply raids or in reprisal attacks.</p>
<p>“Others were carried out by proxy on the orders of certain local figures,” he said in an interview broadcast by U.N.-supported Radio Okapi. “We came to understand that there were poorly managed land conflicts that could be an explanation.”</p>
<p>CEPADHO, a human rights group that observed the trials, said that of those convicted - a mix of ADF rebels, militia fighters, civilians and local chiefs - 42 were sentenced to death, several of them in absentia.</p>
<p>Congo does not apply the death penalty and, in practice, those who receive it serve prison sentences instead. Other defendants received lighter sentences and 45 were acquitted.</p> ARMY INVOLVEMENT?
<p>A report by New York University’s Congo Research Group published last year found that senior army officers, including the former top general in the zone, supported and in some cases organized the killings.</p>
<p>Based on 249 interviews with perpetrators, witnesses and victims as well as internal U.N. reports and arrest records, it found they collaborated with local fighters and, in some cases, soldiers secured the perimeter so that victims could not escape.</p>
<p>However, during the 17 months of trials, the mobile military tribunal, only convicted one army officer, a colonel. He was sentenced to a four-year jail term.</p>
<p>Three men were convicted of “demoralizing the army in the aim of harming national defense” for publicly accusing government and military authorities of organizing the massacres.</p>
<p>Writing by Joe Bavier</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>PARIS (Reuters) - Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was questioned on Tuesday by police investigating whether late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi helped finance his 2007 election campaign.</p>
<p>An official in the French judiciary said Sarkozy, 63, was held in custody in Nanterre, west of Paris.</p>
<p>It is the second major judicial investigation to fall on Sarkozy, who served as president from 2007-2012. He already faces trial on separate charges of illicit spending overruns during his failed re-election campaign in 2012.</p>
<p>A lawyer for Sarkozy could not immediately be reached for comment. The former president has dismissed the Libya allegations as “grotesque” and a “crude manipulation”.</p>
<p>France’s center-right party, The Republicans, backed its former leader. “Members and supporters of The Republicans are once again left feeling that not all lawmakers or former lawmakers are treated equally, depending on their political affiliation,” the party said in a statement.</p>
<p>France opened an inquiry into the Libya case in 2013, after reports by French website Mediapart based on claims by a Franco-Lebanese businessman, Ziad Takieddine, who said he had transferred 5 million euros ($6 million) from Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi to Sarkozy’s campaign chief.</p>
<p>Months after he took office in 2007, Sarkozy became the first Western leader in decades to host a visit by Gaddafi, who pitched his trademark Bedouin-style tent next to the Elysee Palace. Several business deals were signed.</p>
<p>However, Sarkozy was later one of the chief advocates of a NATO-led military campaign that resulted in Gaddafi’s overthrow and killing at the hands of rebel forces in 2011.</p> FILE PHOTO: Nicolas Sarkozy, former head of the Les Republicains political party, attends a Les Republicains (LR) public meeting in Les Sables d'Olonne, France, October 1, 2016. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo CAMPAIGN FINANCES
<p>Investigators in France can hold people for questioning for up to 48 hours before either releasing them or sending them before magistrates who decide whether they have grounds for turning a preliminary inquiry into a full investigation.</p>
<p>The latter can, but does not always, lead to a trial.</p>
<p>The Libya-funding inquiry appeared to have gone quiet until January, when French businessman Alexandre Djouhri, suspected by investigators of funneling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s campaign, was arrested in Britain on a warrant issued by France.</p> Slideshow (7 Images)
<p>A lawyer for Djouhri last month accused French authorities of politicizing the case and manipulating it against his client. French authorities had no comment.</p>
<p>Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was convicted in 2011, after his retirement, of misusing public funds to keep political allies in phantom jobs. That made the now ailing Chirac the first French head of state convicted since Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Petain in 1945.</p>
<p>Sarkozy has been dogged for years by political scandals, but none has led to a conviction.</p>
<p>The Libya inquiry has largely focused on the evidence provided by Takieddine, who is himself under investigation in a separate affair of arms sales to Pakistan in the 1990s.</p>
<p>Takieddine said in 2016 that he personally handed over three suitcases filled with cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy and a senior aide to help finance Sarkozy’s campaign.</p>
<p>Sarkozy’s lawyer at the time, Thierry Herzog, dismissed Takieddine’s claims and produced a copy of a witness statement to police by Takieddine in 2012 in which the businessman said he had last seen Sarkozy in November 2003.</p>
<p>Reporting by Paris bureau; Writing by Brian Love; Editing by Luke Baker, Richard Lough and Peter Graff</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>EDINBURGH (Reuters) - A legal attempt by anti-Brexit campaigners to establish that Britain could unilaterally reverse Brexit was given a boost on Tuesday by Scotland’s top court, which said it wants to examine the case in greater depth.</p> Anti-Brexit demonstrators wave EU and Union flags outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville - RC1A41866470
<p>The group behind the legal challenge, who include pro-EU Scottish lawmakers, want to show that Britain could stay in the European Union after all — if, for example, the final terms of Brexit negotiated by the government were rejected by parliament.</p>
<p>The campaigners are ultimately seeking a formal opinion by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) asserting that Britain could reverse its decision to invoke Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, the formal step that kickstarted the Brexit process.</p>
<p>They argue that once the terms of Brexit have been negotiated, Britain’s sovereign parliament may well decide not to go ahead with it, so lawmakers need to know in advance if that is legally possible.</p>
<p>As things stand, there is no suggestion of a change of course over Brexit, which British voters backed by 52 to 48 percent in a June 2016 referendum. The ruling Conservative Party and main opposition Labour Party are both committed to Britain leaving the European Union.</p>
<p>The legal case, headed by anti-Brexit campaigning lawyer Jolyon Maugham, had been rejected by a lower Scottish court.</p>
<p>The British government argued that the question of whether Britain could unilaterally stop Brexit was irrelevant because the will of the voters was clear and the government was not going to back out of Brexit.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest court, overturned an earlier ruling, saying the case raised important issues and there should be a full hearing so all the arguments could be debated.</p>
<p>“The issue of whether it is legally possible to revoke the notice of withdrawal is, as already stated, one of great importance,” the Court of Session said, referring to the Article 50 process which started in March 2017.</p>
<p>“On one view, authoritative guidance on whether it is legally possible to do so may have the capacity to influence (lawmakers) in deciding what steps to take in advance of, and at the time of, a debate and vote on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill.”</p>
<p>Once a full hearing has taken place in Edinburgh, a decision will be made on whether to refer it to the ECJ, the court said, although it may ultimately decide that it should not.</p>
<p>If the Scottish court decided not to refer to the ECJ, the petitioners can take their appeal to Britain’s Supreme Court.</p>
<p>They argue that while there is no doubt that Britain could stop Brexit with the permission of the other 27 members, it should seek to establish a legal right to do so unilaterally whether the rest of the bloc likes it or not.</p>
<p>Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary; Editing by Estelle Shirbon</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>PARIS (Reuters) - The English language is too dominant in Brussels, especially with Britain soon to exit the European Union, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday as he vowed to fight for a wider use of French in EU institutions and abroad.</p> France's President Emmanuel Macron gives a speech to unveil his strategy to promote French language as part of the International Francophonie Day, before members of the French Academy and other guests, at the French Institute in Paris, France, March 20, 2018. Ludovic Marin/Pool via REUTERS
<p>There are some 274 million French speakers worldwide, making it the fifth most widely spoken language and the fourth most used language on the internet, according to the Francophonie organization of French-speaking countries.</p>
<p>French was long dominant at EU headquarters in Brussels but English has become ubiquitous in European institutions, especially since eastern European members joined the bloc in 2004.</p>
<p>Britain, Europe’s second largest economy and by far its biggest English-speaking country, is due to leave the EU next year.</p>
<p>“The situation now is quite paradoxical. English has probably never been as present in Brussels at the time when we are talking about Brexit,” Macron said.</p>
<p>“This domination is not inevitable. It’s up to us to set some rules, to be present, and make French the language with whom one has access to a number of opportunities,” Macron said, quoting Europe’s relationship with French-speaking Africa.</p> France's President Emmanuel Macron gives a speech to unveil his strategy to promote French language as part of the International Francophonie Day, before members of the French Academy and other guests, at the French Institute in Paris, France, March 20, 2018. Ludovic Marin/Pool via REUTERS
<p>Macron, who, unlike most previous French leaders often speaks in English in public when abroad, said this was not a move against the use of English but one to promote multilingualism.</p>
<p>He said he was in favor of everyone in Europe learning two foreign languages and that France would increase its efforts to teach French to European officials.</p> Slideshow (5 Images)
<p>Macron also announced steps to promote the teaching of French abroad, including through its network of French lycees, as part of a series of measures.</p>
<p>European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he was “an enthusiastic backer of multilingualism.</p> Related Video
<p>“Why would Shakespeare’s language be superior to that of Voltaire?” Juncker told France 5 TV channel. “We are wrong to have become so anglicized,” he said, in French.</p>
<p>But Juncker added: “English has become a daily working language within the EU institutions. Brexit won’t change anything to it. Because those who don’t come from the western part of Europe have become used to speaking in English.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Marine Pennetier; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Michel Rose and Mark Heinrich</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain and the European Union agreed on Monday to a transition period to avoid a “cliff edge” Brexit next year — though only after London accepted a potential solution for Northern Ireland’s land border that may face stiff opposition at home.</p>
<p>The pound surged on confirmation that Britain would remain effectively a non-voting EU member for 21 months until the end of 2020. Some business leaders, however, echoed a warning from EU negotiator Michel Barnier that the deal is legally binding only if London agrees the whole withdrawal treaty by next March.</p>
<p>That means solving outstanding issues, notably how to avoid a “hard border” that could disrupt peace in Northern Ireland. Britain says an EU-UK free trade deal to be sealed by 2021 can do that. But Dublin insists the Brexit treaty must lock in a “backstop” arrangement in case that future pact does not work.</p>
<p>Both sides are committed to keeping a free flow of people and goods over the intra-Irish border without returning to checkpoints, as during the three decades of violence in Northern Ireland. However, finding a practical solution for any customs checks needed post-Brexit has proved elusive so far.</p>
<p>The dispute with Ireland had threatened to derail May’s hopes of a formal political endorsement of the transition deal by EU leaders when they meet in Brussels on Friday. A weekend of intensive talks, however, has broken the deadlock — for now.</p>
<p>Prime Minister Theresa May, who relies on pro-British Northern Ireland members of parliament to pass her Brexit legislation, had rejected a fallback proposed by Brussels three weeks ago. She said an EU offer to keep Northern Ireland under EU trade rules would isolate the province from the mainland.</p>
<p>However, her Brexit Secretary David Davis, in Brussels, has now signed up to following similar principles as negotiators resume work to find an “operational” compromise. Dublin said it was happy to accept as it bound London in to not “backsliding” on pledges May had made on the issue in December..</p>
<p>“We agree on the need to include legal text detailing the ‘backstop’ solution for the border,” Davis told a news conference with Barnier. “But it remains our intention to achieve a partnership that is so close as to not require specific measures in relation to Northern Ireland.”</p>
<p>The question will remain as to whether negotiations on the future trade partnership between Britain and the EU, which are expected to start only next month after EU leaders endorse Barnier’s negotiating guidelines on Friday, can produce results — and quickly enough to avoid having language in the withdrawal treaty that Britain, and May’s Belfast allies, cannot accept.</p>
<p>Her Democratic Unionist Party allies said the “announcement” did not concern them as it left the border issue unresolved.</p>
<p>Longer term, the transition deal may buy people time but business still faces a “cliff edge” of uncertainty come 2021.</p> Britain's Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis and European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier address a joint news conference in Brussels, Belgium March 19, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir “DECISIVE DAY”
<p>Davis agreed with Barnier that Monday’s agreement was “decisive” and increased the odds on finding an orderly deal to avoid Europe’s second biggest economy simply crashing out of the bloc in just over a year. He hailed the certainty that the deals on the transition and other issues, including rights for expatriate citizens, would offer businesses and individuals.</p>
<p>However, Barnier warned: “A decisive step remains a step; we are not at the end of the road and there still remains a lot of work to be done, including on Ireland and Northern Ireland.”</p>
<p>The two sides issued a new, 129-page draft withdrawal treaty that was awash with green highlighter denoting final agreement on large areas of the legal text, including transition. Diplomats put the level of “green” agreement at over 80 percent.</p>
<p>The pound rose as much as one percent against the dollar to $1.4088 <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=GBP&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">GBP=D3</a>, its strongest since Feb. 16.</p> Slideshow (8 Images) TRADE BENEFITS
<p>Davis, who unlike May campaigned for Brexit, said he was pleased with EU agreement to let Britain negotiate and sign trade deals with other countries while remaining covered by EU common trade policy during the transition. Those deals would then take effect once Britain was free to do so in 2021.</p>
<p>He also welcomed wording that gives Britain some say in EU policy during the transition, notably on fishing quotas, and an ability to refuse to implement things it did not agree with — some of his Conservative party allies have complained that the transition deal would leave Britain a “vassal state” of the EU.</p>
<p>The Leave Means Leave campaign accused him of “caving in” on the Irish border. Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage said “Theresa the Appeaser” had “let people down again” by agreeing to EU demands to keep free immigration during the transition.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/uk-britain-eu-barnier/eus-barnier-sees-most-difficult-brexit-issues-to-come-at-the-end-of-talks-idUSKBN1GW2F1" type="external">EU's Barnier sees most difficult Brexit issues to come at the end of talks</a>
<a href="/article/uk-germany-ireland/merkel-pleased-about-brexit-transition-deal-but-says-many-problems-remain-idUSKBN1GW1M2" type="external">Merkel pleased about Brexit transition deal but says many problems remain</a>
<a href="/article/uk-britain-eu-businesses/eu-firms-scale-back-presence-in-uk-as-brexit-nears-survey-idUSKBN1GW00K" type="external">EU firms scale back presence in UK as Brexit nears - survey</a>
<p>More troublingly for May’s prospects of steering the treaty through parliament, her own party’s leader in Scotland, fierce Brexit critic Ruth Davidson, said the transition was a bad deal — for letting the EU retain power over British fishing grounds.</p>
<p>The EU secured agreement that Britain would offer residence rights to EU citizens who arrive after Brexit but before 2021. However, Britain also notched some gains it had pushed for.</p>
<p>The 27 other EU member states have remained closely aligned, though they have differing interests which diplomats say are starting to emerge in discussions about future trade. All have backed Irish demands on the border, although some of Britain’s nearest neighbours, with most trade to lose from Brexit, also pushed for a quick transition deal to help their own businesses.</p>
<p>But many EU diplomats said they felt London had largely agreed to their terms on most issues because of May’s political imperative to get a transition deal that may calm the fears of businesses contemplating moving investments out of Britain.</p>
<p>One EU diplomat said: “The Brits have just given in on everything, so big was their drive to get the transition.”</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper in London, Phillip Blenkinsop, Samantha Koester and Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels, Conor Humphries in Dublin and Jan StrupczewskiWriting by Alastair Macdonald; editing by David Stamp, William Maclean</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | Scores convicted in Congo's Beni massacre trial Former French president Sarkozy held over Gaddafi cash inquiry Court rules in favour of case on Britain's ability to reverse Brexit Macron says too much English spoken in pre-Brexit Brussels UK wins Brexit transition deal in return for Irish vow | false | https://reuters.com/article/us-congo-violence/scores-convicted-in-congos-beni-massacre-trial-idUSKBN1FD2OV | 2018-01-24 | 2least
| 3,050 | GOMA Democratic Republic of Congo Reuters A military tribunal investigating a wave of massacres in eastern Congo blamed on Ugandan rebels has convicted 134 people a senior army prosecutor and a human rights group said on Wednesday More than 800 people were killed 8212 often hacked to death with machetes during the night 8212 around the town of Beni near Democratic Republic of Congo8217s border with Uganda between 2014 and 2016 Congolese authorities say the Allied Democratic Forces ADF a Ugandan Islamist group active in the area were behind the killings but Congolese army officers have also been accused of involvement Rebel and militia attacks are on the rise again in central and eastern Congo and the latest violence coincides with a political crisis brought on by President Joseph Kabila8217s decision to overstay his mandate which expired in December 2016 Congolese troops are currently battling the ADF in the eastern border zones in coordination with the Ugandan military General Timothee Mukutu the Congolese army8217s First AdvocateGeneral said a portion of the earlier massacres were committed by ADF fighters during supply raids or in reprisal attacks 8220Others were carried out by proxy on the orders of certain local figures8221 he said in an interview broadcast by UNsupported Radio Okapi 8220We came to understand that there were poorly managed land conflicts that could be an explanation8221 CEPADHO a human rights group that observed the trials said that of those convicted a mix of ADF rebels militia fighters civilians and local chiefs 42 were sentenced to death several of them in absentia Congo does not apply the death penalty and in practice those who receive it serve prison sentences instead Other defendants received lighter sentences and 45 were acquitted ARMY INVOLVEMENT A report by New York University8217s Congo Research Group published last year found that senior army officers including the former top general in the zone supported and in some cases organized the killings Based on 249 interviews with perpetrators witnesses and victims as well as internal UN reports and arrest records it found they collaborated with local fighters and in some cases soldiers secured the perimeter so that victims could not escape However during the 17 months of trials the mobile military tribunal only convicted one army officer a colonel He was sentenced to a fouryear jail term Three men were convicted of 8220demoralizing the army in the aim of harming national defense8221 for publicly accusing government and military authorities of organizing the massacres Writing by Joe Bavier Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles PARIS Reuters Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was questioned on Tuesday by police investigating whether late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi helped finance his 2007 election campaign An official in the French judiciary said Sarkozy 63 was held in custody in Nanterre west of Paris It is the second major judicial investigation to fall on Sarkozy who served as president from 20072012 He already faces trial on separate charges of illicit spending overruns during his failed reelection campaign in 2012 A lawyer for Sarkozy could not immediately be reached for comment The former president has dismissed the Libya allegations as 8220grotesque8221 and a 8220crude manipulation8221 France8217s centerright party The Republicans backed its former leader 8220Members and supporters of The Republicans are once again left feeling that not all lawmakers or former lawmakers are treated equally depending on their political affiliation8221 the party said in a statement France opened an inquiry into the Libya case in 2013 after reports by French website Mediapart based on claims by a FrancoLebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine who said he had transferred 5 million euros 6 million from Gaddafi8217s former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi to Sarkozy8217s campaign chief Months after he took office in 2007 Sarkozy became the first Western leader in decades to host a visit by Gaddafi who pitched his trademark Bedouinstyle tent next to the Elysee Palace Several business deals were signed However Sarkozy was later one of the chief advocates of a NATOled military campaign that resulted in Gaddafi8217s overthrow and killing at the hands of rebel forces in 2011 FILE PHOTO Nicolas Sarkozy former head of the Les Republicains political party attends a Les Republicains LR public meeting in Les Sables dOlonne France October 1 2016 REUTERSStephane MaheFile Photo CAMPAIGN FINANCES Investigators in France can hold people for questioning for up to 48 hours before either releasing them or sending them before magistrates who decide whether they have grounds for turning a preliminary inquiry into a full investigation The latter can but does not always lead to a trial The Libyafunding inquiry appeared to have gone quiet until January when French businessman Alexandre Djouhri suspected by investigators of funneling money from Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy8217s campaign was arrested in Britain on a warrant issued by France Slideshow 7 Images A lawyer for Djouhri last month accused French authorities of politicizing the case and manipulating it against his client French authorities had no comment Sarkozy8217s predecessor Jacques Chirac was convicted in 2011 after his retirement of misusing public funds to keep political allies in phantom jobs That made the now ailing Chirac the first French head of state convicted since Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Petain in 1945 Sarkozy has been dogged for years by political scandals but none has led to a conviction The Libya inquiry has largely focused on the evidence provided by Takieddine who is himself under investigation in a separate affair of arms sales to Pakistan in the 1990s Takieddine said in 2016 that he personally handed over three suitcases filled with cash from Gaddafi to Sarkozy and a senior aide to help finance Sarkozy8217s campaign Sarkozy8217s lawyer at the time Thierry Herzog dismissed Takieddine8217s claims and produced a copy of a witness statement to police by Takieddine in 2012 in which the businessman said he had last seen Sarkozy in November 2003 Reporting by Paris bureau Writing by Brian Love Editing by Luke Baker Richard Lough and Peter Graff Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles EDINBURGH Reuters A legal attempt by antiBrexit campaigners to establish that Britain could unilaterally reverse Brexit was given a boost on Tuesday by Scotland8217s top court which said it wants to examine the case in greater depth AntiBrexit demonstrators wave EU and Union flags outside the Houses of Parliament in London Britain January 30 2018 REUTERSToby Melville RC1A41866470 The group behind the legal challenge who include proEU Scottish lawmakers want to show that Britain could stay in the European Union after all 8212 if for example the final terms of Brexit negotiated by the government were rejected by parliament The campaigners are ultimately seeking a formal opinion by the European Court of Justice ECJ asserting that Britain could reverse its decision to invoke Article 50 of the EU8217s Lisbon Treaty the formal step that kickstarted the Brexit process They argue that once the terms of Brexit have been negotiated Britain8217s sovereign parliament may well decide not to go ahead with it so lawmakers need to know in advance if that is legally possible As things stand there is no suggestion of a change of course over Brexit which British voters backed by 52 to 48 percent in a June 2016 referendum The ruling Conservative Party and main opposition Labour Party are both committed to Britain leaving the European Union The legal case headed by antiBrexit campaigning lawyer Jolyon Maugham had been rejected by a lower Scottish court The British government argued that the question of whether Britain could unilaterally stop Brexit was irrelevant because the will of the voters was clear and the government was not going to back out of Brexit On Tuesday the Court of Session Scotland8217s highest court overturned an earlier ruling saying the case raised important issues and there should be a full hearing so all the arguments could be debated 8220The issue of whether it is legally possible to revoke the notice of withdrawal is as already stated one of great importance8221 the Court of Session said referring to the Article 50 process which started in March 2017 8220On one view authoritative guidance on whether it is legally possible to do so may have the capacity to influence lawmakers in deciding what steps to take in advance of and at the time of a debate and vote on the European Union Withdrawal Bill8221 Once a full hearing has taken place in Edinburgh a decision will be made on whether to refer it to the ECJ the court said although it may ultimately decide that it should not If the Scottish court decided not to refer to the ECJ the petitioners can take their appeal to Britain8217s Supreme Court They argue that while there is no doubt that Britain could stop Brexit with the permission of the other 27 members it should seek to establish a legal right to do so unilaterally whether the rest of the bloc likes it or not Reporting by Elisabeth OLeary Editing by Estelle Shirbon Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles PARIS Reuters The English language is too dominant in Brussels especially with Britain soon to exit the European Union French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday as he vowed to fight for a wider use of French in EU institutions and abroad Frances President Emmanuel Macron gives a speech to unveil his strategy to promote French language as part of the International Francophonie Day before members of the French Academy and other guests at the French Institute in Paris France March 20 2018 Ludovic MarinPool via REUTERS There are some 274 million French speakers worldwide making it the fifth most widely spoken language and the fourth most used language on the internet according to the Francophonie organization of Frenchspeaking countries French was long dominant at EU headquarters in Brussels but English has become ubiquitous in European institutions especially since eastern European members joined the bloc in 2004 Britain Europe8217s second largest economy and by far its biggest Englishspeaking country is due to leave the EU next year 8220The situation now is quite paradoxical English has probably never been as present in Brussels at the time when we are talking about Brexit8221 Macron said 8220This domination is not inevitable It8217s up to us to set some rules to be present and make French the language with whom one has access to a number of opportunities8221 Macron said quoting Europe8217s relationship with Frenchspeaking Africa Frances President Emmanuel Macron gives a speech to unveil his strategy to promote French language as part of the International Francophonie Day before members of the French Academy and other guests at the French Institute in Paris France March 20 2018 Ludovic MarinPool via REUTERS Macron who unlike most previous French leaders often speaks in English in public when abroad said this was not a move against the use of English but one to promote multilingualism He said he was in favor of everyone in Europe learning two foreign languages and that France would increase its efforts to teach French to European officials Slideshow 5 Images Macron also announced steps to promote the teaching of French abroad including through its network of French lycees as part of a series of measures European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker tweeted that he was 8220an enthusiastic backer of multilingualism Related Video 8220Why would Shakespeare8217s language be superior to that of Voltaire8221 Juncker told France 5 TV channel 8220We are wrong to have become so anglicized8221 he said in French But Juncker added 8220English has become a daily working language within the EU institutions Brexit won8217t change anything to it Because those who don8217t come from the western part of Europe have become used to speaking in English8221 Reporting by Marine Pennetier Writing by Ingrid Melander Editing by Michel Rose and Mark Heinrich Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles BRUSSELS Reuters Britain and the European Union agreed on Monday to a transition period to avoid a 8220cliff edge8221 Brexit next year 8212 though only after London accepted a potential solution for Northern Ireland8217s land border that may face stiff opposition at home The pound surged on confirmation that Britain would remain effectively a nonvoting EU member for 21 months until the end of 2020 Some business leaders however echoed a warning from EU negotiator Michel Barnier that the deal is legally binding only if London agrees the whole withdrawal treaty by next March That means solving outstanding issues notably how to avoid a 8220hard border8221 that could disrupt peace in Northern Ireland Britain says an EUUK free trade deal to be sealed by 2021 can do that But Dublin insists the Brexit treaty must lock in a 8220backstop8221 arrangement in case that future pact does not work Both sides are committed to keeping a free flow of people and goods over the intraIrish border without returning to checkpoints as during the three decades of violence in Northern Ireland However finding a practical solution for any customs checks needed postBrexit has proved elusive so far The dispute with Ireland had threatened to derail May8217s hopes of a formal political endorsement of the transition deal by EU leaders when they meet in Brussels on Friday A weekend of intensive talks however has broken the deadlock 8212 for now Prime Minister Theresa May who relies on proBritish Northern Ireland members of parliament to pass her Brexit legislation had rejected a fallback proposed by Brussels three weeks ago She said an EU offer to keep Northern Ireland under EU trade rules would isolate the province from the mainland However her Brexit Secretary David Davis in Brussels has now signed up to following similar principles as negotiators resume work to find an 8220operational8221 compromise Dublin said it was happy to accept as it bound London in to not 8220backsliding8221 on pledges May had made on the issue in December 8220We agree on the need to include legal text detailing the 8216backstop8217 solution for the border8221 Davis told a news conference with Barnier 8220But it remains our intention to achieve a partnership that is so close as to not require specific measures in relation to Northern Ireland8221 The question will remain as to whether negotiations on the future trade partnership between Britain and the EU which are expected to start only next month after EU leaders endorse Barnier8217s negotiating guidelines on Friday can produce results 8212 and quickly enough to avoid having language in the withdrawal treaty that Britain and May8217s Belfast allies cannot accept Her Democratic Unionist Party allies said the 8220announcement8221 did not concern them as it left the border issue unresolved Longer term the transition deal may buy people time but business still faces a 8220cliff edge8221 of uncertainty come 2021 Britains Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis and European Unions chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier address a joint news conference in Brussels Belgium March 19 2018 REUTERSFrancois Lenoir 8220DECISIVE DAY8221 Davis agreed with Barnier that Monday8217s agreement was 8220decisive8221 and increased the odds on finding an orderly deal to avoid Europe8217s second biggest economy simply crashing out of the bloc in just over a year He hailed the certainty that the deals on the transition and other issues including rights for expatriate citizens would offer businesses and individuals However Barnier warned 8220A decisive step remains a step we are not at the end of the road and there still remains a lot of work to be done including on Ireland and Northern Ireland8221 The two sides issued a new 129page draft withdrawal treaty that was awash with green highlighter denoting final agreement on large areas of the legal text including transition Diplomats put the level of 8220green8221 agreement at over 80 percent The pound rose as much as one percent against the dollar to 14088 GBPD3 its strongest since Feb 16 Slideshow 8 Images TRADE BENEFITS Davis who unlike May campaigned for Brexit said he was pleased with EU agreement to let Britain negotiate and sign trade deals with other countries while remaining covered by EU common trade policy during the transition Those deals would then take effect once Britain was free to do so in 2021 He also welcomed wording that gives Britain some say in EU policy during the transition notably on fishing quotas and an ability to refuse to implement things it did not agree with 8212 some of his Conservative party allies have complained that the transition deal would leave Britain a 8220vassal state8221 of the EU The Leave Means Leave campaign accused him of 8220caving in8221 on the Irish border Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage said 8220Theresa the Appeaser8221 had 8220let people down again8221 by agreeing to EU demands to keep free immigration during the transition Related Coverage EUs Barnier sees most difficult Brexit issues to come at the end of talks Merkel pleased about Brexit transition deal but says many problems remain EU firms scale back presence in UK as Brexit nears survey More troublingly for May8217s prospects of steering the treaty through parliament her own party8217s leader in Scotland fierce Brexit critic Ruth Davidson said the transition was a bad deal 8212 for letting the EU retain power over British fishing grounds The EU secured agreement that Britain would offer residence rights to EU citizens who arrive after Brexit but before 2021 However Britain also notched some gains it had pushed for The 27 other EU member states have remained closely aligned though they have differing interests which diplomats say are starting to emerge in discussions about future trade All have backed Irish demands on the border although some of Britain8217s nearest neighbours with most trade to lose from Brexit also pushed for a quick transition deal to help their own businesses But many EU diplomats said they felt London had largely agreed to their terms on most issues because of May8217s political imperative to get a transition deal that may calm the fears of businesses contemplating moving investments out of Britain One EU diplomat said 8220The Brits have just given in on everything so big was their drive to get the transition8221 Additional reporting by Elizabeth Piper in London Phillip Blenkinsop Samantha Koester and Alissa de Carbonnel in Brussels Conor Humphries in Dublin and Jan StrupczewskiWriting by Alastair Macdonald editing by David Stamp William Maclean Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust 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<p>A little background. Last week Jeb! Bush ran at the mouth along the lines of: “For “the families of these victims, justice has been denied,” Bush said Thursday. “It is very troubling that we do not have a death penalty process that puts them front and center. … Families are aching in pain.” (Orlando Sentinel). Similar quotes appeared statewide. Something had to be done.</p>
<p>Saturday evening I was working with SueZann Bosler on an op-ed to be distributed to the newspapers when I got Jeb!’s weekly e-mail and checked his schedule. And there it was – a special notice about open office hours in Lake City. “First come first served, so come early!” the notice read…. We mobilized on Sunday. SueZann canceled or rescheduled two days worth of appointments (she is a house-calling hair dresser for death penalty abolition!) and by five PM Monday we were on our way North — again in the un-air conditioned abolition-mobile. We picked up Andrew Mason in Orlando, crashed at Amy Jo’s house in Gainesville, met Joe Brew at the Gainesville Kinkos at 5:15 and were in line at Lake City Community College by 6:20am. Bernie Welch and Dennis Lane soon arrived from St. Augustine and Jacksonville, and FSU Film School student Laura Cardona arrived with her camera — all the way from Atlanta.</p>
<p>For more background on this meeting, see the press releases:</p>
<p>“Jeb Bush “Pining and Signing” for Votes” and “Victim’s Family Members Ask Governor and other politicians: “Please stop using our pain for political gain”</p>
<p>at <a href="http://www.fadp.org/pressrel.html" type="external">http://www.fadp.org/pressrel.html</a>.</p>
<p>–AB</p>
<p>DISCUSSION ITEMS OF NOTE:</p>
<p>* “Please don’t use victim’s pain for political gain.” * Presentation of thousands of moratorium petition signatures. * The Innocence Protection Act * New witness in the Amos King case * Illinois Moratorium Commission recommendations * FADP challenge to debate.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Hello</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: Hello.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Hi, SueZann.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m Abe Bonowitz.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Hi, Abe.</p>
<p>[Background talk as others come in. Bush’s Communications staff person introduces the reporters who have come in with us: Ron Word of the Associated Press, Lesley Clark of the Miami Herald, a videographer and reporter from Florida’s News Channel, and Laura Cardona, an FSU film student who is doing a documentary.]</p>
<p>******</p>
<p>Governor Bush: What’s goin’ on?</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: Well, um, I’m here, like you said in the auditorium, I guess I’m here as one of the people to maybe give a little critique, here, just so you’d expect it.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Great.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: Um, I’m going to tell you this is that I’m, I watched my father, Reverend Billy Bosler and myself being stabbed. [Getting a little emotional] I watched my father being stabbed to death in front of my eyes.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: When was that?</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: December 22, 1986. And it was in the parsonage at the church. And, I went to….</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’m sorry…</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: Thank you. I went through many years of being angry at the man that did it, and I finally forgave him. I went through many sentencings and I was able to speak in his name to get him off of death row and into a life sentence, and the reason I did that is because my father was against the death penalty, and my whole family is against the death penalty, and I don’t think a life is for a life. There is no “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, or the world will be blind.” And I made these notes because when I was stabbed I was stabbed in the head twice and my memory and speech, so I will be affected the rest of my life. My time is short and I, I had this video [hands him a video tape] that was done by 48 hours and I would like, I would really appreciate if you were to see it…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Sure.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: …because it shows one big scene…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Is that [pointing to the tape]</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: Correct…SueZann Bosler… and it shows a [inaudible] on one of the trials I was threatened…um to be put into jail…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Why?</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: …because I was, I was, he asked me a question. The State Attorney asked me a question of what I did for a living and I said ‘I’m a hair dresser and I work to abolish the death penalty,’ and that’s what I do, and he threatened to put me into jail.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: SueZann was not allowed to advocate for her family’s position that did not seek the death penalty for the perpetrator, and the judge said ‘if you say anything about that then you’re in jail.’ Because she was not allowed to have her, as a victim’s rights, or as a victim, to have her right to say “I don’t want this guy killed.”</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I don’t think that’s the case anymore, is it?</p>
<p>crosstalk</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m not a lawyer, I couldn’t tell you, but that’s what happened to her.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Yeah.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: And that’s the problem. When people speak – when advocates for the death penalty speak, as we have heard you say just in the last week, “I’m here for the victims,”…well, not all the victims want that.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Right, but most do.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Many do.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Many do.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: But not all.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Nope. Obviously not.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: I’d just appreciate….</p>
<p>Governor Bush: But that, that, that’s not…go ahead.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: I’m sorry to interrupt you… I would just appreciate it if you didn’t use me as one of those of those victims because….</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I won’t.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: ….because I’m here for life, not death. I don’t want anybody to speak in my name for death…because it’s worse. Violence perpetuates violence. It doesn’t help. It makes it more suffering for us, going through that death penalty system and it’s more suffering for me than if they would have put him in for life.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I will not uh refer to you because you obviously are passionate about your views. Having said, I, I support the death penalty. And I wish that it would be administered in a way that wouldn’t be as difficult for victims, the family members, because it is compounded [or confounded] and contorted and twisted and you know in the last two cases where people stood on death row that now there is a stay on there, the crimes I think in the late 70s.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: It’s a long, long time.</p>
<p>Crosstalk</p>
<p>Governor Bush: ….stay and uh…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Last week when you said that you were with the victims that were driving in their cars on the way to the prison, but you know, Linroy Bottison and Amos King have people that love them, too. And when these people are exterminated, then their loved ones become victim’s family’s also. And, it doesn’t matter how you look at it, when you have lost a loved one to violence, it’s losing a loved one to violence, and they’re all victims. So, it’s…there’s obviously a distinction. We ask, please don’t use victim’s pain for political gain.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’m not.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Well, it seems that way. It comes across that way.</p>
<p>Crosstalk</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Well, you’re wrong. You’re wrong. This is the most difficult thing I do and I respect your position and certainly will be mindful of the fact that you have this position and you should respect mine as well, and not imply motivations that are incorrect. Maybe we could reach a consensus…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Well perhaps we can reach a consensus on that…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean that my motivation isn’t sincere, and it is the law of the land and I have a duty to uphold the law. You know, if you want to try to change the law, you have a right to do that.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Well, we are working on that.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: You have every right to do that.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: We have several other things we wanted to share with you.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Sure.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: One is another stack of petitions. We were here with… We were at your office in January with Delbert Tibbs and Brad Scott and Dave Keaton, who are three of Florida’s death row survivors, wrongly convicted and released off of death row and you were out of town that day so we met with one of your assistants but…um.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: You mean you went to Tallahassee?</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: We did a walk, actually. A number of us walked from the death row to Tallahassee, 143 miles to bring you these petitions and at that time it was more than 20,000. Here’s a few more thousand. [SueZann and Abe hand him several stacks of petitions.] But in particular, you know when you’ve got…this is…I’m sure you have your own copy…this is the Commission on Capital Cases report on the 23 people they say 23, there are actually 24 people…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: No, I haven’t seen that.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: You ought to ask Locke Burt for a copy of that. Um, the problem with this report is that it, it’s not complete. Uh, and it’s it purports to look at 23 of the 24 cases of wrongful conviction and there is innuendo in there, there is mis-statement, and, and they claim to have given defense attorneys the opportunity to…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’m sorry. Have you done a critique of it?</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: We are in the process of that and we’ll have…I’ll provide that to you when we get it done, we haven’t had a chance to complete it yet. But I can tell you I have spoken with several lawyers whose clients are…their cases are profiled there and, and they are saying, “wait a second. They didn’t talk to me” and, and, that’s not accurate information. So…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: When do you think you’ll have it ready?</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Uh…hopefully by the end of the summer.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Okay. I can tell you from my perspective which is….from my perspective which is, which relates to the death warrants I have signed…uh I have absolutely no doubt that the people were, were guilty. Absolutely no doubt.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: You know that there is a new witness in Amos King’s case that corroborates part of his story?</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Every time that those…that information comes out, we look at it very closely. And I have absolutely no doubt that the death warrants I have signed have been for people who were justly sentenced for the crime they committed.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: That’s also why…I I think….</p>
<p>Governor Bush: And, the other thing is that people, you know, the system does work in that there are cases of people –</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: That’s why I think that I would respect you more if you did like two other governors in this country have done and put a moratorium in for not only to abolish the death penalty but to bring it out in the open and learn more about it. Because my father taught me that if you believe in something, you have to know both sides. And I think that’s what we all have to know. And if [inaudible] the system. Because James Bernard Campbell, who killed my father has a title, premeditated murderer, and if I’m going to want anybody killed, [inaudible] they would be a premeditated murderer, too how can the Government kill somebody?</p>
<p>Governor Bush: inaudible…(I disagree?)</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: And I don’t think that’s right…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I disagree. I just respectfully disagree. I think there’s a big difference between, uh, capital punishment and the crimes that create the need for it….but again….</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: How that is different?</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Well, one case is uh, uh the protection of innocent life and the other case is someone commits this atrocious crime, you know most murders are not…people aren’t sentenced to the death penalty…it’s only a small fraction of these incredibly atrocious crimes that are committed.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: But…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I can distinguish, as a majority of Floridians can, between those two. And…that’s where our disagreement is probably based.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: [interrupted]</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Having said that, I respect you enormously for having your position, particularly you [looking at Bosler], because of what you’ve gone through. And uh I have many, I’m a devout Catholic and uh once a year I meet with the Bishops and they respectfully lecture me from their position, which is one that I respect enormously about this issue…and they’re on your side. And I, I, this is not something, again, where I I’ve got the impression that you think that I’ve not thought this through…or ….</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I don’t think that at all.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: ….I think about this a lot. It is the most difficult thing I have to do, but I’m at peace with my position, and I do believe that it is appropriate for the State to do it, so….</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m glad you, you mentioned the protection of innocent life. I don’t know if you are familiar but right know in Congress, in, in I think they call it mark-up, they are looking at the Innocence Protection Act this week.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’m not aware of the act….</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Well, hopefully it’s going to pass. And basically what it does is set out protections that have to be in place in state laws and federal laws to make sure that we are not executing the wrong person. And..</p>
<p>Governor Bush: The innocence protection act? [writing it down]</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Innocence Protection Act.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’ll get my office to look at it. I’m not aware of it…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’ll…let me know who to convey that information to…I’ll make sure…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: …I’ll find it… I’ll get it…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: It’s in the Legislature right know, it’s in mark-up. Uh, so we have that concern. Additionally, Governor Ryan, in Illinois, as you know declared a moratorium, but more important, he appointed a nonpartisan committee, a commission, to look at the death penalty in Illinois and they issued their report recently with 85 recommendations about how they can improve the system and try to prevent the execution of the innocent. And a lot of those recommendations would fit right in with Florida’s law in terms of needing to be done. So I would urge you also to look at the report from Illinois. You don’t have to waste Florida tax dollars doing our own commission report. Let’s look at the report from Illinois… and implement those ….</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I’m for not wasting tax payer dollars…so I appreciate the…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Then if that’s the case, then I hope you look at the studies from the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post that show how much money…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: crosstalk</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: …more we’re spending on the death penalty than we would with life without parole.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Two of my favorite papers.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m sure. Uh but you know they don’t put information out without carefully researching it and …and the Palm Beach Post in particular showed that you have…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: small talk inaudible.. (about Lesley Clark, who was in the room for the Miami Herald.)</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m not saying that for Lesley’s benefit….but you have uh the Palm Beach Post estimated that we’d save a minimum of $51 million dollars a year annually if we just went with life without parole instead of the death penalty.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: …we could make the death penalty….</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: We’ve been tryin’ to do that for almost 30 years… and</p>
<p>Governor Bush: If we had a process where it didn’t take 20 years for the execution to take place, then the costs…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Again, it goes to the, I mean James Bernard Campbell, who killed her father was sentenced to death twice before he had a third re-sentencing hearing where he got life w….four life sentences…and that’s a lot of lot of money wasted.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: It is….</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: Florida has one of the highest turnover rates of death sentences…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: It does…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: …which is why</p>
<p>Governor Bush: …why the judiciary needs to, to provide some information to the circuit court judges about when it is appropriate to have the death penalty be the sentence… when 50% of the cases are overturned on direct appeal.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: That’s right. We also need some better training for our prosecutors and our defense attorneys.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Absolutely. That’s [inaudible] responsibility?</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: ….these are all things that are part of the recommendations in the report…I hope you’ll look at that…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: I agree with that. I agree with that. I gotta run.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: I’m sorry. One last thing before we go. We do have a challenge for you… We’d like to invite you to join us in a debate about the issue. So Floridians can hear both sides articulated in a public forum.</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: …we want people to know both sides…</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: We don’t own a newspaper…</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Well, we’ve made it possible for your side to be heard here, so….I have no problems with that. [FADP understands Bush’s response as being to suggest that the forum in which we were then speaking, in front of the media then present, was public enough. FADP is seeking a clarification and a formal response in writing to the challenge to debate publicly]</p>
<p>SueZann Bosler: …..so what I just want to say again – why kill people who kill people to show them that killing people is wrong?</p>
<p>cross talk and good byes.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: And a friend of mine, this is no comment on anything but a friend of mine makes these and asked me to give you that. So, no comment on anything, just might be helpful sometime. [Abe presented Governor Bush with a “Get Out of Hell Free” card see &lt;http://www.thisistrue.com/goohf.html&gt;.]</p>
<p>Thanks, thank you. Good meeting you. Take care.</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz: See you again sometime.</p>
<p>Governor Bush: Yeah, I’m sure….</p>
<p>END OF SESSION</p>
<p>Abe Bonowitz is director of Floridians Against the Death Penalty. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:fadp@fadp.org" type="external">fadp@fadp.org</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Challenging Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/07/19/challenging-jeb-bush-on-the-death-penalty/ | 2002-07-19 | 4left
| 3,051 | A little background Last week Jeb Bush ran at the mouth along the lines of 8220For 8220the families of these victims justice has been denied8221 Bush said Thursday 8220It is very troubling that we do not have a death penalty process that puts them front and center 8230 Families are aching in pain8221 Orlando Sentinel Similar quotes appeared statewide Something had to be done Saturday evening I was working with SueZann Bosler on an oped to be distributed to the newspapers when I got Jeb8217s weekly email and checked his schedule And there it was 8211 a special notice about open office hours in Lake City 8220First come first served so come early8221 the notice read8230 We mobilized on Sunday SueZann canceled or rescheduled two days worth of appointments she is a housecalling hair dresser for death penalty abolition and by five PM Monday we were on our way North 8212 again in the unair conditioned abolitionmobile We picked up Andrew Mason in Orlando crashed at Amy Jo8217s house in Gainesville met Joe Brew at the Gainesville Kinkos at 515 and were in line at Lake City Community College by 620am Bernie Welch and Dennis Lane soon arrived from St Augustine and Jacksonville and FSU Film School student Laura Cardona arrived with her camera 8212 all the way from Atlanta For more background on this meeting see the press releases 8220Jeb Bush 8220Pining and Signing8221 for Votes8221 and 8220Victim8217s Family Members Ask Governor and other politicians 8220Please stop using our pain for political gain8221 at httpwwwfadporgpressrelhtml 8211AB DISCUSSION ITEMS OF NOTE 8220Please don8217t use victim8217s pain for political gain8221 Presentation of thousands of moratorium petition signatures The Innocence Protection Act New witness in the Amos King case Illinois Moratorium Commission recommendations FADP challenge to debate Governor Bush Hello SueZann Bosler Hello Governor Bush Hi SueZann Abe Bonowitz I8217m Abe Bonowitz Governor Bush Hi Abe Background talk as others come in Bush8217s Communications staff person introduces the reporters who have come in with us Ron Word of the Associated Press Lesley Clark of the Miami Herald a videographer and reporter from Florida8217s News Channel and Laura Cardona an FSU film student who is doing a documentary Governor Bush What8217s goin8217 on SueZann Bosler Well um I8217m here like you said in the auditorium I guess I8217m here as one of the people to maybe give a little critique here just so you8217d expect it Governor Bush Great SueZann Bosler Um I8217m going to tell you this is that I8217m I watched my father Reverend Billy Bosler and myself being stabbed Getting a little emotional I watched my father being stabbed to death in front of my eyes Governor Bush When was that SueZann Bosler December 22 1986 And it was in the parsonage at the church And I went to8230 Governor Bush I8217m sorry8230 SueZann Bosler Thank you I went through many years of being angry at the man that did it and I finally forgave him I went through many sentencings and I was able to speak in his name to get him off of death row and into a life sentence and the reason I did that is because my father was against the death penalty and my whole family is against the death penalty and I don8217t think a life is for a life There is no 8220eye for an eye tooth for a tooth or the world will be blind8221 And I made these notes because when I was stabbed I was stabbed in the head twice and my memory and speech so I will be affected the rest of my life My time is short and I I had this video hands him a video tape that was done by 48 hours and I would like I would really appreciate if you were to see it8230 Governor Bush Sure SueZann Bosler 8230because it shows one big scene8230 Governor Bush Is that pointing to the tape SueZann Bosler Correct8230SueZann Bosler8230 and it shows a inaudible on one of the trials I was threatened8230um to be put into jail8230 Governor Bush Why SueZann Bosler 8230because I was I was he asked me a question The State Attorney asked me a question of what I did for a living and I said 8216I8217m a hair dresser and I work to abolish the death penalty8217 and that8217s what I do and he threatened to put me into jail Abe Bonowitz SueZann was not allowed to advocate for her family8217s position that did not seek the death penalty for the perpetrator and the judge said 8216if you say anything about that then you8217re in jail8217 Because she was not allowed to have her as a victim8217s rights or as a victim to have her right to say 8220I don8217t want this guy killed8221 Governor Bush I don8217t think that8217s the case anymore is it crosstalk Abe Bonowitz I8217m not a lawyer I couldn8217t tell you but that8217s what happened to her Governor Bush Yeah Abe Bonowitz And that8217s the problem When people speak 8211 when advocates for the death penalty speak as we have heard you say just in the last week 8220I8217m here for the victims82218230well not all the victims want that Governor Bush Right but most do Abe Bonowitz Many do Governor Bush Many do Abe Bonowitz But not all Governor Bush Nope Obviously not SueZann Bosler I8217d just appreciate8230 Governor Bush But that that that8217s not8230go ahead SueZann Bosler I8217m sorry to interrupt you8230 I would just appreciate it if you didn8217t use me as one of those of those victims because8230 Governor Bush I won8217t SueZann Bosler 8230because I8217m here for life not death I don8217t want anybody to speak in my name for death8230because it8217s worse Violence perpetuates violence It doesn8217t help It makes it more suffering for us going through that death penalty system and it8217s more suffering for me than if they would have put him in for life Governor Bush I will not uh refer to you because you obviously are passionate about your views Having said I I support the death penalty And I wish that it would be administered in a way that wouldn8217t be as difficult for victims the family members because it is compounded or confounded and contorted and twisted and you know in the last two cases where people stood on death row that now there is a stay on there the crimes I think in the late 70s Abe Bonowitz It8217s a long long time Crosstalk Governor Bush 8230stay and uh8230 Abe Bonowitz Last week when you said that you were with the victims that were driving in their cars on the way to the prison but you know Linroy Bottison and Amos King have people that love them too And when these people are exterminated then their loved ones become victim8217s family8217s also And it doesn8217t matter how you look at it when you have lost a loved one to violence it8217s losing a loved one to violence and they8217re all victims So it8217s8230there8217s obviously a distinction We ask please don8217t use victim8217s pain for political gain Governor Bush I8217m not Abe Bonowitz Well it seems that way It comes across that way Crosstalk Governor Bush Well you8217re wrong You8217re wrong This is the most difficult thing I do and I respect your position and certainly will be mindful of the fact that you have this position and you should respect mine as well and not imply motivations that are incorrect Maybe we could reach a consensus8230 Abe Bonowitz Well perhaps we can reach a consensus on that8230 Governor Bush Just because I don8217t agree with you doesn8217t mean that my motivation isn8217t sincere and it is the law of the land and I have a duty to uphold the law You know if you want to try to change the law you have a right to do that Abe Bonowitz Well we are working on that Governor Bush You have every right to do that Abe Bonowitz We have several other things we wanted to share with you Governor Bush Sure Abe Bonowitz One is another stack of petitions We were here with8230 We were at your office in January with Delbert Tibbs and Brad Scott and Dave Keaton who are three of Florida8217s death row survivors wrongly convicted and released off of death row and you were out of town that day so we met with one of your assistants but8230um Governor Bush You mean you went to Tallahassee Abe Bonowitz We did a walk actually A number of us walked from the death row to Tallahassee 143 miles to bring you these petitions and at that time it was more than 20000 Here8217s a few more thousand SueZann and Abe hand him several stacks of petitions But in particular you know when you8217ve got8230this is8230I8217m sure you have your own copy8230this is the Commission on Capital Cases report on the 23 people they say 23 there are actually 24 people8230 Governor Bush No I haven8217t seen that Abe Bonowitz You ought to ask Locke Burt for a copy of that Um the problem with this report is that it it8217s not complete Uh and it8217s it purports to look at 23 of the 24 cases of wrongful conviction and there is innuendo in there there is misstatement and and they claim to have given defense attorneys the opportunity to8230 Governor Bush I8217m sorry Have you done a critique of it Abe Bonowitz We are in the process of that and we8217ll have8230I8217ll provide that to you when we get it done we haven8217t had a chance to complete it yet But I can tell you I have spoken with several lawyers whose clients are8230their cases are profiled there and and they are saying 8220wait a second They didn8217t talk to me8221 and and that8217s not accurate information So8230 Governor Bush When do you think you8217ll have it ready Abe Bonowitz Uh8230hopefully by the end of the summer Governor Bush Okay I can tell you from my perspective which is8230from my perspective which is which relates to the death warrants I have signed8230uh I have absolutely no doubt that the people were were guilty Absolutely no doubt Abe Bonowitz You know that there is a new witness in Amos King8217s case that corroborates part of his story Governor Bush Every time that those8230that information comes out we look at it very closely And I have absolutely no doubt that the death warrants I have signed have been for people who were justly sentenced for the crime they committed SueZann Bosler That8217s also why8230I I think8230 Governor Bush And the other thing is that people you know the system does work in that there are cases of people 8211 SueZann Bosler That8217s why I think that I would respect you more if you did like two other governors in this country have done and put a moratorium in for not only to abolish the death penalty but to bring it out in the open and learn more about it Because my father taught me that if you believe in something you have to know both sides And I think that8217s what we all have to know And if inaudible the system Because James Bernard Campbell who killed my father has a title premeditated murderer and if I8217m going to want anybody killed inaudible they would be a premeditated murderer too how can the Government kill somebody Governor Bush inaudible8230I disagree SueZann Bosler And I don8217t think that8217s right8230 Governor Bush I disagree I just respectfully disagree I think there8217s a big difference between uh capital punishment and the crimes that create the need for it8230but again8230 SueZann Bosler How that is different Governor Bush Well one case is uh uh the protection of innocent life and the other case is someone commits this atrocious crime you know most murders are not8230people aren8217t sentenced to the death penalty8230it8217s only a small fraction of these incredibly atrocious crimes that are committed SueZann Bosler But8230 Governor Bush I can distinguish as a majority of Floridians can between those two And8230that8217s where our disagreement is probably based Abe Bonowitz interrupted Governor Bush Having said that I respect you enormously for having your position particularly you looking at Bosler because of what you8217ve gone through And uh I have many I8217m a devout Catholic and uh once a year I meet with the Bishops and they respectfully lecture me from their position which is one that I respect enormously about this issue8230and they8217re on your side And I I this is not something again where I I8217ve got the impression that you think that I8217ve not thought this through8230or 8230 Abe Bonowitz I don8217t think that at all Governor Bush 8230I think about this a lot It is the most difficult thing I have to do but I8217m at peace with my position and I do believe that it is appropriate for the State to do it so8230 Abe Bonowitz I8217m glad you you mentioned the protection of innocent life I don8217t know if you are familiar but right know in Congress in in I think they call it markup they are looking at the Innocence Protection Act this week Governor Bush I8217m not aware of the act8230 Abe Bonowitz Well hopefully it8217s going to pass And basically what it does is set out protections that have to be in place in state laws and federal laws to make sure that we are not executing the wrong person And Governor Bush The innocence protection act writing it down Abe Bonowitz Innocence Protection Act Governor Bush I8217ll get my office to look at it I8217m not aware of it8230 Abe Bonowitz I8217ll8230let me know who to convey that information to8230I8217ll make sure8230 Governor Bush 8230I8217ll find it8230 I8217ll get it8230 Abe Bonowitz It8217s in the Legislature right know it8217s in markup Uh so we have that concern Additionally Governor Ryan in Illinois as you know declared a moratorium but more important he appointed a nonpartisan committee a commission to look at the death penalty in Illinois and they issued their report recently with 85 recommendations about how they can improve the system and try to prevent the execution of the innocent And a lot of those recommendations would fit right in with Florida8217s law in terms of needing to be done So I would urge you also to look at the report from Illinois You don8217t have to waste Florida tax dollars doing our own commission report Let8217s look at the report from Illinois8230 and implement those 8230 Governor Bush I8217m for not wasting tax payer dollars8230so I appreciate the8230 Abe Bonowitz Then if that8217s the case then I hope you look at the studies from the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post that show how much money8230 Governor Bush crosstalk Abe Bonowitz 8230more we8217re spending on the death penalty than we would with life without parole Governor Bush Two of my favorite papers Abe Bonowitz I8217m sure Uh but you know they don8217t put information out without carefully researching it and 8230and the Palm Beach Post in particular showed that you have8230 Governor Bush small talk inaudible about Lesley Clark who was in the room for the Miami Herald Abe Bonowitz I8217m not saying that for Lesley8217s benefit8230but you have uh the Palm Beach Post estimated that we8217d save a minimum of 51 million dollars a year annually if we just went with life without parole instead of the death penalty Governor Bush 8230we could make the death penalty8230 Abe Bonowitz We8217ve been tryin8217 to do that for almost 30 years8230 and Governor Bush If we had a process where it didn8217t take 20 years for the execution to take place then the costs8230 Abe Bonowitz Again it goes to the I mean James Bernard Campbell who killed her father was sentenced to death twice before he had a third resentencing hearing where he got life w8230four life sentences8230and that8217s a lot of lot of money wasted Governor Bush It is8230 Abe Bonowitz Florida has one of the highest turnover rates of death sentences8230 Governor Bush It does8230 Abe Bonowitz 8230which is why Governor Bush 8230why the judiciary needs to to provide some information to the circuit court judges about when it is appropriate to have the death penalty be the sentence8230 when 50 of the cases are overturned on direct appeal Abe Bonowitz That8217s right We also need some better training for our prosecutors and our defense attorneys Governor Bush Absolutely That8217s inaudible responsibility Abe Bonowitz 8230these are all things that are part of the recommendations in the report8230I hope you8217ll look at that8230 Governor Bush I agree with that I agree with that I gotta run Abe Bonowitz I8217m sorry One last thing before we go We do have a challenge for you8230 We8217d like to invite you to join us in a debate about the issue So Floridians can hear both sides articulated in a public forum SueZann Bosler 8230we want people to know both sides8230 Abe Bonowitz We don8217t own a newspaper8230 Governor Bush Well we8217ve made it possible for your side to be heard here so8230I have no problems with that FADP understands Bush8217s response as being to suggest that the forum in which we were then speaking in front of the media then present was public enough FADP is seeking a clarification and a formal response in writing to the challenge to debate publicly SueZann Bosler 8230so what I just want to say again 8211 why kill people who kill people to show them that killing people is wrong cross talk and good byes Abe Bonowitz And a friend of mine this is no comment on anything but a friend of mine makes these and asked me to give you that So no comment on anything just might be helpful sometime Abe presented Governor Bush with a 8220Get Out of Hell Free8221 card see amplthttpwwwthisistruecomgoohfhtmlampgt Thanks thank you Good meeting you Take care Abe Bonowitz See you again sometime Governor Bush Yeah I8217m sure8230 END OF SESSION Abe Bonowitz is director of Floridians Against the Death Penalty He can be reached at fadpfadporg amp160 | A/DET little/ADJ background/NOUN Last/ADJ week/NOUN Jeb/PROPN Bush/PROPN ran/VERB at/ADP the/DET mouth/NOUN along/ADP the/DET lines/NOUN of/ADP 8220For/NUM 8220the/PRON families/NOUN of/ADP these/DET victims/NOUN justice/NOUN has/AUX been/AUX denied8221/PROPN Bush/PROPN said/VERB Thursday/PROPN 8220It/NUM is/AUX very/ADV troubling/ADJ that/SCONJ we/PRON do/AUX not/PART have/VERB a/DET death/NOUN penalty/NOUN process/NOUN that/PRON puts/VERB them/PRON front/NOUN and/CCONJ 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<p>It’s remarkable how rarely Israel is mentioned in regard to the American plans to attack Iraq — with the exception of occasional notices of how strongly the Israeli government supports those plans. A proper assessment of its part in this war depends upon an understanding of Israel’s position in the United States’ overall policy for the Middle East, and how that policy is being implemented with specific regard to Iraq.</p>
<p>Patrick Buchanan was thoroughly rebuked when he remarked on the eve of the US attack on Iraq in 1991, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” But he was saying aloud what few others were. What his national chauvinism prevented him from noticing was that, in its avidity for war, the Israeli government was acting — as it had for more than a generation — as the principal US client, our “local cop on the beat,” as the Nixon Administration had put it. It’s this ongoing role that explains what part Israel has in the current slaughter of Iraqis.</p>
<p>US FOREIGN POLICY: THE MIDDLE EAST</p>
<p>Since the Second World War — from which the United States emerged as the world’s only undamaged major country and proceeded to organize the economy of the world — a cornerstone of American policy has been control of Middle East energy resources, the greatest geopolitical prize in the modern world. Control, not just access, was what was demanded by all US administrations, Republican and Democrat, because control of those resources gave the US control of its principal economic competitors — which turned out to be, by the late 20th century, a German-led Europe and a Japan-led East Asia.</p>
<p>The US has never in fact required Mideast oil for its own society — all the energy requirements of the US could be filled from national sources (especially when we include in “national sources,” our “backyard” — Latin America) But Germany imports 80% of its energy resources, and Japan, 100%. Who controls world oil, controls the life-line of the modern world.</p>
<p>And the principal threat to U.S. control has always come from what the US called “domestic radicalism” — the dangerous idea amongst the peoples of the oil-producing regions that their natural wealth should be used for their benefit, rather than for that of the corporations and the economic elites to whom the US might assign it. And the chief form of “domestic radicalism” was Arab nationalism. To guard against it, the US constructed (and took over from Britain) a series of repressive Arab governments, the family dictatorships around the Persian Gulf, with Saudi Arabia at their head.</p>
<p>US FOREIGN POLICY: ISRAEL</p>
<p>Since it launched a war and destroyed the center of Arab nationalism in 1967, Israel’s job in America’s “overall framework of order,” in Henry Kissinger’s phrase, was to guarantee that those conservative Arab governments were protected from their most dangerous enemy — their own populations. Israel was to be the final bulwark against the dangers that would be posed to US control if “domestic radicals” came to power in one of the oil-producing states — as happened in Iran in 1979.</p>
<p>For that reason (and not because of some imagined invincibility of the pro-Israel lobby), the US is willing to provide Israel with vastly more money and support than it gives to any other country in the world. (In second place is Egypt, Israel’s principal antagonist in 1967, whom the Carter administration bought off at Camp David in 1978, securing Israel’s southern border; in third, Turkey, Israel’s principal military ally in the present-day Middle East.) Today as a result Israel has perhaps the third strongest military in the world, with hundreds of advanced nuclear weapons (Israel did not sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), missiles and submarines with which to deliver them, and an air force of US-supplied F-16s and attack helicopters.</p>
<p>For that reason too the US is willing to support Israel’s brutal and racist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (condemned by the United Nations thirty-five years ago in Security Council Resolution 242) and its settlement of its citizens in the occupied territories (recognized as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention — a war crime — around the world). Not only have these been the consistent policies of all Israeli governments, Labor and Likud, they also serve the US purpose of discouraging domestic radicalism, a democratic and secular Palestine being seen as a “threat of a good example” even by some Arab states. To discourage the threat of progressive Arab nationalism, the US and Israel have on occasion been willing to fund even Islamicist movements (Hamas and the Mujahideen) that they saw as counters to it. Consistent US/Israeli policy has been largely successful in destroying secular Arab nationalism as it existed two generations ago — and replacing it with religious fundamentalism.</p>
<p>In 1982, in order to consolidate the Israeli control over the occupied territories, the US armed and supported the most extreme terrorist act in the Middle East in a generation, the invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 20,000 people (many more than Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait). It was conducted by the current Prime Minister of Israel and launched because of the danger that peace might break out in the Middle East. That motive grows to the extent that the state is militarized. In the principal American client as perhaps nowhere else in the world is it true that war is the health of the state. And that war is principally a war against Palestinians.</p>
<p>That war is not simply killing. To take one example from far too many, Israeli forces closed the Islamic University and the Polytechnic Institute in Hebron last month, actions to which even the US State Department took mild exception. Elsewhere, the Israeli army looked for similarly creative forms of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing: in east Jerusalem, they sealed the apartments of three imprisoned Hamas militants (one of whom had been sentenced to thirty-five consecutive life terms) by filling the rooms with concrete. The Guardian (UK) reports that now more than a thousand Palestinians are held by the Israeli army under detention without charge (the sort of thing we used to think only totalitarian governments did — it is of course now US practice, too).</p>
<p>This oppressive and anti-intellectual policy is practiced by other American clients as well. US financial and military aid to Turkey was used brutally to suppress the Kurds in the southeast in the 1990s, creating millions of refugees, destroying some 3500 villages, and killing tens of thousands of people — an ethnic cleansing supported by the Clinton administration. Since the military coup in 1980, Turkish universities have been rife with police spies, and evidence of Kurdish culture, to say nothing of Kurdish nationalism, has been suppressed. America and its clients in the Middle East have as their enemies whole peoples of the region.</p>
<p>Any understanding of Israel’s role in the coming US attack on Iraq has to begin with the Jewish state’s continuing position in US policy. Those on the American Right (and elsewhere) who think that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog have got it quite wrong: the dog is firmly in control. Israeli governments, whether Labor or Likud, do nothing without the approval of their American paymasters. Noam Chomsky offers three recent examples, beginning with the first Bush administration:</p>
<p>“–The Bush #1 case involved $10 million in loan guarantees, which Israel was using (illegally, but with US connivance) for settlement in the territories. The Shamir government was doing it in a brazen way that annoyed Baker-Bush. Bush suspended the guarantees, … Israel returned to the preferred Labor-style hypocrisy (‘thickening settlements,’ ‘natural growth,’ etc.) and all was well. “–In 2000, Israel’s highly militarized high-tech economy was counting heavily on a huge sale of Phalcon air war technology to China. The US didn’t like it. Barak said Israel would never back down. Clinton told them quietly, ‘Sorry, no.’ End of story. “–Sharon’s siege of Arafat in Ramallah was interfering with Bush administration efforts to garner support for the war on Iraq. The orders came quietly from Washington. Same [result].”</p>
<p>Chomsky points out that there are many such cases, “some major ones (like Eisenhower ordering Israel out of Egyptian territory on the eve of a presidential election), others minor ones like Ramallah, many in between.” Were it not for the part that Israel plays in the US government’s decades-long plan for control of Middle East energy resources, it would be of no more concern to us than any other state with a questionable racial policy and a population less than that of New York City — Zimbabwe, say, or Uganda (even if the latter had become a Jewish state, as was once proposed).</p>
<p>Israel’s military usefulness to the US is not limited to the Middle East. In two of the worst examples — near-genocidal campaigns in which the US government was hampered by political pressure at home — Israel carried out the bidding of its patron. In the 1970s, at the request of the Carter administration, Israel transferred war-planes to Indonesia to aid in the suppression of the East Timorese, a massacre comparable to those in Cambodia. In the 1980s, Israeli military advisors aided the Reagan administration in genocidal campaigns in Guatemala (for which Clinton later apologized, with monstrous inadequacy).</p>
<p>Chomsky refers to Israel as “virtually an offshore US military establishment.” An Israeli journalist recently described the country as “an army with a state, not state with an army,” and that army is “almost an offshoot of the Pentagon,” Chomsky adds. He points out, “Unfortunately for Israel, it’s coming to resemble the US in other ways. It approximates the US in having the highest inequality in the industrial world, and its social welfare system, once impressive, is visibly declining. It may end up being almost a caricature of the worst features of American society. These are consequences of the choice of confrontation and dependency rather than peaceful integration into the region, fateful choices decades ago.” It also makes the Israeli polity dependent on war: Zalman Shoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US, is quoted as saying recently to Israel’s Military Radio (GALATZ), “The postponement of the war against Iraq is against the Israeli interests.”</p>
<p>US FOREIGN POLICY: IRAQ</p>
<p>In 1934 Fascist Italy invaded the impoverished kingdom of Ethiopia to build its new Empire, and in the event the principal contemporary organ of international law, the League of Nations, was destroyed. The US war on Iraq resembles Italy’s, not least in that it shreds international law and subverts the UN. The comparison perhaps reverses a famous observation about everything in history happening twice: the first time it may have been a farce, but the second may be a great tragedy indeed.</p>
<p>The Bush administration has at least three important goals in launching this criminal enterprise:</p>
<p>First, consistent with the fundamental principle of US foreign policy, this is a war for oil, for control of (not just access to) Iraqi oil reserves, the second largest in the world. That control rather than access is the issue, is shown by the hesitation of the large oil companies about this war: they have access now and fear its disruption.</p>
<p>Second, it is a demonstration war, as all US wars since World War II (including Vietnam) have been: a state which refuses to obey Washington’s orders — or has the dangerous idea that it wants to use its resources for the purposes of its population, rather than integrate them into the world economy on terms set by the US — must be punished severely.</p>
<p>Third, the war distracts from our wretched economy at home; the administration mobilizes for war and encourages the fear of terrorism to cover over their understandably unpopular economic policy — nothing less than the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich — and nevertheless to assure their reelection (if you agree that they were elected in the first place).</p>
<p>The war is meant to secure and defend the long-term foreign policy of the US, in the Middle East and in the world at large. To understand why that policy requires the reduction of Iraq — and indeed the destruction of any regional power with “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) — we need to grasp what might be called “asymmetrical deterrence,” the way in which a weak state may have just enough weapons to deter the threats of a strong one.</p>
<p>The US enjoys nuclear dominance in the world and Israel, with a stronger military than any European NATO country, nuclear dominance in the region. (General Lee Butler, head of the Strategic Command under Clinton: “It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so.”) These weapons are used primarily as a threat against weaker, non-nuclear countries. Thus every US president since Truman has threatened to use nuclear weapons against a Third World country. But the US ability to threaten another country is limited if, even though the US reduced that country to nuclear waste, it could itself be hit with even one nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>Similarly, Israel has an overwhelming dominance of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, and chemical) in the region, but the possession of only a few — or even one — by a rival to the US cop can neutralize the cop’s offensive dominance. Of course it would be insanity for Iraq or any other state to attack Israel — it would be immediately obliterated by Israel and the US — but Israel has to hesitate to use its weapons of mass destruction, or even threaten to do so, if there is any chance that the cost would be Tel Aviv…</p>
<p>The American “framework of order” is endangered if its regional enforcer can be constrained. It is in this way that the possession of a few WMDs (by Iraq, Iran, or any other state in the region) is a defensive posture, not an offensive one — and surely the policy that would have to be adopted even if the government in Baghdad were democratic (highly unlikely, because the US doesn’t want it). Similarly, on an international scale, China developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them a generation ago and produced about twenty, which they still have — not an offensive threat, but a defensive caution to the US and Russia.</p>
<p>The new US attack on Iraq, then, is based first of all on maintaining the persistent US position in the Middle East and eliminating a check on America’s regional enforcer. But it is a good deal more than that. It is also part of a plan for a new colonialism, a plan quite publicly announced by the most extreme elements in the US government, in league with the most right-wing elements in Israel (much to the right of the current prime minister, war criminal as he may be).</p>
<p>As Kurt Nimmo explained in CounterPunch, “…the idea of killing Saddam Hussein and inflicting depredation on the Iraqi people is not a Bush idea (it can be argued Bush has no original ideas of his own) — the current scheme was a roughcast devised by Likudite Richard Perle. In 1996, Perle (and Douglas Feith) wrote ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ which he presented to then Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu. The plan called for not only eliminating Hussein and installing a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad, but also for trashing the Oslo Accords, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and overthrowing or destabilizing the governments of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Perle’s master plan for Likud regional dominance … was crafted for the Jerusalem and Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)…”</p>
<p>The plan had been announced in the Clinton administration (which was more extreme on Israel than the first Bush administration), but the planners came to power in the Pentagon and the State Department in the second Bush administration. They saw 9/11 as a heaven-sent opportunity to put the plan into operation. As the Washington Post recently reported, Bush signed a document directing the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq less than a week after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington — although the administration has never had any evidence of Iraqi complicity in those attacks. And, quite consistently with the views of the Washington hawks (“chicken-hawks” who avoided the military themselves), Israeli Prime Minister Sharon told The Times (UK) that Iran — one of the “axis of evil” powers identified by Bush — should be targeted “the day after” action against Iraq ends because of its role as a “centre of world terror”. The plan is clearly underway.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>IN SUMMARY, ISRAEL’S PART in the US attack on Iraq depends on its central role in the on-going American policy of controlling Middle East energy resources, which gives the US a strangle-hold on the world economy; the US attack removes the defensive constraint that even one weapon of mass destruction might have on Israel’s ability to threaten its neighbors with its overwhelming nuclear advantage, while the US issues a lethal warning to the world of what happens to American clients who stop obeying orders.</p>
<p>The conservative columnist Robert Novak said on Meet the Press in December that the extremists in the Bush administration never wanted inspections in Iraq: “This is really about change of regime in Iraq and change of the political outlines in the Middle East more to Israel’s benefit. That’s what this has all been about, and since it’s very hard to sell that to the American people, they have done it on a weapons of mass destruction basis.” With the proviso that “Israel’s benefit” here means the enhancement of the role that US foreign policy provides for a militarized Israel — hardly to the benefit of the people of Israel — the comment seems about right.</p>
<p>CARL ESTABROOK is a Visiting Scholar University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a CounterPunch columnist. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu" type="external">galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Israel and the US War on Iraq | true | https://counterpunch.org/2003/02/26/israel-and-the-us-war-on-iraq/ | 2003-02-26 | 4left
| 3,051 | It8217s remarkable how rarely Israel is mentioned in regard to the American plans to attack Iraq 8212 with the exception of occasional notices of how strongly the Israeli government supports those plans A proper assessment of its part in this war depends upon an understanding of Israel8217s position in the United States8217 overall policy for the Middle East and how that policy is being implemented with specific regard to Iraq Patrick Buchanan was thoroughly rebuked when he remarked on the eve of the US attack on Iraq in 1991 8220There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East 8212 the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States8221 But he was saying aloud what few others were What his national chauvinism prevented him from noticing was that in its avidity for war the Israeli government was acting 8212 as it had for more than a generation 8212 as the principal US client our 8220local cop on the beat8221 as the Nixon Administration had put it It8217s this ongoing role that explains what part Israel has in the current slaughter of Iraqis US FOREIGN POLICY THE MIDDLE EAST Since the Second World War 8212 from which the United States emerged as the world8217s only undamaged major country and proceeded to organize the economy of the world 8212 a cornerstone of American policy has been control of Middle East energy resources the greatest geopolitical prize in the modern world Control not just access was what was demanded by all US administrations Republican and Democrat because control of those resources gave the US control of its principal economic competitors 8212 which turned out to be by the late 20th century a Germanled Europe and a Japanled East Asia The US has never in fact required Mideast oil for its own society 8212 all the energy requirements of the US could be filled from national sources especially when we include in 8220national sources8221 our 8220backyard8221 8212 Latin America But Germany imports 80 of its energy resources and Japan 100 Who controls world oil controls the lifeline of the modern world And the principal threat to US control has always come from what the US called 8220domestic radicalism8221 8212 the dangerous idea amongst the peoples of the oilproducing regions that their natural wealth should be used for their benefit rather than for that of the corporations and the economic elites to whom the US might assign it And the chief form of 8220domestic radicalism8221 was Arab nationalism To guard against it the US constructed and took over from Britain a series of repressive Arab governments the family dictatorships around the Persian Gulf with Saudi Arabia at their head US FOREIGN POLICY ISRAEL Since it launched a war and destroyed the center of Arab nationalism in 1967 Israel8217s job in America8217s 8220overall framework of order8221 in Henry Kissinger8217s phrase was to guarantee that those conservative Arab governments were protected from their most dangerous enemy 8212 their own populations Israel was to be the final bulwark against the dangers that would be posed to US control if 8220domestic radicals8221 came to power in one of the oilproducing states 8212 as happened in Iran in 1979 For that reason and not because of some imagined invincibility of the proIsrael lobby the US is willing to provide Israel with vastly more money and support than it gives to any other country in the world In second place is Egypt Israel8217s principal antagonist in 1967 whom the Carter administration bought off at Camp David in 1978 securing Israel8217s southern border in third Turkey Israel8217s principal military ally in the presentday Middle East Today as a result Israel has perhaps the third strongest military in the world with hundreds of advanced nuclear weapons Israel did not sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty missiles and submarines with which to deliver them and an air force of USsupplied F16s and attack helicopters For that reason too the US is willing to support Israel8217s brutal and racist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza condemned by the United Nations thirtyfive years ago in Security Council Resolution 242 and its settlement of its citizens in the occupied territories recognized as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention 8212 a war crime 8212 around the world Not only have these been the consistent policies of all Israeli governments Labor and Likud they also serve the US purpose of discouraging domestic radicalism a democratic and secular Palestine being seen as a 8220threat of a good example8221 even by some Arab states To discourage the threat of progressive Arab nationalism the US and Israel have on occasion been willing to fund even Islamicist movements Hamas and the Mujahideen that they saw as counters to it Consistent USIsraeli policy has been largely successful in destroying secular Arab nationalism as it existed two generations ago 8212 and replacing it with religious fundamentalism In 1982 in order to consolidate the Israeli control over the occupied territories the US armed and supported the most extreme terrorist act in the Middle East in a generation the invasion of Lebanon which killed about 20000 people many more than Iraq8217s invasion of Kuwait It was conducted by the current Prime Minister of Israel and launched because of the danger that peace might break out in the Middle East That motive grows to the extent that the state is militarized In the principal American client as perhaps nowhere else in the world is it true that war is the health of the state And that war is principally a war against Palestinians That war is not simply killing To take one example from far too many Israeli forces closed the Islamic University and the Polytechnic Institute in Hebron last month actions to which even the US State Department took mild exception Elsewhere the Israeli army looked for similarly creative forms of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing in east Jerusalem they sealed the apartments of three imprisoned Hamas militants one of whom had been sentenced to thirtyfive consecutive life terms by filling the rooms with concrete The Guardian UK reports that now more than a thousand Palestinians are held by the Israeli army under detention without charge the sort of thing we used to think only totalitarian governments did 8212 it is of course now US practice too This oppressive and antiintellectual policy is practiced by other American clients as well US financial and military aid to Turkey was used brutally to suppress the Kurds in the southeast in the 1990s creating millions of refugees destroying some 3500 villages and killing tens of thousands of people 8212 an ethnic cleansing supported by the Clinton administration Since the military coup in 1980 Turkish universities have been rife with police spies and evidence of Kurdish culture to say nothing of Kurdish nationalism has been suppressed America and its clients in the Middle East have as their enemies whole peoples of the region Any understanding of Israel8217s role in the coming US attack on Iraq has to begin with the Jewish state8217s continuing position in US policy Those on the American Right and elsewhere who think that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog have got it quite wrong the dog is firmly in control Israeli governments whether Labor or Likud do nothing without the approval of their American paymasters Noam Chomsky offers three recent examples beginning with the first Bush administration 82208211The Bush 1 case involved 10 million in loan guarantees which Israel was using illegally but with US connivance for settlement in the territories The Shamir government was doing it in a brazen way that annoyed BakerBush Bush suspended the guarantees 8230 Israel returned to the preferred Laborstyle hypocrisy 8216thickening settlements8217 8216natural growth8217 etc and all was well 82208211In 2000 Israel8217s highly militarized hightech economy was counting heavily on a huge sale of Phalcon air war technology to China The US didn8217t like it Barak said Israel would never back down Clinton told them quietly 8216Sorry no8217 End of story 82208211Sharon8217s siege of Arafat in Ramallah was interfering with Bush administration efforts to garner support for the war on Iraq The orders came quietly from Washington Same result8221 Chomsky points out that there are many such cases 8220some major ones like Eisenhower ordering Israel out of Egyptian territory on the eve of a presidential election others minor ones like Ramallah many in between8221 Were it not for the part that Israel plays in the US government8217s decadeslong plan for control of Middle East energy resources it would be of no more concern to us than any other state with a questionable racial policy and a population less than that of New York City 8212 Zimbabwe say or Uganda even if the latter had become a Jewish state as was once proposed Israel8217s military usefulness to the US is not limited to the Middle East In two of the worst examples 8212 neargenocidal campaigns in which the US government was hampered by political pressure at home 8212 Israel carried out the bidding of its patron In the 1970s at the request of the Carter administration Israel transferred warplanes to Indonesia to aid in the suppression of the East Timorese a massacre comparable to those in Cambodia In the 1980s Israeli military advisors aided the Reagan administration in genocidal campaigns in Guatemala for which Clinton later apologized with monstrous inadequacy Chomsky refers to Israel as 8220virtually an offshore US military establishment8221 An Israeli journalist recently described the country as 8220an army with a state not state with an army8221 and that army is 8220almost an offshoot of the Pentagon8221 Chomsky adds He points out 8220Unfortunately for Israel it8217s coming to resemble the US in other ways It approximates the US in having the highest inequality in the industrial world and its social welfare system once impressive is visibly declining It may end up being almost a caricature of the worst features of American society These are consequences of the choice of confrontation and dependency rather than peaceful integration into the region fateful choices decades ago8221 It also makes the Israeli polity dependent on war Zalman Shoval former Israeli ambassador to the US is quoted as saying recently to Israel8217s Military Radio GALATZ 8220The postponement of the war against Iraq is against the Israeli interests8221 US FOREIGN POLICY IRAQ In 1934 Fascist Italy invaded the impoverished kingdom of Ethiopia to build its new Empire and in the event the principal contemporary organ of international law the League of Nations was destroyed The US war on Iraq resembles Italy8217s not least in that it shreds international law and subverts the UN The comparison perhaps reverses a famous observation about everything in history happening twice the first time it may have been a farce but the second may be a great tragedy indeed The Bush administration has at least three important goals in launching this criminal enterprise First consistent with the fundamental principle of US foreign policy this is a war for oil for control of not just access to Iraqi oil reserves the second largest in the world That control rather than access is the issue is shown by the hesitation of the large oil companies about this war they have access now and fear its disruption Second it is a demonstration war as all US wars since World War II including Vietnam have been a state which refuses to obey Washington8217s orders 8212 or has the dangerous idea that it wants to use its resources for the purposes of its population rather than integrate them into the world economy on terms set by the US 8212 must be punished severely Third the war distracts from our wretched economy at home the administration mobilizes for war and encourages the fear of terrorism to cover over their understandably unpopular economic policy 8212 nothing less than the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich 8212 and nevertheless to assure their reelection if you agree that they were elected in the first place The war is meant to secure and defend the longterm foreign policy of the US in the Middle East and in the world at large To understand why that policy requires the reduction of Iraq 8212 and indeed the destruction of any regional power with 8220weapons of mass destruction8221 WMDs 8212 we need to grasp what might be called 8220asymmetrical deterrence8221 the way in which a weak state may have just enough weapons to deter the threats of a strong one The US enjoys nuclear dominance in the world and Israel with a stronger military than any European NATO country nuclear dominance in the region General Lee Butler head of the Strategic Command under Clinton 8220It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East one nation has armed itself ostensibly with stockpiles of nuclear weapons perhaps numbering in the hundreds and that inspires other nations to do so8221 These weapons are used primarily as a threat against weaker nonnuclear countries Thus every US president since Truman has threatened to use nuclear weapons against a Third World country But the US ability to threaten another country is limited if even though the US reduced that country to nuclear waste it could itself be hit with even one nuclear weapon Similarly Israel has an overwhelming dominance of weapons of mass destruction nuclear biological and chemical in the region but the possession of only a few 8212 or even one 8212 by a rival to the US cop can neutralize the cop8217s offensive dominance Of course it would be insanity for Iraq or any other state to attack Israel 8212 it would be immediately obliterated by Israel and the US 8212 but Israel has to hesitate to use its weapons of mass destruction or even threaten to do so if there is any chance that the cost would be Tel Aviv8230 The American 8220framework of order8221 is endangered if its regional enforcer can be constrained It is in this way that the possession of a few WMDs by Iraq Iran or any other state in the region is a defensive posture not an offensive one 8212 and surely the policy that would have to be adopted even if the government in Baghdad were democratic highly unlikely because the US doesn8217t want it Similarly on an international scale China developed nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them a generation ago and produced about twenty which they still have 8212 not an offensive threat but a defensive caution to the US and Russia The new US attack on Iraq then is based first of all on maintaining the persistent US position in the Middle East and eliminating a check on America8217s regional enforcer But it is a good deal more than that It is also part of a plan for a new colonialism a plan quite publicly announced by the most extreme elements in the US government in league with the most rightwing elements in Israel much to the right of the current prime minister war criminal as he may be As Kurt Nimmo explained in CounterPunch 82208230the idea of killing Saddam Hussein and inflicting depredation on the Iraqi people is not a Bush idea it can be argued Bush has no original ideas of his own 8212 the current scheme was a roughcast devised by Likudite Richard Perle In 1996 Perle and Douglas Feith wrote 8216A Clean Break A New Strategy for Securing the Realm8217 which he presented to then Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu The plan called for not only eliminating Hussein and installing a Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad but also for trashing the Oslo Accords Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and overthrowing or destabilizing the governments of Syria Lebanon Saudi Arabia and Iran Perle8217s master plan for Likud regional dominance 8230 was crafted for the Jerusalem and Washington DCbased Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies IASPS82308221 The plan had been announced in the Clinton administration which was more extreme on Israel than the first Bush administration but the planners came to power in the Pentagon and the State Department in the second Bush administration They saw 911 as a heavensent opportunity to put the plan into operation As the Washington Post recently reported Bush signed a document directing the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq less than a week after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington 8212 although the administration has never had any evidence of Iraqi complicity in those attacks And quite consistently with the views of the Washington hawks 8220chickenhawks8221 who avoided the military themselves Israeli Prime Minister Sharon told The Times UK that Iran 8212 one of the 8220axis of evil8221 powers identified by Bush 8212 should be targeted 8220the day after8221 action against Iraq ends because of its role as a 8220centre of world terror8221 The plan is clearly underway IN SUMMARY ISRAEL8217S PART in the US attack on Iraq depends on its central role in the ongoing American policy of controlling Middle East energy resources which gives the US a stranglehold on the world economy the US attack removes the defensive constraint that even one weapon of mass destruction might have on Israel8217s ability to threaten its neighbors with its overwhelming nuclear advantage while the US issues a lethal warning to the world of what happens to American clients who stop obeying orders The conservative columnist Robert Novak said on Meet the Press in December that the extremists in the Bush administration never wanted inspections in Iraq 8220This is really about change of regime in Iraq and change of the political outlines in the Middle East more to Israel8217s benefit That8217s what this has all been about and since it8217s very hard to sell that to the American people they have done it on a weapons of mass destruction basis8221 With the proviso that 8220Israel8217s benefit8221 here means the enhancement of the role that US foreign policy provides for a militarized Israel 8212 hardly to the benefit of the people of Israel 8212 the comment seems about right CARL ESTABROOK is a Visiting Scholar University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and a CounterPunch columnist He can be reached at galliheralexialisuiucedu amp160 | It8217s/PROPN remarkable/ADJ how/SCONJ rarely/ADV Israel/PROPN is/AUX mentioned/VERB in/ADP regard/NOUN to/ADP the/DET American/ADJ plans/NOUN to/PART attack/VERB Iraq/PROPN 8212/NUM with/ADP the/DET exception/NOUN of/ADP occasional/ADJ notices/NOUN of/ADP how/SCONJ strongly/ADV the/DET Israeli/ADJ government/NOUN supports/VERB those/DET plans/NOUN A/DET proper/ADJ assessment/NOUN of/ADP its/PRON part/NOUN in/ADP this/DET war/NOUN depends/VERB upon/SCONJ an/DET understanding/NOUN of/ADP Israel8217s/PROPN position/NOUN in/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States8217/PROPN overall/ADJ policy/NOUN for/ADP the/DET Middle/PROPN 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<p>What does it take to get a college education? Six years ago, Catalyst Chicago began to examine that complex question in “The College Challenge,” a series of periodic reports on the struggles of nine black and Latino students from Chicago Public Schools who were aiming to earn a college degree.</p>
<p>Associate Editor Debra Williams profiled the nine as they coped with the myriad challenges of making the transition from high school to college: difficulty finding financial aid, inadequate academic preparation and social adjustment.</p>
<p>Since 2001, the district has taken steps to boost college admissions, creating a Department of Postsecondary Education and dispatching college coaches to a dozen schools to motivate students to apply for postsecondary education and help them through the process. Earlier this year, the district released data showing that college attendance now stands at 48 percent. (See <a href="" type="internal">“College-going rates inch higher,” May 2007</a>.)</p>
<p>Yet once in college, students face a tougher hurdle: graduation. Just 45 percent of CPS graduates who enroll in a four-year college end up with a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 64 percent nationally, according to a 2006 study from the Consortium on Chicago School Research.</p>
<p>With this report, Catalyst checks in with five of the nine students to find out whether they graduated and if so, what made the difference in helping them surmount the hurdles. Although the students Catalyst was able to locate and interview each stressed that hard work and perseverance were important to their success, another critical factor emerged: support from outside, whether from a parent, a high-school mentor or the university they attended.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Then: After graduating from Orr High School in Humboldt Park, Brooke Ray was accepted to her dream college: the University of Southern California. But the transition to college was a shock. Though she had been Orr’s valedictorian, Ray struggled in college, and her freshman GPA fell to 2.8. Finding the money was a struggle, too. She had financial aid, took out loans and got support from her mother, but still had to take part-time jobs to pay the hefty $36,000 annual tuition, room and board.</p>
<p>Now: Despite the heavy financial burden, Ray graduated from the University of Southern California in 2005 with a major in international relations and a minor in business. Although her high school classes did not prepare her for university-level work, Ray maintained a B-average GPA by studying hard and asking for help from her professors and teaching assistants.</p>
<p>Ray also says she relied on the emotional support of her high school teachers and administrators to keep going when things got rough. “I think attending Orr High School was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she says. “There are people that believed in me and what I could accomplish.”</p>
<p>Hard work in the real world and skills she learned in an after-school program also paid off.</p>
<p>Ray says she had to work two or three jobs at a time to pay her bills, including stints in USC’s admissions office and architecture department and outside jobs in modeling and event planning. “It was hard to find an academic balance as well as work and have a social life,” she says.</p>
<p>But after graduation, a full resume and the connections she made through employers and the USC alumni association quickly led to a job she loves: director of product development for eForce Media, Inc., a marketing company. Ray manages the design and marketing of the company’s Web site using skills she learned in high school and college.</p>
<p>Ray first learned about Web design through Tech 37, a city-sponsored after-school program that teaches high school juniors and seniors to troubleshoot computer equipment, use new technology and create “Webliographies” to help people find information on the Internet. She saw the program as a link to her future. “I knew that computers interested me. I knew that there would be a life in technology and there would be a demand for it.”</p>
<p>In January, Ray will begin classes for computer programming and Web design to continue to build her skills. Ultimately, she wants to start a marketing company to build Web sites for small businesses, a dream she has had since high school. “I was always a business-minded person and I always knew I would own my own business one day,” she says.</p>
<p>Now, Ray encourages other CPS students to do what she did: Get a job as soon as possible and start learning about potential careers. The part-time jobs she held and the connections she made through them taught her more than she learned in the classroom, she says. “It’s life experiences and interactions that prepare you for the real world.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Then: Vernon Payne had little academic direction as a student at Morgan Park High School. He was a talented artist but a mediocre student who admitted he did only enough schoolwork to get by. Recognizing his talent, his family and teachers encouraged him to enroll at Columbia College—known for its arts programs—to study fine art. At first, he was disorganized and rarely showed up for class. When Catalyst last spoke with him in 2002, he vowed to make school a priority.</p>
<p>Now: Although he had a rocky start, Payne graduated from Columbia College in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts.</p>
<p>Freshman year and the beginning of his sophomore year were the toughest, Payne says. “That’s when I had my worst grades. But eventually I got the hang of college life.”</p>
<p>The second semester of his freshman year, Payne rarely showed up for class and ended up failing the only two classes he was taking. He says anxiety kept him from concentrating and admits he had poor organizational skills.</p>
<p>But pressure from family, friends and teachers to do better helped get him on track. And his mother ended up laying down the law: She said she would no longer pay for his education if he didn’t try harder.</p>
<p>He considered dropping out and returning to school later. But if he did, his mother, who was footing his tuition, told him he would have to pay her back for the classes he had failed before she would help pay his tuition in the future.</p>
<p>The threat worked. Payne got organized and studied hard. Ultimately, he graduated with a 2.9 GPA.</p>
<p>“I didn’t believe in myself, especially in the beginning,” he says.</p>
<p>(Students at Columbia College, an open-admissions school in the South Loop, often lack the academic background needed to succeed at a more competitive institution. The school offers programs to help freshmen who need an extra boost, including the Conaway Achievement Project for students who are first-generation college students, come from low-income families or are disabled; and the Bridge summer program for incoming freshmen who lack the academic skills needed for college work.)</p>
<p>Once he committed to school, Payne took classes in everything from performance art to ceramics. He discovered a passion for printmaking and painting and developed confidence in himself.</p>
<p>“I had an identity crisis because I didn’t know who I was,” he says. “The whole experience of college helped me realize who I really am.”</p>
<p>While still a student, Payne started working at an art supply and frame store in Morgan Park. He is now a manager and loves his job. “I order, I frame, I do it all. I worked my way up from the bottom all the way up,” he says proudly.</p>
<p>Payne has set up a Web site to sell his artwork, www.vernonpayne.com. He also has plans to launch his own business, an online art supply store. Down the road, he hopes to pursue a graduate degree in art.</p>
<p>His advice to other students: Work hard. “You got to want it,” Payne says. “If you don’t want it, it’s not going to come to you.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Then: In 2002, Adam Ramirez was a senior at Roosevelt University earning top grades and about to earn a degree in elementary education—a substantial accomplishment after struggling at Hubbard High in West Lawn. Despite low grades and a low ACT score, the Scholars Teach and Reach (STAR) scholarship program for aspiring teachers took a chance on him. STAR provides financial aid and mentoring for students, and the support paid off: Ramirez became a model college student—STAR requires students to maintain at least a 3.25 GPA each year, but Ramirez had a 3.8 upon graduation—and was a volunteer at Pulaski Elementary in Logan Square.</p>
<p>Now: After graduating in 2003, Ramirez is now living his longtime dream: He’s teaching 7th- and 8th-grade math and 8th-grade reading at Eberhart Elementary in Chicago Lawn, where he started in 2004.</p>
<p>But after several years in the classroom, Ramirez says flat-out, “I don’t think any school prepares you for the actual teaching experience [and] the issues these kids are bringing into the classroom,” he says, noting that his students have dealt with significant problems such as abuse and rape.</p>
<p>“How do I expect these kids to learn how to add integers when they’re going through so much personal trauma inside?” he adds.</p>
<p>Ramirez says he achieved success in college, despite poor preparation in high school, because he discovered his ethnic identity as a Native American. “I joined ethnic dancing and from that I met many people connected to their roots,” he says. “I found who I was as an indigenous person and that made all the difference in the world.”</p>
<p>Now, Ramirez advises high school students to study their ancestry, like he did, to find the self-awareness they need to succeed. “If you don’t know your past, you’re not going to know your future,” he says.</p>
<p>In October, an Eberhart student was murdered and Ramirez turned to his Native American roots to help students cope. He used the tradition of “talking circles” to allow students to discuss the loss and the consequences of decision-making. He also read to them from “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way,” a book by writer and former East Los Angeles gang member Luis Rodriguez on the devastating consequences of gang violence and the importance of making good choices.</p>
<p>Ramirez says he has been disappointed because of a perceived lack of compassion for students among his colleagues. “My goal was to keep these kids out of gangs,” he says. “I was so enthusiastic. But now that dream is just dying. The teachers around me are killing that spirit.”</p>
<p>His answer to that challenge is to pursue a graduate degree in school administration. Then, Ramirez says, he’ll have more power to fix a school by hiring teachers who care about the kids and by implementing a Native American approach to discipline that is similar to the concept of restorative justice—asking kids to make restitution when they do something wrong instead of kicking them out of school via suspension or expulsion.</p>
<p>Even with the difficulties, Ramirez has never considered quitting his job. “When I was going to school, I would often ask myself what I would do if I wasn’t teaching,” he says. “And I still can’t answer that question. I have to keep teaching.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Then: At Juarez High School in Pilsen, Ana Salinas earned good grades and took Advanced Placement classes. So it came as a big surprise to her when she failed a pre-calculus class during her first semester at Loyola University and then had to take a remedial math course. Despite inadequate preparation in high school, Salinas had a passion for numbers and was determined to succeed. With support and hard work, she got good grades—even in math.</p>
<p>Now: Today, Ana Salinas teaches math to 7th-graders at Ruiz Elementary in Pilsen, the same grammar school she attended. She is now working toward a master’s degree in bilingual education and plans to earn a master’s degree in mathematics. Both degrees will make her a hot commodity in the teaching field.</p>
<p>Salinas, who graduated from Loyola University with a 3.0 GPA in 2003, earned a bachelor’s degree in education with a concentration in mathematics. Support from her mother and former teachers (who had encouraged her to pursue a teaching career) kept Salinas on track personally as well as academically.</p>
<p>“I kept talking to my old teachers from high school,” says Salinas, who thought at times that she might not be smart enough to graduate. “It kept inspiring me to complete my studies.”</p>
<p>One of those teachers is Dana Butler, now principal of Ruiz Elementary.</p>
<p>“We see people from all walks of life [become teachers], but I think it’s an added bonus when you can have someone from your own community,” Butler says. Salinas’ success shows the students that a college diploma is achievable for them, too.</p>
<p>Salinas sees herself as a role model for students, but the transition from Ruiz student to Ruiz teacher has been difficult. Although her former teachers now are peers, Salinas is hesitant to call them by their first names. “I still feel like a student,” she says.</p>
<p>Ruiz teachers, however, have had no difficulty accepting Salinas as a colleague. Theresa Kevorkian, an 8th-grade teacher, says she is thrilled to see Salinas grow from an insightful teenager into a talented educator.</p>
<p>“She’s an amazing math teacher,” Kevorkian says. “She knows how to break it down—she’s effective. The kids are focused, she gives them a real strong foundation and they end up really understanding the language of math.”</p>
<p>Salinas says her difficulties with math in college made her a better teacher. “I did struggle, and I saw what did work for me, and that’s what I work into my classroom,” she says. “I’m one of those visual learners. You have to show me. I have to understand the reasons behind it. And that’s how I teach my students.”</p>
<p>Salinas is earning a master’s in bilingual education from Concordia University, where she maintains a 4.0 GPA and is scheduled to graduate in December. She plans to apply to the Illinois Institute of Technology to earn another master’s in mathematics. She also wants to write children’s math books.</p>
<p>“When I first started teaching, I thought that was it—I was done,” Salinas says. “I still love teaching, but I feel that I need to do more.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Then: When Catalyst last spoke with Dannielle Dungey in 2002, she was in her third year at Northern Illinois University, wondering whether she should have chosen another major besides history. The prospect of higher pay lured her to consider other careers—she planned to become a teacher—but she worried that changing that plan would mean losing her grants and scholarships. “I wish I could have been exposed to other careers,” she says now. “There are so many careers out there I didn’t even know about.”</p>
<p>Now: Dungey ultimately stuck with her major, and her decision to become a teacher, because she already had dedicated so much time and money to that career path. In 2004, she graduated from NIU with her teacher’s certification as well as her bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>By the time she began having doubts about her career path, Dungey says, “I was already a junior and had already started my [major] program and I just didn’t want to quit. There were so many people who had invested in me.”</p>
<p>Outside support, from peers and adult mentors, made a critical difference for Dungey. The Golden Apple Foundation, an organization that provides scholarships for teachers, created a support system for her. “It helped me network and meet people, like other scholars,” she says.</p>
<p>While Golden Apple provided emotional support, Dungey knew to reach out to get the academic support she needed at NIU. Whenever Dungey struggled, she went to the university’s writing center to have her papers proofread, or made an appointment to talk with her professors.</p>
<p>Dungey now is teaching history to juniors and seniors at Eisenhower High School in south suburban Blue Island. She felt academically prepared for teaching, and remembered from her own high school classes what made learning fun. But she wasn’t ready for the challenge of teaching unmotivated students.</p>
<p>Dungey says she tries to inspire her students and give them the same passion for education that she had by offering extra-credit options and giving a motivational speech at the end of each class. “If you’re not smiling, I encourage you to put a smile on your face. Live every day to the fullest with no regrets. And always remember life is what you make of it,” she says.</p>
<p>It’s also her job, Dungey says, to prepare her students for college by teaching them to be responsible. For one, she does not accept late assignments. “I tell them I do this because when you go to college, professors aren’t going to go to your dorm and knock on your door to ask if you’re coming to class,” she says.</p>
<p>Beyond the classroom, Dungey assists students who want to go to college the same way her high school teachers helped her: by nominating them for scholarships.</p>
<p>Dungey also has earned a master’s degree in school leadership from Concordia University. She wants to become a dean of discipline and sees it as a way to work in educational policy while still inspiring young people.</p>
<p>“There’s always a good and a bad choice, and the choices you make affect you,” Dungey says. “I want them to understand that there are consequences to everything they do.”</p>
<p>She also wants students to understand that there is potential in everything, too. “I’d love it if they remembered, 20 to 30 years from now, everything I taught them about history,” Dungey says. “But if they don’t remember anything else, I want them to remember they can do anything if they want to.”</p>
<p>The Hyde Park Hair Salon in Chicago was where President Obama used to be a regular customer. His supporters gather here to watch the returns roll in. Photo by Jonathan Gibby.</p>
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<p>Election Day. Photo by Lucio Villa.</p>
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<p>Supporters of President Obama cheer as election results are reported at the Hyde Park Hair Salon on Nov. 6, 2012 in Chicago. The president was once a regular customer here. Photo by Jonathan Gibby.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">permalink</a></p>
<p>The Hyde Park Hair Salon in Chicago was where President Obama used to be a regular customer. His supporters gather here to watch the returns roll in. Photo by Jonathan Gibby.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">permalink</a></p>
<p>Election Day. Photo by Lucio Villa.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">permalink</a></p> | The College Challenge revisited: Support, perseverance are key | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/college-challenge-revisited-support-perseverance-are-key/ | 2007-12-17 | 3left-center
| 3,052 | What does it take to get a college education Six years ago Catalyst Chicago began to examine that complex question in 8220The College Challenge8221 a series of periodic reports on the struggles of nine black and Latino students from Chicago Public Schools who were aiming to earn a college degree Associate Editor Debra Williams profiled the nine as they coped with the myriad challenges of making the transition from high school to college difficulty finding financial aid inadequate academic preparation and social adjustment Since 2001 the district has taken steps to boost college admissions creating a Department of Postsecondary Education and dispatching college coaches to a dozen schools to motivate students to apply for postsecondary education and help them through the process Earlier this year the district released data showing that college attendance now stands at 48 percent See 8220Collegegoing rates inch higher8221 May 2007 Yet once in college students face a tougher hurdle graduation Just 45 percent of CPS graduates who enroll in a fouryear college end up with a bachelor8217s degree within six years compared to 64 percent nationally according to a 2006 study from the Consortium on Chicago School Research With this report Catalyst checks in with five of the nine students to find out whether they graduated and if so what made the difference in helping them surmount the hurdles Although the students Catalyst was able to locate and interview each stressed that hard work and perseverance were important to their success another critical factor emerged support from outside whether from a parent a highschool mentor or the university they attended amp160 amp160 Then After graduating from Orr High School in Humboldt Park Brooke Ray was accepted to her dream college the University of Southern California But the transition to college was a shock Though she had been Orr8217s valedictorian Ray struggled in college and her freshman GPA fell to 28 Finding the money was a struggle too She had financial aid took out loans and got support from her mother but still had to take parttime jobs to pay the hefty 36000 annual tuition room and board Now Despite the heavy financial burden Ray graduated from the University of Southern California in 2005 with a major in international relations and a minor in business Although her high school classes did not prepare her for universitylevel work Ray maintained a Baverage GPA by studying hard and asking for help from her professors and teaching assistants Ray also says she relied on the emotional support of her high school teachers and administrators to keep going when things got rough 8220I think attending Orr High School was the best thing that ever happened to me8221 she says 8220There are people that believed in me and what I could accomplish8221 Hard work in the real world and skills she learned in an afterschool program also paid off Ray says she had to work two or three jobs at a time to pay her bills including stints in USC8217s admissions office and architecture department and outside jobs in modeling and event planning 8220It was hard to find an academic balance as well as work and have a social life8221 she says But after graduation a full resume and the connections she made through employers and the USC alumni association quickly led to a job she loves director of product development for eForce Media Inc a marketing company Ray manages the design and marketing of the company8217s Web site using skills she learned in high school and college Ray first learned about Web design through Tech 37 a citysponsored afterschool program that teaches high school juniors and seniors to troubleshoot computer equipment use new technology and create 8220Webliographies8221 to help people find information on the Internet She saw the program as a link to her future 8220I knew that computers interested me I knew that there would be a life in technology and there would be a demand for it8221 In January Ray will begin classes for computer programming and Web design to continue to build her skills Ultimately she wants to start a marketing company to build Web sites for small businesses a dream she has had since high school 8220I was always a businessminded person and I always knew I would own my own business one day8221 she says Now Ray encourages other CPS students to do what she did Get a job as soon as possible and start learning about potential careers The parttime jobs she held and the connections she made through them taught her more than she learned in the classroom she says 8220It8217s life experiences and interactions that prepare you for the real world8221 amp160 amp160 Then Vernon Payne had little academic direction as a student at Morgan Park High School He was a talented artist but a mediocre student who admitted he did only enough schoolwork to get by Recognizing his talent his family and teachers encouraged him to enroll at Columbia College8212known for its arts programs8212to study fine art At first he was disorganized and rarely showed up for class When Catalyst last spoke with him in 2002 he vowed to make school a priority Now Although he had a rocky start Payne graduated from Columbia College in 2006 with a bachelor8217s degree in fine arts Freshman year and the beginning of his sophomore year were the toughest Payne says 8220That8217s when I had my worst grades But eventually I got the hang of college life8221 The second semester of his freshman year Payne rarely showed up for class and ended up failing the only two classes he was taking He says anxiety kept him from concentrating and admits he had poor organizational skills But pressure from family friends and teachers to do better helped get him on track And his mother ended up laying down the law She said she would no longer pay for his education if he didn8217t try harder He considered dropping out and returning to school later But if he did his mother who was footing his tuition told him he would have to pay her back for the classes he had failed before she would help pay his tuition in the future The threat worked Payne got organized and studied hard Ultimately he graduated with a 29 GPA 8220I didn8217t believe in myself especially in the beginning8221 he says Students at Columbia College an openadmissions school in the South Loop often lack the academic background needed to succeed at a more competitive institution The school offers programs to help freshmen who need an extra boost including the Conaway Achievement Project for students who are firstgeneration college students come from lowincome families or are disabled and the Bridge summer program for incoming freshmen who lack the academic skills needed for college work Once he committed to school Payne took classes in everything from performance art to ceramics He discovered a passion for printmaking and painting and developed confidence in himself 8220I had an identity crisis because I didn8217t know who I was8221 he says 8220The whole experience of college helped me realize who I really am8221 While still a student Payne started working at an art supply and frame store in Morgan Park He is now a manager and loves his job 8220I order I frame I do it all I worked my way up from the bottom all the way up8221 he says proudly Payne has set up a Web site to sell his artwork wwwvernonpaynecom He also has plans to launch his own business an online art supply store Down the road he hopes to pursue a graduate degree in art His advice to other students Work hard 8220You got to want it8221 Payne says 8220If you don8217t want it it8217s not going to come to you8221 amp160 amp160 Then In 2002 Adam Ramirez was a senior at Roosevelt University earning top grades and about to earn a degree in elementary education8212a substantial accomplishment after struggling at Hubbard High in West Lawn Despite low grades and a low ACT score the Scholars Teach and Reach STAR scholarship program for aspiring teachers took a chance on him STAR provides financial aid and mentoring for students and the support paid off Ramirez became a model college student8212STAR requires students to maintain at least a 325 GPA each year but Ramirez had a 38 upon graduation8212and was a volunteer at Pulaski Elementary in Logan Square Now After graduating in 2003 Ramirez is now living his longtime dream He8217s teaching 7th and 8thgrade math and 8thgrade reading at Eberhart Elementary in Chicago Lawn where he started in 2004 But after several years in the classroom Ramirez says flatout 8220I don8217t think any school prepares you for the actual teaching experience and the issues these kids are bringing into the classroom8221 he says noting that his students have dealt with significant problems such as abuse and rape 8220How do I expect these kids to learn how to add integers when they8217re going through so much personal trauma inside8221 he adds Ramirez says he achieved success in college despite poor preparation in high school because he discovered his ethnic identity as a Native American 8220I joined ethnic dancing and from that I met many people connected to their roots8221 he says 8220I found who I was as an indigenous person and that made all the difference in the world8221 Now Ramirez advises high school students to study their ancestry like he did to find the selfawareness they need to succeed 8220If you don8217t know your past you8217re not going to know your future8221 he says In October an Eberhart student was murdered and Ramirez turned to his Native American roots to help students cope He used the tradition of 8220talking circles8221 to allow students to discuss the loss and the consequences of decisionmaking He also read to them from 8220It Doesn8217t Have to Be This Way8221 a book by writer and former East Los Angeles gang member Luis Rodriguez on the devastating consequences of gang violence and the importance of making good choices Ramirez says he has been disappointed because of a perceived lack of compassion for students among his colleagues 8220My goal was to keep these kids out of gangs8221 he says 8220I was so enthusiastic But now that dream is just dying The teachers around me are killing that spirit8221 His answer to that challenge is to pursue a graduate degree in school administration Then Ramirez says he8217ll have more power to fix a school by hiring teachers who care about the kids and by implementing a Native American approach to discipline that is similar to the concept of restorative justice8212asking kids to make restitution when they do something wrong instead of kicking them out of school via suspension or expulsion Even with the difficulties Ramirez has never considered quitting his job 8220When I was going to school I would often ask myself what I would do if I wasn8217t teaching8221 he says 8220And I still can8217t answer that question I have to keep teaching8221 amp160 amp160 Then At Juarez High School in Pilsen Ana Salinas earned good grades and took Advanced Placement classes So it came as a big surprise to her when she failed a precalculus class during her first semester at Loyola University and then had to take a remedial math course Despite inadequate preparation in high school Salinas had a passion for numbers and was determined to succeed With support and hard work she got good grades8212even in math Now Today Ana Salinas teaches math to 7thgraders at Ruiz Elementary in Pilsen the same grammar school she attended She is now working toward a master8217s degree in bilingual education and plans to earn a master8217s degree in mathematics Both degrees will make her a hot commodity in the teaching field Salinas who graduated from Loyola University with a 30 GPA in 2003 earned a bachelor8217s degree in education with a concentration in mathematics Support from her mother and former teachers who had encouraged her to pursue a teaching career kept Salinas on track personally as well as academically 8220I kept talking to my old teachers from high school8221 says Salinas who thought at times that she might not be smart enough to graduate 8220It kept inspiring me to complete my studies8221 One of those teachers is Dana Butler now principal of Ruiz Elementary 8220We see people from all walks of life become teachers but I think it8217s an added bonus when you can have someone from your own community8221 Butler says Salinas8217 success shows the students that a college diploma is achievable for them too Salinas sees herself as a role model for students but the transition from Ruiz student to Ruiz teacher has been difficult Although her former teachers now are peers Salinas is hesitant to call them by their first names 8220I still feel like a student8221 she says Ruiz teachers however have had no difficulty accepting Salinas as a colleague Theresa Kevorkian an 8thgrade teacher says she is thrilled to see Salinas grow from an insightful teenager into a talented educator 8220She8217s an amazing math teacher8221 Kevorkian says 8220She knows how to break it down8212she8217s effective The kids are focused she gives them a real strong foundation and they end up really understanding the language of math8221 Salinas says her difficulties with math in college made her a better teacher 8220I did struggle and I saw what did work for me and that8217s what I work into my classroom8221 she says 8220I8217m one of those visual learners You have to show me I have to understand the reasons behind it And that8217s how I teach my students8221 Salinas is earning a master8217s in bilingual education from Concordia University where she maintains a 40 GPA and is scheduled to graduate in December She plans to apply to the Illinois Institute of Technology to earn another master8217s in mathematics She also wants to write children8217s math books 8220When I first started teaching I thought that was it8212I was done8221 Salinas says 8220I still love teaching but I feel that I need to do more8221 amp160 amp160 Then When Catalyst last spoke with Dannielle Dungey in 2002 she was in her third year at Northern Illinois University wondering whether she should have chosen another major besides history The prospect of higher pay lured her to consider other careers8212she planned to become a teacher8212but she worried that changing that plan would mean losing her grants and scholarships 8220I wish I could have been exposed to other careers8221 she says now 8220There are so many careers out there I didn8217t even know about8221 Now Dungey ultimately stuck with her major and her decision to become a teacher because she already had dedicated so much time and money to that career path In 2004 she graduated from NIU with her teacher8217s certification as well as her bachelor8217s degree By the time she began having doubts about her career path Dungey says 8220I was already a junior and had already started my major program and I just didn8217t want to quit There were so many people who had invested in me8221 Outside support from peers and adult mentors made a critical difference for Dungey The Golden Apple Foundation an organization that provides scholarships for teachers created a support system for her 8220It helped me network and meet people like other scholars8221 she says While Golden Apple provided emotional support Dungey knew to reach out to get the academic support she needed at NIU Whenever Dungey struggled she went to the university8217s writing center to have her papers proofread or made an appointment to talk with her professors Dungey now is teaching history to juniors and seniors at Eisenhower High School in south suburban Blue Island She felt academically prepared for teaching and remembered from her own high school classes what made learning fun But she wasn8217t ready for the challenge of teaching unmotivated students Dungey says she tries to inspire her students and give them the same passion for education that she had by offering extracredit options and giving a motivational speech at the end of each class 8220If you8217re not smiling I encourage you to put a smile on your face Live every day to the fullest with no regrets And always remember life is what you make of it8221 she says It8217s also her job Dungey says to prepare her students for college by teaching them to be responsible For one she does not accept late assignments 8220I tell them I do this because when you go to college professors aren8217t going to go to your dorm and knock on your door to ask if you8217re coming to class8221 she says Beyond the classroom Dungey assists students who want to go to college the same way her high school teachers helped her by nominating them for scholarships Dungey also has earned a master8217s degree in school leadership from Concordia University She wants to become a dean of discipline and sees it as a way to work in educational policy while still inspiring young people 8220There8217s always a good and a bad choice and the choices you make affect you8221 Dungey says 8220I want them to understand that there are consequences to everything they do8221 She also wants students to understand that there is potential in everything too 8220I8217d love it if they remembered 20 to 30 years from now everything I taught them about history8221 Dungey says 8220But if they don8217t remember anything else I want them to remember they can do anything if they want to8221 The Hyde Park Hair Salon in Chicago was where President Obama used to be a regular customer His supporters gather here to watch the returns roll in Photo by Jonathan Gibby permalink Election Day Photo by Lucio Villa permalink Supporters of President Obama cheer as election results are reported at the Hyde Park Hair Salon on Nov 6 2012 in Chicago The president was once a regular customer here Photo by Jonathan Gibby permalink The Hyde Park Hair Salon in Chicago was where President Obama used to be a regular customer His supporters gather here to watch the returns roll in Photo by Jonathan Gibby permalink Election Day Photo by Lucio Villa permalink | What/PRON does/AUX it/PRON take/VERB to/PART get/VERB a/DET college/NOUN education/NOUN Six/NUM years/NOUN ago/ADV Catalyst/PROPN Chicago/PROPN began/VERB to/PART examine/VERB that/DET complex/ADJ question/NOUN in/ADP 8220The/PROPN College/PROPN Challenge8221/PROPN a/DET series/NOUN of/ADP periodic/ADJ reports/NOUN on/ADP the/DET struggles/NOUN of/ADP nine/NUM black/ADJ and/CCONJ Latino/ADJ students/NOUN from/ADP Chicago/PROPN Public/PROPN Schools/PROPN who/PRON were/AUX aiming/VERB to/PART earn/VERB a/DET college/NOUN degree/NOUN Associate/PROPN Editor/PROPN Debra/PROPN Williams/PROPN profiled/VERB the/DET nine/NUM as/SCONJ they/PRON coped/VERB with/ADP the/DET myriad/ADJ challenges/NOUN of/ADP making/VERB the/DET transition/NOUN from/ADP high/ADJ school/NOUN to/ADP college/NOUN difficulty/NOUN finding/VERB financial/ADJ aid/NOUN inadequate/ADJ academic/ADJ preparation/NOUN and/CCONJ 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<p>Hatred of U.S. foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world, but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism.</p>
<p>Instead, the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels, militarize the nation beyond rationality, move toward preemptive warfare as a first-choice instrument of national policy, and, with more arrogance than ever, label as “evil” a variety of nations and groups that oppose U.S. policies. With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security, it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship–a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security–a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB (the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union). To top it off, Bush, flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice, his entire top foreign-policy team except for behind-the-scenes manipulator Cheney, has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader, Yasir Arafat.</p>
<p>Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government’s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years, from the early failures in its “war on terrorism,” and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury. More importantly, this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associates/handlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the U.S.</p>
<p>Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies, but so far they don’t amount to much. Vice President Cheney and other foreign-policy formulators in the White House, the NSC staff, and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States. Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change, but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue. Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle. He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney, the NSC, and the Pentagon (as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove, and his comrade-in-arms Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister). The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell, who after all still has something of an independent political base in the U.S. But, to repeat, at the moment no grounds exist for believing–or hoping–that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation.</p>
<p>All of this means that no changes in U.S. foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration. Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much all-powerful, any new pressures from abroad, at least for the near future, are likely to have little effect.</p>
<p>New pressures from inside the U.S., however, could be considerably more effective. The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration’s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party’s position in Congress this fall, followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush’s own reelection effort in 2004. Similarly, the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall. Right now, then, is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the U.S. should change its internal security, military, and above all foreign policies.</p>
<p>Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current U.S. policies associated with the so-called war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary. So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies. Many of us who agree that Bush’s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important. That’s okay. We have to start somewhere, and the important thing is to start NOW. Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive Bush-Cheney wars will be upon us before we know it, and Attorney General Ashcroft’s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture.</p>
<p>The task is not impossible. Those of us who give public talks on these issues, or participate in radio interviews or talk shows, know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours, and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts. It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush’s foreign policies are immutable. In fact, support for those policies is probably quite shallow. One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize U.S. foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well.</p>
<p>For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the U.S. are rarely influenced by foreign policies, we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about. All the lobbies powerful in U.S. politics–lobbies for Israel, arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates, or any others you want to name–cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration. We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections, never forgetting that the combined targets of G.W. Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004.</p>
<p>Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize. Let’s see more proposals from others. We should probably concentrate on only a few topics, ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in U.S. internal security, military, and foreign policies.</p>
<p>ONE: We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security. We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act, to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes.</p>
<p>As already mentioned, a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB. Even the Soviets avoided that error, out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment. While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization, pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop, and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident. Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oft-expressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department, it’s not hard to believe they could flip-flop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions. To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain. Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new, extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents? Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective?</p>
<p>Given other flip-flops of this administration, particularly on the Israel-Palestine issue (Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go), we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department. But even without changes, the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people–particularly immigrants–than any other arm of the government, except for the armed services, which have full power over military personnel. Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the U.S. after its creation. Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s. Many fear that such a development is possible, and they are right to be fearful. We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born.</p>
<p>Most people don’t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security. That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory. So let’s go out and slay this dragon.</p>
<p>We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now. The Secret Service, for example, is now in the Treasury Department–with no logic at all. But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury. Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants, but as a significant reason for a new cabinet-level department, it flunks. The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security.</p>
<p>TWO. We should urge U.S. voters to oppose the Bush administration’s drive for global hegemony and domination. The Bush approach of “what we say goes” increases worldwide hatreds of the U.S., and in no way benefits a majority of Americans.</p>
<p>The U.S. has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of big-corporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago. The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters, who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world. Average wage earners in the U.S. receive few if any benefits, and some are actually hurt.</p>
<p>The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations. Four months ago, an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly: “If Congress cranks up the Pentagon’s budget as much as President Bush would like, the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined.” These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare, and also make it harder for the U.S. to help alleviate global poverty. This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war. The true cause, however, and we should emphasize this fact to voters, is the pursuit of global domination by the United States. This ultimate goal of U.S. foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable, and it will not in the end be worth the cost, either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed.</p>
<p>In response to arguments that Bush’s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above, you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1, 2002 to the West Point graduating class. In this speech, he explicitly stated that “America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the U.S. plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world.</p>
<p>In the same speech, Bush said, “Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action.” He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment, saying that deterrence “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks,” and that containment “is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies.” A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast U.S. militarization now underway. We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years, and to oppose this preemptive-war strategy with all their might. In fact, we should oppose ever initiating a war, because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants. Furthermore, unless and until the U.S. is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons, other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves. Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of U.S. preemptive actions. We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons, including those of the U.S.</p>
<p>THREE. We should urge the U.S. government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel’s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>A majority of people in almost all countries believe that U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and one-sided in support of Israel. Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the U.S. on this issue, but they are aware of these majority views in their countries. In all Arab and Muslim nations, these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States.</p>
<p>We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves–not only most people in other nations–believe U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years.</p>
<p>Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters. Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of U.S. policy that you are sure are true. Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the U.S. and Israel. If anyone charges you with anti-Semitism, state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-American. You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of anti-Semitism. The charge is spurious.</p>
<p>If anyone asks what you thought of Bush’s statement on June 24, in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene, one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which U.S. governmental policy has long treated the Israel-Palestine issue. Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the U.S. It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator.</p>
<p>In this same statement, Bush also blamed most recent problems in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism. In fact, Israeli terrorism, both by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and by settler groups, has caused more killings of Palestinian non-combatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli non-combatants and children. And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first, while the Israelis only retaliate. Both sides, with equal justification, can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions. Nor can the Israelis claim there is no “moral equivalence” between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli non-combatants, and the “accidental” or “collateral-damage” killings of Palestinian non-combatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions. There is ample evidence, from reliable sources including Israel’s own media, that many Palestinian non-combatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes. There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism. Both are equally inexcusable.</p>
<p>For those of us who believe U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the U.S. and its allies, it is vital to highlight one specific point. More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of U.S. aid is the most important single change that the U.S. government should make in its policy toward Israel. Each year congress and the president approve, with little debate, aid (grants, not loans) to Israel now officially totaling almost $3 billion, but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in, the total is nearer $5 billion annually. That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities. It is the greatest single element of injustice in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine, and Arabs who see U.S. aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the U.S. aid package.</p>
<p>We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel, and to make the answer a major factor in the voter’s choice of a candidate. It is no longer just a “single issue,” not important enough to determine one’s vote. It is now an absolutely critical issue, because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the U.S. increases or gradually subsides. If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel, we should urge people not to vote for any of them, and to make their reasons public. It is that important.</p>
<p>Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.</p> | The Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US, Part 3 | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/07/08/the-disastrous-foreign-policies-of-the-us-part-3-3/ | 2002-07-08 | 4left
| 3,052 | Hatred of US foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism Instead the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels militarize the nation beyond rationality move toward preemptive warfare as a firstchoice instrument of national policy and with more arrogance than ever label as 8220evil8221 a variety of nations and groups that oppose US policies With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship8211a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security8211a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union To top it off Bush flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice his entire top foreignpolicy team except for behindthescenes manipulator Cheney has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader Yasir Arafat Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government8217s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years from the early failures in its 8220war on terrorism8221 and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury More importantly this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associateshandlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the US Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies but so far they don8217t amount to much Vice President Cheney and other foreignpolicy formulators in the White House the NSC staff and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney the NSC and the Pentagon as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove and his comradeinarms Ariel Sharon Israel8217s Prime Minister The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell who after all still has something of an independent political base in the US But to repeat at the moment no grounds exist for believing8211or hoping8211that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation All of this means that no changes in US foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much allpowerful any new pressures from abroad at least for the near future are likely to have little effect New pressures from inside the US however could be considerably more effective The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration8217s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party8217s position in Congress this fall followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush8217s own reelection effort in 2004 Similarly the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall Right now then is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the US should change its internal security military and above all foreign policies Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current US policies associated with the socalled war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies Many of us who agree that Bush8217s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important That8217s okay We have to start somewhere and the important thing is to start NOW Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive BushCheney wars will be upon us before we know it and Attorney General Ashcroft8217s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture The task is not impossible Those of us who give public talks on these issues or participate in radio interviews or talk shows know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush8217s foreign policies are immutable In fact support for those policies is probably quite shallow One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize US foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the US are rarely influenced by foreign policies we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about All the lobbies powerful in US politics8211lobbies for Israel arms manufacturers energy conglomerates or any others you want to name8211cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections never forgetting that the combined targets of GW Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004 Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize Let8217s see more proposals from others We should probably concentrate on only a few topics ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in US internal security military and foreign policies ONE We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes As already mentioned a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB Even the Soviets avoided that error out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oftexpressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department it8217s not hard to believe they could flipflop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective Given other flipflops of this administration particularly on the IsraelPalestine issue Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department But even without changes the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people8211particularly immigrants8211than any other arm of the government except for the armed services which have full power over military personnel Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the US after its creation Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s Many fear that such a development is possible and they are right to be fearful We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born Most people don8217t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory So let8217s go out and slay this dragon We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now The Secret Service for example is now in the Treasury Department8211with no logic at all But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants but as a significant reason for a new cabinetlevel department it flunks The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security TWO We should urge US voters to oppose the Bush administration8217s drive for global hegemony and domination The Bush approach of 8220what we say goes8221 increases worldwide hatreds of the US and in no way benefits a majority of Americans The US has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of bigcorporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world Average wage earners in the US receive few if any benefits and some are actually hurt The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations Four months ago an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly 8220If Congress cranks up the Pentagon8217s budget as much as President Bush would like the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined8221 These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare and also make it harder for the US to help alleviate global poverty This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war The true cause however and we should emphasize this fact to voters is the pursuit of global domination by the United States This ultimate goal of US foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable and it will not in the end be worth the cost either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed In response to arguments that Bush8217s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1 2002 to the West Point graduating class In this speech he explicitly stated that 8220America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace8221 This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the US plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world In the same speech Bush said 8220Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action8221 He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment saying that deterrence 8220means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks8221 and that containment 8220is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies8221 A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast US militarization now underway We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years and to oppose this preemptivewar strategy with all their might In fact we should oppose ever initiating a war because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants Furthermore unless and until the US is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of US preemptive actions We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons including those of the US THREE We should urge the US government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel8217s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem A majority of people in almost all countries believe that US policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and onesided in support of Israel Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the US on this issue but they are aware of these majority views in their countries In all Arab and Muslim nations these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves8211not only most people in other nations8211believe US policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of US policy that you are sure are true Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the US and Israel If anyone charges you with antiSemitism state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither antiSemitic nor antiAmerican You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of antiSemitism The charge is spurious If anyone asks what you thought of Bush8217s statement on June 24 in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which US governmental policy has long treated the IsraelPalestine issue Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the US It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator In this same statement Bush also blamed most recent problems in the IsraeliPalestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism In fact Israeli terrorism both by the Israel Defense Force IDF and by settler groups has caused more killings of Palestinian noncombatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli noncombatants and children And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first while the Israelis only retaliate Both sides with equal justification can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions Nor can the Israelis claim there is no 8220moral equivalence8221 between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli noncombatants and the 8220accidental8221 or 8220collateraldamage8221 killings of Palestinian noncombatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions There is ample evidence from reliable sources including Israel8217s own media that many Palestinian noncombatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism Both are equally inexcusable For those of us who believe US policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the US and its allies it is vital to highlight one specific point More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of US aid is the most important single change that the US government should make in its policy toward Israel Each year congress and the president approve with little debate aid grants not loans to Israel now officially totaling almost 3 billion but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in the total is nearer 5 billion annually That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities It is the greatest single element of injustice in US policy toward Israel and Palestine and Arabs who see US aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the US aid package We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel and to make the answer a major factor in the voter8217s choice of a candidate It is no longer just a 8220single issue8221 not important enough to determine one8217s vote It is now an absolutely critical issue because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the US increases or gradually subsides If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel we should urge people not to vote for any of them and to make their reasons public It is that important Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950 and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas for at various times Southeast Asia South Asia and Africa Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA8217s Office of Regional and Political Analysis a 250person unit His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA retiring in 1979 Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine | Hatred/NOUN of/ADP US/PROPN foreign/ADJ policies/NOUN intensifies/NOUN day/NOUN by/ADP day/NOUN in/ADP much/ADJ of/ADP the/DET world/NOUN but/CCONJ the/DET present/ADJ administration/NOUN is/AUX not/PART even/ADV examining/VERB the/DET possibility/NOUN of/ADP changing/VERB those/DET policies/NOUN to/PART allay/VERB the/DET hatred/NOUN 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<p />
<p>“When I came here last year, I was a virgin girl,” says Hanna Mekureya, stirring raw coffee beans over coals. In the dark room down a side alley of Addis Ababa’s marketplace, the cow dung walls muffle the hubbub from the crowds outside. So, as the beans roast from green to brown, Mekureya tells her story in a near-whisper: how she moved to this city of 2 million people, leaving her mother and her three brothers and sisters back home, and how, a year later, she is supporting them all by having sex with men in a little room above a bar in the market.</p>
<p>“I was 19 then,” she says, looking down into the myrrh smoldering next to the fire. “My mother was widowed when I was a small girl. She sewed some dresses and sold them. She baked injera [the staple bread of Ethiopians] and sold that, too. But then the price of grain went up and she couldn’t afford to do that anymore.”</p>
<p>Mekureya quit her eighth-grade class and took a bus to the Ethiopian capital 78 miles away, a city that, until then, had been little more than a mirage. She walked the better neighborhoods looking for work as a housemaid, which would pay her about $8 a month, plus food and a bed. But with no person to act as guarantor, she was turned away at every door. Then she met a bar owner, who asked for only a few simple assurances: that she buy a new pair of plastic sandals, and that she curl her hair in soft waves around her plump face. For that, she would be welcome every night and could earn about $4.50 a man upstairs.</p>
<p>“Sometimes, there are no customers,” she says. But some weeks there is one man a night, and earlier this month she hopped a bus to her village of Nazareth and handed her mother $15–a little over one month’s earnings for the average person in Ethiopia, the second-poorest country on the planet.</p>
<p>“The street boys beg,” says Beletshachew Berhane, a social worker who recently began handing out condoms in the sprawling marketplace to hundreds of teenage prostitutes. “But the girls have another choice. They have their sex to sell. They can earn much, much more with that. And why not? They might be raped anyway if they don’t sell it.”</p>
<p>On the other side of town, Yeshi Alamayu, 45, for years has supported her eight children and her aging mother by gathering wood in the government’s plantation forests. Alamayu leaves her house every morning at dawn, walks five miles into the mountains, and pays a dime’s bribe to the forest guards at the gate. Whatever has dropped to the ground is fair pickings: leaves, twigs, spindly branches. She binds her booty with some rope, heaves it onto her back, and joins the traffic of women who can be seen most days of the week treading the roads into Addis, their bodies bent beneath their bundles.</p>
<p>Alamayu began her trade when she was 10, gathering wood with her mother from the eucalyptus forests right on the edge of town. At the time, Addis was a market town with a half million people. But in three decades, the city’s population doubled, then doubled again, then kept leaping upwards, until now, rickety tin shacks crawl up the hills and tiny plastic hovels cling to the sidewalks downtown. Desperate for fuel, the town folk have stripped the area surrounding their city naked of trees. And as they’ve done so, Alamayu’s daily search for wood has stretched farther and farther into the hills. These days, her 10-mile walk ends at the doorstep of an Addis trader, who will hand her about 80 cents for her troubles.</p>
<p />
<p>Like Mekureya and Alamayu, countless women around the globe weave their lives around simple survival. For many, the daily struggle dims whatever dreams they may have had. Indeed, when the photographers who traveled the world for the project in these pages asked women what they hoped for their futures, some barely understood the question. Scripted by poverty and illiteracy, the narrative of their lives had seemed immutable from birth.</p>
<p>These women include Zenebu Tulu, whose first year of life in the Ethiopian hamlet of Moulo was marked by a clitoridectomy. She recalls her reluctance at being kidnapped when she was 18 by her husband-to-be, who then sent elders to her parents to negotiate the bride-price. Eleven years later, they live in a one-room grass hut with their five children. Now, she says, “I’m very happy. I have my own children.”</p>
<p>Thousands of miles away, in a tiny village in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh, Mishri Devi was married to Bachau Yadav when she was 10 years old, moving into his house when she reached puberty. Now, the couple has five children and Yadav hopes her own daughter, who is 9, will marry as well.</p>
<p>And in Haiti, Madame Dentes Delfoart, a mother of four, also was married as a teenager. She dropped her own first and last names (in the tradition of most rural Haitian women), and moved into her husband’s house, bringing a few prized handkerchiefs and some animals. Nowadays, Madame–the only name by which she is known–earns money “just to eat with,” by buying grains and canned food in bulk from the village market, and selling them retail from a storeroom next to her home.</p>
<p>Like one-quarter of the women in the world, Mishri Devi and Madame Delfoart have never learned to read or write. As their mothers and grandmothers before them, they have lived in isolation, rarely exposed to anyone beyond their districts. But the cultural walls are crumbling quickly. Albanian women name their sons after newfound pop icons like Michael Jackson and Kevin Costner, whom they see on Italian television shows which reach them by satellite. Families in Brazil eat dinner to the background sounds of CNN, where women correspondents report from bomb scenes in Bosnia or Oklahoma. With their isolation punctured, many poor women imagine that the seductive abundance of their Western counterparts might somehow be within their reach, or at least that it ought to be, since its trappings have become a part of their lives.</p>
<p>The feeling is deceptive, however. United Nations statisticians say that the gap between the world’s rich and poor has widened noticeably during the past few decades. And women represent as much as 60 percent of the billion or so people the U.N. defines as poor, those earning about $1 or less a day.</p>
<p>It is these millions of impoverished women who are now at the center of an international debate, galvanized largely by a conviction that improving women’s lives will mean lower birthrates. As more and more countries are overwhelmed by increasing population and poverty, development officials and activists have begun arguing that women represent a huge, untapped source of talent and energy–resources that could play a vital role in the economic growth of many developing countries. These officials are convinced that if women are educated, allowed real economic status and some political clout, and paid hard cash for their now-free labor–work that sometimes drives subsistence economies–they will contribute not only to their country’s economic growth, but also to lower birthrates.</p>
<p>When the U.N. and a few major Western organizations began tackling population growth in the late 1940s, their efforts focused on census-taking and data analysis. During the late 1960s, several governments introduced national family planning programs, often facing hostility from communities or the Roman Catholic Church. But the programs were largely limited to getting contraceptives into women’s hands, and remained that way until very recently.</p>
<p>Now, studies done both by the United Nations and organizations like the Population Council show that it’s equally important to help women change their lives. This can be achieved by giving them access to loans and credits, training them in moneymaking skills, and making primary education universally available. Women’s advocacy groups argue that if governments continue promoting only traditional family planning programs, the results are likely to be disappointing.</p>
<p />
<p>Gertrude Mongella is a small woman with a disarming smile, who works in a 12th-floor office in Manhattan’s United Nations Plaza. As secretary general of the conference, she has led the planning for the Fourth World Conference on Women being held this month in Beijing. Many of the delegates–women who dress in dazzling saris, sarongs, and boubous—are not government officials, but they have gained a kind of street credibility from their years heading grassroots organizations back home in their villages.</p>
<p>Indeed, Gertrude Mongella has come a long way from rural Tanzania, where she was born in a tiny settlement on an island in Lake Victoria 50 years ago. “There were so many girls in my village who were as bright as me but who were never educated, and for whom the doors were just closed forever after that,” the secretary general says.</p>
<p>In March, a preparatory committee drafted a plan of action to draw women into the paid labor force. Now Mongella is in a position to give the Beijing conference participants help in implementing those proposals back home.</p>
<p>“Economically, women are very important,” she says. “They are doing so many things that people don’t even realize. Look at the developing countries: 70 percent of all the food in Africa is being produced by women. Yet women are never targeted in economic development and planning.”</p>
<p>One of the most vocal of the new group of women is Bisi Ogunleye, an imposing, voluble Nigerian chief in her 60s, whose large presence in her multicolored head scarves has become a familiar feature at inter-national meetings. Like Mongella, the chief began life in a scrap of a village.</p>
<p>“I was born by the roadside, to a farming family where women would wake up early and work 18 hours a day, fetching water, cleaning the house, carrying food,” she says. Through a mixture of tenacity, talent, and luck, Ogunleye became a schoolteacher, then did graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and now heads the Country Women’s Association of Nigeria, which she founded in 1982. She also founded the North African Rural Women’s Association in 1992 and is one of the most active board members of the New York-based Women’s Environment and Development Organization.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, the chief attended her first international gathering, the U.N. women’s conference in Mexico City. “We saw it just as a struggle between women and men,” she recalls of the delegates who converged there from organizations and projects around the world. Today, she says, gender politics have subsided because many of those women are busy running programs back home. “They don’t believe anybody is going to do it for them,” Ogunleye says. “They have to rely on their own skills. Before, we weren’t talking about things like credit loans. We were just lobbying our governments.”</p>
<p>Nonetheless, Ogunleye and Mongella both believe that one of the major points to be won in their politicking is to persuade governments to give monetary value to traditional women’s work, like harvesting, and to persuade loan institutions like the World Bank to deal directly with grassroots development organizations, rather than strictly through governments. Meanwhile, the chief’s group and hundreds of others like it have taken on numerous quasigovernmental functions, lending women start-up capital for homespun enterprises, organizing sewing and farming cooperatives, teaching literacy, and, as always, offering family planning.</p>
<p>About 5,500 women from organizations like these converged last September in Cairo, at the U.N.’s International Conference on Population and Development, where they made the case for a 20-year plan of primary education, health care, and political rights for women. It was hard not to be swept away by the heady dynamism of the moment, as activists aiming for a radical change in women’s lives swayed scores of suited men plotting population strategies in conference plenary sessions. And even more women activists are expected to show up in Beijing, at the once-a-decade U.N. women’s conference.</p>
<p>Gertrude Mongella sees the diplomatic process as giving women’s organizations more potency. “Women themselves have learned to network globally,” she says. “There is a lot that we have achieved. Discussing women’s issues isn’t as difficult as it used to be. At least you can put it on the agenda, and people will listen.” Indeed, the networking has spawned numerous coalitions of women’s groups, linking organizations like Ogunleye’s with those in the West, and allowing activists from developing countries access to funding for literacy, family planning, and poverty programs.</p>
<p>But despite the optimism, the future is still unclear. The groups face large problems, which could ultimately derail their mission to transform the lives of women.</p>
<p>First, plans to educate, train, and provide universal health care for women rely heavily on foreign aid. And much of that financial commitment and political backing must come from Western governments, whose track record on supporting social change in the developing world is not good.</p>
<p>The Cairo plan, which will cost about $22 billion over the next two decades, was embraced last September by the United States, which committed itself to help fund the program. But two months later, conservative Republicans gained power in Congress, promising deep cuts in foreign aid as one of their priorities. Among their chief targets are the very social programs that women’s development will require: those in “nonstrategic” areas like Africa, and those funded through organizations connected to abortion services abroad.</p>
<p>Second, women’s activists are in danger of losing focus. The argument for giving women a greater stake in their societies has been firmly rooted in the politics of population. By remaining so sharply focused on a single crisis, women’s groups have been remarkably successful in getting governments to take them seriously. But pumped up by their diplomatic success at the world gathering in Cairo, women’s activists sprang into organizing for two further massive conferences–the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen last March, and the current Beijing meeting.</p>
<p>In Copenhagen, women’s groups broadened their fight from population politics to the global economy, arguing that redistribution of wealth and better international lending programs were key to raising women’s status. Meanwhile, the agenda for the Beijing women’s conference has become so unfocused that the40,000 or so participants will tackle no fewer than 12 major subjects. The list includes armed conflict, economic restructuring, and the environment, each of which already has its own busy schedule of international conferences.</p>
<p>The third potential problem emerges when talking to the people who have most to gain from social transformation. The broad political support for improving the status of women derives from the current belief that if women had more money, better education, and better access to health care, they would have far smaller families. But this causal relationship is not so simple. (For a detailed discussion, see the essay <a href="/news/feature/1995/09/ehrlich.html" type="external">“What It Will Take,”</a> in this issue.) When I ask Zenebu Tulu what she would do differently if she were rich, she thinks hard for a while, and then says: “If I were wealthy, say if I had horses and a better house, I’d have more children.”</p>
<p>Virginia Abernethy, an anthropology and psychiatry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., rejects the idea that improving women’s status necessarily equals lower birthrates. “There is one thing that seems to work–if women are given jobs in the cash economy,” says Abernethy, whose maverick position has support only among a minority of people working on women’s development.</p>
<p>“Most of the other women’s status things are completely unsupported by data,” she says. “Education would be very nice, but that’s for the next generation. What women really want is $100 to start a chicken farm or buy a sewing machine.”</p>
<p />
<p>In a spare one-room building in Ahmadabad, a city in western India, a group of illiterate women has done exactly what Abernethy recommends. After learning to sign their names, these women registered a new bank called the Self-Employed Women’s Association. Since 1974, SEWA has provided tens of thousands of women with loans, sometimes as little as $1, and often using the women’s jewelry as collateral.</p>
<p>Among the many efforts to change women’s prospects, these tiny, local projects offer some of the surest signs of success. While it’s hard to predict whether SEWA will help these entrepreneurs have fewer children, the bank is definitely helping some of those already burdened by large families.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, Shardaben Chauhan’s husband, whom she had married at the age of 12, died of heart disease. Chauhan was 30 and had seven children. She was also deep in debt from having hired equipment from a trader at 10 percent interest to run a small carpentry business out of her home. As an alternative, SEWA lent her 100 rupees, about $3.87, at less than 1 percent interest. By 1993, she had taken out two more loans, expanded her enterprise, and bought her house.</p>
<p>Even in the Ethiopian hamlet of Moulo, the new generation is one with far grander ambitions than Zenebu Tulu could ever dream. When I ask Tulu’s 10-year-old niece, Zelalem Abera, an ebullient girl who ends each sentence with a giggle, how she imagines her adult life, she says: “I want to be a doctor and live in Addis Ababa.”</p>
<p>Forty miles away in Addis, Hanna Mekureya still earns money as a prostitute. But now she spends her days in a classroom with other poor women, learning to run her own business. In a new program funded by Save the Children, the women are forming credit loan groups similar to the early efforts of SEWA and launching their own small industries, including soapmaking and leatherwork.</p>
<p>And Yeshi Alamayu, who has survived as a firewood seller for 35 of her 45 years, has joined a vegetable garden cooperative started by the International Labor Organization. Since then, she sends some of her eight children to the forests to gather wood in her place. But soon, she hopes to begin selling the vegetables she has planted in a small patch of land in the city. If all goes as planned, the crop will bring far more than the 80 cents her daily 10-mile hike yields.</p>
<p>Vivienne Walt has reported extensively from Africa as a staff writer for Newsday and as part of this project. She covered the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo last September.</p>
<p /> | Women’s Work | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/1995/09/womens-work/ | 2018-09-01 | 4left
| 3,052 | 8220When I came here last year I was a virgin girl8221 says Hanna Mekureya stirring raw coffee beans over coals In the dark room down a side alley of Addis Ababa8217s marketplace the cow dung walls muffle the hubbub from the crowds outside So as the beans roast from green to brown Mekureya tells her story in a nearwhisper how she moved to this city of 2 million people leaving her mother and her three brothers and sisters back home and how a year later she is supporting them all by having sex with men in a little room above a bar in the market 8220I was 19 then8221 she says looking down into the myrrh smoldering next to the fire 8220My mother was widowed when I was a small girl She sewed some dresses and sold them She baked injera the staple bread of Ethiopians and sold that too But then the price of grain went up and she couldn8217t afford to do that anymore8221 Mekureya quit her eighthgrade class and took a bus to the Ethiopian capital 78 miles away a city that until then had been little more than a mirage She walked the better neighborhoods looking for work as a housemaid which would pay her about 8 a month plus food and a bed But with no person to act as guarantor she was turned away at every door Then she met a bar owner who asked for only a few simple assurances that she buy a new pair of plastic sandals and that she curl her hair in soft waves around her plump face For that she would be welcome every night and could earn about 450 a man upstairs 8220Sometimes there are no customers8221 she says But some weeks there is one man a night and earlier this month she hopped a bus to her village of Nazareth and handed her mother 158211a little over one month8217s earnings for the average person in Ethiopia the secondpoorest country on the planet 8220The street boys beg8221 says Beletshachew Berhane a social worker who recently began handing out condoms in the sprawling marketplace to hundreds of teenage prostitutes 8220But the girls have another choice They have their sex to sell They can earn much much more with that And why not They might be raped anyway if they don8217t sell it8221 On the other side of town Yeshi Alamayu 45 for years has supported her eight children and her aging mother by gathering wood in the government8217s plantation forests Alamayu leaves her house every morning at dawn walks five miles into the mountains and pays a dime8217s bribe to the forest guards at the gate Whatever has dropped to the ground is fair pickings leaves twigs spindly branches She binds her booty with some rope heaves it onto her back and joins the traffic of women who can be seen most days of the week treading the roads into Addis their bodies bent beneath their bundles Alamayu began her trade when she was 10 gathering wood with her mother from the eucalyptus forests right on the edge of town At the time Addis was a market town with a half million people But in three decades the city8217s population doubled then doubled again then kept leaping upwards until now rickety tin shacks crawl up the hills and tiny plastic hovels cling to the sidewalks downtown Desperate for fuel the town folk have stripped the area surrounding their city naked of trees And as they8217ve done so Alamayu8217s daily search for wood has stretched farther and farther into the hills These days her 10mile walk ends at the doorstep of an Addis trader who will hand her about 80 cents for her troubles Like Mekureya and Alamayu countless women around the globe weave their lives around simple survival For many the daily struggle dims whatever dreams they may have had Indeed when the photographers who traveled the world for the project in these pages asked women what they hoped for their futures some barely understood the question Scripted by poverty and illiteracy the narrative of their lives had seemed immutable from birth These women include Zenebu Tulu whose first year of life in the Ethiopian hamlet of Moulo was marked by a clitoridectomy She recalls her reluctance at being kidnapped when she was 18 by her husbandtobe who then sent elders to her parents to negotiate the brideprice Eleven years later they live in a oneroom grass hut with their five children Now she says 8220I8217m very happy I have my own children8221 Thousands of miles away in a tiny village in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh Mishri Devi was married to Bachau Yadav when she was 10 years old moving into his house when she reached puberty Now the couple has five children and Yadav hopes her own daughter who is 9 will marry as well And in Haiti Madame Dentes Delfoart a mother of four also was married as a teenager She dropped her own first and last names in the tradition of most rural Haitian women and moved into her husband8217s house bringing a few prized handkerchiefs and some animals Nowadays Madame8211the only name by which she is known8211earns money 8220just to eat with8221 by buying grains and canned food in bulk from the village market and selling them retail from a storeroom next to her home Like onequarter of the women in the world Mishri Devi and Madame Delfoart have never learned to read or write As their mothers and grandmothers before them they have lived in isolation rarely exposed to anyone beyond their districts But the cultural walls are crumbling quickly Albanian women name their sons after newfound pop icons like Michael Jackson and Kevin Costner whom they see on Italian television shows which reach them by satellite Families in Brazil eat dinner to the background sounds of CNN where women correspondents report from bomb scenes in Bosnia or Oklahoma With their isolation punctured many poor women imagine that the seductive abundance of their Western counterparts might somehow be within their reach or at least that it ought to be since its trappings have become a part of their lives The feeling is deceptive however United Nations statisticians say that the gap between the world8217s rich and poor has widened noticeably during the past few decades And women represent as much as 60 percent of the billion or so people the UN defines as poor those earning about 1 or less a day It is these millions of impoverished women who are now at the center of an international debate galvanized largely by a conviction that improving women8217s lives will mean lower birthrates As more and more countries are overwhelmed by increasing population and poverty development officials and activists have begun arguing that women represent a huge untapped source of talent and energy8211resources that could play a vital role in the economic growth of many developing countries These officials are convinced that if women are educated allowed real economic status and some political clout and paid hard cash for their nowfree labor8211work that sometimes drives subsistence economies8211they will contribute not only to their country8217s economic growth but also to lower birthrates When the UN and a few major Western organizations began tackling population growth in the late 1940s their efforts focused on censustaking and data analysis During the late 1960s several governments introduced national family planning programs often facing hostility from communities or the Roman Catholic Church But the programs were largely limited to getting contraceptives into women8217s hands and remained that way until very recently Now studies done both by the United Nations and organizations like the Population Council show that it8217s equally important to help women change their lives This can be achieved by giving them access to loans and credits training them in moneymaking skills and making primary education universally available Women8217s advocacy groups argue that if governments continue promoting only traditional family planning programs the results are likely to be disappointing Gertrude Mongella is a small woman with a disarming smile who works in a 12thfloor office in Manhattan8217s United Nations Plaza As secretary general of the conference she has led the planning for the Fourth World Conference on Women being held this month in Beijing Many of the delegates8211women who dress in dazzling saris sarongs and boubous8212are not government officials but they have gained a kind of street credibility from their years heading grassroots organizations back home in their villages Indeed Gertrude Mongella has come a long way from rural Tanzania where she was born in a tiny settlement on an island in Lake Victoria 50 years ago 8220There were so many girls in my village who were as bright as me but who were never educated and for whom the doors were just closed forever after that8221 the secretary general says In March a preparatory committee drafted a plan of action to draw women into the paid labor force Now Mongella is in a position to give the Beijing conference participants help in implementing those proposals back home 8220Economically women are very important8221 she says 8220They are doing so many things that people don8217t even realize Look at the developing countries 70 percent of all the food in Africa is being produced by women Yet women are never targeted in economic development and planning8221 One of the most vocal of the new group of women is Bisi Ogunleye an imposing voluble Nigerian chief in her 60s whose large presence in her multicolored head scarves has become a familiar feature at international meetings Like Mongella the chief began life in a scrap of a village 8220I was born by the roadside to a farming family where women would wake up early and work 18 hours a day fetching water cleaning the house carrying food8221 she says Through a mixture of tenacity talent and luck Ogunleye became a schoolteacher then did graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh and now heads the Country Women8217s Association of Nigeria which she founded in 1982 She also founded the North African Rural Women8217s Association in 1992 and is one of the most active board members of the New Yorkbased Women8217s Environment and Development Organization Twenty years ago the chief attended her first international gathering the UN women8217s conference in Mexico City 8220We saw it just as a struggle between women and men8221 she recalls of the delegates who converged there from organizations and projects around the world Today she says gender politics have subsided because many of those women are busy running programs back home 8220They don8217t believe anybody is going to do it for them8221 Ogunleye says 8220They have to rely on their own skills Before we weren8217t talking about things like credit loans We were just lobbying our governments8221 Nonetheless Ogunleye and Mongella both believe that one of the major points to be won in their politicking is to persuade governments to give monetary value to traditional women8217s work like harvesting and to persuade loan institutions like the World Bank to deal directly with grassroots development organizations rather than strictly through governments Meanwhile the chief8217s group and hundreds of others like it have taken on numerous quasigovernmental functions lending women startup capital for homespun enterprises organizing sewing and farming cooperatives teaching literacy and as always offering family planning About 5500 women from organizations like these converged last September in Cairo at the UN8217s International Conference on Population and Development where they made the case for a 20year plan of primary education health care and political rights for women It was hard not to be swept away by the heady dynamism of the moment as activists aiming for a radical change in women8217s lives swayed scores of suited men plotting population strategies in conference plenary sessions And even more women activists are expected to show up in Beijing at the onceadecade UN women8217s conference Gertrude Mongella sees the diplomatic process as giving women8217s organizations more potency 8220Women themselves have learned to network globally8221 she says 8220There is a lot that we have achieved Discussing women8217s issues isn8217t as difficult as it used to be At least you can put it on the agenda and people will listen8221 Indeed the networking has spawned numerous coalitions of women8217s groups linking organizations like Ogunleye8217s with those in the West and allowing activists from developing countries access to funding for literacy family planning and poverty programs But despite the optimism the future is still unclear The groups face large problems which could ultimately derail their mission to transform the lives of women First plans to educate train and provide universal health care for women rely heavily on foreign aid And much of that financial commitment and political backing must come from Western governments whose track record on supporting social change in the developing world is not good The Cairo plan which will cost about 22 billion over the next two decades was embraced last September by the United States which committed itself to help fund the program But two months later conservative Republicans gained power in Congress promising deep cuts in foreign aid as one of their priorities Among their chief targets are the very social programs that women8217s development will require those in 8220nonstrategic8221 areas like Africa and those funded through organizations connected to abortion services abroad Second women8217s activists are in danger of losing focus The argument for giving women a greater stake in their societies has been firmly rooted in the politics of population By remaining so sharply focused on a single crisis women8217s groups have been remarkably successful in getting governments to take them seriously But pumped up by their diplomatic success at the world gathering in Cairo women8217s activists sprang into organizing for two further massive conferences8211the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen last March and the current Beijing meeting In Copenhagen women8217s groups broadened their fight from population politics to the global economy arguing that redistribution of wealth and better international lending programs were key to raising women8217s status Meanwhile the agenda for the Beijing women8217s conference has become so unfocused that the40000 or so participants will tackle no fewer than 12 major subjects The list includes armed conflict economic restructuring and the environment each of which already has its own busy schedule of international conferences The third potential problem emerges when talking to the people who have most to gain from social transformation The broad political support for improving the status of women derives from the current belief that if women had more money better education and better access to health care they would have far smaller families But this causal relationship is not so simple For a detailed discussion see the essay 8220What It Will Take8221 in this issue When I ask Zenebu Tulu what she would do differently if she were rich she thinks hard for a while and then says 8220If I were wealthy say if I had horses and a better house I8217d have more children8221 Virginia Abernethy an anthropology and psychiatry professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tenn rejects the idea that improving women8217s status necessarily equals lower birthrates 8220There is one thing that seems to work8211if women are given jobs in the cash economy8221 says Abernethy whose maverick position has support only among a minority of people working on women8217s development 8220Most of the other women8217s status things are completely unsupported by data8221 she says 8220Education would be very nice but that8217s for the next generation What women really want is 100 to start a chicken farm or buy a sewing machine8221 In a spare oneroom building in Ahmadabad a city in western India a group of illiterate women has done exactly what Abernethy recommends After learning to sign their names these women registered a new bank called the SelfEmployed Women8217s Association Since 1974 SEWA has provided tens of thousands of women with loans sometimes as little as 1 and often using the women8217s jewelry as collateral Among the many efforts to change women8217s prospects these tiny local projects offer some of the surest signs of success While it8217s hard to predict whether SEWA will help these entrepreneurs have fewer children the bank is definitely helping some of those already burdened by large families Ten years ago Shardaben Chauhan8217s husband whom she had married at the age of 12 died of heart disease Chauhan was 30 and had seven children She was also deep in debt from having hired equipment from a trader at 10 percent interest to run a small carpentry business out of her home As an alternative SEWA lent her 100 rupees about 387 at less than 1 percent interest By 1993 she had taken out two more loans expanded her enterprise and bought her house Even in the Ethiopian hamlet of Moulo the new generation is one with far grander ambitions than Zenebu Tulu could ever dream When I ask Tulu8217s 10yearold niece Zelalem Abera an ebullient girl who ends each sentence with a giggle how she imagines her adult life she says 8220I want to be a doctor and live in Addis Ababa8221 Forty miles away in Addis Hanna Mekureya still earns money as a prostitute But now she spends her days in a classroom with other poor women learning to run her own business In a new program funded by Save the Children the women are forming credit loan groups similar to the early efforts of SEWA and launching their own small industries including soapmaking and leatherwork And Yeshi Alamayu who has survived as a firewood seller for 35 of her 45 years has joined a vegetable garden cooperative started by the International Labor Organization Since then she sends some of her eight children to the forests to gather wood in her place But soon she hopes to begin selling the vegetables she has planted in a small patch of land in the city If all goes as planned the crop will bring far more than the 80 cents her daily 10mile hike yields Vivienne Walt has reported extensively from Africa as a staff writer for Newsday and as part of this project She covered the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo last September | 8220When/ADV I/PRON came/VERB here/ADV last/ADJ year/NOUN I/PRON was/AUX a/DET virgin/PROPN girl8221/PROPN says/VERB Hanna/PROPN Mekureya/PROPN stirring/VERB raw/ADJ coffee/NOUN beans/NOUN over/ADP coals/NOUN In/ADP the/DET dark/ADJ room/NOUN down/ADP a/DET side/NOUN alley/NOUN of/ADP Addis/PROPN Ababa8217s/PROPN marketplace/VERB the/DET cow/NOUN dung/NOUN walls/NOUN muffle/VERB the/DET hubbub/NOUN from/ADP the/DET crowds/NOUN outside/ADV So/ADV as/SCONJ the/DET beans/NOUN roast/VERB from/ADP green/ADJ to/ADP brown/ADJ Mekureya/PROPN tells/VERB her/PRON story/NOUN in/ADP a/DET nearwhisper/NOUN how/SCONJ she/PRON 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<p>Catholicism is not a “religion of the book,” but rather a faith built around word and sacrament — or, if you prefer, text and demonstration. Symbolic acts that convey the truths the Church teaches are of the essence of Catholic practice; this is true of the Church’s public life as well as of its worship. The Church teaches an ethic of charity toward the poor and marginalized; the Church embodies that teaching in its hospitals, schools, and social-service agencies. The Church teaches that the just society is composed of a democratic political community, a free economy, and a vibrant public moral culture; the Church embodies that teaching in its support for the institutions of civil society that make free politics and free economics possible — even when that requires challenging the existing political order, as it did during the pontificate of John Paul II in countries as diverse as Poland, Chile, Argentina, and the Philippines.</p>
<p>Viewed through this prism of word-and-sacrament, or text-and-demonstration, Pope Benedict XVI’s March 26-28 pilgrimage to the island prison of Cuba was a rather Protestant exercise: brilliant in word but deficient in “sacramentality.” The pope’s time in Santiago and Havana was by no means wasted. But it could have been used better by demonstrating in action the truths Benedict XVI taught with conviction; such a demonstration would have strengthened the hand of the civil-society associations on which the transition to a free Cuba ultimately depends. The gap between “text” and “demonstration” during the pope’s Cuban voyage is also instructive through the light it sheds on the Catholic future in a Cuba-in-transition, and on a crucial issue in the conclave that will choose Pope Benedict’s successor.</p>
<p>THE TEXTS Benedict XVI’s addresses in Cuba were vintage Joseph Ratzinger: richly informed by Biblical and theological wisdom, and lucidly expressed. Despite his pre-papal reputation as a fierce defender of orthodoxy, Ratzinger’s papacy has consistently shown the world the real man his friends and colleagues knew and admired: a man who doesn’t raise his voice as a matter of habit (or tactic), but who makes his arguments calmly, drawing on an unmatched fund of knowledge in a variety of fields. Benedict XVI, on occasion, has had to use somewhat more elliptical constructions than is his wont. But his meaning is never much in doubt.</p>
<p>Thus, in a airborne press conference en route to Latin America, the pope who, a quarter-century ago, once referred to the “impossible compromise between Christianity and Marxism,” now spoke of Cuban Marxism as something that “no longer corresponds to reality” — a slightly less edgy formulation, one might think, except that it was a polite papal way of saying that Castroite Communism is crazy, mad, completely-out-of-touch-with-the-real-world: which is another way of saying that it’s hellish. There is little chance that what the pope meant was missed by Raúl Castro and the rest of Cuba’s jailer-class.</p>
<p>Then, in Santiago, which is both the devotional center of Cuban Catholicism (centered on the small icon of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre) and the heartland of the Castroite revolution, Benedict XVI insisted in his Mass homily that Christianity “opens the doors of the world to truth,” especially the truth that “apart from God we are alienated from ourselves and hurled into the void” — an explicit inversion (and thus rejection) of the Marxist theory of Biblical religion’s “alienating” role in history. This truth the Church bears, the pope concluded, has “crushed the power of evil which darkens everything” and opens windows through which new possibilities of authentic liberation may be discerned. Later, at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity, the pope committed to the Virgin’s care “those who are deprived of freedom, those who are separated from their loved ones or who are undergoing times of difficulty.” In light of these unmistakable challenges, the pope’s words of greeting at Mass to “the civil authorities who have graciously wished to join us” came as close to public irony as Joseph Ratzinger ever gets.</p>
<p>Finally, at the Mass in José Martí Square in Havana, Benedict XVI returned to the theme of Marxism’s madness, in a homily that stressed the importance of truth and reason in building the just society. In contrast to those who seek authentic truth in a reasonable way and build freedom on that solid foundation, the pope deplored the “irrationality and fanaticism” that some “try to impose…on others” — which was not, one may safely assume, a reference to the division in Cuba between Yankees fans and Red Sox fans. Then, as if to ensure that no one present, including Raúl Castro, missed the point, Benedict XVI insisted that religious freedom is not just the freedom of public worship, important as that is. Rather, “the right to freedom of religion, both in its private and public dimensions, manifests the unity of the human person, who is at once a citizen and a believer,” so the just state must recognize that “believers have a contribution to make to the building-up of society.” Benedict then illustrated this point by paying homage to Father Félix Varela, a 19th-century precursor of Cuban independence and a patron of pro-democracy forces in Cuba today. “Cuba and the world need change,” the pope concluded, “but this will occur only if each person is in a position to seek the truth,” i.e., without coercive state power blocking the way, or keeping the truth-tellers in rancid prisons for decades.</p>
<p>COUNTER-SIGNS AND MISSING SYMBOLS These were profoundly challenging words of truth, deftly crafted, and delivered with calm assurance by a figure of indisputable moral authority in the face of the regime and its leadership. But virtually all that wisdom was undercut by the photos the next day of Benedict XVI in conversation with Fidel Castro. The Catholic Church has some two millennia of experience with the crucial importance of symbols and signs in the proclamation of the truth; the pope’s men seemed virtually clueless about that “sacramental” dimension of Catholicism in planning and executing the papal visit to Cuba.</p>
<p>In the run-up to the visit, the papal nuncio, or ambassador, celebrated a Mass at the Havana cathedral with the cardinal archbishop of the city, Jaimé Ortega, for the healing of Hugo Chávez, a persecutor of the Venezuelan Church, then in Cuba for medical treatment; both Chávez and Raúl Castro, neither noted for public displays of piety in recent decades, were present. The LadiesinWhite, the most prominent of all Cuban civil-society groups, requested a meeting with the pope during a session with the nuncio; 70 members of the group were subsequently arrested and others were beaten. Just before the pope arrived, Cuban dissidents frustrated by the Vatican’s unwillingness to announce that the pope would meet with members of Cuban civil society occupied a church in Havana; Cardinal Ortega had the police remove the demonstrators, and his ham-handed archdiocesan spokesman criticized the demonstrators for politicizing the papal visit — as if the impending papal pilgrimage would take place on some planet devoid of politics. Throughout the pope’s time in Cuba, cell-phone communication among civil-society dissidents was interrupted by the regime in order to make organizing more difficult; almost 200 pro-democracy leaders were arrested; and on the pope’s second day in Cuba, Cuban internal security texted several known dissidents a warning that, after the pope left, “you will be disappeared.” All of this was known, almost as it happened, throughout the world; it is inconceivable that the attack on dissidents during the papal visit was not known to the nunciature in Havana and to the papal party, and yet there were no public denunciations of the regime’s police-state tactics of intimidation and brutalization, nor was the regime challenged by a papal meeting w ith Cuban democrats.</p>
<p>To the contrary: Asked at the end of the visit why the pope had not met with the Ladies in White and other civil-society dissidents, the Holy See’s sometimes-hapless press spokesman, Fr. Federico Lombardi, S.J., made matters worse by replying that the Vatican, in planning such a visit, had to take account of the wishes of the public authorities about the pope’s program.</p>
<p>That, however, was not John Paul II’s view of the matter. Prior to the second papal visit to Poland, which took place in 1983 during martial law, the regime insisted that the pope could not meet with Lech Wałesa, the imprisoned Solidarity leader; the pope insisted on the meeting and threatened to leave early if the meeting were not arranged; and the meeting took place. And if it be countered that, well, Benedict XVI is not a Cuban returning to his own country, then it should be remembered that John Paul II did precisely the same thing in Chile in 1987, when, much to the aggravation of the Pinochet regime, he had a lengthy meeting (arranged by local Catholic authorities) with the Chilean democratic opposition.</p>
<p>On the last day of Benedict XVI’s Cuban visit, when there was still hope that a previously unannounced papal meeting with civil-society representatives might be held, Vatican sources suggested that efforts had been made to arrange such an encounter, but that those efforts had been systematically thwarted by the regime. Assuming that was indeed the case, the claim nonetheless raises more questions than it answers.</p>
<p>If the pope was being prevented from meeting members of his flock whom he wanted to meet, why was a doddering and slightly gaga Fidel Castro granted a half-hour of the pope’s time? Couldn’t the Vatican planners have used the regime’s desire for an obvious propaganda photo-op as leverage to dismantle the obstacles the regime had put in the way of a papal meeting with pro-democracy Catholics and other civil-society representatives?</p>
<p>Moreover, Cuba is not North Korea. It may still be a gigantic prison, but it is not the country it was 30 years ago. If representatives of the National Endowment for Democracy could recently arrange to bring into Cuba an award for the founders of the Ladies in White and could bestow that award at a meeting with civil-society and pro-democracy activists, there is no reason why a competent Vatican nunciature in Havana, working with competent papal trip planners, couldn’t have figured out a way for the pope to meet representatives of Cuban civil society. At the very least, the Vatican could have extracted a high price from the regime (including international media exposure) for blocking such a meeting.</p>
<p>A week after the pope left Cuba, veteran Cuba analyst Carlos Alberto Montaner wrote in the Miami Herald that “ecclesiastical sources,” some of them “very close to the Holy Father,” had told him of the Vatican’s surprise at the sharp contrast between the spontaneous and joyful mass welcome the pope had received in Mexico (just before he came to Cuba), and the controlled atmosphere of an impoverished country the papal party had experienced in Cuba. Moreover, Montaner reported, Vatican officials “found it lamentable” that Raúl Castro had given a speech in Santiago “intended to justify the dictatorship,” a point reinforced during the papal visit by two other senior Cuban officials who insisted that political change was not on the horizon in Cuba. Those same Vatican officials, according to Montaner, found it “painful” that Cuban officials “reprised the most inflexible and Stalinist” orthodoxies whenever journalists were present. Further, Montaner wrote, the visit confirmed the Vatican’s sense of a division in the Cuban Church between bishops who want to support religious freedom by defending the free associations of civil society, and bishops like Cardinal Ortega who take a more benign view of the regime’s program of “reform” and wish to work with it — or, at the very least, not directly against it.</p>
<p>All of this, if true, raises even more questions, for everything Montaner reports the Vatican “learned” from the papal visit to Cuba was well known before the visit was even planned. There was no reason for surprise. The Castro regime behaved precisely the way any knowledgeable person would have expected it to behave. Thus the Vatican’s papal trip planners were either unaware of fundamental Cuban realities, or resigned to dealing with the regime over the long haul, or incapable of imagining effective counter-measures to the regime’s attempts to manipulate the visit for its own purposes. None of those three alternatives is very edifying.</p>
<p>THE FUTURE, IN CUBA AND IN ROME And that brings this discussion to questions of the future. One of those sets of questions involves the Church’s role in Cuba in the next several years. The second set of questions involves the future of the papacy.</p>
<p>As to Cuba: Everyone knows that a transition is underway on that long-suffering island. The question is whether that transition will resemble Spain, and result in a relatively swift and easy transition to democracy and the free economy, or whether it will resemble China, with the regime retaining (and enforcing) its political power while the country opens up economically. The social doctrine of the Catholic Church ought to impel the Vatican to bend every effort to support a Spanish-type transition. Yet that will require the Holy See to remember, and learn from, the example of John Paul II in Poland in the 1980s.</p>
<p>Ever since it was reported that John Paul II would go to Cuba in January 1998, inappropriate analogies have been drawn between the Church in Poland and the Church in Cuba. The blunt fact is that the Cuban Church has nothing resembling the grip on Cuban culture that the Polish Church had on Polish culture. Moreover, Cuban Catholicism has nothing like the overwhelming number of adherents the Polish Church had at the rise of Solidarity, a figure north of 90 percent of the national population. So expectations that Catholicism could play the pivotal role in Cuba that the Catholic Church played in Poland have usually been misplaced.</p>
<p>But there is a relevant Polish-Cuban analogy with lessons for the future. As martial law was winding down in Poland in 1983, the Jaruzelski regime hinted that it was open to an arrangement in which the Catholic Church would become its negotiating partner over the future of Polish society. Some churchmen were tempted (including, one suspects, the primate, Cardinal Józef Glemp). But John Paul II refused the deal, insisting that the nascent associations and institutions of Polish civil society, like Solidarity, had their own integrity, which the Church was duty-bound to respect and support. There would be no deal, then, in which Solidarity was quietly interred while the Church became the de facto institutional opposition to the regime. The Church, as its doctrine required, would support civil society.</p>
<p>Raúl Castro may well be taking a page from the Jaruzelski playbook, hinting to Cardinal Ortega and those of his cast of mind that the regime will work with the Church on certain changes, on the understanding that the Church will not ally itself with Cuban civil society and pro-democracy dissidents. That deal, like the Jaruzelski deal, should be firmly rejected. Doing so will require new, vigorous, and courageous leadership in Cuban Catholicism, of the sort displayed by Archbishop Dionisio García Ibáñez of Santiago, who snubbed Raúl Castro in a receiving line at the papal arrival ceremony. Cardinal Ortega is already six months past the normal retirement age of 75, which means that his letter of resignation has been received by the Holy See. One hopes that it will be swiftly accepted, and leadership capable of leading the Cuban Church in support of Cuban civil society brought to the fore.</p>
<p>And as to the next conclave: The re-Italianization of the Roman Curia under Benedict XVI’s secretary of state, Cardina l Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B., must be critically scrutinized before a new pope is elected. That process has proven deeply problematic on any number of counts; what the Cuba visit suggests is that re-Italianization has brought with it a return to the international perspective of the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, architect of the failed Vatican strategy of “saving what could be saved” behind the old Iron Curtain, which meant reaching accommodations with Communist regimes. That strategy not only failed politically; it created enormous, post-Communist obstacles to the Church’s evangelical mission in free societies that had thrown off the Communist yoke. Accommodation is morally offensive in itself. And while prudence remains an important political virtue, prudence does not equate with appeasement, as history has taught time and again in a variety of circumstances.</p>
<p>The Casaroli approach, which seems to have shaped the planning of the papal visit to Cuba, also fails to grasp the nature of papal power in the 21st-century world. A century and a half after the demise of the Papal States, many Italian curialists and more than a few Vatican diplomats still habitually think of the pope as the sovereign of a mid-sized European power, who deals with other political sovereigns according to the usual rules of the sovereignty game: thus Father Lombardi’s clumsy response to journalists at the end of the papal visit, asserting that Benedict XVI had to play by the established ground rules. But he doesn’t, and neither does any other 21st-century pope. Yes, the pope is a sovereign under international law. But his authority in world affairs does not derive from the fact that he is the master of 110 acres in the middle of Rome and issues his own stamps and coins. As John Paul II demonstrated, and as Benedict XVI has also shown in many of his major public addresses (including those in Cuba), contemporary papal power is a unique form of moral authority that comes from an unshakeable determination to speak the truth, even in the face of worldly power.</p>
<p>Benedict XVI has been ill-served during his pontificate by associates who too often seem to have forgotten that fact. Putting that truth about the nature of papal authority in world affairs back at the center of the Church’s global role — and getting the next pope the kind of assistance he needs to live that truth out — ought to be high on the agenda of discussion in the College of Cardinals at the next papal transition.</p>
<p>Nothing less than the Church’s commitment to a New Evangelization of the 21st century is at stake.</p>
<p>– George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | Benedict XVI in Cuba | false | https://eppc.org/publications/benedict-xvi-in-cuba/ | 1right-center
| 3,052 | Catholicism is not a 8220religion of the book8221 but rather a faith built around word and sacrament 8212 or if you prefer text and demonstration Symbolic acts that convey the truths the Church teaches are of the essence of Catholic practice this is true of the Church8217s public life as well as of its worship The Church teaches an ethic of charity toward the poor and marginalized the Church embodies that teaching in its hospitals schools and socialservice agencies The Church teaches that the just society is composed of a democratic political community a free economy and a vibrant public moral culture the Church embodies that teaching in its support for the institutions of civil society that make free politics and free economics possible 8212 even when that requires challenging the existing political order as it did during the pontificate of John Paul II in countries as diverse as Poland Chile Argentina and the Philippines Viewed through this prism of wordandsacrament or textanddemonstration Pope Benedict XVI8217s March 2628 pilgrimage to the island prison of Cuba was a rather Protestant exercise brilliant in word but deficient in 8220sacramentality8221 The pope8217s time in Santiago and Havana was by no means wasted But it could have been used better by demonstrating in action the truths Benedict XVI taught with conviction such a demonstration would have strengthened the hand of the civilsociety associations on which the transition to a free Cuba ultimately depends The gap between 8220text8221 and 8220demonstration8221 during the pope8217s Cuban voyage is also instructive through the light it sheds on the Catholic future in a Cubaintransition and on a crucial issue in the conclave that will choose Pope Benedict8217s successor THE TEXTS Benedict XVI8217s addresses in Cuba were vintage Joseph Ratzinger richly informed by Biblical and theological wisdom and lucidly expressed Despite his prepapal reputation as a fierce defender of orthodoxy Ratzinger8217s papacy has consistently shown the world the real man his friends and colleagues knew and admired a man who doesn8217t raise his voice as a matter of habit or tactic but who makes his arguments calmly drawing on an unmatched fund of knowledge in a variety of fields Benedict XVI on occasion has had to use somewhat more elliptical constructions than is his wont But his meaning is never much in doubt Thus in a airborne press conference en route to Latin America the pope who a quartercentury ago once referred to the 8220impossible compromise between Christianity and Marxism8221 now spoke of Cuban Marxism as something that 8220no longer corresponds to reality8221 8212 a slightly less edgy formulation one might think except that it was a polite papal way of saying that Castroite Communism is crazy mad completelyoutoftouchwiththerealworld which is another way of saying that it8217s hellish There is little chance that what the pope meant was missed by Ra250l Castro and the rest of Cuba8217s jailerclass Then in Santiago which is both the devotional center of Cuban Catholicism centered on the small icon of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre and the heartland of the Castroite revolution Benedict XVI insisted in his Mass homily that Christianity 8220opens the doors of the world to truth8221 especially the truth that 8220apart from God we are alienated from ourselves and hurled into the void8221 8212 an explicit inversion and thus rejection of the Marxist theory of Biblical religion8217s 8220alienating8221 role in history This truth the Church bears the pope concluded has 8220crushed the power of evil which darkens everything8221 and opens windows through which new possibilities of authentic liberation may be discerned Later at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity the pope committed to the Virgin8217s care 8220those who are deprived of freedom those who are separated from their loved ones or who are undergoing times of difficulty8221 In light of these unmistakable challenges the pope8217s words of greeting at Mass to 8220the civil authorities who have graciously wished to join us8221 came as close to public irony as Joseph Ratzinger ever gets Finally at the Mass in Jos233 Mart237 Square in Havana Benedict XVI returned to the theme of Marxism8217s madness in a homily that stressed the importance of truth and reason in building the just society In contrast to those who seek authentic truth in a reasonable way and build freedom on that solid foundation the pope deplored the 8220irrationality and fanaticism8221 that some 8220try to impose8230on others8221 8212 which was not one may safely assume a reference to the division in Cuba between Yankees fans and Red Sox fans Then as if to ensure that no one present including Ra250l Castro missed the point Benedict XVI insisted that religious freedom is not just the freedom of public worship important as that is Rather 8220the right to freedom of religion both in its private and public dimensions manifests the unity of the human person who is at once a citizen and a believer8221 so the just state must recognize that 8220believers have a contribution to make to the buildingup of society8221 Benedict then illustrated this point by paying homage to Father F233lix Varela a 19thcentury precursor of Cuban independence and a patron of prodemocracy forces in Cuba today 8220Cuba and the world need change8221 the pope concluded 8220but this will occur only if each person is in a position to seek the truth8221 ie without coercive state power blocking the way or keeping the truthtellers in rancid prisons for decades COUNTERSIGNS AND MISSING SYMBOLS These were profoundly challenging words of truth deftly crafted and delivered with calm assurance by a figure of indisputable moral authority in the face of the regime and its leadership But virtually all that wisdom was undercut by the photos the next day of Benedict XVI in conversation with Fidel Castro The Catholic Church has some two millennia of experience with the crucial importance of symbols and signs in the proclamation of the truth the pope8217s men seemed virtually clueless about that 8220sacramental8221 dimension of Catholicism in planning and executing the papal visit to Cuba In the runup to the visit the papal nuncio or ambassador celebrated a Mass at the Havana cathedral with the cardinal archbishop of the city Jaim233 Ortega for the healing of Hugo Ch225vez a persecutor of the Venezuelan Church then in Cuba for medical treatment both Ch225vez and Ra250l Castro neither noted for public displays of piety in recent decades were present The LadiesinWhite the most prominent of all Cuban civilsociety groups requested a meeting with the pope during a session with the nuncio 70 members of the group were subsequently arrested and others were beaten Just before the pope arrived Cuban dissidents frustrated by the Vatican8217s unwillingness to announce that the pope would meet with members of Cuban civil society occupied a church in Havana Cardinal Ortega had the police remove the demonstrators and his hamhanded archdiocesan spokesman criticized the demonstrators for politicizing the papal visit 8212 as if the impending papal pilgrimage would take place on some planet devoid of politics Throughout the pope8217s time in Cuba cellphone communication among civilsociety dissidents was interrupted by the regime in order to make organizing more difficult almost 200 prodemocracy leaders were arrested and on the pope8217s second day in Cuba Cuban internal security texted several known dissidents a warning that after the pope left 8220you will be disappeared8221 All of this was known almost as it happened throughout the world it is inconceivable that the attack on dissidents during the papal visit was not known to the nunciature in Havana and to the papal party and yet there were no public denunciations of the regime8217s policestate tactics of intimidation and brutalization nor was the regime challenged by a papal meeting w ith Cuban democrats To the contrary Asked at the end of the visit why the pope had not met with the Ladies in White and other civilsociety dissidents the Holy See8217s sometimeshapless press spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi SJ made matters worse by replying that the Vatican in planning such a visit had to take account of the wishes of the public authorities about the pope8217s program That however was not John Paul II8217s view of the matter Prior to the second papal visit to Poland which took place in 1983 during martial law the regime insisted that the pope could not meet with Lech Wa322esa the imprisoned Solidarity leader the pope insisted on the meeting and threatened to leave early if the meeting were not arranged and the meeting took place And if it be countered that well Benedict XVI is not a Cuban returning to his own country then it should be remembered that John Paul II did precisely the same thing in Chile in 1987 when much to the aggravation of the Pinochet regime he had a lengthy meeting arranged by local Catholic authorities with the Chilean democratic opposition On the last day of Benedict XVI8217s Cuban visit when there was still hope that a previously unannounced papal meeting with civilsociety representatives might be held Vatican sources suggested that efforts had been made to arrange such an encounter but that those efforts had been systematically thwarted by the regime Assuming that was indeed the case the claim nonetheless raises more questions than it answers If the pope was being prevented from meeting members of his flock whom he wanted to meet why was a doddering and slightly gaga Fidel Castro granted a halfhour of the pope8217s time Couldn8217t the Vatican planners have used the regime8217s desire for an obvious propaganda photoop as leverage to dismantle the obstacles the regime had put in the way of a papal meeting with prodemocracy Catholics and other civilsociety representatives Moreover Cuba is not North Korea It may still be a gigantic prison but it is not the country it was 30 years ago If representatives of the National Endowment for Democracy could recently arrange to bring into Cuba an award for the founders of the Ladies in White and could bestow that award at a meeting with civilsociety and prodemocracy activists there is no reason why a competent Vatican nunciature in Havana working with competent papal trip planners couldn8217t have figured out a way for the pope to meet representatives of Cuban civil society At the very least the Vatican could have extracted a high price from the regime including international media exposure for blocking such a meeting A week after the pope left Cuba veteran Cuba analyst Carlos Alberto Montaner wrote in the Miami Herald that 8220ecclesiastical sources8221 some of them 8220very close to the Holy Father8221 had told him of the Vatican8217s surprise at the sharp contrast between the spontaneous and joyful mass welcome the pope had received in Mexico just before he came to Cuba and the controlled atmosphere of an impoverished country the papal party had experienced in Cuba Moreover Montaner reported Vatican officials 8220found it lamentable8221 that Ra250l Castro had given a speech in Santiago 8220intended to justify the dictatorship8221 a point reinforced during the papal visit by two other senior Cuban officials who insisted that political change was not on the horizon in Cuba Those same Vatican officials according to Montaner found it 8220painful8221 that Cuban officials 8220reprised the most inflexible and Stalinist8221 orthodoxies whenever journalists were present Further Montaner wrote the visit confirmed the Vatican8217s sense of a division in the Cuban Church between bishops who want to support religious freedom by defending the free associations of civil society and bishops like Cardinal Ortega who take a more benign view of the regime8217s program of 8220reform8221 and wish to work with it 8212 or at the very least not directly against it All of this if true raises even more questions for everything Montaner reports the Vatican 8220learned8221 from the papal visit to Cuba was well known before the visit was even planned There was no reason for surprise The Castro regime behaved precisely the way any knowledgeable person would have expected it to behave Thus the Vatican8217s papal trip planners were either unaware of fundamental Cuban realities or resigned to dealing with the regime over the long haul or incapable of imagining effective countermeasures to the regime8217s attempts to manipulate the visit for its own purposes None of those three alternatives is very edifying THE FUTURE IN CUBA AND IN ROME And that brings this discussion to questions of the future One of those sets of questions involves the Church8217s role in Cuba in the next several years The second set of questions involves the future of the papacy As to Cuba Everyone knows that a transition is underway on that longsuffering island The question is whether that transition will resemble Spain and result in a relatively swift and easy transition to democracy and the free economy or whether it will resemble China with the regime retaining and enforcing its political power while the country opens up economically The social doctrine of the Catholic Church ought to impel the Vatican to bend every effort to support a Spanishtype transition Yet that will require the Holy See to remember and learn from the example of John Paul II in Poland in the 1980s Ever since it was reported that John Paul II would go to Cuba in January 1998 inappropriate analogies have been drawn between the Church in Poland and the Church in Cuba The blunt fact is that the Cuban Church has nothing resembling the grip on Cuban culture that the Polish Church had on Polish culture Moreover Cuban Catholicism has nothing like the overwhelming number of adherents the Polish Church had at the rise of Solidarity a figure north of 90 percent of the national population So expectations that Catholicism could play the pivotal role in Cuba that the Catholic Church played in Poland have usually been misplaced But there is a relevant PolishCuban analogy with lessons for the future As martial law was winding down in Poland in 1983 the Jaruzelski regime hinted that it was open to an arrangement in which the Catholic Church would become its negotiating partner over the future of Polish society Some churchmen were tempted including one suspects the primate Cardinal J243zef Glemp But John Paul II refused the deal insisting that the nascent associations and institutions of Polish civil society like Solidarity had their own integrity which the Church was dutybound to respect and support There would be no deal then in which Solidarity was quietly interred while the Church became the de facto institutional opposition to the regime The Church as its doctrine required would support civil society Ra250l Castro may well be taking a page from the Jaruzelski playbook hinting to Cardinal Ortega and those of his cast of mind that the regime will work with the Church on certain changes on the understanding that the Church will not ally itself with Cuban civil society and prodemocracy dissidents That deal like the Jaruzelski deal should be firmly rejected Doing so will require new vigorous and courageous leadership in Cuban Catholicism of the sort displayed by Archbishop Dionisio Garc237a Ib225241ez of Santiago who snubbed Ra250l Castro in a receiving line at the papal arrival ceremony Cardinal Ortega is already six months past the normal retirement age of 75 which means that his letter of resignation has been received by the Holy See One hopes that it will be swiftly accepted and leadership capable of leading the Cuban Church in support of Cuban civil society brought to the fore And as to the next conclave The reItalianization of the Roman Curia under Benedict XVI8217s secretary of state Cardina l Tarcisio Bertone SDB must be critically scrutinized before a new pope is elected That process has proven deeply problematic on any number of counts what the Cuba visit suggests is that reItalianization has brought with it a return to the international perspective of the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli architect of the failed Vatican strategy of 8220saving what could be saved8221 behind the old Iron Curtain which meant reaching accommodations with Communist regimes That strategy not only failed politically it created enormous postCommunist obstacles to the Church8217s evangelical mission in free societies that had thrown off the Communist yoke Accommodation is morally offensive in itself And while prudence remains an important political virtue prudence does not equate with appeasement as history has taught time and again in a variety of circumstances The Casaroli approach which seems to have shaped the planning of the papal visit to Cuba also fails to grasp the nature of papal power in the 21stcentury world A century and a half after the demise of the Papal States many Italian curialists and more than a few Vatican diplomats still habitually think of the pope as the sovereign of a midsized European power who deals with other political sovereigns according to the usual rules of the sovereignty game thus Father Lombardi8217s clumsy response to journalists at the end of the papal visit asserting that Benedict XVI had to play by the established ground rules But he doesn8217t and neither does any other 21stcentury pope Yes the pope is a sovereign under international law But his authority in world affairs does not derive from the fact that he is the master of 110 acres in the middle of Rome and issues his own stamps and coins As John Paul II demonstrated and as Benedict XVI has also shown in many of his major public addresses including those in Cuba contemporary papal power is a unique form of moral authority that comes from an unshakeable determination to speak the truth even in the face of worldly power Benedict XVI has been illserved during his pontificate by associates who too often seem to have forgotten that fact Putting that truth about the nature of papal authority in world affairs back at the center of the Church8217s global role 8212 and getting the next pope the kind of assistance he needs to live that truth out 8212 ought to be high on the agenda of discussion in the College of Cardinals at the next papal transition Nothing less than the Church8217s commitment to a New Evangelization of the 21st century is at stake 8211 George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington8217s Ethics and Public Policy Center where he holds the William E Simon Chair in Catholic Studies | Catholicism/PROPN is/AUX not/PART a/DET 8220religion/NOUN of/ADP the/DET book8221/PROPN but/CCONJ rather/ADV a/DET faith/NOUN built/VERB around/ADP word/NOUN and/CCONJ sacrament/NOUN 8212/NUM or/CCONJ if/SCONJ you/PRON prefer/VERB text/NOUN and/CCONJ demonstration/NOUN Symbolic/PROPN acts/VERB that/PRON convey/VERB 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<p>On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton responded to questions from reporters regarding the ongoing controversy over her exclusive use of personal email while she was serving as secretary of state.</p>
<p>“I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails than two,” <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-to-answer-questions-about-use-of-private-e-mail-server/2015/03/10/4c000d00-c735-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_story.html" type="external">Clinton said.</a> “I did it for convenience and I now looking back think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning.”</p>
<p>Although the email revelation, which was reported by the New York Times last week, does not appear to have affected top <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/democratic-donors-unfazed-hillary-clintons-private-email-015155559.html;_ylt=A0LEVi1eF_9UbbAAs4onnIlQ" type="external">Democratic donors’</a> enthusiasm for Clinton, it has prompted renewed questions about the likely presidential candidate’s propensity for secrecy.</p>
<p>Aside from a tweet saying she requested the State Department publicize 55,000 pages of emails that she turned over, Clinton has largely avoided addressing the emails until today.&#160;</p>
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<p>For more on the Clintons and their relationship with the media in the wake of this latest controversy, read&#160; <a href="" type="internal">David Corn’s analysis here.&#160;</a></p>
<p>Her <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/03/10/transcript-hillary-clinton-addresses-e-mails-iran/?tid=sm_tw" type="external">full</a>transcript below:&#160;</p>
<p>I want to thank the United Nations for hosting today’s events and putting the challenge of gender equality front and center on the international agenda. I’m especially pleased to have so many leaders here from the private sector standing shoulder to shoulder with advocates who have worked tirelessly for equality for decades.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, this was a lonelier struggle. Today, we mark the progress that has been made in the two decades since the international community gathered in Beijing and declared with one voice that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.</p>
<p>And because of advances in health, education, and legal protections, we can say that there has never been a better time in history to be born female. Yet as the comprehensive new report, published by the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation this week makes clear, despite all this progress, when it comes to the full participation of women and girls, we’re just not there yet.</p>
<p>As I said today, this remains the great unfinished business of the 21st century. And my passion for this fight burns as brightly today as it did 20 years ago.</p>
<p>I want to comment on a matter in the news today regarding Iran. The president and his team are in the midst of intense negotiations. Their goal is a diplomatic solution that would close off Iran’s pathways to a nuclear bomb and give us unprecedented access and insight into Iran’s nuclear program.</p>
<p>Now, reasonable people can disagree about what exactly it will take to accomplish this objective, and we all must judge any final agreement on its merits.</p>
<p>But the recent letter from Republican senators was out of step with the best traditions of American leadership. And one has to ask, what was the purpose of this letter?</p>
<p>There appear to be two logical answers. Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander- in-chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy. Either answer does discredit to the letters’ signatories.</p>
<p>Now, I would be pleased to talk more about this important matter, but I know there have been questions about my email, so I want to address that directly, and then I will take a few questions from you.</p>
<p>There are four things I want the public to know.</p>
<p>First, when I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.</p>
<p>Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue.</p>
<p>Second, the vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department.</p>
<p>Third, after I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work- related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totalled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them. We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work- related emails and deliver them to the State Department. At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.</p>
<p>No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.</p>
<p>Fourth, I took the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my work-related emails public for everyone to see.</p>
<p>I am very proud of the work that I and my colleagues and our public servants at the department did during my four years as secretary of state, and I look forward to people being able to see that for themselves.</p>
<p>Again, looking back, it would’ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts. I thought using one device would be simpler, and obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way.</p>
<p>Now I’m happy to take a few questions.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Sorry.</p>
<p>Madam Secretary, Kahraman Haliscelik with Turkish Television. On behalf of the U.N. Correspondence Association, thank you very much for your remarks, and it’s wonderful to see you here again.</p>
<p>Madam Secretary, why did you opt out not using two devices at the time? Obviously, if this didn’t come out, you wouldn’t — probably wouldn’t become an issue.</p>
<p>QUESTION: And my — my second follow-up question is, if you were a man today, would all this fuss being made be made?</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well, I will — I will leave that to others to answer.</p>
<p>But as I — as I said, I saw it as a matter of convenience, and it was allowed. Others had done it. According to the State Department, which recently said Secretary Kerry was the first secretary of state to rely primarily on a state.gov e-mail account.</p>
<p>And when I got there, I wanted to just use one device for both personal and work e-mails, instead of two. It was allowed. And as I said, it was for convenience. And it was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their .gov accounts so those e-mails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet recordkeeping requirements, and that, indeed, is what happened.</p>
<p>And I heard just a little while ago the State Department announced they would begin to post some of my e-mails, which I’m very glad to hear, because I want it all out there.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Madam Secretary, can you…</p>
<p>CLINTON: Andrea? Andrea, thank you, Andrea.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Can you explain how you decided which of the personal e-mails to get rid of, how you got rid of them and when? And how you’ll respond to questions about you being the arbiter of what you release?</p>
<p>And, secondly, could you answer the questions that have been raised about foreign contributions from Middle Eastern countries, like Saudi Arabia, that abuse women or permit violence against women to the family foundation and whether that disturbs you as you are rightly celebrating 20 years of leadership on this issue?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well, those are two very different questions. Let me see if I can take them in order. And I’ll give you some of the background.</p>
<p>In going through the e-mails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work. I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear.</p>
<p>For any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related. I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the e-mails that were produced.</p>
<p>And I feel like once the American public begins to see the e- mails, they will have an unprecedented insight into a high government official’s daily communications, which I think will be quite interesting.</p>
<p>With respect to the foundation, I am very proud of the work the foundation does. I’m very proud of the hundreds of thousands of people who support the work of the foundation and the results that have been achieved for people here at home and around the world.</p>
<p>And I think that we are very clear about where we stand, certainly where I stand, on all of these issues. There can’t be any mistake about my passion concerning women’s rights here at home and around the world.</p>
<p>So I think that people who want to support the foundation know full well what it is we stand for and what we’re working on.</p>
<p>CLINTON: Hi, right here.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Secretary Clinton?</p>
<p>CLINTON: She’s sort of squashed, so we’ve got to…</p>
<p>QUESTION: Hi, Secretary.</p>
<p>CLINTON: Hi.</p>
<p>QUESTION: I was wondering if you think that you made a mistake either in exclusively using your private e-mail or in response to the controversy around it. And, if so, what have you learned from that?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well, I have to tell you that, as I said in my remarks, looking back, it would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices. But I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department.</p>
<p>And I have to add, even if I had had two devices, which is obviously permitted — many people do that — you would still have to put the responsibility where it belongs, which is on the official. So I did it for convenience and I now, looking back, think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Secretary Clinton?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Yes? QUESTION: Did you or any of your aides delete any government- related e-mails from your personal account? And what lengths are you willing to go to to prove that you didn’t?</p>
<p>Some people, including supporters of yours, have suggested having an independent arbiter look at your server, for instance.</p>
<p>CLINTON: We did not. In fact, my direction to conduct the thorough investigation was to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean they will be by the State Department once the State Department goes through them, but out of an abundance of caution and care, you know, we wanted to send that message unequivocally.</p>
<p>That is the responsibility of the individual and I have fulfilled that responsibility, and I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done. When the search was conducted, we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records, and that’s exactly what we did.</p>
<p>And we went, as I said, beyond that. And the process produced over 30,000 you know, work emails, and I think that we have more than met the requests from the State Department. The server contains personal communications from my husband and me, and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private and I think that the State Department will be able, over time, to release all of the records that were provided.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Madam Secretary, can you…</p>
<p>CLINTON: Right there.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Madam Secretary, two quick follow ups. You mentioned the server. That’s one of the distinctions here.</p>
<p>This wasn’t Gmail or Yahoo or something. This was a server that you owned. Is that appropriate? Is it — was there any precedent for it? Did you clear it with any State Department security officials? And do they have — did they have full access to it when you were secretary?</p>
<p>And then separately, will any of this have any bearing or effect on your timing or decision about whether or not you run for president? Thank you.</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well, the system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office. And it had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches.</p>
<p>So, I think that the — the use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure. Now, with respect to any sort of future — future issues, look, I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters. And I feel that I’ve taken unprecedented steps to provide these work-related emails. They’re going to be in the public domain. And I think that Americans will find that you know, interesting, and I look forward to having a discussion about that.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Madam Secretary?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Hi.</p>
<p>QUESTION: How could the public be assured that when you deleted emails that were personal in nature, that you didn’t also delete emails that were professional, but possibly unflattering?</p>
<p>And what do you think about this Republican idea of having an independent third party come in an examine your emails?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well first of all, you have to ask that question to every single federal employee, because the way the system works, the federal employee, the individual, whether they have one device, two devices, three devices, how many addresses, they make the decision.</p>
<p>So, even if you have a work-related device with a work-related .gov account, you choose what goes on that. That is the way our system works. And so we trust and count on the judgment of thousands, maybe millions of people to make those decisions.</p>
<p>And I feel that I did that and even more, that I went above and beyond what I was requested to do. And again, those will be out in the public domain, and people will be able to judge for themselves.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Okay, Madam.</p>
<p>Madam Secretary?</p>
<p>Madam Secretary, excuse me.</p>
<p>Madam Secretary, State Department rules at the time you were secretary were perfectly clear that if a State Department employee was going to be using private email, that employee needed to turn those emails over to the State Department to be preserved on government computers.</p>
<p>Why did you not do that? Why did you not go along with State Department rules until nearly two years after you left office?</p>
<p>QUESTION: And also, the president of the United States said that he was unaware that you had this unusual email arrangement. The White House counsel’s office says that you never approved this arrangement through them.</p>
<p>Why did you not do that? Why did you — why have you apparently caught the White House by surprise?</p>
<p>And then just one last political question, if I — I might. Does all of this make — affect your decision in any way on whether or not to run for president?</p>
<p>CLINTON: Well, let me try to unpack your multiple questions.</p>
<p>First, the laws and regulations in effect when I was secretary of state allowed me to use my email for work. That is undisputed.</p>
<p>Secondly, under the Federal Records Act, records are defined as reported information, regardless of its form or characteristics, and in meeting the record keeping obligations, it was my practice to email government officials on their state or other .gov accounts so that the emails were immediately captured and preserved.</p>
<p>Now, there are different rules governing the White House than there are governing the rest of the executive branch, and in order to address the requirements I was under, I did exactly what I have said. I emailed two people, and I not only knew, I expected that then to be captured in the State Department or any other government agency that I was emailing to at a .gov account.</p>
<p>What happened in — sorry, I guess late summer, early — early fall, is that the State Department sent a letter to former secretaries of state, not just to me, asking for some assistance in providing any work-related emails that might be on the personal email.</p>
<p>And what I did was to direct, you know, my counsel to conduct a thorough investigation and to err on the side of providing anything that could be connected to work. They did that, and that was my obligation. I fully fulfilled it, and then I took the unprecedented step of saying, “Go ahead and release them, and let people see them.”</p>
<p>QUESTION: Why did you wait two months? Why — why did you wait two months to turn those emails over? The rules say you have to turn them over…</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK) CLINTON: I don’t think — I’d be happy to have somebody talk to you about the rules. I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Were you ever — were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using — using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president?</p>
<p>CLINTON: I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.</p>
<p>So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)</p>
<p>CLINTON: Because they were personal and private about matters that I believed were within the scope of my personal privacy and that particularly of other people. They have nothing to do with work, but I didn’t see any reason to keep them.</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>QUESTION: At the end of the process.</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>QUESTION: … who was forced to resign two years ago because of his personal use of emails?</p>
<p>By the way, David Shuster from Al Jazeera America.</p>
<p>CLINTON: Yeah. Right…</p>
<p>QUESTION: What about Ambassador Scott (inaudible) being forced to resign?</p>
<p>CLINTON: David, I think you should go online and read the entire I.G. report. That is not an accurate representation of what happened.</p>
<p>(CROSSTALK)</p>
<p>CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.</p>
<p /> | Hillary Clinton Just Responded to Her Email Controversy | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/hillary-clinton-email-controversy/ | 2015-03-10 | 4left
| 3,052 | On Tuesday Hillary Clinton responded to questions from reporters regarding the ongoing controversy over her exclusive use of personal email while she was serving as secretary of state 8220I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails than two8221 Clinton said 8220I did it for convenience and I now looking back think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning8221 Although the email revelation which was reported by the New York Times last week does not appear to have affected top Democratic donors8217 enthusiasm for Clinton it has prompted renewed questions about the likely presidential candidate8217s propensity for secrecy Aside from a tweet saying she requested the State Department publicize 55000 pages of emails that she turned over Clinton has largely avoided addressing the emails until todayamp160 For more on the Clintons and their relationship with the media in the wake of this latest controversy readamp160 David Corn8217s analysis hereamp160 Her fulltranscript belowamp160 I want to thank the United Nations for hosting today8217s events and putting the challenge of gender equality front and center on the international agenda I8217m especially pleased to have so many leaders here from the private sector standing shoulder to shoulder with advocates who have worked tirelessly for equality for decades Twenty years ago this was a lonelier struggle Today we mark the progress that has been made in the two decades since the international community gathered in Beijing and declared with one voice that human rights are women8217s rights and women8217s rights are human rights And because of advances in health education and legal protections we can say that there has never been a better time in history to be born female Yet as the comprehensive new report published by the Clinton Foundation and the Gates Foundation this week makes clear despite all this progress when it comes to the full participation of women and girls we8217re just not there yet As I said today this remains the great unfinished business of the 21st century And my passion for this fight burns as brightly today as it did 20 years ago I want to comment on a matter in the news today regarding Iran The president and his team are in the midst of intense negotiations Their goal is a diplomatic solution that would close off Iran8217s pathways to a nuclear bomb and give us unprecedented access and insight into Iran8217s nuclear program Now reasonable people can disagree about what exactly it will take to accomplish this objective and we all must judge any final agreement on its merits But the recent letter from Republican senators was out of step with the best traditions of American leadership And one has to ask what was the purpose of this letter There appear to be two logical answers Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander inchief in the midst of highstakes international diplomacy Either answer does discredit to the letters8217 signatories Now I would be pleased to talk more about this important matter but I know there have been questions about my email so I want to address that directly and then I will take a few questions from you There are four things I want the public to know First when I got to work as secretary of state I opted for convenience to use my personal email account which was allowed by the State Department because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two Looking back it would8217ve been better if I8217d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone but at the time this didn8217t seem like an issue Second the vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department Third after I left office the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work related emails from our personal accounts I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be workrelated which totalled roughly 55000 printed pages even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work related emails and deliver them to the State Department At the end I chose not to keep my private personal emails 8212 emails about planning Chelsea8217s wedding or my mother8217s funeral arrangements condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines family vacations the other things you typically find in inboxes No one wants their personal emails made public and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy Fourth I took the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my workrelated emails public for everyone to see I am very proud of the work that I and my colleagues and our public servants at the department did during my four years as secretary of state and I look forward to people being able to see that for themselves Again looking back it would8217ve been better for me to use two separate phones and two email accounts I thought using one device would be simpler and obviously it hasn8217t worked out that way Now I8217m happy to take a few questions QUESTION Sorry Madam Secretary Kahraman Haliscelik with Turkish Television On behalf of the UN Correspondence Association thank you very much for your remarks and it8217s wonderful to see you here again Madam Secretary why did you opt out not using two devices at the time Obviously if this didn8217t come out you wouldn8217t 8212 probably wouldn8217t become an issue QUESTION And my 8212 my second followup question is if you were a man today would all this fuss being made be made Thank you CLINTON Well I will 8212 I will leave that to others to answer But as I 8212 as I said I saw it as a matter of convenience and it was allowed Others had done it According to the State Department which recently said Secretary Kerry was the first secretary of state to rely primarily on a stategov email account And when I got there I wanted to just use one device for both personal and work emails instead of two It was allowed And as I said it was for convenience And it was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their gov accounts so those emails would be automatically saved in the State Department system to meet recordkeeping requirements and that indeed is what happened And I heard just a little while ago the State Department announced they would begin to post some of my emails which I8217m very glad to hear because I want it all out there QUESTION Madam Secretary can you8230 CLINTON Andrea Andrea thank you Andrea QUESTION Can you explain how you decided which of the personal emails to get rid of how you got rid of them and when And how you8217ll respond to questions about you being the arbiter of what you release And secondly could you answer the questions that have been raised about foreign contributions from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia that abuse women or permit violence against women to the family foundation and whether that disturbs you as you are rightly celebrating 20 years of leadership on this issue CLINTON Well those are two very different questions Let me see if I can take them in order And I8217ll give you some of the background In going through the emails there were over 60000 in total sent and received About half were workrelated and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work I had no reason to save them but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear For any government employee it is that government employee8217s responsibility to determine what8217s personal and what8217s workrelated I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the emails that were produced And I feel like once the American public begins to see the e mails they will have an unprecedented insight into a high government official8217s daily communications which I think will be quite interesting With respect to the foundation I am very proud of the work the foundation does I8217m very proud of the hundreds of thousands of people who support the work of the foundation and the results that have been achieved for people here at home and around the world And I think that we are very clear about where we stand certainly where I stand on all of these issues There can8217t be any mistake about my passion concerning women8217s rights here at home and around the world So I think that people who want to support the foundation know full well what it is we stand for and what we8217re working on CLINTON Hi right here QUESTION Secretary Clinton CLINTON She8217s sort of squashed so we8217ve got to8230 QUESTION Hi Secretary CLINTON Hi QUESTION I was wondering if you think that you made a mistake either in exclusively using your private email or in response to the controversy around it And if so what have you learned from that CLINTON Well I have to tell you that as I said in my remarks looking back it would have been probably you know smarter to have used two devices But I have absolute confidence that everything that could be in any way connected to work is now in the possession of the State Department And I have to add even if I had had two devices which is obviously permitted 8212 many people do that 8212 you would still have to put the responsibility where it belongs which is on the official So I did it for convenience and I now looking back think that it might have been smarter to have those two devices from the very beginning QUESTION Secretary Clinton CLINTON Yes QUESTION Did you or any of your aides delete any government related emails from your personal account And what lengths are you willing to go to to prove that you didn8217t Some people including supporters of yours have suggested having an independent arbiter look at your server for instance CLINTON We did not In fact my direction to conduct the thorough investigation was to err on the side of providing anything that could be possibly viewed as work related That doesn8217t mean they will be by the State Department once the State Department goes through them but out of an abundance of caution and care you know we wanted to send that message unequivocally That is the responsibility of the individual and I have fulfilled that responsibility and I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done When the search was conducted we were asking that any email be identified and preserved that could potentially be federal records and that8217s exactly what we did And we went as I said beyond that And the process produced over 30000 you know work emails and I think that we have more than met the requests from the State Department The server contains personal communications from my husband and me and I believe I have met all of my responsibilities and the server will remain private and I think that the State Department will be able over time to release all of the records that were provided QUESTION Madam Secretary can you8230 CLINTON Right there QUESTION Madam Secretary two quick follow ups You mentioned the server That8217s one of the distinctions here This wasn8217t Gmail or Yahoo or something This was a server that you owned Is that appropriate Is it 8212 was there any precedent for it Did you clear it with any State Department security officials And do they have 8212 did they have full access to it when you were secretary And then separately will any of this have any bearing or effect on your timing or decision about whether or not you run for president Thank you CLINTON Well the system we used was set up for President Clinton8217s office And it had numerous safeguards It was on property guarded by the Secret Service And there were no security breaches So I think that the 8212 the use of that server which started with my husband certainly proved to be effective and secure Now with respect to any sort of future 8212 future issues look I trust the American people to make their decisions about political and public matters And I feel that I8217ve taken unprecedented steps to provide these workrelated emails They8217re going to be in the public domain And I think that Americans will find that you know interesting and I look forward to having a discussion about that QUESTION Madam Secretary CLINTON Hi QUESTION How could the public be assured that when you deleted emails that were personal in nature that you didn8217t also delete emails that were professional but possibly unflattering And what do you think about this Republican idea of having an independent third party come in an examine your emails CLINTON Well first of all you have to ask that question to every single federal employee because the way the system works the federal employee the individual whether they have one device two devices three devices how many addresses they make the decision So even if you have a workrelated device with a workrelated gov account you choose what goes on that That is the way our system works And so we trust and count on the judgment of thousands maybe millions of people to make those decisions And I feel that I did that and even more that I went above and beyond what I was requested to do And again those will be out in the public domain and people will be able to judge for themselves QUESTION Okay Madam Madam Secretary Madam Secretary excuse me Madam Secretary State Department rules at the time you were secretary were perfectly clear that if a State Department employee was going to be using private email that employee needed to turn those emails over to the State Department to be preserved on government computers Why did you not do that Why did you not go along with State Department rules until nearly two years after you left office QUESTION And also the president of the United States said that he was unaware that you had this unusual email arrangement The White House counsel8217s office says that you never approved this arrangement through them Why did you not do that Why did you 8212 why have you apparently caught the White House by surprise And then just one last political question if I 8212 I might Does all of this make 8212 affect your decision in any way on whether or not to run for president CLINTON Well let me try to unpack your multiple questions First the laws and regulations in effect when I was secretary of state allowed me to use my email for work That is undisputed Secondly under the Federal Records Act records are defined as reported information regardless of its form or characteristics and in meeting the record keeping obligations it was my practice to email government officials on their state or other gov accounts so that the emails were immediately captured and preserved Now there are different rules governing the White House than there are governing the rest of the executive branch and in order to address the requirements I was under I did exactly what I have said I emailed two people and I not only knew I expected that then to be captured in the State Department or any other government agency that I was emailing to at a gov account What happened in 8212 sorry I guess late summer early 8212 early fall is that the State Department sent a letter to former secretaries of state not just to me asking for some assistance in providing any workrelated emails that might be on the personal email And what I did was to direct you know my counsel to conduct a thorough investigation and to err on the side of providing anything that could be connected to work They did that and that was my obligation I fully fulfilled it and then I took the unprecedented step of saying 8220Go ahead and release them and let people see them8221 QUESTION Why did you wait two months Why 8212 why did you wait two months to turn those emails over The rules say you have to turn them over8230 CROSSTALK CLINTON I don8217t think 8212 I8217d be happy to have somebody talk to you about the rules I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by QUESTION Were you ever 8212 were you ever specifically briefed on the security implications of using 8212 using your own email server and using your personal address to email with the president CLINTON I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email There is no classified material So I8217m certainly wellaware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material CROSSTALK QUESTION OFFMIKE CLINTON Because they were personal and private about matters that I believed were within the scope of my personal privacy and that particularly of other people They have nothing to do with work but I didn8217t see any reason to keep them CROSSTALK QUESTION At the end of the process CROSSTALK QUESTION 8230 who was forced to resign two years ago because of his personal use of emails By the way David Shuster from Al Jazeera America CLINTON Yeah Right8230 QUESTION What about Ambassador Scott inaudible being forced to resign CLINTON David I think you should go online and read the entire IG report That is not an accurate representation of what happened CROSSTALK CLINTON Thank you Thank you Thank you all | On/ADP Tuesday/PROPN Hillary/PROPN Clinton/PROPN responded/VERB to/ADP questions/NOUN from/ADP reporters/NOUN regarding/VERB the/DET ongoing/ADJ controversy/NOUN over/ADP her/PRON exclusive/ADJ use/NOUN of/ADP personal/ADJ email/NOUN while/SCONJ she/PRON was/AUX serving/VERB as/ADP secretary/PROPN of/ADP state/PROPN 8220I/PROPN thought/VERB it/PRON would/AUX be/AUX easier/ADJ to/PART carry/VERB just/ADV one/NUM device/NOUN for/ADP my/PRON work/NOUN and/CCONJ for/ADP my/PRON personal/ADJ emails/NOUN than/SCONJ 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<p>Let’s get one thing straight from the start. Rick Perry is no blow-dry George Bush clone, even though he owes his political career about 50/50 to Bush and Osama bin Laden. So what is the political profile of&#160;the Texas Governor,&#160; now officially in the race as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination?&#160; A Rasmussen poll this week had him at &#160;29, as against his current rivals, Romney at 18, and Bachmann 13.</p>
<p>Inside Texas he’s one of the most successful politicians in the entire history of the state. George Bush lost his first congressional race.&#160; In a lifetime career of ten elections since 1984 Perry has never lost one. He has an acute sense of political timing. His defeated opponents readily attest to Perry’s relentless&#160; self-discipline as a campaigner , skills at raising campaign cash. He already has a huge prospective war chest for his first national foray. They all emphasize the fatal consequences of underestimating him. He has a team of campaign advisors, notably, notably Dave Carney,&#160; whose skills – ruthless in the crunch – have elicited admiration from&#160; professionals across the board. Prior to&#160; Perry the Texas governorship&#160; were a notoriously weak post, with decisive power wielded by the legislature and State Comptroller and state commissioners, Railroad Commission etc. Perry has changed all that across his three stints as&#160; governor, previously contentious posts now inhabited by his compliant appointees.</p>
<p>But above all, Rick Perry is one lucky son of a bitch. Not just once or twice, but at almost every decisive twist fork in the road Fate has given him a benign tap on the shoulder. “Give me lucky generals,” Napoleon once exclaimed. Looking at Perry’s CV he’d have made him Grand Marshall of France&#160; on the spot.</p>
<p>Back at the pre-dawn of Perry’s political career Democrats were still the most powerful political party in Texas, and Perry began as a (an extremely conservative) Democrat. Son of tenant farmers (dryland cotton) in Paint Creek, sixty miles north of Abilene, Perry says he never met a Republican till he was 25.&#160; He was elected first as a Democratic state legislator and in 1988 was the Texas campaign chairman for (the extremely conservative) Democrat Al Gore who ultimately lost in the primaries to Michael Dukakis. Seeing scant future for Democrats in Texas Perry’s&#160; showed his aptitude for timing and shifted to the Republican Party, making straight for its conservative wing.</p>
<p>His first really big race was as Agricultural Commissioner –a powerful post in Texas and one held in 1990 by Jim Hightower, a left populist, detested by Big Texas Money, which sluiced into Perry’s challenge. Some say Hightower was overconfident, and his office burdened with a couple of scandals, not staining Hightower personally;&#160; others that Perry, with plenty of cash on hand from Hightower’s plentiful corporate&#160; and big ag foes&#160; enemies hit him with campaign commercials, linking him to Jesse Jackson and black insurgency. Maybe both are true. At all events Perry squeaked through, and was handily reelected in 1994.</p>
<p>In 1998 Perry ran for Lieutenant Governor. Victory would put the first Republican in the slot since Reconstruction. Bush was already planning his 2000 presidential run, which would mean quitting the gubernatorial chair. But he could not risk the charge from fellow Republicans that presidential ambitions had allowed him to hand over the governor’s mansion to a Democrat, stepping up from the Lieut. Gov’s office, and so Karl Rove took a close strategic and tactical interest in Perry’s bid. The Bush clan ran ads for Perry,&#160; though the latter’s refusal to follow Bush’s “big tent, compassionate society” message sowed the seeds for hostility between Perry and the Bush camp that is still flaring, with&#160; Rove currently denouncing Perry’s current onslaughts on Fed chairman&#160; Ben Bernanke. (How the world spins! I can remember in the&#160; early 1970s Texas populist Democrat&#160; Wright Patman, chairman of the House Banking Committee, snarling at then Fed chairman Arthur Burns, before him to give testimony, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?”)</p>
<p>Perry was up against&#160; John Sharp, a capable Democrat , previously Comptroller. Recently Sharp recalled to Paul Burka of Texas Monthly,</p>
<p>“Running against Perry is like running against God. Everything breaks his way! Either he’s the luckiest guy in the world or the Lord is taking care of him. &#160;He’s a relentless campaigner. I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule. Our money was about even, until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute. Two weeks before the election, the largest flood of the century hit the Eighteenth District, which I’d represented in the state Senate. The flood inundated towns all along the Guadalupe River, with massive flooding in Gonzales, Cuero, and Victoria, my hometown. No one thinks about voting when their house is flooded. I received 70 percent of the vote there, but, of course, it was a record-low turnout. It’s hard to get out the vote from a boat. I don’t know if God is calling Rick Perry to run for president, but if he runs, the other candidates are going to need a big dose of magic and a lot of shoe leather. He is focused with a capital F, and his political advisers are the best I’ve ever seen. If you run against Rick Perry, you better pack a big lunch.”</p>
<p>In 2000 and in the wake of the big Florida fix Bush moved up to the Oval Office and Perry became governor. Enter fate in the form of Osama. On September 10 2001 Bush was a failing president and Perry far from strong. Amid the embers of the Towers, the Great War on Terror was on, Bush renaissant and manly Republicanism juicing up Perry. With vicious campaign ads race-baiting his 2002 gubernatorial opponent he won his second term against Tony Sanchez and a third run in 2010, another powerful dose of luck when Kay Bailey Hutchison messed up her primary&#160; challenge. And now Perry, an early communicant with the Tea Party has the luck of facing the perennially unconvincing&#160; Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann.</p>
<p>All governors running for the presidency in an economically stable state claims that responsibility for this good fortune is theirs alone. If times are hard Washington DC gets the blame. No Republican is going to credit Big Government with anything but baneful intrusion and failure.</p>
<p>Perry’s no exception. Thanks in part to Texas’ exacting regulation of home mortgages, — courtesy of progressive campaigns in the last century – the state emerged relatively unscathed in the great housing bust.&#160; Perry of course invokes low regulation and the entrepreneurial powers of the untrammeled Market for Texas’ budgetary virtue since the great crash of 2008. All nonsense. As Burka points out,</p>
<p>“Texas has been a low-tax, low-service state for at least half a century, most of that time under conservative Democratic leadership. Then, as now, a good bidness climate was the first objective of state fiscal policy. The Legislature, not the governor, determines the level of spending, and the elected comptroller serves as a watchdog who can refuse to approve spending that exceeds available revenue.”</p>
<p>When federal stimulus money came through Perry used it to mop up red ink&#160; in the annual budget.&#160; Last week Jared Bernstein, formerly Biden’s economic advisor, pointed out derisively that</p>
<p>“When he announced his candidacy for President the other day, he growled that his goal as president would be to make Washington ‘as inconsequential in your lives as I can.’ Except when it comes to job creation. &#160; Over the last few years, government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas: 47 per cent of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas. Texas employment wasn’t down much at all in these years, as the state lost only 53,000 jobs.&#160; But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector (down 178,000) and large gains (up 125,000) in government jobs…</p>
<p>“The nation as a whole added 264,000 government jobs, 2007-10, meaning public-sector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation’s public-sector jobs over these years. How did that happen?&#160; Well, Gov Perry has a funny way of going about that ‘inconsequential’ thing.&#160; According to many news accounts from back in the Recovery Act days:</p>
<p>“Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97 per cent of its shortfall for fiscal 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.”</p>
<p>“Now, I’ve got no problem with a state government using Recovery Act funds to retain or create jobs.&#160; In fact, the figure and quote above shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan: as the private sector contracts, turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference.”</p>
<p>Perry has a few skeletons in his closet, some of them noisome to the conservatives. In 2007 he tried to force an executive order through requiring that sixth-grade girls in Texas be vaccinated, with the consent of their parents, (withheld consent was to be a tough process) against the human papilloma virus, a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. Merck, the pharmaceutical giant,&#160; was pushing the vaccine and Perry’s former chief of staff was Merck’s lobbyist. Ultimately Perry’s plan was beaten back, and he admits it was a mistake. It’s one of the reasons the some of the right think Perry is a phony conservative, since the whole plan was redolent of nanny-state government and unwarranted intrusion into family business.</p>
<p>Then there was&#160; the Perry-initiated&#160; Trans-Texas Corridor , a vast network of&#160; toll roads&#160; and rights of way , crossing Texas, scything its way through&#160; land acquired by power of eminent domain carrying cars, trains, pipelines and powerlines, fiber optic cables and so forth, to&#160; be built and controlled by Cintra-Zachry, a partnership between Spanish-based toll-road developer/operator Cintra and Texas-based Zachry Construction,. Aside from the fortunes to be made by Perry backers, eminent domain – a “taking”, par excellence —&#160; is anathema to the libertarian right. In 2010, the Federal Highway Administration, formally ended the project. The action eliminated the study area and canceled the agreement between TxDOT and Cintra Zachry. In 2011, the Texas Legislature formally canceled the Trans-Texas Corridor.</p>
<p>Openings for Bachman: Perry said at one point he was “fine” with New York state legalizing marriage between same-sex couples. He based this on his belief that the Tenth Amendment reserves for the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution. The religious right went crazy and Perry hastily backtracked saying that he favored constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage and abortion.</p>
<p>Nor does the libertarian, Tea Party right relish Perry’s &#160;support for the children of&#160; illegal aliens to attend Texas state colleges and universities. “To punish these young Texans for their parents’ actions is not what America has always been about” he told a New Hampshire paper this summer. In 2010 he criticized Arizona’s immigration law, saying “it would not be the right direction for Texas.”&#160; He’s also actually closed a prison in Texas – a first for the state – &#160;and boosted diversionary programs to keep convicted people out of them,&#160; part of the realization by state governors and legislatures that the gulag is too expensive.</p>
<p>Another source of grave suspicion by the Tea Party right, Perry attended a 2007 Bilderburg conference, thus rendering himself in the eyes of many in the Tea Party, a pawn of secret world government.</p>
<p>For their part the progressives howl about Perry’s gesture towards secession. “We’ve got a great union,” he famously said in response to a reporter’s question. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.” Big cheers from the crowd. I don’t see what’s wrong with Perry’s stand. I’m all for the right to self-determination, hence state secession. Aside from anything else, it’s how empires fall apart. Vermont, Alaska, Hawai’i, Texas – the empire crumbling just like the Towers. What’s wrong with that picture?</p>
<p>Perry enters the race, intent on capturing the right-wing base,&#160; crushing Romney and Bachmann in South Carolina, which clinched&#160; McCain’s path to nomination in 2008. Hence the Perry-hosted&#160; “Response” — a national day of prayer, on August 4 at Reliant Arena that drew&#160; 30,000 Christians and that was broadcast on cable Christian channels and the Internet nationwide, including in at least 1,000 churches. “Father, our heart breaks for America,” Perry intoned in his 12-minute address. “We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us.” Christians should turn to God for answers to the nation’s troubles.</p>
<p>Perry subsequently tried to distance himself a bit from the New Apostolic Movement, the crowd behind The Response. I don’t see why. Their views seem far more engaging&#160; than those of Obama’s economic necromancers. The Movement’s high command believe they have a direct line to God who remits specific instructions and warnings, no doubt more credible than those of Standard &amp; Poor. Ignore the warnings at your peril: earthquakes in Japan, terrorist attacks in New York,&#160; economic collapse. They don’t care for the Freemasons and consider the Democratic Party to be&#160; controlled by the Satan-worshipper and all-round slut Jezebel plus three lesser demons.</p>
<p>Sounds like a plausible description of the DNC to me. Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings. Me too. Of course the progressives raise&#160; the usual alarm about Perry being an evangelical Christian, not a wholesome servant of God like Obama,&#160; baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.</p>
<p>Perry on the campaign trail is be taking his whacks at Bernanke, who richly deserves every kick, and regularly receives them right here from the great Mike Whitney, whom CounterPunch strongly recommends to Perry as his prime economic adviser. Of course Perry is slamming AGW and making fun of Al Gore. If Perry can’t make hay with the recent report “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis” by NASA scientists at Penn State, fretting that aliens may exact fearsome retribution for excessive C02 production by earthlings, he doesn’t deserve to be in the race.</p>
<p>Perry’s&#160; rhetorical lunges have drawn measured reproof from the New York Times, seeking to push Perry towards the kook exit. But at this stage in the game measured approval in the New York Times is not exactly what Perry is after, any more than is Bachmann or the man closer to the libertarian right’s heart than Perry, namely Ron Paul, scandalously blacked out in the press. No surprises there. Coming out against war and empire really is a no-no.</p>
<p>The obvious&#160; question is whether Perry, having won the right, can clamber back along the kook branch towards something vaguely resembling the solid timber of sanity, to capture the necessary independents and disillusioned&#160; folk who bet on Obama in 2008. Hard to say. Perry is pretty far out on the limb. Reagan, with the strenuous help of the press, managed the crawl back in 1980, amid widespread disappointment and disgust with Jimmy Carter. Disappointment and disgust with Barack Obama? The president has slithered down in the most recent polls, and now is just above the 50 per cent disapproval rating. There are still around 30 million Americans without work, or enough work. There’s the endlessly cited observation that no president presiding over moe than a 7 per cent jobless rate can hope for a second term.</p>
<p>The progressive sector is already rallying the Obama vote by pounding out the unsurprising message that Perry is a shil and errand boy for corporate America, Amazing! Imagine that a conservative Texas Republican would end up in that corner, arm in arm with Barack Obama, messenger of hope and change, also shil and errand boy for corporate America, starting with the nuclear industry, the arms sector, the ag/pesticide complex and moving on through&#160; Wall Street and the Fed, and equipped with truly noxious beliefs about fiscal discipline, the merits of compromise. He’s a far more dangerous man to have in the Oval Office than Perry.&#160; We need a polarizer to awake the left from its unending, unbreakable&#160; infatuation with our current president, despite all the horrors he has perpetrated and presided over, mostly significantly the impending onslaught on Social Security and Medicare.</p>
<p>Bush and Obama have much in common, starting with no fixed beliefs, and sessions at Ivy League schools. Perry went to Texas A&amp;M back in the 1970s. I remember a speaking trip, in the company of Christopher Hitchens and JoAnn Wypijewski many years back, when CH hadn’t jumped the fence. I think we were in Houston in the company of the late Molly Ivins. I told Molly&#160; our next gig was at Texas A&amp;M at College Station and she rang me at the motel later that night, imploring us to cancel the engagement, citing grave personal risk to our persons.&#160; In the event we had a fine time, and when Hitchens paused in his seditious diatribes to demand extra fuel in the form of a pint&#160; or two of vodka to be brought to the podium, helpful Aggies , some in uniform, dashed forward with restorative beakers of the stuff.</p>
<p>Silliest sentence of the Week</p>
<p>In “Indictment in Hariri Assassination Is Published” (New York Times, August 17, 2011), Nada Bakri wrote: “The full story will, however, only unfold in the courtroom, where an open, public, fair and transparent trial will render a final verdict…”</p>
<p>Incidentally, the NYT, notably its so-so columnist Joe Nocera,&#160; has taken some shots at the Wall Street Journal for giving its owner, Rupert Murdoch indulgent space to give his side of the story in the News of the World hacking scandal. Let it be recalled that in 1985 when Sidney Schanberg presumed in his NYT op ed column to address issues of&#160; property development in the Times Square region, not unconnected to the business interests of the owners of the NYT, he had his column yanked in 24 hours and left the paper soon thereafter.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Rick Perry: One Lucky Son-of-a-Bitch | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/08/19/rick-perry-one-lucky-son-of-a-bitch/ | 2011-08-19 | 4left
| 3,052 | Let8217s get one thing straight from the start Rick Perry is no blowdry George Bush clone even though he owes his political career about 5050 to Bush and Osama bin Laden So what is the political profile ofamp160the Texas Governoramp160 now officially in the race as a candidate for the Republican presidential nominationamp160 A Rasmussen poll this week had him at amp16029 as against his current rivals Romney at 18 and Bachmann 13 Inside Texas he8217s one of the most successful politicians in the entire history of the state George Bush lost his first congressional raceamp160 In a lifetime career of ten elections since 1984 Perry has never lost one He has an acute sense of political timing His defeated opponents readily attest to Perry8217s relentlessamp160 selfdiscipline as a campaigner skills at raising campaign cash He already has a huge prospective war chest for his first national foray They all emphasize the fatal consequences of underestimating him He has a team of campaign advisors notably notably Dave Carneyamp160 whose skills 8211 ruthless in the crunch 8211 have elicited admiration fromamp160 professionals across the board Prior toamp160 Perry the Texas governorshipamp160 were a notoriously weak post with decisive power wielded by the legislature and State Comptroller and state commissioners Railroad Commission etc Perry has changed all that across his three stints asamp160 governor previously contentious posts now inhabited by his compliant appointees But above all Rick Perry is one lucky son of a bitch Not just once or twice but at almost every decisive twist fork in the road Fate has given him a benign tap on the shoulder 8220Give me lucky generals8221 Napoleon once exclaimed Looking at Perry8217s CV he8217d have made him Grand Marshall of Franceamp160 on the spot Back at the predawn of Perry8217s political career Democrats were still the most powerful political party in Texas and Perry began as a an extremely conservative Democrat Son of tenant farmers dryland cotton in Paint Creek sixty miles north of Abilene Perry says he never met a Republican till he was 25amp160 He was elected first as a Democratic state legislator and in 1988 was the Texas campaign chairman for the extremely conservative Democrat Al Gore who ultimately lost in the primaries to Michael Dukakis Seeing scant future for Democrats in Texas Perry8217samp160 showed his aptitude for timing and shifted to the Republican Party making straight for its conservative wing His first really big race was as Agricultural Commissioner 8211a powerful post in Texas and one held in 1990 by Jim Hightower a left populist detested by Big Texas Money which sluiced into Perry8217s challenge Some say Hightower was overconfident and his office burdened with a couple of scandals not staining Hightower personallyamp160 others that Perry with plenty of cash on hand from Hightower8217s plentiful corporateamp160 and big ag foesamp160 enemies hit him with campaign commercials linking him to Jesse Jackson and black insurgency Maybe both are true At all events Perry squeaked through and was handily reelected in 1994 In 1998 Perry ran for Lieutenant Governor Victory would put the first Republican in the slot since Reconstruction Bush was already planning his 2000 presidential run which would mean quitting the gubernatorial chair But he could not risk the charge from fellow Republicans that presidential ambitions had allowed him to hand over the governor8217s mansion to a Democrat stepping up from the Lieut Gov8217s office and so Karl Rove took a close strategic and tactical interest in Perry8217s bid The Bush clan ran ads for Perryamp160 though the latter8217s refusal to follow Bush8217s 8220big tent compassionate society8221 message sowed the seeds for hostility between Perry and the Bush camp that is still flaring withamp160 Rove currently denouncing Perry8217s current onslaughts on Fed chairmanamp160 Ben Bernanke How the world spins I can remember in theamp160 early 1970s Texas populist Democratamp160 Wright Patman chairman of the House Banking Committee snarling at then Fed chairman Arthur Burns before him to give testimony 8220Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary8221 Perry was up againstamp160 John Sharp a capable Democrat previously Comptroller Recently Sharp recalled to Paul Burka of Texas Monthly 8220Running against Perry is like running against God Everything breaks his way Either he8217s the luckiest guy in the world or the Lord is taking care of him amp160He8217s a relentless campaigner I was up at five every morning just to match his schedule Our money was about even until an extra million dollars miraculously came to him at the last minute Two weeks before the election the largest flood of the century hit the Eighteenth District which I8217d represented in the state Senate The flood inundated towns all along the Guadalupe River with massive flooding in Gonzales Cuero and Victoria my hometown No one thinks about voting when their house is flooded I received 70 percent of the vote there but of course it was a recordlow turnout It8217s hard to get out the vote from a boat I don8217t know if God is calling Rick Perry to run for president but if he runs the other candidates are going to need a big dose of magic and a lot of shoe leather He is focused with a capital F and his political advisers are the best I8217ve ever seen If you run against Rick Perry you better pack a big lunch8221 In 2000 and in the wake of the big Florida fix Bush moved up to the Oval Office and Perry became governor Enter fate in the form of Osama On September 10 2001 Bush was a failing president and Perry far from strong Amid the embers of the Towers the Great War on Terror was on Bush renaissant and manly Republicanism juicing up Perry With vicious campaign ads racebaiting his 2002 gubernatorial opponent he won his second term against Tony Sanchez and a third run in 2010 another powerful dose of luck when Kay Bailey Hutchison messed up her primaryamp160 challenge And now Perry an early communicant with the Tea Party has the luck of facing the perennially unconvincingamp160 Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann All governors running for the presidency in an economically stable state claims that responsibility for this good fortune is theirs alone If times are hard Washington DC gets the blame No Republican is going to credit Big Government with anything but baneful intrusion and failure Perry8217s no exception Thanks in part to Texas8217 exacting regulation of home mortgages 8212 courtesy of progressive campaigns in the last century 8211 the state emerged relatively unscathed in the great housing bustamp160 Perry of course invokes low regulation and the entrepreneurial powers of the untrammeled Market for Texas8217 budgetary virtue since the great crash of 2008 All nonsense As Burka points out 8220Texas has been a lowtax lowservice state for at least half a century most of that time under conservative Democratic leadership Then as now a good bidness climate was the first objective of state fiscal policy The Legislature not the governor determines the level of spending and the elected comptroller serves as a watchdog who can refuse to approve spending that exceeds available revenue8221 When federal stimulus money came through Perry used it to mop up red inkamp160 in the annual budgetamp160 Last week Jared Bernstein formerly Biden8217s economic advisor pointed out derisively that 8220When he announced his candidacy for President the other day he growled that his goal as president would be to make Washington 8216as inconsequential in your lives as I can8217 Except when it comes to job creation amp160 Over the last few years government jobs have been awfully consequential in Texas 47 per cent of all government jobs added in the US between 2007 and 2010 were added in Texas Texas employment wasn8217t down much at all in these years as the state lost only 53000 jobsamp160 But looming behind that number are large losses in the private sector down 178000 and large gains up 125000 in government jobs8230 8220The nation as a whole added 264000 government jobs 200710 meaning publicsector jobs added in Texas account for almost half of the nation8217s publicsector jobs over these years How did that happenamp160 Well Gov Perry has a funny way of going about that 8216inconsequential8217 thingamp160 According to many news accounts from back in the Recovery Act days 8220Turns out Texas was the state that depended the most on those very stimulus funds to plug nearly 97 per cent of its shortfall for fiscal 2010 according to the National Conference of State Legislatures8221 8220Now I8217ve got no problem with a state government using Recovery Act funds to retain or create jobsamp160 In fact the figure and quote above shows Texas to be following a traditional Keynesian game plan as the private sector contracts turn to the public sector to temporarily make up part of the difference8221 Perry has a few skeletons in his closet some of them noisome to the conservatives In 2007 he tried to force an executive order through requiring that sixthgrade girls in Texas be vaccinated with the consent of their parents withheld consent was to be a tough process against the human papilloma virus a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer Merck the pharmaceutical giantamp160 was pushing the vaccine and Perry8217s former chief of staff was Merck8217s lobbyist Ultimately Perry8217s plan was beaten back and he admits it was a mistake It8217s one of the reasons the some of the right think Perry is a phony conservative since the whole plan was redolent of nannystate government and unwarranted intrusion into family business Then there wasamp160 the Perryinitiatedamp160 TransTexas Corridor a vast network ofamp160 toll roadsamp160 and rights of way crossing Texas scything its way throughamp160 land acquired by power of eminent domain carrying cars trains pipelines and powerlines fiber optic cables and so forth toamp160 be built and controlled by CintraZachry a partnership between Spanishbased tollroad developeroperator Cintra and Texasbased Zachry Construction Aside from the fortunes to be made by Perry backers eminent domain 8211 a 8220taking8221 par excellence 8212amp160 is anathema to the libertarian right In 2010 the Federal Highway Administration formally ended the project The action eliminated the study area and canceled the agreement between TxDOT and Cintra Zachry In 2011 the Texas Legislature formally canceled the TransTexas Corridor Openings for Bachman Perry said at one point he was 8220fine8221 with New York state legalizing marriage between samesex couples He based this on his belief that the Tenth Amendment reserves for the states all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution The religious right went crazy and Perry hastily backtracked saying that he favored constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage and abortion Nor does the libertarian Tea Party right relish Perry8217s amp160support for the children ofamp160 illegal aliens to attend Texas state colleges and universities 8220To punish these young Texans for their parents8217 actions is not what America has always been about8221 he told a New Hampshire paper this summer In 2010 he criticized Arizona8217s immigration law saying 8220it would not be the right direction for Texas8221amp160 He8217s also actually closed a prison in Texas 8211 a first for the state 8211 amp160and boosted diversionary programs to keep convicted people out of themamp160 part of the realization by state governors and legislatures that the gulag is too expensive Another source of grave suspicion by the Tea Party right Perry attended a 2007 Bilderburg conference thus rendering himself in the eyes of many in the Tea Party a pawn of secret world government For their part the progressives howl about Perry8217s gesture towards secession 8220We8217ve got a great union8221 he famously said in response to a reporter8217s question 8220There8217s absolutely no reason to dissolve it But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people you know who knows what might come out of that8221 Big cheers from the crowd I don8217t see what8217s wrong with Perry8217s stand I8217m all for the right to selfdetermination hence state secession Aside from anything else it8217s how empires fall apart Vermont Alaska Hawai8217i Texas 8211 the empire crumbling just like the Towers What8217s wrong with that picture Perry enters the race intent on capturing the rightwing baseamp160 crushing Romney and Bachmann in South Carolina which clinchedamp160 McCain8217s path to nomination in 2008 Hence the Perryhostedamp160 8220Response8221 8212 a national day of prayer on August 4 at Reliant Arena that drewamp160 30000 Christians and that was broadcast on cable Christian channels and the Internet nationwide including in at least 1000 churches 8220Father our heart breaks for America8221 Perry intoned in his 12minute address 8220We see discord at home We see fear in the marketplace We see anger in the halls of government and as a nation we have forgotten who made us who protects us who blesses us8221 Christians should turn to God for answers to the nation8217s troubles Perry subsequently tried to distance himself a bit from the New Apostolic Movement the crowd behind The Response I don8217t see why Their views seem far more engagingamp160 than those of Obama8217s economic necromancers The Movement8217s high command believe they have a direct line to God who remits specific instructions and warnings no doubt more credible than those of Standard ampamp Poor Ignore the warnings at your peril earthquakes in Japan terrorist attacks in New Yorkamp160 economic collapse They don8217t care for the Freemasons and consider the Democratic Party to beamp160 controlled by the Satanworshipper and allround slut Jezebel plus three lesser demons Sounds like a plausible description of the DNC to me Some prophets even claim to have seen demons at public meetings Me too Of course the progressives raiseamp160 the usual alarm about Perry being an evangelical Christian not a wholesome servant of God like Obamaamp160 baptized in the early 1990s at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago Perry on the campaign trail is be taking his whacks at Bernanke who richly deserves every kick and regularly receives them right here from the great Mike Whitney whom CounterPunch strongly recommends to Perry as his prime economic adviser Of course Perry is slamming AGW and making fun of Al Gore If Perry can8217t make hay with the recent report 8220Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity A Scenario Analysis8221 by NASA scientists at Penn State fretting that aliens may exact fearsome retribution for excessive C02 production by earthlings he doesn8217t deserve to be in the race Perry8217samp160 rhetorical lunges have drawn measured reproof from the New York Times seeking to push Perry towards the kook exit But at this stage in the game measured approval in the New York Times is not exactly what Perry is after any more than is Bachmann or the man closer to the libertarian right8217s heart than Perry namely Ron Paul scandalously blacked out in the press No surprises there Coming out against war and empire really is a nono The obviousamp160 question is whether Perry having won the right can clamber back along the kook branch towards something vaguely resembling the solid timber of sanity to capture the necessary independents and disillusionedamp160 folk who bet on Obama in 2008 Hard to say Perry is pretty far out on the limb Reagan with the strenuous help of the press managed the crawl back in 1980 amid widespread disappointment and disgust with Jimmy Carter Disappointment and disgust with Barack Obama The president has slithered down in the most recent polls and now is just above the 50 per cent disapproval rating There are still around 30 million Americans without work or enough work There8217s the endlessly cited observation that no president presiding over moe than a 7 per cent jobless rate can hope for a second term The progressive sector is already rallying the Obama vote by pounding out the unsurprising message that Perry is a shil and errand boy for corporate America Amazing Imagine that a conservative Texas Republican would end up in that corner arm in arm with Barack Obama messenger of hope and change also shil and errand boy for corporate America starting with the nuclear industry the arms sector the agpesticide complex and moving on throughamp160 Wall Street and the Fed and equipped with truly noxious beliefs about fiscal discipline the merits of compromise He8217s a far more dangerous man to have in the Oval Office than Perryamp160 We need a polarizer to awake the left from its unending unbreakableamp160 infatuation with our current president despite all the horrors he has perpetrated and presided over mostly significantly the impending onslaught on Social Security and Medicare Bush and Obama have much in common starting with no fixed beliefs and sessions at Ivy League schools Perry went to Texas AampampM back in the 1970s I remember a speaking trip in the company of Christopher Hitchens and JoAnn Wypijewski many years back when CH hadn8217t jumped the fence I think we were in Houston in the company of the late Molly Ivins I told Mollyamp160 our next gig was at Texas AampampM at College Station and she rang me at the motel later that night imploring us to cancel the engagement citing grave personal risk to our personsamp160 In the event we had a fine time and when Hitchens paused in his seditious diatribes to demand extra fuel in the form of a pintamp160 or two of vodka to be brought to the podium helpful Aggies some in uniform dashed forward with restorative beakers of the stuff Silliest sentence of the Week In 8220Indictment in Hariri Assassination Is Published8221 New York Times August 17 2011 Nada Bakri wrote 8220The full story will however only unfold in the courtroom where an open public fair and transparent trial will render a final verdict82308221 Incidentally the NYT notably its soso columnist Joe Noceraamp160 has taken some shots at the Wall Street Journal for giving its owner Rupert Murdoch indulgent space to give his side of the story in the News of the World hacking scandal Let it be recalled that in 1985 when Sidney Schanberg presumed in his NYT op ed column to address issues ofamp160 property development in the Times Square region not unconnected to the business interests of the owners of the NYT he had his column yanked in 24 hours and left the paper soon thereafter amp160 | Let8217s/PROPN get/VERB one/NUM thing/NOUN straight/ADV from/ADP the/DET start/NOUN Rick/PROPN Perry/PROPN is/AUX no/DET blowdry/ADJ George/PROPN Bush/PROPN clone/VERB even/ADV though/SCONJ he/PRON 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<p><a href="//videos/37/68163" type="external" /></p>
<p>RUSH: Can you believe the future Speaker of the House having an affair? Bob Livingston, Newt Gingrich, this guy, McCarthy. You know, it’s about time this becomes a resume enhancement for us instead of something that wipes us out. Something like this happens on the left, it’s a big time resume enhancement. It proves that they’re hip. It proves that they’re pro-women. (laughing) It proves that they’re virile. It proves that they’re attractive to women and so forth. But on our side it does nothing but destroy us. I know — I know — I understand why. But this whole story, this is easy for me to say, and you are free to think that I am doing a snow job here, but I’m not. You’re free to think what you want, and you may get mad at me telling you this. Snerdley sent me a note last night as though this is the first he was hearing about this.</p>
<p>Are you kidding me, you had not heard about this affair until yesterday? This is years-old stuff. I mean, this is the kind of stuff rumors — I just totally stay away from it because it’s all gonna come out in the wash anyway at some point. The interesting thing about this is the Drive-By Media is acting like all of Washington’s been turned upside down. You know, the lesson to learn here is that Kevin McCarthy and Renee Ellmers, uh, did I say something that’s not known yet? (interruption) I did? (interruption) Oh, they’re denying this? (interruption) Oh, really, denials? (interruption) Oh. Okay, well, then I guess what I’ve known about for many, many months is not true. Forget it. I’m sorry. (interruption) They’re denying it?</p>
<p>Well, anyway, what I was gonna say, folks, the Drive-By Media acting like this is totally shaking up — why isn’t the media acting happy? Why isn’t the media ecstatic that the Republicans are imploding this way, instead of why are they worried the Republicans are imploding? Have you figured that out? Has that hit you in that regard yet? What it should tell you is that McCarthy obviously is a Washington insider and his fall from grace as future Speaker obviously is bad news to the insiders or the establishment in Washington, both parties, and the reason for that is it is perceived that Ted Cruz and the House Conservative Caucus are behind this, these Tea Party yokels, and it is viewed as these upstart conservatives taking control of the House, and they’re outsiders.</p>
<p>So you see that the insider elites are bound together not by ideology, but by class. If they were bound together by ideology there wouldn’t be a Republican in the establishment in Washington, there wouldn’t be a Republican lead allowed in. But the establishment in Washington is made up of people of both parties. The people not in it are conservatives, but Republicans, moderate level Republicans, liberal Republicans, communist Republicans, and all Democrats are in the establishment. Conservative Republicans aren’t. Conservative Republicans, it is said, have claimed a scalp here, and they might also get Renee Ellmers. Sorry, should I not have mentioned that? (interruption) What are you laughing at so hard? Folks, have you ever been privy to something everybody knows or you thought everybody knew and then when it hits everybody acts like they had no idea?</p>
<p>That’s how I’m sitting here right now. (interruption) Am I gonna have to deny this? (interruption) I am. (interruption) Okay, we’re not on like a 10-minute delay here where we can just bleep everything that’s happened and start over? (interruption) Okay, well, then forget it. You know, I’m probably… Chalk it up to the deliriousness of the common cold virus. The ravages of the cold virus have rendered my equilibrium out of whack, and I have not known what I’m talking about here for the first 10 minutes. And I apologize. I really…</p>
<p>This is what happens. This what happens when you show up and you shouldn’t show up. It’s what happens when the guardrails are down. (interruption) Well, what I know is that Newt offered himself as speaker, and that they want Paul Ryan to be the replacement now for McCarthy, and that there are — ah, you know — people on both sides of that. Ryan is perceived as somebody who has slowly evolved to a “progressive insider” establishment kind of Republican, the Romney VP candidate.</p>
<p>Romney has… I mean, I saw his name. Did he offer himself up or did somebody suggest Romney to be…? (interruption) No, no, I’m not making this up. Don’t tell me I’m making this up! Don’t tell me I didn’t see that. I saw Romney’s name tossed in. I read something that either Romney had offered or somebody had suggested. So you got Newt. Why doesn’t somebody call Bob Livingston and see if he’s interested? You know, he was denied the first time. Maybe he wants to give it another go. Grab audio sound bite number three.</p>
<p>Friday, if I ask for number three, are you gonna play three? (interruption) No? Okay. ‘Cause the show open had us in LA so I’m just checking, Friday. This is yesterday on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and the guest is Robert Costa who is with the Washington Post. He’s a national political reporter now, Bob Costa — Robert Costa. Not related to Bob Costas. Robert Costa used to be at National Review and National Review Online, which meant that he was conservative. Just information. Now, the Q&amp;A with the viewers. We have a sound bite here. A guy from Wisconsin named Paul called.</p>
<p>He said, “I don’t think McCarthy will ever be speaker. He’s too honest. He told the truth about the Benghazi committee witch hunt, and not only that, he’s talking about repealing Obamacare. When are they gonna get over that one?”</p>
<p>COSTA: The problem for many House Republicans is they would like to see a lot of other people stand up to be competitors to McCarthy, but no one had the will to run. McCarthy’s there as the de facto next speaker because he’s willing to do it and he’s willing to have the kind of exchanges, listening members of the House, people who — who listen to Rush Limbaugh. And I mean this respectfully of all conservative talk radio. By listening to those voices, it creates a new kind of dynamic in House Republican politics. Because there are, as I said, those expectations of a push for aggression even if it’s not possible.</p>
<p>RUSH: So Robert Costa there says — if you’re able to translate that — there aren’t a whole lot of House Republicans who want to be speaker because of having to deal with me. And what did he say? The demand that I would make (and my talk radio brethren and sisteren) for aggression, or aggressiveness — or just simply defending the cause, standing up for it — they don’t want that. And you know, Boehner mentioned me. Would we have that sound bite, Friday? I thought we might.</p>
<p>Boehner got mad at me once. Boehner was talking about when he came to the House there was only CNN and there was only this one talk show or some… Pardon the sniffles here, folks. I thought we had the Boehner bite here when I went through the roster. Apparently not. But anyway, that’s Robert Costa. And, you know, there’s probably more truth to this than not, even though it was on C-SPAN and nobody heard it. There probably is — the Republican caucus — some trepidation over having to deal with…</p>
<p>You know, “talk radio,” it’s a euphemism. “Talk radio” means the base of the party. “Talk radio” means the grassroots. “Talk radio” means Tea Party, what have you. It means the people out there who make this country work. It means the people outside Washington. “Talk radio” has just become a code phrase to use either signifying me or in larger measure the into a Republican grassroots base. New York Magazine. See, I knew I was not off the… “How the Media Is Handling Kevin McCarthy’s Rumored Affair.” It’s by Margaret Hartmann.</p>
<p>“Gingrich Open to Return.” New Republic: The Republican House today was more melodramatic than high school.” That’s for sure. It does look… You know, that’s a good analogy. It does look like it’s high school, like musical chairs or prom night or something, weird stuff. And Frank Luntz is out there saying this story of a rumor is crap. There’s nothing to it. There never has been anything to it. It’s all just total, 100% BS. So there’s that.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: So, Snerdley, I just got… I got an e-mail that said that opening was very weird — very, very weird. It was great to have me back and all that; my voice is a welcome. It was a “very weird.” What was weird about it other than it’s from LA? What was weird about the open? (interruption) No, you have to help me because not I’m only 75% here today. Really, folks, I’m struggling to stay focused. So what’s weird? What was weird about the open? The shift from… (interruption) You mean the confirmation, the confirmation?</p>
<p>All right, well, look, here the UK Daily Mail has a story here: “Did Rumors of Love Affair Between Kevin McCarthy and a Married Congresswoman Torpedo His Elevation to Speaker?” Look, did he even have a path to getting the votes? Everybody’s acting like it’s automatic that he was gonna get it. But, anyway, let me say: The story here in the UK Daily Mail acknowledges the strong rumors and that they’ve been around for years, but that the female participant vigorously denies them.</p>
<p>Well, don’t they all?</p>
<p>Isn’t that the rule of thumb?</p>
<p>You deny, deny, deny, deny. Isn’t that right, Wendy? You just deny, deny, deny, deny. No matter what kind of evidence there is, you just deny. No matter what, you deny it. Here’s the Boehner sound bite that I was looking for. This is August 3rd, 2015. It was on The Golf Channel, David Feherty’s show. And remember, this is after playing Robert Costa on C-SPAN essentially saying that the Republican potentials for speaker of the House, few of them want it because of me. And here’s Boehner. This is August 3rd of this year, and he’s explaining to Feherty. Feherty says, “Is there less bipartisanship today than there used to be?”</p>
<p>BOEHNER: Twenty years ago when, uh, we won the first Republican majority in 40 years, there was one radio talk show host that nobody’d ever heard of. Uh, there was one cable news channel that just did news. And you look at today, you’ve got hundreds of radio talk show hosts all trying to outdo themselves, right — going further right and further right and further right. Uh, you’ve got all these cable news channels, and all they do are politics, and it’s tending to either push or pull people into one of two camps.</p>
<p>RUSH: You know what that sounds like? This sounds like… Remember, it was — I don’t know — 1993, ’94, and there was a TIME Magazine cover: “Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?” Was there too much democracy, they asked. Were there too many informed people? Were too many people more informed than they’d ever been, for their own good? It was a serious story. And Boehner’s basically saying the same thing: “Twenty years ago when we came into the House, you had one cable news channel,” CNN. You had a brand-new…</p>
<p>He was talking about me, the new talk radio show “nobody had ever heard of,” which was true. When I launched, nobody’d ever heard of me. And, he said, now look what’s happened. And he thinks all of this has pushed everything right or made it all “political,” and he’s got his timeline all wrong. The people that changed are the people that won the House in 1994. Had they stayed conservative and had they remained true… Hell, you know, even that Republican freshman class was forced out. They got rid of a lot of those people inside of six or eight years, too.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Grab sound bite number five. Here’s Charlie Rose. This is this morning on CBS. And he’s having a chat with John Dickerson of Face the Nation talking about this race in the House for speakership.</p>
<p>ROSE: Can anybody control these people that represent the Freedom Caucus? Can anybody in the Republican Party —</p>
<p>DICKERSON: For right now, it doesn’t look like anybody can.</p>
<p>ROSE: — cause unless they get their way, they’re willing to take the House down?</p>
<p>DICKERSON: Well, yeah, because they think the House has been selling out Republicans and conservatives for the last many years, and it’s finally their chance to stop that.</p>
<p>RUSH: You know, Charlie Rose here… This is the voice of establishment thinking here, by the way, “Can anybody control these out of control conservatives? These freedom people? Can anybody control ’em? I mean, for crying out loud, they’re willing to take the House down.” It’s what happens. See, when the establishment is taking it on the chin, that means the government is under assault and attack, and it’s falling, or is about to fall. Dickerson had it more right than wrong in his answer.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: John in Raleigh, North Carolina. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.</p>
<p>CALLER: Hey, Rush. How you doing? It’s a real privilege to talk to you. Hey, thanks a lot for the Rush Revere books. Just want to let you know how much my kids enjoy reading them.</p>
<p>RUSH: Thank you. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that.</p>
<p>CALLER: No problem. I’ll to the point. No problem. Hey, I’m in the second district here in North Carolina that Renee Ellmers represents. It’s strange coincidence that she seems to be, all of a sudden, getting tangled up here with McCarthy and all the allegations that seem to be coming out about some kind of illicit affair. All of which we have no idea of knowing whether that’s true or not. The bottom line is, she’s not a conservative. She doesn’t support conservative values here in this district and, quite frankly, she never has.</p>
<p>RUSH: Wait. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold it just a second, now. Correct me if I’m wrong. Didn’t Renee Ellmers seek office on the premise that she was a conservative and was gonna stop Obamacare and was gonna implement all these conservative ideas?</p>
<p>CALLER: No, you’re absolutely right, and again, it’s the typical bait-and-switch that we see with a lot of these professional lies, political class.</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay, she campaigned as a conservative but she never has been, as you say?</p>
<p>CALLER: No, and just look to the voting record. It’s quite frank.</p>
<p>RUSH: All right.</p>
<p>CALLER: You know, you can look at Conservative Review; they rank her very lowly, and justifiably so. And, you know, she doesn’t really do a great job supporting the military community here, either.</p>
<p>RUSH: But you still hope the rumors are not true?</p>
<p>CALLER: No, of course not. Nobody wants to see that because to the second point, a couple years ago when she came out here to Fort Bragg because of our senior leaders like she does pretty regularly, some of them were severely reprimanded for some inappropriate e-mail comments. It was locker room humor, and it was in bad taste. But, you know, these guys are held to a higher standard, and their careers were ruined over things like this, allegations like this. So it’s just… you know, the political hypocrisy, again, is beyond belief, and it’s in our own House.</p>
<p>RUSH: Yeah, ’cause this kind of stuff on the Democrat side’s a resume enhancement.</p>
<p>CALLER: Yeah, absolutely. But again, we need to do a better job at the local level vetting these people and making sure we get conservatives.</p>
<p>RUSH: Wait a minute. That’s a good point. How you supposed to…? When somebody comes to you and convinces you that they are conservative and that they’re gonna stop Obama whenever they can — they’re gonna go represent the views and the values of the district — what are you supposed to base the fact that they’re lying to you on?</p>
<p>CALLER: Well, you gotta look at the established record. I mean, none of these people just show up and run for office. They all start at some local level. And so that’s a great point, too. You know, we have to get involved at the local level. You’re talking city council, county commissioner, school board.</p>
<p>RUSH: Yeah, but let me focus the question even more: Why was Renee Ellmers believed? You said people need to do a better job vetting. I assume you’re talking about the voters. What did they miss? Was it there to spot that she wasn’t what she said she was?</p>
<p>CALLER: Yes. So when you look her background, when you look at what she was doing in the whole private sector, she’s got a nursing background, and she’s very involved in the medical industry here in the county.</p>
<p>RUSH: Yeah.</p>
<p>CALLER: And, you know, you could tell by the causes that she supported that she wasn’t going to advance any of these agendas that were very important to us. And you really gotta dig deep, and you gotta look, and you gotta read local news reports, local articles. I mean, this stuff is out there; you just gotta look.</p>
<p>RUSH: Okay. All right. You claim was there to know, and so this is on the voters then, the voters screwed up. They should have known that she was lying. I can see that point of view. I mean, a lot of people do think voters are stupid, that the American people in general are stupid. Gullibility and stupid are two different things. Believing what you want to believe. Look, I don’t know how she sold it, but apparently it was enough to get elected a number of times. On this business of the affair. No, not on this business of the affair. There really… You know, until this is what it is or what it isn’t, we’ve done enough.</p> | If the Republicans Are Imploding Over Kevin McCarthy, Why Aren’t the Drive-Bys Happy About It? | true | http://rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/10/09/if_the_republicans_are_imploding_over_kevin_mccarthy_why_aren_t_the_drive_bys_happy_about_it | 2015-10-09 | 0right
| 3,052 | RUSH Can you believe the future Speaker of the House having an affair Bob Livingston Newt Gingrich this guy McCarthy You know it8217s about time this becomes a resume enhancement for us instead of something that wipes us out Something like this happens on the left it8217s a big time resume enhancement It proves that they8217re hip It proves that they8217re prowomen laughing It proves that they8217re virile It proves that they8217re attractive to women and so forth But on our side it does nothing but destroy us I know 8212 I know 8212 I understand why But this whole story this is easy for me to say and you are free to think that I am doing a snow job here but I8217m not You8217re free to think what you want and you may get mad at me telling you this Snerdley sent me a note last night as though this is the first he was hearing about this Are you kidding me you had not heard about this affair until yesterday This is yearsold stuff I mean this is the kind of stuff rumors 8212 I just totally stay away from it because it8217s all gonna come out in the wash anyway at some point The interesting thing about this is the DriveBy Media is acting like all of Washington8217s been turned upside down You know the lesson to learn here is that Kevin McCarthy and Renee Ellmers uh did I say something that8217s not known yet interruption I did interruption Oh they8217re denying this interruption Oh really denials interruption Oh Okay well then I guess what I8217ve known about for many many months is not true Forget it I8217m sorry interruption They8217re denying it Well anyway what I was gonna say folks the DriveBy Media acting like this is totally shaking up 8212 why isn8217t the media acting happy Why isn8217t the media ecstatic that the Republicans are imploding this way instead of why are they worried the Republicans are imploding Have you figured that out Has that hit you in that regard yet What it should tell you is that McCarthy obviously is a Washington insider and his fall from grace as future Speaker obviously is bad news to the insiders or the establishment in Washington both parties and the reason for that is it is perceived that Ted Cruz and the House Conservative Caucus are behind this these Tea Party yokels and it is viewed as these upstart conservatives taking control of the House and they8217re outsiders So you see that the insider elites are bound together not by ideology but by class If they were bound together by ideology there wouldn8217t be a Republican in the establishment in Washington there wouldn8217t be a Republican lead allowed in But the establishment in Washington is made up of people of both parties The people not in it are conservatives but Republicans moderate level Republicans liberal Republicans communist Republicans and all Democrats are in the establishment Conservative Republicans aren8217t Conservative Republicans it is said have claimed a scalp here and they might also get Renee Ellmers Sorry should I not have mentioned that interruption What are you laughing at so hard Folks have you ever been privy to something everybody knows or you thought everybody knew and then when it hits everybody acts like they had no idea That8217s how I8217m sitting here right now interruption Am I gonna have to deny this interruption I am interruption Okay we8217re not on like a 10minute delay here where we can just bleep everything that8217s happened and start over interruption Okay well then forget it You know I8217m probably8230 Chalk it up to the deliriousness of the common cold virus The ravages of the cold virus have rendered my equilibrium out of whack and I have not known what I8217m talking about here for the first 10 minutes And I apologize I really8230 This is what happens This what happens when you show up and you shouldn8217t show up It8217s what happens when the guardrails are down interruption Well what I know is that Newt offered himself as speaker and that they want Paul Ryan to be the replacement now for McCarthy and that there are 8212 ah you know 8212 people on both sides of that Ryan is perceived as somebody who has slowly evolved to a 8220progressive insider8221 establishment kind of Republican the Romney VP candidate Romney has8230 I mean I saw his name Did he offer himself up or did somebody suggest Romney to be8230 interruption No no I8217m not making this up Don8217t tell me I8217m making this up Don8217t tell me I didn8217t see that I saw Romney8217s name tossed in I read something that either Romney had offered or somebody had suggested So you got Newt Why doesn8217t somebody call Bob Livingston and see if he8217s interested You know he was denied the first time Maybe he wants to give it another go Grab audio sound bite number three Friday if I ask for number three are you gonna play three interruption No Okay 8216Cause the show open had us in LA so I8217m just checking Friday This is yesterday on CSPAN8217s Washington Journal and the guest is Robert Costa who is with the Washington Post He8217s a national political reporter now Bob Costa 8212 Robert Costa Not related to Bob Costas Robert Costa used to be at National Review and National Review Online which meant that he was conservative Just information Now the QampampA with the viewers We have a sound bite here A guy from Wisconsin named Paul called He said 8220I don8217t think McCarthy will ever be speaker He8217s too honest He told the truth about the Benghazi committee witch hunt and not only that he8217s talking about repealing Obamacare When are they gonna get over that one8221 COSTA The problem for many House Republicans is they would like to see a lot of other people stand up to be competitors to McCarthy but no one had the will to run McCarthy8217s there as the de facto next speaker because he8217s willing to do it and he8217s willing to have the kind of exchanges listening members of the House people who 8212 who listen to Rush Limbaugh And I mean this respectfully of all conservative talk radio By listening to those voices it creates a new kind of dynamic in House Republican politics Because there are as I said those expectations of a push for aggression even if it8217s not possible RUSH So Robert Costa there says 8212 if you8217re able to translate that 8212 there aren8217t a whole lot of House Republicans who want to be speaker because of having to deal with me And what did he say The demand that I would make and my talk radio brethren and sisteren for aggression or aggressiveness 8212 or just simply defending the cause standing up for it 8212 they don8217t want that And you know Boehner mentioned me Would we have that sound bite Friday I thought we might Boehner got mad at me once Boehner was talking about when he came to the House there was only CNN and there was only this one talk show or some8230 Pardon the sniffles here folks I thought we had the Boehner bite here when I went through the roster Apparently not But anyway that8217s Robert Costa And you know there8217s probably more truth to this than not even though it was on CSPAN and nobody heard it There probably is 8212 the Republican caucus 8212 some trepidation over having to deal with8230 You know 8220talk radio8221 it8217s a euphemism 8220Talk radio8221 means the base of the party 8220Talk radio8221 means the grassroots 8220Talk radio8221 means Tea Party what have you It means the people out there who make this country work It means the people outside Washington 8220Talk radio8221 has just become a code phrase to use either signifying me or in larger measure the into a Republican grassroots base New York Magazine See I knew I was not off the8230 8220How the Media Is Handling Kevin McCarthy8217s Rumored Affair8221 It8217s by Margaret Hartmann 8220Gingrich Open to Return8221 New Republic The Republican House today was more melodramatic than high school8221 That8217s for sure It does look8230 You know that8217s a good analogy It does look like it8217s high school like musical chairs or prom night or something weird stuff And Frank Luntz is out there saying this story of a rumor is crap There8217s nothing to it There never has been anything to it It8217s all just total 100 BS So there8217s that BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH So Snerdley I just got8230 I got an email that said that opening was very weird 8212 very very weird It was great to have me back and all that my voice is a welcome It was a 8220very weird8221 What was weird about it other than it8217s from LA What was weird about the open interruption No you have to help me because not I8217m only 75 here today Really folks I8217m struggling to stay focused So what8217s weird What was weird about the open The shift from8230 interruption You mean the confirmation the confirmation All right well look here the UK Daily Mail has a story here 8220Did Rumors of Love Affair Between Kevin McCarthy and a Married Congresswoman Torpedo His Elevation to Speaker8221 Look did he even have a path to getting the votes Everybody8217s acting like it8217s automatic that he was gonna get it But anyway let me say The story here in the UK Daily Mail acknowledges the strong rumors and that they8217ve been around for years but that the female participant vigorously denies them Well don8217t they all Isn8217t that the rule of thumb You deny deny deny deny Isn8217t that right Wendy You just deny deny deny deny No matter what kind of evidence there is you just deny No matter what you deny it Here8217s the Boehner sound bite that I was looking for This is August 3rd 2015 It was on The Golf Channel David Feherty8217s show And remember this is after playing Robert Costa on CSPAN essentially saying that the Republican potentials for speaker of the House few of them want it because of me And here8217s Boehner This is August 3rd of this year and he8217s explaining to Feherty Feherty says 8220Is there less bipartisanship today than there used to be8221 BOEHNER Twenty years ago when uh we won the first Republican majority in 40 years there was one radio talk show host that nobody8217d ever heard of Uh there was one cable news channel that just did news And you look at today you8217ve got hundreds of radio talk show hosts all trying to outdo themselves right 8212 going further right and further right and further right Uh you8217ve got all these cable news channels and all they do are politics and it8217s tending to either push or pull people into one of two camps RUSH You know what that sounds like This sounds like8230 Remember it was 8212 I don8217t know 8212 1993 821794 and there was a TIME Magazine cover 8220Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America8221 Was there too much democracy they asked Were there too many informed people Were too many people more informed than they8217d ever been for their own good It was a serious story And Boehner8217s basically saying the same thing 8220Twenty years ago when we came into the House you had one cable news channel8221 CNN You had a brandnew8230 He was talking about me the new talk radio show 8220nobody had ever heard of8221 which was true When I launched nobody8217d ever heard of me And he said now look what8217s happened And he thinks all of this has pushed everything right or made it all 8220political8221 and he8217s got his timeline all wrong The people that changed are the people that won the House in 1994 Had they stayed conservative and had they remained true8230 Hell you know even that Republican freshman class was forced out They got rid of a lot of those people inside of six or eight years too BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH Grab sound bite number five Here8217s Charlie Rose This is this morning on CBS And he8217s having a chat with John Dickerson of Face the Nation talking about this race in the House for speakership ROSE Can anybody control these people that represent the Freedom Caucus Can anybody in the Republican Party 8212 DICKERSON For right now it doesn8217t look like anybody can ROSE 8212 cause unless they get their way they8217re willing to take the House down DICKERSON Well yeah because they think the House has been selling out Republicans and conservatives for the last many years and it8217s finally their chance to stop that RUSH You know Charlie Rose here8230 This is the voice of establishment thinking here by the way 8220Can anybody control these out of control conservatives These freedom people Can anybody control 8217em I mean for crying out loud they8217re willing to take the House down8221 It8217s what happens See when the establishment is taking it on the chin that means the government is under assault and attack and it8217s falling or is about to fall Dickerson had it more right than wrong in his answer BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH John in Raleigh North Carolina Great to have you on the EIB Network Hello CALLER Hey Rush How you doing It8217s a real privilege to talk to you Hey thanks a lot for the Rush Revere books Just want to let you know how much my kids enjoy reading them RUSH Thank you Thank you sir I really appreciate that CALLER No problem I8217ll to the point No problem Hey I8217m in the second district here in North Carolina that Renee Ellmers represents It8217s strange coincidence that she seems to be all of a sudden getting tangled up here with McCarthy and all the allegations that seem to be coming out about some kind of illicit affair All of which we have no idea of knowing whether that8217s true or not The bottom line is she8217s not a conservative She doesn8217t support conservative values here in this district and quite frankly she never has RUSH Wait Wait whoa whoa whoa Hold it just a second now Correct me if I8217m wrong Didn8217t Renee Ellmers seek office on the premise that she was a conservative and was gonna stop Obamacare and was gonna implement all these conservative ideas CALLER No you8217re absolutely right and again it8217s the typical baitandswitch that we see with a lot of these professional lies political class RUSH Okay she campaigned as a conservative but she never has been as you say CALLER No and just look to the voting record It8217s quite frank RUSH All right CALLER You know you can look at Conservative Review they rank her very lowly and justifiably so And you know she doesn8217t really do a great job supporting the military community here either RUSH But you still hope the rumors are not true CALLER No of course not Nobody wants to see that because to the second point a couple years ago when she came out here to Fort Bragg because of our senior leaders like she does pretty regularly some of them were severely reprimanded for some inappropriate email comments It was locker room humor and it was in bad taste But you know these guys are held to a higher standard and their careers were ruined over things like this allegations like this So it8217s just8230 you know the political hypocrisy again is beyond belief and it8217s in our own House RUSH Yeah 8217cause this kind of stuff on the Democrat side8217s a resume enhancement CALLER Yeah absolutely But again we need to do a better job at the local level vetting these people and making sure we get conservatives RUSH Wait a minute That8217s a good point How you supposed to8230 When somebody comes to you and convinces you that they are conservative and that they8217re gonna stop Obama whenever they can 8212 they8217re gonna go represent the views and the values of the district 8212 what are you supposed to base the fact that they8217re lying to you on CALLER Well you gotta look at the established record I mean none of these people just show up and run for office They all start at some local level And so that8217s a great point too You know we have to get involved at the local level You8217re talking city council county commissioner school board RUSH Yeah but let me focus the question even more Why was Renee Ellmers believed You said people need to do a better job vetting I assume you8217re talking about the voters What did they miss Was it there to spot that she wasn8217t what she said she was CALLER Yes So when you look her background when you look at what she was doing in the whole private sector she8217s got a nursing background and she8217s very involved in the medical industry here in the county RUSH Yeah CALLER And you know you could tell by the causes that she supported that she wasn8217t going to advance any of these agendas that were very important to us And you really gotta dig deep and you gotta look and you gotta read local news reports local articles I mean this stuff is out there you just gotta look RUSH Okay All right You claim was there to know and so this is on the voters then the voters screwed up They should have known that she was lying I can see that point of view I mean a lot of people do think voters are stupid that the American people in general are stupid Gullibility and stupid are two different things Believing what you want to believe Look I don8217t know how she sold it but apparently it was enough to get elected a number of 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<p>SLAVOJ ZIZEK, the Giant of Ljubljana, is like the great brain of Goethe’s fairytale “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. In this revolutionary and allegorical tale (reputedly inspired by Mozart’s Magic Flute) there are two lands separated by a river. There are only two ways to cross the river. One is by ferry, and the boatman is a kind of sadist that exacts bizarre tribute for the occasion. The other is to wait for the giant to appear and appropriate his shadow as a type of liminal bridge — perhaps a metaphor for the umbra (or penumbra) of semi-consciousness and imagination.</p>
<p>Zizek, as this giant (or giant brain), has cast a very long shadow indeed in what can only be termed “cultural studies” (though he would despise the characterization). He is effectively the most brilliant purveyor of Lacanian mischief, and, as a follower of the French “liberator” of Freud, Zizek’s Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables. That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years. He is also a legendary trickster (having learned his craft as part of the communist nomenklatura in Slovenia), a kind of Don Quixote for unrepentant Marxists and scourge of liberals, social democrats, new-age “obscurantists”, multi-culturalists, and … You get the picture.</p>
<p>I first sat through a Lacanian conference at NYU in the late 1990s and understood 10% of the language. It was, however, 110% thrilling. The sheer bravado of the performances by the French-inflected intellectuals was delightful and sexy. It was only later, in 2001, that I had an opportunity to hear Slavoj Zizek speak. The event was standing room only, and the venue was a very high-brow, conceptual art gallery called the Drawing Center in NYC. Zizek was reading/performing “Il n’y a pas de rapport religieux” from the latest edition of Lacanian Ink (#18), the movement’s journal. In this particular essay he rehearsed Lacan’s notion that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship but re-enscribed it in the context of something else (in this case ‘religion’) — as he is wont to do with most all his tactical maneuvers. The print version is illustrated with works by Damien Hirst. More striking, however, was that this perhaps marked the beginning of Zizek’s appropriation of St. Paul. This appropriation of St. Paul is significant insofar as when Zizek performs one of his acts of re-writing he is taking/ripping the original out of one context and inserting/transplanting it into another. In the case of St. Paul, what interested him most was that here was a figure (not a disciple!) who constructed the entire edifice of the Christian faith on the crucifixion and resurrection. Recall that in Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ (or at least Scorsese’s) Paul appears in the delusionary vision Jesus has — i.e., that he has escaped the cross and gone on to live, marry and have children — and repudiates Jesus as an imposter. Zizek is quick to point out (often) that post-modernists have multiple versions of everything — e.g., multiple versions of Nietzsche and multiple versions of Marx or Freud — but he also is the master of re-branding a concept, or a historical figure, to elucidate what might be best termed “synchronic or structural phenomena”. As a skilled structuralist (though he’d deny this too), Zizek constructs castles in the air and then sends a barrage of waves in pursuit of these tentative forms. He is Neptune to his own Odysseus — But he is also Minerva. In the case of Paul, as in the more recent resuscitation of Lenin, we witness Zizek isolating a critical moment, or even a failed moment, for purposes wholly related to the exasperating state of the current critical or failed moment — late-modern capitalism and post-modernity.</p>
<p>In such an intelligence we see the mark of an archaic synthetic brilliance — an almost heroic intelligence — that assembles, analyzes and destroys. His actual performances are theatrical events. He sweats bullets as he unpacks his torrent of complex references, flings asides, flings aside asides, tackles a hard kernel of Hegel or Marx, drops in an allusion to Hitchcock or even some pop cultural trash like the Worst-Case Scenario phenomenon or “Reality TV” to explain away our symptoms — to talk through our collective delusions and paranoias. His agitated (agit-prop) presentations are exhausting for the audience and for the actor. When he concludes, he invariable loses his bearings and is led off stage by his host or hostess. At the Drawing Center, he was whisked away by handlers (before the Lacanian bacchantes/babes could get to him?).</p>
<p>So what is he up to? And why does he succeed, where others have failed, in constructing an “actually-existing” alternative to left-right politics?</p>
<p>The version of Lenin that Zizek is re-enscribing into radical political discourse is ostensibly (by his own admission) the Lenin of the October Revolution, or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution “you have to have a revolution”. Why is he doing this?</p>
<p>Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates. He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize. The production of cultural difference (a trendy subject) is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream — a dream that recalls perhaps Orwell’s 1984 or even Terry Gilliam’s Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom — the flip side of this is film noir. Zizek has determined that late-modern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the real Real. The Real only exists as a fragment and this fragment is fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede. These dreams and nightmares are systemic, structural neuroses, and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic. The hegemon — the prevailing set of coordinates — always seeks to “take over” the Real, and, therefore, this contaminated Real must be periodically purged.</p>
<p>Without descending into the Lacanian house of mirrors we can understand this on an everyday level if we observe what Zizek is up to with “Lenin”. In his essay “Repeating Lenin” (1997) — ever the trickster, he convened a symposium on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be — Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form. “[O]ne should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of ‘narratives’ — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with ‘formalism,’ with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which ‘colors’ the entire field in question […]” (italics added). He is interested, as most fire-breathing artists are, in discerning the real Real amid the rubbish of systems. In part, in appropriating “Lenin” he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia — “the [pure] management of things”. That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Zizek is extracting the signifier “Lenin” from the historical continuum which includes that failure — or the onslaught of Stalinism.</p>
<p>He adds: “‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism–recall his acerb[ic] remark apropos of some new problem: ‘About this, Marx and Engels said not a word.’ The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation.” He compares 1914 to 1990, and, in a superb bit of multi-tasking, describes how Lenin attempted to convince long-suffering Russian soldiers to withdraw from the front and turn on the Czar. He does this by drawing on multiple, but singular examples of times when the Slave came face to face with the Master, as in the famous case of Hitler’s train being momentarily stalled en route through Thuringia when a second train full of wounded soldiers pulled alongside permitting Hitler to see them and they to see Hitler dining in splendour. (As a Zizek-inspired aside, let us note that this scene was folded into the recent film Enemy at the Gates (2001), a rather mannered depiction of the Battle for Stalingrad, wherein two snipers go up against one another and the entire war is collapsed into a game of cat and mouse.) Zizek marshals (martials?) several versions of this accidental (catastrophic) confrontation which is always-already suppressed to illustrate how the veil sometimes falls from the carefully constructed image we have both adopted and been inducted into. This image is the so-called Real but in fact the mirage constructed by the hegemonic “hidden hand”. Perhaps this is why Godard (and Herzog) both came round to admitting that there were no more images available for cinema and, as in Godard’s King Lear (1987), the audience is left effectively staring at a bare-naked light bulb.</p>
<p>“Today, more than ever, we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism–BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. The battle to be fought is thus a twofold one: first, yes, anticapitalism. However, anticapitalism without problematizing the capitalism’s POLITICAL form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient, no matter how ‘radical’ it is. Perhaps THE lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy which — as some Leftists claim — although engendered by capitalism, acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism.”</p>
<p>Here Zizek takes aim at all manner of post-cultural delusions — including Deleuzionary escapisms, and/or new Situationisms — in the manner that Marxists have long endorsed. On the one hand, the Left has decided to indulge “the long march through institutions”. On the other, the new surrealist or rote formalist is merely indulging in “ludic” games. These games usually come with the price of disengaging from the “proper” political, or, as with 1920s French Surrealism, playing at the political. This severe “Socratic” agenda — of deconstructing the coordinates of the ruling hegemony — is, for Zizek, impossible if the crisis of identity plaguing the late-modern subject (the doubling, tripling, quadrupling of identity) is not ‘cauterized’ by intellectual fire.</p>
<p>In his critique of contemporary capitalism Zizek finds not simply the conditions that Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified and made nearly intangible. “A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own ‘normal’ constraints […] Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values acquires autonomy, is transformed into the specter of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment.” In the era of globalization, then, the main question is: “Does today’s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way — his ‘net value’ is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the future?”</p>
<p>What Zizek is hammering away at, repeatedly and in various guises, is the empty present-day concept of the Universal (what I would call the meta-Real). The Universal is the form of forms (perhaps the urform of all forms) — as it signifies the latent content of all possible forms. This may seem hyper Platonic, but in fact such “higher” coordinates are the vacated premises of modern-day political economy. It is other possible concepts of political-economic form that are repeatedly revoked and/or given up for mutable, indeterminate, vague, and generally empty gestures in neo-liberalism. These empty gestures substitute for the meta-Real where everything critical is actually manipulated. This manipulated terrain, in Lacanian terms, interacts/intersects with the realm of the Symbolic — the place where the Thou Shalt Nots are inscribed. The Symbolic, in turn, is controlled by the collective force of the hegemonic, now “dematerialized” structures of late capitalism. Zizek’s complaints against “new social movements” is that they are generally “one issue movements” which do not engage the Universal. This totalizing language is partly a linguistic convention to confer a semantic and structuralist integrity to the idea of the Universal Singular, but also to circumvent or defuse the endless ineffective operations of “strictly limited goals” or “marketing” typified by the ubiquitous and generally tolerated NGOs. How many such organizations use a liberal, white guilt trip to raise funds? How many of these organizations exist only because government has been purged of its higher functions (its higher calling)?</p>
<p>“In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence — it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merl[eau]-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.”</p>
<p>Hopping from peak to peak, and periodically descending into the valley of present-day culture for refreshment, Zizek outlines a topology of activity that recovers revealed truths. In many ways he is similar to a host of others who have sought to reverse the decimation of our experience of the world. Like Giorgio Agamben — see Infancy and History (1993) — he has utilized language to re-enscribe the terms of resistance and the game of turning things upside down to empty them out and examine them. His appropriations are classic as well as modern. His giant brain is an effective bridge to another world inside or opposite, above or below, or simply always-already here. His agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the structural chains that enslave late-modern man. His nostalgia is for very large gestures — for the meta-Real, the Universal, and the Formal. “THIS resistance is the answer to the question ‘Why Lenin?’: it is the signifier ‘Lenin’ which FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation.”</p>
<p>Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New York. and the author of <a href="http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/birkhauser.html" type="external">On the Nature of Things</a>, a book documenting the travails of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.</p>
<p>He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:ateliermp@netscape.net" type="external">ateliermp@netscape.net</a></p>
<p>OUTTAKES</p>
<p>Slavoj Zizek’s essay <a href="http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm" type="external">Repeating Lenin</a> (@ Lacan.com) The new Karl Marx–“Capitalism has now triumphed, it is ‘the only game in town’, statist socialism is ‘dead’, and, yes, that is what Marx had said would happen all along.” <a href="" type="internal">Tittering at High Gate</a> (The Guardian Unlimited, 05/19/02)</p>
<p>Zizek reviews Lenin by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse–“In 1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet–there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction, no desire to say “I told you so.” At the same time, the catastrophe made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International.” <a href="" type="internal">Seize the Day</a> (The Guardian Unlimited, 07/23/02)</p>
<p>Alain Badiou rehearses his reappraisal of the 20th century–“Where are we today? The figure of active nihilism is regarded as completely obsolete. Every reasonable activity is limited, limiting, constrained by the burdens of reality. The best that one can do is to get away from evil, and to do this, the shortest path is to avoid any contact with the real. Ultimately one comes up against the nothing, the there-is-nothing-real, and in this sense one remains in nihilism. But since the terrorist element, the desire to purify the real, has been suppressed, nihilism is disactivated. It has become passive, or reactive, nihilism, that is, hostile to every action as well as to every thought.” <a href="http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm" type="external">One Divides Into Two</a> (CultureMachine, 2000)</p>
<p>Jacques Lacan <a href="http://psychematters.com/bibliographies/lacan.htm" type="external">Bibliography</a>, plus linkage (@ Psyche Matters) See also, Thus Spake Zizek in <a href="http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/formalism.html" type="external">Landscape Formalism, Anyone "?"</a> (Anti-Journal 2:1)</p>
<p>For a biography of Slavoj Zizek, see <a href="http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/zizek.html" type="external">More Zizek</a></p> | Zizek and Lenin | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/07/27/zizek-and-lenin/ | 2002-07-27 | 4left
| 3,052 | SLAVOJ ZIZEK the Giant of Ljubljana is like the great brain of Goethe8217s fairytale 8220The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily8221 In this revolutionary and allegorical tale reputedly inspired by Mozart8217s Magic Flute there are two lands separated by a river There are only two ways to cross the river One is by ferry and the boatman is a kind of sadist that exacts bizarre tribute for the occasion The other is to wait for the giant to appear and appropriate his shadow as a type of liminal bridge 8212 perhaps a metaphor for the umbra or penumbra of semiconsciousness and imagination Zizek as this giant or giant brain has cast a very long shadow indeed in what can only be termed 8220cultural studies8221 though he would despise the characterization He is effectively the most brilliant purveyor of Lacanian mischief and as a follower of the French 8220liberator8221 of Freud Zizek8217s Lacan is almost exclusively transcribed in mesmerizing language games or intellectual parables That he has an encyclopedic grasp of political philosophical literary artistic cinematic and pop cultural currents 8212 and that he has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination 8212 is the prime reason he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years He is also a legendary trickster having learned his craft as part of the communist nomenklatura in Slovenia a kind of Don Quixote for unrepentant Marxists and scourge of liberals social democrats newage 8220obscurantists8221 multiculturalists and 8230 You get the picture I first sat through a Lacanian conference at NYU in the late 1990s and understood 10 of the language It was however 110 thrilling The sheer bravado of the performances by the Frenchinflected intellectuals was delightful and sexy It was only later in 2001 that I had an opportunity to hear Slavoj Zizek speak The event was standing room only and the venue was a very highbrow conceptual art gallery called the Drawing Center in NYC Zizek was readingperforming 8220Il n8217y a pas de rapport religieux8221 from the latest edition of Lacanian Ink 18 the movement8217s journal In this particular essay he rehearsed Lacan8217s notion that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship but reenscribed it in the context of something else in this case 8216religion8217 8212 as he is wont to do with most all his tactical maneuvers The print version is illustrated with works by Damien Hirst More striking however was that this perhaps marked the beginning of Zizek8217s appropriation of St Paul This appropriation of St Paul is significant insofar as when Zizek performs one of his acts of rewriting he is takingripping the original out of one context and insertingtransplanting it into another In the case of St Paul what interested him most was that here was a figure not a disciple who constructed the entire edifice of the Christian faith on the crucifixion and resurrection Recall that in Kazantzakis8217 The Last Temptation of Christ or at least Scorsese8217s Paul appears in the delusionary vision Jesus has 8212 ie that he has escaped the cross and gone on to live marry and have children 8212 and repudiates Jesus as an imposter Zizek is quick to point out often that postmodernists have multiple versions of everything 8212 eg multiple versions of Nietzsche and multiple versions of Marx or Freud 8212 but he also is the master of rebranding a concept or a historical figure to elucidate what might be best termed 8220synchronic or structural phenomena8221 As a skilled structuralist though he8217d deny this too Zizek constructs castles in the air and then sends a barrage of waves in pursuit of these tentative forms He is Neptune to his own Odysseus 8212 But he is also Minerva In the case of Paul as in the more recent resuscitation of Lenin we witness Zizek isolating a critical moment or even a failed moment for purposes wholly related to the exasperating state of the current critical or failed moment 8212 latemodern capitalism and postmodernity In such an intelligence we see the mark of an archaic synthetic brilliance 8212 an almost heroic intelligence 8212 that assembles analyzes and destroys His actual performances are theatrical events He sweats bullets as he unpacks his torrent of complex references flings asides flings aside asides tackles a hard kernel of Hegel or Marx drops in an allusion to Hitchcock or even some pop cultural trash like the WorstCase Scenario phenomenon or 8220Reality TV8221 to explain away our symptoms 8212 to talk through our collective delusions and paranoias His agitated agitprop presentations are exhausting for the audience and for the actor When he concludes he invariable loses his bearings and is led off stage by his host or hostess At the Drawing Center he was whisked away by handlers before the Lacanian bacchantesbabes could get to him So what is he up to And why does he succeed where others have failed in constructing an 8220actuallyexisting8221 alternative to leftright politics The version of Lenin that Zizek is reenscribing into radical political discourse is ostensibly by his own admission the Lenin of the October Revolution or the Lenin that had the epiphany that in order to have a revolution 8220you have to have a revolution8221 Why is he doing this Primarily the goal appears to be to demolish the coordinates of the liberal hegemony that permit excess and aberration insofar as it does not threaten the true coordinates He suggests as well that the true coordinates are much better hidden than we realize The production of cultural difference a trendy subject is to Zizek the production of the inoperative dream 8212 a dream that recalls perhaps Orwell8217s 1984 or even Terry Gilliam8217s Brazil where a kind of generic pastoralism or a sexualized nature substitutes for authentic freedom 8212 the flip side of this is film noir Zizek has determined that latemodern capitalism has engendered a whole range of alternative seductions to keep the eye and brain off of the real Real The Real only exists as a fragment and this fragment is fast receding on the horizon as fantasy and often phantasm intercede These dreams and nightmares are systemic structural neuroses and they are part of the coordinates of the hegemonic The hegemon 8212 the prevailing set of coordinates 8212 always seeks to 8220take over8221 the Real and therefore this contaminated Real must be periodically purged Without descending into the Lacanian house of mirrors we can understand this on an everyday level if we observe what Zizek is up to with 8220Lenin8221 In his essay 8220Repeating Lenin8221 1997 8212 ever the trickster he convened a symposium on Lenin in Germany in part to see what the reaction would be 8212 Zizek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form 8220One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberalmulticulturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of 8216narratives8217 8212 not only literature but also politics religion science they are all different narratives stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist in which everyone from ethnic to sexual minorities will have the right and possibility to tell his story The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form Form has nothing to do with 8216formalism8217 with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent particular content it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real for the antagonism which 8216colors8217 the entire field in question 82308221 italics added He is interested as most firebreathing artists are in discerning the real Real amid the rubbish of systems In part in appropriating 8220Lenin8221 he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia 8212 8220the pure management of things8221 That Lenin failed is immaterial since Zizek is extracting the signifier 8220Lenin8221 from the historical continuum which includes that failure 8212 or the onslaught of Stalinism He adds 82208216Lenin8217 is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty quite on the contrary to put it in Kierkegaard8217s terms THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenininbecoming the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism8211recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem 8216About this Marx and Engels said not a word8217 The idea is not to return to Lenin but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense to retrieve the same impulse in today8217s constellation8221 He compares 1914 to 1990 and in a superb bit of multitasking describes how Lenin attempted to convince longsuffering Russian soldiers to withdraw from the front and turn on the Czar He does this by drawing on multiple but singular examples of times when the Slave came face to face with the Master as in the famous case of Hitler8217s train being momentarily stalled en route through Thuringia when a second train full of wounded soldiers pulled alongside permitting Hitler to see them and they to see Hitler dining in splendour As a Zizekinspired aside let us note that this scene was folded into the recent film Enemy at the Gates 2001 a rather mannered depiction of the Battle for Stalingrad wherein two snipers go up against one another and the entire war is collapsed into a game of cat and mouse Zizek marshals martials several versions of this accidental catastrophic confrontation which is alwaysalready suppressed to illustrate how the veil sometimes falls from the carefully constructed image we have both adopted and been inducted into This image is the socalled Real but in fact the mirage constructed by the hegemonic 8220hidden hand8221 Perhaps this is why Godard and Herzog both came round to admitting that there were no more images available for cinema and as in Godard8217s King Lear 1987 the audience is left effectively staring at a barenaked light bulb 8220Today more than ever we should here return to Lenin yes economy is the key domain the battle will be decided there one has to break the spell of the global capitalism8211BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL not economic The battle to be fought is thus a twofold one first yes anticapitalism However anticapitalism without problematizing the capitalism8217s POLITICAL form liberal parliamentary democracy is not sufficient no matter how 8216radical8217 it is Perhaps THE lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberaldemocratic legacy which 8212 as some Leftists claim 8212 although engendered by capitalism acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism8221 Here Zizek takes aim at all manner of postcultural delusions 8212 including Deleuzionary escapisms andor new Situationisms 8212 in the manner that Marxists have long endorsed On the one hand the Left has decided to indulge 8220the long march through institutions8221 On the other the new surrealist or rote formalist is merely indulging in 8220ludic8221 games These games usually come with the price of disengaging from the 8220proper8221 political or as with 1920s French Surrealism playing at the political This severe 8220Socratic8221 agenda 8212 of deconstructing the coordinates of the ruling hegemony 8212 is for Zizek impossible if the crisis of identity plaguing the latemodern subject the doubling tripling quadrupling of identity is not 8216cauterized8217 by intellectual fire In his critique of contemporary capitalism Zizek finds not simply the conditions that Marx anathematized but those same conditions reified and made nearly intangible 8220A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history perceived as a localizable perversion as an excess a deviation is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life in the speculative movement of money begetting more money of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions that is to say in which the thing can only survive as its own excess constantly exceeding its own 8216normal8217 constraints 8230 Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use and exchangevalue in capitalism the potentials of this opposition are fully realized the domain of exchangevalues acquires autonomy is transformed into the specter of selfpropelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment8221 In the era of globalization then the main question is 8220Does today8217s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way 8212 his 8216net value8217 is zero he directly operates just with the surplus borrowing from the future8221 What Zizek is hammering away at repeatedly and in various guises is the empty presentday concept of the Universal what I would call the metaReal The Universal is the form of forms perhaps the urform of all forms 8212 as it signifies the latent content of all possible forms This may seem hyper Platonic but in fact such 8220higher8221 coordinates are the vacated premises of modernday political economy It is other possible concepts of politicaleconomic form that are repeatedly revoked andor given up for mutable indeterminate vague and generally empty gestures in neoliberalism These empty gestures substitute for the metaReal where everything critical is actually manipulated This manipulated terrain in Lacanian terms interactsintersects with the realm of the Symbolic 8212 the place where the Thou Shalt Nots are inscribed The Symbolic in turn is controlled by the collective force of the hegemonic now 8220dematerialized8221 structures of late capitalism Zizek8217s complaints against 8220new social movements8221 is that they are generally 8220one issue movements8221 which do not engage the Universal This totalizing language is partly a linguistic convention to confer a semantic and structuralist integrity to the idea of the Universal Singular but also to circumvent or defuse the endless ineffective operations of 8220strictly limited goals8221 or 8220marketing8221 typified by the ubiquitous and generally tolerated NGOs How many such organizations use a liberal white guilt trip to raise funds How many of these organizations exist only because government has been purged of its higher functions its higher calling 8220In a proper revolutionary breakthrough the utopian future is neither simply fully realized present nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence 8212 it is rather as if in a unique suspension of temporality in the shortcircuit between the present and the future we are 8212 as if by Grace 8212 for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is not yet fully here but already at hand just there to be grabbed Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow 8212 in it we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS no matter how difficult the circumstances Revolution is not a MerleauPontyan wager an act suspended in the futur anterieur to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF an immediate index of its own truth8221 Hopping from peak to peak and periodically descending into the valley of presentday culture for refreshment Zizek outlines a topology of activity that recovers revealed truths In many ways he is similar to a host of others who have sought to reverse the decimation of our experience of the world Like Giorgio Agamben 8212 see Infancy and History 1993 8212 he has utilized language to reenscribe the terms of resistance and the game of turning things upside down to empty them out and examine them His appropriations are classic as well as modern His giant brain is an effective bridge to another world inside or opposite above or below or simply alwaysalready here His agenda is to foster and engender a withering critique of the structural chains that enslave latemodern man His nostalgia is for very large gestures 8212 for the metaReal the Universal and the Formal 8220THIS resistance is the answer to the question 8216Why Lenin8217 it is the signifier 8216Lenin8217 which FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation8221 Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York New York and the author of On the Nature of Things a book documenting the travails of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s He can be reached at ateliermpnetscapenet OUTTAKES Slavoj Zizek8217s essay Repeating Lenin Lacancom The new Karl Marx82118220Capitalism has now triumphed it is 8216the only game in town8217 statist socialism is 8216dead8217 and yes that is what Marx had said would happen all along8221 Tittering at High Gate The Guardian Unlimited 051902 Zizek reviews Lenin by H233l232ne Carr232re d8217Encausse82118220In 1914 an entire world disappeared taking with it not only the bourgeois faith in progress but the socialist movement that accompanied it Lenin the Lenin of What Is to Be Done felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet8211there was in his desperate reaction no sense of satisfaction no desire to say 8220I told you so8221 At the same time the catastrophe made possible the key Leninist Event the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International8221 Seize the Day The Guardian Unlimited 072302 Alain Badiou rehearses his reappraisal of the 20th century82118220Where are we today The figure of active nihilism is regarded as completely obsolete Every reasonable activity is limited limiting constrained by the burdens of reality The best that one can do is to get away from evil and to do this the shortest path is to avoid any contact with the real Ultimately one comes up against the nothing the thereisnothingreal and in this sense one remains in nihilism But since the terrorist element the desire to purify the real has been suppressed nihilism is disactivated It has become passive or reactive nihilism that is hostile to every action as well as to every thought8221 One Divides Into Two CultureMachine 2000 Jacques Lacan Bibliography plus linkage Psyche Matters See also Thus Spake Zizek in Landscape Formalism Anyone AntiJournal 21 For a biography of Slavoj Zizek see More Zizek | SLAVOJ/PROPN ZIZEK/PROPN the/DET Giant/PROPN 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<p>Shutterstock</p>
<p>This post originally ran on <a href="http://robertreich.org/post/117835755110" type="external">Robert Reich’s web page</a>.</p>
<p>For the past quarter-century I’ve offered in articles, books, and lectures an explanation for why average working people in advanced nations like the United States have failed to gain ground and are under increasing economic stress: Put simply, globalization and technological change have made most of us less competitive. The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.</p>
<p />
<p>My solution—and I’m hardly alone in suggesting this—has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to become more productive, and redistributes to the needy. These recommendations have been vigorously opposed by those who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed.</p>
<p>While the explanation I offered a quarter-century ago for what has happened is still relevant—indeed, it has become the standard, widely accepted explanation—I’ve come to believe it overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs. And the governmental solutions I have propounded, while I believe them still useful, are in some ways beside the point because they take insufficient account of the government’s more basic role in setting the rules of the economic game.</p>
<p>Worse yet, the ensuing debate over the merits of the “free market” versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a half-century ago, why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then, and what the basic rules of the market should be. It has allowed America to cling to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the market, without examining the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim has meaning only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable.</p>
<p>&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;II</p>
<p>Most fundamentally, the standard explanation for what has happened ignores power. As such, it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it.</p>
<p>The standard explanation has allowed some to argue, for example, that the median wage of the bottom 90 percent—which for the first 30 years after World War II rose in tandem with productivity—has stagnated for the last 30 years, even as productivity has continued to rise, because middle-income workers are worth less than they were before new software technologies and globalization made many of their old jobs redundant. They therefore have to settle for lower wages and less security. If they want better jobs, they need more education and better skills. So hath the market decreed.</p>
<p>Yet this market view cannot be the whole story because it fails to account for much of what we have experienced. For one thing, it doesn’t clarify why the transformation occurred so suddenly. The divergence between productivity gains and the median wage began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then took off. Yet globalization and technological change did not suddenly arrive at America’s doorstep in those years. What else began happening then?</p>
<p>Nor can the standard explanation account for why other advanced economies facing similar forces of globalization and technological change did not succumb to them as readily as the United States. By 2011, the median income in Germany, for example, was rising faster than it was in the United States, and Germany’s richest 1 percent took home about 11 percent of total income, before taxes, while America’s richest 1 percent took home more than 17 percent. Why have globalization and technological change widened inequality in the United States to a much greater degree?</p>
<p>Nor can the standard explanation account for why the compensation packages of the top executives of big companies soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times. Or why the denizens of Wall Street, who in the 1950s and 1960s earned comparatively modest sums, are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually. Are they really “worth” that much more now than they were worth then?</p>
<p>Finally and perhaps most significantly, the market explanation cannot account for the decline in wages of recent college graduates. If the market explanation were accurate, college graduates would command higher wages in line with their greater productivity. After all, a college education was supposed to boost personal incomes and maintain American prosperity.</p>
<p>To be sure, young people with college degrees have continued to do better than people without them. In 2013, Americans with four-year college degrees earned 98 percent more per hour on average than people without a college degree. That was a bigger advantage than the 89 percent premium that college graduates earned relative to non-graduates five years before, and the 64 percent advantage they held in the early 1980s.</p>
<p>But since 2000, the real average hourly wages of young college graduates have dropped. The entry-level wages of female college graduates have dropped by more than 8 percent, and male graduates by more than 6.5 percent. To state it another way, while a college education has become a prerequisite for joining the middle class, it is no longer a sure means for gaining ground once admitted to it. That’s largely because the middle class’s share of the total economic pie continues to shrink, while the share going to the top continues to grow.&#160;</p>
<p>&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160;III</p>
<p>A deeper understanding of what has happened to American incomes over the last 25 years requires an examination of changes in the organization of the market. These changes stem from a dramatic increase in the political power of large corporations and Wall Street to change the rules of the market in ways that have enhanced their profitability, while reducing the share of economic gains going to the majority of Americans.&#160;</p>
<p>This transformation has amounted to a redistribution upward, but not as “redistribution” is normally defined. The government did not tax the middle class and poor and transfer a portion of their incomes to the rich. The government undertook the upward redistribution by altering the rules of the game.</p>
<p>Intellectual property rights—patents, trademarks, and copyrights—have been enlarged and extended, for example. This has created windfalls for pharmaceuticals, high tech, biotechnology, and many entertainment companies, which now preserve their monopolies longer than ever. It has also meant high prices for average consumers, including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.</p>
<p>At the same time, antitrust laws have been relaxed for corporations with significant market power. This has meant large profits for Monsanto, which sets the prices for most of the nation’s seed corn; for a handful of companies with significant market power over network portals and platforms (Amazon, Facebook, and Google); for cable companies facing little or no broadband competition (Comcast, Time Warner, AT&amp;T, Verizon); and for the largest Wall Street banks, among others. And as with intellectual property rights, this market power has simultaneously raised prices and reduced services available to average Americans. (Americans have the most expensive and slowest broadband of any industrialized nation, for example.)&#160;</p>
<p>Financial laws and regulations instituted in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 and the consequential Great Depression have been abandoned—restrictions on interstate banking, on the intermingling of investment and commercial banking, and on banks becoming publicly held corporations, for example—thereby allowing the largest Wall Street banks to acquire unprecedented influence over the economy. The growth of the financial sector, in turn, spawned junk-bond financing, unfriendly takeovers, private equity and “activist” investing, and the notion that corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder value.</p>
<p>Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations—notably airlines and automobile manufacturers—allowing them to abrogate labor contracts, threaten closures unless they receive wage concessions, and leave workers and communities stranded. Notably, bankruptcy has not been extended to homeowners who are burdened by mortgage debt and owe more on their homes than the homes are worth, or to graduates laden with student debt. Meanwhile, the largest banks and auto manufacturers were bailed out in the downturn of 2008–2009. The result has been to shift the risks of economic failure onto the backs of average working people and taxpayers.</p>
<p>Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations. Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information. CEOs have used stock buybacks to boost share prices when they cash in their own stock options. Tax laws have created loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and private-equity funds, special favors for the oil and gas industry, lower marginal income-tax rates on the highest incomes, and reduced estate taxes on great wealth.</p>
<p>All these instances represent distributions upward—toward big corporations and financial firms, and their executives and shareholders—and away from average working people.</p>
<p>&#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; &#160; IV</p>
<p>Meanwhile, corporate executives and Wall Street managers and traders have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most workers from rising in tandem with productivity gains, in order that more of the gains go instead toward corporate profits. Higher corporate profits have meant higher returns for shareholders and, directly and indirectly, for the executives and bankers themselves.</p>
<p>Workers worried about keeping their jobs have been compelled to accept this transformation without fully understanding its political roots. For example, some of their economic insecurity has been the direct consequence of trade agreements that have encouraged American companies to outsource jobs abroad. Since all nations’ markets reflect political decisions about how they are organized, so-called “free trade” agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are to be integrated. The most important aspects of such negotiations concern intellectual property, financial assets, and labor. The first two of these interests have gained stronger protection in such agreements, at the insistence of big U.S. corporations and Wall Street. The latter—the interests of average working Americans in protecting the value of their labor—have gained less protection, because the voices of working people have been muted.&#160;</p>
<p>Rising job insecurity can also be traced to high levels of unemployment. Here, too, government policies have played a significant role. The Great Recession, whose proximate causes were the bursting of housing and debt bubbles brought on by the deregulation of Wall Street, hurled millions of Americans out of work. Then, starting in 2010, Congress opted for austerity because it was more interested in reducing budget deficits than in stimulating the economy and reducing unemployment. The resulting joblessness undermined the bargaining power of average workers and translated into stagnant or declining wages.</p>
<p>Some insecurity has been the result of shredded safety nets and disappearing labor protections. Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II had placed most economic risks squarely on large corporations through strong employment contracts, along with Social Security, workers’ compensation, 40-hour workweeks with time-and-a-half for overtime, and employer-provided health benefits (wartime price controls encouraged such tax-free benefits as substitutes for wage increases). But in the wake of the junk-bond and takeover mania of the 1980s, economic risks were shifted to workers. Corporate executives did whatever they could to reduce payrolls—outsource abroad, install labor-replacing technologies, and utilize part-time and contract workers. A new set of laws and regulations facilitated this transformation.</p>
<p>As a result, economic insecurity became baked into employment. Full-time workers who had put in decades with a company often found themselves without a job overnight—with no severance pay, no help finding another job, and no health insurance. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch in the two preceding decades, about half of all families experienced some decline in income.</p>
<p>Today, nearly one out of every five working Americans is in a part-time job. Many are consultants, freelancers,&#160;and independent contractors. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck. And employment benefits have shriveled. The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from just over half in 1979 to under 35 percent today. In MetLife’s 2014 survey of employees, 40 percent anticipated that their employers would reduce benefits even further.</p>
<p>The prevailing insecurity is also a consequence of the demise of labor unions. Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America, the typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars. By 2014, America’s largest employer was Walmart, and the typical entry-level Walmart worker earned about $9 an hour.&#160;</p>
<p>This does not mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was “worth” four times what the typical Walmart employee in 2014 was worth. The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than the Walmart worker. The real difference was that GM workers a half-century ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they would be unionized if they did not come close to matching the union contracts.</p>
<p>Today’s Walmart workers do not have a union to negotiate a better deal. They are on their own. And because less than 7 percent of today’s private-sector workers are unionized, most employers across America do not have to match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage. Public policies have enabled and encouraged this fundamental change. More states have adopted so-called “right-to-work” laws. The National Labor Relations Board, understaffed and overburdened, has barely enforced collective bargaining. When workers have been harassed or fired for seeking to start a union, the board rewards them back pay—a mere slap on the wrist of corporations that have violated the law. The result has been a race to the bottom.&#160;</p>
<p>Given these changes in the organization of the market, it is not surprising that corporate profits have increased as a portion of the total economy, while wages have declined. Those whose income derives directly or indirectly from profits—corporate executives, Wall Street traders, and shareholders—have done exceedingly well. Those dependent primarily on wages have not.</p>
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<p>The underlying problem, then, is not that most Americans are “worth” less in the market than they had been, or that they have been living beyond their means. Nor is it that they lack enough education to be sufficiently productive. The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it, while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power—both economic and political—to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II. As a result, their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide them.&#160;</p>
<p>To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to disregard the power of large corporations and the financial sector, which have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power. As their gains have continued to accumulate, so has their power to accumulate even more.</p>
<p>&#160;Under these circumstances, education is no panacea. Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward distributions within the rules of the market, and giving workers the bargaining leverage they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth. Yet neither will be possible as long as large corporations and Wall Street have the power to prevent such a restructuring. And as they, and the executives and managers who run them, continue to collect the lion’s share of the income and wealth generated by the economy, their influence over the politicians, administrators, and judges who determine the rules of the game may be expected to grow.</p>
<p>The answer to this conundrum is not found in economics. It is found in politics. The changes in the organization of the economy have been reinforcing and cumulative: As more of the nation’s income flows to large corporations and Wall Street and to those whose earnings and wealth derive directly from them, the greater is their political influence over the rules of the market, which in turn enlarges their share of total income.&#160;</p>
<p>The more dependent politicians become on their financial favors, the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests. The weaker unions and other traditional sources of countervailing power become economically, the less able they are to exert political influence over the rules of the market, which causes the playing field to tilt even further against average workers and the poor.</p>
<p>Ultimately, the trend toward widening inequality in America, as elsewhere, can be reversed only if the vast majority, whose incomes have stagnated and whose wealth has failed to increase, join together to demand fundamental change. The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left, or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground, and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to its growing distress.</p>
<p>[This article is from the fall issue of “The American Prospect.”]</p>
<p /> | The Real Reason Inequality Is Widening and Average Working Americans Can't Gain Ground | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/the-real-reason-inequality-is-widening-and-average-working-americans-cant-gain-ground/ | 2015-05-04 | 4left
| 3,052 | Shutterstock This post originally ran on Robert Reich8217s web page For the past quartercentury I8217ve offered in articles books and lectures an explanation for why average working people in advanced nations like the United States have failed to gain ground and are under increasing economic stress Put simply globalization and technological change have made most of us less competitive The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lowerpaid workers abroad or by computerdriven machines My solution8212and I8217m hardly alone in suggesting this8212has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to become more productive and redistributes to the needy These recommendations have been vigorously opposed by those who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed While the explanation I offered a quartercentury ago for what has happened is still relevant8212indeed it has become the standard widely accepted explanation8212I8217ve come to believe it overlooks a critically important phenomenon the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs And the governmental solutions I have propounded while I believe them still useful are in some ways beside the point because they take insufficient account of the government8217s more basic role in setting the rules of the economic game Worse yet the ensuing debate over the merits of the 8220free market8221 versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a halfcentury ago why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then and what the basic rules of the market should be It has allowed America to cling to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they8217re 8220worth8221 in the market without examining the legal and political institutions that define the market The tautology is easily confused for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid Yet this claim has meaning only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160II Most fundamentally the standard explanation for what has happened ignores power As such it lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it The standard explanation has allowed some to argue for example that the median wage of the bottom 90 percent8212which for the first 30 years after World War II rose in tandem with productivity8212has stagnated for the last 30 years even as productivity has continued to rise because middleincome workers are worth less than they were before new software technologies and globalization made many of their old jobs redundant They therefore have to settle for lower wages and less security If they want better jobs they need more education and better skills So hath the market decreed Yet this market view cannot be the whole story because it fails to account for much of what we have experienced For one thing it doesn8217t clarify why the transformation occurred so suddenly The divergence between productivity gains and the median wage began in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then took off Yet globalization and technological change did not suddenly arrive at America8217s doorstep in those years What else began happening then Nor can the standard explanation account for why other advanced economies facing similar forces of globalization and technological change did not succumb to them as readily as the United States By 2011 the median income in Germany for example was rising faster than it was in the United States and Germany8217s richest 1 percent took home about 11 percent of total income before taxes while America8217s richest 1 percent took home more than 17 percent Why have globalization and technological change widened inequality in the United States to a much greater degree Nor can the standard explanation account for why the compensation packages of the top executives of big companies soared from an average of 20 times that of the typical worker 40 years ago to almost 300 times Or why the denizens of Wall Street who in the 1950s and 1960s earned comparatively modest sums are now paid tens or hundreds of millions annually Are they really 8220worth8221 that much more now than they were worth then Finally and perhaps most significantly the market explanation cannot account for the decline in wages of recent college graduates If the market explanation were accurate college graduates would command higher wages in line with their greater productivity After all a college education was supposed to boost personal incomes and maintain American prosperity To be sure young people with college degrees have continued to do better than people without them In 2013 Americans with fouryear college degrees earned 98 percent more per hour on average than people without a college degree That was a bigger advantage than the 89 percent premium that college graduates earned relative to nongraduates five years before and the 64 percent advantage they held in the early 1980s But since 2000 the real average hourly wages of young college graduates have dropped The entrylevel wages of female college graduates have dropped by more than 8 percent and male graduates by more than 65 percent To state it another way while a college education has become a prerequisite for joining the middle class it is no longer a sure means for gaining ground once admitted to it That8217s largely because the middle class8217s share of the total economic pie continues to shrink while the share going to the top continues to growamp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160III A deeper understanding of what has happened to American incomes over the last 25 years requires an examination of changes in the organization of the market These changes stem from a dramatic increase in the political power of large corporations and Wall Street to change the rules of the market in ways that have enhanced their profitability while reducing the share of economic gains going to the majority of Americansamp160 This transformation has amounted to a redistribution upward but not as 8220redistribution8221 is normally defined The government did not tax the middle class and poor and transfer a portion of their incomes to the rich The government undertook the upward redistribution by altering the rules of the game Intellectual property rights8212patents trademarks and copyrights8212have been enlarged and extended for example This has created windfalls for pharmaceuticals high tech biotechnology and many entertainment companies which now preserve their monopolies longer than ever It has also meant high prices for average consumers including the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation At the same time antitrust laws have been relaxed for corporations with significant market power This has meant large profits for Monsanto which sets the prices for most of the nation8217s seed corn for a handful of companies with significant market power over network portals and platforms Amazon Facebook and Google for cable companies facing little or no broadband competition Comcast Time Warner ATampampT Verizon and for the largest Wall Street banks among others And as with intellectual property rights this market power has simultaneously raised prices and reduced services available to average Americans Americans have the most expensive and slowest broadband of any industrialized nation for exampleamp160 Financial laws and regulations instituted in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 and the consequential Great Depression have been abandoned8212restrictions on interstate banking on the intermingling of investment and commercial banking and on banks becoming publicly held corporations for example8212thereby allowing the largest Wall Street banks to acquire unprecedented influence over the economy The growth of the financial sector in turn spawned junkbond financing unfriendly takeovers private equity and 8220activist8221 investing and the notion that corporations exist solely to maximize shareholder value Bankruptcy laws have been loosened for large corporations8212notably airlines and automobile manufacturers8212allowing them to abrogate labor contracts threaten closures unless they receive wage concessions and leave workers and communities stranded Notably bankruptcy has not been extended to homeowners who are burdened by mortgage debt and owe more on their homes than the homes are worth or to graduates laden with student debt Meanwhile the largest banks and auto manufacturers were bailed out in the downturn of 200882112009 The result has been to shift the risks of economic failure onto the backs of average working people and taxpayers Contract laws have been altered to require mandatory arbitration before private judges selected by big corporations Securities laws have been relaxed to allow insider trading of confidential information CEOs have used stock buybacks to boost share prices when they cash in their own stock options Tax laws have created loopholes for the partners of hedge funds and privateequity funds special favors for the oil and gas industry lower marginal incometax rates on the highest incomes and reduced estate taxes on great wealth All these instances represent distributions upward8212toward big corporations and financial firms and their executives and shareholders8212and away from average working people amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 IV Meanwhile corporate executives and Wall Street managers and traders have done everything possible to prevent the wages of most workers from rising in tandem with productivity gains in order that more of the gains go instead toward corporate profits Higher corporate profits have meant higher returns for shareholders and directly and indirectly for the executives and bankers themselves Workers worried about keeping their jobs have been compelled to accept this transformation without fully understanding its political roots For example some of their economic insecurity has been the direct consequence of trade agreements that have encouraged American companies to outsource jobs abroad Since all nations8217 markets reflect political decisions about how they are organized socalled 8220free trade8221 agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are to be integrated The most important aspects of such negotiations concern intellectual property financial assets and labor The first two of these interests have gained stronger protection in such agreements at the insistence of big US corporations and Wall Street The latter8212the interests of average working Americans in protecting the value of their labor8212have gained less protection because the voices of working people have been mutedamp160 Rising job insecurity can also be traced to high levels of unemployment Here too government policies have played a significant role The Great Recession whose proximate causes were the bursting of housing and debt bubbles brought on by the deregulation of Wall Street hurled millions of Americans out of work Then starting in 2010 Congress opted for austerity because it was more interested in reducing budget deficits than in stimulating the economy and reducing unemployment The resulting joblessness undermined the bargaining power of average workers and translated into stagnant or declining wages Some insecurity has been the result of shredded safety nets and disappearing labor protections Public policies that emerged during the New Deal and World War II had placed most economic risks squarely on large corporations through strong employment contracts along with Social Security workers8217 compensation 40hour workweeks with timeandahalf for overtime and employerprovided health benefits wartime price controls encouraged such taxfree benefits as substitutes for wage increases But in the wake of the junkbond and takeover mania of the 1980s economic risks were shifted to workers Corporate executives did whatever they could to reduce payrolls8212outsource abroad install laborreplacing technologies and utilize parttime and contract workers A new set of laws and regulations facilitated this transformation As a result economic insecurity became baked into employment Fulltime workers who had put in decades with a company often found themselves without a job overnight8212with no severance pay no help finding another job and no health insurance Even before the crash of 2008 the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at the University of Michigan found that over any given twoyear stretch in the two preceding decades about half of all families experienced some decline in income Today nearly one out of every five working Americans is in a parttime job Many are consultants freelancersamp160and independent contractors Twothirds are living paycheck to paycheck And employment benefits have shriveled The portion of workers with any pension connected to their job has fallen from just over half in 1979 to under 35 percent today In MetLife8217s 2014 survey of employees 40 percent anticipated that their employers would reduce benefits even further The prevailing insecurity is also a consequence of the demise of labor unions Fifty years ago when General Motors was the largest employer in America the typical GM worker earned 35 an hour in today8217s dollars By 2014 America8217s largest employer was Walmart and the typical entrylevel Walmart worker earned about 9 an houramp160 This does not mean the typical GM employee a halfcentury ago was 8220worth8221 four times what the typical Walmart employee in 2014 was worth The GM worker was not better educated or motivated than the Walmart worker The real difference was that GM workers a halfcentury ago had a strong union behind them that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members And because more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union the bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of nonunionized workers as well Nonunion firms knew they would be unionized if they did not come close to matching the union contracts Today8217s Walmart workers do not have a union to negotiate a better deal They are on their own And because less than 7 percent of today8217s privatesector workers are unionized most employers across America do not have to match union contracts This puts unionized firms at a competitive disadvantage Public policies have enabled and encouraged this fundamental change More states have adopted socalled 8220righttowork8221 laws The National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened has barely enforced collective bargaining When workers have been harassed or fired for seeking to start a union the board rewards them back pay8212a mere slap on the wrist of corporations that have violated the law The result has been a race to the bottomamp160 Given these changes in the organization of the market it is not surprising that corporate profits have increased as a portion of the total economy while wages have declined Those whose income derives directly or indirectly from profits8212corporate executives Wall Street traders and shareholders8212have done exceedingly well Those dependent primarily on wages have not amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160V The underlying problem then is not that most Americans are 8220worth8221 less in the market than they had been or that they have been living beyond their means Nor is it that they lack enough education to be sufficiently productive The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power8212both economic and political8212to receive as large a portion of the economy8217s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II As a result their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide themamp160 To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the 8220free market8221 is to disregard the power of large corporations and the financial sector which have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power As their gains have continued to accumulate so has their power to accumulate even more amp160Under these circumstances education is no panacea Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward distributions within the rules of the market and giving workers the bargaining leverage they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth Yet neither will be possible as long as large corporations and Wall Street have the power to prevent such a restructuring And as they and the executives and managers who run them continue to collect the lion8217s share of the income and wealth generated by the economy their influence over the politicians administrators and judges who determine the rules of the game may be expected to grow The answer to this conundrum is not found in economics It is found in politics The changes in the organization of the economy have been reinforcing and cumulative As more of the nation8217s income flows to large corporations and Wall Street and to those whose earnings and wealth derive directly from them the greater is their political influence over the rules of the market which in turn enlarges their share of total incomeamp160 The more dependent politicians become on their financial favors the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests The weaker unions and other traditional sources of countervailing power become economically the less able they are to exert political influence over the rules of the market which causes the playing field to tilt even further against average workers and the poor Ultimately the trend toward widening inequality in America as elsewhere can be reversed only if the vast majority whose incomes have stagnated and whose wealth has failed to increase join together to demand fundamental change The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to its growing distress This article is from the fall issue of 8220The American Prospect8221 | Shutterstock/VERB This/DET post/NOUN originally/ADV ran/VERB on/ADP Robert/PROPN Reich8217s/PROPN web/NOUN page/NOUN For/ADP the/DET past/ADJ quartercentury/NOUN I8217ve/PROPN offered/VERB in/ADP articles/NOUN books/NOUN and/CCONJ lectures/VERB an/DET explanation/NOUN for/ADP why/SCONJ average/ADJ working/VERB people/NOUN in/ADP 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<p>The hottest topics in the current presidential campaign are the Iraq war and the “war” on “terrorism”. It is disappointing how glibly Kerry has adopted the Bush administration’s campaign against “terror” and has not critically examined its premise. Of course, to do so, would be political suicide. Any politician who speaks out against the war on terrorism and how it is a war on citizens and civil rights, will risk being called a terrorist or a traitor. Senator Russell Feingold, the only Senator to vote against the un-Patriotic Patriot act and one of the few who voting against the Iraq war, is fighting for his political life in Wisconsin.</p>
<p>The word “terrorism” is defined differently in hundreds of fed laws and regulations, depending on their contexts. The most expansive use of the term, for instance, is reserved for immigrants and resident aliens ­ those having green cards and student visas, for instance.</p>
<p>Terrorism is whatever the government wants it to be. It is a moving and mornping construct. It can justify the closing of streets at home, and the waging of war abroad. It encompasses peacefully demonstrating against George Bush at home, and speaking negatively against him abroad (I am referring to restrictions on Arab news media who are trying to report on Iraq). It is the excuse for declaring a war on civil liberties.</p>
<p>By war on civil liberties, I am referring to the erosion of the freedoms ” embodied in the first ten amendments to the Constitution – known collectively as the Bill of Rights. Bush said that “they” “hate” ‘us” for our freedoms. Well “they” have much less to “hate” three years after Sep 11. Bush talks of spreading “liberty” abroad like butter or jelly. Well, we are scraping away “liberty” at home. It is something we are told we must do, in order to “preserve” freedom.</p>
<p>A radio interviewer made an interesting suggestion to me recently–should we call the Bill of Rights the Bill of Restrictions? I like that idea. Restrictions on government power. We could reframe them as not freedom of speech but freedom from government intrusion into speech, assembly. Not freedom to have an attorney represent us, but freedom from government eavesdropping on us and our attorneys and on limiting our right to counsel, as it has done in the case of hundreds of immigrants, hundreds of “enemy combatants,” material witnesses, and Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla.</p>
<p>We are supposed to have freedom from being arrested without probable cause or not being held to account for a crime unless indicted by a grand jury. We are supposed to be free from government denying us access to the witnesses against us. Evidence is supposed to be presented in open court and subject to cross examination and the scrutiny of the light of day. We are supposed to be free from inquisition by secret evidence. We are supposed to be free from bond being denied us while we await trial and free from cruel and unusual punishment. And by we, I mean not just American citizens, but aliens lawfully in this country. These guarantees have been violated thousands of times since September 11.</p>
<p>Hundreds and hundreds of peaceful demonstrators at the Republican National Convention were arrested and held for as long as three days before a judge dismissed the charges against them. They had committed no crime and further, were held long outside the time allowed by law. Mayor Bloomberg, taking a page from George Bush’s playbook, would do it all again, he said, proud that the liberties of Americans were sacrificed in the name of George Bush.</p>
<p>In my book I follow some of the more egregious examples of the government’s violation of its compact with we, the governed, embodied not just in the Bill of Rights but also in in federal laws and rules of procedure.</p>
<p>Much of what I wrote about was ongoing as the book went to press. I want to bring you up to date on some of the events I wrote about. Not one conviction or plea gained by John Ashcroft in his prosecution of “terrorists” has been against anyone plotting anything against the United States. Most have been for non-terrorism crimes like lying on visa application or lying to prosecutors (which is why none of you should EVER talk to a prosecutor ­ you cannot in any way defend yourself, lest you be charged later with lying) or being involved with a Muslim charity that sends money, goods to countries we don’t like-regardless of whether relief goes to civilians or not.</p>
<p>The Detroit Cell convictions-the first jury convictions of people charged with supporting “terorrism” have been overturned, the FBI evidence having been deemed a fraud. Attorney Lynne Stewart has begun the defense of her case, the govt having rested last week by reading letters from her client, Sheik Abdel Rahmen, convicted in the 1993 WTC bombings. She should spend the rest of her life in prison, the government argues, because she represented a terrorist, appointed by the federal court to do so. They call her his “associate,” not his lawyer. A frightening link that should, and does, give all brave attorneys who defend “terrorists”, pause.</p>
<p>What is the government saying Stewart did? They say that in answering press questions about her client and, perhaps, impeding John Ashcroft’s efforts to record conversations between her and her client, a blind man in a prison in Minnesota, she was “providing personnel” ­her client and herself-for terrorism attacks. Ashcroft directed prison officials to tape record all communications with her client.</p>
<p>Ashcroft continues to besmirch the name of Steven Hatfield, the so-called “person of interest” in the anthrax scare of 2001. Last week, a federal judge hearing a suit Hatfield has bravely brought against Ashcroft said that the DOJ made him ashamed of the system. He ordered Ashcroft to either arrest Hatfield or cease libeling and slandering him. But Ashcroft does not obey federal court orders, holding himself above the law. On at least two occasions he personally spoke about the government’s case in the Detroit trials, blatantly violating Judge Rosen’s gag order on all attorneys. Tell your boss my orders refer to him, Rosen said to a prosecutor in the case.</p>
<p>Three young Muslim men, Northern Virginia residents and American citizens, are serving 85 to 100 years in prison for supporting, with their words, and with one visit to a foreign training camp, the Muslim cause in Kashmir. The three were part of what the govt referred to as the “Alexandria 11. Yes, the got 85 to 100 years for doing nothing. The trial took place in federal court in Alexandria. The buddies who testified against them in exchange for ten years in prison (better than 100, right) said, falsely, that when the guys played paintball they were “practicing” for battle. Better think twice before you schedule a paintball party for your kids’ birthday celebration. These men are giving their lives for a cause they talked about said they might someday participate in. The US is on the side of India in the battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Endangering the Indian cause is terrorism. But wait, isn’t Pakistan our friend, too? Don’t ask. I have to emphasize, that there is no consistency in this madness.</p>
<p>Six young men in Buffalo, NY are serving 10-14 years in prison for journeying to Afghanistan on a religious trip prior to September 11 and lying about going. They were afraid to say they went–and the govt presumed from that they were plotting against American. Only, after they were convicted, the lead prosecutor said they were not a “cell.” There was not evidence they were plotting anything, he said. Funny, he had no problem with presiding over their guilty pleas, extracted, by the prosecutor’s admission, under threat of banishment to Guantanamo as enemy combatants.</p>
<p>A young attorney in the Ashcroft Justice Department remains under investigation, unemployed and unemployable, because she blew the whistle on the DOJ and told a federal prosecutor and judge in Alex that the DOJ had not turned over all of its communications with FBI agents who interrogated John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan. She knew, because she is the one who told the FBI not to question Lindh as his parents and his lawyer had contact DOJ and wanted their son represented by counsel. The FBI ignored her and extracted confessions that led Lindh to plead guilty to conspiring against the US. He was doing nothing of the sort, but in this Alice in Wonderland world according to John Ashcroft and George Bush, innocence is guilt, lies are truth, and injustice masquerades as justice.</p>
<p>The Bush administration continues to disobey the law, flaunt federal judges’ orders, including those of the Supreme Court. Jose Padilla, an American charged with no crime, still is imprisoned in a Navy brig months after the Supreme Court dismissed his suit because filed in the wrong court. Once it was refiled the federal judge in South Caroline refused to expedite the case, no hurry he said.</p>
<p>Four months after arguing before the S Ct that American citizen Yaser Hamdi was so dangerous (though never charged with a crime) that he could not even see a lawyer or be out of solitary confinement, the government sent him to Saudi Arabia where his family lives. Originally the govt wanted Saudi Arabia to charge him with a crime (what? The govt demanded the same of Britain when it released four British men from Gitmo, but the British home secretary refused to press charges. They have done nothing wrong, he said), or keep him under some kind of house arrest or restrict his travel. Hamdi’s release was delayed for two weeks before the US finally let him go. Of course, we don’t know what kind of deal was struck behind the scenes. When held to account for three years of lawless imprisonment, the balance sheet came up zero.</p>
<p>But what is even more about the striking case is that Hamdi, charged with no crime was not only deported but also STRIPPED of his US citizenship,likely no great loss considering how he was treated by its laws.</p>
<p>Falls Church resident Ahmed Abu Ali remains in a Saudi prison, where Saudi police took him from a Saudi university classroom in June 2003. Federal prosecutors and FBI agents from Alex Va visited him personally and questioned him in connection with the Alexandria 11 prosecutions, while denying that they ever heard of him. You can be sure if he had any connection, they would have extradited him, as they did another man living in Saudi. Finally, forced to admit that he was in Saudi, Ashcroft and company said they had nothing to do with his detention. But the Saudis disagree. They said they are holding him because the Americans told them to. His family has sued in federal court in DC to gain the release of their son. The govt says it has nothing to do with the case ­ Saudi has him. The Saudis now say that the US is pressuring them to prosecute their son. For what, they don’t yet know.</p>
<p>The new Intelligence bill floating around the Congress now affirmatively calls for the US to ship immigrants to countries for the express purpose of being tortured. Don’t take my word for it. Go read the bill. Your congressmen likely are not.</p>
<p>The Transporation Security Administration has more than 10,000 “names” on a no fly list and you can’t know how you got on it and you can’t get off of it. The ACLU is suing the government in behalf of a couple who even the govt admits should not be on the list. But they won’t take them off.</p>
<p>The government wants you to believe that Cat Moonbeam Stevens is properly on the list. Accepting that premise, then, aren’t you appalled that the plane he was supposedly in danger of blowing up took off? How many “terrorists” whose names are or are not on the list are boarding planes? Speaking of Cat, though, don’t you love it that the plane was diverted from DC to Maine, presumably steering clear of Kennebunkport?</p>
<p>The government continues its ignorant campaign of telling you how safe you are while terrorists, like Cat Stevens (I mean that is their designation, not mine), board planes, intelligence sits collecting dust because the govt can’t seem to find Arabic translators (who, as you recall, must be card-carrying heterosexuals), and, by recent report, guns and explosives continue to make it through airport security. Billions of dollars in training can’t keep us safe. We know that. The government says more money and more restrictions will guarantee it</p>
<p>Besides, Ashcroft can read our email get our bank records. Don’t you feel safer?</p>
<p>I applaud the Congressman who shut down his office. If it as dangerous as the feds and DC and Capitol police are telling me, he says, then we ought to get out of this place. I don’t know whether or not he is serious or demonstrating the absurdity of the govt position. But if it is for the later reason, I applaud it. My 10 year old grandson commented as we were trying to get around the city this summer to do some sightseeing and faced fenced in monuments, closed streets, and cops with assault guns on the subway. Why don’t they tear down the monuments if we can’t visit them? What good are they, he said, this after our “tickets” to see the Washington Monument (did you know you need tickets and have to pay online with your credit card to have a shot at seeing the momuments-online ticket purchasers are given preference-you know where I am going with this) were cancelled three days before Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Try explaining that to a 10 year old. But, he said, our tickets being for Wednesday, the funeral isn’t until Friday? Speaking of all our thwarted efforts this summer, he said, why don’t they just shut down the city he said and send food and clothes to the people who have to live there? Even he felt the absurdity of the government’s position.</p>
<p>As we begin year four of the war on civil liberties, some Americans are a little more aware of what our government is doing to us, some congressmen and women are a little concerned, and a few judges are taking names and making notes. Hundreds of counties and cities, and a few states, have passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act (which, by the way, is only the tip of the iceberg in the govt’s war on its people. Much has been blamed on the Patriot Act which has nothing to do with that law).</p>
<p>Would anything be different under a Kerry administration? I doubt it. I tend to agree with Nader that Kerry is, in terms of Bush and civil liberties, a distinction without much of a difference. I think he or anyone else that replaces Bush (someday) will appreciate the precedence of the Bush years that sanctioned an administration making up the rules as it goes along and ignoring the courts and the Congress. Who wouldn’t want that power? The founding fathers did not want the Bill of Rights, and fought its exclusion from the actual constitution. Refusal of some delegates to the Constitutional Convention to agree to sign the Constitution without some protection of people’s rights led to their adoption as amendments.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt; Thanks to the lobbying of George Mason and others, the Bill of Rights became law.</p>
<p>But the Bill of Rights-or any other law-only has meaning if it is obeyed and enforced. In the past three years, Bush has demonstrated that an Administration can trample on the Bill of Rights with impunity. That is not a trend that we will see reversed in our lifetimes.</p>
<p>I believe, as I stated in my book, that the erosions of liberty and justice that masquerade as laws to protect us from terror, will serve any president’s powers. I don’t think any administration will want to give up the right to eavesdrop, spy on, and arrest Americans for wearing a T-shirt it does not like, or send FBI to law school symposia or community organizations interested in peace and the environment.</p>
<p>Kerry’s administration, if there is one, might not choose to act against its citizens but it won’t repeal the laws.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about history or political science. I am a lawyer committed to the rule of law administered with a good dose of compassion and a strong sense of injustice. It has been many many years since the country had a revolution committed to justice – the civil rights era, protests against the Vietnam war, but that was 40-50 years ago.</p>
<p>It’s time for a revival of those days, but that requires a change of heart in the country. We have to have a change of heart before we have a change of govt.</p>
<p>I hope our Nov 2 will be counted and counted accurately.</p>
<p>I doubt they will be for reasons too numerous to mention. But one bears particular notice:John Ashcroft is leading the charge to state and local voting officials to man the polls with law enforcement presence, something that every American ought to rise up and rail against. This directive and its execution is an act of terrorism aimed at non-Bush voters.</p>
<p>I hope that the only poll that counts ­ the 5-4 poll of justices on the Supreme Court ­ doesn’t decide this election.</p>
<p>I hope we rid our country of the evil of George Bush and John Ashcroft. But if we do, our work will begin in earnest to hold the new administration to the contract the govt has with us embodied in the constitution. It won’t be easy, because neither Republicans or Democrats are committed to civil liberties. And therein lies the heart of our dilemma, our challenge, as we look outside the ballot box.</p>
<p>ELAINE CASSEL practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teaches law and psychology, and follows the Bush regime’s dismantling of the Constitution at <a href="" type="internal">Civil Liberties Watch</a>. Her book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556525559/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights</a>, will be published by Lawrence Hill this summer. She can be reached at: <a href="mailto:ecassel1@cox.net" type="external">ecassel1@cox.net</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | The Other War | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/10/18/the-other-war/ | 2004-10-18 | 4left
| 3,053 | The hottest topics in the current presidential campaign are the Iraq war and the 8220war8221 on 8220terrorism8221 It is disappointing how glibly Kerry has adopted the Bush administration8217s campaign against 8220terror8221 and has not critically examined its premise Of course to do so would be political suicide Any politician who speaks out against the war on terrorism and how it is a war on citizens and civil rights will risk being called a terrorist or a traitor Senator Russell Feingold the only Senator to vote against the unPatriotic Patriot act and one of the few who voting against the Iraq war is fighting for his political life in Wisconsin The word 8220terrorism8221 is defined differently in hundreds of fed laws and regulations depending on their contexts The most expansive use of the term for instance is reserved for immigrants and resident aliens 173 those having green cards and student visas for instance Terrorism is whatever the government wants it to be It is a moving and mornping construct It can justify the closing of streets at home and the waging of war abroad It encompasses peacefully demonstrating against George Bush at home and speaking negatively against him abroad I am referring to restrictions on Arab news media who are trying to report on Iraq It is the excuse for declaring a war on civil liberties By war on civil liberties I am referring to the erosion of the freedoms 8221 embodied in the first ten amendments to the Constitution 8211 known collectively as the Bill of Rights Bush said that 8220they8221 8220hate8221 8216us8221 for our freedoms Well 8220they8221 have much less to 8220hate8221 three years after Sep 11 Bush talks of spreading 8220liberty8221 abroad like butter or jelly Well we are scraping away 8220liberty8221 at home It is something we are told we must do in order to 8220preserve8221 freedom A radio interviewer made an interesting suggestion to me recently8211should we call the Bill of Rights the Bill of Restrictions I like that idea Restrictions on government power We could reframe them as not freedom of speech but freedom from government intrusion into speech assembly Not freedom to have an attorney represent us but freedom from government eavesdropping on us and our attorneys and on limiting our right to counsel as it has done in the case of hundreds of immigrants hundreds of 8220enemy combatants8221 material witnesses and Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla We are supposed to have freedom from being arrested without probable cause or not being held to account for a crime unless indicted by a grand jury We are supposed to be free from government denying us access to the witnesses against us Evidence is supposed to be presented in open court and subject to cross examination and the scrutiny of the light of day We are supposed to be free from inquisition by secret evidence We are supposed to be free from bond being denied us while we await trial and free from cruel and unusual punishment And by we I mean not just American citizens but aliens lawfully in this country These guarantees have been violated thousands of times since September 11 Hundreds and hundreds of peaceful demonstrators at the Republican National Convention were arrested and held for as long as three days before a judge dismissed the charges against them They had committed no crime and further were held long outside the time allowed by law Mayor Bloomberg taking a page from George Bush8217s playbook would do it all again he said proud that the liberties of Americans were sacrificed in the name of George Bush In my book I follow some of the more egregious examples of the government8217s violation of its compact with we the governed embodied not just in the Bill of Rights but also in in federal laws and rules of procedure Much of what I wrote about was ongoing as the book went to press I want to bring you up to date on some of the events I wrote about Not one conviction or plea gained by John Ashcroft in his prosecution of 8220terrorists8221 has been against anyone plotting anything against the United States Most have been for nonterrorism crimes like lying on visa application or lying to prosecutors which is why none of you should EVER talk to a prosecutor 173 you cannot in any way defend yourself lest you be charged later with lying or being involved with a Muslim charity that sends money goods to countries we don8217t likeregardless of whether relief goes to civilians or not The Detroit Cell convictionsthe first jury convictions of people charged with supporting 8220terorrism8221 have been overturned the FBI evidence having been deemed a fraud Attorney Lynne Stewart has begun the defense of her case the govt having rested last week by reading letters from her client Sheik Abdel Rahmen convicted in the 1993 WTC bombings She should spend the rest of her life in prison the government argues because she represented a terrorist appointed by the federal court to do so They call her his 8220associate8221 not his lawyer A frightening link that should and does give all brave attorneys who defend 8220terrorists8221 pause What is the government saying Stewart did They say that in answering press questions about her client and perhaps impeding John Ashcroft8217s efforts to record conversations between her and her client a blind man in a prison in Minnesota she was 8220providing personnel8221 173her client and herselffor terrorism attacks Ashcroft directed prison officials to tape record all communications with her client Ashcroft continues to besmirch the name of Steven Hatfield the socalled 8220person of interest8221 in the anthrax scare of 2001 Last week a federal judge hearing a suit Hatfield has bravely brought against Ashcroft said that the DOJ made him ashamed of the system He ordered Ashcroft to either arrest Hatfield or cease libeling and slandering him But Ashcroft does not obey federal court orders holding himself above the law On at least two occasions he personally spoke about the government8217s case in the Detroit trials blatantly violating Judge Rosen8217s gag order on all attorneys Tell your boss my orders refer to him Rosen said to a prosecutor in the case Three young Muslim men Northern Virginia residents and American citizens are serving 85 to 100 years in prison for supporting with their words and with one visit to a foreign training camp the Muslim cause in Kashmir The three were part of what the govt referred to as the 8220Alexandria 11 Yes the got 85 to 100 years for doing nothing The trial took place in federal court in Alexandria The buddies who testified against them in exchange for ten years in prison better than 100 right said falsely that when the guys played paintball they were 8220practicing8221 for battle Better think twice before you schedule a paintball party for your kids8217 birthday celebration These men are giving their lives for a cause they talked about said they might someday participate in The US is on the side of India in the battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir Endangering the Indian cause is terrorism But wait isn8217t Pakistan our friend too Don8217t ask I have to emphasize that there is no consistency in this madness Six young men in Buffalo NY are serving 1014 years in prison for journeying to Afghanistan on a religious trip prior to September 11 and lying about going They were afraid to say they went8211and the govt presumed from that they were plotting against American Only after they were convicted the lead prosecutor said they were not a 8220cell8221 There was not evidence they were plotting anything he said Funny he had no problem with presiding over their guilty pleas extracted by the prosecutor8217s admission under threat of banishment to Guantanamo as enemy combatants A young attorney in the Ashcroft Justice Department remains under investigation unemployed and unemployable because she blew the whistle on the DOJ and told a federal prosecutor and judge in Alex that the DOJ had not turned over all of its communications with FBI agents who interrogated John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan She knew because she is the one who told the FBI not to question Lindh as his parents and his lawyer had contact DOJ and wanted their son represented by counsel The FBI ignored her and extracted confessions that led Lindh to plead guilty to conspiring against the US He was doing nothing of the sort but in this Alice in Wonderland world according to John Ashcroft and George Bush innocence is guilt lies are truth and injustice masquerades as justice The Bush administration continues to disobey the law flaunt federal judges8217 orders including those of the Supreme Court Jose Padilla an American charged with no crime still is imprisoned in a Navy brig months after the Supreme Court dismissed his suit because filed in the wrong court Once it was refiled the federal judge in South Caroline refused to expedite the case no hurry he said Four months after arguing before the S Ct that American citizen Yaser Hamdi was so dangerous though never charged with a crime that he could not even see a lawyer or be out of solitary confinement the government sent him to Saudi Arabia where his family lives Originally the govt wanted Saudi Arabia to charge him with a crime what The govt demanded the same of Britain when it released four British men from Gitmo but the British home secretary refused to press charges They have done nothing wrong he said or keep him under some kind of house arrest or restrict his travel Hamdi8217s release was delayed for two weeks before the US finally let him go Of course we don8217t know what kind of deal was struck behind the scenes When held to account for three years of lawless imprisonment the balance sheet came up zero But what is even more about the striking case is that Hamdi charged with no crime was not only deported but also STRIPPED of his US citizenshiplikely no great loss considering how he was treated by its laws Falls Church resident Ahmed Abu Ali remains in a Saudi prison where Saudi police took him from a Saudi university classroom in June 2003 Federal prosecutors and FBI agents from Alex Va visited him personally and questioned him in connection with the Alexandria 11 prosecutions while denying that they ever heard of him You can be sure if he had any connection they would have extradited him as they did another man living in Saudi Finally forced to admit that he was in Saudi Ashcroft and company said they had nothing to do with his detention But the Saudis disagree They said they are holding him because the Americans told them to His family has sued in federal court in DC to gain the release of their son The govt says it has nothing to do with the case 173 Saudi has him The Saudis now say that the US is pressuring them to prosecute their son For what they don8217t yet know The new Intelligence bill floating around the Congress now affirmatively calls for the US to ship immigrants to countries for the express purpose of being tortured Don8217t take my word for it Go read the bill Your congressmen likely are not The Transporation Security Administration has more than 10000 8220names8221 on a no fly list and you can8217t know how you got on it and you can8217t get off of it The ACLU is suing the government in behalf of a couple who even the govt admits should not be on the list But they won8217t take them off The government wants you to believe that Cat Moonbeam Stevens is properly on the list Accepting that premise then aren8217t you appalled that the plane he was supposedly in danger of blowing up took off How many 8220terrorists8221 whose names are or are not on the list are boarding planes Speaking of Cat though don8217t you love it that the plane was diverted from DC to Maine presumably steering clear of Kennebunkport The government continues its ignorant campaign of telling you how safe you are while terrorists like Cat Stevens I mean that is their designation not mine board planes intelligence sits collecting dust because the govt can8217t seem to find Arabic translators who as you recall must be cardcarrying heterosexuals and by recent report guns and explosives continue to make it through airport security Billions of dollars in training can8217t keep us safe We know that The government says more money and more restrictions will guarantee it Besides Ashcroft can read our email get our bank records Don8217t you feel safer I applaud the Congressman who shut down his office If it as dangerous as the feds and DC and Capitol police are telling me he says then we ought to get out of this place I don8217t know whether or not he is serious or demonstrating the absurdity of the govt position But if it is for the later reason I applaud it My 10 year old grandson commented as we were trying to get around the city this summer to do some sightseeing and faced fenced in monuments closed streets and cops with assault guns on the subway Why don8217t they tear down the monuments if we can8217t visit them What good are they he said this after our 8220tickets8221 to see the Washington Monument did you know you need tickets and have to pay online with your credit card to have a shot at seeing the momumentsonline ticket purchasers are given preferenceyou know where I am going with this were cancelled three days before Ronald Reagan8217s funeral Try explaining that to a 10 year old But he said our tickets being for Wednesday the funeral isn8217t until Friday Speaking of all our thwarted efforts this summer he said why don8217t they just shut down the city he said and send food and clothes to the people who have to live there Even he felt the absurdity of the government8217s position As we begin year four of the war on civil liberties some Americans are a little more aware of what our government is doing to us some congressmen and women are a little concerned and a few judges are taking names and making notes Hundreds of counties and cities and a few states have passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act which by the way is only the tip of the iceberg in the govt8217s war on its people Much has been blamed on the Patriot Act which has nothing to do with that law Would anything be different under a Kerry administration I doubt it I tend to agree with Nader that Kerry is in terms of Bush and civil liberties a distinction without much of a difference I think he or anyone else that replaces Bush someday will appreciate the precedence of the Bush years that sanctioned an administration making up the rules as it goes along and ignoring the courts and the Congress Who wouldn8217t want that power The founding fathers did not want the Bill of Rights and fought its exclusion from the actual constitution Refusal of some delegates to the Constitutional Convention to agree to sign the Constitution without some protection of people8217s rights led to their adoption as amendmentsampltopampgtampltopampgt Thanks to the lobbying of George Mason and others the Bill of Rights became law But the Bill of Rightsor any other lawonly has meaning if it is obeyed and enforced In the past three years Bush has demonstrated that an Administration can trample on the Bill of Rights with impunity That is not a trend that we will see reversed in our lifetimes I believe as I stated in my book that the erosions of liberty and justice that masquerade as laws to protect us from terror will serve any president8217s powers I don8217t think any administration will want to give up the right to eavesdrop spy on and arrest Americans for wearing a Tshirt it does not like or send FBI to law school symposia or community organizations interested in peace and the environment Kerry8217s administration if there is one might not choose to act against its citizens but it won8217t repeal the laws I don8217t know much about history or political science I am a lawyer committed to the rule of law administered with a good dose of compassion and a strong sense of injustice It has been many many years since the country had a revolution committed to justice 8211 the civil rights era protests against the Vietnam war but that was 4050 years ago It8217s time for a revival of those days but that requires a change of heart in the country We have to have a change of heart before we have a change of govt I hope our Nov 2 will be counted and counted accurately I doubt they will be for reasons too numerous to mention But one bears particular noticeJohn Ashcroft is leading the charge to state and local voting officials to man the polls with law enforcement presence something that every American ought to rise up and rail against This directive and its execution is an act of terrorism aimed at nonBush voters I hope that the only poll that counts 173 the 54 poll of justices on the Supreme Court 173 doesn8217t decide this election I hope we rid our country of the evil of George Bush and John Ashcroft But if we do our work will begin in earnest to hold the new administration to the contract the govt has with us embodied in the constitution It won8217t be easy because neither Republicans or Democrats are committed to civil liberties And therein lies the heart of our dilemma our challenge as we look outside the ballot box ELAINE CASSEL practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia teaches law and psychology and follows the Bush regime8217s dismantling of the Constitution at Civil Liberties Watch Her book The War on Civil Liberties How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights will be published by Lawrence Hill this summer She can be reached at ecassel1coxnet amp160 | The/DET hottest/ADJ topics/NOUN in/ADP the/DET current/ADJ presidential/ADJ campaign/NOUN are/AUX the/DET Iraq/PROPN war/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET 8220war8221/NUM on/ADP 8220terrorism8221/NOUN It/PRON is/AUX disappointing/ADJ how/SCONJ glibly/ADV Kerry/PROPN has/AUX adopted/VERB the/DET Bush/PROPN administration8217s/PROPN campaign/NOUN against/ADP 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<p>It is to be hoped that the institution of capital punishment in the United States will, if I may borrow a bit of Marxist language, collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions in the near future. To bring this about, it should be the long-term goal of death-penalty abolitionists to heighten these contradictions and thereby to hasten the institution’s demise. Yet unfortunately, the general approach among those who oppose capital punishment has not been to emphasize inherent and irresolvable problems in the system of capital punishment, but to argue casuistically that such and such proposed execution ought not happen.</p>
<p>Now, if one is an abolitionist then one must always agree in principle with the casuists’ arguments: if the death penalty should never be employed, then it follows that it should not be employed in this or that case. But to proceed only by cases is to imply, willy-nilly, that capital punishment is in principle acceptable. To argue that some convicted murderer’s IQ is too low to attribute moral agency to him implies that if he scored just a few points more then he would be suitable for execution; to invoke a Death Row inmate’s belated acceptance of Jesus Christ as his savior as a reason not to execute him is to imply, disturbingly, that a murderer who ‘converts’ to secular humanism is more deserving of death than his avowedly Christian counterpart; to focus exclusively on exculpatory DNA evidence is to proceed as though the clearly guilty deserve to hang (or whatever the latest fashionable method of dispatch happens to be). The approach of those who argue by cases does nothing to change the conviction of our society that the existence of at least a few confessed non-religious murderers, who score reasonably well on standardized tests and who have been caught in the act, smearing DNA-rich semen and blood and saliva all over the crime scene, by themselves justify the existence of the institution of capital punishment.</p>
<p>The pressure the casuists have exerted over the past few decades has pushed towards reform of the institution, but not, evidently, towards its abolition. Of course, an abolitionist might hope that demands for the just application of the death penalty could at some point become so difficult to meet that reformism will de facto bring the result that abolitionism seeks on principle. The commutation of all death sentences by George Ryan, the governor of Illinois, in 2003 would seem to be an example of this. But Ryan was worried about flaws in the system, not its fundamental injustice. Flaws can be worked out. While Ryan’s move was laudable, it did nothing to move our society towards principled opposition to capital punishment itself. It is of course praiseworthy to employ whatever rhetorical strategies one believes will be of use in the case at hand. However, there is good reason to believe that the best argument in any case will be the one that conveys the rottenness of capital punishment in all cases. It will be an argument that focuses not on who the convicted criminal is and what is about to be done to him, but rather on who we are and what we –both those actively involved as well as the complicit public– are about to do. It is by approaching the problem in this way that its contradictions, rather than its mere kinks, emerge, and it is on this approach that capital punishment’s fundamental incompatibility with our society’s most basic principles of morality and justice comes into clear focus.</p>
<p>What is it we are doing when we execute someone? One bit of insight into the true nature of capital punishment may be discerned by considering the odd practice of keeping death-row prisoners on suicide watch. Why bother if the plan is to execute them anyway? Part of the answer seems to be that the aim of capital punishment is not simply to bring it about that the prisoners are dead, but to bring it about that they are killed. In this respect, even if we do not eat their remains, their deaths resemble the ritual slaughter of animals more than we might like to think. There is moreover an important conceptual difference worth pausing on for a moment between slaughter and extermination: nobody would object if a vermin exterminator found a method of getting pigeons or raccoons or rats to commit suicide, while a cow that killed itself would no doubt be deemed inedible. Capital punishment, then, is not the practice of reducing the number of living murderers in the world. It is an ancient and savage spectacle that can be traced back to pagan sacrifice of both humans and animals, but cleaned up and made palatable through modern institutional procedures, through the legitimizing apparatus of euphemism- filled paperwork, lengthy delays and somber expressions conveying the impression that, when, the moment finally comes, it has to be that way.</p>
<p>Abolitionism, as opposed to reformism, would refuse to accept the somber tone of the judges and sheriffs and governors, by replying: no, it does not have to be that way. The balance of justice can be maintained without periodic sacrifices. Abolitionism would advertise the moral taint these public figures invite through their involvement in the affair, and it would show why the reformist arguments by themselves, while useful for saving the lives of individual Death Row inmates, fail to take seriously the fundamental incompatibility of capital punishment with other basic principles of morality and justice that our society claims to accept.</p>
<p>The abolitionist will take an interest in reformist arguments not because these might help to work out the kinks in the system of capital punishment, but because any effort to render this system more just or more humane can in fact in the end only serve to highlight the system’s fundamental injustice and inhumanity. With this in mind, it may be useful to look at the principle reformist arguments.</p>
<p>Arguments from Possible Innocence</p>
<p>Recent developments in DNA testing have been remarkably useful in revealing just how unreliable the legal system’s judgments have been in murder cases. It was on the basis of new proof from DNA evidence of the innocence of a sizable minority of Illinois’s Death Row inmates that Governor Ryan decided to commute all death sentences in his state. As he commented in 2000 after declaring a moratorium on new death sentences, “We have now freed more people than we have put to death under our system–13 people have been exonerated and 12 have been put to death. There is a flaw in the system, without question, and it needs to be studied.” The reason to study it, again, was for him only to see how it might be more justly employed. “I still believe the death penalty is a proper response to heinous crimes,” he continued, “but I want to make sure … that the person who is put to death is absolutely guilty.”</p>
<p>Again, an abolitionist might hope that the standard Ryan set, if it were to catch on, would be so hard to meet that effectively our society could become one without capital punishment even if that possibility remained in the law books. But, to take a more extreme case, surely we would all agree that Iran will never be a decent society so long as it holds open the legal possibility of stoning teenage girls to death for the crime of lost chastity, even if in fact it never again resorts to this punishment. If a legal possibility remains dormant, then it may as well be stricken from the books; if it is not stricken, then it is because the society is still committed to its justice. In the case of Iran and the United States, that is to say that our societies are still tainted by the savagery of our commitments, even if we never act on them.</p>
<p>We might imagine a society that remains committed in principle to capital punishment for the guilty, but that believes it is never possible to establish with certainty what Ryan calls ‘absolute guilt’. Verdicts have the force of certainty, but they may always be overturned; in any other sentence besides that of death, the criminal has this possibility open to him for the duration of his natural life. In this sense, capital punishment is different from all other forms in that it brings a criminal case to a forced and irreversible end, when future contingencies might otherwise change the condemned’s fate at any time. Future contingencies might also make the condemned a valuable person for the legal system to have around.. In this respect capital punishment necessarily involves the destruction of evidence. As Christopher Hitchens complains, it is “the official snuffing of the chief witness.” Capital punishment renders irreversible what in all other cases the legal system leaves to nature.</p>
<p>Arguments from Lack of Moral Agency</p>
<p>‘Absolute guilt’ of the sort Ryan would hope to establish has not only to do, by the reformists’ lights, with the way a condemned murderer’s limbs moved at some moment in the past, with what tools in hand, pointed in what direction, but also with questions of intent and with the internal mental capacities of the agent. Even if we establish absolutely that someone did something, this is not necessarily the same as establishing that that person is ‘absolutely’ guilty. There are questions of context”e.g., whether the murder was premeditated or committed in a moment of uncharacteristic rage; whether the murderer was him- or herself a victim of violence. And there are questions as to whether the murderer has certain innate cognitive abilities that the legal system associates with the presence of moral agency. These questions emerge from a by no means obvious philosophical distinction between the intellectual and the moral realms. Implicit in them is the presumption that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is one that comes along with a certain cognitive capacity; to know that something is wrong is to be able to grasp the truth of the proposition: ‘That is wrong’.</p>
<p>But it is not at all clear that this is how moral choices are ever made. Rather, morally blameworthy actions are performed out of desperation or compulsion, states in which people of all different cognitive abilities find themselves. A cognitively impaired person who commits murder ‘knows’ that what he is doing is something out of the ordinary, and bad, and knowing this is not a skill that is in any way comparable to, say, knowing how to balance a checkbook. To index moral responsibility to cognitive aptitude is to presume the truth of a very debatable philosophical theory of both morality and intelligence. This theory reaches its maximum point of strain when Death Row prisoners are given tests in which they are asked multiple-choice questions about geometrical shapes and logical orderings of sets in order to determine whether they ought to be held responsible for, say, having cut off someone’s head with an axe. This is not to say that cognitively impaired people ought to be executed, but only that cognitive impairment is an odd thing to invoke in debating whether someone should be executed.</p>
<p>Arguments from Moral Salvation</p>
<p>There are multiple theories of human nature, all of which must be shown respect in a pluralistic society. Only some of these theories would have it that a human being is fundamentally rotten, but nonetheless capable of becoming the opposite of that as a consequence of some declaration, of some speech act, in which he or she declares (to summarize): ‘I am saved!’</p>
<p>Another theory of human nature would have it that we are all perpetually prone to doing dastardly things, even if we recognize that it would be better to do nice things, and that it is only actions, and not declarations, that will settle the matter. In a social climate that lays emphasis on the speech act itself, rather than on the character that becomes discernible through repetition of actions, it is not surprising to see a number of people claiming conversion from a downcast state of being to an exalted one. And it is not surprising to see people in desperate situations, such as that of Death Row prisoners, claiming, through speech acts, to have undergone such a conversion. These should be of little interest to a rational justice system.</p>
<p>I myself signed the petition to nominate Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams for a Nobel Peace Prize. I hoped, casuistically, that this would save his life, though truth be told it was never clear to me that Williams was, at the moment of his death, a radically transformed individual. His purported transformation was not, for me, in any case, a prerequisite for his worthiness to live, and that is why I signed the petition. But it is interesting that even those who despise the death penalty continue to perceive such transformation as relevant. In Williams’ case, the transformation was packaged and presented as a belatedly discovered appreciation of the desirability of peace (even if the Crips, a gang Williams helped to found, initially came together as an organization for the defense of black neighborhoods, which is to say for the preservation of neighborhood tranquility).</p>
<p>Generally, the crucial transformation is packaged in terms of salvation by Jesus Christ. But nowhere in the Gospels is there any such prerequisite for our respect of some individual human life. If anything, the requirement stated there is that we must value the life that is most wretched, most unredeemed. In this sense, Death Row conversions are wholly irrelevant to any serious abolitionist movement.</p>
<p>Arguments from Unfair Application</p>
<p>It is undeniable that, as applied, the death penalty in the United States is a reflection of endemic racism. I do not need to recite the statistics here; these are readily available to anyone who knows how to use a search engine. More black people are executed for murder than their convicted white murderous counterparts.</p>
<p>But the abolitionist will not for this reason argue that justice will be better served by executing more white people. This would be to get things backwards. Fewer African Americans executed –indeed none– would amount to justice, not more whites executed. In this connection, the reformists often seem to lapse into that tired old talk of quotas, as though it were a matter of proportional representation in some profession or social club. The death penalty in its application is racist; but its non-racist application would still not be just.</p>
<p>Arguments from the Relative Cruelty of the Method</p>
<p>As I have argued previously in this space, the logic governing the periodic changes since the 18th century, from one method of execution to another, is rooted not in science, nor in moral progress, but in fashion. What dictates hanging this season, and lethal injection the next, is the same illusion of real change that makes the style-conscious now disdainful of bellbottoms, now covetous of them.</p>
<p>We do not like to think of our moral standards as comparable to sartorial whims. Morality is supposed to be improving, while anyone with any reflective ability can see that one season’s fashion musts are objectively no better nor worse than another’s. Yet it is a useful exercise to take stock of what exactly the last few centuries of purportedly humanitarian efforts to improve execution methods have brought us. Capital punishment still hurts, and it still results in death.</p>
<p>At the most fundamental level, the problem is that we are straining to retain capital punishment in a justice system that has already done away with corporal punishment. In such an odd –and unprecedented– state of affairs, the only way we could really live up to the prohibition without abandoning the practice in conflict with it is if we were able somehow to subtract souls from existence without having to work through the bodies these souls inhabit. But that can’t work: to kill someone is by definition to do harm to their body. (Even if the killing itself could be experienced as a sweet, seductive sleep, check back some time later and you will see that the body is not doing so well.) Capital punishment is not categorically different from corporal punishment, but rather a limit case of it. There is thus no way to have one without the other. Arguing over the relative comfort of the method of execution employed is a pseudohumanitarian farce, but one that is useful to the abolitionist movement in its illustration of the ill fit between ritual human sacrifice and hypersensitivity about pain.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Not everyone on Death Row is, cognitively speaking, an idiot. At lease some of the people on Death Row in fact did what the juries that sent them there concluded they did. Not everyone on Death Row has undergone a spiritual transformation, and there is good reason to doubt, under the circumstances, the sincerity of any claims to have done so. Arguments against killing this or that Death Row prisoner on the grounds that he is innocent, that he is too cognitively impaired to be deemed guilty or innocent, that he has undergone radical spiritual –and thus, the implication is, moral– transformation since the murder, say nothing about the justice or morality of capital punishment itself.</p>
<p>It would be a callous moral equivalence to maintain that our killing of murderers is as obscene as the stoning of sexually active teenage girls. Killing is universally abhorred, while it is only a certain kind of society that makes much of a fuss about ‘promiscuity’ (to wit, a hypocritical, patriarchal one). But responding to killing with killing is by no means universal either” life imprisonment, banishment, whipping, ritual prostration, have all in various times and places presented themselves as adequate responses. To choose to respond to killing with killing, or even to hold that possibility open in principle, is to choose to be a certain kind of society.</p>
<p>We are a society that sacrifices to the god of vengeance. We do this collectively, not in the heat of passion, but with somber premeditation and keen technical interest in the art of it. We are cognitively in good shape, and evidently quite far from any spiritual transformation.</p>
<p>We are, in Governor Ryan’s terms, absolutely guilty.</p>
<p>JUSTIN E. H. SMITH teaches philosophy in Montreal. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:justismi@alcor.concordia.ca" type="external">justismi@alcor.concordia.ca</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Ending the Death Penalty | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/09/21/ending-the-death-penalty/ | 2006-09-21 | 4left
| 3,053 | It is to be hoped that the institution of capital punishment in the United States will if I may borrow a bit of Marxist language collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions in the near future To bring this about it should be the longterm goal of deathpenalty abolitionists to heighten these contradictions and thereby to hasten the institution8217s demise Yet unfortunately the general approach among those who oppose capital punishment has not been to emphasize inherent and irresolvable problems in the system of capital punishment but to argue casuistically that such and such proposed execution ought not happen Now if one is an abolitionist then one must always agree in principle with the casuists8217 arguments if the death penalty should never be employed then it follows that it should not be employed in this or that case But to proceed only by cases is to imply willynilly that capital punishment is in principle acceptable To argue that some convicted murderer8217s IQ is too low to attribute moral agency to him implies that if he scored just a few points more then he would be suitable for execution to invoke a Death Row inmate8217s belated acceptance of Jesus Christ as his savior as a reason not to execute him is to imply disturbingly that a murderer who 8216converts8217 to secular humanism is more deserving of death than his avowedly Christian counterpart to focus exclusively on exculpatory DNA evidence is to proceed as though the clearly guilty deserve to hang or whatever the latest fashionable method of dispatch happens to be The approach of those who argue by cases does nothing to change the conviction of our society that the existence of at least a few confessed nonreligious murderers who score reasonably well on standardized tests and who have been caught in the act smearing DNArich semen and blood and saliva all over the crime scene by themselves justify the existence of the institution of capital punishment The pressure the casuists have exerted over the past few decades has pushed towards reform of the institution but not evidently towards its abolition Of course an abolitionist might hope that demands for the just application of the death penalty could at some point become so difficult to meet that reformism will de facto bring the result that abolitionism seeks on principle The commutation of all death sentences by George Ryan the governor of Illinois in 2003 would seem to be an example of this But Ryan was worried about flaws in the system not its fundamental injustice Flaws can be worked out While Ryan8217s move was laudable it did nothing to move our society towards principled opposition to capital punishment itself It is of course praiseworthy to employ whatever rhetorical strategies one believes will be of use in the case at hand However there is good reason to believe that the best argument in any case will be the one that conveys the rottenness of capital punishment in all cases It will be an argument that focuses not on who the convicted criminal is and what is about to be done to him but rather on who we are and what we 8211both those actively involved as well as the complicit public8211 are about to do It is by approaching the problem in this way that its contradictions rather than its mere kinks emerge and it is on this approach that capital punishment8217s fundamental incompatibility with our society8217s most basic principles of morality and justice comes into clear focus What is it we are doing when we execute someone One bit of insight into the true nature of capital punishment may be discerned by considering the odd practice of keeping deathrow prisoners on suicide watch Why bother if the plan is to execute them anyway Part of the answer seems to be that the aim of capital punishment is not simply to bring it about that the prisoners are dead but to bring it about that they are killed In this respect even if we do not eat their remains their deaths resemble the ritual slaughter of animals more than we might like to think There is moreover an important conceptual difference worth pausing on for a moment between slaughter and extermination nobody would object if a vermin exterminator found a method of getting pigeons or raccoons or rats to commit suicide while a cow that killed itself would no doubt be deemed inedible Capital punishment then is not the practice of reducing the number of living murderers in the world It is an ancient and savage spectacle that can be traced back to pagan sacrifice of both humans and animals but cleaned up and made palatable through modern institutional procedures through the legitimizing apparatus of euphemism filled paperwork lengthy delays and somber expressions conveying the impression that when the moment finally comes it has to be that way Abolitionism as opposed to reformism would refuse to accept the somber tone of the judges and sheriffs and governors by replying no it does not have to be that way The balance of justice can be maintained without periodic sacrifices Abolitionism would advertise the moral taint these public figures invite through their involvement in the affair and it would show why the reformist arguments by themselves while useful for saving the lives of individual Death Row inmates fail to take seriously the fundamental incompatibility of capital punishment with other basic principles of morality and justice that our society claims to accept The abolitionist will take an interest in reformist arguments not because these might help to work out the kinks in the system of capital punishment but because any effort to render this system more just or more humane can in fact in the end only serve to highlight the system8217s fundamental injustice and inhumanity With this in mind it may be useful to look at the principle reformist arguments Arguments from Possible Innocence Recent developments in DNA testing have been remarkably useful in revealing just how unreliable the legal system8217s judgments have been in murder cases It was on the basis of new proof from DNA evidence of the innocence of a sizable minority of Illinois8217s Death Row inmates that Governor Ryan decided to commute all death sentences in his state As he commented in 2000 after declaring a moratorium on new death sentences 8220We have now freed more people than we have put to death under our system821113 people have been exonerated and 12 have been put to death There is a flaw in the system without question and it needs to be studied8221 The reason to study it again was for him only to see how it might be more justly employed 8220I still believe the death penalty is a proper response to heinous crimes8221 he continued 8220but I want to make sure 8230 that the person who is put to death is absolutely guilty8221 Again an abolitionist might hope that the standard Ryan set if it were to catch on would be so hard to meet that effectively our society could become one without capital punishment even if that possibility remained in the law books But to take a more extreme case surely we would all agree that Iran will never be a decent society so long as it holds open the legal possibility of stoning teenage girls to death for the crime of lost chastity even if in fact it never again resorts to this punishment If a legal possibility remains dormant then it may as well be stricken from the books if it is not stricken then it is because the society is still committed to its justice In the case of Iran and the United States that is to say that our societies are still tainted by the savagery of our commitments even if we never act on them We might imagine a society that remains committed in principle to capital punishment for the guilty but that believes it is never possible to establish with certainty what Ryan calls 8216absolute guilt8217 Verdicts have the force of certainty but they may always be overturned in any other sentence besides that of death the criminal has this possibility open to him for the duration of his natural life In this sense capital punishment is different from all other forms in that it brings a criminal case to a forced and irreversible end when future contingencies might otherwise change the condemned8217s fate at any time Future contingencies might also make the condemned a valuable person for the legal system to have around In this respect capital punishment necessarily involves the destruction of evidence As Christopher Hitchens complains it is 8220the official snuffing of the chief witness8221 Capital punishment renders irreversible what in all other cases the legal system leaves to nature Arguments from Lack of Moral Agency 8216Absolute guilt8217 of the sort Ryan would hope to establish has not only to do by the reformists8217 lights with the way a condemned murderer8217s limbs moved at some moment in the past with what tools in hand pointed in what direction but also with questions of intent and with the internal mental capacities of the agent Even if we establish absolutely that someone did something this is not necessarily the same as establishing that that person is 8216absolutely8217 guilty There are questions of context8221eg whether the murder was premeditated or committed in a moment of uncharacteristic rage whether the murderer was him or herself a victim of violence And there are questions as to whether the murderer has certain innate cognitive abilities that the legal system associates with the presence of moral agency These questions emerge from a by no means obvious philosophical distinction between the intellectual and the moral realms Implicit in them is the presumption that the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is one that comes along with a certain cognitive capacity to know that something is wrong is to be able to grasp the truth of the proposition 8216That is wrong8217 But it is not at all clear that this is how moral choices are ever made Rather morally blameworthy actions are performed out of desperation or compulsion states in which people of all different cognitive abilities find themselves A cognitively impaired person who commits murder 8216knows8217 that what he is doing is something out of the ordinary and bad and knowing this is not a skill that is in any way comparable to say knowing how to balance a checkbook To index moral responsibility to cognitive aptitude is to presume the truth of a very debatable philosophical theory of both morality and intelligence This theory reaches its maximum point of strain when Death Row prisoners are given tests in which they are asked multiplechoice questions about geometrical shapes and logical orderings of sets in order to determine whether they ought to be held responsible for say having cut off someone8217s head with an axe This is not to say that cognitively impaired people ought to be executed but only that cognitive impairment is an odd thing to invoke in debating whether someone should be executed Arguments from Moral Salvation There are multiple theories of human nature all of which must be shown respect in a pluralistic society Only some of these theories would have it that a human being is fundamentally rotten but nonetheless capable of becoming the opposite of that as a consequence of some declaration of some speech act in which he or she declares to summarize 8216I am saved8217 Another theory of human nature would have it that we are all perpetually prone to doing dastardly things even if we recognize that it would be better to do nice things and that it is only actions and not declarations that will settle the matter In a social climate that lays emphasis on the speech act itself rather than on the character that becomes discernible through repetition of actions it is not surprising to see a number of people claiming conversion from a downcast state of being to an exalted one And it is not surprising to see people in desperate situations such as that of Death Row prisoners claiming through speech acts to have undergone such a conversion These should be of little interest to a rational justice system I myself signed the petition to nominate Stanley 8216Tookie8217 Williams for a Nobel Peace Prize I hoped casuistically that this would save his life though truth be told it was never clear to me that Williams was at the moment of his death a radically transformed individual His purported transformation was not for me in any case a prerequisite for his worthiness to live and that is why I signed the petition But it is interesting that even those who despise the death penalty continue to perceive such transformation as relevant In Williams8217 case the transformation was packaged and presented as a belatedly discovered appreciation of the desirability of peace even if the Crips a gang Williams helped to found initially came together as an organization for the defense of black neighborhoods which is to say for the preservation of neighborhood tranquility Generally the crucial transformation is packaged in terms of salvation by Jesus Christ But nowhere in the Gospels is there any such prerequisite for our respect of some individual human life If anything the requirement stated there is that we must value the life that is most wretched most unredeemed In this sense Death Row conversions are wholly irrelevant to any serious abolitionist movement Arguments from Unfair Application It is undeniable that as applied the death penalty in the United States is a reflection of endemic racism I do not need to recite the statistics here these are readily available to anyone who knows how to use a search engine More black people are executed for murder than their convicted white murderous counterparts But the abolitionist will not for this reason argue that justice will be better served by executing more white people This would be to get things backwards Fewer African Americans executed 8211indeed none8211 would amount to justice not more whites executed In this connection the reformists often seem to lapse into that tired old talk of quotas as though it were a matter of proportional representation in some profession or social club The death penalty in its application is racist but its nonracist application would still not be just Arguments from the Relative Cruelty of the Method As I have argued previously in this space the logic governing the periodic changes since the 18th century from one method of execution to another is rooted not in science nor in moral progress but in fashion What dictates hanging this season and lethal injection the next is the same illusion of real change that makes the styleconscious now disdainful of bellbottoms now covetous of them We do not like to think of our moral standards as comparable to sartorial whims Morality is supposed to be improving while anyone with any reflective ability can see that one season8217s fashion musts are objectively no better nor worse than another8217s Yet it is a useful exercise to take stock of what exactly the last few centuries of purportedly humanitarian efforts to improve execution methods have brought us Capital punishment still hurts and it still results in death At the most fundamental level the problem is that we are straining to retain capital punishment in a justice system that has already done away with corporal punishment In such an odd 8211and unprecedented8211 state of affairs the only way we could really live up to the prohibition without abandoning the practice in conflict with it is if we were able somehow to subtract souls from existence without having to work through the bodies these souls inhabit But that can8217t work to kill someone is by definition to do harm to their body Even if the killing itself could be experienced as a sweet seductive sleep check back some time later and you will see that the body is not doing so well Capital punishment is not categorically different from corporal punishment but rather a limit case of it There is thus no way to have one without the other Arguing over the relative comfort of the method of execution employed is a pseudohumanitarian farce but one that is useful to the abolitionist movement in its illustration of the ill fit between ritual human sacrifice and hypersensitivity about pain Not everyone on Death Row is cognitively speaking an idiot At lease some of the people on Death Row in fact did what the juries that sent them there concluded they did Not everyone on Death Row has undergone a spiritual transformation and there is good reason to doubt under the circumstances the sincerity of any claims to have done so Arguments against killing this or that Death Row prisoner on the grounds that he is innocent that he is too cognitively impaired to be deemed guilty or innocent that he has undergone radical spiritual 8211and thus the implication is moral8211 transformation since the murder say nothing about the justice or morality of capital punishment itself It would be a callous moral equivalence to maintain that our killing of murderers is as obscene as the stoning of sexually active teenage girls Killing is universally abhorred while it is only a certain kind of society that makes much of a fuss about 8216promiscuity8217 to wit a hypocritical patriarchal one But responding to killing with killing is by no means universal either8221 life imprisonment banishment whipping ritual prostration have all in various times and places presented themselves as adequate responses To choose to respond to killing with killing or even to hold that possibility open in principle is to choose to be a certain kind of society We are a society that sacrifices to the god of vengeance We do this collectively not in the heat of passion but with somber premeditation and keen technical interest in the art of it We are cognitively in good shape and evidently quite far from any spiritual transformation We are in Governor Ryan8217s terms absolutely guilty JUSTIN E H 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<p>When Susan Burton and I walked up the concrete steps of the neat stucco bungalow on a sunny, palm tree-lined street in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, nothing indicated the concentration of pain, heartache, friendship and joy that we would find inside.</p>
<p>As we stepped into the front room, we met a buzz of activity.</p>
<p>In one corner, a tall, young woman with intricate tattoos cascading down her shoulder and arm skillfully added braided extensions to another woman’s hair. At a side table, a serious, bespectacled woman assisted an older woman, equally serious, in filling out forms. On the couch, three women in shorts and colorful tank tops cooed over baby photos.</p>
<p>They all looked up and greeted Burton warmly as we passed through. “Hello, Ms. Burton.” “How ya doin’, Ms. Burton?”</p>
<p />
<p>She paused at each group, introduced me as her guest, and with a deep chuckle added her own sweet comment on the baby pictures. Everyone, it seemed, had something they wanted to tell her.</p>
<p>The bedrooms were tidy, the beds made up with colorful quilts, some decorated with embroidered pillows, stuffed animals and dolls. The tops of the dressers were crowded with toiletries—shampoos, hair gels, skin creams and makeup.</p>
<p>“In prison, these beauty products are an indication of your assets—they are all you can have, so when you have a lot, you want to show them off,” Burton explained.</p>
<p>The house is home to eight women, all of whom have served time in California jails and prisons. It is one of five houses in Watts that Burton runs for A New Way of Life, a program she started in 1998, only two years after she herself was released from prison. She started with one small cottage, purchased with money she earned from working multiple jobs as a home health aide, and with the assistance of her nephew, who had a good job, good credit and no criminal record to impede his signing for the mortgage. She furnished it with five sets of Ikea bunk beds, and asked the men from her 12-step program to help her assemble them.</p>
<p>To find women who could benefit from A New Way of Life, Burton would go down to the bus station around the corner from skid row. “I didn’t know who’d be getting off the bus, but I knew that, every day, women released from prison were on it. I showed up there because I wished someone had been there for me. Sometimes I saw a familiar face get off the bus, someone I’d served time with. I’d tell them, ‘I have a house in L.A., there’s a bed for you if you want it. It’s drug- and alcohol-free. You don’t have to go back to the streets if you don’t want to.’&#160;”</p>
<p>Lisa James, at 52 a bus driver and writer—her play “Freedom from Bondage” was performed by life-sentence prisoners at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, the largest women’s prison in the country—is one of the women Burton welcomed. James’ warm smile, elegant, braided hairdo and welcoming demeanor belie the rough life she has endured. “When I went from the prison gate to the Greyhound bus station, I had no idea where I was going to go. I had burned all my bridges. I called a friend to take me to a 12-step meeting, because I knew I had to stay clean and sober. I didn’t want to go back where I came from. I told them, ‘I just got out of prison today.’&#160;”</p>
<p>Someone gave her Burton’s number. She called, and Burton invited her to stay.</p>
<p>“I had to tell her that I had no money, and she responded, ‘Did I ask you for money?’ &#160;” James recalled.</p>
<p>Behind the cheer and camaraderie inside the small house in Watts are sorrowful memories etched as indelibly as the residents’ tattoos. Like the vast majority of incarcerated women, most of the residents were victims of physical and sexual abuse, some from a very young age.</p>
<p>Tiffany Johnson, 48, served 16 years for killing the man who had abused her since she was 5. “When I went to prison, I was warned not to talk to anyone—and I didn’t for many years. When I finally started opening up, I realized that I wasn’t alone. So many other women and girls have been through the same thing—you don’t tell anyone about these secrets.”</p>
<p>The prevalence of physical abuse may be the most open secret behind the growing incarceration of women. Ann Cammett, associate dean of the law school at City University of New York, has developed innovative programs in several states for women facing the challenges of reentry in the age of mass incarceration. “I rarely had a client who had not been a victim of physical or sexual abuse,” Cammett told me. “When I started interviewing women in prison, [every person] had a history of violence in their lives.”</p>
<p>The statistics, though scant, bear out Cammett’s observations. The last <a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&amp;iid=837" type="external">Department of Justice report</a>, from 1999, documented that more than half of incarcerated women had suffered physical or sexual abuse. When I asked the DOJ spokeswoman for an update, she told me there is no more recent national study. All she could provide were academic studies of populations limited by geography and other factors.</p>
<p>Sue Osthoff, director and co-founder of the <a href="" type="external">National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women</a>, co-authored a survey of those studies, which show that the figure is as high as 90 percent, and even this, Osthoff charges, undercounts the number of abuse victims who are still in prison. “Do we really need to verify a reality that we already know?” she asks.</p>
<p>Cammett asserts that violence against women increases their risk of being incarcerated. African-American and Latina women are at a higher risk both of physical abuse and incarceration, especially in the war-on-drugs era, when law enforcement focus disproportionately on communities of color.</p>
<p>The numerous pathways from victimization to incarceration are complex.</p>
<p>First, there are the direct crimes: Like Tiffany Johnson, a woman may physically attack an abuser to protect herself or her children. Johnson stabbed the man who had sexually assaulted her as a child when she became terrified that he would start molesting her 5-year-old niece.</p>
<p>But there are also indirect routes.</p>
<p>When a young girl is abused at home, she often will run away. Now homeless, she may seek shelter and security from a man who promises he will provide for her—and then forces her into prostitution and continues the abuse.</p>
<p>Lisa James describes how she fell into that trap: “We found ourselves trying to overcome mental abuse that was so evil and so dark. We just attached ourselves to someone, trying to find some form of affection, which just didn’t exist.”</p>
<p>In addition, a woman’s dire situation may lead to severe depression, and she will self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to cope.</p>
<p>Plunged into poverty and with no income, she will turn to crimes of survival—such as shoplifting, theft and the sex trade.</p>
<p>Susan Burton’s experiences followed that downward spiral. At 15, she was raped and later gave birth to her daughter. The former honor student dropped out of school and ran away from home. Alone and penniless, she soon found herself in the clutches of a man who thrust her into the world of prostitution and drug dealing. It cast a shadow over her life for decades.</p>
<p>Some abusive partners exert their control by threatening to use the legal system against the women. James relates her experience. “The guy that I was with, a white man, called me ‘nigger,’ told me I was no good, and constantly humiliated me. When I tried to leave him, he retaliated. He actually told my probation officer, ‘You need to make an example of her. Just throw her in prison.’&#160;”</p>
<p>The huge <a href="http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/women/" type="external">rise in the numbers of female prisoners</a> means their stories can no longer be ignored. In 1980, there were 15,000 women in state prisons around the country. By 2014, that number had risen to 106,232, a growth rate of more than 700 percent. If women in city and county jails are included, the number rises to 215,332—a third of all female prisoners <a href="" type="external">in the world</a>. Most are locked up for nonviolent crimes. Two-thirds of them have children under 18.</p>
<p>The toll is especially harsh for African-American women. Though drug use and dealing occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic lines, black women are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses as white women. According to The Sentencing Project, the lifetime likelihood that a white woman will be imprisoned is 1 in 118. For black women, it is 1 in 19.</p>
<p>If it is so clear that violence perpetuated against women and girls increases their risk of arrest and incarceration, what measures have been taken to break the cycle? The quest for solutions has been challenging—and not without pitfalls.</p>
<p>One landmark victory was the passage of the <a href="https://www.legalmomentum.org/history-vawa" type="external">Violence Against Women Act in 1994</a>, after a long and arduous campaign by tenacious advocates in the domestic violence community. That pioneering federal law greatly enhanced the resources for investigation and criminal penalties for assaults against women, including intimate-partner violence.</p>
<p>According to Leni Marin, a former senior vice president of Futures Without Violence who worked primarily with immigrant women, “The turning point came when society recognized that domestic violence is not a private issue but a social problem.</p>
<p>“Once the abusive behavior is criminalized in the public sphere, then the legal system has to become involved,” she says.</p>
<p>Yet Marin is quick to point out the contradictions. “We know that racism permeates the criminal justice system, and we were well aware of some of the harmful impact, especially in communities of color.” Marin noted that consequences for immigrant women can be even harsher, as a woman’s abuser may have control over her legal status in this country.</p>
<p>“The enhancement of legal intervention after the passage of [the Violence Against Women Act] worked well for some people, but not for many others,” Osthoff notes,</p>
<p>“A lot of people who live in communities of color rightfully ask, ‘Why are so many resources going into the criminal justice system?’ They see an overemphasis on criminal legal responses—protective orders, arrests, imprisonment—yet that is often not what victims want,” she says.</p>
<p>Cammett notes, “We have a history in this country—in both civil and religious law—of allowing violence against women. When the women’s movement insisted that we needed to change this, we as a society criminalized the problem, rather than dealing with the underlying issues.</p>
<p>“In reality,” she says, “we live in a complex web of violence—with the military, law enforcement, gangs. But the law doesn’t have the capacity to deal with those complexities, so we separate people into victims and perpetrators.</p>
<p>“These are the constraints of law combined with a failure of imagination,” Cammett says.</p>
<p>She warns that along with the growth of awareness about domestic violence, there also must be awareness of the toll that a racialized criminal justice system takes on the communities most affected by violence. Though domestic violence cuts across all class and racial lines, the impact is felt most acutely in communities of color.</p>
<p>Burton sees the consequences of this contradiction every day. “All the recourses have such harsh consequences that people don’t accept them. Say you take the problem to your school, the school automatically calls the police. There is so much disruption for the family when the police come into play.</p>
<p>“We need services that are not law enforcement. Otherwise, this trauma over decades turns into substance abuse, people react irrationally—choosing fight or flight—and they, in turn, are criminalized, sometimes for very serious offenses.”</p>
<p>Cherri Allison, director of the Alameda County Family Justice Center in Oakland, Calif., understands the dichotomy well. “As an African-American woman who grew up in Oakland, I know what they are talking about,” she said. She brings a wealth of experience: As an attorney she represented both victims of domestic violence through the Family Violence Law Center and helped craft state legislation to address violence faced by women prisoners, including a prohibition on the shackling of women giving birth in prison.</p>
<p>Allison points to another law that went into effect this year, one that allows victims of human trafficking who have been arrested or convicted in juvenile court for any nonviolent crime to have their records vacated, sealed and destroyed.</p>
<p>Echoing Burton’s concerns, she explains: “A lot of our clients are afraid to call police. The police might take their children, they might call Child Protective Services and the children would be removed.”</p>
<p>But Allison also sees it from another perspective. “Police officers have told me they might come to the same house six or seven times before a woman can be persuaded to leave. They see little kids traumatized, shivering in the corner, and they don’t feel right leaving them there.”</p>
<p>The Alameda County Family Justice Center has partnerships with a dozen social service, health, counseling and job training organizations—a combination of government agencies and nonprofits all housed under one roof. Unlike Burton’s homey cottages, it is a large government building, a former medical facility. Colorful, handmade quilts, children’s artwork and origami cranes temper the institutional feel. Because it comes under the auspices of the district attorney’s office, the center has the resources to provide wraparound services to the 10,000 women and girls who come through each year—from teen victims of sex trafficking to older women being trained in computer programming.</p>
<p>Leni Marin’s organization, Futures Without Violence, also has collaborated with government actors, creating training programs for police and judges about intimate-partner violence. “We aimed to create a culture that does not tolerate domestic violence and implement procedures that recognize how complex this is,” she says.</p>
<p>Another pivotal state intervention was the passage of a <a href="http://www.freefromabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/California-habeas-law.pdf" type="external">unique California law</a> in 2002 that allows some women who are incarcerated for crimes relating to their experience of abuse to seek a new trial and present expert testimony on domestic violence. One of the groups that lobbied for its passage was Convicted Women Against Abuse, survivors of domestic violence at the Chowchilla facility, who organized a legislative hearing inside the prison to highlight their experiences. After its passage, the group helped get the word out to other prisons and connected incarcerated women with volunteer attorneys to represent them. To date, California is the only state with such a law, although others, including New York, are considering one.</p>
<p>Osthoff warns that domestic violence advocates should not underestimate the shared traumatic experience of women who have been incarcerated. “If battering is about threats and control, think of how that is replicated in prison: the use of violence, intimidation, rules that change all the time, punishments that don’t fit the crime. The whole experience of incarceration is brutal.</p>
<p>“We spend more time, energy and resources on incarceration than on support services. Why are we putting women in institutions that replicate their experiences of abuse?”</p>
<p>Osthoff says that it is only by listening to affected women that we can come up with innovative programs and additional ways to support them outside of the legal system.</p>
<p>Cammett agrees. “Peer initiatives will be most successful. After all, who understands this better than those who have been through both domestic violence and the criminal justice system?”</p>
<p>Burton’s work epitomizes that challenge. In addition to providing housing and other services, she realized that helping individual women would not be enough to mitigate the racism and unfairness most experienced in the system. She successfully advocated for legislation to make broader changes, including <a href="https://americanchecked.com/new-california-ban-box-regulation-effective-july-2017/" type="external">“Ban the Box,”</a> which makes it easier for people who have been convicted of a crime to find work, and <a href="" type="external">Proposition 47</a>, which allows for the retroactive reduction of certain felonies to misdemeanors and the expungement of criminal records.</p>
<p>Burton’s most recent initiative, Women Organized for Justice and Opportunity (WOJO), trains formerly incarcerated women to become activists in movements for social justice, including registering people in jails to vote. When she watches women from WOJO making phone calls to get out the vote, Burton says, “Many were still on parole and did not themselves have the right to vote. This, I realized, was a new type of underground railroad.”</p>
<p>An incident outside Burton’s A New Way of Life house is emblematic of just how many hazards there are on this journey. A group of residents is helping another resident, a young Asian-American woman in khaki shorts and a pink polo shirt who is moving out, carry her belongings to a white station wagon parked in the driveway. They load up a duffel bag, several shopping bags filled with baby clothes, a pink backpack and a jumbo size box of Pampers Newborn.</p>
<p>One woman cuddles a tiny baby, only a few months old—the departing resident’s child. Her friends give her hugs and small farewell tokens—a nosegay of cloth violets, a box of chocolates, a baby’s bib.</p>
<p>Burton approaches the group but does not join in the gaiety. I watch her gaze—she is eyeing the grim, stocky man in a starched, button-down shirt standing impatiently on the driver’s side of the car.</p>
<p>She wishes the young woman well, and then walks me back into the cool shelter of the house.</p>
<p>“She shouldn’t be going back to him,” she says, shaking her head. “He’s a military man, and he controls her by force. She’s going right back into violence and abuse.”</p>
<p>Inside the house, several women approach Burton to talk about an upcoming leadership training session, eager to show her various schedules and plans.</p>
<p>Tiffany Johnson spent almost two decades behind bars, and had to go before the parole board four times before she was granted her release and permission to take the spot Burton offered her at a New Way of Life. Today, she is the associate director there. “Now I look at my life as a healing process, for me and for the little girl [I used to be, who] was abused and terrified, and I tell other women that they are not alone,” Johnson says.</p>
<p>Elaine Elinson is the former communications director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and prize-winning coauthor of “Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.”</p> | The Link Between Violence and Female Incarceration | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/link-violence-female-incarceration/ | 2017-09-13 | 4left
| 3,053 | When Susan Burton and I walked up the concrete steps of the neat stucco bungalow on a sunny palm treelined street in Los Angeles8217 Watts neighborhood nothing indicated the concentration of pain heartache friendship and joy that we would find inside As we stepped into the front room we met a buzz of activity In one corner a tall young woman with intricate tattoos cascading down her shoulder and arm skillfully added braided extensions to another woman8217s hair At a side table a serious bespectacled woman assisted an older woman equally serious in filling out forms On the couch three women in shorts and colorful tank tops cooed over baby photos They all looked up and greeted Burton warmly as we passed through 8220Hello Ms Burton8221 8220How ya doin8217 Ms Burton8221 She paused at each group introduced me as her guest and with a deep chuckle added her own sweet comment on the baby pictures Everyone it seemed had something they wanted to tell her The bedrooms were tidy the beds made up with colorful quilts some decorated with embroidered pillows stuffed animals and dolls The tops of the dressers were crowded with toiletries8212shampoos hair gels skin creams and makeup 8220In prison these beauty products are an indication of your assets8212they are all you can have so when you have a lot you want to show them off8221 Burton explained The house is home to eight women all of whom have served time in California jails and prisons It is one of five houses in Watts that Burton runs for A New Way of Life a program she started in 1998 only two years after she herself was released from prison She started with one small cottage purchased with money she earned from working multiple jobs as a home health aide and with the assistance of her nephew who had a good job good credit and no criminal record to impede his signing for the mortgage She furnished it with five sets of Ikea bunk beds and asked the men from her 12step program to help her assemble them To find women who could benefit from A New Way of Life Burton would go down to the bus station around the corner from skid row 8220I didn8217t know who8217d be getting off the bus but I knew that every day women released from prison were on it I showed up there because I wished someone had been there for me Sometimes I saw a familiar face get off the bus someone I8217d served time with I8217d tell them 8216I have a house in LA there8217s a bed for you if you want it It8217s drug and alcoholfree You don8217t have to go back to the streets if you don8217t want to8217amp1608221 Lisa James at 52 a bus driver and writer8212her play 8220Freedom from Bondage8221 was performed by lifesentence prisoners at Central California Women8217s Facility in Chowchilla the largest women8217s prison in the country8212is one of the women Burton welcomed James8217 warm smile elegant braided hairdo and welcoming demeanor belie the rough life she has endured 8220When I went from the prison gate to the Greyhound bus station I had no idea where I was going to go I had burned all my bridges I called a friend to take me to a 12step meeting because I knew I had to stay clean and sober I didn8217t want to go back where I came from I told them 8216I just got out of prison today8217amp1608221 Someone gave her Burton8217s number She called and Burton invited her to stay 8220I had to tell her that I had no money and she responded 8216Did I ask you for money8217 amp1608221 James recalled Behind the cheer and camaraderie inside the small house in Watts are sorrowful memories etched as indelibly as the residents8217 tattoos Like the vast majority of incarcerated women most of the residents were victims of physical and sexual abuse some from a very young age Tiffany Johnson 48 served 16 years for killing the man who had abused her since she was 5 8220When I went to prison I was warned not to talk to anyone8212and I didn8217t for many years When I finally started opening up I realized that I wasn8217t alone So many other women and girls have been through the same thing8212you don8217t tell anyone about these secrets8221 The prevalence of physical abuse may be the most open secret behind the growing incarceration of women Ann Cammett associate dean of the law school at City University of New York has developed innovative programs in several states for women facing the challenges of reentry in the age of mass incarceration 8220I rarely had a client who had not been a victim of physical or sexual abuse8221 Cammett told me 8220When I started interviewing women in prison every person had a history of violence in their lives8221 The statistics though scant bear out Cammett8217s observations The last Department of Justice report from 1999 documented that more than half of incarcerated women had suffered physical or sexual abuse When I asked the DOJ spokeswoman for an update she told me there is no more recent national study All she could provide were academic studies of populations limited by geography and other factors Sue Osthoff director and cofounder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women coauthored a survey of those studies which show that the figure is as high as 90 percent and even this Osthoff charges undercounts the number of abuse victims who are still in prison 8220Do we really need to verify a reality that we already know8221 she asks Cammett asserts that violence against women increases their risk of being incarcerated AfricanAmerican and Latina women are at a higher risk both of physical abuse and incarceration especially in the warondrugs era when law enforcement focus disproportionately on communities of color The numerous pathways from victimization to incarceration are complex First there are the direct crimes Like Tiffany Johnson a woman may physically attack an abuser to protect herself or her children Johnson stabbed the man who had sexually assaulted her as a child when she became terrified that he would start molesting her 5yearold niece But there are also indirect routes When a young girl is abused at home she often will run away Now homeless she may seek shelter and security from a man who promises he will provide for her8212and then forces her into prostitution and continues the abuse Lisa James describes how she fell into that trap 8220We found ourselves trying to overcome mental abuse that was so evil and so dark We just attached ourselves to someone trying to find some form of affection which just didn8217t exist8221 In addition a woman8217s dire situation may lead to severe depression and she will selfmedicate with drugs or alcohol to cope Plunged into poverty and with no income she will turn to crimes of survival8212such as shoplifting theft and the sex trade Susan Burton8217s experiences followed that downward spiral At 15 she was raped and later gave birth to her daughter The former honor student dropped out of school and ran away from home Alone and penniless she soon found herself in the clutches of a man who thrust her into the world of prostitution and drug dealing It cast a shadow over her life for decades Some abusive partners exert their control by threatening to use the legal system against the women James relates her experience 8220The guy that I was with a white man called me 8216nigger8217 told me I was no good and constantly humiliated me When I tried to leave him he retaliated He actually told my probation officer 8216You need to make an example of her Just throw her in prison8217amp1608221 The huge rise in the numbers of female prisoners means their stories can no longer be ignored In 1980 there were 15000 women in state prisons around the country By 2014 that number had risen to 106232 a growth rate of more than 700 percent If women in city and county jails are included the number rises to 2153328212a third of all female prisoners in the world Most are locked up for nonviolent crimes Twothirds of them have children under 18 The toll is especially harsh for AfricanAmerican women Though drug use and dealing occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic lines black women are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses as white women According to The Sentencing Project the lifetime likelihood that a white woman will be imprisoned is 1 in 118 For black women it is 1 in 19 If it is so clear that violence perpetuated against women and girls increases their risk of arrest and incarceration what measures have been taken to break the cycle The quest for solutions has been challenging8212and not without pitfalls One landmark victory was the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 after a long and arduous campaign by tenacious advocates in the domestic violence community That pioneering federal law greatly enhanced the resources for investigation and criminal penalties for assaults against women including intimatepartner violence According to Leni Marin a former senior vice president of Futures Without Violence who worked primarily with immigrant women 8220The turning point came when society recognized that domestic violence is not a private issue but a social problem 8220Once the abusive behavior is criminalized in the public sphere then the legal system has to become involved8221 she says Yet Marin is quick to point out the contradictions 8220We know that racism permeates the criminal justice system and we were well aware of some of the harmful impact especially in communities of color8221 Marin noted that consequences for immigrant women can be even harsher as a woman8217s abuser may have control over her legal status in this country 8220The enhancement of legal intervention after the passage of the Violence Against Women Act worked well for some people but not for many others8221 Osthoff notes 8220A lot of people who live in communities of color rightfully ask 8216Why are so many resources going into the criminal justice system8217 They see an overemphasis on criminal legal responses8212protective orders arrests imprisonment8212yet that is often not what victims want8221 she says Cammett notes 8220We have a history in this country8212in both civil and religious law8212of allowing violence against women When the women8217s movement insisted that we needed to change this we as a society criminalized the problem rather than dealing with the underlying issues 8220In reality8221 she says 8220we live in a complex web of violence8212with the military law enforcement gangs But the law doesn8217t have the capacity to deal with those complexities so we separate people into victims and perpetrators 8220These are the constraints of law combined with a failure of imagination8221 Cammett says She warns that along with the growth of awareness about domestic violence there also must be awareness of the toll that a racialized criminal justice system takes on the communities most affected by violence Though domestic violence cuts across all class and racial lines the impact is felt most acutely in communities of color Burton sees the consequences of this contradiction every day 8220All the recourses have such harsh consequences that people don8217t accept them Say you take the problem to your school the school automatically calls the police There is so much disruption for the family when the police come into play 8220We need services that are not law enforcement Otherwise this trauma over decades turns into substance abuse people react irrationally8212choosing fight or flight8212and they in turn are criminalized sometimes for very serious offenses8221 Cherri Allison director of the Alameda County Family Justice Center in Oakland Calif understands the dichotomy well 8220As an AfricanAmerican woman who grew up in Oakland I know what they are talking about8221 she said She brings a wealth of experience As an attorney she represented both victims of domestic violence through the Family Violence Law Center and helped craft state legislation to address violence faced by women prisoners including a prohibition on the shackling of women giving birth in prison Allison points to another law that went into effect this year one that allows victims of human trafficking who have been arrested or convicted in juvenile court for any nonviolent crime to have their records vacated sealed and destroyed Echoing Burton8217s concerns she explains 8220A lot of our clients are afraid to call police The police might take their children they might call Child Protective Services and the children would be removed8221 But Allison also sees it from another perspective 8220Police officers have told me they might come to the same house six or seven times before a woman can be persuaded to leave They see little kids traumatized shivering in the corner and they don8217t feel right leaving them there8221 The Alameda County Family Justice Center has partnerships with a dozen social service health counseling and job training organizations8212a combination of government agencies and nonprofits all housed under one roof Unlike Burton8217s homey cottages it is a large government building a former medical facility Colorful handmade quilts children8217s artwork and origami cranes temper the institutional feel Because it comes under the auspices of the district attorney8217s office the center has the resources to provide wraparound services to the 10000 women and girls who come through each year8212from teen victims of sex trafficking to older women being trained in computer programming Leni Marin8217s organization Futures Without Violence also has collaborated with government actors creating training programs for police and judges about intimatepartner violence 8220We aimed to create a culture that does not tolerate domestic violence and implement procedures that recognize how complex this is8221 she says Another pivotal state intervention was the passage of a unique California law in 2002 that allows some women who are incarcerated for crimes relating to their experience of abuse to seek a new trial and present expert testimony on domestic violence One of the groups that lobbied for its passage was Convicted Women Against Abuse survivors of domestic violence at the Chowchilla facility who organized a legislative hearing inside the prison to highlight their experiences After its passage the group helped get the word out to other prisons and connected incarcerated women with volunteer attorneys to represent them To date California is the only state with such a law although others including New York are considering one Osthoff warns that domestic violence advocates should not underestimate the shared traumatic experience of women who have been incarcerated 8220If battering is about threats and control think of how that is replicated in prison the use of violence intimidation rules that change all the time punishments that don8217t fit the crime The whole experience of incarceration is brutal 8220We spend more time energy and resources on incarceration than on support services Why are we putting women in institutions that replicate their experiences of abuse8221 Osthoff says that it is only by listening to affected women that we can come up with innovative programs and additional ways to support them outside of the legal system Cammett agrees 8220Peer initiatives will be most successful After all who understands this better than those who have been through both domestic violence and the criminal justice system8221 Burton8217s work epitomizes that challenge In addition to providing housing and other services she realized that helping individual women would not be enough to mitigate the racism and unfairness most experienced in the system She successfully advocated for legislation to make broader changes including 8220Ban the Box8221 which makes it easier for people who have been convicted of a crime to find work and Proposition 47 which allows for the retroactive reduction of certain felonies to misdemeanors and the expungement of criminal records Burton8217s most recent initiative Women Organized for Justice and Opportunity WOJO trains formerly incarcerated women to become activists in movements for social justice including registering people in jails to vote When she watches women from WOJO making phone calls to get out the vote Burton says 8220Many were still on parole and did not themselves have the right to vote This I realized was a new type of underground railroad8221 An incident outside Burton8217s A New Way of Life house is emblematic of just how many hazards there are on this journey A group of residents is helping another resident a young AsianAmerican woman in khaki shorts and a pink polo shirt who is moving out carry her belongings to a white station wagon parked in the driveway They load up a duffel bag several shopping bags filled with baby clothes a pink backpack and a jumbo size box of Pampers Newborn One woman cuddles a tiny baby only a few months old8212the departing resident8217s child Her friends give her hugs and small farewell tokens8212a nosegay of cloth violets a box of chocolates a baby8217s bib Burton approaches the group but does not join in the gaiety I watch her gaze8212she is eyeing the grim stocky man in a starched buttondown shirt standing impatiently on the driver8217s side of the car She wishes the young woman well and then walks me back into the cool shelter of the house 8220She shouldn8217t be going back to him8221 she says shaking her head 8220He8217s a military man and he controls her by force She8217s going right back into violence and abuse8221 Inside the house several women approach Burton to talk about an upcoming leadership training session eager to show her various schedules and plans Tiffany Johnson spent almost two decades behind bars and had to go before the parole board four times before she was granted her release and permission to take the spot Burton offered her at a New Way of Life Today she is the associate director there 8220Now I look at my life as a healing process for me and for the little girl I used to be who was abused and terrified and I tell other women that they are not alone8221 Johnson says Elaine Elinson is the former communications director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and prizewinning coauthor of 8220Wherever There8217s a Fight How Runaway Slaves Suffragists Immigrants Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California8221 | When/SCONJ Susan/PROPN Burton/PROPN and/CCONJ I/PRON walked/VERB up/ADP the/DET concrete/ADJ steps/NOUN of/ADP the/DET neat/ADJ stucco/NOUN bungalow/VERB on/ADP a/DET sunny/ADJ palm/NOUN treelined/VERB street/NOUN in/ADP Los/PROPN Angeles8217/PROPN Watts/PROPN neighborhood/NOUN nothing/PRON indicated/VERB the/DET concentration/NOUN of/ADP pain/NOUN heartache/NOUN friendship/NOUN and/CCONJ joy/NOUN that/PRON we/PRON would/AUX find/VERB inside/ADV As/SCONJ we/PRON stepped/VERB into/ADP the/DET front/ADJ room/NOUN 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<p>Whose side are you on? That’s the question that President George W. Bush asked in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And he gave the world his answer and warning: “Either you are with us or against us.”1</p>
<p>The president has not retreated from his “them-versus-us” framing of international affairs. At home, restrictionist groups demanding a clampdown on legal and illegal immigration are framing the immigration debate in the same dualistic terms. They insist that U.S. political leaders tell the public whose side they are on–the side of pro-immigrant groups, or the side of the opponents of “mass immigration,” “open borders,” and “immigrant terrorists.”</p>
<p>The “whose side are you on” question about immigration is sparking political fires across the country–from U.S. border communities in southeastern Arizona, where citizen vigilantes proudly say they are protecting the “home front,” to the halls of Congress. An increasingly powerful caucus of Republican representatives is pushing to close the borders to the immigrants that stream across on a daily basis and to deport the 9 ­ 10 million unauthorized immigrants living within U.S. borders.</p>
<p>Anti-immigrant movements are, of course, nothing new in the United States. Campaigns against new immigrants have generally coincided with the business cycle, rising in intensity with economic slowdowns, declining in times of prosperity. There are two main corollaries to this rule. One, the U.S. public generally views immigrants with more or less hostility according to the color of their skin, their English-speaking abilities, and the degree to which their religions and cultures depart from Judeo-Christianity and what conservative Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington calls the “American Creed.”2 Two, in times of war, immigrants from nations in conflict with the United States are especially suspect.</p>
<p>Grassroots campaigns that blame immigrants for job losses and declining wage levels, as well as charges that fault the immigrant population for crime and public health crises, have coursed through U.S. history, ebbing and surging in response to economic and political circumstances. Certainly, the deepening sense of vulnerability experienced by many U.S. citizens today in the face of downsizing, outsourcing, stagnant wages, labor union decline, and the steady loss of medical and retirement benefits explains part of the rising anti-immigrant backlash.</p>
<p>But now, the restrictionist forces come to the public debate armed with a righteousness that goes beyond perceived economic threats from foreign workers. Immigration restrictionism is increasingly framed as key to homeland and cultural protection. Most of the allied anti-immigrant forces argue that the War on Terror cannot be successfully fought without gaining total control of U.S. borders, downsizing the resident immigrant population, and severely restricting new immigration.</p>
<p>Propelling the restrictionist movement is an unprecedented nationwide network of anti-immigrant think tanks, policy institutes, and statewide campaigns focused on mobilizing public opinion and lobbying legislators. The leading national restrictionist organizations–both in immigration and language issues–are part of an institutional network that emerged from the population control, environmental, and “carrying-capacity” movements in the late 1970s. In the view of a break-off faction of Zero Population Growth’s (ZPG) board of directors, “population control” in the United States suddenly became synonymous with “immigration control.”</p>
<p>In 1979, John Tanton and several other former board members of ZPG formed the country’s first anti-immigrant policy institute, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In addition to being a cofounder and current board member of FAIR, Tanton has been a key figure in establishing and funding a phalanx of anti-immigrant and “English Only” institutes, including NumbersUSA, the Center for Immigration Studies, Population-Environment Balance, U.S. English, ProEnglish, Social Contract Press, and U.S. Inc.3 Other leading restrictionist groups include Project USA, Americans for Immigration Control, and Americans for Better Immigration.</p>
<p>Although these institutes are politically situated on the right and within the umbrella of the Republican Party, they operate outside the political network of the right’s leading think tanks and policy institutes, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation–organizations that are closely associated with corporate interests and therefore opposed to the restrictionist agenda. The restrictionist institutes are, however, linked with these and other right-wing organizations through the main conservative foundations that fund both groups.4</p>
<p>Late last year, the increasingly powerful House Immigration Caucus and its allies, working in coalition with the House hawks, managed to obstruct the quick passage of the Intelligence Reform Bill by tagging immigration restrictionist measures on it. This was a wake-up call to the political establishment that the business-as-usual approach to immigration policy was no longer viable. Then came the resounding approval by Arizona voters of the Protect Arizona Now referendum, which authorized the denial of state services to undocumented immigrants and closer cooperation between all state employees in alerting authorities to the presence of immigrants lacking legal documentation.</p>
<p>The U.S. public may have missed these turning points, but it’s been near impossible to miss the flood of media reports about the “immigration crisis.” The reports resound with escalating alarmism about the threats of immigrants to our national security, culture, and economy. The border is commonly referred to as “Terrorist Alley,” and crazed vigilantes in the desert borderlands are projected nationally as voices of reason and patriotism. The main message echoing through the media is that the combination of terrorism, mass immigration, and unprotected borders constitute the country’s utmost security threat. Anti-immigrant forces have effectively seized the notion of homeland security in their campaign to transform U.S. borders into barriers, deport all immigrants here illegally, halt all immigration from Islamic countries, penalize firms that hire “illegals,” and move toward creating a national ID card.</p>
<p>Anti-immigrant activists have used the terrorist threat to stir up popular xenophobia, racism, and fear of immigrants. Mark Krikorian, for example, president of the Center for Immigration Studies, quotes Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other high administration officials to bolster his case that the “home front” must be our first defense against terrorism. According to Wolfowitz, “Since last September, the home front has become a battlefront every bit as real as any we’ve known before.”5</p>
<p>These activists argue that since we can’t defeat the terrorists on the battlefield in conventional warfare, U.S. citizens and their government must find new ways to respond to this “asymmetric warfare.” Shutting down the borders and shoving out the “illegals” is the most effective and logical first step. “Immigration control is to asymmetric warfare what missile defense is to strategic warfare,” Krikorian asserts. Homeland defense must embrace an immigration-control policy with “layers overseas, at the borders, and inside the country.” The militarism of this new immigration/anti-terrorism policy is also on display at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where DHS Under Secretary Asa Hutchinson described the visa process in September 2003 as a “forward-based defense” against terrorists and criminals.</p>
<p>Republican Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, one of the country’s leading hawks, gives the DHS credit for making progress in “securing our borders.” Yet more needs to be done, according to Brownback, and all citizens can enlist in the War on Terror. “While the battle may be waged on several fronts,” says the Senator, “for the man or woman on the street, immigration is in many ways the front line of our defense.”6</p>
<p>Based on the immigration-terrorism connection, anti-immigrant groups have made inroads within the traditionally pro-immigrant neoconservative camp. Most of the leading neoconservatives, especially Jews and Catholics, have a strong sense of their immigrant origins. Moreover, the neoconservatives have regarded immigration flows of both cheap and skilled workers as an unmitigated benefit for U.S. corporations and hence the U.S. economy. However, neoconservatives are fierce opponents of affirmative action programs and government-sponsored bilingual education and are also proponents of “Official English” laws. The 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror have caused many neocons to back away from their pro-immigrant posture.</p>
<p>The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neocon think tank that focuses almost exclusively on promoting an Israeli-centered U.S. foreign policy, includes Richard Lamm on its board of advisers. In an FDD policy paper, Lamm, the former Colorado governor who is one of the country’s most prominent cultural nationalists, reframed his restrictionist positions within the new framework of counterterrorism. Asserting that the 9/11 attacks forever changed “the nature of warfare” for the United States, Lamm, who also serves on the board of advisers of FAIR, warned, ” America is now the battlefield and every American is a potential target.” We ignore this fact, he insists, at our peril. And “if we wish to respond to this new type of warfare,” he says, “we must confront the relationship between immigration and terrorism.”</p>
<p>Criticizing President Bush’s State of the Union address, Republican Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, who heads the House Immigration Reform Caucus, asked: “Why is it so difficult for the president to integrate the concept of border security into homeland security? Is there anyone on the planet who does not realize that terrorists take advantage of porous borders? Is it possible that any president would put the economic interests of corporations addicted to cheap labor ahead of the safety of American men, women, and children?”7</p>
<p>While the anti-immigrant din has grown louder in Washington, even that rhetoric fails to capture the surge of rage, fear, xenophobia, and indignation experienced outside the beltway. Across the country–and especially on the Southwestern border–the concept of a “home front” in the war against terrorism has become a source of vigilante activism. Citizen militias like Project Minuteman and American Border Patrol believe that the United States is “under siege” by “hordes of illegal aliens.” Emblematic of the rising anti-immigrant rage in the borderlands is Stop the Invasion, which includes as part of its homepage banner a drawing depicting white Texans making the last stand in the Alamo against Santa Anna’s Mexican troops.</p>
<p>For the immigrants themselves, the “home front” is an increasingly deadly zone. Dehydration, freezing, and armed gangs that prey on immigrants have left a body count of more than 2,000 dead migrants in the U.S. borderlands since 1998 when border walls and intensified concentration of the Border Patrol in California and parts of the Texas border began to force immigrants to take more hazardous routes through vast stretches of desolate desert and rugged mountain terrain.</p>
<p>Soon after the dust settled from the 2004 elections, the most divisive issue to dominate the political landscape–even more so than Social Security–became U.S. immigration policy. Fierce opposition started coming from inside the president’s own party over his promotion of a guest worker program and his refusal to further restrict immigration. Although orchestrated by a small clique of beltway policy institutes, the anti-immigrant emotions pulsing through the country now count on a palpable grassroots base. Restrictionist views have been spreading throughout the country, effectively fanned by the media. They feed on rapidly changing perceptions about national, economic, and cultural security.</p>
<p>The alarmism over immigration has not only clouded the political landscape but threatens to reorganize it. It had been the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that by supporting “liberal” immigration policies, such as family reunification and legalization of the undocumented population, they would expand their political base among Latinos. Recognizing the political potential of the expanding Latino population, President Bush initially broached a variation on this theme during the early months of his first administration.</p>
<p>Although neither the Republican nor Democratic Party leadership have yet discarded this political strategy, both parties have been inching away from earlier policy commitments regarding the regularization of the10 million illegal residents. Given the tide of anti-immigrant backlash and Arizona Latinos’ surprising one-out-of-four support for the Protect Arizona Now legislation, Democrats and Republicans alike are beginning to weigh the political costs of supporting immigration policies that are being described as anti-worker, pro-big business, and weak on homeland security.</p>
<p>The National Review’s December 31 cover article, “GOP Be Warned,” by neoconservative pundit and author David Frum, makes the case that “no issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration.” He and others have pointed out that prominent Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, are bucking Democratic Party political correctness by expressing concern about immigrants overrunning communities in rural New York. According to Frum, “There’s no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party’s leaders.”</p>
<p>The “them-versus-us” framework that the Bush administration has superimposed on its counterterrorism strategy has tapped into some of the most base sentiments in U.S. society–its sense of moral and cultural superiority, its racist characterization of foreigners and their societies, its isolationism and U.S.-centric view of international affairs, and an underlying fear of losing its power and privilege.</p>
<p>Until the publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, anti-immigrant arguments based on cultural nationalism were relegated to the dark corners of the right-wing’s old guard. There, white supremacists and nativists weaved conspiracy theories and xenophobic fantasies with relatively little mainstream attention. But Huntington, most famous for his previous book The Clash of Civilizations, raised cultural nationalism to a new, intellectually acceptable level. “In this new era,” he wrote, “the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico.” Huntington makes the case that unlike previous immigrants, Mexican-Americans are not interested in assimilating. “As their numbers increase,” he observed, “Mexican-Americans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture.”</p>
<p>The resurgence of restrictionist sentiment in the United States underscores the spread of the politics of hate and fear across the land. These anti-immigrant campaigns, whether they win or lose, will divide communities along racial, political, and cultural lines and deepen fissures. Even longtime migrant residents, integrated into daily life on all levels but the formal one, will face renewed hostility in their own homes. As immigration restrictionists advance their agenda, the very act of assimilation that they demand of immigrants will become increasingly impossible in deeply polarized communities.</p>
<p>Apart from the severe impact on immigrants themselves, this tide of restrictionism is reinforcing the worst aspects of U.S. isolationist, nationalist, and culturally supremacist attitudes. It has already caused immigrant communities and their supporters to pull back from their creative initiatives to make them more openly participative members of their communities. No longer is there the political will to support measures that would allow undocumented residents to use their home-country identity papers in the process of opening bank accounts or obtaining loans, for example. The steps taken by communities across the country to grant their non-citizen members stakeholder-status and some measure of legality and respect are now coming under sustained attack.</p>
<p>Equating terrorist threats with immigration has resulted in a steady dilution of immigrant rights and, by extension, increased restraints on the civil liberties of the entire society. The embrace of the “home front” logic of national security has also reinforced the steady militarization of the country’s borders and ports of entry. The anti-immigrant forces believe that terrorism will prove the game-winning trump card. Like the spurious “terrorist” evidence offered to build support for the Iraq invasion, restrictionists are offering their own manufactured proof that the southern border is a “terrorist alley” and the immigrant population represents a clear and present danger. The purported immigration/terrorism link has proved a convenient political vehicle to advance the long-standing agenda of anti-immigrant groups.</p>
<p>In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Representative Tancredo asked his colleagues: “How many people in this country have to lose their lives before we come to the understanding that the defense of the nation begins at the defense of the borders?”8 But not one of the al-Qaida terrorists entered the country through Mexico. Nor did any of them enter as immigrants. Rather they visited the United States on temporary visas. As the Cato Institute’s Daniel Griswold observed: “We could reduce immigration to zero and still not stop terrorists from slipping into the country on temporary, non-immigrant visas.”9</p>
<p>Rabid anti-immigration figures like Tancredo, media personality Lou Dobbs, and think tank president Mark Krikorian are betting that they can persuade a credulous U.S. public and Congress to launch a “home front” war against immigrants by casting them as national security threats. Like the war in Iraq, the mounting campaign against immigrants is a dangerous diversion from the real national security task of identifying and dismantling international terrorist networks that threaten our collective security. The “counterterrorism” measures contained in legislation sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, of extending the barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, of making it more difficult for refugees to gain asylum and of prohibiting illegal immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses, will prove of little use in capturing Osama bin Laden or preventing another terrorist attack.</p>
<p>The anti-immigrant forces are certainly right, however, in their contention that immigration–legal and illegal–is an issue that needs the urgent attention of policymakers. However, by scapegoating immigrants for so many of the country’s ills–environmental degradation, low wages, tax burdens, crime, social disintegration, and even terrorist threats–the anti-immigration forces are unleashing a vicious backlash movement that’s already deepening the social, economic, and political divides in the nation. In the process, the anti-immigrant groups are diverting popular attention away from the more fundamental causes of the socioeconomic problems that are eroding the substance and spirit of the United States.</p>
<p>“Whose side are you on?” It’s a question that does not merit an answer.</p>
<p>TOM BARRY is policy director of the International Relations Center (IRC), online at <a href="http://www.irc-online.org/" type="external">www.irc-online.org</a>, and an associate of the IRC Americas Program.</p>
<p>Endnotes</p>
<p>1. President George W. Bush, November 6, 2001, White House speech, <a href="" type="internal">http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011106-4.htm</a>.</p>
<p>2. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity ( New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 2004).</p>
<p>3. “John Tanton,” Right Web Profile (International Relations Center, 2004), <a href="http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/tanton/tanton.php" type="external">http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/tanton/tanton.php</a>.</p>
<p>4. The major sources of funding for the restrictionist institutes include the following foundations: Philip M, McKenna Foundation, Jaquelin Hume Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, Carthage Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation.</p>
<p>5. Mark Krikorian, “Keeping Terror Out: Immigration and Asymmetric Warfare,” National Interest, Spring 2004.</p>
<p>6. “Border Security,” statement of Senator Sam Brownback, <a href="http://brownback.senate.gov/LIBorderSecurity.cfm" type="external">http://brownback.senate.gov/LIBorderSecurity.cfm</a>.</p>
<p>7. “Tancredo SOTU Response,” News from Tom Tancredo, February 8, 2005.</p>
<p>8. Quoted in Daniel Griswold, “Congressman Uses Sept. 11 Terrorism to Advance Anti-Immigration Agenda,” Cato Institute, November 18, 2001.</p>
<p>9. Daniel Griswold, “Congressman Uses Sept. 11 Terrorism to Advance Anti-Immigration Agenda,” Cato Institute, November 18, 2001.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | The Immigration Debate | true | https://counterpunch.org/2005/06/03/the-immigration-debate/ | 2005-06-03 | 4left
| 3,054 | Whose side are you on That8217s the question that President George W Bush asked in the aftermath of the 911 attacks And he gave the world his answer and warning 8220Either you are with us or against us82211 The president has not retreated from his 8220themversusus8221 framing of international affairs At home restrictionist groups demanding a clampdown on legal and illegal immigration are framing the immigration debate in the same dualistic terms They insist that US political leaders tell the public whose side they are on8211the side of proimmigrant groups or the side of the opponents of 8220mass immigration8221 8220open borders8221 and 8220immigrant terrorists8221 The 8220whose side are you on8221 question about immigration is sparking political fires across the country8211from US border communities in southeastern Arizona where citizen vigilantes proudly say they are protecting the 8220home front8221 to the halls of Congress An increasingly powerful caucus of Republican representatives is pushing to close the borders to the immigrants that stream across on a daily basis and to deport the 9 173 10 million unauthorized immigrants living within US borders Antiimmigrant movements are of course nothing new in the United States Campaigns against new immigrants have generally coincided with the business cycle rising in intensity with economic slowdowns declining in times of prosperity There are two main corollaries to this rule One the US public generally views immigrants with more or less hostility according to the color of their skin their Englishspeaking abilities and the degree to which their religions and cultures depart from JudeoChristianity and what conservative Harvard scholar Samuel P Huntington calls the 8220American Creed82212 Two in times of war immigrants from nations in conflict with the United States are especially suspect Grassroots campaigns that blame immigrants for job losses and declining wage levels as well as charges that fault the immigrant population for crime and public health crises have coursed through US history ebbing and surging in response to economic and political circumstances Certainly the deepening sense of vulnerability experienced by many US citizens today in the face of downsizing outsourcing stagnant wages labor union decline and the steady loss of medical and retirement benefits explains part of the rising antiimmigrant backlash But now the restrictionist forces come to the public debate armed with a righteousness that goes beyond perceived economic threats from foreign workers Immigration restrictionism is increasingly framed as key to homeland and cultural protection Most of the allied antiimmigrant forces argue that the War on Terror cannot be successfully fought without gaining total control of US borders downsizing the resident immigrant population and severely restricting new immigration Propelling the restrictionist movement is an unprecedented nationwide network of antiimmigrant think tanks policy institutes and statewide campaigns focused on mobilizing public opinion and lobbying legislators The leading national restrictionist organizations8211both in immigration and language issues8211are part of an institutional network that emerged from the population control environmental and 8220carryingcapacity8221 movements in the late 1970s In the view of a breakoff faction of Zero Population Growth8217s ZPG board of directors 8220population control8221 in the United States suddenly became synonymous with 8220immigration control8221 In 1979 John Tanton and several other former board members of ZPG formed the country8217s first antiimmigrant policy institute the Federation for American Immigration Reform FAIR In addition to being a cofounder and current board member of FAIR Tanton has been a key figure in establishing and funding a phalanx of antiimmigrant and 8220English Only8221 institutes including NumbersUSA the Center for Immigration Studies PopulationEnvironment Balance US English ProEnglish Social Contract Press and US Inc3 Other leading restrictionist groups include Project USA Americans for Immigration Control and Americans for Better Immigration Although these institutes are politically situated on the right and within the umbrella of the Republican Party they operate outside the political network of the right8217s leading think tanks and policy institutes such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation8211organizations that are closely associated with corporate interests and therefore opposed to the restrictionist agenda The restrictionist institutes are however linked with these and other rightwing organizations through the main conservative foundations that fund both groups4 Late last year the increasingly powerful House Immigration Caucus and its allies working in coalition with the House hawks managed to obstruct the quick passage of the Intelligence Reform Bill by tagging immigration restrictionist measures on it This was a wakeup call to the political establishment that the businessasusual approach to immigration policy was no longer viable Then came the resounding approval by Arizona voters of the Protect Arizona Now referendum which authorized the denial of state services to undocumented immigrants and closer cooperation between all state employees in alerting authorities to the presence of immigrants lacking legal documentation The US public may have missed these turning points but it8217s been near impossible to miss the flood of media reports about the 8220immigration crisis8221 The reports resound with escalating alarmism about the threats of immigrants to our national security culture and economy The border is commonly referred to as 8220Terrorist Alley8221 and crazed vigilantes in the desert borderlands are projected nationally as voices of reason and patriotism The main message echoing through the media is that the combination of terrorism mass immigration and unprotected borders constitute the country8217s utmost security threat Antiimmigrant forces have effectively seized the notion of homeland security in their campaign to transform US borders into barriers deport all immigrants here illegally halt all immigration from Islamic countries penalize firms that hire 8220illegals8221 and move toward creating a national ID card Antiimmigrant activists have used the terrorist threat to stir up popular xenophobia racism and fear of immigrants Mark Krikorian for example president of the Center for Immigration Studies quotes Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other high administration officials to bolster his case that the 8220home front8221 must be our first defense against terrorism According to Wolfowitz 8220Since last September the home front has become a battlefront every bit as real as any we8217ve known before82215 These activists argue that since we can8217t defeat the terrorists on the battlefield in conventional warfare US citizens and their government must find new ways to respond to this 8220asymmetric warfare8221 Shutting down the borders and shoving out the 8220illegals8221 is the most effective and logical first step 8220Immigration control is to asymmetric warfare what missile defense is to strategic warfare8221 Krikorian asserts Homeland defense must embrace an immigrationcontrol policy with 8220layers overseas at the borders and inside the country8221 The militarism of this new immigrationantiterrorism policy is also on display at the Department of Homeland Security DHS where DHS Under Secretary Asa Hutchinson described the visa process in September 2003 as a 8220forwardbased defense8221 against terrorists and criminals Republican Kansas Senator Sam Brownback one of the country8217s leading hawks gives the DHS credit for making progress in 8220securing our borders8221 Yet more needs to be done according to Brownback and all citizens can enlist in the War on Terror 8220While the battle may be waged on several fronts8221 says the Senator 8220for the man or woman on the street immigration is in many ways the front line of our defense82216 Based on the immigrationterrorism connection antiimmigrant groups have made inroads within the traditionally proimmigrant neoconservative camp Most of the leading neoconservatives especially Jews and Catholics have a strong sense of their immigrant origins Moreover the neoconservatives have regarded immigration flows of both cheap and skilled workers as an unmitigated benefit for US corporations and hence the US economy However neoconservatives are fierce opponents of affirmative action programs and governmentsponsored bilingual education and are also proponents of 8220Official English8221 laws The 911 attacks and the War on Terror have caused many neocons to back away from their proimmigrant posture The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies FDD a neocon think tank that focuses almost exclusively on promoting an Israelicentered US foreign policy includes Richard Lamm on its board of advisers In an FDD policy paper Lamm the former Colorado governor who is one of the country8217s most prominent cultural nationalists reframed his restrictionist positions within the new framework of counterterrorism Asserting that the 911 attacks forever changed 8220the nature of warfare8221 for the United States Lamm who also serves on the board of advisers of FAIR warned 8221 America is now the battlefield and every American is a potential target8221 We ignore this fact he insists at our peril And 8220if we wish to respond to this new type of warfare8221 he says 8220we must confront the relationship between immigration and terrorism8221 Criticizing President Bush8217s State of the Union address Republican Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo who heads the House Immigration Reform Caucus asked 8220Why is it so difficult for the president to integrate the concept of border security into homeland security Is there anyone on the planet who does not realize that terrorists take advantage of porous borders Is it possible that any president would put the economic interests of corporations addicted to cheap labor ahead of the safety of American men women and children82217 While the antiimmigrant din has grown louder in Washington even that rhetoric fails to capture the surge of rage fear xenophobia and indignation experienced outside the beltway Across the country8211and especially on the Southwestern border8211the concept of a 8220home front8221 in the war against terrorism has become a source of vigilante activism Citizen militias like Project Minuteman and American Border Patrol believe that the United States is 8220under siege8221 by 8220hordes of illegal aliens8221 Emblematic of the rising antiimmigrant rage in the borderlands is Stop the Invasion which includes as part of its homepage banner a drawing depicting white Texans making the last stand in the Alamo against Santa Anna8217s Mexican troops For the immigrants themselves the 8220home front8221 is an increasingly deadly zone Dehydration freezing and armed gangs that prey on immigrants have left a body count of more than 2000 dead migrants in the US borderlands since 1998 when border walls and intensified concentration of the Border Patrol in California and parts of the Texas border began to force immigrants to take more hazardous routes through vast stretches of desolate desert and rugged mountain terrain Soon after the dust settled from the 2004 elections the most divisive issue to dominate the political landscape8211even more so than Social Security8211became US immigration policy Fierce opposition started coming from inside the president8217s own party over his promotion of a guest worker program and his refusal to further restrict immigration Although orchestrated by a small clique of beltway policy institutes the antiimmigrant emotions pulsing through the country now count on a palpable grassroots base Restrictionist views have been spreading throughout the country effectively fanned by the media They feed on rapidly changing perceptions about national economic and cultural security The alarmism over immigration has not only clouded the political landscape but threatens to reorganize it It had been the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that by supporting 8220liberal8221 immigration policies such as family reunification and legalization of the undocumented population they would expand their political base among Latinos Recognizing the political potential of the expanding Latino population President Bush initially broached a variation on this theme during the early months of his first administration Although neither the Republican nor Democratic Party leadership have yet discarded this political strategy both parties have been inching away from earlier policy commitments regarding the regularization of the10 million illegal residents Given the tide of antiimmigrant backlash and Arizona Latinos8217 surprising oneoutoffour support for the Protect Arizona Now legislation Democrats and Republicans alike are beginning to weigh the political costs of supporting immigration policies that are being described as antiworker probig business and weak on homeland security The National Review8217s December 31 cover article 8220GOP Be Warned8221 by neoconservative pundit and author David Frum makes the case that 8220no issue not one threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration8221 He and others have pointed out that prominent Democrats notably Hillary Clinton are bucking Democratic Party political correctness by expressing concern about immigrants overrunning communities in rural New York According to Frum 8220There8217s no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rankandfile diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party8217s leaders8221 The 8220themversusus8221 framework that the Bush administration has superimposed on its counterterrorism strategy has tapped into some of the most base sentiments in US society8211its sense of moral and cultural superiority its racist characterization of foreigners and their societies its isolationism and UScentric view of international affairs and an underlying fear of losing its power and privilege Until the publication of Samuel P Huntington8217s book Who Are We The Challenges to America8217s National Identity antiimmigrant arguments based on cultural nationalism were relegated to the dark corners of the rightwing8217s old guard There white supremacists and nativists weaved conspiracy theories and xenophobic fantasies with relatively little mainstream attention But Huntington most famous for his previous book The Clash of Civilizations raised cultural nationalism to a new intellectually acceptable level 8220In this new era8221 he wrote 8220the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America8217s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America especially Mexico8221 Huntington makes the case that unlike previous immigrants MexicanAmericans are not interested in assimilating 8220As their numbers increase8221 he observed 8220MexicanAmericans feel increasingly comfortable with their own culture and often contemptuous of American culture8221 The resurgence of restrictionist sentiment in the United States underscores the spread of the politics of hate and fear across the land These antiimmigrant campaigns whether they win or lose will divide communities along racial political and cultural lines and deepen fissures Even longtime migrant residents integrated into daily life on all levels but the formal one will face renewed hostility in their own homes As immigration restrictionists advance their agenda the very act of assimilation that they demand of immigrants will become increasingly impossible in deeply polarized communities Apart from the severe impact on immigrants themselves this tide of restrictionism is reinforcing the worst aspects of US isolationist nationalist and culturally supremacist attitudes It has already caused immigrant communities and their supporters to pull back from their creative initiatives to make them more openly participative members of their communities No longer is there the political will to support measures that would allow undocumented residents to use their homecountry identity papers in the process of opening bank accounts or obtaining loans for example The steps taken by communities across the country to grant their noncitizen members stakeholderstatus and some measure of legality and respect are now coming under sustained attack Equating terrorist threats with immigration has resulted in a steady dilution of immigrant rights and by extension increased restraints on the civil liberties of the entire society The embrace of the 8220home front8221 logic of national security has also reinforced the steady militarization of the country8217s borders and ports of entry The antiimmigrant forces believe that terrorism will prove the gamewinning trump card Like the spurious 8220terrorist8221 evidence offered to build support for the Iraq invasion restrictionists are offering their own manufactured proof that the southern border is a 8220terrorist alley8221 and the immigrant population represents a clear and present danger The purported immigrationterrorism link has proved a convenient political vehicle to advance the longstanding agenda of antiimmigrant groups In the aftermath of the 911 attacks Representative Tancredo asked his colleagues 8220How many people in this country have to lose their lives before we come to the understanding that the defense of the nation begins at the defense of the borders82218 But not one of the alQaida terrorists entered the country through Mexico Nor did any of them enter as immigrants Rather they visited the United States on temporary visas As the Cato Institute8217s Daniel Griswold observed 8220We could reduce immigration to zero and still not stop terrorists from slipping into the country on temporary nonimmigrant visas82219 Rabid antiimmigration figures like Tancredo media personality Lou Dobbs and think tank president Mark Krikorian are betting that they can persuade a credulous US public and Congress to launch a 8220home front8221 war against immigrants by casting them as national security threats Like the war in Iraq the mounting campaign against immigrants is a dangerous diversion from the real national security task of identifying and dismantling international terrorist networks that threaten our collective security The 8220counterterrorism8221 measures contained in legislation sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman F James Sensenbrenner a Wisconsin Republican of extending the barriers along the USMexico border of making it more difficult for refugees to gain asylum and of prohibiting illegal immigrants from obtaining driver8217s licenses will prove of little use in capturing Osama bin Laden or preventing another terrorist attack The antiimmigrant forces are certainly right however in their contention that immigration8211legal and illegal8211is an issue that needs the urgent attention of policymakers However by scapegoating immigrants for so many of the country8217s ills8211environmental degradation low wages tax burdens crime social disintegration and even terrorist threats8211the antiimmigration forces are unleashing a vicious backlash movement that8217s already deepening the social economic and political divides in the nation In the process the antiimmigrant groups are diverting popular attention away from the more fundamental causes of the socioeconomic problems that are eroding the substance and spirit of the United States 8220Whose side are you on8221 It8217s a question that does not merit an answer TOM BARRY is policy director of the International Relations Center IRC online at wwwirconlineorg and an associate of the IRC Americas Program Endnotes 1 President George W Bush November 6 2001 White House speech httpwwwwhitehousegovnewsreleases200111200111064htm 2 Samuel P Huntington Who Are We The Challenges to America8217s National Identity New York Simon ampamp Schuster 2004 3 8220John Tanton8221 Right Web Profile International Relations Center 2004 httprightwebirconlineorgindtantontantonphp 4 The major sources of funding for the restrictionist institutes include the following foundations Philip M McKenna Foundation Jaquelin Hume Foundation Sarah Scaife Foundation John M Olin Foundation Carthage Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation 5 Mark Krikorian 8220Keeping Terror Out Immigration and Asymmetric Warfare8221 National Interest Spring 2004 6 8220Border Security8221 statement of Senator Sam Brownback httpbrownbacksenategovLIBorderSecuritycfm 7 8220Tancredo SOTU Response8221 News from Tom Tancredo February 8 2005 8 Quoted in Daniel Griswold 8220Congressman Uses Sept 11 Terrorism to Advance AntiImmigration Agenda8221 Cato Institute November 18 2001 9 Daniel Griswold 8220Congressman Uses Sept 11 Terrorism to Advance AntiImmigration Agenda8221 Cato Institute November 18 2001 amp160 amp160 | Whose/DET side/NOUN are/AUX you/PRON on/ADP That8217s/PROPN the/DET question/NOUN that/SCONJ President/PROPN George/PROPN W/PROPN Bush/PROPN asked/VERB in/ADP the/DET aftermath/NOUN of/ADP the/DET 911/NUM attacks/NOUN And/CCONJ he/PRON gave/VERB the/DET world/NOUN his/PRON answer/NOUN and/CCONJ warning/VERB 8220Either/NUM you/PRON are/AUX with/ADP us/PRON or/CCONJ against/ADP us82211/PROPN The/DET president/NOUN has/AUX not/PART retreated/VERB from/ADP his/PRON 8220themversusus8221/NUM framing/NOUN of/ADP international/ADJ affairs/NOUN At/ADP home/NOUN restrictionist/NOUN groups/NOUN demanding/VERB a/DET clampdown/NOUN on/ADP legal/ADJ and/CCONJ illegal/ADJ immigration/NOUN are/AUX framing/VERB the/DET immigration/NOUN debate/NOUN in/ADP the/DET same/ADJ dualistic/ADJ terms/NOUN They/PRON insist/VERB that/SCONJ US/PROPN 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<p>Most of the corners along 16th Street, in the heart of the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale, are vacant lots. On snowy winter days, no one clears the sidewalks in front of the lots, forcing pedestrians to trudge down the middle of the street.</p>
<p>Here and there, a run-down building still stands—some house little neighborhood stores, others are boarded up and tagged with graffiti. Only two new buildings exist: a fire station and an apartment building on the site where Martin Luther King Jr. once lived in 1966 during his stint in Chicago to protest the city’s segregated housing.</p>
<p>Two schools remain. The biggest one, Penn, is a grey-beige, mammoth structure. On its marquee is a little prayer: “Save our Schools.”</p>
<p>Penn and other neighborhood schools in North Lawndale have half as many students as they did a decade ago. CPS officials have gone out of their way to emphasize that North Lawndale’s population loss, and the population loss in other mostly black West and South Side neighborhoods, is the driving factor in the dwindling enrollment. For that reason, CPS has said, schools must be closed.</p>
<p>But population loss is not the entire story. Several converging factors, from housing policies to social ills, have led to fewer children in these Chicago neighborhoods.</p>
<p>“It was not a natural process,” says Pauline Lipman, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.</p>
<p>On top of outside factors, Lipman says, neighborhood schools were destabilized as the school district shifted its focus to what it calls “schools of choice.” CPS slowly pulled money and resources out of neighborhood schools years before they were closed, she insists.</p>
<p>The phenomenon of closing schools and moving toward charter schools is a national one. Because most of the schools being closed serve black and sometimes Latino students, activists and students from New York, Detroit, Washington D.C. and 15 other cities came together last year to file civil rights complaints with the U.S. Department of Education and the U. S. Department of Justice.</p>
<p>Helen Moore, a long-time Detroit activist, says the closings of more than 300 neighborhood schools in her city over the past decade has led to even more population loss in already-devastated communities.</p>
<p>“I see blight everywhere,” says Moore. She partly blames CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who led the school system in Detroit from 2009 to 2011.</p>
<p>On top of this added decline, Moore says, many children have dropped out of school because their mothers don’t have money to get them to and from the new schools—many of which are charters.&#160;</p>
<p>CPS officials and advocates for school choice are virtually certain to disagree with Lipman’s assertion that the district has long neglected neighborhood schools. But one thing is clear: The population decline that affects many schools has been worsened by the expansion of choice over the past decade.</p>
<p>Consider these statistics from a Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data for 2012:</p>
<p>Only 40 percent of elementary students in North Lawndale attend their neighborhood school. A decade ago, the situation was reversed, with 60 percent of students going to neighborhood schools and 40 percent traveling to schools elsewhere.</p>
<p>In 14 predominantly black South Side and West Side communities that CPS defines as “underutilized,” an average of 54 percent of elementary students attend their neighborhood school. In other communities, two-thirds of elementary students attend their neighborhood school.</p>
<p>In the 10 neighborhoods with the most children attending their neighborhood school, six are well-to-do neighborhoods on the North Side or Northwest Side. The other four are Latino neighborhoods–two on the Far Southeast Side and two on the Southwest Side of the city.</p>
<p>To a large degree, this situation was created by design. When former Mayor Richard M. Daley and then-Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan launched Renaissance 2010, the central idea was to put new schools into communities that did not have enough good options and, at the same time, to shut down low-achieving schools.</p>
<p>In 2004, North Lawndale, along with every other community that today has a high number of underutilized schools, was among the top 25 neighborhoods in need of better schools. That assessment was made in a report by the Illinois Facilities Fund, which provides loans to non-profits, including charter schools. (The fund is now known as IFF.)</p>
<p>Daley and Duncan opened more than 100 new schools, mostly charters but also some magnet schools. They were more cautious when it came to closing schools, leaving some communities with a glut of classrooms.</p>
<p>North Lawndale has been caught in the middle, with five charter elementary schools, more than any other community area in the city. Three of these charter schools—Learn, Legacy and North Lawndale College Prep—have received strong financial and political support from the influential Steans Family Foundation, which focuses its philanthropy on North Lawndale.</p>
<p>A third of North Lawndale students who don’t attend their neighborhood school go to charters, according to CPS data.</p>
<p>Darren Tillis, a local businessman who co-chairs the community council charged with coming up with a plan for schools in the neighborhood, says that community leaders didn’t do enough to prevent this imbalance. North Lawndale wasn’t at the top of the list of neighborhoods that needed better schools, but it got the most new ones anyway.</p>
<p>“Who stood up and asked questions?” Tillis asks.</p>
<p>Still, the charter schools have given North Lawndale families some better options. Two of the five elementary charter schools are at Level 1, the district’s top rating on a performance scale that is based on test scores, improvement and attendance. One charter is at Level 3, the worst rating. In comparison, none of the 12 traditional neighborhood schools were at Level 1 in 2012, and nine received the worst rating.</p>
<p>Tillis, who is in his mid-40s, grew up in North Lawndale and says his parents didn’t have to go through the taxing process of worrying about where to send him for elementary school.</p>
<p>“The neighborhood school was seen as having a quality education,” he recalls.</p>
<p>But during that time, the community suffered its biggest blows. North Lawndale is famous for being the site of riots in 1968 following the assassination of the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr. These riots destroyed the businesses along Roosevelt Road.</p>
<p>Then, in the following decade, major businesses took off, including Sears, Zenith, Sunbeam and Western Electric. Families with means also left, sending the population plummeting from nearly 95,000 in 1970 to 47,296 in the1990 census.</p>
<p>Yet in the1990s, hope seemed to spring up. North Lawndale is just 15 minutes from downtown and close to a major medical district, so developers thought they might have a chance to lure higher-income homebuyers to the area. New houses began to pop up.</p>
<p>Around Homan Square at West Arthington and South Central Park (the location of the old Sears headquarters), gated communities of townhomes and single-family homes were built. Many of these homes were subsidized by New Homes for Chicago, a city housing program that encouraged mixed-income developments. In 2000, a new community center and park district facility opened up.</p>
<p>In 2005, the optimism about the neighborhood was evident. A plan developed through the New Communities Program (a development initiative funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation) put forth this bold vision: “By 2010, North Lawndale will have a growing and diverse population with a mix of incomes, generations and cultures. It will be a place where people choose to live, invest, raise their families and work.”</p>
<p>But these plans never materialized, derailed by a combination of unscrupulous landlords, the housing crisis during the recession and the collapse of Daley’s 2016 Olympic dreams.</p>
<p>Community activist Valerie Leonard drives down Douglas Boulevard, a wide, winding thoroughfare lined with greystones and deep, courtyard apartment buildings. Like others in the community, Leonard points to a major blow that came in 2005: the seizure by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development of 100 of the buildings along Douglas, Independence and some interior streets.&#160;&#160;</p>
<p>As Leonard tells the story, it started when a woman accidentally backed into a garage. Inspectors who came to look at the property found deplorable conditions in the building, which was owned by Lawndale Restoration Limited Partnership.</p>
<p>Inspectors went to look at other HUD-subsidized buildings owned by the partnership, which was managed by Cecil Butler, once a highly esteemed North Lawndale businessman.</p>
<p>Most of the buildings owned by the partnership could be identified by their thick brown windowpanes, Leonard says. “That one, that one, that one,” she says, pointing to one apartment building after the other. Altogether, the partnership lost 1,200 units of housing.</p>
<p>“When these buildings were foreclosed on, it was huge,” she says. “It was like a neutron bomb hit the area.”Since then, the federal government has sold the buildings to a variety of for-profit and non-profit owners. But Leonard notes that families have been slow to move back in.&#160;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in the mid-2000s, more new houses were built on various side streets. Many of the blocks are now an odd mix—two or three new houses in a row, a few greystones, an apartment building and empty lots.</p>
<p>Median home values rose by 10 percent throughout North Lawndale between 2000 and 2008, and the percent of owner-occupied units also rose, according to a report by the Metropolitan Planning Council.</p>
<p>Schools also got a boost. Michael Scott, an influential businessman who grew up in the area, was president of the CPS Board of Education for two separate terms in the 2000s. Under Scott’s watch, local schools got more than other neighborhoods for capital projects, according to a 2004 Catalyst analysis. (See “School repairs up on Scott’s watch” in the March 2004 issue of Catalyst Chicago.) Yet at the time, Scott noted the funds came after decades of neglect and were “a drop in the bucket” at best.</p>
<p>Scott also bought up parcels of empty land in the community, in anticipation that Chicago would host the Olympics. The sprawling Douglas Park in the center of North Lawndale was to be a venue for events.</p>
<p>Then, in 2008, the Olympic dream died and the bottom fell out of the housing market. (In 2009, Scott’s body was found in the Chicago River; the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office ruled his death was a suicide.)</p>
<p>Like many black neighborhoods on the West and South sides, North Lawndale was devastated by the foreclosure crisis. Boarded-up homes, both new and old, are now found on nearly every street.</p>
<p>Many of these buildings were owned by landlords who didn’t inform residents that they were losing their property, says Tracie Worthy, education organizer from the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, a not-for-profit housing organization.</p>
<p>“These landlords were continuing to collect rent while not paying their mortgage,” she says. “Residents didn’t find out until the sheriff showed up at their door and all of a sudden they had to move or were homeless.”</p>
<p>While the housing market in Chicago is rebounding in some communities, North Lawndale isn’t one of the lucky areas. On real estate websites, most properties listed are foreclosures or pre-foreclosures. More than a third of those currently on the market are for sale for less than $50,000, according to Trulia.com.</p>
<p>Also, as in many other communities with underutilized schools, North Lawndale lost population—and children—when its public housing projects were demolished. Ogden Courts was torn down in 2007, and though there are plans for redevelopment, the land where the buildings once stood along West Ogden Avenue is yet another stretch of vacant property.</p>
<p>The schools that remain in the neighborhood are remnants of North Lawndale’s heyday. Before white, mostly Jewish families abandoned North Lawndale, before the major businesses moved away, there was a school construction boom. Adding to the stock of early 1900s, grand old brick buildings with ornate molding, like Penn, nearly 10 buildings rose up around the neighborhood in the 1950s and early 1960s.</p>
<p>At the time, the area was bustling with families, and many of these schools were only blocks apart. Mason Elementary, which was built in 1922, got three additions, in 1958, 1964 and 1972. It became a sprawling campus of motley buildings that today house a charter school, a small high school and an elementary school with a dwindling enrollment.</p>
<p>Most of North Lawndale’s population was lost between the 1970s and 2000s. During that time, more than one-fifth of the residents left. Between 2000 and 2010, the population dropped by another 14 percent, according to the U.S. Census.</p>
<p>Many of the residents still in the community don’t have as many children. The number of school-age youngsters in North Lawndale fell by about 25 percent during the past decade.</p>
<p>At community meetings, CPS officials have brought PowerPoint presentations detailing the population loss in the areas. But Tracie Worthy, Valerie Leonard and others say population loss is beside the point—the presentations seem as though officials are trying to convince them of something they already know, something they live every day.</p>
<p>Leonard, who grew up in North Lawndale and whose father was the principal of Paderewski (a neighborhood school), is dismayed as she drives and walks through the neighborhood.</p>
<p>“Wow,” she says, stopping s at a newly constructed two-flat that has boarded-up windows and is marked with a red X, signaling demolition.</p>
<p>The one shining spot is the MLK apartments on 16th Street. The Lawndale Christian Development Corporation has space for a health clinic, a restaurant and a professional kitchen that caterers can use. Also, a fair housing exhibit center is planned for the first floor. “We want it to be a destination point around Chicago,” Worthy says.</p>
<p>A couple of blocks away, Lawndale Christian Development Corporation is building an art and technology center.</p>
<p>The vision is to provide adults with job training in industries where jobs exist, and give teenagers the opportunity to become involved in the arts.</p>
<p>Yet these hopeful developments don’t erase the current reality that the area is a desert—a grocery store desert, a healthy food desert, a technology desert, a job desert.</p>
<p>Worthy and others say they want to hang on to schools, not because they will be able to fill every seat in every classroom, but more because an empty school will be another blow, another institution lost.</p>
<p>“It feels like children are being punished,” Worthy says.</p>
<p>Betty Green, who is co-chair of the local Community Action Council, says that in many cases, the school is the only thing children and families have left. For 39 years, she was principal of Herzl Elementary. As time went by, she saw children coming to school scarred by one of the other signs of the neighborhood’s devastation: Many of them had parents in prison.</p>
<p>After she retired in 2008, Green started a mentoring program for children of the incarcerated or children who had been affected by incarceration. (See <a href="http://catalyst-chicago.org/2007/04/retiring-principal-new-mission/" type="external">Catalyst Chicago, April 2007</a>.)</p>
<p>Green says the discussion about space and closing schools doesn’t take into account the fact that schools provide stability.</p>
<p>“The children expect to see their classmates. They expect to see their teachers,” says Green. “When I was at Herzl, I had students whose parents and grandparents were also my students.”</p>
<p>Henson Principal Demetrius Hobson points out schools are one of the few places in the community with a group of people who have college degrees. As such, he sees himself and his staff serving as an example. Hobson came to the school a year and a half ago, and is working mightily to improve it.</p>
<p>Hobson says that drug dealers often sell on the corners surrounding the school; as he puts it, “young brothers work” the streets. With their presence glaringly evident to his students as they come to and from school, Hobson says he often feels as though he must sell education as a better alternative.</p>
<p>“We know the right path. We are the light bearers,” says Hobson, a young black man who went through the school leadership program at Harvard University. “We shine the way.”</p>
<p>A shuttered, discarded school sends the opposite message, Hobson notes.</p>
<p>Henson, just three blocks from Penn, is a hub for the community in other ways. It has a cozy health clinic run by Erie Health Center. Not only can students come in when they aren’t feeling well, but people in the community can also get appointments.</p>
<p>The clinic was inside Frazier Elementary until it was closed in 2007. Most of the students from Frazier went to Henson, so the health clinic followed the students.</p>
<p>Erie helped connect the school with the Greater Chicago Food Depository so that it could also house a food pantry. A sign outside reads “Free groceries,” rather than “Food pantry,” in an attempt to erase the stigma for people in need.</p>
<p>Inside the room is Euler Hatchett. She has lived in the community all her life, raised her children there and now is raising her nephew.</p>
<p>One day, Hatchett is cooking potatoes and showing parents how to prepare healthy meals. The smell of spices fills the air. Hatchett tells the story of what happened with her nephew during a previous round of school closings.</p>
<p>Her nephew was at Frazier when it was a traditional neighborhood school and shut down. He then went to the charter school that took over the building. That lasted a year.</p>
<p>“They found a reason to put him out,” Hatchett says.&#160; She didn’t feel welcomed at the charter school and didn’t like it. Her nephew later ended up at Henson.</p>
<p>The whole school action process was detrimental to her nephew, Hatchett says. The time span from when Frazier closed to when he ended up at Henson took a toll on him. Just as he got settled into a new environment, he was uprooted again and finally landed at Henson, where he got his academics back on track.</p>
<p>Hatchett says she wishes the powers-that-be would realize two things about her community as they talk about closing schools. One is that they are poor and need resources. The other is that they deserve resources.</p>
<p>&#160;“A lot of children here don’t have anything to eat,” Hatchett says. “Children and people in the community are hungry.</p>
<p>“They should take more consideration [into] helping people instead of throwing them out and down,” she adds.</p>
<p>“There are some beautiful people in this community, some beautiful children. Not everyone is bad.”</p>
<p>Tell us what you think. Leave a comment below, or email <a href="mailto:karp@catalyst-chicago.org" type="external">karp@catalyst-chicago.org</a>.</p> | A sign of stability | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/sign-stability/ | 2013-04-03 | 3left-center
| 3,054 | Most of the corners along 16th Street in the heart of the West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale are vacant lots On snowy winter days no one clears the sidewalks in front of the lots forcing pedestrians to trudge down the middle of the street Here and there a rundown building still stands8212some house little neighborhood stores others are boarded up and tagged with graffiti Only two new buildings exist a fire station and an apartment building on the site where Martin Luther King Jr once lived in 1966 during his stint in Chicago to protest the city8217s segregated housing Two schools remain The biggest one Penn is a greybeige mammoth structure On its marquee is a little prayer 8220Save our Schools8221 Penn and other neighborhood schools in North Lawndale have half as many students as they did a decade ago CPS officials have gone out of their way to emphasize that North Lawndale8217s population loss and the population loss in other mostly black West and South Side neighborhoods is the driving factor in the dwindling enrollment For that reason CPS has said schools must be closed But population loss is not the entire story Several converging factors from housing policies to social ills have led to fewer children in these Chicago neighborhoods 8220It was not a natural process8221 says Pauline Lipman an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago On top of outside factors Lipman says neighborhood schools were destabilized as the school district shifted its focus to what it calls 8220schools of choice8221 CPS slowly pulled money and resources out of neighborhood schools years before they were closed she insists The phenomenon of closing schools and moving toward charter schools is a national one Because most of the schools being closed serve black and sometimes Latino students activists and students from New York Detroit Washington DC and 15 other cities came together last year to file civil rights complaints with the US Department of Education and the U S Department of Justice Helen Moore a longtime Detroit activist says the closings of more than 300 neighborhood schools in her city over the past decade has led to even more population loss in alreadydevastated communities 8220I see blight everywhere8221 says Moore She partly blames CEO Barbara ByrdBennett who led the school system in Detroit from 2009 to 2011 On top of this added decline Moore says many children have dropped out of school because their mothers don8217t have money to get them to and from the new schools8212many of which are chartersamp160 CPS officials and advocates for school choice are virtually certain to disagree with Lipman8217s assertion that the district has long neglected neighborhood schools But one thing is clear The population decline that affects many schools has been worsened by the expansion of choice over the past decade Consider these statistics from a Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data for 2012 Only 40 percent of elementary students in North Lawndale attend their neighborhood school A decade ago the situation was reversed with 60 percent of students going to neighborhood schools and 40 percent traveling to schools elsewhere In 14 predominantly black South Side and West Side communities that CPS defines as 8220underutilized8221 an average of 54 percent of elementary students attend their neighborhood school In other communities twothirds of elementary students attend their neighborhood school In the 10 neighborhoods with the most children attending their neighborhood school six are welltodo neighborhoods on the North Side or Northwest Side The other four are Latino neighborhoods8211two on the Far Southeast Side and two on the Southwest Side of the city To a large degree this situation was created by design When former Mayor Richard M Daley and thenChief Executive Officer Arne Duncan launched Renaissance 2010 the central idea was to put new schools into communities that did not have enough good options and at the same time to shut down lowachieving schools In 2004 North Lawndale along with every other community that today has a high number of underutilized schools was among the top 25 neighborhoods in need of better schools That assessment was made in a report by the Illinois Facilities Fund which provides loans to nonprofits including charter schools The fund is now known as IFF Daley and Duncan opened more than 100 new schools mostly charters but also some magnet schools They were more cautious when it came to closing schools leaving some communities with a glut of classrooms North Lawndale has been caught in the middle with five charter elementary schools more than any other community area in the city Three of these charter schools8212Learn Legacy and North Lawndale College Prep8212have received strong financial and political support from the influential Steans Family Foundation which focuses its philanthropy on North Lawndale A third of North Lawndale students who don8217t attend their neighborhood school go to charters according to CPS data Darren Tillis a local businessman who cochairs the community council charged with coming up with a plan for schools in the neighborhood says that community leaders didn8217t do enough to prevent this imbalance North Lawndale wasn8217t at the top of the list of neighborhoods that needed better schools but it got the most new ones anyway 8220Who stood up and asked questions8221 Tillis asks Still the charter schools have given North Lawndale families some better options Two of the five elementary charter schools are at Level 1 the district8217s top rating on a performance scale that is based on test scores improvement and attendance One charter is at Level 3 the worst rating In comparison none of the 12 traditional neighborhood schools were at Level 1 in 2012 and nine received the worst rating Tillis who is in his mid40s grew up in North Lawndale and says his parents didn8217t have to go through the taxing process of worrying about where to send him for elementary school 8220The neighborhood school was seen as having a quality education8221 he recalls But during that time the community suffered its biggest blows North Lawndale is famous for being the site of riots in 1968 following the assassination of the RevMartin Luther King Jr These riots destroyed the businesses along Roosevelt Road Then in the following decade major businesses took off including Sears Zenith Sunbeam and Western Electric Families with means also left sending the population plummeting from nearly 95000 in 1970 to 47296 in the1990 census Yet in the1990s hope seemed to spring up North Lawndale is just 15 minutes from downtown and close to a major medical district so developers thought they might have a chance to lure higherincome homebuyers to the area New houses began to pop up Around Homan Square at West Arthington and South Central Park the location of the old Sears headquarters gated communities of townhomes and singlefamily homes were built Many of these homes were subsidized by New Homes for Chicago a city housing program that encouraged mixedincome developments In 2000 a new community center and park district facility opened up In 2005 the optimism about the neighborhood was evident A plan developed through the New Communities Program a development initiative funded by the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation put forth this bold vision 8220By 2010 North Lawndale will have a growing and diverse population with a mix of incomes generations and cultures It will be a place where people choose to live invest raise their families and work8221 But these plans never materialized derailed by a combination of unscrupulous landlords the housing crisis during the recession and the collapse of Daley8217s 2016 Olympic dreams Community activist Valerie Leonard drives down Douglas Boulevard a wide winding thoroughfare lined with greystones and deep courtyard apartment buildings Like others in the community Leonard points to a major blow that came in 2005 the seizure by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development of 100 of the buildings along Douglas Independence and some interior streetsamp160amp160 As Leonard tells the story it started when a woman accidentally backed into a garage Inspectors who came to look at the property found deplorable conditions in the building which was owned by Lawndale Restoration Limited Partnership Inspectors went to look at other HUDsubsidized buildings owned by the partnership which was managed by Cecil Butler once a highly esteemed North Lawndale businessman Most of the buildings owned by the partnership could be identified by their thick brown windowpanes Leonard says 8220That one that one that one8221 she says pointing to one apartment building after the other Altogether the partnership lost 1200 units of housing 8220When these buildings were foreclosed on it was huge8221 she says 8220It was like a neutron bomb hit the area8221Since then the federal government has sold the buildings to a variety of forprofit and nonprofit owners But Leonard notes that families have been slow to move back inamp160 Meanwhile in the mid2000s more new houses were built on various side streets Many of the blocks are now an odd mix8212two or three new houses in a row a few greystones an apartment building and empty lots Median home values rose by 10 percent throughout North Lawndale between 2000 and 2008 and the percent of owneroccupied units also rose according to a report by the Metropolitan Planning Council Schools also got a boost Michael Scott an influential businessman who grew up in the area was president of the CPS Board of Education for two separate terms in the 2000s Under Scott8217s watch local schools got more than other neighborhoods for capital projects according to a 2004 Catalyst analysis See 8220School repairs up on Scott8217s watch8221 in the March 2004 issue of Catalyst Chicago Yet at the time Scott noted the funds came after decades of neglect and were 8220a drop in the bucket8221 at best Scott also bought up parcels of empty land in the community in anticipation that Chicago would host the Olympics The sprawling Douglas Park in the center of North Lawndale was to be a venue for events Then in 2008 the Olympic dream died and the bottom fell out of the housing market In 2009 Scott8217s body was found in the Chicago River the Cook County Medical Examiner8217s office ruled his death was a suicide Like many black neighborhoods on the West and South sides North Lawndale was devastated by the foreclosure crisis Boardedup homes both new and old are now found on nearly every street Many of these buildings were owned by landlords who didn8217t inform residents that they were losing their property says Tracie Worthy education organizer from the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation a notforprofit housing organization 8220These landlords were continuing to collect rent while not paying their mortgage8221 she says 8220Residents didn8217t find out until the sheriff showed up at their door and all of a sudden they had to move or were homeless8221 While the housing market in Chicago is rebounding in some communities North Lawndale isn8217t one of the lucky areas On real estate websites most properties listed are foreclosures or preforeclosures More than a third of those currently on the market are for sale for less than 50000 according to Truliacom Also as in many other communities with underutilized schools North Lawndale lost population8212and children8212when its public housing projects were demolished Ogden Courts was torn down in 2007 and though there are plans for redevelopment the land where the buildings once stood along West Ogden Avenue is yet another stretch of vacant property The schools that remain in the neighborhood are remnants of North Lawndale8217s heyday Before white mostly Jewish families abandoned North Lawndale before the major businesses moved away there was a school construction boom Adding to the stock of early 1900s grand old brick buildings with ornate molding like Penn nearly 10 buildings rose up around the neighborhood in the 1950s and early 1960s At the time the area was bustling with families and many of these schools were only blocks apart Mason Elementary which was built in 1922 got three additions in 1958 1964 and 1972 It became a sprawling campus of motley buildings that today house a charter school a small high school and an elementary school with a dwindling enrollment Most of North Lawndale8217s population was lost between the 1970s and 2000s During that time more than onefifth of the residents left Between 2000 and 2010 the population dropped by another 14 percent according to the US Census Many of the residents still in the community don8217t have as many children The number of schoolage youngsters in North Lawndale fell by about 25 percent during the past decade At community meetings CPS officials have brought PowerPoint presentations detailing the population loss in the areas But Tracie Worthy Valerie Leonard and others say population loss is beside the point8212the presentations seem as though officials are trying to convince them of something they already know something they live every day Leonard who grew up in North Lawndale and whose father was the principal of Paderewski a neighborhood school is dismayed as she drives and walks through the neighborhood 8220Wow8221 she says stopping s at a newly constructed twoflat that has boardedup windows and is marked with a red X signaling demolition The one shining spot is the MLK apartments on 16th Street The Lawndale Christian Development Corporation has space for a health clinic a restaurant and a professional kitchen that caterers can use Also a fair housing exhibit center is planned for the first floor 8220We want it to be a destination point around Chicago8221 Worthy says A couple of blocks away Lawndale Christian Development Corporation is building an art and technology center The vision is to provide adults with job training in industries where jobs exist and give teenagers the opportunity to become involved in the arts Yet these hopeful developments don8217t erase the current reality that the area is a desert8212a grocery store desert a healthy food desert a technology desert a job desert Worthy and others say they want to hang on to schools not because they will be able to fill every seat in every classroom but more because an empty school will be another blow another institution lost 8220It feels like children are being punished8221 Worthy says Betty Green who is cochair of the local Community Action Council says that in many cases the school is the only thing children and families have left For 39 years she was principal of Herzl Elementary As time went by she saw children coming to school scarred by one of the other signs of the neighborhood8217s devastation Many of them had parents in prison After she retired in 2008 Green started a mentoring program for children of the incarcerated or children who had been affected by incarceration See Catalyst Chicago April 2007 Green says the discussion about space and closing schools doesn8217t take into account the fact that schools provide stability 8220The children expect to see their classmates They expect to see their teachers8221 says Green 8220When I was at Herzl I had students whose parents and grandparents were also my students8221 Henson Principal Demetrius Hobson points out schools are one of the few places in the community with a group of people who have college degrees As such he sees himself and his staff serving as an example Hobson came to the school a year and a half ago and is working mightily to improve it Hobson says that drug dealers often sell on the corners surrounding the school as he puts it 8220young brothers work8221 the streets With their presence glaringly evident to his students as they come to and from school Hobson says he often feels as though he must sell education as a better alternative 8220We know the right path We are the light bearers8221 says Hobson a young black man who went through the school leadership program at Harvard University 8220We shine the way8221 A shuttered discarded school sends the opposite message Hobson notes Henson just three blocks from Penn is a hub for the community in other ways It has a cozy health clinic run by Erie Health Center Not only can students come in when they aren8217t feeling well but people in the community can also get appointments The clinic was inside Frazier Elementary until it was closed in 2007 Most of the students from Frazier went to Henson so the health clinic followed the students Erie helped connect the school with the Greater Chicago Food Depository so that it could also house a food pantry A sign outside reads 8220Free groceries8221 rather than 8220Food pantry8221 in an attempt to erase the stigma for people in need Inside the room is Euler Hatchett She has lived in the community all her life raised her children there and now is raising her nephew One day Hatchett is cooking potatoes and showing parents how to prepare healthy meals The smell of spices fills the air Hatchett tells the story of what happened with her nephew during a previous round of school closings Her nephew was at Frazier when it was a traditional neighborhood school and shut down He then went to the charter school that took over the building That lasted a year 8220They found a reason to put him out8221 Hatchett saysamp160 She didn8217t feel welcomed at the charter school and didn8217t like it Her nephew later ended up at Henson The whole school action process was detrimental to her nephew Hatchett says The time span from when Frazier closed to when he ended up at Henson took a toll on him Just as he got settled into a new environment he was uprooted again and finally landed at Henson where he got his academics back on track Hatchett says she wishes the powersthatbe would realize two things about her community as they talk about closing schools One is that they are poor and need resources The other is that they deserve resources amp1608220A lot of children here don8217t have anything to eat8221 Hatchett says 8220Children and people in the community are hungry 8220They should take more consideration into helping people instead of throwing them out and down8221 she adds 8220There are some beautiful people in this community some beautiful children Not everyone is bad8221 Tell us what you think Leave a comment below or email karpcatalystchicagoorg | Most/ADJ of/ADP the/DET corners/NOUN along/ADP 16th/ADJ Street/PROPN in/ADP the/DET heart/NOUN of/ADP the/DET West/PROPN Side/PROPN neighborhood/NOUN of/ADP North/PROPN Lawndale/PROPN are/AUX vacant/ADJ lots/NOUN On/ADP snowy/ADJ winter/NOUN days/NOUN no/DET one/NOUN clears/VERB the/DET sidewalks/NOUN in/ADP front/NOUN of/ADP the/DET lots/NOUN forcing/VERB pedestrians/NOUN to/PART trudge/VERB down/ADP 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<p>Thanks to the president’s press conference last week—broadcast live from the bridge of USS Caine (“Ahh, but the strawberries that’s… that’s where I had them…”)—the only political topic of conversation that matters is when and how President Donald Trump will leave office.</p>
<p>Conventional thinking has the Republican majority in Congress rising up in indignation, pouring over purloined tax returns for princely emoluments from some suspect foreign power, and then joining the Democrats to remove Trump from the highest office.</p>
<p>Those who like their morning coffee with some conspiracy have Trump going down as a Manchurian president, done in by the revelation not just that Putin tilted the electoral wheels with the connivance of the disgraced General Michael Flynn, but that Trump’s entourage is a cell of fellow travellers, in office to pay off the venture capital that Putin spread around Trump Inc. when Donald had to turn to the Russian mob for a payday loan.</p>
<p>The problem with both paths from power is that they assume an orderly transition, based on precedent and succession clauses in the Constitution, not an assassination worthy of Cesarian Rome (“Et tu, Mitch?”) or some of the slow poisons mixed into the sacraments that have been known to speed change among the popes.</p>
<p>Alas, palace intrigue in Washington is as American as the Bill of Rights, which may explain why so many plotters come as if a well-armed militia.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>According to the storyboards used in most high schools (not to mention by cable commentators), American democracy is the last, best-hope on earth—the munificent bequest of the founding fathers—and a paradise exempt from palace revolutions, coups, putsches, cabals, nights of the long knives, and seizures of the radio station. After all, we’re not Guatemala or Sierra Leone.</p>
<p>Consistent with the brochures passed out at Independence Hall, the United States only replaces its leaders after sober deliberations and presidential debates—with Wolf Blitzer moderating.</p>
<p>If Trump is to leave office before his term expires, it should only be according to the rules established in the Constitution, which has two sections dealing with the removal of the president from office. Article Two states:</p>
<p>The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.</p>
<p>Then there is the 25th Amendment, which, in part, reads:</p>
<p>Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.</p>
<p>Since 1789, when the Constitution was ratified, no president has been convicted of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”</p>
<p>Nor since 1967, when the 25th Amendment passed, has a president been deemed incompetent and removed by a cabinet camarilla (plus a doctor’s note).</p>
<p>That said, the United States has turned palace revolutions into a political art, so that many presidencies have been swept away, as if by Medici daggers. In the last 238 years, presidents—many as incompetent as Donald Trump, if not worse—have been shot, blackmailed, threatened, and bullied until they left office.</p>
<p>One in three presidencies have ended before their time, which explains how and why many of those who have risen to the highest office have done so on the back of illness, assassination, black ops, and other instruments of the putsch.</p>
<p>I know, I know, you want to believe that American democracy is among the oldest on the planet, and that our leaders are descended from Athenian idealism, not Bohemian defenestration.</p>
<p>The norm for much of American history, however, is that when some elements of the republic don’t like the choice made at the ballot box, they overthrow the president—by fair means or murder most foul.</p>
<p>By Trump’s reasoning, he’s serving on a four-year contract, as called for in the Constitution. In truth, he has the job security of an NFL cornerback, who can be cut anytime “to clear cap space” for the ruling class.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>For those who don’t buy the theory that the United States is a gated, banana republic, let’s have a review of a few presidencies, starting with Abraham Lincoln’s, that came to premature endings:</p>
<p>—As everyone knows, Lincoln was assassinated, and the co-conspirators of gunman John Wilkes Booth could well have filled another Ford Theater, as they included not just fellow assassins (who also shot William Seward), but horse handlers, doctors, and proprietors of safe houses in rural Maryland and Virginia.</p>
<p>—Andrew Johnson, after Lincoln, served out his term, although he was impeached and only survived because his supporters set up a slush fund of $150,000 to buy swing votes at theSenate impeachment trial. (Not something you read about in Profiles in Courage.)</p>
<p>—The presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes was over almost as it began, as true ballot fraud (not those mythical buses rolling into New Hampshire) put him in office.</p>
<p>—James Garfield, who succeeded Hayes, was shot early in his term by Charles Guiteau, who (at least in his deranged fantasies) was closely allied with Vice-President Chester Arthur’s patronage party.</p>
<p>When he pulled the trigger at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C., Guiteau shouted: “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!” And he was, to the delight of fix-it man Roscoe Conkling.</p>
<p>—An anarchist from the Midwest, Leon Czolgosz, murdered President William McKinley in 1901, allowing—in the words of political boss Mark Hanna—“that damned cowboy” (Teddy Roosevelt) to become president.</p>
<p>—Roosevelt, himself, while campaigning in 1912 against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, was shot but not killed.</p>
<p>—Warren Harding died in office in summer 1923, while barnstorming the country. His quackish doctor, Charles “Doc” Sawyer, at first thought he had eaten bad shellfish in Alaska. Others thought maybe he was poisoned, although later it became evident that Harding suffered from heart disease.</p>
<p>Conspiracists, however, do wonder why the ailing U.S. president got so little professional care in the last days of his life (he died in a San Francisco hotel suite), as was the case in 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt became ill and died in Warm Springs.</p>
<p>—President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963. Even though his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had connections to the FBI, CIA, Russia, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (if not Ted Cruz’s father), he was consigned to the dustbin of history as a “lone gunman,” a species of agitation unique to American politics.</p>
<p>—In summer 1974, Richard Nixon resigned during his second term, the victim of his own paranoia and Watergate-related crimes, but with a shove out the door from unelected co-conspirators in the FBI (see Throat, Deep), CIA, the Washington Post, and other stalwarts in the capital.</p>
<p>—The Iranian hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter his presidency, and in 1981 another assassin (also of the lone gunman persuasion) shot and seriously wounded President Ronald Reagan, although he survived and stayed in office.</p>
<p>—Technically a cabal did not remove President George W. Bush but lifted him to power, thanks to the good offices of a compliant Supreme Court, which did not trust Floridians to recount the contested ballots in the 2000 presidential election.</p>
<p>My point with all these examples is that, for a country that prides itself on the so-called “democratic process” and all that Inauguration Day, CNN hogwash about “the peaceful transfer of power,” many presidencies have begun or ended because of assassins, conspirators, plotters, stalwarts, witch doctors, or bureaucratic coups d’état, all of which ought to give Trump pause whenever bad shellfish are on the menu at Mar-a-Lago or an anarchist heads his way.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>What are the chances that someone will shoot Trump? Let’s hope they are poor. In the bloodstream of democracy, assassinations are a toxin, more fit for Czarist Russia or some African country with a near-endless supply of ambitious colonels.</p>
<p>What is remarkable in American history is that the republic has survived so many gun attacks on its highest elected officials. Overall, there have been more than twenty attempts on the lives of American presidents.</p>
<p>The hope is that the president travels safely in the bubble of Secret Service protection. That said, I am sure Trump’s erratic behavior, in his first month of office, has given pause to his protectors, who no doubt have had to scramble whenever he decides to dump his press pool and, say, play golf or head to a local restaurant.</p>
<p>Nor can I imagine that the Secret Service is happy that his weekend residences are a Florida beach club (still raffling membership to anyone with two-hundred grand) and a New York apartment building, where it must be difficult to endlessly check visitors and their guests (as opposed, say, to Camp David on its own military reservation).</p>
<p>I could well imagine that a growing preoccupation among Trump’s security detail is how to keep him safe from armed drones, which presumably can find U.S. officials as easily as they can the ISIS or Taliban leadership. If Amazon or UPS can send a drone to your front door, so, too, presumably, can other retailers of anarchy.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>More likely than a physical attack is that Trump will find himself at the sharp end of a silent coup, the kind of sting that the FBI and others in Washington ran against Richard Nixon. In that case, an embarrassing series of leaks were orchestrated to agitate the press and Congress to remove the President from office.</p>
<p>Who might organize such a plot against Donald Trump?</p>
<p>At the moment high on the list of potential conspirators would be the so-called Deep State of the intelligence agencies and corporate black holes around Washington that have a variety of grievances against Trump.</p>
<p>For starters, both the NSA and the CIA are now subject to criminal investigations over leaks that revealed compromising phones calls between General Flynn and the Russians.</p>
<p>Someone in one of the agencies leaked the contents of a phone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington, revealing that the general had, in fact, discussed sanctions against Russia that the Obama administration had imposed after election tampering was confirmed in an FBI investigation.</p>
<p>I assume that nearly all of the intelligence agencies around Washington (there are some seventeen) are tapping the phone of the Russian ambassador (why else have bugs?), so that the search for the leaker will not be easy.</p>
<p>But when the usual suspects are rounded up and paraded to the stockade, you can be sure that the conflict will draw even sharper battle lines between Trump and the Parallax Corporation, the deadly front company at the center of the 1974 Alan Pakula political thriller.</p>
<p>More accomplices to the intrigue? Democrats in opposition—despairing that they don’t have the votes in the House to impeach (i.e., indict) or the votes in the Senate to convict—will no doubt turn to far-flung sources to find a “throw-down gun,” that is, “supplied” evidence that would make a conflict-of-interest conviction a lot easier.</p>
<p>For some conspirators the lowest-hanging dirt is probably the dealings of the Trump campaign in Russia, which is already the subject of an FBI investigation and various headline-chasing congressional committees. FBI Director Comey’s limousine, parked ominously in front of the capitol, cannot have been reassuring to the administration.</p>
<p>Some cabalists are hopeful that, by forcing the release of Trump’s taxes, other smoking guns might be found. Personally, I doubt anything in his taxes will bring down his presidency. Embarrass him? Sure, especially if he is not as rich as he boasted to those eager apprentices or if his taxes are a mountain of losses carried forward, from those moments when the “art of the deal” was to con shareholders, hedge funds, banks, et al. into paying for his many blunders.</p>
<p>The release of his tax forms would, however, give Trump’s opponents a road map to his fortune or to favors outstanding, especially if any foreign governments view the president as an in-the-money option.</p>
<p>More likely, there is be found among his many partners (his business model is to franchise the Trump brand name for a 30 percent stake in large projects) quasi-governmental pools of money from the Persian Gulf and Asia, so-called “sovereign” funds, which is how many emerging nations stash their money along Fifth Avenue.</p>
<p>What better place to hide money than in New York real estate, and who better to front the transaction than cable’s-own Donald Trump?</p>
<p>The emoluments clause in the Constitution, drafted in 1789, did not understand the essence of Russian flight capital in 2017 or how a New York real estate empire could be built on hot money from around world. But James Madison was well acquainted with earlier Donald Trumps, as when he wrote:</p>
<p>The stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it, by clamours and combinations.</p>
<p>Madison might have the explanation why the speculator is now betting on politics.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>How does Trump go down?</p>
<p>For starters, expect to see street demonstrations continue to flourish (some may be spontaneous, others may have sponsors) and that many will target members of the House and Senate in vulnerable constituencies.</p>
<p>At the same time articles will circulate, mostly on the Internet, about Trump’s mental incapacities—his narcissism, fragmented speech patterns, paranoia, and detachment from reality. Get ready for a parade of online medical experts testifying about his dictatorial fantasies.</p>
<p>Aides will do their best to keep him from looking like Charles Foster (aka Citizen) Kane (“There’s only one person in the world who’s going to decide what I’m going to do and that’s me…”) or Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle (“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets”), but the real Trump will never be offline for long.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the White House will increasingly come to resemble Fort Apache or Little Bighorn, a lonely redoubt in Indian country. By that point, all those corporate CEOs in the cabinet will be taking long lunches and gossiping with their staff, while the government becomes a subsidiary of Trump, his immediate family, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and the Steve Miller band of one true believer.</p>
<p>Every day in the press will come various leaks and documents all of which will be designed to make Trump look like a Russian dupe, swindler, inside trader, riverboat gambler, or confidence man.</p>
<p>Some of the leaks will become subject to congressional investigation at which point the many officials that Trump has fired (Flynn et al.) will take to the microphones with primetime anecdotes about his vanity, use of the Oval Office to peddle influence and condos, or sweethearts.</p>
<p>Just so the storyline is clear to a majority of Americans, Ben Affleck will direct a blockbuster movie about a president gone mad in office (Original Intent), and the country saved only by a crusading CIA agent (Ben Affleck), who has orders from shadowy bosses to take down the tyrant (Michael Douglas) and his mole of a Russian wife (Angelina Jolie, but without all the tatts).</p>
<p>Lacking a smoking gun indicating that the President actively conspired with Russia during the election or that he was personally aware of a Putin shell company with investments in a Trump development, Congress will cite numerous presidential aides for contempt of Congress until an independent prosecutor, Benjamin Civiletti, of Watergate fame, is appointed. (The revenge of the Democrats for Whitewater and Monica’s dress.)</p>
<p>On slow days for news, tearful women with Flashdance hairdos who now work as “personal trainers” will parade before the cameras and tell how Trump tried to entice them into the steam room at Mar-a-Lago.</p>
<p>Fed by every Trump-hating agency in Washington, the special prosecutor will have a field day picking apart the offal of Trump’s real estate speculations, not to mention the public company that fleeced investors of almost $1 billion.</p>
<p>Trump will refuse to allow either his family or senior staff to testify before Congress or the special prosecutor, citing executive privilege and even Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to justify his refusal to cooperate, in what he deems to be “wartime”. To emphasize the point he will start wearing a uniform.</p>
<p>Although Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be long gone, the Bannon praetorian guard will announce that Iran has concrete plans to attack Israel with long-range missiles, some of which—no one is quite sure—might be tipped with tactical nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Several U.S. Navy fleets will be dispatched to the Persian Gulf while a Marine Corps brigade is flown into western Pakistan, between Quetta and the Iranian border. At the same time the CIA and several other intelligence agencies will leak to the press that the Trump administration has fabricated the readiness of Iranian missiles or that government’s rumors of war.</p>
<p>With the Supreme Court hearing evidence in the case Trump v. United States of America about the extent of executive privilege and how it applies to members of a president’s immediate family, the swing vote in the case will belong to the newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, who has made it known to his clerks that James Madison thought presidents “ought to be accountable” to the people (original intent?), through the Congress.</p>
<p>Before the Supreme Court gives its opinion, Trump will resign, blaming the Clintons, Barack Obama, CNN, the “failing” New York Times, the Washington Post, the CIA and NSA, the FBI, the Democratic leadership in Congress, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, “overrated actress” Meryl Streep, Jake Tapper, Oprah Winfrey, Paul Krugman, mullahs in Iran, and the Russians. It’s the mother of all rants.</p>
<p>In the last scene of the movie, after Ben Affleck has brought down the president (although for whom and why he’s unsure), the camera focuses on two men talking quietly about Trump at the bar of the Cosmos Club in Washington.</p>
<p>“You know,” one of them is heard to say, “he’s right.”</p>
<p>Matthew Stevenson, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, is the author of many books including, most recently, <a href="" type="internal">Reading the Rails</a>.</p> | The Parallax View of Donald Trump | true | https://counterpunch.org/2017/02/24/the-parallax-view-of-donald-trump/ | 2017-02-24 | 4left
| 3,054 | Thanks to the president8217s press conference last week8212broadcast live from the bridge of USS Caine 8220Ahh but the strawberries that8217s8230 that8217s where I had them823082218212the only political topic of conversation that matters is when and how President Donald Trump will leave office Conventional thinking has the Republican majority in Congress rising up in indignation pouring over purloined tax returns for princely emoluments from some suspect foreign power and then joining the Democrats to remove Trump from the highest office Those who like their morning coffee with some conspiracy have Trump going down as a Manchurian president done in by the revelation not just that Putin tilted the electoral wheels with the connivance of the disgraced General Michael Flynn but that Trump8217s entourage is a cell of fellow travellers in office to pay off the venture capital that Putin spread around Trump Inc when Donald had to turn to the Russian mob for a payday loan The problem with both paths from power is that they assume an orderly transition based on precedent and succession clauses in the Constitution not an assassination worthy of Cesarian Rome 8220Et tu Mitch8221 or some of the slow poisons mixed into the sacraments that have been known to speed change among the popes Alas palace intrigue in Washington is as American as the Bill of Rights which may explain why so many plotters come as if a wellarmed militia According to the storyboards used in most high schools not to mention by cable commentators American democracy is the last besthope on earth8212the munificent bequest of the founding fathers8212and a paradise exempt from palace revolutions coups putsches cabals nights of the long knives and seizures of the radio station After all we8217re not Guatemala or Sierra Leone Consistent with the brochures passed out at Independence Hall the United States only replaces its leaders after sober deliberations and presidential debates8212with Wolf Blitzer moderating If Trump is to leave office before his term expires it should only be according to the rules established in the Constitution which has two sections dealing with the removal of the president from office Article Two states The President Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for and Conviction of Treason Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors Then there is the 25th Amendment which in part reads Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President Since 1789 when the Constitution was ratified no president has been convicted of 8220Treason Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors8221 Nor since 1967 when the 25th Amendment passed has a president been deemed incompetent and removed by a cabinet camarilla plus a doctor8217s note That said the United States has turned palace revolutions into a political art so that many presidencies have been swept away as if by Medici daggers In the last 238 years presidents8212many as incompetent as Donald Trump if not worse8212have been shot blackmailed threatened and bullied until they left office One in three presidencies have ended before their time which explains how and why many of those who have risen to the highest office have done so on the back of illness assassination black ops and other instruments of the putsch I know I know you want to believe that American democracy is among the oldest on the planet and that our leaders are descended from Athenian idealism not Bohemian defenestration The norm for much of American history however is that when some elements of the republic don8217t like the choice made at the ballot box they overthrow the president8212by fair means or murder most foul By Trump8217s reasoning he8217s serving on a fouryear contract as called for in the Constitution In truth he has the job security of an NFL cornerback who can be cut anytime 8220to clear cap space8221 for the ruling class For those who don8217t buy the theory that the United States is a gated banana republic let8217s have a review of a few presidencies starting with Abraham Lincoln8217s that came to premature endings 8212As everyone knows Lincoln was assassinated and the coconspirators of gunman John Wilkes Booth could well have filled another Ford Theater as they included not just fellow assassins who also shot William Seward but horse handlers doctors and proprietors of safe houses in rural Maryland and Virginia 8212Andrew Johnson after Lincoln served out his term although he was impeached and only survived because his supporters set up a slush fund of 150000 to buy swing votes at theSenate impeachment trial Not something you read about in Profiles in Courage 8212The presidency of Rutherford B Hayes was over almost as it began as true ballot fraud not those mythical buses rolling into New Hampshire put him in office 8212James Garfield who succeeded Hayes was shot early in his term by Charles Guiteau who at least in his deranged fantasies was closely allied with VicePresident Chester Arthur8217s patronage party When he pulled the trigger at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington DC Guiteau shouted 8220I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President8221 And he was to the delight of fixit man Roscoe Conkling 8212An anarchist from the Midwest Leon Czolgosz murdered President William McKinley in 1901 allowing8212in the words of political boss Mark Hanna82128220that damned cowboy8221 Teddy Roosevelt to become president 8212Roosevelt himself while campaigning in 1912 against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson was shot but not killed 8212Warren Harding died in office in summer 1923 while barnstorming the country His quackish doctor Charles 8220Doc8221 Sawyer at first thought he had eaten bad shellfish in Alaska Others thought maybe he was poisoned although later it became evident that Harding suffered from heart disease Conspiracists however do wonder why the ailing US president got so little professional care in the last days of his life he died in a San Francisco hotel suite as was the case in 1945 when President Franklin Roosevelt became ill and died in Warm Springs 8212President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas in November 1963 Even though his alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had connections to the FBI CIA Russia and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee if not Ted Cruz8217s father he was consigned to the dustbin of history as a 8220lone gunman8221 a species of agitation unique to American politics 8212In summer 1974 Richard Nixon resigned during his second term the victim of his own paranoia and Watergaterelated crimes but with a shove out the door from unelected coconspirators in the FBI see Throat Deep CIA the Washington Post and other stalwarts in the capital 8212The Iranian hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter his presidency and in 1981 another assassin also of the lone gunman persuasion shot and seriously wounded President Ronald Reagan although he survived and stayed in office 8212Technically a cabal did not remove President George W Bush but lifted him to power thanks to the good offices of a compliant Supreme Court which did not trust Floridians to recount the contested ballots in the 2000 presidential election My point with all these examples is that for a country that prides itself on the socalled 8220democratic process8221 and all that Inauguration Day CNN hogwash about 8220the peaceful transfer of power8221 many presidencies have begun or ended because of assassins conspirators plotters stalwarts witch doctors or bureaucratic coups d8217233tat all of which ought to give Trump pause whenever bad shellfish are on the menu at MaraLago or an anarchist heads his way What are the chances that someone will shoot Trump Let8217s hope they are poor In the bloodstream of democracy assassinations are a toxin more fit for Czarist Russia or some African country with a nearendless supply of ambitious colonels What is remarkable in American history is that the republic has survived so many gun attacks on its highest elected officials Overall there have been more than twenty attempts on the lives of American presidents The hope is that the president travels safely in the bubble of Secret Service protection That said I am sure Trump8217s erratic behavior in his first month of office has given pause to his protectors who no doubt have had to scramble whenever he decides to dump his press pool and say play golf or head to a local restaurant Nor can I imagine that the Secret Service is happy that his weekend residences are a Florida beach club still raffling membership to anyone with twohundred grand and a New York apartment building where it must be difficult to endlessly check visitors and their guests as opposed say to Camp David on its own military reservation I could well imagine that a growing preoccupation among Trump8217s security detail is how to keep him safe from armed drones which presumably can find US officials as easily as they can the ISIS or Taliban leadership If Amazon or UPS can send a drone to your front door so too presumably can other retailers of anarchy More likely than a physical attack is that Trump will find himself at the sharp end of a silent coup the kind of sting that the FBI and others in Washington ran against Richard Nixon In that case an embarrassing series of leaks were orchestrated to agitate the press and Congress to remove the President from office Who might organize such a plot against Donald Trump At the moment high on the list of potential conspirators would be the socalled Deep State of the intelligence agencies and corporate black holes around Washington that have a variety of grievances against Trump For starters both the NSA and the CIA are now subject to criminal investigations over leaks that revealed compromising phones calls between General Flynn and the Russians Someone in one of the agencies leaked the contents of a phone call between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to Washington revealing that the general had in fact discussed sanctions against Russia that the Obama administration had imposed after election tampering was confirmed in an FBI investigation I assume that nearly all of the intelligence agencies around Washington there are some seventeen are tapping the phone of the Russian ambassador why else have bugs so that the search for the leaker will not be easy But when the usual suspects are rounded up and paraded to the stockade you can be sure that the conflict will draw even sharper battle lines between Trump and the Parallax Corporation the deadly front company at the center of the 1974 Alan Pakula political thriller More accomplices to the intrigue Democrats in opposition8212despairing that they don8217t have the votes in the House to impeach ie indict or the votes in the Senate to convict8212will no doubt turn to farflung sources to find a 8220throwdown gun8221 that is 8220supplied8221 evidence that would make a conflictofinterest conviction a lot easier For some conspirators the lowesthanging dirt is probably the dealings of the Trump campaign in Russia which is already the subject of an FBI investigation and various headlinechasing congressional committees FBI Director Comey8217s limousine parked ominously in front of the capitol cannot have been reassuring to the administration Some cabalists are hopeful that by forcing the release of Trump8217s taxes other smoking guns might be found Personally I doubt anything in his taxes will bring down his presidency Embarrass him Sure especially if he is not as rich as he boasted to those eager apprentices or if his taxes are a mountain of losses carried forward from those moments when the 8220art of the deal8221 was to con shareholders hedge funds banks et al into paying for his many blunders The release of his tax forms would however give Trump8217s opponents a road map to his fortune or to favors outstanding especially if any foreign governments view the president as an inthemoney option More likely there is be found among his many partners his business model is to franchise the Trump brand name for a 30 percent stake in large projects quasigovernmental pools of money from the Persian Gulf and Asia socalled 8220sovereign8221 funds which is how many emerging nations stash their money along Fifth Avenue What better place to hide money than in New York real estate and who better to front the transaction than cable8217sown Donald Trump The emoluments clause in the Constitution drafted in 1789 did not understand the essence of Russian flight capital in 2017 or how a New York real estate empire could be built on hot money from around world But James Madison was well acquainted with earlier Donald Trumps as when he wrote The stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government at once its tool and its tyrant bribed by its largesses and overawing it by clamours and combinations Madison might have the explanation why the speculator is now betting on politics How does Trump go down For starters expect to see street demonstrations continue to flourish some may be spontaneous others may have sponsors and that many will target members of the House and Senate in vulnerable constituencies At the same time articles will circulate mostly on the Internet about Trump8217s mental incapacities8212his narcissism fragmented speech patterns paranoia and detachment from reality Get ready for a parade of online medical experts testifying about his dictatorial fantasies Aides will do their best to keep him from looking like Charles Foster aka Citizen Kane 8220There8217s only one person in the world who8217s going to decide what I8217m going to do and that8217s me82308221 or Taxi Driver8217s Travis Bickle 8220Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets8221 but the real Trump will never be offline for long Meanwhile the White House will increasingly come to resemble Fort Apache or Little Bighorn a lonely redoubt in Indian country By that point all those corporate CEOs in the cabinet will be taking long lunches and gossiping with their staff while the government becomes a subsidiary of Trump his immediate family Jared Kushner Steve Bannon Kellyanne Conway and the Steve Miller band of one true believer Every day in the press will come various leaks and documents all of which will be designed to make Trump look like a Russian dupe swindler inside trader riverboat gambler or confidence man Some of the leaks will become subject to congressional investigation at which point the many officials that Trump has fired Flynn et al will take to the microphones with primetime anecdotes about his vanity use of the Oval Office to peddle influence and condos or sweethearts Just so the storyline is clear to a majority of Americans Ben Affleck will direct a blockbuster movie about a president gone mad in office Original Intent and the country saved only by a crusading CIA agent Ben Affleck who has orders from shadowy bosses to take down the tyrant Michael Douglas and his mole of a Russian wife Angelina Jolie but without all the tatts Lacking a smoking gun indicating that the President actively conspired with Russia during the election or that he was personally aware of a Putin shell company with investments in a Trump development Congress will cite numerous presidential aides for contempt of Congress until an independent prosecutor Benjamin Civiletti of Watergate fame is appointed The revenge of the Democrats for Whitewater and Monica8217s dress On slow days for news tearful women with Flashdance hairdos who now work as 8220personal trainers8221 will parade before the cameras and tell how Trump tried to entice them into the steam room at MaraLago Fed by every Trumphating agency in Washington the special prosecutor will have a field day picking apart the offal of Trump8217s real estate speculations not to mention the public company that fleeced investors of almost 1 billion Trump will refuse to allow either his family or senior staff to testify before Congress or the special prosecutor citing executive privilege and even Abraham Lincoln8217s suspension of habeas corpus to justify his refusal to cooperate in what he deems to be 8220wartime8221 To emphasize the point he will start wearing a uniform Although Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be long gone the Bannon praetorian guard will announce that Iran has concrete plans to attack Israel with longrange missiles some of which8212no one is quite sure8212might be tipped with tactical nuclear weapons Several US Navy fleets will be dispatched to the Persian Gulf while a Marine Corps brigade is flown into western Pakistan between Quetta and the Iranian border At the same time the CIA and several other intelligence agencies will leak to the press that the Trump administration has fabricated the readiness of Iranian missiles or that government8217s rumors of war With the Supreme Court hearing evidence in the case Trump v United States of America about the extent of executive privilege and how it applies to members of a president8217s immediate family the swing vote in the case will belong to the newest Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch who has made it known to his clerks that James Madison thought presidents 8220ought to be accountable8221 to the people original intent through the Congress Before the Supreme Court gives its opinion Trump will resign blaming the Clintons Barack Obama CNN the 8220failing8221 New York Times the Washington Post the CIA and NSA the FBI the Democratic leadership in Congress Bill Gates Warren Buffett John McCain Lindsey Graham 8220overrated actress8221 Meryl Streep Jake Tapper Oprah Winfrey Paul Krugman mullahs in Iran and the Russians It8217s the mother of all rants In the last scene of the movie after Ben Affleck has brought down the president although for whom and why he8217s unsure the camera focuses on two men talking quietly about Trump at the bar of the Cosmos Club in Washington 8220You know8221 one of them is heard to say 8220he8217s right8221 Matthew Stevenson a contributing editor of Harper8217s Magazine is the author of many books including most recently Reading the Rails | Thanks/NOUN to/ADP the/DET president8217s/PRON press/NOUN conference/NOUN last/ADJ week8212broadcast/NOUN live/VERB from/ADP the/DET bridge/NOUN of/ADP USS/PROPN Caine/PROPN 8220Ahh/PROPN but/CCONJ the/DET strawberries/NOUN that8217s8230/ADP that8217s/PROPN where/SCONJ I/PRON had/VERB them823082218212the/DET only/ADJ political/ADJ topic/NOUN 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<p>Here are ten popular arguments Zionists use to defend Israel's crimes against the Palestinians and how to answer them effectively.</p>
<p>If you’re active in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East, you’ve no doubt frequently encountered Zionists who defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. You’re familiar with many of their talking points, and maybe you know how to answer many or most of them. Here are ten you’ve likely encountered, but perhaps didn’t know quite how to debate effectively–until now!</p>
<p>There are two principle fallacies in this argument:</p>
<p>One, it was not simply that Palestinians fled war. Many did flee, but this was encouraged by the Zionist forces, which also directly expelled many civilians from their homes and destroyed their villages so they could never return. It was the intent of the Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine of most of its Arab population in order for the demographically “Jewish state” of Israel to be established. Indeed, cleansing Palestine of Arabs was a prerequisite for this state to be created.&#160;This is why Israel refused to allow those refugees to return.</p>
<p>Two, this argument assumes that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, was legitimate.&#160;It wasn’t. The Zionists had neither any legal nor moral authority to declare sovereignty over a land in which they were a minority and of which they owned only about 7 percent. While they cited UN Resolution 181 (the “partition plan” resolution) as granting such authority, in fact, this resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration.</p>
<p>No&#160;state has a “right to exist”. This concept is a propaganda device invented by the US and Israel for a reason that will become clear momentarily.</p>
<p>One might be tempted to answer this argument with: “Well, Palestine has a right to exist, too!” But this is not the proper response!</p>
<p>Political entities defined by lines on maps do not have rights,&#160;individuals do. The proper framework for discussion is&#160;the right to self-determination. And it is manifestly&#160;Israel&#160;that has denied that right to the&#160;Palestinians&#160;since its founding (and indeed, by the Zionists even before Israel’s founding), and not vice versa.</p>
<p>The necessity of redefining the framework for discussion thus becomes obvious. To say that Israel has a “right to exist” is effectively to assert that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence&#160;and the ethnic cleansing by which Israel actually came into being were&#160;legitimate. Needless to say, these were not legitimate actions on the part of the Zionists.</p>
<p>Israel’s attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967 — the event that started the “Six Day War” —&#160;was not preemptive.</p>
<p>Zionists will argue that Nasser’s threats, Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran and Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, its movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula, and its expelling of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) all essentially amounted to acts of war.</p>
<p>However, none of these actions constituted aggression under international law.</p>
<p>Egypt’s perspective was that the straits and Suez Canal were its territorial waterways so it had a right to deny passage to an enemy state that had already attacked it once, in 1956 (when Israel conspired with Britain and France to launch a war of aggression against Egypt). While legal scholars may debate the legitimacy of that point of view, the fact is that Israel had peaceful means available to it to seek redress for this grievance against Egypt. It did not, under international law, constitute a&#160;casus belli&#160;(justification for war).</p>
<p>Nasser wanted the UN peacekeeping force gone because he was being accused by Syria and Jordan of hiding behind it. His bellicose rhetoric was about saving face but was just that:&#160;rhetoric. The proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel’s side of the border, but, instructively,&#160;Israel rejected this proposal.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the CIA observed that Egypt’s troops took up&#160;defensive&#160;positions in the Sinai,&#160;and&#160;Israel’s own intelligence assessed that Israel was under no threat of attack from Egypt.</p>
<p>In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged, “In June&#160;1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”</p>
<p>Under international law, Israel’s attack on Egypt constituted aggression, defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime”.</p>
<p>This is a lie. Unfortunately, it is very effective Zionist hasbara and is widely believed even by supporters of Palestinians’ rights.</p>
<p>There are three main components of the Zionist argument:</p>
<p>Briefly, here are the flaws in these arguments:</p>
<p>First of all, this is nonsense even on its face: the resolution does not say Israel must withdraw from “the&#160;territories occupied” so we must understand it to mean Israel must withdraw from only “some&#160;territories occupied”? This self-defeating Zionist logic is prima facie nonsense.</p>
<p>In truth, the absence of the article has&#160;no effect&#160;on the meaning of the resolution inasmuch as the&#160;extent&#160;of withdraw is concerned. It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces “from territories occupied”, plural. The Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai, and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are all “territories occupied” during the 1967 war and thus territories from which Israel was required to withdraw under the clear and unambiguous wording of Resolution 242.</p>
<p>In fact, the preambulatory section of the resolution emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible — and it is in the context of that emphasized principle that the resolution’s call for Israeli withdrawal must be understood.</p>
<p>As for sub-paragraph (ii), while it does call for the establishment of “secure and recognized borders”, it does not establish this as a precondition for the withdraw of Israeli forces. It says “both” Israeli withdrawal&#160;and&#160;establishment of such borders are required,&#160;conditioning neither one upon the other.&#160;It was not the Security Council’s intent that a people whose land was occupied be required to negotiate with the occupier over where to draw the border.</p>
<p>Zionists claim otherwise, but to do so, they quote Caradon and Goldberg from years after the resolution’s passage. But, first, UN resolutions are not open to unilateral interpretation, but must be understand according to the will of the Security Council as a whole; and, second, the relevant documentary record for understanding the will of the Council is from prior to and up until the resolution’s adoption.</p>
<p>And turning to that documentary record, it is absolutely clear that the Security Council was&#160;explicit and&#160;unanimous&#160;that Resolution 242 required Israel to return to the lines it held prior to June 5, 1967.</p>
<p>This argument assumes that Israel accepts the two-state solution and had made generous concessions in each of those “offers”, such as that made at Camp David in 2000.&#160;Those assumptions are absolutely false.</p>
<p>In fact, every single concession made during each of the “offers” in question — throughout the entire so-called “peace process” — was demanded or made by the Palestinians.</p>
<p>This Zionist hasbara, frequently propagated by US government officials and media commentators, simply&#160;frames&#160;the discussion in terms of what Israel&#160;wants&#160;rather than what it has a&#160;right&#160;to under international law.</p>
<p>Zionists say things like, “Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 95 percent of the West Bank at Camp David”. First of all, this is false. Israel started out demanding to annex 12 percent of the West Bank, and by the end of the talks was still demanding 9 percent. Second, none of this land was Israel’s to give. Under international law, every inch of it is recognized as “occupied Palestinian territory”. So translated into meaningful terms, we see arguments like the above equate that Israel “offered” to take&#160;only 5 percent (really 9 percent) of the Palestinians’ land.</p>
<p>Furthermore, these demands to annex Palestinian territory were accompanied with other unreasonable demands, such as dividing the West Bank into Bantustan-like enclaves with Jewish-only highways connecting illegally constructed Israeli settlements and Israeli military control over Palestine’s borders and airspace. In other words, Israel demanded that the Palestinians surrender more of their land, rights, and sovereignty.</p>
<p>If a thief steals a $100&#160;from you and then says he will give you back $91 if you agree to certain other demands requiring you to surrender your rights, would you describe it as a “generous offer” or a “concession”?</p>
<p>The truth is that while the Palestinian leadership has accepted the two-state solution since the late 1980s, Israel has always rejected it. In fact, the US-led so-called “peace process” is in reality&#160;the process by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution.</p>
<p>Actually, the UN has repeatedly affirmed the&#160;illegality&#160;of Israel’s blockade, which amounts to a policy of collective punishment in violation of international law. This criminal policy has been condemned by numerous UN bodies; the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); and numerous international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli rights groups B’Tselem and Gisha. This blockade continues in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860, which called on Israel to end it.</p>
<p>So what are Zionists talking about when they claim the UN has said Israel’s blockade is legal?</p>
<p>They are talking about a report commissioned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon known as the “Palmer Report”. It’s true&#160;that this report expressed the opinion of its two chairmembers that Israel’s naval&#160;blockade was legal. But what Zionists don’t tell you is that they also noted in their report itself that this conclusion of theirs went beyond their mandate and that they had no authority to offer their legal opinion.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the arguments they employed to arrive at their conclusion were riddled with factual and logical errors. Essentially, they employed circular reasoning by adopting the conclusion as their premise: in short, they argued that the naval blockade was legal because it was not a policy of collective punishment. In fact, they went to great lengths to&#160;avoid&#160;inquiring whether the blockade constituted collective punishment under international law, and they resorted to demonstrable misrepresentations of what international law actually has to say in an effort to sustain their expressed opinion.</p>
<p>So why would they do that? Well, they stated the reason in their report: their mandate was&#160;not&#160;to inquire into the legality of the blockade, but the&#160;political objective of allowing Israel and Turkey to put&#160;the Mavi Marmara incident behind them.</p>
<p>That was the incident in May 2010 in which Israeli forces attacked the humanitarian “Freedom Flotilla” — which was seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade and draw the world’s attention to it — in international waters and murdered nine Turkish activists on board.</p>
<p>Ban Ki-moon charged them with helping these two states to reconcile. Had they affirmed the international consensus that Israel’s blockade was illegal, it would have undermined their political objective. So they expressed the opinion it was not as a predetermined conclusion and then proceeded to manipulate the facts and employ fallacious reasoning to support it.</p>
<p>This Zionist hasbara — frequently parroted by the US government and mainstream media — is deceit by omission.&#160;It’s true that in the years prior to Israel’s 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead” thousands of rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza — and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli population centers are certainly war crimes. However, what the Zionists&#160;don’t&#160;tell you is that on June 19, Israel and Hamas entered into a ceasefire agreement&#160;that was repeatedly violated not by Hamas, but Israel.</p>
<p>The&#160;New York Times&#160;actually reported on the most serious of those Israeli violations on the day it occurred (November 4, 2008), but thereafter tossed this fact down the memory hole. Subsequently, when it referred to the ceasefire, it merely said that it “broke down” without stating the reason why:&#160;because it was violated by Israel. More frequently, that there had even&#160;been&#160;a ceasefire — much less that it was not Hamas but Israel who violated it — was completely omitted, replaced by a false narrative in which Israel was acting in self defense against Hamas rocket attacks.</p>
<p>As illustrated by Operation Cast Lead, it is a modus operandi of Israel’s to take actions to attempt to provoke a violent response from Palestinian militants in order to create pretexts for its own resorts to its own violence, which occurs on an incomparably greater scale.</p>
<p>This is a lie. The truth is that Israel engaged in deliberately disproportionate use of force during its 2008-09 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defense), and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge) assaults on Gaza. In fact, it openly declared its intention to commit what amount to war crimes with its so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” — a reference to the flattening of the Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 to punish the civilian population.</p>
<p>To take the example of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s war crimes are well documented and incontrovertible. It deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure for destruction as part of a policy of punishing the people of Gaza, and the IDF routinely used indiscriminate force, such as attacks on UN schools being used as shelters, hospitals, and residential homes.</p>
<p>In fact, there is not a single documented case of a Palestinian civilian killed during Operation Cast Lead who was being used by Hamas at the time as a human shield.</p>
<p>This might seem like a shocking truth, given the US mainstream media’s mindless repetition of the IDF’s own propaganda about civilians dying only because Hamas was using them as human shields, but this operation has been extensively investigated by human rights organizations and the UN, all of which investigations have concluded that there is no evidence to support Israel’s claimed justifications for killing civilians.</p>
<p>On the other hand, these investigations&#160;did&#160;conclude that&#160;Israeli forces&#160;used Palestinian civilians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead, such as forcing children to walk in front of them as they cleared&#160;homes.</p>
<p>This is a lie. What Zionist apologists for Israeli war crimes are referring to, specifically, when they make this claim is an op-ed by one of the four chairs of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Justice Richard Goldstone.</p>
<p>The so-called Goldstone Report did indeed conclude that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes — and these conclusions still stand.</p>
<p>For his part in that report, Goldstone came under intense pressure and heavy criticism from Zionists, including&#160;threats to protest outside of and bar him from attending his grandon’s bar mitzvah. His op-ed was a transparent attempt to appease his Zionist detractors. But further than that, it was a disgraceful betrayal of truth and justice, as Goldstone outright lied about the UN report’s findings in his attempt at appeasement.</p>
<p>The occasion for Goldstone’s betrayal was the report of a follow-up UN committee charged with inquiring into the credibility of Hamas’s and Israel’s self-investigations into the allegations of war crimes. In this context, Goldstone wrote that had the UN Fact-Finding Mission known then what was now known, it would not have arrived at the conclusions it did.</p>
<p>Goldstone, however, was&#160;lying&#160;about the contents of the both the Goldstone Report and the follow-up committee’s report. He claimed the Fact-Finding Mission had not examined any evidence presented by Israel. That was false. In fact, the Mission fully took into account Israel’s own reports of its self-investigations that had occurred.</p>
<p>Goldstone also set up his op-ed on the premise of a strawman argument: the claim was ostensibly now retracting was that Israel had a policy of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians for death. In fact, this was&#160;not&#160;a finding of the Fact-Finding Mission’s report. Rather, the Mission concluded that Israel’s policy was to&#160;punish&#160;the civilian population through the deliberate use of disproportionate force. By setting up this strawman argument, Goldstone avoided having to “retract” the Mission’s&#160;actual&#160;findings.</p>
<p>Further, he quoted the follow-up committee’s finding that&#160;“Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza”, but he&#160;withheld&#160;from readers the fact that the committee found&#160;that these investigations lacked credibility.</p>
<p>After Goldstone’s disgraceful betrayal of justice, his three co-authors publicly criticized his op-ed and pointed out&#160;that information that had since come to light — including the findings of the follow-up committee Goldstone was &#160;deceptively relying on to support his own argument — did&#160;not&#160;change the Mission’s conclusions, but&#160;bolstered&#160;them.</p>
<p>As with Operation Cast Lead, the truth is dramatically different.</p>
<p>Israeli apologists — including US government officials and US mainstream media commentators — cited as the initiating event a Hamas attack on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jeep just days before Israel launched its operation. What was withheld from readers in this Zionist hasbara was the fact that this was an attack on IDF forces&#160;that had invaded Gaza&#160;and was in part retaliation for the IDF’s murder of a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy shortly prior.</p>
<p>Furthermore, just the day before Israel launched its operation, once again Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire that was then&#160;violated by Israel. In fact,&#160;Israel took advantage of the opportunity created by Hamas’s acceptance of the ceasefire to draw out and assassinate a senior Hamas official, Ahmed al-Jabari one of the initiating events of its “Operation Pillar of Defense”. Israel’s Orwellian justification for this operation was that it was intended to re-establish calm — the very calm that was shattered by its launch of the operation and assassination of Jabari.</p>
<p>For peace and justice to be realized, the lies have to be exposed and the true nature of the conflict must come to light. There needs to be a paradigm shift in which it is no longer feasible for mainstream media outlets — which effectively serve the role of manufacturing consent for the US policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians — to mindlessly parrot US and Israeli government claims and peddle deceitful propaganda.</p>
<p>Zionist apologists for Israel’s behavior employ numerous hasbara talking points to try to justify its crimes. Knowing how to effectively counter the propaganda is key to effecting the necessary paradigm shift for peace to be achieved.</p>
<p>You as an individual can play an important role in helping to effect that paradigm shift.</p>
<p>Empower yourself with the knowledge you need to become an effective voice for peace.</p>
<p>Educate yourself and gain the confidence you need to speak up and correct those around you who have been misinformed about the true nature of the conflict.</p>
<p>Challenge the Zionist apologists when you encounter them on Facebook or Twitter and know how to destroy their propagandistic talking points with the truth.</p>
<p>If we want peace, government isn’t going to get the job done. It’s up to us. Go to it!</p> | 10 Zionist Arguments You’ve Encountered, But Didn’t Have Answers To | false | http://foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/11/28/10-zionist-arguments-youve-encountered-but-didnt-have-answers-to/ | 2016-11-28 | 1right-center
| 3,055 | Here are ten popular arguments Zionists use to defend Israels crimes against the Palestinians and how to answer them effectively If you8217re active in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East you8217ve no doubt frequently encountered Zionists who defend Israel8217s crimes against the Palestinians You8217re familiar with many of their talking points and maybe you know how to answer many or most of them Here are ten you8217ve likely encountered but perhaps didn8217t know quite how to debate effectively8211until now There are two principle fallacies in this argument One it was not simply that Palestinians fled war Many did flee but this was encouraged by the Zionist forces which also directly expelled many civilians from their homes and destroyed their villages so they could never return It was the intent of the Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine of most of its Arab population in order for the demographically 8220Jewish state8221 of Israel to be established Indeed cleansing Palestine of Arabs was a prerequisite for this state to be createdamp160This is why Israel refused to allow those refugees to return Two this argument assumes that the Zionists8217 unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14 1948 was legitimateamp160It wasn8217t The Zionists had neither any legal nor moral authority to declare sovereignty over a land in which they were a minority and of which they owned only about 7 percent While they cited UN Resolution 181 the 8220partition plan8221 resolution as granting such authority in fact this resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration Noamp160state has a 8220right to exist8221 This concept is a propaganda device invented by the US and Israel for a reason that will become clear momentarily One might be tempted to answer this argument with 8220Well Palestine has a right to exist too8221 But this is not the proper response Political entities defined by lines on maps do not have rightsamp160individuals do The proper framework for discussion isamp160the right to selfdetermination And it is manifestlyamp160Israelamp160that has denied that right to theamp160Palestiniansamp160since its founding and indeed by the Zionists even before Israel8217s founding and not vice versa The necessity of redefining the framework for discussion thus becomes obvious To say that Israel has a 8220right to exist8221 is effectively to assert that the Zionists8217 unilateral declaration of Israel8217s existenceamp160and the ethnic cleansing by which Israel actually came into being wereamp160legitimate Needless to say these were not legitimate actions on the part of the Zionists Israel8217s attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5 1967 8212 the event that started the 8220Six Day War8221 8212amp160was not preemptive Zionists will argue that Nasser8217s threats Egypt8217s closing of the Straits of Tiran and Suez Canal to Israeli shipping its movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula and its expelling of the United Nations Emergency Force UNEF all essentially amounted to acts of war However none of these actions constituted aggression under international law Egypt8217s perspective was that the straits and Suez Canal were its territorial waterways so it had a right to deny passage to an enemy state that had already attacked it once in 1956 when Israel conspired with Britain and France to launch a war of aggression against Egypt While legal scholars may debate the legitimacy of that point of view the fact is that Israel had peaceful means available to it to seek redress for this grievance against Egypt It did not under international law constitute aamp160casus belliamp160justification for war Nasser wanted the UN peacekeeping force gone because he was being accused by Syria and Jordan of hiding behind it His bellicose rhetoric was about saving face but was just thatamp160rhetoric The proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel8217s side of the border but instructivelyamp160Israel rejected this proposal Furthermore the CIA observed that Egypt8217s troops took upamp160defensiveamp160positions in the Sinaiamp160andamp160Israel8217s own intelligence assessed that Israel was under no threat of attack from Egypt In 1982 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged 8220In Juneamp1601967 we again had a choice The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us We must be honest with ourselves We decided to attack him8221 Under international law Israel8217s attack on Egypt constituted aggression defined at Nuremberg as 8220the supreme international crime8221 This is a lie Unfortunately it is very effective Zionist hasbara and is widely believed even by supporters of Palestinians8217 rights There are three main components of the Zionist argument Briefly here are the flaws in these arguments First of all this is nonsense even on its face the resolution does not say Israel must withdraw from 8220theamp160territories occupied8221 so we must understand it to mean Israel must withdraw from only 8220someamp160territories occupied8221 This selfdefeating Zionist logic is prima facie nonsense In truth the absence of the article hasamp160no effectamp160on the meaning of the resolution inasmuch as theamp160extentamp160of withdraw is concerned It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces 8220from territories occupied8221 plural The Syrian Golan Heights the Egyptian Sinai and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are all 8220territories occupied8221 during the 1967 war and thus territories from which Israel was required to withdraw under the clear and unambiguous wording of Resolution 242 In fact the preambulatory section of the resolution emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible 8212 and it is in the context of that emphasized principle that the resolution8217s call for Israeli withdrawal must be understood As for subparagraph ii while it does call for the establishment of 8220secure and recognized borders8221 it does not establish this as a precondition for the withdraw of Israeli forces It says 8220both8221 Israeli withdrawalamp160andamp160establishment of such borders are requiredamp160conditioning neither one upon the otheramp160It was not the Security Council8217s intent that a people whose land was occupied be required to negotiate with the occupier over where to draw the border Zionists claim otherwise but to do so they quote Caradon and Goldberg from years after the resolution8217s passage But first UN resolutions are not open to unilateral interpretation but must be understand according to the will of the Security Council as a whole and second the relevant documentary record for understanding the will of the Council is from prior to and up until the resolution8217s adoption And turning to that documentary record it is absolutely clear that the Security Council wasamp160explicit andamp160unanimousamp160that Resolution 242 required Israel to return to the lines it held prior to June 5 1967 This argument assumes that Israel accepts the twostate solution and had made generous concessions in each of those 8220offers8221 such as that made at Camp David in 2000amp160Those assumptions are absolutely false In fact every single concession made during each of the 8220offers8221 in question 8212 throughout the entire socalled 8220peace process8221 8212 was demanded or made by the Palestinians This Zionist hasbara frequently propagated by US government officials and media commentators simplyamp160framesamp160the discussion in terms of what Israelamp160wantsamp160rather than what it has aamp160rightamp160to under international law Zionists say things like 8220Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 95 percent of the West Bank at Camp David8221 First of all this is false Israel started out demanding to annex 12 percent of the West Bank and by the end of the talks was still demanding 9 percent Second none of this land was Israel8217s to give Under international law every inch of it is recognized as 8220occupied Palestinian territory8221 So translated into meaningful terms we see arguments like the above equate that Israel 8220offered8221 to takeamp160only 5 percent really 9 percent of the Palestinians8217 land Furthermore these demands to annex Palestinian territory were accompanied with other unreasonable demands such as dividing the West Bank into Bantustanlike enclaves with Jewishonly highways connecting illegally constructed Israeli settlements and Israeli military control over Palestine8217s borders and airspace In other words Israel demanded that the Palestinians surrender more of their land rights and sovereignty If a thief steals a 100amp160from you and then says he will give you back 91 if you agree to certain other demands requiring you to surrender your rights would you describe it as a 8220generous offer8221 or a 8220concession8221 The truth is that while the Palestinian leadership has accepted the twostate solution since the late 1980s Israel has always rejected it In fact the USled socalled 8220peace process8221 is in realityamp160the process by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the twostate solution Actually the UN has repeatedly affirmed theamp160illegalityamp160of Israel8217s blockade which amounts to a policy of collective punishment in violation of international law This criminal policy has been condemned by numerous UN bodies the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC and numerous international human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch Amnesty International and the Israeli rights groups B8217Tselem and Gisha This blockade continues in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860 which called on Israel to end it So what are Zionists talking about when they claim the UN has said Israel8217s blockade is legal They are talking about a report commissioned by UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon known as the 8220Palmer Report8221 It8217s trueamp160that this report expressed the opinion of its two chairmembers that Israel8217s navalamp160blockade was legal But what Zionists don8217t tell you is that they also noted in their report itself that this conclusion of theirs went beyond their mandate and that they had no authority to offer their legal opinion Furthermore the arguments they employed to arrive at their conclusion were riddled with factual and logical errors Essentially they employed circular reasoning by adopting the conclusion as their premise in short they argued that the naval blockade was legal because it was not a policy of collective punishment In fact they went to great lengths toamp160avoidamp160inquiring whether the blockade constituted collective punishment under international law and they resorted to demonstrable misrepresentations of what international law actually has to say in an effort to sustain their expressed opinion So why would they do that Well they stated the reason in their report their mandate wasamp160notamp160to inquire into the legality of the blockade but theamp160political objective of allowing Israel and Turkey to putamp160the Mavi Marmara incident behind them That was the incident in May 2010 in which Israeli forces attacked the humanitarian 8220Freedom Flotilla8221 8212 which was seeking to break Israel8217s illegal blockade and draw the world8217s attention to it 8212 in international waters and murdered nine Turkish activists on board Ban Kimoon charged them with helping these two states to reconcile Had they affirmed the international consensus that Israel8217s blockade was illegal it would have undermined their political objective So they expressed the opinion it was not as a predetermined conclusion and then proceeded to manipulate the facts and employ fallacious reasoning to support it This Zionist hasbara 8212 frequently parroted by the US government and mainstream media 8212 is deceit by omissionamp160It8217s true that in the years prior to Israel8217s 200809 8220Operation Cast Lead8221 thousands of rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza 8212 and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli population centers are certainly war crimes However what the Zionistsamp160don8217tamp160tell you is that on June 19 Israel and Hamas entered into a ceasefire agreementamp160that was repeatedly violated not by Hamas but Israel Theamp160New York Timesamp160actually reported on the most serious of those Israeli violations on the day it occurred November 4 2008 but thereafter tossed this fact down the memory hole Subsequently when it referred to the ceasefire it merely said that it 8220broke down8221 without stating the reason whyamp160because it was violated by Israel More frequently that there had evenamp160beenamp160a ceasefire 8212 much less that it was not Hamas but Israel who violated it 8212 was completely omitted replaced by a false narrative in which Israel was acting in self defense against Hamas rocket attacks As illustrated by Operation Cast Lead it is a modus operandi of Israel8217s to take actions to attempt to provoke a violent response from Palestinian militants in order to create pretexts for its own resorts to its own violence which occurs on an incomparably greater scale This is a lie The truth is that Israel engaged in deliberately disproportionate use of force during its 200809 Operation Cast Lead 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense and 2014 Operation Protective Edge assaults on Gaza In fact it openly declared its intention to commit what amount to war crimes with its socalled 8220Dahiya Doctrine8221 8212 a reference to the flattening of the Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 to punish the civilian population To take the example of Operation Cast Lead Israel8217s war crimes are well documented and incontrovertible It deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure for destruction as part of a policy of punishing the people of Gaza and the IDF routinely used indiscriminate force such as attacks on UN schools being used as shelters hospitals and residential homes In fact there is not a single documented case of a Palestinian civilian killed during Operation Cast Lead who was being used by Hamas at the time as a human shield This might seem like a shocking truth given the US mainstream media8217s mindless repetition of the IDF8217s own propaganda about civilians dying only because Hamas was using them as human shields but this operation has been extensively investigated by human rights organizations and the UN all of which investigations have concluded that there is no evidence to support Israel8217s claimed justifications for killing civilians On the other hand these investigationsamp160didamp160conclude thatamp160Israeli forcesamp160used Palestinian civilians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead such as forcing children to walk in front of them as they clearedamp160homes This is a lie What Zionist apologists for Israeli war crimes are referring to specifically when they make this claim is an oped by one of the four chairs of the UN FactFinding Mission on the Gaza Conflict Justice Richard Goldstone The socalled Goldstone Report did indeed conclude that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes 8212 and these conclusions still stand For his part in that report Goldstone came under intense pressure and heavy criticism from Zionists includingamp160threats to protest outside of and bar him from attending his grandon8217s bar mitzvah His oped was a transparent attempt to appease his Zionist detractors But further than that it was a disgraceful betrayal of truth and justice as Goldstone outright lied about the UN report8217s findings in his attempt at appeasement The occasion for Goldstone8217s betrayal was the report of a followup UN committee charged with inquiring into the credibility of Hamas8217s and Israel8217s selfinvestigations into the allegations of war crimes In this context Goldstone wrote that had the UN FactFinding Mission known then what was now known it would not have arrived at the conclusions it did Goldstone however wasamp160lyingamp160about the contents of the both the Goldstone Report and the followup committee8217s report He claimed the FactFinding Mission had not examined any evidence presented by Israel That was false In fact the Mission fully took into account Israel8217s own reports of its selfinvestigations that had occurred Goldstone also set up his oped on the premise of a strawman argument the claim was ostensibly now retracting was that Israel had a policy of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians for death In fact this wasamp160notamp160a finding of the FactFinding Mission8217s report Rather the Mission concluded that Israel8217s policy was toamp160punishamp160the civilian population through the deliberate use of disproportionate force By setting up this strawman argument Goldstone avoided having to 8220retract8221 the Mission8217samp160actualamp160findings Further he quoted the followup committee8217s finding thatamp1608220Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza8221 but heamp160withheldamp160from readers the fact that the committee foundamp160that these investigations lacked credibility After Goldstone8217s disgraceful betrayal of justice his three coauthors publicly criticized his oped and pointed outamp160that information that had since come to light 8212 including the findings of the followup committee Goldstone was amp160deceptively relying on to support his own argument 8212 didamp160notamp160change the Mission8217s conclusions butamp160bolsteredamp160them As with Operation Cast Lead the truth is dramatically different Israeli apologists 8212 including US government officials and US mainstream media commentators 8212 cited as the initiating event a Hamas attack on an Israel Defense Forces IDF jeep just days before Israel launched its operation What was withheld from readers in this Zionist hasbara was the fact that this was an attack on IDF forcesamp160that had invaded Gazaamp160and was in part retaliation for the IDF8217s murder of a thirteenyearold Palestinian boy shortly prior Furthermore just the day before Israel launched its operation once again Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire that was thenamp160violated by Israel In factamp160Israel took advantage of the opportunity created by Hamas8217s acceptance of the ceasefire to draw out and assassinate a senior Hamas official Ahmed alJabari one of the initiating events of its 8220Operation Pillar of Defense8221 Israel8217s Orwellian justification for this operation was that it was intended to reestablish calm 8212 the very calm that was shattered by its launch of the operation and assassination of Jabari For peace and justice to be realized the lies have to be exposed and the true nature of the conflict must come to light There needs to be a paradigm shift in which it is no longer feasible for mainstream media outlets 8212 which effectively serve the role of manufacturing consent for the US policy of supporting Israel8217s crimes against the Palestinians 8212 to mindlessly parrot US and Israeli government claims and peddle deceitful propaganda Zionist apologists for Israel8217s behavior employ numerous hasbara talking points to try to justify its crimes Knowing how to effectively counter the propaganda is key to effecting the necessary paradigm shift for peace to be achieved You as an individual can play an important role in helping to effect that paradigm shift Empower yourself with the knowledge you need to become an effective voice for peace Educate yourself and gain the confidence you need to speak up and correct those around you who have been misinformed about the true nature of the conflict Challenge the Zionist apologists when you encounter them on Facebook or Twitter and know how to destroy their propagandistic talking points with the truth If we want peace government isn8217t going to get the job done It8217s up to us Go to it | Here/ADV are/AUX ten/NUM popular/ADJ arguments/NOUN Zionists/NOUN use/VERB to/PART defend/VERB Israels/PROPN crimes/NOUN against/ADP the/DET Palestinians/PROPN and/CCONJ how/SCONJ to/PART answer/VERB them/PRON effectively/ADV If/SCONJ you8217re/PRON active/ADJ in/ADP the/DET struggle/NOUN for/ADP peace/NOUN and/CCONJ justice/NOUN in/ADP the/DET Middle/PROPN East/PROPN you8217ve/INTJ no/PRON doubt/ADV frequently/ADV encountered/VERB Zionists/PROPN who/PRON defend/VERB Israel8217s/PROPN crimes/NOUN against/ADP the/DET Palestinians/PROPN You8217re/NOUN familiar/ADJ with/ADP many/ADJ of/ADP their/PRON talking/NOUN points/NOUN and/CCONJ maybe/ADV you/PRON know/VERB how/SCONJ to/PART answer/VERB many/ADJ or/CCONJ most/ADJ of/ADP them/PRON Here/ADV are/AUX ten/NUM you8217ve/PROPN likely/ADV encountered/VERB but/CCONJ perhaps/ADV didn8217/NOUN t/NOUN know/VERB quite/ADV how/SCONJ to/PART debate/VERB effectively8211until/PROPN now/ADV There/PRON are/VERB two/NUM principle/ADJ fallacies/NOUN in/ADP this/DET argument/NOUN One/NUM it/PRON was/AUX not/PART simply/ADV that/SCONJ Palestinians/PROPN fled/VERB war/NOUN Many/ADJ did/VERB flee/VERB but/CCONJ this/PRON was/AUX encouraged/VERB by/ADP the/DET Zionist/ADJ forces/NOUN which/PRON also/ADV directly/ADV expelled/VERB many/ADJ civilians/NOUN from/ADP their/PRON homes/NOUN and/CCONJ destroyed/VERB their/PRON villages/NOUN so/SCONJ they/PRON could/AUX never/ADV return/VERB It/PRON was/AUX the/DET intent/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Zionists/PROPN to/PART ethnically/ADV cleanse/VERB Palestine/PROPN of/ADP most/ADJ of/ADP its/PRON Arab/ADJ population/NOUN in/ADP order/NOUN for/ADP the/DET demographically/ADV 8220Jewish/NUM state8221/NOUN of/ADP Israel/PROPN to/PART be/AUX established/VERB Indeed/ADV cleansing/VERB Palestine/PROPN of/ADP Arabs/PROPN was/AUX a/DET prerequisite/NOUN for/SCONJ this/DET state/NOUN to/PART be/AUX createdamp160This/PRON is/AUX why/SCONJ Israel/PROPN refused/VERB to/PART allow/VERB those/DET refugees/NOUN to/PART return/VERB Two/NUM this/DET argument/NOUN assumes/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET Zionists8217/PROPN unilateral/ADJ declaration/NOUN of/ADP the/DET existence/NOUN of/ADP Israel/PROPN on/ADP May/PROPN 14/NUM 1948/NUM was/AUX legitimateamp160It/PROPN wasn8217/PROPN t/NOUN The/DET Zionists/PROPN had/VERB neither/CCONJ any/DET legal/ADJ nor/CCONJ moral/ADJ authority/NOUN to/PART declare/VERB sovereignty/NOUN over/ADP a/DET land/NOUN in/ADP which/PRON they/PRON were/AUX a/DET minority/NOUN and/CCONJ of/ADP which/PRON they/PRON owned/VERB only/ADV about/ADV 7/NUM percent/NOUN While/SCONJ they/PRON cited/VERB UN/PROPN Resolution/PROPN 181/NUM the/DET 8220partition/NOUN plan8221/NOUN resolution/NOUN as/ADP granting/VERB such/ADJ authority/NOUN in/ADP fact/NOUN this/DET resolution/NOUN neither/CCONJ 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<p>Here are ten popular arguments Zionists use to defend Israel's crimes against the Palestinians and how to answer them effectively.</p>
<p>If you’re active in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East, you’ve no doubt frequently encountered Zionists who defend Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. You’re familiar with many of their talking points, and maybe you know how to answer many or most of them. Here are ten you’ve likely encountered, but perhaps didn’t know quite how to debate effectively–until now!</p>
<p>There are two principle fallacies in this argument:</p>
<p>One, it was not simply that Palestinians fled war. Many did flee, but this was encouraged by the Zionist forces, which also directly expelled many civilians from their homes and destroyed their villages so they could never return. It was the intent of the Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine of most of its Arab population in order for the demographically “Jewish state” of Israel to be established. Indeed, cleansing Palestine of Arabs was a prerequisite for this state to be created.&#160;This is why Israel refused to allow those refugees to return.</p>
<p>Two, this argument assumes that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14, 1948, was legitimate.&#160;It wasn’t. The Zionists had neither any legal nor moral authority to declare sovereignty over a land in which they were a minority and of which they owned only about 7 percent. While they cited UN Resolution 181 (the “partition plan” resolution) as granting such authority, in fact, this resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration.</p>
<p>No&#160;state has a “right to exist”. This concept is a propaganda device invented by the US and Israel for a reason that will become clear momentarily.</p>
<p>One might be tempted to answer this argument with: “Well, Palestine has a right to exist, too!” But this is not the proper response!</p>
<p>Political entities defined by lines on maps do not have rights,&#160;individuals do. The proper framework for discussion is&#160;the right to self-determination. And it is manifestly&#160;Israel&#160;that has denied that right to the&#160;Palestinians&#160;since its founding (and indeed, by the Zionists even before Israel’s founding), and not vice versa.</p>
<p>The necessity of redefining the framework for discussion thus becomes obvious. To say that Israel has a “right to exist” is effectively to assert that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence&#160;and the ethnic cleansing by which Israel actually came into being were&#160;legitimate. Needless to say, these were not legitimate actions on the part of the Zionists.</p>
<p>Israel’s attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967 — the event that started the “Six Day War” —&#160;was not preemptive.</p>
<p>Zionists will argue that Nasser’s threats, Egypt’s closing of the Straits of Tiran and Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, its movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula, and its expelling of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) all essentially amounted to acts of war.</p>
<p>However, none of these actions constituted aggression under international law.</p>
<p>Egypt’s perspective was that the straits and Suez Canal were its territorial waterways so it had a right to deny passage to an enemy state that had already attacked it once, in 1956 (when Israel conspired with Britain and France to launch a war of aggression against Egypt). While legal scholars may debate the legitimacy of that point of view, the fact is that Israel had peaceful means available to it to seek redress for this grievance against Egypt. It did not, under international law, constitute a&#160;casus belli&#160;(justification for war).</p>
<p>Nasser wanted the UN peacekeeping force gone because he was being accused by Syria and Jordan of hiding behind it. His bellicose rhetoric was about saving face but was just that:&#160;rhetoric. The proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel’s side of the border, but, instructively,&#160;Israel rejected this proposal.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the CIA observed that Egypt’s troops took up&#160;defensive&#160;positions in the Sinai,&#160;and&#160;Israel’s own intelligence assessed that Israel was under no threat of attack from Egypt.</p>
<p>In 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged, “In June&#160;1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”</p>
<p>Under international law, Israel’s attack on Egypt constituted aggression, defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime”.</p>
<p>This is a lie. Unfortunately, it is very effective Zionist hasbara and is widely believed even by supporters of Palestinians’ rights.</p>
<p>There are three main components of the Zionist argument:</p>
<p>Briefly, here are the flaws in these arguments:</p>
<p>First of all, this is nonsense even on its face: the resolution does not say Israel must withdraw from “the&#160;territories occupied” so we must understand it to mean Israel must withdraw from only “some&#160;territories occupied”? This self-defeating Zionist logic is prima facie nonsense.</p>
<p>In truth, the absence of the article has&#160;no effect&#160;on the meaning of the resolution inasmuch as the&#160;extent&#160;of withdraw is concerned. It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces “from territories occupied”, plural. The Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai, and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are all “territories occupied” during the 1967 war and thus territories from which Israel was required to withdraw under the clear and unambiguous wording of Resolution 242.</p>
<p>In fact, the preambulatory section of the resolution emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible — and it is in the context of that emphasized principle that the resolution’s call for Israeli withdrawal must be understood.</p>
<p>As for sub-paragraph (ii), while it does call for the establishment of “secure and recognized borders”, it does not establish this as a precondition for the withdraw of Israeli forces. It says “both” Israeli withdrawal&#160;and&#160;establishment of such borders are required,&#160;conditioning neither one upon the other.&#160;It was not the Security Council’s intent that a people whose land was occupied be required to negotiate with the occupier over where to draw the border.</p>
<p>Zionists claim otherwise, but to do so, they quote Caradon and Goldberg from years after the resolution’s passage. But, first, UN resolutions are not open to unilateral interpretation, but must be understand according to the will of the Security Council as a whole; and, second, the relevant documentary record for understanding the will of the Council is from prior to and up until the resolution’s adoption.</p>
<p>And turning to that documentary record, it is absolutely clear that the Security Council was&#160;explicit and&#160;unanimous&#160;that Resolution 242 required Israel to return to the lines it held prior to June 5, 1967.</p>
<p>This argument assumes that Israel accepts the two-state solution and had made generous concessions in each of those “offers”, such as that made at Camp David in 2000.&#160;Those assumptions are absolutely false.</p>
<p>In fact, every single concession made during each of the “offers” in question — throughout the entire so-called “peace process” — was demanded or made by the Palestinians.</p>
<p>This Zionist hasbara, frequently propagated by US government officials and media commentators, simply&#160;frames&#160;the discussion in terms of what Israel&#160;wants&#160;rather than what it has a&#160;right&#160;to under international law.</p>
<p>Zionists say things like, “Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 95 percent of the West Bank at Camp David”. First of all, this is false. Israel started out demanding to annex 12 percent of the West Bank, and by the end of the talks was still demanding 9 percent. Second, none of this land was Israel’s to give. Under international law, every inch of it is recognized as “occupied Palestinian territory”. So translated into meaningful terms, we see arguments like the above equate that Israel “offered” to take&#160;only 5 percent (really 9 percent) of the Palestinians’ land.</p>
<p>Furthermore, these demands to annex Palestinian territory were accompanied with other unreasonable demands, such as dividing the West Bank into Bantustan-like enclaves with Jewish-only highways connecting illegally constructed Israeli settlements and Israeli military control over Palestine’s borders and airspace. In other words, Israel demanded that the Palestinians surrender more of their land, rights, and sovereignty.</p>
<p>If a thief steals a $100&#160;from you and then says he will give you back $91 if you agree to certain other demands requiring you to surrender your rights, would you describe it as a “generous offer” or a “concession”?</p>
<p>The truth is that while the Palestinian leadership has accepted the two-state solution since the late 1980s, Israel has always rejected it. In fact, the US-led so-called “peace process” is in reality&#160;the process by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution.</p>
<p>Actually, the UN has repeatedly affirmed the&#160;illegality&#160;of Israel’s blockade, which amounts to a policy of collective punishment in violation of international law. This criminal policy has been condemned by numerous UN bodies; the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); and numerous international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli rights groups B’Tselem and Gisha. This blockade continues in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860, which called on Israel to end it.</p>
<p>So what are Zionists talking about when they claim the UN has said Israel’s blockade is legal?</p>
<p>They are talking about a report commissioned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon known as the “Palmer Report”. It’s true&#160;that this report expressed the opinion of its two chairmembers that Israel’s naval&#160;blockade was legal. But what Zionists don’t tell you is that they also noted in their report itself that this conclusion of theirs went beyond their mandate and that they had no authority to offer their legal opinion.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the arguments they employed to arrive at their conclusion were riddled with factual and logical errors. Essentially, they employed circular reasoning by adopting the conclusion as their premise: in short, they argued that the naval blockade was legal because it was not a policy of collective punishment. In fact, they went to great lengths to&#160;avoid&#160;inquiring whether the blockade constituted collective punishment under international law, and they resorted to demonstrable misrepresentations of what international law actually has to say in an effort to sustain their expressed opinion.</p>
<p>So why would they do that? Well, they stated the reason in their report: their mandate was&#160;not&#160;to inquire into the legality of the blockade, but the&#160;political objective of allowing Israel and Turkey to put&#160;the Mavi Marmara incident behind them.</p>
<p>That was the incident in May 2010 in which Israeli forces attacked the humanitarian “Freedom Flotilla” — which was seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade and draw the world’s attention to it — in international waters and murdered nine Turkish activists on board.</p>
<p>Ban Ki-moon charged them with helping these two states to reconcile. Had they affirmed the international consensus that Israel’s blockade was illegal, it would have undermined their political objective. So they expressed the opinion it was not as a predetermined conclusion and then proceeded to manipulate the facts and employ fallacious reasoning to support it.</p>
<p>This Zionist hasbara — frequently parroted by the US government and mainstream media — is deceit by omission.&#160;It’s true that in the years prior to Israel’s 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead” thousands of rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza — and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli population centers are certainly war crimes. However, what the Zionists&#160;don’t&#160;tell you is that on June 19, Israel and Hamas entered into a ceasefire agreement&#160;that was repeatedly violated not by Hamas, but Israel.</p>
<p>The&#160;New York Times&#160;actually reported on the most serious of those Israeli violations on the day it occurred (November 4, 2008), but thereafter tossed this fact down the memory hole. Subsequently, when it referred to the ceasefire, it merely said that it “broke down” without stating the reason why:&#160;because it was violated by Israel. More frequently, that there had even&#160;been&#160;a ceasefire — much less that it was not Hamas but Israel who violated it — was completely omitted, replaced by a false narrative in which Israel was acting in self defense against Hamas rocket attacks.</p>
<p>As illustrated by Operation Cast Lead, it is a modus operandi of Israel’s to take actions to attempt to provoke a violent response from Palestinian militants in order to create pretexts for its own resorts to its own violence, which occurs on an incomparably greater scale.</p>
<p>This is a lie. The truth is that Israel engaged in deliberately disproportionate use of force during its 2008-09 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defense), and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge) assaults on Gaza. In fact, it openly declared its intention to commit what amount to war crimes with its so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” — a reference to the flattening of the Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 to punish the civilian population.</p>
<p>To take the example of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s war crimes are well documented and incontrovertible. It deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure for destruction as part of a policy of punishing the people of Gaza, and the IDF routinely used indiscriminate force, such as attacks on UN schools being used as shelters, hospitals, and residential homes.</p>
<p>In fact, there is not a single documented case of a Palestinian civilian killed during Operation Cast Lead who was being used by Hamas at the time as a human shield.</p>
<p>This might seem like a shocking truth, given the US mainstream media’s mindless repetition of the IDF’s own propaganda about civilians dying only because Hamas was using them as human shields, but this operation has been extensively investigated by human rights organizations and the UN, all of which investigations have concluded that there is no evidence to support Israel’s claimed justifications for killing civilians.</p>
<p>On the other hand, these investigations&#160;did&#160;conclude that&#160;Israeli forces&#160;used Palestinian civilians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead, such as forcing children to walk in front of them as they cleared&#160;homes.</p>
<p>This is a lie. What Zionist apologists for Israeli war crimes are referring to, specifically, when they make this claim is an op-ed by one of the four chairs of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, Justice Richard Goldstone.</p>
<p>The so-called Goldstone Report did indeed conclude that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes — and these conclusions still stand.</p>
<p>For his part in that report, Goldstone came under intense pressure and heavy criticism from Zionists, including&#160;threats to protest outside of and bar him from attending his grandon’s bar mitzvah. His op-ed was a transparent attempt to appease his Zionist detractors. But further than that, it was a disgraceful betrayal of truth and justice, as Goldstone outright lied about the UN report’s findings in his attempt at appeasement.</p>
<p>The occasion for Goldstone’s betrayal was the report of a follow-up UN committee charged with inquiring into the credibility of Hamas’s and Israel’s self-investigations into the allegations of war crimes. In this context, Goldstone wrote that had the UN Fact-Finding Mission known then what was now known, it would not have arrived at the conclusions it did.</p>
<p>Goldstone, however, was&#160;lying&#160;about the contents of the both the Goldstone Report and the follow-up committee’s report. He claimed the Fact-Finding Mission had not examined any evidence presented by Israel. That was false. In fact, the Mission fully took into account Israel’s own reports of its self-investigations that had occurred.</p>
<p>Goldstone also set up his op-ed on the premise of a strawman argument: the claim was ostensibly now retracting was that Israel had a policy of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians for death. In fact, this was&#160;not&#160;a finding of the Fact-Finding Mission’s report. Rather, the Mission concluded that Israel’s policy was to&#160;punish&#160;the civilian population through the deliberate use of disproportionate force. By setting up this strawman argument, Goldstone avoided having to “retract” the Mission’s&#160;actual&#160;findings.</p>
<p>Further, he quoted the follow-up committee’s finding that&#160;“Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza”, but he&#160;withheld&#160;from readers the fact that the committee found&#160;that these investigations lacked credibility.</p>
<p>After Goldstone’s disgraceful betrayal of justice, his three co-authors publicly criticized his op-ed and pointed out&#160;that information that had since come to light — including the findings of the follow-up committee Goldstone was &#160;deceptively relying on to support his own argument — did&#160;not&#160;change the Mission’s conclusions, but&#160;bolstered&#160;them.</p>
<p>As with Operation Cast Lead, the truth is dramatically different.</p>
<p>Israeli apologists — including US government officials and US mainstream media commentators — cited as the initiating event a Hamas attack on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jeep just days before Israel launched its operation. What was withheld from readers in this Zionist hasbara was the fact that this was an attack on IDF forces&#160;that had invaded Gaza&#160;and was in part retaliation for the IDF’s murder of a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy shortly prior.</p>
<p>Furthermore, just the day before Israel launched its operation, once again Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire that was then&#160;violated by Israel. In fact,&#160;Israel took advantage of the opportunity created by Hamas’s acceptance of the ceasefire to draw out and assassinate a senior Hamas official, Ahmed al-Jabari one of the initiating events of its “Operation Pillar of Defense”. Israel’s Orwellian justification for this operation was that it was intended to re-establish calm — the very calm that was shattered by its launch of the operation and assassination of Jabari.</p>
<p>For peace and justice to be realized, the lies have to be exposed and the true nature of the conflict must come to light. There needs to be a paradigm shift in which it is no longer feasible for mainstream media outlets — which effectively serve the role of manufacturing consent for the US policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians — to mindlessly parrot US and Israeli government claims and peddle deceitful propaganda.</p>
<p>Zionist apologists for Israel’s behavior employ numerous hasbara talking points to try to justify its crimes. Knowing how to effectively counter the propaganda is key to effecting the necessary paradigm shift for peace to be achieved.</p>
<p>You as an individual can play an important role in helping to effect that paradigm shift.</p>
<p>Empower yourself with the knowledge you need to become an effective voice for peace.</p>
<p>Educate yourself and gain the confidence you need to speak up and correct those around you who have been misinformed about the true nature of the conflict.</p>
<p>Challenge the Zionist apologists when you encounter them on Facebook or Twitter and know how to destroy their propagandistic talking points with the truth.</p>
<p>If we want peace, government isn’t going to get the job done. It’s up to us. Go to it!</p> | 10 Zionist Arguments You’ve Encountered, But Didn’t Have Answers To | false | http://foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/11/28/10-zionist-arguments-youve-encountered-but-didnt-have-answers-to/ | 2016-11-28 | 1right-center
| 3,055 | Here are ten popular arguments Zionists use to defend Israels crimes against the Palestinians and how to answer them effectively If you8217re active in the struggle for peace and justice in the Middle East you8217ve no doubt frequently encountered Zionists who defend Israel8217s crimes against the Palestinians You8217re familiar with many of their talking points and maybe you know how to answer many or most of them Here are ten you8217ve likely encountered but perhaps didn8217t know quite how to debate effectively8211until now There are two principle fallacies in this argument One it was not simply that Palestinians fled war Many did flee but this was encouraged by the Zionist forces which also directly expelled many civilians from their homes and destroyed their villages so they could never return It was the intent of the Zionists to ethnically cleanse Palestine of most of its Arab population in order for the demographically 8220Jewish state8221 of Israel to be established Indeed cleansing Palestine of Arabs was a prerequisite for this state to be createdamp160This is why Israel refused to allow those refugees to return Two this argument assumes that the Zionists8217 unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel on May 14 1948 was legitimateamp160It wasn8217t The Zionists had neither any legal nor moral authority to declare sovereignty over a land in which they were a minority and of which they owned only about 7 percent While they cited UN Resolution 181 the 8220partition plan8221 resolution as granting such authority in fact this resolution neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration Noamp160state has a 8220right to exist8221 This concept is a propaganda device invented by the US and Israel for a reason that will become clear momentarily One might be tempted to answer this argument with 8220Well Palestine has a right to exist too8221 But this is not the proper response Political entities defined by lines on maps do not have rightsamp160individuals do The proper framework for discussion isamp160the right to selfdetermination And it is manifestlyamp160Israelamp160that has denied that right to theamp160Palestiniansamp160since its founding and indeed by the Zionists even before Israel8217s founding and not vice versa The necessity of redefining the framework for discussion thus becomes obvious To say that Israel has a 8220right to exist8221 is effectively to assert that the Zionists8217 unilateral declaration of Israel8217s existenceamp160and the ethnic cleansing by which Israel actually came into being wereamp160legitimate Needless to say these were not legitimate actions on the part of the Zionists Israel8217s attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5 1967 8212 the event that started the 8220Six Day War8221 8212amp160was not preemptive Zionists will argue that Nasser8217s threats Egypt8217s closing of the Straits of Tiran and Suez Canal to Israeli shipping its movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula and its expelling of the United Nations Emergency Force UNEF all essentially amounted to acts of war However none of these actions constituted aggression under international law Egypt8217s perspective was that the straits and Suez Canal were its territorial waterways so it had a right to deny passage to an enemy state that had already attacked it once in 1956 when Israel conspired with Britain and France to launch a war of aggression against Egypt While legal scholars may debate the legitimacy of that point of view the fact is that Israel had peaceful means available to it to seek redress for this grievance against Egypt It did not under international law constitute aamp160casus belliamp160justification for war Nasser wanted the UN peacekeeping force gone because he was being accused by Syria and Jordan of hiding behind it His bellicose rhetoric was about saving face but was just thatamp160rhetoric The proposal was made to restation UNEF on Israel8217s side of the border but instructivelyamp160Israel rejected this proposal Furthermore the CIA observed that Egypt8217s troops took upamp160defensiveamp160positions in the Sinaiamp160andamp160Israel8217s own intelligence assessed that Israel was under no threat of attack from Egypt In 1982 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged 8220In Juneamp1601967 we again had a choice The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us We must be honest with ourselves We decided to attack him8221 Under international law Israel8217s attack on Egypt constituted aggression defined at Nuremberg as 8220the supreme international crime8221 This is a lie Unfortunately it is very effective Zionist hasbara and is widely believed even by supporters of Palestinians8217 rights There are three main components of the Zionist argument Briefly here are the flaws in these arguments First of all this is nonsense even on its face the resolution does not say Israel must withdraw from 8220theamp160territories occupied8221 so we must understand it to mean Israel must withdraw from only 8220someamp160territories occupied8221 This selfdefeating Zionist logic is prima facie nonsense In truth the absence of the article hasamp160no effectamp160on the meaning of the resolution inasmuch as theamp160extentamp160of withdraw is concerned It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces 8220from territories occupied8221 plural The Syrian Golan Heights the Egyptian Sinai and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank are all 8220territories occupied8221 during the 1967 war and thus territories from which Israel was required to withdraw under the clear and unambiguous wording of Resolution 242 In fact the preambulatory section of the resolution emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible 8212 and it is in the context of that emphasized principle that the resolution8217s call for Israeli withdrawal must be understood As for subparagraph ii while it does call for the establishment of 8220secure and recognized borders8221 it does not establish this as a precondition for the withdraw of Israeli forces It says 8220both8221 Israeli withdrawalamp160andamp160establishment of such borders are requiredamp160conditioning neither one upon the otheramp160It was not the Security Council8217s intent that a people whose land was occupied be required to negotiate with the occupier over where to draw the border Zionists claim otherwise but to do so they quote Caradon and Goldberg from years after the resolution8217s passage But first UN resolutions are not open to unilateral interpretation but must be understand according to the will of the Security Council as a whole and second the relevant documentary record for understanding the will of the Council is from prior to and up until the resolution8217s adoption And turning to that documentary record it is absolutely clear that the Security Council wasamp160explicit andamp160unanimousamp160that Resolution 242 required Israel to return to the lines it held prior to June 5 1967 This argument assumes that Israel accepts the twostate solution and had made generous concessions in each of those 8220offers8221 such as that made at Camp David in 2000amp160Those assumptions are absolutely false In fact every single concession made during each of the 8220offers8221 in question 8212 throughout the entire socalled 8220peace process8221 8212 was demanded or made by the Palestinians This Zionist hasbara frequently propagated by US government officials and media commentators simplyamp160framesamp160the discussion in terms of what Israelamp160wantsamp160rather than what it has aamp160rightamp160to under international law Zionists say things like 8220Israel offered the Palestinians a state in 95 percent of the West Bank at Camp David8221 First of all this is false Israel started out demanding to annex 12 percent of the West Bank and by the end of the talks was still demanding 9 percent Second none of this land was Israel8217s to give Under international law every inch of it is recognized as 8220occupied Palestinian territory8221 So translated into meaningful terms we see arguments like the above equate that Israel 8220offered8221 to takeamp160only 5 percent really 9 percent of the Palestinians8217 land Furthermore these demands to annex Palestinian territory were accompanied with other unreasonable demands such as dividing the West Bank into Bantustanlike enclaves with Jewishonly highways connecting illegally constructed Israeli settlements and Israeli military control over Palestine8217s borders and airspace In other words Israel demanded that the Palestinians surrender more of their land rights and sovereignty If a thief steals a 100amp160from you and then says he will give you back 91 if you agree to certain other demands requiring you to surrender your rights would you describe it as a 8220generous offer8221 or a 8220concession8221 The truth is that while the Palestinian leadership has accepted the twostate solution since the late 1980s Israel has always rejected it In fact the USled socalled 8220peace process8221 is in realityamp160the process by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the twostate solution Actually the UN has repeatedly affirmed theamp160illegalityamp160of Israel8217s blockade which amounts to a policy of collective punishment in violation of international law This criminal policy has been condemned by numerous UN bodies the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC and numerous international human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch Amnesty International and the Israeli rights groups B8217Tselem and Gisha This blockade continues in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860 which called on Israel to end it So what are Zionists talking about when they claim the UN has said Israel8217s blockade is legal They are talking about a report commissioned by UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon known as the 8220Palmer Report8221 It8217s trueamp160that this report expressed the opinion of its two chairmembers that Israel8217s navalamp160blockade was legal But what Zionists don8217t tell you is that they also noted in their report itself that this conclusion of theirs went beyond their mandate and that they had no authority to offer their legal opinion Furthermore the arguments they employed to arrive at their conclusion were riddled with factual and logical errors Essentially they employed circular reasoning by adopting the conclusion as their premise in short they argued that the naval blockade was legal because it was not a policy of collective punishment In fact they went to great lengths toamp160avoidamp160inquiring whether the blockade constituted collective punishment under international law and they resorted to demonstrable misrepresentations of what international law actually has to say in an effort to sustain their expressed opinion So why would they do that Well they stated the reason in their report their mandate wasamp160notamp160to inquire into the legality of the blockade but theamp160political objective of allowing Israel and Turkey to putamp160the Mavi Marmara incident behind them That was the incident in May 2010 in which Israeli forces attacked the humanitarian 8220Freedom Flotilla8221 8212 which was seeking to break Israel8217s illegal blockade and draw the world8217s attention to it 8212 in international waters and murdered nine Turkish activists on board Ban Kimoon charged them with helping these two states to reconcile Had they affirmed the international consensus that Israel8217s blockade was illegal it would have undermined their political objective So they expressed the opinion it was not as a predetermined conclusion and then proceeded to manipulate the facts and employ fallacious reasoning to support it This Zionist hasbara 8212 frequently parroted by the US government and mainstream media 8212 is deceit by omissionamp160It8217s true that in the years prior to Israel8217s 200809 8220Operation Cast Lead8221 thousands of rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza 8212 and indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli population centers are certainly war crimes However what the Zionistsamp160don8217tamp160tell you is that on June 19 Israel and Hamas entered into a ceasefire agreementamp160that was repeatedly violated not by Hamas but Israel Theamp160New York Timesamp160actually reported on the most serious of those Israeli violations on the day it occurred November 4 2008 but thereafter tossed this fact down the memory hole Subsequently when it referred to the ceasefire it merely said that it 8220broke down8221 without stating the reason whyamp160because it was violated by Israel More frequently that there had evenamp160beenamp160a ceasefire 8212 much less that it was not Hamas but Israel who violated it 8212 was completely omitted replaced by a false narrative in which Israel was acting in self defense against Hamas rocket attacks As illustrated by Operation Cast Lead it is a modus operandi of Israel8217s to take actions to attempt to provoke a violent response from Palestinian militants in order to create pretexts for its own resorts to its own violence which occurs on an incomparably greater scale This is a lie The truth is that Israel engaged in deliberately disproportionate use of force during its 200809 Operation Cast Lead 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense and 2014 Operation Protective Edge assaults on Gaza In fact it openly declared its intention to commit what amount to war crimes with its socalled 8220Dahiya Doctrine8221 8212 a reference to the flattening of the Dahiya district of Beirut in 2006 to punish the civilian population To take the example of Operation Cast Lead Israel8217s war crimes are well documented and incontrovertible It deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure for destruction as part of a policy of punishing the people of Gaza and the IDF routinely used indiscriminate force such as attacks on UN schools being used as shelters hospitals and residential homes In fact there is not a single documented case of a Palestinian civilian killed during Operation Cast Lead who was being used by Hamas at the time as a human shield This might seem like a shocking truth given the US mainstream media8217s mindless repetition of the IDF8217s own propaganda about civilians dying only because Hamas was using them as human shields but this operation has been extensively investigated by human rights organizations and the UN all of which investigations have concluded that there is no evidence to support Israel8217s claimed justifications for killing civilians On the other hand these investigationsamp160didamp160conclude thatamp160Israeli forcesamp160used Palestinian civilians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead such as forcing children to walk in front of them as they clearedamp160homes This is a lie What Zionist apologists for Israeli war crimes are referring to specifically when they make this claim is an oped by one of the four chairs of the UN FactFinding Mission on the Gaza Conflict Justice Richard Goldstone The socalled Goldstone Report did indeed conclude that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes 8212 and these conclusions still stand For his part in that report Goldstone came under intense pressure and heavy criticism from Zionists includingamp160threats to protest outside of and bar him from attending his grandon8217s bar mitzvah His oped was a transparent attempt to appease his Zionist detractors But further than that it was a disgraceful betrayal of truth and justice as Goldstone outright lied about the UN report8217s findings in his attempt at appeasement The occasion for Goldstone8217s betrayal was the report of a followup UN committee charged with inquiring into the credibility of Hamas8217s and Israel8217s selfinvestigations into the allegations of war crimes In this context Goldstone wrote that had the UN FactFinding Mission known then what was now known it would not have arrived at the conclusions it did Goldstone however wasamp160lyingamp160about the contents of the both the Goldstone Report and the followup committee8217s report He claimed the FactFinding Mission had not examined any evidence presented by Israel That was false In fact the Mission fully took into account Israel8217s own reports of its selfinvestigations that had occurred Goldstone also set up his oped on the premise of a strawman argument the claim was ostensibly now retracting was that Israel had a policy of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians for death In fact this wasamp160notamp160a finding of the FactFinding Mission8217s report Rather the Mission concluded that Israel8217s policy was toamp160punishamp160the civilian population through the deliberate use of disproportionate force By setting up this strawman argument Goldstone avoided having to 8220retract8221 the Mission8217samp160actualamp160findings Further he quoted the followup committee8217s finding thatamp1608220Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza8221 but heamp160withheldamp160from readers the fact that the committee foundamp160that these investigations lacked credibility After Goldstone8217s disgraceful betrayal of justice his three coauthors publicly criticized his oped and pointed outamp160that information that had since come to light 8212 including the findings of the followup committee Goldstone was amp160deceptively relying on to support his own argument 8212 didamp160notamp160change the Mission8217s conclusions butamp160bolsteredamp160them As with Operation Cast Lead the truth is dramatically different Israeli apologists 8212 including US government officials and US mainstream media commentators 8212 cited as the initiating event a Hamas attack on an Israel Defense Forces IDF jeep just days before Israel launched its operation What was withheld from readers in this Zionist hasbara was the fact that this was an attack on IDF forcesamp160that had invaded Gazaamp160and was in part retaliation for the IDF8217s murder of a thirteenyearold Palestinian boy shortly prior Furthermore just the day before Israel launched its operation once again Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire that was thenamp160violated by Israel In factamp160Israel took advantage of the opportunity created by Hamas8217s acceptance of the ceasefire to draw out and assassinate a senior Hamas official Ahmed alJabari one of the initiating events of its 8220Operation Pillar of Defense8221 Israel8217s Orwellian justification for this operation was that it was intended to reestablish calm 8212 the very calm that was shattered by its launch of the operation and assassination of Jabari For peace and justice to be realized the lies have to be exposed and the true nature of the conflict must come to light There needs to be a paradigm shift in which it is no longer feasible for mainstream media outlets 8212 which effectively serve the role of manufacturing consent for the US policy of supporting Israel8217s crimes against the Palestinians 8212 to mindlessly parrot US and Israeli government claims and peddle deceitful propaganda Zionist apologists for Israel8217s behavior employ numerous hasbara talking points to try to justify its crimes Knowing how to effectively counter the propaganda is key to effecting the necessary paradigm shift for peace to be achieved You as an individual can play an important role in helping to effect that paradigm shift Empower yourself with the knowledge you need to become an effective voice for peace Educate yourself and gain the confidence you need to speak up and correct those around you who have been misinformed about the true nature of the conflict Challenge the Zionist apologists when you encounter them on Facebook or Twitter and know how to destroy their propagandistic talking points with the truth If we want peace government isn8217t going to get the job done It8217s up to us Go to it | Here/ADV are/AUX ten/NUM popular/ADJ arguments/NOUN Zionists/NOUN use/VERB to/PART defend/VERB Israels/PROPN crimes/NOUN against/ADP the/DET Palestinians/PROPN and/CCONJ how/SCONJ to/PART answer/VERB them/PRON effectively/ADV If/SCONJ you8217re/PRON active/ADJ in/ADP the/DET struggle/NOUN for/ADP peace/NOUN and/CCONJ justice/NOUN in/ADP the/DET Middle/PROPN East/PROPN you8217ve/INTJ no/PRON doubt/ADV frequently/ADV encountered/VERB Zionists/PROPN who/PRON defend/VERB Israel8217s/PROPN crimes/NOUN against/ADP the/DET Palestinians/PROPN You8217re/NOUN familiar/ADJ with/ADP many/ADJ of/ADP their/PRON talking/NOUN points/NOUN and/CCONJ maybe/ADV you/PRON know/VERB how/SCONJ to/PART answer/VERB many/ADJ or/CCONJ most/ADJ of/ADP them/PRON Here/ADV are/AUX ten/NUM you8217ve/PROPN likely/ADV encountered/VERB but/CCONJ perhaps/ADV didn8217/NOUN t/NOUN know/VERB quite/ADV how/SCONJ to/PART debate/VERB effectively8211until/PROPN now/ADV There/PRON are/VERB two/NUM principle/ADJ fallacies/NOUN in/ADP this/DET argument/NOUN One/NUM it/PRON was/AUX not/PART simply/ADV that/SCONJ Palestinians/PROPN fled/VERB war/NOUN Many/ADJ did/VERB flee/VERB but/CCONJ this/PRON was/AUX encouraged/VERB by/ADP the/DET Zionist/ADJ forces/NOUN which/PRON also/ADV directly/ADV expelled/VERB many/ADJ civilians/NOUN from/ADP their/PRON homes/NOUN and/CCONJ destroyed/VERB their/PRON villages/NOUN so/SCONJ they/PRON could/AUX never/ADV return/VERB It/PRON was/AUX the/DET intent/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Zionists/PROPN to/PART ethnically/ADV cleanse/VERB Palestine/PROPN of/ADP most/ADJ of/ADP its/PRON Arab/ADJ population/NOUN in/ADP order/NOUN for/ADP the/DET demographically/ADV 8220Jewish/NUM state8221/NOUN of/ADP Israel/PROPN to/PART be/AUX established/VERB Indeed/ADV cleansing/VERB Palestine/PROPN of/ADP Arabs/PROPN was/AUX a/DET prerequisite/NOUN for/SCONJ this/DET state/NOUN to/PART be/AUX createdamp160This/PRON is/AUX why/SCONJ Israel/PROPN refused/VERB to/PART allow/VERB those/DET refugees/NOUN to/PART return/VERB Two/NUM this/DET argument/NOUN assumes/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET Zionists8217/PROPN unilateral/ADJ declaration/NOUN of/ADP the/DET existence/NOUN of/ADP Israel/PROPN on/ADP May/PROPN 14/NUM 1948/NUM was/AUX legitimateamp160It/PROPN wasn8217/PROPN t/NOUN The/DET Zionists/PROPN had/VERB neither/CCONJ any/DET legal/ADJ nor/CCONJ moral/ADJ authority/NOUN to/PART declare/VERB sovereignty/NOUN over/ADP a/DET land/NOUN in/ADP which/PRON they/PRON were/AUX a/DET minority/NOUN and/CCONJ of/ADP which/PRON they/PRON owned/VERB only/ADV about/ADV 7/NUM percent/NOUN While/SCONJ they/PRON cited/VERB UN/PROPN Resolution/PROPN 181/NUM the/DET 8220partition/NOUN plan8221/NOUN resolution/NOUN as/ADP granting/VERB such/ADJ authority/NOUN in/ADP fact/NOUN this/DET resolution/NOUN neither/CCONJ partitioned/VERB Palestine/PROPN nor/CCONJ conferred/VERB any/DET legal/ADJ authority/NOUN to/ADP the/DET Zionists/PROPN for/ADP their/PRON unilateral/ADJ declaration/NOUN Noamp160state/NOUN has/VERB a/DET 8220right/NOUN to/ADP exist8221/PROPN This/DET concept/NOUN is/AUX a/DET propaganda/NOUN device/NOUN invented/VERB by/ADP the/DET US/PROPN and/CCONJ Israel/PROPN for/ADP a/DET reason/NOUN that/PRON will/AUX become/VERB clear/ADV momentarily/ADV One/PRON might/AUX be/AUX tempted/VERB to/PART answer/VERB this/DET argument/NOUN with/SCONJ 8220Well/PROPN Palestine/PROPN has/VERB a/DET right/NOUN to/PART exist/VERB too8221/NOUN But/CCONJ this/PRON is/AUX not/PART the/DET proper/ADJ response/NOUN Political/ADJ entities/NOUN defined/VERB by/ADP lines/NOUN on/ADP maps/NOUN do/AUX not/PART have/VERB rightsamp160individuals/NOUN do/VERB The/DET proper/ADJ framework/NOUN for/ADP discussion/NOUN isamp160the/DET right/NOUN to/ADP selfdetermination/NOUN And/CCONJ it/PRON is/AUX manifestlyamp160Israelamp160that/PRON has/AUX denied/VERB that/PRON right/ADV to/PART theamp160Palestiniansamp160since/VERB its/PRON founding/NOUN and/CCONJ indeed/ADV by/ADP the/DET Zionists/PROPN even/ADV before/SCONJ Israel8217s/PROPN founding/NOUN and/CCONJ not/PART vice/ADV versa/ADV The/DET necessity/NOUN of/ADP redefining/VERB the/DET framework/NOUN for/ADP discussion/NOUN thus/ADV becomes/VERB obvious/ADJ To/PART say/VERB that/SCONJ Israel/PROPN has/VERB a/DET 8220right/NOUN to/ADP exist8221/PROPN is/AUX effectively/ADV to/PART assert/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET Zionists8217/PROPN unilateral/ADJ declaration/NOUN of/ADP Israel8217s/PROPN existenceamp160and/CCONJ the/DET ethnic/ADJ cleansing/NOUN by/ADP which/PRON Israel/PROPN actually/ADV came/VERB into/ADP being/AUX wereamp160legitimate/NUM Needless/PROPN to/PART say/VERB these/PRON were/AUX not/PART legitimate/ADJ actions/NOUN on/ADP the/DET part/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Zionists/PROPN Israel8217s/ADJ attack/NOUN on/ADP Egypt/PROPN on/ADP the/DET morning/NOUN of/ADP June/PROPN 5/NUM 1967/NUM 8212/NUM the/DET event/NOUN that/PRON started/VERB the/DET 8220Six/NUM Day/PROPN War8221/NOUN 8212amp160was/NUM not/PART preemptive/ADJ Zionists/PROPN will/AUX argue/VERB that/SCONJ Nasser8217s/PROPN threats/VERB Egypt8217s/PROPN closing/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Straits/PROPN of/ADP Tiran/PROPN and/CCONJ Suez/PROPN Canal/PROPN to/ADP Israeli/ADJ shipping/VERB its/PRON movement/NOUN of/ADP troops/NOUN into/ADP the/DET Sinai/PROPN Peninsula/PROPN and/CCONJ its/PRON expelling/NOUN of/ADP the/DET United/PROPN Nations/PROPN Emergency/PROPN Force/PROPN UNEF/PROPN all/PRON essentially/ADV amounted/VERB to/ADP acts/NOUN of/ADP war/NOUN However/ADV none/NOUN of/ADP these/DET actions/NOUN constituted/VERB aggression/NOUN under/ADP international/ADJ law/NOUN Egypt8217s/PROPN perspective/NOUN was/AUX that/SCONJ the/DET straits/NOUN and/CCONJ Suez/PROPN Canal/PROPN were/AUX its/PRON territorial/ADJ waterways/NOUN so/SCONJ it/PRON had/VERB 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to/ADP us/PRON Go/VERB to/ADP it/PRON |
<p>Thank you for the invitation to participate in this 125th anniversary lecture series on “Faith, Freedom, and the Future.”</p>
<p>That strikes me as an entirely appropriate theme for your anniversary, for Grove City College has long understood that the future of freedom depends on the virtues of a free people—and that, for the overwhelming majority of Americans, the virtues essential to preserving and extending freedom are expressions in history of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. By holding fast to its conviction that biblical faith informs freedom and points the exercise of freedom onto its true trajectory, Grove City College has made an important contribution to the education of future citizens, to American higher education, and to the defense of American democracy.</p>
<p>We are here this evening to reflect on the historic impact of a man who also believes that faith and freedom are intimately linked. Interestingly enough, this man, who has had an immense impact on the history of our times, is neither a politician, a diplomat, or an international relations theorist. That is, he does not wield power as the world conventionally understands “power.” Rather, he is a pastor, an evangelist, and a witness to basic human rights. Like the men and women who have led Grove City College for 125 years, Pope John Paul II is convinced that ideas and moral convictions are levers with which to move the world. Ideas and values are distinctive forms of power. Reflecting on how the Pope has exercised the power of truth is not only an interesting exercise in its own right; it may help us to understand how the world really works.</p>
<p>That John Paul II has had a considerable impact on contemporary history is now widely conceded by even his most implacable critics, inside and outside the Catholic Church. Yet one may well wonder whether those who think about the dynamics of history, professionally or as an avocation, have begin to come to grips intellectually with the meaning of John Paul’s accomplishment in the world of affairs—or what that accomplishment suggests about the working-out of history and the contours of world politics in the 21st century.</p>
<p>So my plan here is to sketch, briefly, the Pope’s accomplishment as I have come to understand it as his biographer, using three examples; then I shall indicate, again briefly, some lessons from this accomplishment for the future; and finally, I shall suggest where the new intellectual terrain lies, post-John Paul II, for those interested in the impact of ideas and religiously-grounded moral values on politics, especially the politics and ethics of international relations</p>
<p>I.</p>
<p>To understand John Paul II’s concept of the dynamics of international relations—indeed, the dynamics of history itself—let’s go back in our imaginations to the small Polish town of Wadowice, about forty miles southwest of Cracow, somewhere in the late 1920s. There, we meet a young Polish boy named Karol Wojty a. Young Karol, we discover, has learned from his father (a retired military officer) and from his elementary and secondary schooling the great lesson of modern Polish history: that it was through its culture—its language, it literature, its religion—that Poland the nation survived when Poland the state was erased for 123 years from the map of Europe.</p>
<p>Between 1795—when the three great powers of east central Europe, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, completed the third and final partition of the Polish lands—and 1918, nothing labeled “Poland” appeared on any map of Europe. It was an unprecedented act of destruction, the vivisection of a historic, living state. Yet throughout those 123 years of wandering in the wilderness of history, the Polish nation survived because the idea of “Poland” survived. Indeed, it survived with such potency that the Polish nation could give birth to a new Polish state in the aftermath of World War I.</p>
<p>History viewed from the Vistula River basin looks different; it has a tangible spiritual dimension. Looking at history from that distinctive angle-of-vision, we learn that overwhelming material force can be resisted successfully through the resources of the human spirit—through culture. And in reflecting on that, we learn that culture—not politics, not economics, and not some combination of politics-and-economics—is the most dynamic, enduring factor in human affairs, at least over the long haul.</p>
<p>Having learned these lessons as a young man, Karol Wojty a, a son of Poland whom the world would later know as Pope John Paul II, applied this concept of the priority of culture in history in resistance to the two great totalitarian powers that sought to subjugate Poland between 1939 and 1989.</p>
<p>He applied it in a variety of resistance activities against the draconian Nazi Occupation of Poland from 1939 until 1945. The Nazi’s strategic goal in Poland was to erase these Polish-Slavic untermenschen from the European New Order. One step toward achieving that goal was to decapitate the Polish nation by liquidating it intellectual, religious, and cultural leadership—thus, two months after Poland’s defeat in September 1939, 186 professors from the Jagiellonian University deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. One effective means of resistance to this tactic of decapitation was to keep Polish culture alive. Karol Wojty a was intensely involved in this, at the daily risk of his life, through his participation in a host of cultural resistance groups: the underground Jagiellonian University, clandestine literary, theatrical, and religious activities, a pioneering movement of civic renewal called UNIA which sought to lay the intellectual foundations for a post-war Christian democracy in Poland.</p>
<p>As a priest and bishop in Cracow from 1949 through 1978, Karol Wojty a applied a similar “culture-first” strategy to resistance against the communist effort to rewrite Poland’s history and redefine Poland’s culture. Wojty a had no direct “political” involvement over those three, grey decades. He could have cared less about the internal politics of the Polish communist party, who was up and who was down in the politburo, the twists and turns of the official party line. But his efforts to nurture an informed, intelligent Catholic laity were examples of what a later generation of democratic activists would call “building civil society”—and thus laying the groundwork for an active resistance movement with political traction.</p>
<p>Pope John Paul II has applied this strategy of culturally-driven change on a global stage since his election on October 16, 1978.</p>
<p>In 1992, when Oxford University Press published my study, The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, there were many eyebrows raised, within the professoriate and the punditocracy, about my claim that the Church and the Pope had played pivotal roles in the collapse of European communism. When I amplified that claim in Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, which was published seven years later, no one batted an eye. Over the course of the 1990s, John Paul’s crucial role in the collapse of European communism came to be generally recognized—even by Mikhail Gorbachev, who might have been expected to take a somewhat rueful view of the matter. But while the Pope’s pivotal role in these epic events is now recognized, it does not seem well understood.</p>
<p>John Paul II was not, pace Tad Szulc in his biography of the Pope, a wily diplomat skillfully negotiating a transition beyond one-party rule in Poland. He was not, pace Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in their fantasy-biography, His Holiness, a co-conspirator with Ronald Reagan in a “holy alliance” to effect communism’s demise. He was not, pace the late Jonathan Kwitny in his lengthy study of Wojty a’s career, a Gandhi in a white cassock, running a non-violent resistance movement in Poland through a clandestine messenger service from the Vatican.</p>
<p>Rather, John Paul shaped the politics of east central Europe in the 1980s as a pastor, an evangelist, and a witness to basic human rights</p>
<p>Primary-source evidence for this is found in the texts of the Pope’s epic June 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland, nine days on which the history of the 20th century pivoted. In some forty sermons, addresses, lectures, and impromptu remarks, the Pope told his fellow-countrymen, in so many words: “You are not who they say you are. Let me remind you who you are.” By restoring to the Polish people their authentic history and culture—by giving back to his people their identity— John Paul created a revolution of conscience that, fourteen months later, produced the nonviolent Solidarity resistance movement, a unique hybrid of workers and intellectuals: a “forest planed by aroused consciences,” as the Pope’s friend, the philosopher Józef Tischner once put it. And by restoring to his people a form of freedom and a fearlessness that communism could not reach, John Paul II set in motion the human dynamics that eventually led, over a decade, to what we know as the Revolution of 1989.</p>
<p>Those nine days in June 1979 were not only a time of catharsis for a people long frustrated by their inability to express the truth about themselves publicly. Together, they also formed one decisive, historic moment in which convictions were crystallized, to the point where the mute acquiescence that, as Václav Havel wrote, made continuing communist rule possible was shattered. Many people had long wanted to say “No” to communism. But they could not do so, publicly, except on the basis of a higher and more compelling “Yes.” Providing that “Yes” was what John Paul II did in June 1979. Moreover, it was not simply that, as French historian Alain Besancon nicely put it, “people regained the private ownership of their tongues” during the Solidarity revolution. It was what those tongues said—their new willingness to defy what Havel called the communist “culture of the lie”—that made the crucial difference.</p>
<p>To be sure, there were other factors in creating the Revolution of 1989: the policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl; Mikhail Gorbachev, a Soviet leader not formed in the brutalities of Stalin’s purge trials; the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act and their effects throughout Europe, and in linking human rights activists in the captive nations and the old democracies. But if we ask why communism collapsed when it did—in 1989 rather than 1999 or 2009 or 2019—and how it did—without mass violence (with the sole exception of Romania)—then sufficient account has to be taken of June 1979 and the revolution of conscience it ignited. This was a different kind of revolution, because the revolutionaries were a different sort of people—people who understood, as Adam Michnik aptly put it, that “those who begin by tearing down Bastilles end up building their own.”</p>
<p>This singular contribution of the Pope in June 1979 is a point stressed by local witnesses. When I first began researching The Final Revolution in 1990, I thought that the Church and the Pope had had something to do with the Revolution of 1989. In talking with dozens, even hundreds, of the people of the revolution, however, I came to a different, more expansive view. Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks, religious and secular alike, were unanimous in their testimony about the crucial impact of June 1979, which had launched a different kind of revolution—a revolution of conscience that made a nonviolent political revolution possible. June 1979, they unanimously insisted, was when “1989″ started.</p>
<p>(Parenthetically, it’s worth noting that the West largely missed this. Thus the New York Times editorial of June 5, 1979: “As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.” But two other Slavic readers of the signs of the times were not at all confused: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yuri Andropov both knew that the rise of John Paul II and the deployment of his “culture-first” strategy of social change was a profound threat to the Soviet order. The degree of seriousness with which Andropov took this threat may be inferred from the events in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, when Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II.)</p>
<p>“1989” had certain unique, unrepeatable characteristics, like any great historical event. Still, John Paul applied a similar strategy—the renovation of political life through the restoration of public moral culture—when he went to Chile in 1987. Fourteen years of the Pinochet government, following the crisis of the Allende regime, had created deep divisions in Chilean society. There were raw wounds in the body politic because of human rights abuses and the recalcitrance of the Left; there was, in a phrase, no “civil society,” and that lack made a transition to a democratic future impossible.</p>
<p>Therefore, John Paul, in collaboration with the Chilean bishops, decided that the public purpose of his 1987 pilgrimage to Chile would be to help reconstitute civil society through a reclamation of Chile’s Christian culture. The great theme for the visit would be that “Chile’s vocation is for understanding, not confrontation” The papal pilgrimage would, as one of its organizers put it to me, “take back the streets,” which had been places of fear under Allende and Pinochet, and transform them, once again, into places of community. And people would be deliberately mixed together at the venues for the papal Masses: Chileans would be compelled, under the eye of their common religious “father,” to look at each other, once again, as persons rather than ideological objects. And it seems no accident that, some eighteen months after the papal visit had accelerated the process of reconstructing Chilean civil society, a national plebiscite voted to move beyond military rule and restore democracy.</p>
<p>The third example of John Paul II’s “culture first” approach to political change can be found in his pilgrimage to Cuba in January 1998. There, the Pope did not mention the current Cuban regime, once—not once, in five days. Rather, he re-read Cuban history through the lens of a Christianity that had formed a distinctively Cuban people from native peoples, Spaniards, and black African slaves. And he re-read the Cuban national liberation struggle of the 19th century through the prism of its Christian inspiration. Here, as in Poland in 1979, the Pope was restoring to a people their authentic history and culture. In doing so, he was also calling for a reinsertion of Cuba into history and into the hemisphere, asking the Cuban people to stop thinking of themselves as victims (the theme of Fidel Castro’s welcoming address), and to start thinking of themselves as the protagonists of their own destiny.</p>
<p>II.</p>
<p>Several lessons can be drawn from reflecting on the distinctive impact of Pope John Paul II on the history of our times.</p>
<p>First, the experience of John Paul II suggests that what we call “civil society” is not simply institutional: a free press, free trade unions, free business organizations, free associations, and so forth. “Civil society” has an essential moral core. Civil society is built on the foundation of common moral convictions about the nature of the human person, and the requirements of human community.</p>
<p>Secondly, John Paul’s “culture-first” strategy reminds us that “power” cannot be measured solely in terms of aggregates of military or economic capability. The “power of the powerless” is a real form of power. Moral conviction, deployed in such a way as to restore to peoples their authentic identity, can be an Archimedean lever from which to move the world.</p>
<p>In the third place, the Pope’s impact demonstrates that non-state actors count in contemporary world politics, and sometimes in decisive ways. John Paul II did not shape the history of our times as the temporal sovereign of the Vatican City micro-state, but as the Bishop of Rome and the universal pastor of the Catholic Church. At the end of a century which began with secular modernity convinced that human being would quickly “outgrow” their “need” for religion, one of the most potent actors on the world stage was the holder of the world’s oldest religious office. The world does not work the way the world sometimes thinks it works—or the way conventional academic analyses of the dynamics of history and politics tell us it works.</p>
<p>III.</p>
<p>Still, for all its “worldly” accomplishments, the pontificate of John Paul II has left some gaps in our understanding that urgently need filling in the years just ahead.</p>
<p>It is curious that this son of a soldier, who has expressed his respect for the military vocation on many occasions, has not have developed the Catholic Church’s just war doctrine. This was most evident during Gulf War, but beyond such relatively conventional conflicts, there are new issues today at the intersection of ethics and world politics—the problem of outlaw states, the morality of preemption in the face of weapons of mass destruction, the locus of “legitimate authority” in the international community—that the Pope has simply not addressed. Others must take up that task.</p>
<p>The same can be said for “humanitarian intervention,”which the Pope identified as a “moral duty” in an address to the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization in 1992. But this “duty” was not defined. On whom does it fall, and why? By what means is it to be discharged? What about the claims of sovereignty? These are large questions that demand the most careful reflection.</p>
<p>IV.</p>
<p>John Paul II has been the most politically consequential pope in centuries. But his impact did not come through the normal modalities of politics. He had no army. His success did not, in the main, come through the normal instruments of diplomacy. In terms of the history of ideas, his “culture-first” reading of history is a sharp challenge to the regnant notions that politics runs history, or economics runs history. Does the fact of the Pope’s success suggest that we are moving into a period in which nation-states are of less consequence in “world affairs”? Or were the accomplishments I’ve outlined here idiosyncratic, the result of a singular personality meeting a unique set of circumstances with singular prescience and effect? There is much to chew on here, for students of history and international affairs, in the years immediately ahead. But that we have been living, in this pontificate, through the days of a giant seems clear enough.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | And the Wall Came Tumbling Down | false | https://eppc.org/publications/and-the-wall-came-tumbling-down/ | 1right-center
| 3,055 | Thank you for the invitation to participate in this 125th anniversary lecture series on 8220Faith Freedom and the Future8221 That strikes me as an entirely appropriate theme for your anniversary for Grove City College has long understood that the future of freedom depends on the virtues of a free people8212and that for the overwhelming majority of Americans the virtues essential to preserving and extending freedom are expressions in history of faith in the God of Abraham Isaac Jacob and Jesus By holding fast to its conviction that biblical faith informs freedom and points the exercise of freedom onto its true trajectory Grove City College has made an important contribution to the education of future citizens to American higher education and to the defense of American democracy We are here this evening to reflect on the historic impact of a man who also believes that faith and freedom are intimately linked Interestingly enough this man who has had an immense impact on the history of our times is neither a politician a diplomat or an international relations theorist That is he does not wield power as the world conventionally understands 8220power8221 Rather he is a pastor an evangelist and a witness to basic human rights Like the men and women who have led Grove City College for 125 years Pope John Paul II is convinced that ideas and moral convictions are levers with which to move the world Ideas and values are distinctive forms of power Reflecting on how the Pope has exercised the power of truth is not only an interesting exercise in its own right it may help us to understand how the world really works That John Paul II has had a considerable impact on contemporary history is now widely conceded by even his most implacable critics inside and outside the Catholic Church Yet one may well wonder whether those who think about the dynamics of history professionally or as an avocation have begin to come to grips intellectually with the meaning of John Paul8217s accomplishment in the world of affairs8212or what that accomplishment suggests about the workingout of history and the contours of world politics in the 21st century So my plan here is to sketch briefly the Pope8217s accomplishment as I have come to understand it as his biographer using three examples then I shall indicate again briefly some lessons from this accomplishment for the future and finally I shall suggest where the new intellectual terrain lies postJohn Paul II for those interested in the impact of ideas and religiouslygrounded moral values on politics especially the politics and ethics of international relations I To understand John Paul II8217s concept of the dynamics of international relations8212indeed the dynamics of history itself8212let8217s go back in our imaginations to the small Polish town of Wadowice about forty miles southwest of Cracow somewhere in the late 1920s There we meet a young Polish boy named Karol Wojty a Young Karol we discover has learned from his father a retired military officer and from his elementary and secondary schooling the great lesson of modern Polish history that it was through its culture8212its language it literature its religion8212that Poland the nation survived when Poland the state was erased for 123 years from the map of Europe Between 17958212when the three great powers of east central Europe Prussia AustriaHungary and Russia completed the third and final partition of the Polish lands8212and 1918 nothing labeled 8220Poland8221 appeared on any map of Europe It was an unprecedented act of destruction the vivisection of a historic living state Yet throughout those 123 years of wandering in the wilderness of history the Polish nation survived because the idea of 8220Poland8221 survived Indeed it survived with such potency that the Polish nation could give birth to a new Polish state in the aftermath of World War I History viewed from the Vistula River basin looks different it has a tangible spiritual dimension Looking at history from that distinctive angleofvision we learn that overwhelming material force can be resisted successfully through the resources of the human spirit8212through culture And in reflecting on that we learn that culture8212not politics not economics and not some combination of politicsandeconomics8212is the most dynamic enduring factor in human affairs at least over the long haul Having learned these lessons as a young man Karol Wojty a a son of Poland whom the world would later know as Pope John Paul II applied this concept of the priority of culture in history in resistance to the two great totalitarian powers that sought to subjugate Poland between 1939 and 1989 He applied it in a variety of resistance activities against the draconian Nazi Occupation of Poland from 1939 until 1945 The Nazi8217s strategic goal in Poland was to erase these PolishSlavic untermenschen from the European New Order One step toward achieving that goal was to decapitate the Polish nation by liquidating it intellectual religious and cultural leadership8212thus two months after Poland8217s defeat in September 1939 186 professors from the Jagiellonian University deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp One effective means of resistance to this tactic of decapitation was to keep Polish culture alive Karol Wojty a was intensely involved in this at the daily risk of his life through his participation in a host of cultural resistance groups the underground Jagiellonian University clandestine literary theatrical and religious activities a pioneering movement of civic renewal called UNIA which sought to lay the intellectual foundations for a postwar Christian democracy in Poland As a priest and bishop in Cracow from 1949 through 1978 Karol Wojty a applied a similar 8220culturefirst8221 strategy to resistance against the communist effort to rewrite Poland8217s history and redefine Poland8217s culture Wojty a had no direct 8220political8221 involvement over those three grey decades He could have cared less about the internal politics of the Polish communist party who was up and who was down in the politburo the twists and turns of the official party line But his efforts to nurture an informed intelligent Catholic laity were examples of what a later generation of democratic activists would call 8220building civil society82218212and thus laying the groundwork for an active resistance movement with political traction Pope John Paul II has applied this strategy of culturallydriven change on a global stage since his election on October 16 1978 In 1992 when Oxford University Press published my study The Final Revolution The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism there were many eyebrows raised within the professoriate and the punditocracy about my claim that the Church and the Pope had played pivotal roles in the collapse of European communism When I amplified that claim in Witness to Hope The Biography of Pope John Paul II which was published seven years later no one batted an eye Over the course of the 1990s John Paul8217s crucial role in the collapse of European communism came to be generally recognized8212even by Mikhail Gorbachev who might have been expected to take a somewhat rueful view of the matter But while the Pope8217s pivotal role in these epic events is now recognized it does not seem well understood John Paul II was not pace Tad Szulc in his biography of the Pope a wily diplomat skillfully negotiating a transition beyond oneparty rule in Poland He was not pace Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in their fantasybiography His Holiness a coconspirator with Ronald Reagan in a 8220holy alliance8221 to effect communism8217s demise He was not pace the late Jonathan Kwitny in his lengthy study of Wojty a8217s career a Gandhi in a white cassock running a nonviolent resistance movement in Poland through a clandestine messenger service from the Vatican Rather John Paul shaped the politics of east central Europe in the 1980s as a pastor an evangelist and a witness to basic human rights Primarysource evidence for this is found in the texts of the Pope8217s epic June 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland nine days on which the history of the 20th century pivoted In some forty sermons addresses lectures and impromptu remarks the Pope told his fellowcountrymen in so many words 8220You are not who they say you are Let me remind you who you are8221 By restoring to the Polish people their authentic history and culture8212by giving back to his people their identity8212 John Paul created a revolution of conscience that fourteen months later produced the nonviolent Solidarity resistance movement a unique hybrid of workers and intellectuals a 8220forest planed by aroused consciences8221 as the Pope8217s friend the philosopher J243zef Tischner once put it And by restoring to his people a form of freedom and a fearlessness that communism could not reach John Paul II set in motion the human dynamics that eventually led over a decade to what we know as the Revolution of 1989 Those nine days in June 1979 were not only a time of catharsis for a people long frustrated by their inability to express the truth about themselves publicly Together they also formed one decisive historic moment in which convictions were crystallized to the point where the mute acquiescence that as V225clav Havel wrote made continuing communist rule possible was shattered Many people had long wanted to say 8220No8221 to communism But they could not do so publicly except on the basis of a higher and more compelling 8220Yes8221 Providing that 8220Yes8221 was what John Paul II did in June 1979 Moreover it was not simply that as French historian Alain Besancon nicely put it 8220people regained the private ownership of their tongues8221 during the Solidarity revolution It was what those tongues said8212their new willingness to defy what Havel called the communist 8220culture of the lie82218212that made the crucial difference To be sure there were other factors in creating the Revolution of 1989 the policies of Ronald Reagan Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl Mikhail Gorbachev a Soviet leader not formed in the brutalities of Stalin8217s purge trials the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act and their effects throughout Europe and in linking human rights activists in the captive nations and the old democracies But if we ask why communism collapsed when it did8212in 1989 rather than 1999 or 2009 or 20198212and how it did8212without mass violence with the sole exception of Romania8212then sufficient account has to be taken of June 1979 and the revolution of conscience it ignited This was a different kind of revolution because the revolutionaries were a different sort of people8212people who understood as Adam Michnik aptly put it that 8220those who begin by tearing down Bastilles end up building their own8221 This singular contribution of the Pope in June 1979 is a point stressed by local witnesses When I first began researching The Final Revolution in 1990 I thought that the Church and the Pope had had something to do with the Revolution of 1989 In talking with dozens even hundreds of the people of the revolution however I came to a different more expansive view Poles Czechs and Slovaks religious and secular alike were unanimous in their testimony about the crucial impact of June 1979 which had launched a different kind of revolution8212a revolution of conscience that made a nonviolent political revolution possible June 1979 they unanimously insisted was when 822019898243 started Parenthetically it8217s worth noting that the West largely missed this Thus the New York Times editorial of June 5 1979 8220As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe8221 But two other Slavic readers of the signs of the times were not at all confused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yuri Andropov both knew that the rise of John Paul II and the deployment of his 8220culturefirst8221 strategy of social change was a profound threat to the Soviet order The degree of seriousness with which Andropov took this threat may be inferred from the events in St Peter8217s Square on May 13 1981 when Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II 822019898221 had certain unique unrepeatable characteristics like any great historical event Still John Paul applied a similar strategy8212the renovation of political life through the restoration of public moral culture8212when he went to Chile in 1987 Fourteen years of the Pinochet government following the crisis of the Allende regime had created deep divisions in Chilean society There were raw wounds in the body politic because of human rights abuses and the recalcitrance of the Left there was in a phrase no 8220civil society8221 and that lack made a transition to a democratic future impossible Therefore John Paul in collaboration with the Chilean bishops decided that the public purpose of his 1987 pilgrimage to Chile would be to help reconstitute civil society through a reclamation of Chile8217s Christian culture The great theme for the visit would be that 8220Chile8217s vocation is for understanding not confrontation8221 The papal pilgrimage would as one of its organizers put it to me 8220take back the streets8221 which had been places of fear under Allende and Pinochet and transform them once again into places of community And people would be deliberately mixed together at the venues for the papal Masses Chileans would be compelled under the eye of their common religious 8220father8221 to look at each other once again as persons rather than ideological objects And it seems no accident that some eighteen months after the papal visit had accelerated the process of reconstructing Chilean civil society a national plebiscite voted to move beyond military rule and restore democracy The third example of John Paul II8217s 8220culture first8221 approach to political change can be found in his pilgrimage to Cuba in January 1998 There the Pope did not mention the current Cuban regime once8212not once in five days Rather he reread Cuban history through the lens of a Christianity that had formed a distinctively Cuban people from native peoples Spaniards and black African slaves And he reread the Cuban national liberation struggle of the 19th century through the prism of its Christian inspiration Here as in Poland in 1979 the Pope was restoring to a people their authentic history and culture In doing so he was also calling for a reinsertion of Cuba into history and into the hemisphere asking the Cuban people to stop thinking of themselves as victims the theme of Fidel Castro8217s welcoming address and to start thinking of themselves as the protagonists of their own destiny II Several lessons can be drawn from reflecting on the distinctive impact of Pope John Paul II on the history of our times First the experience of John Paul II suggests that what we call 8220civil society8221 is not simply institutional a free press free trade unions free business organizations free associations and so forth 8220Civil society8221 has an essential moral core Civil society is built on the foundation of common moral convictions about the nature of the human person and the requirements of human community Secondly John Paul8217s 8220culturefirst8221 strategy reminds us that 8220power8221 cannot be measured solely in terms of aggregates of military or economic capability The 8220power of the powerless8221 is a real form of power Moral conviction deployed in such a way as to restore to peoples their authentic identity can be an Archimedean lever from which to move the world In the third place the Pope8217s impact demonstrates that nonstate actors count in contemporary world politics and sometimes in decisive ways John Paul II did not shape the history of our times as the temporal sovereign of the Vatican City microstate but as the Bishop of Rome and the universal pastor of the Catholic Church At the end of a century which began with secular modernity convinced that human being would quickly 8220outgrow8221 their 8220need8221 for religion one of the most potent actors on the world stage was the holder of the world8217s oldest religious office The world does not work the way the world sometimes thinks it works8212or the way conventional academic analyses of the dynamics of history and politics tell us it works III Still for all its 8220worldly8221 accomplishments the pontificate of John Paul II has left some gaps in our understanding that urgently need filling in the years just ahead It is curious that this son of a soldier who has expressed his respect for the military vocation on many occasions has not have developed the Catholic Church8217s just war doctrine This was most evident during Gulf War but beyond such relatively conventional conflicts there are new issues today at the intersection of ethics and world politics8212the problem of outlaw states the morality of preemption in the face of weapons of mass destruction the locus of 8220legitimate authority8221 in the international community8212that the Pope has simply not addressed Others must take up that task The same can be said for 8220humanitarian intervention8221which the Pope identified as a 8220moral duty8221 in an address to the UN8217s Food and Agricultural Organization in 1992 But this 8220duty8221 was not defined On whom does it fall and why By what means is it to be discharged What about the claims of sovereignty These are large questions that demand the most careful reflection IV John Paul II has been the most politically consequential pope in centuries But his impact did not come through the normal modalities of politics He had no army His success did not in the main come through the normal instruments of diplomacy In terms of the history of ideas his 8220culturefirst8221 reading of history is a sharp challenge to the regnant notions that politics runs history or economics runs history Does the fact of the Pope8217s success suggest that we are moving into a period in which nationstates are of less consequence in 8220world affairs8221 Or were the accomplishments I8217ve outlined here idiosyncratic the result of a singular personality meeting a unique set of circumstances with singular prescience and effect There is much to chew on here for students of history and international affairs in the years immediately ahead But that we have been living in this pontificate through the days of a giant seems clear enough George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC and holds EPPC8217s William E Simon Chair in Catholic Studies | Thank/VERB you/PRON for/ADP the/DET invitation/NOUN to/PART participate/VERB in/ADP this/DET 125th/ADJ anniversary/NOUN lecture/NOUN series/NOUN on/ADP 8220Faith/PROPN Freedom/PROPN 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|
<p>“People should be entertaining or useful; preferably both”</p>
<p>–Sun Bear</p>
<p>The sun set late on a warm mid-summer day. The full moon rose slowly; glistening off the glaciers of Mt Jefferson. Lamar Marshall blew away bringing the fire to life. Twilley Cannon produced a couple cases of some near-toxic Mescal and Tizwin. Mike Roselle supplied the Busch beer. Sticky, sweet joints of Oregon’s finest sensemilla passed from hand to hand. Somebody broke out the inevitable drums. The Squirrel Monkey (Mark Ottenad) stripped off his clothes and started dancing and playing his flute. Soon, dozens of young activists stripped down and joined him. A very pregnant Catia Juliani egged on the dancers. It was a Pagan scene to warm any Gaian’s heart.</p>
<p>I turned to a bit under-the-weather Mike Roselle and said, “Wow, Mike. What do you think would happen if the Wise Users got hold of a video of this?”</p>
<p>“We’d win! We’d win!,” he shouted without missing a beat. “Their kids would be joining us!”</p>
<p>Man of All Bioregions</p>
<p>In his book with Josh Mahan, <a href="" type="internal">Tree Spiker: From Earth First! To Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action</a> Roselle takes us on a journey from the days when he was the young virgin joining in on a series of progressive movements and, while at it, drinking, smoking the good herb and hoping to maybe get laid – from 1970s Yippies/Zippies/Hippies; to occupying the Nevada Nuclear Test Site the very day of a scheduled test; to major efforts to preserve the remnants of our Ancient Forests; to uphill struggles to end the trade in illegal tropical logging; to the current campaign to end the atrocity of Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal extraction.</p>
<p>Always entertaining, Mike also lived up to the other part of the incomparable Winona LaDuke’s late father Sun Bear’s maxim by finding out just where he could plug in and be useful. If it meant running a mimeograph machine, Mike did it. If it meant washing every dish in the sink, he did that. If the younger Yippies felt that Abbie Hoffman was getting a swelled head and not following grassroots protocol, then Mike was there to dump his once-idol Abbie in the hotel swimming pool. If it meant climbing the flagpole at Miami’s Flamingo Park during the 1972 GOP Convention and replacing Old Glory with the Viet Cong Battle Flag, well… Mike was always ready to answer the call.</p>
<p>Soon, Mike wasn’t only joining up with groups of like-minded folks; he was co-founding some of the more radical action groups we’ve seen. He provides an engrossing tale of the founding of Earth First! and the Buckaroos behind it. At the time he was still the young guy – drinking, smoking, no longer a virgin – finding his niche while working as a roughneck in the Wyoming Oil Patch. He even successfully opposed a Forest Service drilling lease that was to be drilled by the very rig he worked on.</p>
<p>The Buckaroos were hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-partying guys who were incensed at the loss of wild lands and the biodiversity they support. They were minor staffers for some of the big green environmental groups. They had seen firsthand how the Big Greens failed to protect wild lands whenever the groups’ ties to Democrats demanded inaction or some lame, compromise settlement that would be publicly called a victory: but ultimately condemned ever more swaths of wild lands to the bulldozers and chainsaws. On numerous occasions, across varied issues, Mike does not shy away from taking the Big Greens, the institutional Peace Movement and other progressive bureaucracies to task for their ‘insider” game and how it undermines actual success and destroys grassroots efforts; often stealing credit for hard-won grassroots victories at the same time.</p>
<p>Soon, Mike and the rest of the fledgling EF! group were out pulling road survey stakes and using Monkeywrenching (sabotage of industrial equipment, etc.) to stop destructive activities in the wild. Eventually, it escalated to where Mike and allies would drive large spikes into trees and then spray-paint them and label them as being spiked – to draw attention to the proposed logging.</p>
<p>Throughout the book, Mike carries out the internal movement (and personal) monologue/dialogue about Monkeywrenching – the violence vs. non-violence ethical debate that’s been around progressive politics since long before the days of Malcolm X and Dr. King. Mike mostly stuck to the non-violent civil disobedience model; much more so as he aged.</p>
<p>Besides co-founding Earth First!, Mike also had a hand in the founding of the Rainforest Action Network. The chapter on the rainforests is the strongest chapter in the book. In that and his other chapters on forest preservation efforts, Roselle, provides a very good analysis of logging’s eco-impacts using easily-understandable terminology – “layman’s terms” as he eschews what he sees as forestry’s faith-based “dogma” cloaked as science. He gives the reader a feel for just what it was/is like to be an identified conservationist living in resource extraction communities worldwide. He points out that the loggers, miners and ranchers of these communities are not bad people. In fact, he cites what is true of most grassroots activists; “One can like loggers without loving logging. I would rather hang out with loggers than with most environmentalists.”</p>
<p>Roselle has been arrested over 50 times by his estimation. Eventually, the latest arresting authorities when perusing his record come to realize that the threat of incarceration sure isn’t going to dissuade him. The longest he ever served time was four months in South Dakota for an effort to place a huge, mock gas mask and banner on George Washington at Mt. Rushmore – to protest coal-fired power plant acid rain emissions. His vignettes from inside the jail with its high percentage of Lakota inmates are the most entertaining parts of the book. He recounts the hilarious tale of how he was arrested for violating his parole while still in jail!</p>
<p>“Until we treat the destruction of the ancient forests like the crime it is, we will continue to witness its disappearance.”</p>
<p>–Mike Roselle</p>
<p>Mike writes an excellent chapter on the 1990 Redwood Summer campaign in Northern California and the still-unsolved bombing of two of its organizers, the late Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. When the Big Greens cower and some even side with the FBI’s false charges against the wounded activists, Greenpeace, an off again/on again Roselle habitat, comes through for Bari, Cherney and the Redwoods, assisting the exceptional local groups that first nationalized the issue. However, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club – all fall into the trap of, as Mike puts it; “no longer whether to log, only where to log.”</p>
<p>Periodically, Greenpeace completely shifts direction and Roselle and other radicals are purged. Roselle has been hired and fired by Greenpeace at least six times. But, they, and other groups, are always just one bleak campaign away from seeking out his usefulness again. As Mike points out, “My phone never rings unless an environmental group is desperate.”</p>
<p>The Big Wild</p>
<p>The effort to protect the Salmon-Selway ecosystem – the largest intact roadless area in the 48 states – and the Cove/Mallard road/logging project gets a thorough retelling. In perhaps Roselle and allies finest effort, they take on the subsidized roading and logging of this magnificent five-million acre-plus ecosystem. Ramon (Robert Amon) buys a piece of land astride where one of the roads is to be punched into the wild and it becomes Ground Zero for the effort. Seeds for Peace set up camp and kitchen; well-stocked with dumpster gleanings. Hundreds of activists visited over the multi-year campaign with over 150 arrested blocking the road-building efforts, with some getting major jail time.</p>
<p>Like Freedom Riders in the South, activists had to be wary when entering the local mill towns – not only were they resource-extraction company towns, but also some of the strongholds of the white supremacist movement. When Lloyd Clayton, Lauren Esserman, Karyn Moscowitz and I traveled across Idaho one hot, smoky day to the encampment outside tiny Dixie for Roselle’s 40th Birthday party – listening to Richie Havens singing “Freedom” as it was also the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock – we were greeted at a Kamiah gas station by a biker Billy Jack look-alike who was wearing a shirt with a Crusader’s Shield on it, complete with concertina wire wrapped around the cross and the slogan “Soldiers for Christ.” He was giving a hippie on a motorcycle the third degree. The hippie was giving up no information and warily eyeing his exit. Though sobering, that was nothing. Numerous dedicated wilderness defenders suffered actual assaults.</p>
<p>Idaho responded to the effrontery of the Big Wild defenders by passing the Earth First! Law. The ultimately-proven unconstitutional law made it a felony to even discuss blocking logging roads. Mill owners got million dollar (never collected) judgments against the activists. But, in the end, the Cove/Mallard project was dropped and the area has remained inviolate to this day – and a new crop of activists and lawyers are on the case.</p>
<p>Mike went on to challenge the Mahogany Pirates, even seizing a ship loaded with illegal lumber. Back with Greenpeace for one last stand, Mike set up the Forest Crimes Unit which succeeded in getting an international commission to begin seizures of its own. Mahogany was/is a little safer now and Mike moved back to southern Oregon to fight the resumed logging there.</p>
<p>Making a Ruckus</p>
<p>Soon, Roselle, Twilley and allies decide that a new organization, one that will train young activists in the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience is needed and Mike co-founds another one – The Ruckus Society. Starting with the 80 present at the first training in 1995 – that of the campfire dancing scene I described – Ruckus trained over 1000 new activists in such necessary things as banner hangings to media work to filing boring old Appeals of agency decisions. Most of these activists are still at it today, staffing a number of progressive organizations from Peace groups to end-of-life choice groups to an assortment of eco-groups.</p>
<p>It’s in his chapter on Ruckus that Mike delineates his thoughts on non-violence as a tactic – “not a strategy:”</p>
<p>“(Nonviolence) is most commonly used when the opposition holds all the power over an in important issue and refuses to acknowledge the opposition’s voice. Nonviolence serves to address this lopsided balance of power through the willingness to sacrifice one’s own freedom in order to persuade or coerce the other party into agreement.”</p>
<p>“I hate these anarchists. They won’t do anything you tell them to.”</p>
<p>–Mike Roselle</p>
<p>It’s also in the Ruckus chapter and the two penultimate ones that the book swerves off course. In his convert zeal for non-violence, Mike morphs into grouchy, old man mode and takes young activists to task for their current Monkeywrenching. He decries the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrators for the actions of the few Black Block anarchists who “fucked shit up,” completely missing the actual successes and, even greater symbolic importance of the WTO protests altogether -even Labor was there ferchrissakes protesting a neolib Democrat administration’s wrong-doing! Think the world didn’t notice that? And, what about the tens of thousands who were radicalized/more radicalized by the experience? It’s hard not to be made even more wary of Imperial America after getting gassed, beaten and shot at with rock hard superballs, while you and tens of thousands of others are doing, yes – non-violent CD.</p>
<p>He moves right along and goes after the Ruckus Society which he now deems as promoting “violence.” He hits moral dungeon high gear when he lambastes the arsonists in his penultimate chapter GREEN SCARE – THE BRIEF AND BRUTAL CAREER OF THE ELF (Earth Liberation Front).</p>
<p>Mike simply fails to give the new rabble rousers the slack he gives that old activist Mike Roselle. He simply won’t let them have the same chance to grow up. Sorry, good buddy, but there is no way “their kids will be joining us” if we don’t grant them the leeway to make some of the same damned mistakes. Sure, it’s hard to see people demanding the Right to make those same mistakes over an over and hard as hell to have patience with it. But deep down, I, for one, admit they have that Right. Sure, we’d dearly benefit from some elder respect, or at least ferreting out lessons learned thru those elders’ experiences. Grassroots democracy is always messy and may not get us there, but what’s the alternative? Surely, not the Big and Little Green model of absolutely no democracy for the peasants (the paying membership.)</p>
<p>Mike undermines his own arguments for scrupulous non-violence when he shows that, even for him, it’s situational, as he intentionally knocks a guy off a pro-Redwoods banner so that Woody Harrelson and Celia Alario can successfully hang it off the Golden Gate Bridge. Ironically, the inconvenienced bridge driver he knocked off the banner was doing his own non-violent CD trying to prevent the banner’s deployment.</p>
<p>The reality is that the same feeling of desperation that Mike once felt (and still does) motivates the “fuck shit up” crowd. Mike doesn’t connect the dots. He seems to not realize how corrupted the entire forest protection movement – not just the Big Greens, but also the smaller, regional green groups became and that the result was their collective blessing – in exchange for six-figure foundation grants – of Clinton’s resumption of ancient forest logging – the Northwest Forest Plan – Option 9.</p>
<p>He spends an entire chapter on Clinton’s Salvage Rider and the movement response to it, yet does not see how Option 9 begat that “logging without laws” Salvage Rider; which begat the Healthy (sic) Forests Initiative; which begat the phony Roadless Rule. Once the foundation-dependent greens rolled over on Ancient Forest logging which we had stopped under Pappy Bush, it was easy for the Democrats to suspend the laws and foist off the Salvage Rider; then they implemented logging the forests in order to save them (Healthy Forests) and; finally, to falsely claim that “58.5 million acres were protected” by Clinton’s 11th Hour Roadless Rule which was nothing more than Al Gore 2000 Greenwash and institutional green fund-raiser (in-boxes fill every year a decade later with the same damn message: “Defend the Roadless Rule! Send us money.”)</p>
<p>Other young activists did connect the dots; not just on forests, but on a host of ecological issues, and felt hopeless. That desperation led to the ELF as surely as Big Green concerns for foundation grants and useless “access” to their Democratic Party buddies led to renewed logging.</p>
<p>While letting the architects of the Option 9 and other pro-Dem sell-outs off the hook – even serially praising one of the major ones – Roselle spends three chapters lambasting a handful of now-incarcerated folks and others who invited incarceration with their frenzied responses to what they saw as serious threats to biodiversity, human and animal rights. This is the very same Mike Roselle who years earlier at the Miami Convention endured a comparable tongue-lashing from Allen Ginsberg to the effect that Roselle’s “trashing” had “screwed everything up and we would get four more years of Nixon because of it.”</p>
<p>Having a much-needed discussion on non-violence is one thing, but cut ‘em some slack Mike. Many of the things you once did believing them to be the best things you could do for biodiversity would carry a “terrorist enhancement” sentence these days.</p>
<p>The Final (?) Frontier</p>
<p>The book ends with an appeal for help in ending the monstrous crime of mountaintop removal (MTR) coal extraction and the entire fossil-fuel economy that dooms biodiversity. Mike has been camped in Appalachia for the last few years and the effort there is getting <a href="http://mountainjusticesummer.org/" type="external">mainstream press</a>. A sure sign they are making progress is that Big Coal is now paying workers to attend hearings and intimidate activists, just as Big Timber did over hearings to protect special paces during the Ancient Forests Campaign.</p>
<p>As Carbon Off-sets magnate Al Gore noted; “We are now treating the Earth’s atmosphere as an open sewer. I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers, and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”</p>
<p>Mike and his Appalachian allies would like to see Al’s vision carried out (with Al at the barricades himself.) Mike has been able to stick a toe out of the left-wing media ghetto; conducting endless TV/radio interviews and he even has a recent very good interview in <a href="" type="internal">TIME</a>. This alone will bring much needed attention to MTR.</p>
<p>In the end, the book is a retelling of an entire movement. A movement based on love for this beautiful planet and her dependent creatures – a movement of people who indeed put personal comfort below eco-Justice. Mike remembers people well. Great activists like Atossa Soltani, Jake Kreilick, Ed Abbey, Karen Pickett, Karen Coulter, John Seed, Randy Hayes, Howie Wolke, Vandana Shiva, Tracy Katelman, Bart Koehler, even Dave Foreman, in addition to the those mentioned already and many others are given credit where due.</p>
<p>He gives a nod to Brock Evans, the first guy to draw Wilderness boundaries on maps of the Pacific Northwest back in the ‘60s in advance of the original Wilderness Act. We’ve been fighting for the areas on Brock’s maps that were left out of that and later Wilderness Bills ever since. Brock always said that the secret of winning an impossible campaign is “endless pressure; endlessly applied.”</p>
<p>It’s a very good book even with my criticisms; far superior to Tree Huggers, Kathie Durbin’s turgid hosanna to the Option 9 sell-out. It’s well written, humorous, moves fast and hits the major points head on. He carries out the grassroots activist’s ancient code. He lets us in on just what the threats are; who is behind the threats; who is responding and he puts out the recruitment word.</p>
<p>He never does let his readers know what the hell Lowbagging is, however.</p>
<p>Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan will bring their road show to Portland, Oregon on October 30th, at 7 PM in Julia’s Cafe, 2130 NE Broadway St, Portland, OR 97232-1513.</p>
<p>MICHAEL DONNELLY is a long-time ancient forest activist. He considers his friend Mike Roselle as entertaining and useful a guy as has ever walked this blue-green sphere we call Mother. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:pahtoo@aol.com" type="external">pahtoo@aol.com</a></p> | Outside Agitator | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/10/19/outside-agitator/ | 2009-10-19 | 4left
| 3,055 | 8220People should be entertaining or useful preferably both8221 8211Sun Bear The sun set late on a warm midsummer day The full moon rose slowly glistening off the glaciers of Mt Jefferson Lamar Marshall blew away bringing the fire to life Twilley Cannon produced a couple cases of some neartoxic Mescal and Tizwin Mike Roselle supplied the Busch beer Sticky sweet joints of Oregon8217s finest sensemilla passed from hand to hand Somebody broke out the inevitable drums The Squirrel Monkey Mark Ottenad stripped off his clothes and started dancing and playing his flute Soon dozens of young activists stripped down and joined him A very pregnant Catia Juliani egged on the dancers It was a Pagan scene to warm any Gaian8217s heart I turned to a bit undertheweather Mike Roselle and said 8220Wow Mike What do you think would happen if the Wise Users got hold of a video of this8221 8220We8217d win We8217d win8221 he shouted without missing a beat 8220Their kids would be joining us8221 Man of All Bioregions In his book with Josh Mahan Tree Spiker From Earth First To Lowbagging My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action Roselle takes us on a journey from the days when he was the young virgin joining in on a series of progressive movements and while at it drinking smoking the good herb and hoping to maybe get laid 8211 from 1970s YippiesZippiesHippies to occupying the Nevada Nuclear Test Site the very day of a scheduled test to major efforts to preserve the remnants of our Ancient Forests to uphill struggles to end the trade in illegal tropical logging to the current campaign to end the atrocity of Mountaintop Removal MTR coal extraction Always entertaining Mike also lived up to the other part of the incomparable Winona LaDuke8217s late father Sun Bear8217s maxim by finding out just where he could plug in and be useful If it meant running a mimeograph machine Mike did it If it meant washing every dish in the sink he did that If the younger Yippies felt that Abbie Hoffman was getting a swelled head and not following grassroots protocol then Mike was there to dump his onceidol Abbie in the hotel swimming pool If it meant climbing the flagpole at Miami8217s Flamingo Park during the 1972 GOP Convention and replacing Old Glory with the Viet Cong Battle Flag well8230 Mike was always ready to answer the call Soon Mike wasn8217t only joining up with groups of likeminded folks he was cofounding some of the more radical action groups we8217ve seen He provides an engrossing tale of the founding of Earth First and the Buckaroos behind it At the time he was still the young guy 8211 drinking smoking no longer a virgin 8211 finding his niche while working as a roughneck in the Wyoming Oil Patch He even successfully opposed a Forest Service drilling lease that was to be drilled by the very rig he worked on The Buckaroos were hardworking harddrinking hardpartying guys who were incensed at the loss of wild lands and the biodiversity they support They were minor staffers for some of the big green environmental groups They had seen firsthand how the Big Greens failed to protect wild lands whenever the groups8217 ties to Democrats demanded inaction or some lame compromise settlement that would be publicly called a victory but ultimately condemned ever more swaths of wild lands to the bulldozers and chainsaws On numerous occasions across varied issues Mike does not shy away from taking the Big Greens the institutional Peace Movement and other progressive bureaucracies to task for their 8216insider8221 game and how it undermines actual success and destroys grassroots efforts often stealing credit for hardwon grassroots victories at the same time Soon Mike and the rest of the fledgling EF group were out pulling road survey stakes and using Monkeywrenching sabotage of industrial equipment etc to stop destructive activities in the wild Eventually it escalated to where Mike and allies would drive large spikes into trees and then spraypaint them and label them as being spiked 8211 to draw attention to the proposed logging Throughout the book Mike carries out the internal movement and personal monologuedialogue about Monkeywrenching 8211 the violence vs nonviolence ethical debate that8217s been around progressive politics since long before the days of Malcolm X and Dr King Mike mostly stuck to the nonviolent civil disobedience model much more so as he aged Besides cofounding Earth First Mike also had a hand in the founding of the Rainforest Action Network The chapter on the rainforests is the strongest chapter in the book In that and his other chapters on forest preservation efforts Roselle provides a very good analysis of logging8217s ecoimpacts using easilyunderstandable terminology 8211 8220layman8217s terms8221 as he eschews what he sees as forestry8217s faithbased 8220dogma8221 cloaked as science He gives the reader a feel for just what it wasis like to be an identified conservationist living in resource extraction communities worldwide He points out that the loggers miners and ranchers of these communities are not bad people In fact he cites what is true of most grassroots activists 8220One can like loggers without loving logging I would rather hang out with loggers than with most environmentalists8221 Roselle has been arrested over 50 times by his estimation Eventually the latest arresting authorities when perusing his record come to realize that the threat of incarceration sure isn8217t going to dissuade him The longest he ever served time was four months in South Dakota for an effort to place a huge mock gas mask and banner on George Washington at Mt Rushmore 8211 to protest coalfired power plant acid rain emissions His vignettes from inside the jail with its high percentage of Lakota inmates are the most entertaining parts of the book He recounts the hilarious tale of how he was arrested for violating his parole while still in jail 8220Until we treat the destruction of the ancient forests like the crime it is we will continue to witness its disappearance8221 8211Mike Roselle Mike writes an excellent chapter on the 1990 Redwood Summer campaign in Northern California and the stillunsolved bombing of two of its organizers the late Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney When the Big Greens cower and some even side with the FBI8217s false charges against the wounded activists Greenpeace an off againon again Roselle habitat comes through for Bari Cherney and the Redwoods assisting the exceptional local groups that first nationalized the issue However Greenpeace World Wildlife Federation Sierra Club 8211 all fall into the trap of as Mike puts it 8220no longer whether to log only where to log8221 Periodically Greenpeace completely shifts direction and Roselle and other radicals are purged Roselle has been hired and fired by Greenpeace at least six times But they and other groups are always just one bleak campaign away from seeking out his usefulness again As Mike points out 8220My phone never rings unless an environmental group is desperate8221 The Big Wild The effort to protect the SalmonSelway ecosystem 8211 the largest intact roadless area in the 48 states 8211 and the CoveMallard roadlogging project gets a thorough retelling In perhaps Roselle and allies finest effort they take on the subsidized roading and logging of this magnificent fivemillion acreplus ecosystem Ramon Robert Amon buys a piece of land astride where one of the roads is to be punched into the wild and it becomes Ground Zero for the effort Seeds for Peace set up camp and kitchen wellstocked with dumpster gleanings Hundreds of activists visited over the multiyear campaign with over 150 arrested blocking the roadbuilding efforts with some getting major jail time Like Freedom Riders in the South activists had to be wary when entering the local mill towns 8211 not only were they resourceextraction company towns but also some of the strongholds of the white supremacist movement When Lloyd Clayton Lauren Esserman Karyn Moscowitz and I traveled across Idaho one hot smoky day to the encampment outside tiny Dixie for Roselle8217s 40th Birthday party 8211 listening to Richie Havens singing 8220Freedom8221 as it was also the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock 8211 we were greeted at a Kamiah gas station by a biker Billy Jack lookalike who was wearing a shirt with a Crusader8217s Shield on it complete with concertina wire wrapped around the cross and the slogan 8220Soldiers for Christ8221 He was giving a hippie on a motorcycle the third degree The hippie was giving up no information and warily eyeing his exit Though sobering that was nothing Numerous dedicated wilderness defenders suffered actual assaults Idaho responded to the effrontery of the Big Wild defenders by passing the Earth First Law The ultimatelyproven unconstitutional law made it a felony to even discuss blocking logging roads Mill owners got million dollar never collected judgments against the activists But in the end the CoveMallard project was dropped and the area has remained inviolate to this day 8211 and a new crop of activists and lawyers are on the case Mike went on to challenge the Mahogany Pirates even seizing a ship loaded with illegal lumber Back with Greenpeace for one last stand Mike set up the Forest Crimes Unit which succeeded in getting an international commission to begin seizures of its own Mahogany wasis a little safer now and Mike moved back to southern Oregon to fight the resumed logging there Making a Ruckus Soon Roselle Twilley and allies decide that a new organization one that will train young activists in the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience is needed and Mike cofounds another one 8211 The Ruckus Society Starting with the 80 present at the first training in 1995 8211 that of the campfire dancing scene I described 8211 Ruckus trained over 1000 new activists in such necessary things as banner hangings to media work to filing boring old Appeals of agency decisions Most of these activists are still at it today staffing a number of progressive organizations from Peace groups to endoflife choice groups to an assortment of ecogroups It8217s in his chapter on Ruckus that Mike delineates his thoughts on nonviolence as a tactic 8211 8220not a strategy8221 8220Nonviolence is most commonly used when the opposition holds all the power over an in important issue and refuses to acknowledge the opposition8217s voice Nonviolence serves to address this lopsided balance of power through the willingness to sacrifice one8217s own freedom in order to persuade or coerce the other party into agreement8221 8220I hate these anarchists They won8217t do anything you tell them to8221 8211Mike Roselle It8217s also in the Ruckus chapter and the two penultimate ones that the book swerves off course In his convert zeal for nonviolence Mike morphs into grouchy old man mode and takes young activists to task for their current Monkeywrenching He decries the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization WTO demonstrators for the actions of the few Black Block anarchists who 8220fucked shit up8221 completely missing the actual successes and even greater symbolic importance of the WTO protests altogether even Labor was there ferchrissakes protesting a neolib Democrat administration8217s wrongdoing Think the world didn8217t notice that And what about the tens of thousands who were radicalizedmore radicalized by the experience It8217s hard not to be made even more wary of Imperial America after getting gassed beaten and shot at with rock hard superballs while you and tens of thousands of others are doing yes 8211 nonviolent CD He moves right along and goes after the Ruckus Society which he now deems as promoting 8220violence8221 He hits moral dungeon high gear when he lambastes the arsonists in his penultimate chapter GREEN SCARE 8211 THE BRIEF AND BRUTAL CAREER OF THE ELF Earth Liberation Front Mike simply fails to give the new rabble rousers the slack he gives that old activist Mike Roselle He simply won8217t let them have the same chance to grow up Sorry good buddy but there is no way 8220their kids will be joining us8221 if we don8217t grant them the leeway to make some of the same damned mistakes Sure it8217s hard to see people demanding the Right to make those same mistakes over an over and hard as hell to have patience with it But deep down I for one admit they have that Right Sure we8217d dearly benefit from some elder respect or at least ferreting out lessons learned thru those elders8217 experiences Grassroots democracy is always messy and may not get us there but what8217s the alternative Surely not the Big and Little Green model of absolutely no democracy for the peasants the paying membership Mike undermines his own arguments for scrupulous nonviolence when he shows that even for him it8217s situational as he intentionally knocks a guy off a proRedwoods banner so that Woody Harrelson and Celia Alario can successfully hang it off the Golden Gate Bridge Ironically the inconvenienced bridge driver he knocked off the banner was doing his own nonviolent CD trying to prevent the banner8217s deployment The reality is that the same feeling of desperation that Mike once felt and still does motivates the 8220fuck shit up8221 crowd Mike doesn8217t connect the dots He seems to not realize how corrupted the entire forest protection movement 8211 not just the Big Greens but also the smaller regional green groups became and that the result was their collective blessing 8211 in exchange for sixfigure foundation grants 8211 of Clinton8217s resumption of ancient forest logging 8211 the Northwest Forest Plan 8211 Option 9 He spends an entire chapter on Clinton8217s Salvage Rider and the movement response to it yet does not see how Option 9 begat that 8220logging without laws8221 Salvage Rider which begat the Healthy sic Forests Initiative which begat the phony Roadless Rule Once the foundationdependent greens rolled over on Ancient Forest logging which we had stopped under Pappy Bush it was easy for the Democrats to suspend the laws and foist off the Salvage Rider then they implemented logging the forests in order to save them Healthy Forests and finally to falsely claim that 8220585 million acres were protected8221 by Clinton8217s 11th Hour Roadless Rule which was nothing more than Al Gore 2000 Greenwash and institutional green fundraiser inboxes fill every year a decade later with the same damn message 8220Defend the Roadless Rule Send us money8221 Other young activists did connect the dots not just on forests but on a host of ecological issues and felt hopeless That desperation led to the ELF as surely as Big Green concerns for foundation grants and useless 8220access8221 to their Democratic Party buddies led to renewed logging While letting the architects of the Option 9 and other proDem sellouts off the hook 8211 even serially praising one of the major ones 8211 Roselle spends three chapters lambasting a handful of nowincarcerated folks and others who invited incarceration with their frenzied responses to what they saw as serious threats to biodiversity human and animal rights This is the very same Mike Roselle who years earlier at the Miami Convention endured a comparable tonguelashing from Allen Ginsberg to the effect that Roselle8217s 8220trashing8221 had 8220screwed everything up and we would get four more years of Nixon because of it8221 Having a muchneeded discussion on nonviolence is one thing but cut 8216em some slack Mike Many of the things you once did believing them to be the best things you could do for biodiversity would carry a 8220terrorist enhancement8221 sentence these days The Final Frontier The book ends with an appeal for help in ending the monstrous crime of mountaintop removal MTR coal extraction and the entire fossilfuel economy that dooms biodiversity Mike has been camped in Appalachia for the last few years and the effort there is getting mainstream press A sure sign they are making progress is that Big Coal is now paying workers to attend hearings and intimidate activists just as Big Timber did over hearings to protect special paces during the Ancient Forests Campaign As Carbon Offsets magnate Al Gore noted 8220We are now treating the Earth8217s atmosphere as an open sewer I can8217t understand why there aren8217t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coalfired power plants8221 Mike and his Appalachian allies would like to see Al8217s vision carried out with Al at the barricades himself Mike has been able to stick a toe out of the leftwing media ghetto conducting endless TVradio interviews and he even has a recent very good interview in TIME This alone will bring much needed attention to MTR In the end the book is a retelling of an entire movement A movement based on love for this beautiful planet and her dependent creatures 8211 a movement of people who indeed put personal comfort below ecoJustice Mike remembers people well Great activists like Atossa Soltani Jake Kreilick Ed Abbey Karen Pickett Karen Coulter John Seed Randy Hayes Howie Wolke Vandana Shiva Tracy Katelman Bart Koehler even Dave Foreman in addition to the those mentioned already and many others are given credit where due He gives a nod to Brock Evans the first guy to draw Wilderness boundaries on maps of the Pacific Northwest back in the 821660s in advance of the original Wilderness Act We8217ve been fighting for the areas on Brock8217s maps that were left out of that and later Wilderness Bills ever since Brock always said that the secret of winning an impossible campaign is 8220endless pressure endlessly applied8221 It8217s a very good book even with my criticisms far superior to Tree Huggers Kathie Durbin8217s turgid hosanna to the Option 9 sellout It8217s well written humorous moves fast and hits the major points head on He carries out the grassroots activist8217s ancient code He lets us in on just what the threats are who is behind the threats who is responding and he puts out the recruitment word He never does let his readers know what the hell Lowbagging is however Mike Roselle and Josh Mahan will bring their road show to Portland Oregon on October 30th at 7 PM in Julia8217s Cafe 2130 NE Broadway St Portland OR 972321513 MICHAEL DONNELLY is a longtime ancient forest activist He considers his friend Mike Roselle as entertaining and useful a guy as has ever walked this bluegreen sphere we call Mother He can be reached at pahtooaolcom | 8220People/PRON should/AUX be/AUX entertaining/ADJ or/CCONJ useful/ADJ preferably/ADV both8221/PROPN 8211Sun/NUM Bear/PROPN The/DET sun/NOUN set/VERB late/ADV on/ADP a/DET warm/ADJ midsummer/ADJ day/NOUN The/DET full/ADJ moon/NOUN rose/VERB slowly/ADV glistening/VERB off/ADP the/DET glaciers/NOUN of/ADP Mt/PROPN Jefferson/PROPN Lamar/PROPN Marshall/PROPN blew/VERB away/ADP bringing/VERB the/DET fire/NOUN to/ADP life/NOUN Twilley/PROPN Cannon/PROPN produced/VERB 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<p />
<p>In early March, 2003, with the US invasion imminent, major media companies pulled their correspondents out of Baghdad. A handful of intrepid independent reporters stuck around, among them the young Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad.</p>
<p>Seierstad got her start in journalism in the 1990s covering the war in Chechnya, where she developed strong views on the proper way to report on a conflict. “It’s hard to cover a war when you have no idea what it looks like down there, you have no opinion of the people, you haven’t met them, and you’re fed lies and propaganda,” Asne explains. “I really had to go and see for myself.” She has since applied this approach to her reporting on the conflicts in Serbia, Kosovo, and Afghanstan, and her first book, The Bookseller of Kabul, was an account of life in Afghanistan before, during, and after the removal of the Taliban.</p>
<p>Seierstad reported for various media outlets from Baghdad from January through March 2003. Her new book, A Hundred &amp; One Days, grew out of this experience. Seierstad’s Iraq reportage is fresh, honest, and determinedly focused on small-scale human stories. “I wish I could have written a novel about this, because again I think the more human stories you tell, the more you can put the reader inside someone else’s head and be insightful.” On a recent visit to San Francisco, she sat down with Mother Jones to talk about her work.</p>
<p>Mother Jones: You write in your foreword, “I have never worked in more difficult conditions than I did in Iraq.” What was so difficult about reporting on the war in Iraq compared to Kosovo, Chechnya, or Afghanistan?</p>
<p>Asne Seierstad: During the dictatorship, people were so afraid to speak their minds. It was like the Stalin period in the Soviet Union in the 193os. Whatever you ask, you get these banalities and safe phrases, phrases that they had been taught to say to foreigners. We were always fighting to get a quote or a story. We also had to spend so much time and money on bureaucracy to get visas and to go to press conferences. During a war, you have to be very careful – you can’t really move where you want. In Iraq, we had to be in Baghdad all the time, we couldn’t go out from the city. So we were really not free at all.</p>
<p>MJ: What was the atmosphere like in Baghdad before the war? What were the people saying, and how did that change over the course of your stay?</p>
<p>AS: The atmosphere was wary. You could feel the clouds of war nearing, but you couldn’t see them, like when you know a storm is approaching. In the beginning, people didn’t want to talk much about the war. They would easily come up with phrases against Bush or against the bombing, but they were kind of relaxed. As the war became imminent, the anger came out, and people would just be screaming and crying. Nobody knew how this war was going to be, whether there would be the use of chemical weapons or other types of new weapons we’d never even heard of. There were so many rumors, both among the journalists and among the population.</p>
<p>MJ: What were the attitudes toward the Saddam regime and toward the US?</p>
<p>AS: I think the population was split. There was definitely a part who supported the coming war just to get rid of the dictator. Many Shia Muslims were the most affected by his dictatorship – they were the most hit by his cleansing campaigns where he killed and imprisoned tens of thousands of people. If you’d lost a lot of family members to torture camps, you would want to get rid of that man at any cost. They were also the people who greeted the Americans when they came. Then there were those Iraqi nationalists or Baathists who were very against the war for political reasons. And then you had a big chunk of the population who were defenseless and were against the war because they were afraid of a bomb dropping on their house, on their children, the city being destroyed, who thought that there should be some other means. It seemed that the Iraqis were very much aware of the situation. They said, okay, Bush wants this war, there’s nothing that can stop him. I think many who supported the war have now turned their backs on the Americans. They’re disappointed because they see that they didn’t come to liberate them, because they haven’t really done anything to protect the population.</p>
<p>MJ: How deep, as far as you could tell, did Saddam’s cult of personality go?</p>
<p>AS: That’s a difficult question. Some people were definitely brainwashed. I’m still wondering about my translator, Aliya. She seemed to be a child of Saddam, born in the 70s to a Sunni family, who never really suffered anything. She didn’t have any loss in her family. She didn’t grow up knowing anything about politics. She only grew up to admire this great man who was everywhere – there were posters, statues, prayers for him, songs for him. She was translating his speeches. She did not doubt him. She thought he was the greatest man, and felt very humiliated and shocked as we stood their watching the statue of Saddam fall in Baghdad. I think going around to the prisons and talking to those who had been affected did have an effect on her, but I believe she would still say that she had a better life before. I sometimes speak to her by phone and she says, “The worst thing now is that we have no idea what will happen tomorrow, what will happen on my way home. We have no influence over our own lives.”</p>
<p>MJ: Can you talk a bit about your relationship with Aliya?</p>
<p>AS: I had just fired my first translator because there was no connection whatsoever. I was sitting outside the Ministry of Information on my computer thinking, what can I do without a translator? And there was this big woman just standing there. I asked her in English, “Hey, what are you reading?” And she said, “Oh, same as usual.” And I thought, That’s an interesting answer, because in Iraq you’re supposed to say that the papers are so interesting. And then we just started to talk, and I realized that she spoke great English, which most of the translators didn’t. So I applied to get her as a translator, and she was happy to work with me. She said, “I’ll protect you, whatever happens. Now you hide behind my back, and I’ll hide behind your back when the Americans come.”</p>
<p>But she was also a minder from the regime, so her job was to control me and to translate. It wasn’t really a friendship, but a sort of mutual respect. She also stayed all through the war when everybody left, and she came to work every day. We fought a little, liked each other a little, and at times she was like a safe pole in my life. I actually liked the fact that she was more scared than I was. She would just say that’s too dangerous, or we shouldn’t be stupid, it’s dangerous as it is. She would make those decisions at times, she wouldn’t just follow mindlessly. When the Americans came, she went into this kind of depression coma, and I was sometimes being sarcastic just to make her live again. And then in the end, after seeing the torture camps, she said, “Maybe Saddam didn’t care about us.” And that was such a hard phrase for her to say, because Saddam had always been the big hero in her life.</p>
<p>MJ: Do you think a lot of Iraqis went through that same disillusionment?</p>
<p>AS: If you’ve lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you’re used to people lying to you. If you now read that Saddam was a tyrant, you’ll think that’s just American propaganda. There’s no real basis for them to judge what’s right and what’s wrong. I think some people want him back and don’t really acknowledge how he was. But now it’s papers who talk about this, so that would be an opinion. Aliya went around and saw it and listened to people.</p>
<p>MJ: What were the advantages and disadvantages of being a white woman reporter in Iraq? Did it allow you to position yourself in ways that men perhaps would have had more difficulty in doing?</p>
<p>AS: As a woman, I think you can connect better with the women, especially in a Muslim society, but I think it mostly depends on being a nice person. As a journalist, you just have to try to be nice, straightforward, and honest — as honest as you can be, of course. Sometimes you use your charm if you have to. In this war, it was basically that I was more interested in the human stories. When you have that interest, I think you will be able to find those stories, whether you’re a man or a woman.</p>
<p>MJ: Are you happy with the kinds of stories you found?</p>
<p>AS: I think I did my best. Of course, there was always this hunger to understand more and to meet more people, but in a dictatorship, you just know that you can’t have it all. I gathered those human stories that I found most interesting by [focusing on] Aliya, and also the two drivers Abbas and Amir, who started as the best of friends, but when the statue falls they cry for different reasons. Now they don’t speak to each other. Abbas is working for the American forces, and Amir is supporting the suicide bombers. So they chose totally different paths, but two violent paths. And then you have Aliya, who’s just doing her job, she’s coping with her situation. It’s the eternal role of a woman, even though she wouldn’t think of it like that. Even in a war, someone has to take care of daily life. Someone has to feed and clothe the children. As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.</p>
<p>MJ: At several points in the book, we find you in Ministry of Information office begging to stay in Iraq after your allotted time, ten days, was up. Why do you think they let you stay for so long?</p>
<p>AS: First of all, I had this protector, Kadim, and he must have liked me. Because for most people, it was ten days, no discussion, you had to leave. He must have trusted me as well because he took my money. Everybody did it, but he had to be careful about it. I also tried to play my case that I work for eight newspapers. Because the thing is, they wanted the coverage, but they wanted as few as possible of us in order to control us. So I said, okay I’m working for eight newspapers from eight countries. Wouldn’t you rather have me than eight journalists?</p>
<p>MJ: What made you want to stay while other journalists were leaving?</p>
<p>AS: When you’re there, it takes an effort even to pack your bags and leave. I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to see what was happening. In many of these situations, my curiosity is greater than my fear. And then it’s also this feeling that says, I’m going to be okay. I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I’m going to be okay.</p>
<p>MJ: At one point in the book, you urge a young Finnish man, who has gone to Baghdad to be a human shield, to leave. Isn’t that a bit paradoxical?</p>
<p>AS: I think that was totally an emotional thing. There were other human shields that I didn’t care about. This man was young, and he reminded me of my brother. I wouldn’t want that to be my brother. Also, their mission was over. Yes, it would be a symbol if they were killed while they were linked to those installations, and they had been brave to go there, but the war was inevitable. He was also one of the very few Westerners, most of the other human shields had already left, and he was kind of on his own there.</p>
<p>MJ: Why did you leave when you did?</p>
<p>AS: I just had had enough. I was so exhausted – so tired, and I couldn’t think, and during the last days I had to force myself to work. I was interested in the story, and that’s also why I stayed as long as I did, but when you get tired, you also get scared. After the war had ended, the violence was actually growing. People were shooting in the streets, it was lawless. And I was thinking, I’ve just survived the whole war, I don’t want to get killed now. I did my thing, and I was getting afraid. And I think when you start to get afraid, it’s time to leave. I think I stayed another two weeks after the war ended.</p>
<p>MJ: Have you been back?</p>
<p>AS: No, I haven’t. And now I wouldn’t go back. When you’re there, you forget that there is peace outside. The situation was so intense in the build-up to the war, and I really wanted to stay and see the end. It was a big story, a world event, and I was so focused on finding out what would happen in that war. But now that I’m outside, I wouldn’t go back in. Also, the dangers are different. Back then, we at least had some sense of collectiveness – we could be hit by the bombs, but somehow I didn’t have that great a fear of being taken hostage or used as a human shield. Today, the fear of being kidnapped is too big for me. With my job, first of all I always follow my gut feeling, and now it says no. As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get. Right now you can’t really walk the streets, you would be stuck in a hotel, not being able to spend more than 10 minutes at one site because someone might report that there’s a foreigner. The violence has escalated, and so has the danger of being hit by stray bullets, being kidnapped, or meeting the fate of Marla Ruzicka, whom I knew, who died in the car bomb on April 16.</p>
<p>MJ: Do you have an opinion on how the US media covered the war?</p>
<p>AS: It seems to me that many of them are kind of patriotic in talking about “our troops” and “our boys” and “moving toward democracy” without going into the depth of the conflict. When I go around and read from my book, giving the Iraqis faces and names, lots of people tell me, “This is a story we never heard. We never get to know the Iraqis, for us they are just the Iraqis or the insurgents.” If you never present the human stories, you end up demonizing a country and its people. If you never saw their faces or heard their names, their cries, or even just ordinary non-violent stories, they become like the enemy. By putting a human face on the enemy, maybe you find out he’s not your enemy. I think that’s lacking in the American media.</p>
<p>MJ:Your book is unusual — part war reportage, part memoir, part cultural study, and at the same time, very lyrical, almost poetic. What inspired you to write your book in such a way?</p>
<p>AS: I believe in literature. I wish I could have written a novel about this, because again I think the more human stories you tell, the more you can put the reader inside someone else’s head and be insightful. In order to achieve that, you can’t just use the very straightforward language of the newspaper. You have to try to find other ways. I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.</p>
<p>MJ: You manage pretty successfully to keep your politics out of the narrative. Was that deliberate? And was it difficult?</p>
<p>AS: It’s not so difficult. There is no journalist without opinions, and there’s no real objectivity, but we can strive toward it. If I was older, maybe I would be sharper, and think okay, now I know. Still being relatively young, I’m here to learn. I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don’t think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.</p>
<p>MJ: Do you feel like sharing your real opinion now?</p>
<p>AS: Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things. Look at Chechnya. It started as a little invasion ten years ago, and now 10% of the population have been killed in 10 years. The occupation has been so hard and now they resort to terrorist attacks, which is new as well. It hasn’t solved anything. Kosovo is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess. I believe the consequences of a war are so harsh that it should be always the last resort. In this war, the US didn’t try everything. The UN weapons inspectors were begging for more time. And there was nothing Saddam Hussein could have done in those months. What was the hurry about when you see what’s happening today? There was no plan for peace. I think that’s one of the worst things, that there was this great hurry and yet there’s obviously no coordination – not even enough troops to keep the city safe.</p>
<p>MJ: What’s next for you?</p>
<p>AS: I’m taking some time off. It’s been a lot, writing two books and covering three wars and the last five years, four wars in ten years. I just need to recover.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | A Hundred & One Days: An Interview with Asne Seierstad | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2005/05/hundred-one-days-interview-asne-seierstad/ | 2005-05-12 | 4left
| 3,055 | In early March 2003 with the US invasion imminent major media companies pulled their correspondents out of Baghdad A handful of intrepid independent reporters stuck around among them the young Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad Seierstad got her start in journalism in the 1990s covering the war in Chechnya where she developed strong views on the proper way to report on a conflict 8220It8217s hard to cover a war when you have no idea what it looks like down there you have no opinion of the people you haven8217t met them and you8217re fed lies and propaganda8221 Asne explains 8220I really had to go and see for myself8221 She has since applied this approach to her reporting on the conflicts in Serbia Kosovo and Afghanstan and her first book The Bookseller of Kabul was an account of life in Afghanistan before during and after the removal of the Taliban Seierstad reported for various media outlets from Baghdad from January through March 2003 Her new book A Hundred ampamp One Days grew out of this experience Seierstad8217s Iraq reportage is fresh honest and determinedly focused on smallscale human stories 8220I wish I could have written a novel about this because again I think the more human stories you tell the more you can put the reader inside someone else8217s head and be insightful8221 On a recent visit to San Francisco she sat down with Mother Jones to talk about her work Mother Jones You write in your foreword 8220I have never worked in more difficult conditions than I did in Iraq8221 What was so difficult about reporting on the war in Iraq compared to Kosovo Chechnya or Afghanistan Asne Seierstad During the dictatorship people were so afraid to speak their minds It was like the Stalin period in the Soviet Union in the 193os Whatever you ask you get these banalities and safe phrases phrases that they had been taught to say to foreigners We were always fighting to get a quote or a story We also had to spend so much time and money on bureaucracy to get visas and to go to press conferences During a war you have to be very careful 8211 you can8217t really move where you want In Iraq we had to be in Baghdad all the time we couldn8217t go out from the city So we were really not free at all MJ What was the atmosphere like in Baghdad before the war What were the people saying and how did that change over the course of your stay AS The atmosphere was wary You could feel the clouds of war nearing but you couldn8217t see them like when you know a storm is approaching In the beginning people didn8217t want to talk much about the war They would easily come up with phrases against Bush or against the bombing but they were kind of relaxed As the war became imminent the anger came out and people would just be screaming and crying Nobody knew how this war was going to be whether there would be the use of chemical weapons or other types of new weapons we8217d never even heard of There were so many rumors both among the journalists and among the population MJ What were the attitudes toward the Saddam regime and toward the US AS I think the population was split There was definitely a part who supported the coming war just to get rid of the dictator Many Shia Muslims were the most affected by his dictatorship 8211 they were the most hit by his cleansing campaigns where he killed and imprisoned tens of thousands of people If you8217d lost a lot of family members to torture camps you would want to get rid of that man at any cost They were also the people who greeted the Americans when they came Then there were those Iraqi nationalists or Baathists who were very against the war for political reasons And then you had a big chunk of the population who were defenseless and were against the war because they were afraid of a bomb dropping on their house on their children the city being destroyed who thought that there should be some other means It seemed that the Iraqis were very much aware of the situation They said okay Bush wants this war there8217s nothing that can stop him I think many who supported the war have now turned their backs on the Americans They8217re disappointed because they see that they didn8217t come to liberate them because they haven8217t really done anything to protect the population MJ How deep as far as you could tell did Saddam8217s cult of personality go AS That8217s a difficult question Some people were definitely brainwashed I8217m still wondering about my translator Aliya She seemed to be a child of Saddam born in the 70s to a Sunni family who never really suffered anything She didn8217t have any loss in her family She didn8217t grow up knowing anything about politics She only grew up to admire this great man who was everywhere 8211 there were posters statues prayers for him songs for him She was translating his speeches She did not doubt him She thought he was the greatest man and felt very humiliated and shocked as we stood their watching the statue of Saddam fall in Baghdad I think going around to the prisons and talking to those who had been affected did have an effect on her but I believe she would still say that she had a better life before I sometimes speak to her by phone and she says 8220The worst thing now is that we have no idea what will happen tomorrow what will happen on my way home We have no influence over our own lives8221 MJ Can you talk a bit about your relationship with Aliya AS I had just fired my first translator because there was no connection whatsoever I was sitting outside the Ministry of Information on my computer thinking what can I do without a translator And there was this big woman just standing there I asked her in English 8220Hey what are you reading8221 And she said 8220Oh same as usual8221 And I thought That8217s an interesting answer because in Iraq you8217re supposed to say that the papers are so interesting And then we just started to talk and I realized that she spoke great English which most of the translators didn8217t So I applied to get her as a translator and she was happy to work with me She said 8220I8217ll protect you whatever happens Now you hide behind my back and I8217ll hide behind your back when the Americans come8221 But she was also a minder from the regime so her job was to control me and to translate It wasn8217t really a friendship but a sort of mutual respect She also stayed all through the war when everybody left and she came to work every day We fought a little liked each other a little and at times she was like a safe pole in my life I actually liked the fact that she was more scared than I was She would just say that8217s too dangerous or we shouldn8217t be stupid it8217s dangerous as it is She would make those decisions at times she wouldn8217t just follow mindlessly When the Americans came she went into this kind of depression coma and I was sometimes being sarcastic just to make her live again And then in the end after seeing the torture camps she said 8220Maybe Saddam didn8217t care about us8221 And that was such a hard phrase for her to say because Saddam had always been the big hero in her life MJ Do you think a lot of Iraqis went through that same disillusionment AS If you8217ve lived in a dictatorship for thirty years you8217re used to people lying to you If you now read that Saddam was a tyrant you8217ll think that8217s just American propaganda There8217s no real basis for them to judge what8217s right and what8217s wrong I think some people want him back and don8217t really acknowledge how he was But now it8217s papers who talk about this so that would be an opinion Aliya went around and saw it and listened to people MJ What were the advantages and disadvantages of being a white woman reporter in Iraq Did it allow you to position yourself in ways that men perhaps would have had more difficulty in doing AS As a woman I think you can connect better with the women especially in a Muslim society but I think it mostly depends on being a nice person As a journalist you just have to try to be nice straightforward and honest 8212 as honest as you can be of course Sometimes you use your charm if you have to In this war it was basically that I was more interested in the human stories When you have that interest I think you will be able to find those stories whether you8217re a man or a woman MJ Are you happy with the kinds of stories you found AS I think I did my best Of course there was always this hunger to understand more and to meet more people but in a dictatorship you just know that you can8217t have it all I gathered those human stories that I found most interesting by focusing on Aliya and also the two drivers Abbas and Amir who started as the best of friends but when the statue falls they cry for different reasons Now they don8217t speak to each other Abbas is working for the American forces and Amir is supporting the suicide bombers So they chose totally different paths but two violent paths And then you have Aliya who8217s just doing her job she8217s coping with her situation It8217s the eternal role of a woman even though she wouldn8217t think of it like that Even in a war someone has to take care of daily life Someone has to feed and clothe the children As a woman you accept the situation adapt to it and do your best whereas men would choose violence MJ At several points in the book we find you in Ministry of Information office begging to stay in Iraq after your allotted time ten days was up Why do you think they let you stay for so long AS First of all I had this protector Kadim and he must have liked me Because for most people it was ten days no discussion you had to leave He must have trusted me as well because he took my money Everybody did it but he had to be careful about it I also tried to play my case that I work for eight newspapers Because the thing is they wanted the coverage but they wanted as few as possible of us in order to control us So I said okay I8217m working for eight newspapers from eight countries Wouldn8217t you rather have me than eight journalists MJ What made you want to stay while other journalists were leaving AS When you8217re there it takes an effort even to pack your bags and leave I didn8217t want to leave I wanted to see what was happening In many of these situations my curiosity is greater than my fear And then it8217s also this feeling that says I8217m going to be okay I was thinking there are 5 million people and I am just one of those 5 million In the buildup to the war you see children playing in the street and you think ah I8217m going to be okay MJ At one point in the book you urge a young Finnish man who has gone to Baghdad to be a human shield to leave Isn8217t that a bit paradoxical AS I think that was totally an emotional thing There were other human shields that I didn8217t care about This man was young and he reminded me of my brother I wouldn8217t want that to be my brother Also their mission was over Yes it would be a symbol if they were killed while they were linked to those installations and they had been brave to go there but the war was inevitable He was also one of the very few Westerners most of the other human shields had already left and he was kind of on his own there MJ Why did you leave when you did AS I just had had enough I was so exhausted 8211 so tired and I couldn8217t think and during the last days I had to force myself to work I was interested in the story and that8217s also why I stayed as long as I did but when you get tired you also get scared After the war had ended the violence was actually growing People were shooting in the streets it was lawless And I was thinking I8217ve just survived the whole war I don8217t want to get killed now I did my thing and I was getting afraid And I think when you start to get afraid it8217s time to leave I think I stayed another two weeks after the war ended MJ Have you been back AS No I haven8217t And now I wouldn8217t go back When you8217re there you forget that there is peace outside The situation was so intense in the buildup to the war and I really wanted to stay and see the end It was a big story a world event and I was so focused on finding out what would happen in that war But now that I8217m outside I wouldn8217t go back in Also the dangers are different Back then we at least had some sense of collectiveness 8211 we could be hit by the bombs but somehow I didn8217t have that great a fear of being taken hostage or used as a human shield Today the fear of being kidnapped is too big for me With my job first of all I always follow my gut feeling and now it says no As a war correspondent you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get Right now you can8217t really walk the streets you would be stuck in a hotel not being able to spend more than 10 minutes at one site because someone might report that there8217s a foreigner The violence has escalated and so has the danger of being hit by stray bullets being kidnapped or meeting the fate of Marla Ruzicka whom I knew who died in the car bomb on April 16 MJ Do you have an opinion on how the US media covered the war AS It seems to me that many of them are kind of patriotic in talking about 8220our troops8221 and 8220our boys8221 and 8220moving toward democracy8221 without going into the depth of the conflict When I go around and read from my book giving the Iraqis faces and names lots of people tell me 8220This is a story we never heard We never get to know the Iraqis for us they are just the Iraqis or the insurgents8221 If you never present the human stories you end up demonizing a country and its people If you never saw their faces or heard their names their cries or even just ordinary nonviolent stories they become like the enemy By putting a human face on the enemy maybe you find out he8217s not your enemy I think that8217s lacking in the American media MJYour book is unusual 8212 part war reportage part memoir part cultural study and at the same time very lyrical almost poetic What inspired you to write your book in such a way AS I believe in literature I wish I could have written a novel about this because again I think the more human stories you tell the more you can put the reader inside someone else8217s head and be insightful In order to achieve that you can8217t just use the very straightforward language of the newspaper You have to try to find other ways I always try to describe the situation just as it is I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories MJ You manage pretty successfully to keep your politics out of the narrative Was that deliberate And was it difficult AS It8217s not so difficult There is no journalist without opinions and there8217s no real objectivity but we can strive toward it If I was older maybe I would be sharper and think okay now I know Still being relatively young I8217m here to learn I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after but I don8217t think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war I want to write for everybody MJ Do you feel like sharing your real opinion now AS Being a war correspondent and having covered four wars I know that wars very seldom solve things Look at Chechnya It started as a little invasion ten years ago and now 10 of the population have been killed in 10 years The occupation has been so hard and now they resort to terrorist attacks which is new as well It hasn8217t solved anything Kosovo is a mess Afghanistan is a mess I believe the consequences of a war are so harsh that it should be always the last resort In this war the US didn8217t try everything The UN weapons inspectors were begging for more time And there was nothing Saddam Hussein could have done in those months What was the hurry about when you see what8217s happening today There was no plan for peace I think that8217s one of the worst things that there was this great hurry and yet there8217s obviously no coordination 8211 not even enough troops to keep the city safe MJ What8217s next for you AS I8217m taking some time off It8217s been a lot writing two books and covering three wars and the last five years four wars in ten years I just need to recover amp160 | In/ADP early/ADJ March/PROPN 2003/NUM with/ADP the/DET US/PROPN invasion/NOUN imminent/ADJ major/ADJ media/NOUN companies/NOUN pulled/VERB their/PRON correspondents/NOUN out/ADP of/ADP Baghdad/PROPN A/DET handful/NOUN of/ADP intrepid/ADJ independent/ADJ reporters/NOUN stuck/VERB around/ADV among/ADP them/PRON the/DET young/ADJ Norwegian/ADJ journalist/NOUN Asne/PROPN Seierstad/PROPN Seierstad/PROPN got/VERB her/PRON start/NOUN in/ADP journalism/NOUN in/ADP the/DET 1990s/NOUN covering/VERB the/DET war/NOUN in/ADP Chechnya/PROPN where/SCONJ she/PRON developed/VERB strong/ADJ views/NOUN on/ADP the/DET proper/ADJ way/NOUN to/PART report/VERB on/ADP a/DET conflict/NOUN 8220It8217s/NOUN 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<p>[This essay is excerpted from CounterPunch’s hot new book, <a href="http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html" type="external">Dime’s Worth of Difference</a>.]</p>
<p>Had it not been for Monica’s captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be “reformed” and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.</p>
<p>It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clinton’s secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clinton’s polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clinton’s death warrant.</p>
<p>In an instant Clinton spun on the dime and became Social Security’s mighty champion, coining the slogan “Save Social Security First”.</p>
<p>Let us now reconstruct the plot in greater detail.</p>
<p>In the mid-1990s pessimism about the future of Social Security was rife in seminars, conferences, op-eds and learned papers by which elite consensus is fashioned. The media lent an eager ear to charlatanry from outfits like the Third Millennium, which ventriloquized a supposed consensus amongst youth that the program would not be there for them when they came to retire ­ and that consequently their best bet was to take their FICA payments and put them in a private share account in soar-away Wall Street. Third Millennium released artfully contrived polls claiming to show that, for example, more young Americans believed in UFOs than in the future of Social Security. In fact the poll had no question linking the two propositions but this didn’t stop lazy columnists and editorialists from picking it up and kindred ‘findings’ such as that General Hospital would outlast the program or that a bet on the Super Bowl was a more rational use of money.</p>
<p>Third Millennium was, of course, a front for the privatization lobby. But it did tap into a vein of public anxiety and skepticism concerning Social Security finances and, with the stock market soaring upward, its Wall Street connections were an asset not a liability. Whatever the exaggerations of the privatizers, the claim that an aging society would have to meet rising costs was not in itself wrong. The idea that “something must be done” was widespread and many expected that Clinton would follow up his capitulation to Republicans on welfare with a deal on Social Security. But he didn’t, thanks to the zaftig young woman in a blue dress who caught his eye in 1995.</p>
<p>We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton’s orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric “Special Issues” on the White House agenda.</p>
<p>What was in fact being prepared for the President was precisely that second dose of welfare reform, this time targeted on the very citadel of the New Deal, the Social Security program Roosevelt himself established.</p>
<p>The “Special Issues” secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. The Deputy Treasury Secretary’s fondness for schemes to privatize Social Security comes as no surprise. As Chief Economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s Summers had commissioned a notorious report, “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, that argued that Merrill Lynch and Fidelity would be better at pension provision than any government. In fact governments should offer only a safety net and farm out their power to tax payrolls to private financial concerns, which would run mandatory funded pensions on the Chilean model. The task of the Special Issues group was to find an installment of privatization that could reconcile realistic Republicans and Democrats, and be sold as still honoring most existing entitlements.</p>
<p>Participants at the Harvard conference conceded that severe technical problems beset efforts to introduce commercial practices. The existing program has low administration costs whereas running tens of millions of small investment accounts would be expensive. The secret White House team sought to finesse the problem by pooling individual funds and stripping down the element of choice or customer service. But Summers was unhappy: as one Team member now recalls it, “Deputy Secretary Summers was fond of saying that we had to guard against the risk of setting up the Post Office when people were used to dealing with Federal Express”. And pooled funds were also to be avoided because they would risk government control of business.</p>
<p>Some members of the team also worried that allowing employees the option of setting up their own accounts would soon turn into a “slippery slope”, since the defection of the richest five or ten per cent of employees would soon undermine the program’s ability to honor its commitments to existing retirees.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, under Summers’ guidance, the secret team pushed forward. There were high hopes that the President would embrace what had by now had become a detailed blueprint: “The working group’s estimates were at the level of detail that it was determined how many digits an ID number would have to be for each fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year.”</p>
<p>Clinton was kept up to date with briefings every few weeks and in July 1998 attended one of the “Special Issues” meetings himself. But in that same month he was served with a grand jury subpoena. A month later he finally acknowledged a sexual relationship with Monica.</p>
<p>By the end of 1998 the secret team concluded with heavy hearts that the escalating Lewinsky affair might well doom all their efforts. The President was desirous to be seen doing something dramatic for Social Security, but not anything risky. It could be controversial, but controversial in the direction of doing more for the program, not endangering it. As one team member put it this summer in the Harvard conclave: “Toward the end of 1998, as the possibility that the President would be impeached came clearly into view, the policy dynamic of the Social Security debate changed dramatically and it became clear to the White House that this was not the time to take risks on the scale that would be necessary to achieve a deal on an issue as contentious as Social Security reform.”</p>
<p>Clinton was so desperate for an approach that would prove popular that he was even prepared to disappoint Wall Street. “The President decided to follow a strategy of trying to unite the Democrats around a plan that would strengthen Social Security by transferring budget surpluses to Social Security and investing a portion in equities.”</p>
<p>In his 1999 State of the Union address Clinton seized the initiative from the privatizers with a bold new plan that gave substance to the “Save Social Security First” slogan. He proposed that 62 per cent of the budget surplus should be used to build up the Social Security trust fund. He promised to veto any attempt to divert Social Security funds to other uses, and he urged that 15 per cent of the trust fund should be invested in the stock market, not by individuals but by the Social Security Administration.</p>
<p>Part of the cunning of this approach was that it stole a Republican theme. While rejecting individualization it insisted that Social Security funds should not be spent on other programs or on tax cuts. Republicans had urged that Social Security taxes be placed in a “lock box” and soon Clinton himself was using the term. Not content with this Clinton also offered public subsidies to Universal Savings Accounts that would be set up outside Social Security and not at its expense. This was a residue of the commercializing approach but it won few plaudits from the privatizers as it was a voluntary add-on to a strengthened public program.</p>
<p>Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was willing to see the budget surplus pledged to Social Security but he denounced the plan to invest the trust fund in equities on the grounds that it would lead to government interference in business. A writer in the New York Times, January 25, 1999, warned that if the trust fund was allowed to invest in stocks and shares it would be impossible to prevent the politicization of investment: “The danger is that Congress will meddle, for example, steering funds into environmentally-friendly companies rather than, say, tobacco companies.”</p>
<p>The next day Milton Friedman contributed an excited piece to the Wall Street Journal warning that Clinton was embarked on a different type of slippery slope to that pondered by his secret team: “I have often speculated that an ingenious way for a socialist to achieve his objective would be to persuade Congress, in the name of fiscal responsibility, to (1) fully fund obligations under Social Security and (2) invest the accumulated reserves in the capital market by purchasing equity interests in domestic corporations.” Clinton had promised that the trust fund would be insulated from political pressure and that only 15 per cent of the trust fund would be invested, but Friedman was not at all convinced.</p>
<p>Clinton was also attacked for “double counting” when he pledged the budget surplus for Social Security. But accounts at the Harvard conference make clear that this concerned the pledge about the surplus aimed at separating the trust fund from the rest of the Federal budget. The proposal to allow the trust to hold a range of assets, not simply Treasury IOUs, would not only give Social Security real assets but would also create a powerful new lever on economic policy, something that Greenspan was jealously aware of.</p>
<p>Despite such attacks the Clinton plan as a whole went down very well with the American people. Republicans were swiftly moved to insist that they too would give priority to Social Security. Pessimism about the future of the program was replaced by a growing consensus that the program must be ­ and could be ­ saved. All that was needed was the will and a determination not to squander the trust fund.</p>
<p>Under the lash of the Lewinsky crisis, a President had issued a full-throated endorsement of the Social Security system. It was a terrible blow to a spectrum of opinion that stretched from the Cato Institute and Third Millennium to many New Democrats, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has proclaimed the need for individual accounts in the name of “choice”. In his presidential campaign Al Gore, we should note, publicly opposed the idea of the Social Security trust find holding a range of assets.</p>
<p>Even the Republic leadership sheepishly rallied to the notion that the surplus on the Social Security fund should be spent on nothing else. Just four days before the election Governor Bush told a crowd in Saginaw, Michigan, that protecting the Social Security trust fund was going to be one of his top priorities. The employee’s Social Security taxes, he promised, were “only going to be spent on one thing ­ what they’re meant for ­ Social Security. We’re not going to let Congress touch them for any other reason.” Less than a year later the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the administration would need $9 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund to balance its budget and much more next, even as Bush reassured Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle that he wouldn’t raid the famous Social Security lock-box.</p>
<p>Bush’s predicament over the trust fund was the more edgy because he wanted to introduce individual accounts into Social Security and has set up his own Commission to work out the best way to deliver this taste of privatization. The Bush White House web site featured an explanation of the promised “reform” which fulsomely insisted that all Social Security must be respected and that the private accounts would not be allowed to jeopardize them in any way.</p>
<p>The Democrats can blame the President for creating the budget problem by an unwise tax cut. If they had the guts the Democrats could have found a strategy for economic recovery by revisiting the Social Security debate of the late nineties, when Clinton not only coined the slogan now giving grief to his successor ­ ‘Save Social Security First’ ­ but also boldly proposed separating the trust fund from the Federal budget, allowing the trustees to pursue an investment strategy of its own.</p>
<p>The logic of Social Security was once memorably explained and defended by Larry Summers’ brilliant uncle, the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson. Compulsory social arrangements of this sort were, he explained, a necessary defense against greedy and short-sighted “free riders”; “if all but one obey, the one may gain selfish advantage by disobeying – which is where the sheriff comes in: we politically invoke force on ourselves. Once social coercion or contracting is admitted into the picture the problem (of free riders) disappears.” Samuelson was impelled to show that individualism needs collectivism: “That the Protestant ethic should have been instrumental in creating individualistic capitalism one may accept: but that it should stop there is not necessarily plausible. What made Jeremy Bentham a Benthamite in 1800, one suspects, might in 1900 have made him a Fabian (and do we not see a lot in common in the personalities of James Mill and Friedrich Engels?) Let mankind enter into a Hobbes-Rousseau social contract in which the young are assured of their retirement subsistence if they will today support the aged, such assurance to be guaranteed by a draft on the yet unborn.” (This passage is to be found in Samuelson’s paper, “An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money”, Journal of Political Economy, December 1958.)</p>
<p>But by 1998 Samuelson’s nephew, Larry Summers, was busy undermining the social contract between the generations and, as we have seen, it took young Lewinsky to give it extra breathing space. In the process the Clinton White House, mired in scandal as it was, found itself exploring ideas of collective funding that went beyond the pay-as-you-go principles that Samuelson enunciated. If generations are of unequal size, and if the aging of the population gives rise to increased retirement or medical costs, then it becomes wise to introduce an element of pre-funding. Clinton and Gore eventually settled on a strategy of using such a fund to pay down the public debt and invoking the “lock box”. But the papers at that Harvard conference showed that sooner or later pre-funding could not be confined to paying down the public debt, partly because surpluses might swallow it up in a few years and partly because it might not be feasible or advisable to do so.</p>
<p>The Harvard papers were not the only evidence of new thinking on Social Security in the wake of the impeachment crisis. In another part of the Clinton White House an aide called Peter Orszag was working with Joseph Stiglitz, then Chief Economist at the World Bank, on a paper entitled “Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths about Social Security Systems”. This constituted a powerful critique of the earlier World Bank report commissioned by Summers. The paper, originally delivered in September 1999, was later published in a book edited by Robert Holzman and Stiglitz, entitled New Ideas About Old Age Security. Its whole thrust is to defend public provision and to explore forms of pre-funding that would assist this. Indeed the paper, several of whose points are born out by the difficulties encountered by Clinton’s secret team, now give the opponents of privatization a potent weapon.</p>
<p>The collapse of the markets at the end of the Nineties bubble also meant that Bush and his Commission had a much harder task ahead of them, before the focus of terrorism changed the whole focus of Bush’s agenda. Flawed as it is, the case for privatization was superficially appealing during the heady days of the late-1990s bull market. Indeed its defeat at that time could turn out to have been decisive. On the other hand the economic downturn makes more relevant than ever the other prong of the original Clinton strategy, namely the idea that the Trust Fund should acquire its own assets. In a recession-hit economy these could include public bonds linked to investment in education or urban renewal, or they could involve injecting funds into sectors downcast by post-bubble blues. This would, it is true, be to go further than Clinton ever suggested ­ but it would be fully in the spirit of many left proponents of the original trust fund when it was added to the program in 1939 and it would be very well received by many sections of organized labor, such as the folks at the Heartland Alliance.</p>
<p>In his famous tract “What is History?” E.H. Carr debated the influence on history exercised by Cleopatra’s nose. Future historians of Social Security will be able to intersperse their explanation of the intricacies of COLAS, bend points and IPEs with at least a paragraph on the political and intellectual consequences of Monica’s beguiling smile. She saved the day.</p>
<p>ROBIN BLACKBURN, a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, is the former editor of <a href="http://www.newleftreview.net/" type="external">The New Left Review</a> and author of the excellent history of the slave trade, <a href="" type="internal">The Making of New World Slavery</a> and the new book from Verso <a href="" type="internal">Banking on Death: the Future of Pensions</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/10/30/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security/ | 2004-10-30 | 4left
| 3,055 | This essay is excerpted from CounterPunch8217s hot new book Dime8217s Worth of Difference Had it not been for Monica8217s captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that just like welfare Social Security was nearbroke had to be 8220reformed8221 and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete It was a desperately close run thing On the account of members of Clinton8217s secret White House team mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security they had got as far down the road as finetuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality Clinton8217s polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoitytoity elites intoning Clinton8217s death warrant In an instant Clinton spun on the dime and became Social Security8217s mighty champion coining the slogan 8220Save Social Security First8221 Let us now reconstruct the plot in greater detail In the mid1990s pessimism about the future of Social Security was rife in seminars conferences opeds and learned papers by which elite consensus is fashioned The media lent an eager ear to charlatanry from outfits like the Third Millennium which ventriloquized a supposed consensus amongst youth that the program would not be there for them when they came to retire 173 and that consequently their best bet was to take their FICA payments and put them in a private share account in soaraway Wall Street Third Millennium released artfully contrived polls claiming to show that for example more young Americans believed in UFOs than in the future of Social Security In fact the poll had no question linking the two propositions but this didn8217t stop lazy columnists and editorialists from picking it up and kindred 8216findings8217 such as that General Hospital would outlast the program or that a bet on the Super Bowl was a more rational use of money Third Millennium was of course a front for the privatization lobby But it did tap into a vein of public anxiety and skepticism concerning Social Security finances and with the stock market soaring upward its Wall Street connections were an asset not a liability Whatever the exaggerations of the privatizers the claim that an aging society would have to meet rising costs was not in itself wrong The idea that 8220something must be done8221 was widespread and many expected that Clinton would follow up his capitulation to Republicans on welfare with a deal on Social Security But he didn8217t thanks to the zaftig young woman in a blue dress who caught his eye in 1995 We have this on the authority of highranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton8217s orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric 8220Special Issues8221 on the White House agenda What was in fact being prepared for the President was precisely that second dose of welfare reform this time targeted on the very citadel of the New Deal the Social Security program Roosevelt himself established The 8220Special Issues8221 secret team was set up by thenDeputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard and Gene Sperling the head of the Council of Economic Advisers The Deputy Treasury Secretary8217s fondness for schemes to privatize Social Security comes as no surprise As Chief Economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s Summers had commissioned a notorious report 8220Averting the Old Age Crisis8221 that argued that Merrill Lynch and Fidelity would be better at pension provision than any government In fact governments should offer only a safety net and farm out their power to tax payrolls to private financial concerns which would run mandatory funded pensions on the Chilean model The task of the Special Issues group was to find an installment of privatization that could reconcile realistic Republicans and Democrats and be sold as still honoring most existing entitlements Participants at the Harvard conference conceded that severe technical problems beset efforts to introduce commercial practices The existing program has low administration costs whereas running tens of millions of small investment accounts would be expensive The secret White House team sought to finesse the problem by pooling individual funds and stripping down the element of choice or customer service But Summers was unhappy as one Team member now recalls it 8220Deputy Secretary Summers was fond of saying that we had to guard against the risk of setting up the Post Office when people were used to dealing with Federal Express8221 And pooled funds were also to be avoided because they would risk government control of business Some members of the team also worried that allowing employees the option of setting up their own accounts would soon turn into a 8220slippery slope8221 since the defection of the richest five or ten per cent of employees would soon undermine the program8217s ability to honor its commitments to existing retirees Nevertheless under Summers8217 guidance the secret team pushed forward There were high hopes that the President would embrace what had by now had become a detailed blueprint 8220The working group8217s estimates were at the level of detail that it was determined how many digits an ID number would have to be for each fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year8221 Clinton was kept up to date with briefings every few weeks and in July 1998 attended one of the 8220Special Issues8221 meetings himself But in that same month he was served with a grand jury subpoena A month later he finally acknowledged a sexual relationship with Monica By the end of 1998 the secret team concluded with heavy hearts that the escalating Lewinsky affair might well doom all their efforts The President was desirous to be seen doing something dramatic for Social Security but not anything risky It could be controversial but controversial in the direction of doing more for the program not endangering it As one team member put it this summer in the Harvard conclave 8220Toward the end of 1998 as the possibility that the President would be impeached came clearly into view the policy dynamic of the Social Security debate changed dramatically and it became clear to the White House that this was not the time to take risks on the scale that would be necessary to achieve a deal on an issue as contentious as Social Security reform8221 Clinton was so desperate for an approach that would prove popular that he was even prepared to disappoint Wall Street 8220The President decided to follow a strategy of trying to unite the Democrats around a plan that would strengthen Social Security by transferring budget surpluses to Social Security and investing a portion in equities8221 In his 1999 State of the Union address Clinton seized the initiative from the privatizers with a bold new plan that gave substance to the 8220Save Social Security First8221 slogan He proposed that 62 per cent of the budget surplus should be used to build up the Social Security trust fund He promised to veto any attempt to divert Social Security funds to other uses and he urged that 15 per cent of the trust fund should be invested in the stock market not by individuals but by the Social Security Administration Part of the cunning of this approach was that it stole a Republican theme While rejecting individualization it insisted that Social Security funds should not be spent on other programs or on tax cuts Republicans had urged that Social Security taxes be placed in a 8220lock box8221 and soon Clinton himself was using the term Not content with this Clinton also offered public subsidies to Universal Savings Accounts that would be set up outside Social Security and not at its expense This was a residue of the commercializing approach but it won few plaudits from the privatizers as it was a voluntary addon to a strengthened public program Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was willing to see the budget surplus pledged to Social Security but he denounced the plan to invest the trust fund in equities on the grounds that it would lead to government interference in business A writer in the New York Times January 25 1999 warned that if the trust fund was allowed to invest in stocks and shares it would be impossible to prevent the politicization of investment 8220The danger is that Congress will meddle for example steering funds into environmentallyfriendly companies rather than say tobacco companies8221 The next day Milton Friedman contributed an excited piece to the Wall Street Journal warning that Clinton was embarked on a different type of slippery slope to that pondered by his secret team 8220I have often speculated that an ingenious way for a socialist to achieve his objective would be to persuade Congress in the name of fiscal responsibility to 1 fully fund obligations under Social Security and 2 invest the accumulated reserves in the capital market by purchasing equity interests in domestic corporations8221 Clinton had promised that the trust fund would be insulated from political pressure and that only 15 per cent of the trust fund would be invested but Friedman was not at all convinced Clinton was also attacked for 8220double counting8221 when he pledged the budget surplus for Social Security But accounts at the Harvard conference make clear that this concerned the pledge about the surplus aimed at separating the trust fund from the rest of the Federal budget The proposal to allow the trust to hold a range of assets not simply Treasury IOUs would not only give Social Security real assets but would also create a powerful new lever on economic policy something that Greenspan was jealously aware of Despite such attacks the Clinton plan as a whole went down very well with the American people Republicans were swiftly moved to insist that they too would give priority to Social Security Pessimism about the future of the program was replaced by a growing consensus that the program must be 173 and could be 173 saved All that was needed was the will and a determination not to squander the trust fund Under the lash of the Lewinsky crisis a President had issued a fullthroated endorsement of the Social Security system It was a terrible blow to a spectrum of opinion that stretched from the Cato Institute and Third Millennium to many New Democrats including Senator Joseph Lieberman who has proclaimed the need for individual accounts in the name of 8220choice8221 In his presidential campaign Al Gore we should note publicly opposed the idea of the Social Security trust find holding a range of assets Even the Republic leadership sheepishly rallied to the notion that the surplus on the Social Security fund should be spent on nothing else Just four days before the election Governor Bush told a crowd in Saginaw Michigan that protecting the Social Security trust fund was going to be one of his top priorities The employee8217s Social Security taxes he promised were 8220only going to be spent on one thing 173 what they8217re meant for 173 Social Security We8217re not going to let Congress touch them for any other reason8221 Less than a year later the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the administration would need 9 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund to balance its budget and much more next even as Bush reassured Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle that he wouldn8217t raid the famous Social Security lockbox Bush8217s predicament over the trust fund was the more edgy because he wanted to introduce individual accounts into Social Security and has set up his own Commission to work out the best way to deliver this taste of privatization The Bush White House web site featured an explanation of the promised 8220reform8221 which fulsomely insisted that all Social Security must be respected and that the private accounts would not be allowed to jeopardize them in any way The Democrats can blame the President for creating the budget problem by an unwise tax cut If they had the guts the Democrats could have found a strategy for economic recovery by revisiting the Social Security debate of the late nineties when Clinton not only coined the slogan now giving grief to his successor 173 8216Save Social Security First8217 173 but also boldly proposed separating the trust fund from the Federal budget allowing the trustees to pursue an investment strategy of its own The logic of Social Security was once memorably explained and defended by Larry Summers8217 brilliant uncle the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson Compulsory social arrangements of this sort were he explained a necessary defense against greedy and shortsighted 8220free riders8221 8220if all but one obey the one may gain selfish advantage by disobeying 8211 which is where the sheriff comes in we politically invoke force on ourselves Once social coercion or contracting is admitted into the picture the problem of free riders disappears8221 Samuelson was impelled to show that individualism needs collectivism 8220That the Protestant ethic should have been instrumental in creating individualistic capitalism one may accept but that it should stop there is not necessarily plausible What made Jeremy Bentham a Benthamite in 1800 one suspects might in 1900 have made him a Fabian and do we not see a lot in common in the personalities of James Mill and Friedrich Engels Let mankind enter into a HobbesRousseau social contract in which the young are assured of their retirement subsistence if they will today support the aged such assurance to be guaranteed by a draft on the yet unborn8221 This passage is to be found in Samuelson8217s paper 8220An Exact ConsumptionLoan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money8221 Journal of Political Economy December 1958 But by 1998 Samuelson8217s nephew Larry Summers was busy undermining the social contract between the generations and as we have seen it took young Lewinsky to give it extra breathing space In the process the Clinton White House mired in scandal as it was found itself exploring ideas of collective funding that went beyond the payasyougo principles that Samuelson enunciated If generations are of unequal size and if the aging of the population gives rise to increased retirement or medical costs then it becomes wise to introduce an element of prefunding Clinton and Gore eventually settled on a strategy of using such a fund to pay down the public debt and invoking the 8220lock box8221 But the papers at that Harvard conference showed that sooner or later prefunding could not be confined to paying down the public debt partly because surpluses might swallow it up in a few years and partly because it might not be feasible or advisable to do so The Harvard papers were not the only evidence of new thinking on Social Security in the wake of the impeachment crisis In another part of the Clinton White House an aide called Peter Orszag was working with Joseph Stiglitz then Chief Economist at the World Bank on a paper entitled 8220Rethinking Pension Reform Ten Myths about Social Security Systems8221 This constituted a powerful critique of the earlier World Bank report commissioned by Summers The paper originally delivered in September 1999 was later published in a book edited by Robert Holzman and Stiglitz entitled New Ideas About Old Age Security Its whole thrust is to defend public provision and to explore forms of prefunding that would assist this Indeed the paper several of whose points are born out by the difficulties encountered by Clinton8217s secret team now give the opponents of privatization a potent weapon The collapse of the markets at the end of the Nineties bubble also meant that Bush and his Commission had a much harder task ahead of them before the focus of terrorism changed the whole focus of Bush8217s agenda Flawed as it is the case for privatization was superficially appealing during the heady days of the late1990s bull market Indeed its defeat at that time could turn out to have been decisive On the other hand the economic downturn makes more relevant than ever the other prong of the original Clinton strategy namely the idea that the Trust Fund should acquire its own assets In a recessionhit economy these could include public bonds linked to investment in education or urban renewal or they could involve injecting funds into sectors downcast by postbubble blues This would it is true be to go further than Clinton ever suggested 173 but it would be fully in the spirit of many left proponents of the original trust fund when it was added to the program in 1939 and it would be very well received by many sections of organized labor such as the folks at the Heartland Alliance In his famous tract 8220What is History8221 EH Carr debated the influence on history exercised by Cleopatra8217s nose Future historians of Social Security will be able to intersperse their explanation of the intricacies of COLAS bend points and IPEs with at least a paragraph on the political and intellectual consequences of Monica8217s beguiling smile She saved the day ROBIN BLACKBURN a frequent contributor to CounterPunch is the former editor of The New Left Review and author of the excellent history of the slave trade The Making of New World Slavery and the new book from Verso Banking on Death the Future of Pensions amp160 | This/DET essay/NOUN is/AUX excerpted/VERB from/ADP CounterPunch8217s/PROPN hot/ADJ new/ADJ book/NOUN Dime8217s/PROPN Worth/PROPN of/ADP Difference/PROPN Had/AUX it/PRON not/PART been/AUX for/ADP Monica8217s/PROPN captivating/VERB smile/NOUN and/CCONJ first/ADV inviting/VERB snap/NOUN of/ADP that/DET famous/ADJ thong/NOUN President/PROPN Bill/PROPN Clinton/PROPN would/AUX have/AUX consummated/VERB the/DET politics/NOUN of/ADP triangulation/NOUN heeding/VERB the/DET counsel/NOUN of/ADP a/DET secret/ADJ White/PROPN House/PROPN team/NOUN and/CCONJ deputy/NOUN treasury/NOUN secretary/NOUN Larry/PROPN 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<p>iStockphoto</p>
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<p>Monica Bosquez managed to “stay positive” most of the time. But in our conversation just days before she left for Ciudad Juárez, the bright and friendly program analyst for the state of Texas broke into tears. “If I don’t come back,” she said, “make sure you tell people what happened.”</p>
<p>For the thousands of American citizens who, like Bosquez, are married to Mexican nationals working their way through the legal immigration process, all roads go through Juárez. That’s because the United States consulate there is the only one in Mexico that handles immigrant visas—the documents that allows a foreigner to live in the US while awaiting permanent legal residency.</p>
<p>The sprawling compound—it’s the largest consulate facility in the world—is located in an upscale neighborhood known as zona dorada, the golden zone. It looks like Anytown, USA. Walk a block and you can choose between Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Denny’s. A bit further southwest and you’re at a new mall anchored by a Sears, boasting a cineplex with an IMAX® theater and a Total Fitness gym complete with a climbing wall.</p>
<p>But this sense of normalcy is an illusion. The $66 million fortress of a consulate is surrounded by a moat of heavily armed men, who guard it against an almost unimaginably brutal civil war raging just outside the golden zone. Ciudad Juárez, population 1.3 million, is sometimes called the “murder capital of the Americas”—a fitting description for a city that has seen roughly 7,000 killings in less than three years, including more than 3,100 last year.</p>
<p>Located just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Juárez is ground zero in a bloody clash between the Mexican government and the drug cartels that feed Americans’ craving for cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. The “narco-war” includes turf battles between rival cartels. Since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderón launched a military offensive against the cartels, officials put the national death toll at more than 30,000.</p>
<p>An internal Department of Homeland Security assessment notes that one of the cartels “has used terror tactics generally seen in Iraq and Afghanistan—mass video-recorded decapitations, targeting of civilians…to instill fear among rivals, law enforcement and the general public.” One Mexican human-rights worker interviewed by London’s Guardian newspaper summed up the Juárez situation as “martial law, without the law.”</p>
<p>The violence in northern Mexico is worse than officials from either country will publicly admit, but a recently leaked State Department cable indicates that both sides understand the stakes. At a September 2009 meeting in Mexico City, that country’s undersecretary for governance, Gerónimo Gutiérrez Fernández, warned a US delegation that Mexico was in danger of “losing” entire regions like Juárez to the cartels.</p>
<p>In 2009, more than 94,000 Mexicans came to Juárez to apply for permanent resident status. Many, like Monica’s husband Alvaro, were undocumented and living gainfully in the United States. In past decades, applying would have been no big deal for such people. Thanks partly toMonica Bosquez and her husband Alvaro a 1965 Great Society law that emphasized the need to keep families intact, applicants already living in the United States could petition for a change of status without having to leave.</p>
<p>But over the years, foes of illegal immigration have chipped away at the policies to the point where keeping families together is no longer a key consideration. Since 2001, undocumented foreigners living here for a year or more have been instructed to return to their native countries, where they must then wait a decade before becoming eligible to apply for a change in status. (Applicants may request a waiver of the 10-year waiting period, but may do so only after leaving the country.)</p>
<p>Immigrant visas were once processed at all nine US consulates in Mexico, but in 1988, the task was consolidated to two consulates, in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. In 1992, the Tijuana unit was closed. One State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the consolidation was a purely administrative move, and applies to “all countries where we have more than one consulate, except where there are regional language differences.”</p>
<p>On immigration-related websites like the <a href="http://www.smf.juarez-mexico.com" type="external">Juarez, Mexico Discussion Forum</a> and <a href="http://immigrate2us.net/forum" type="external">Immigrate2US</a>, members often speculate as to why, of all of the cities in Mexico, they are forced to go to the Murder Capital. Some see it as a deliberate move to discourage people from applying. “This process is built to break one down,” wrote a member of the Juárez forum. “And most importantly, to instill fear.”</p>
<p>State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson dismisses this claim. “The decision was made years ago,” she told me, “before the increased drug-related violence along the border area.” But the decision still stands now that the city is a war zone. A different spokeswoman, for the Juárez consulate, insisted that the golden zone is “relatively safe.” Besides, she explained, “Visa applicants are not the targets. The war is between the cartels and gangs.”</p>
<p>When I run that notion by Martín Orquiz, a reporter for the Juárez newspaper El Diario, he replies that it’s generally true, but that many of the victims have been bystanders. “They were killed,” he said, “because they passed by where a shooting occurred.” He confirms that the area around the consulate is “relatively safe.”</p>
<p>To reach that safe zone, though, applicants must pass through sections of town that regularly see mass killings, through armed security checkpoints, and near the site of a car-bomb explosion that killed three people in July. “The quality of the neighborhood around the compound doesn’t much change the whole business of getting into and out of the city,” one visa applicant told me. “The scariest part of our trip was the ride from the airport to the consulate, then back again.” Especially, he explained, when his bus was suddenly behind a military truck filled with armed soldiers wearing black balaclavas.</p>
<p>The consulate’s website is vague on the safety issue. Under “Frequently Asked Questions,” it asks: “Is it safe for my family and I to travel to Ciudad Juárez given the recent reports of violence?”</p>
<p>The answer: “All immigrant visa cases in Mexico are currently processed at the U.S. Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez. Therefore all applicants must present themselves at the Consulate at the time and date of their appointment if they wish to proceed with their cases. It is incumbent upon you to take the necessary precautions when traveling to your visa appointment.”</p>
<p>The State Department, meanwhile, urges US citizens to “defer unnecessary travel” to Juárez because of the violence: “DTOs (drug-trafficking organizations) have erected unauthorized checkpoints, and killed motorists who have not stopped at them…. Ciudad Juarez is of special concern…. In confrontations with the Mexican army and police, DTOs have employed automatic weapons and grenades. In some cases, assailants have worn full or partial police or military uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles…. Innocent bystanders have been killed in shootouts between DTOs and Mexican law enforcement or between rival DTOs…. U.S. citizens should be aware that many cases of violent crime are never resolved by Mexican law enforcement, and the U.S. government has no authority to investigate crimes committed in Mexico.” And so on.</p>
<p>&#160;“The websites say stay away, don’t travel there,” one woman complained to me. “But for families who are trying to do the right, legal, thing and go through the immigration process, they do not give us any other option.”</p>
<p>If anyone imagined that US citizenship offered impunity from the violence, that myth was laid to rest last March 13. Lesley Enriquez and her husband Arthur Redelfs, both American citizens, were leaving a children’s birthday party in Juárez with their seven-month-old daughter strapped into a car seat. (Enriquez was also four months pregnant.) Sometime after 2 p.m., a car roared up behind their white Toyota RAV4, which bore Texas plates, and gunmen opened fire on the family.</p>
<p>The adults were killed; their baby daughter wasn’t hit. Ten minutes later, gunmen attacked a white Honda Pilot coming from the same party, killing its driver, Jorge Salcido, and wounding his two young children in the back seat. The victims had a connection beyond the party: Lesley Enriquez and Salcido’s wife both worked at the consulate.</p>
<p>Three days after the murders, Monica Bosquez and her husband landed in Juárez. Alvaro’s interview was scheduled for St. Patrick’s Day, and Monica was wearing socks with green shamrocks for good luck. The couple stayed at a Holiday Inn inside the golden zone guarded by men with machine guns—even the bellboy carried a sidearm. None of it made her feel safe. In fact, Monica confessed, she was “absolutely terrified” for several days after the interview, waiting to see if Alvaro’s application would be approved.</p>
<p>On the afternoon of March 22, Monica posted a message to the Juárez discussion forum: “Can’t wait for this to be over.”</p>
<p>Later, she send me a personal message: “The fear is the hardest part.”</p>
<p>In emails to friends and in online postings, Bosquez had begun to refer to her family’s ordeal simply as “the nightmare.” It’s clear that this included more than just Juárez. Months would often go by, for instance, without any status updates or responses to questions from immigration officials. In addition to the endless delays, applicants regularly complain of rude treatment by consulate staff, and of being given incorrect information that results in further delays or denial of an application.</p>
<p>“I’m going crazy,” Monica posted as one point as she waited to learn whether, and when, she and her husband would be reunited. “Why aren’t we showing up in the…system yet?” she wrote. “I wish this nightmare would finally end.”</p>
<p>This part of the nightmare is the result of a tangle of laws and regulations that has grown mind-numbingly complex over the decades. Part Kafka, part Alice in Wonderland, it frustrates applicants and consulate staff alike. The problem is exacerbated by chronic understaffing. “The consular section in Ciudad Juarez is the largest in the world,” stated a 2009 report by the office of the State Department’s Inspector General, “yet its staffing is still too small for the workload.” Juárez officers are forced to process twice as many applications per day as their counterparts in other countries, “threatening to burn people out.”</p>
<p>The report also revealed a growing desire among consular employees to live across the border in El Paso, citing “grisly narcotics-related violence.”</p>
<p>Monica often comforted her peers on the Juárez forum, women trapped in their own versions of the nightmare. “I can’t imagine how terrible it seems right now,” she replied to a woman who felt she had lost the battle to be reunited with her husband of 11 years. “Don’t give up—this is another bureaucratic hurdle this stupid system is throwing at you, but you can beat it!”</p>
<p>Over at the Immigrate2US forum, Susan O’Brien (a pseudonym) took on a similar role, posting as Liley99. In 1998, at age 17, her husband Sabas had embarked on the treacherous journey across the Sonoran desert and entered the United States. He’d worked hard and saved his money. He married O’Brien and, by 2007, the couple had their own home, a successful carpet-cleaning business, and a baby boy.</p>
<p>In late 2007, Sabas left the United States so that he could apply for legal immigrant status. “He is living the all-American dream!” O’Brien wrote in a filing to the Juárez consulate. Wanting to remain closer to his wife and child, Sabas decided to look for work in Juárez rather than travel far from the border. Using money from their savings, he rented an apartment in a gated area. But O’Brien still worried. “My husband told me that in just March, 250 people have been killed in Juárez alone,” she posted to her forum.</p>
<p>Because the US consulate in Juárez was so short-staffed, Sabas’ application was placed on backlog, a bureaucratic limbo. “I had no idea what immigration was,” O’Brien wrote on the forum on May 17, 2008, after six months apart from her husband, “nor did I understand the obstacles in front of us now…”</p>
<p>Five hours later, she posted another message to the forum, this one frantic. The subject line read: “Please pray, oh god please pray.” Sabas had been kidnapped along with two other men. For hours, O’Brien called her husband’s cell phone with no response. When she finally got through, the man on the other end of the line was a police detective.</p>
<p>Throughout that night and into the early morning hours, as O’Brien posted what few details she managed to learn, dozens of forum members stayed up to support her.</p>
<p>At 2:15 a.m., she notified the forum that the Juárez police had found a car with three unidentified bodies. “God please let this NOT be him,” O’Brien wrote. “I am lost, I don’t know what to do.”</p>
<p>By 5:22 a.m., the identity of one of the bodies had been established; it was the owner of the apartment complex where Sabas lived. “I only hope that he is not one of the other 2,” she wrote.</p>
<p>At 8:05 a.m., more bad news. The victims’ last names hadn’t been released, but one had been identified by the first name Sabas. O’Brien awaited the inevitable: “I can’t sleep and still feel like I am dying slowly.”</p>
<p>Just after midnight, she posted a message saying that her husband’s body had been positively identified. His hands and feet were bound and he had been shot in the head and tossed into the car trunk. Supporters of Liley99 filled the forum boards with expressions of grief, sympathy, and calls for changes to the system they blamed for Sabas’ death.</p>
<p>“…they really need to move this consulate to a safer area or do our appointments in the US, i am so scared to send my husband off to this horrible place, i could not stand to lose him, my heart goes out to you.”</p>
<p>“…this could have been anyone of us. I can’t imagine to carry that pain that she must be carrying right now. This is one of my worst nightmares. I cannot wrap my head around this.”</p>
<p>“This is what US citizens and their spouses get for trying to do things the legal way?! This is the reward for trying to go through the system?!”</p>
<p>Moving the visa-processing center to a safer consulate may seem like a solution, but the State Department insists it’s not practical. “They’re all dug in,” explains Houston immigration attorney Laurel Scott, referring to the new state-of-the-art facility. Even if officials were willing to move the unit, she adds, where would they put it? “The situation in Mexico is destabilizing very quickly and severely,” Scott says, “and not just in Juárez.” By the time you could build a new facility anywhere in northern Mexico, that area could be as dangerous as the current location.</p>
<p>Take Monterrey, Mexico’s third largest city, located 130 miles south of the border. It was named the safest city in all of Latin America just five years ago, according to an international business journal. But drug violence recently swept in, prompting a mass exodus of business leaders. Last April, a score of armed men stormed a Holiday Inn and kidnapped several guests. Murders in broad daylight are now commonplace. In August, employees at the Monterrey consulate were ordered to evacuate their children after an attempted kidnapping left two bodyguards dead outside the elite college-prep American school. If even Monterrey is no longer safe, experts say, moving visa processing is a non-starter.</p>
<p>Short of a government victory over the drug cartels, something nobody expects anytime soon, people living “the nightmare” would like to see the US go back to its old policy of allowing people to apply from inside the United States.</p>
<p>But the trend appears to be headed in the opposite direction. The Senate recently killed the DREAM act, the legislation President Obama touted in his State of the Union address, which would open the door to citizenship for undocumented foreigners who arrived here as children—so long as they meet certain conditions, like attending a four-year college or serving in the US military.</p>
<p>One of the bill’s original sponsors, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, explained his continued support for the bill at a town hall meeting last July. “A lot of these kids are brought in as infants,” he told the crowd. “They don’t even know that they’re not citizens until they graduate from high school. If they’ve lived good lives and they’ve done good things, why would we penalize them and not let them at least go to school?”</p>
<p>But in December, when the bill came to a vote on the Senate floor, Hatch wasn’t there. The senator, who faces a primary challenge in 2012, now says that even if he had been present, he would have voted against the act he helped write.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the House committee that handles major immigration issues, has a new chair. He is Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), champion of a 1996 legislative crackdown on illegal immigration that created the arduous visa process now in place. Since then, Smith has cosponsored a bill that would deny citizenship to babies born to undocumented parents on US soil. Opponents call it draconian and unconstitutional. Smith simply says it’s necessary.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the thousands of families intent on doing things “the right way” struggle to stay positive. Things sometimes do work out. The State Department granted O’Brien permission to have her husband’s body returned to her. “And he did come back to the states,” she posted to her forum, “not as planned but he was able to return to the world that he knew and loved.”</p>
<p>For Monica Bosquez and her family, it was a happy ending. On December 7, she sent me a picture of Alvaro from her cell phone. He looks exhausted and red-eyed, but manages a weary smile. He’s holding open his Mexican passport so that the contents are visible. The picture is grainy and blurred but you can still make out the word “VISA.” To the left is a smaller version of Alvaro’s smiling face, to the right an engraving that is just recognizable: the dome of the US Capitol and beside it, the Liberty Bell.</p>
<p>Along with the photo comes a short message: “We made it. :)”</p>
<p>This reporting was supported in part by contributions from the <a href="http://spot.us/" type="external">Spot.Us</a> community.</p>
<p /> | Dying for a Green Card | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/immigration-green-card-juarez-cartel-violence/ | 2011-02-03 | 4left
| 3,055 | iStockphoto Monica Bosquez managed to 8220stay positive8221 most of the time But in our conversation just days before she left for Ciudad Ju225rez the bright and friendly program analyst for the state of Texas broke into tears 8220If I don8217t come back8221 she said 8220make sure you tell people what happened8221 For the thousands of American citizens who like Bosquez are married to Mexican nationals working their way through the legal immigration process all roads go through Ju225rez That8217s because the United States consulate there is the only one in Mexico that handles immigrant visas8212the documents that allows a foreigner to live in the US while awaiting permanent legal residency The sprawling compound8212it8217s the largest consulate facility in the world8212is located in an upscale neighborhood known as zona dorada the golden zone It looks like Anytown USA Walk a block and you can choose between Starbucks McDonald8217s Wendy8217s and Denny8217s A bit further southwest and you8217re at a new mall anchored by a Sears boasting a cineplex with an IMAX174 theater and a Total Fitness gym complete with a climbing wall But this sense of normalcy is an illusion The 66 million fortress of a consulate is surrounded by a moat of heavily armed men who guard it against an almost unimaginably brutal civil war raging just outside the golden zone Ciudad Ju225rez population 13 million is sometimes called the 8220murder capital of the Americas82218212a fitting description for a city that has seen roughly 7000 killings in less than three years including more than 3100 last year Located just across the Rio Grande from El Paso Texas Ju225rez is ground zero in a bloody clash between the Mexican government and the drug cartels that feed Americans8217 craving for cocaine heroin and marijuana The 8220narcowar8221 includes turf battles between rival cartels Since late 2006 when President Felipe Calder243n launched a military offensive against the cartels officials put the national death toll at more than 30000 An internal Department of Homeland Security assessment notes that one of the cartels 8220has used terror tactics generally seen in Iraq and Afghanistan8212mass videorecorded decapitations targeting of civilians8230to instill fear among rivals law enforcement and the general public8221 One Mexican humanrights worker interviewed by London8217s Guardian newspaper summed up the Ju225rez situation as 8220martial law without the law8221 The violence in northern Mexico is worse than officials from either country will publicly admit but a recently leaked State Department cable indicates that both sides understand the stakes At a September 2009 meeting in Mexico City that country8217s undersecretary for governance Ger243nimo Guti233rrez Fern225ndez warned a US delegation that Mexico was in danger of 8220losing8221 entire regions like Ju225rez to the cartels In 2009 more than 94000 Mexicans came to Ju225rez to apply for permanent resident status Many like Monica8217s husband Alvaro were undocumented and living gainfully in the United States In past decades applying would have been no big deal for such people Thanks partly toMonica Bosquez and her husband Alvaro a 1965 Great Society law that emphasized the need to keep families intact applicants already living in the United States could petition for a change of status without having to leave But over the years foes of illegal immigration have chipped away at the policies to the point where keeping families together is no longer a key consideration Since 2001 undocumented foreigners living here for a year or more have been instructed to return to their native countries where they must then wait a decade before becoming eligible to apply for a change in status Applicants may request a waiver of the 10year waiting period but may do so only after leaving the country Immigrant visas were once processed at all nine US consulates in Mexico but in 1988 the task was consolidated to two consulates in Ciudad Ju225rez and Tijuana In 1992 the Tijuana unit was closed One State Department official speaking on condition of anonymity told me that the consolidation was a purely administrative move and applies to 8220all countries where we have more than one consulate except where there are regional language differences8221 On immigrationrelated websites like the Juarez Mexico Discussion Forum and Immigrate2US members often speculate as to why of all of the cities in Mexico they are forced to go to the Murder Capital Some see it as a deliberate move to discourage people from applying 8220This process is built to break one down8221 wrote a member of the Ju225rez forum 8220And most importantly to instill fear8221 State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson dismisses this claim 8220The decision was made years ago8221 she told me 8220before the increased drugrelated violence along the border area8221 But the decision still stands now that the city is a war zone A different spokeswoman for the Ju225rez consulate insisted that the golden zone is 8220relatively safe8221 Besides she explained 8220Visa applicants are not the targets The war is between the cartels and gangs8221 When I run that notion by Mart237n Orquiz a reporter for the Ju225rez newspaper El Diario he replies that it8217s generally true but that many of the victims have been bystanders 8220They were killed8221 he said 8220because they passed by where a shooting occurred8221 He confirms that the area around the consulate is 8220relatively safe8221 To reach that safe zone though applicants must pass through sections of town that regularly see mass killings through armed security checkpoints and near the site of a carbomb explosion that killed three people in July 8220The quality of the neighborhood around the compound doesn8217t much change the whole business of getting into and out of the city8221 one visa applicant told me 8220The scariest part of our trip was the ride from the airport to the consulate then back again8221 Especially he explained when his bus was suddenly behind a military truck filled with armed soldiers wearing black balaclavas The consulate8217s website is vague on the safety issue Under 8220Frequently Asked Questions8221 it asks 8220Is it safe for my family and I to travel to Ciudad Ju225rez given the recent reports of violence8221 The answer 8220All immigrant visa cases in Mexico are currently processed at the US Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez Therefore all applicants must present themselves at the Consulate at the time and date of their appointment if they wish to proceed with their cases It is incumbent upon you to take the necessary precautions when traveling to your visa appointment8221 The State Department meanwhile urges US citizens to 8220defer unnecessary travel8221 to Ju225rez because of the violence 8220DTOs drugtrafficking organizations have erected unauthorized checkpoints and killed motorists who have not stopped at them8230 Ciudad Juarez is of special concern8230 In confrontations with the Mexican army and police DTOs have employed automatic weapons and grenades In some cases assailants have worn full or partial police or military uniforms and have used vehicles that resemble police vehicles8230 Innocent bystanders have been killed in shootouts between DTOs and Mexican law enforcement or between rival DTOs8230 US citizens should be aware that many cases of violent crime are never resolved by Mexican law enforcement and the US government has no authority to investigate crimes committed in Mexico8221 And so on amp1608220The websites say stay away don8217t travel there8221 one woman complained to me 8220But for families who are trying to do the right legal thing and go through the immigration process they do not give us any other option8221 If anyone imagined that US citizenship offered impunity from the violence that myth was laid to rest last March 13 Lesley Enriquez and her husband Arthur Redelfs both American citizens were leaving a children8217s birthday party in Ju225rez with their sevenmonthold daughter strapped into a car seat Enriquez was also four months pregnant Sometime after 2 pm a car roared up behind their white Toyota RAV4 which bore Texas plates and gunmen opened fire on the family The adults were killed their baby daughter wasn8217t hit Ten minutes later gunmen attacked a white Honda Pilot coming from the same party killing its driver Jorge Salcido and wounding his two young children in the back seat The victims had a connection beyond the party Lesley Enriquez and Salcido8217s wife both worked at the consulate Three days after the murders Monica Bosquez and her husband landed in Ju225rez Alvaro8217s interview was scheduled for St Patrick8217s Day and Monica was wearing socks with green shamrocks for good luck The couple stayed at a Holiday Inn inside the golden zone guarded by men with machine guns8212even the bellboy carried a sidearm None of it made her feel safe In fact Monica confessed she was 8220absolutely terrified8221 for several days after the interview waiting to see if Alvaro8217s application would be approved On the afternoon of March 22 Monica posted a message to the Ju225rez discussion forum 8220Can8217t wait for this to be over8221 Later she send me a personal message 8220The fear is the hardest part8221 In emails to friends and in online postings Bosquez had begun to refer to her family8217s ordeal simply as 8220the nightmare8221 It8217s clear that this included more than just Ju225rez Months would often go by for instance without any status updates or responses to questions from immigration officials In addition to the endless delays applicants regularly complain of rude treatment by consulate staff and of being given incorrect information that results in further delays or denial of an application 8220I8217m going crazy8221 Monica posted as one point as she waited to learn whether and when she and her husband would be reunited 8220Why aren8217t we showing up in the8230system yet8221 she wrote 8220I wish this nightmare would finally end8221 This part of the nightmare is the result of a tangle of laws and regulations that has grown mindnumbingly complex over the decades Part Kafka part Alice in Wonderland it frustrates applicants and consulate staff alike The problem is exacerbated by chronic understaffing 8220The consular section in Ciudad Juarez is the largest in the world8221 stated a 2009 report by the office of the State Department8217s Inspector General 8220yet its staffing is still too small for the workload8221 Ju225rez officers are forced to process twice as many applications per day as their counterparts in other countries 8220threatening to burn people out8221 The report also revealed a growing desire among consular employees to live across the border in El Paso citing 8220grisly narcoticsrelated violence8221 Monica often comforted her peers on the Ju225rez forum women trapped in their own versions of the nightmare 8220I can8217t imagine how terrible it seems right now8221 she replied to a woman who felt she had lost the battle to be reunited with her husband of 11 years 8220Don8217t give up8212this is another bureaucratic hurdle this stupid system is throwing at you but you can beat it8221 Over at the Immigrate2US forum Susan O8217Brien a pseudonym took on a similar role posting as Liley99 In 1998 at age 17 her husband Sabas had embarked on the treacherous journey across the Sonoran desert and entered the United States He8217d worked hard and saved his money He married O8217Brien and by 2007 the couple had their own home a successful carpetcleaning business and a baby boy In late 2007 Sabas left the United States so that he could apply for legal immigrant status 8220He is living the allAmerican dream8221 O8217Brien wrote in a filing to the Ju225rez consulate Wanting to remain closer to his wife and child Sabas decided to look for work in Ju225rez rather than travel far from the border Using money from their savings he rented an apartment in a gated area But O8217Brien still worried 8220My husband told me that in just March 250 people have been killed in Ju225rez alone8221 she posted to her forum Because the US consulate in Ju225rez was so shortstaffed Sabas8217 application was placed on backlog a bureaucratic limbo 8220I had no idea what immigration was8221 O8217Brien wrote on the forum on May 17 2008 after six months apart from her husband 8220nor did I understand the obstacles in front of us now82308221 Five hours later she posted another message to the forum this one frantic The subject line read 8220Please pray oh god please pray8221 Sabas had been kidnapped along with two other men For hours O8217Brien called her husband8217s cell phone with no response When she finally got through the man on the other end of the line was a police detective Throughout that night and into the early morning hours as O8217Brien posted what few details she managed to learn dozens of forum members stayed up to support her At 215 am she notified the forum that the Ju225rez police had found a car with three unidentified bodies 8220God please let this NOT be him8221 O8217Brien wrote 8220I am lost I don8217t know what to do8221 By 522 am the identity of one of the bodies had been established it was the owner of the apartment complex where Sabas lived 8220I only hope that he is not one of the other 28221 she wrote At 805 am more bad news The victims8217 last names hadn8217t been released but one had been identified by the first name Sabas O8217Brien awaited the inevitable 8220I can8217t sleep and still feel like I am dying slowly8221 Just after midnight she posted a message saying that her husband8217s body had been positively identified His hands and feet were bound and he had been shot in the head and tossed into the car trunk Supporters of Liley99 filled the forum boards with expressions of grief sympathy and calls for changes to the system they blamed for Sabas8217 death 82208230they really need to move this consulate to a safer area or do our appointments in the US i am so scared to send my husband off to this horrible place i could not stand to lose him my heart goes out to you8221 82208230this could have been anyone of us I can8217t imagine to carry that pain that she must be carrying right now This is one of my worst nightmares I cannot wrap my head around this8221 8220This is what US citizens and their spouses get for trying to do things the legal way This is the reward for trying to go through the system8221 Moving the visaprocessing center to a safer consulate may seem like a solution but the State Department insists it8217s not practical 8220They8217re all dug in8221 explains Houston immigration attorney Laurel Scott referring to the new stateoftheart facility Even if officials were willing to move the unit she adds where would they put it 8220The situation in Mexico is destabilizing very quickly and severely8221 Scott says 8220and not just in Ju225rez8221 By the time you could build a new facility anywhere in northern Mexico that area could be as dangerous as the current location Take Monterrey Mexico8217s third largest city located 130 miles south of the border It was named the safest city in all of Latin America just five years ago according to an international business journal But drug violence recently swept in prompting a mass exodus of business leaders Last April a score of armed men stormed a Holiday Inn and kidnapped several guests Murders in broad daylight are now commonplace In August employees at the Monterrey consulate were ordered to evacuate their children after an attempted kidnapping left two bodyguards dead outside the elite collegeprep American school If even Monterrey is no longer safe experts say moving visa processing is a nonstarter Short of a government victory over the drug cartels something nobody expects anytime soon people living 8220the nightmare8221 would like to see the US go back to its old policy of allowing people to apply from inside the United States But the trend appears to be headed in the opposite direction The Senate recently killed the DREAM act the legislation President Obama touted in his State of the Union address which would open the door to citizenship for undocumented foreigners who arrived here as children8212so long as they meet certain conditions like attending a fouryear college or serving in the US military One of the bill8217s original sponsors Utah Senator Orrin Hatch explained his continued support for the bill at a town hall meeting last July 8220A lot of these kids are brought in as infants8221 he told the crowd 8220They don8217t even know that they8217re not citizens until they graduate from high school If they8217ve lived good lives and they8217ve done good things why would we penalize them and not let them at least go to school8221 But in December when the bill came to a vote on the Senate floor Hatch wasn8217t there The senator who faces a primary challenge in 2012 now says that even if he had been present he would have voted against the act he helped write Meanwhile the House committee that handles major immigration issues has a new chair He is Rep Lamar Smith RTex champion of a 1996 legislative crackdown on illegal immigration that created the arduous visa process now in place Since then Smith has cosponsored a bill that would deny citizenship to babies born to undocumented parents on US soil Opponents call it draconian and unconstitutional Smith simply says it8217s necessary In the meantime the thousands of families intent on doing things 8220the right way8221 struggle to stay positive Things sometimes do work out The State Department granted O8217Brien permission to have her husband8217s body returned to her 8220And he did come back to the states8221 she posted to her forum 8220not as planned but he was able to return to the world that he knew and loved8221 For Monica Bosquez and her family it was a happy ending On December 7 she sent me a picture of Alvaro from her cell phone He looks exhausted and redeyed but manages a weary smile He8217s holding open his Mexican passport so that the contents are visible The picture is grainy and blurred but you can still make out the word 8220VISA8221 To the left is a smaller version of Alvaro8217s smiling face to the right an engraving that is just recognizable the dome of the US Capitol and beside it the Liberty Bell Along with the photo comes a short message 8220We made it 8221 This reporting was supported in part by contributions from the SpotUs community | iStockphoto/PROPN Monica/PROPN Bosquez/PROPN managed/VERB to/PART 8220stay/VERB positive8221/NOUN most/ADJ of/ADP the/DET time/NOUN But/CCONJ in/ADP our/PRON conversation/NOUN just/ADV days/NOUN before/SCONJ she/PRON left/VERB for/ADP Ciudad/PROPN Ju225rez/NOUN the/DET bright/ADJ and/CCONJ friendly/ADJ program/NOUN analyst/NOUN for/ADP the/DET state/NOUN of/ADP Texas/PROPN broke/VERB 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<p>Evo Morales is the latest democratically-elected Latin American president to be the target of a US plot to destabilize and overthrow his government. On September 10, 2008 Morales expelled US Ambassador Philip Goldberg because “he is conspiring against democracy and seeking the division of Bolivia.” Observers of US-Latin American policy tend to view the crisis in US-Bolivian relations as due to a policy of neglect and ineptness towards Latin America because of US involvement in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. In fact, the Bolivia coup attempt was a conscious policy rooted in US hostility towards Morales, his political party the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the social movements that are aligned with him.</p>
<p>“The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia, violating our sovereignty, treating us like a banana republic,” says Gustavo Guzman, who was expelled as Bolivian ambassador to Washington following Goldberg’s removal. In 2002, when Morales narrowly lost his first bid for the presidency, US ambassador Manuel Rocha openly campaigned against him, threatening, “ if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of US assistance to Bolivia.” Because he led the Cocaleros Federation prior to assuming the presidency, the US State Department called Morales an “illegal coca agitator.”Morales advocated “Coca Yes, Cocaine No,” and called which for an end to violent U.S.-sponsored coca eradication raids, and for the right of Bolivian peasants to grow coca for domestic consumption, medicinal uses and even for export as an herb in tea and other products.</p>
<p>“When Morales triumphed in the next presidential election,” says Guzman, “it represented a defeat for the United States.” Shortly after his inauguration, Morales received a call from George Bush, offering to help “bring a better life to Bolivians.” Morales asked Bush to reduce US trade barriers for Bolivian products, and suggested that he come for a visit. Bush did not reply. As Guzman notes, “the United States was trying to woo Morales with polite and banal comments to keep him from aligning with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.” David Greenlee, the US ambassador prior to Goldberg, expressed his “preoccupation” with Bolivia’s foreign alliances, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon began talking about “security concerns” in Bolivia.</p>
<p>Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, the highest ranking US official to attend Morales’ inauguration, declared a willingness to dialogue with Morales. In fact, what followed were almost three years of diplomatic wrangling while the U.S. provided direct and covert assistance to the opposition movement centered in the four eastern departments of Bolivia known as “La Media Luna”. Dominated by agro-industrial interests, the departments began a drive for regional autonomy soon after Morales, the first Indian president in Bolivian history took office. (About 55% of the country’s population is Indian.) Headed by departmental prefects (governors) and large landowners, the autonomy movement has been determined to stymie Morales’ plans for national agrarian reform, and bent on taking control of the substantial hydro-carbon resources located in the Media Luna.</p>
<p>The Bush administration has pursued a two-track policy similar to the strategy the United States employed to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The diplomatic negotiations initiated by Shannon centered almost exclusively on differences over drug policies, with the Bush administration continually threatening to cut or curtail economic assistance and preferential trade if Bolivia did not abide by the US policy of coca eradication and criminalization. At the same time, the United States through its embassy in La Paz and the Agency for International Development (USAID), funded political forces that opposed Morales and MAS. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), with 37 in-country agents, appears to have acted like the CIA in Bolivia, gathering intelligence and engaging in clandestine political operations with the opposition.</p>
<p>Intervention is evident from the very start of the Morales administration, with early USAID activities through the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). After Morales took office, USAID documents state the OTI set out “to provide support to fledgling regional governments.” Altogether the OTI funneled 116 grants for $4,451,249 “to help departmental governments operate more strategically.” In an effort to establish expedient political ties, the OTI also brought departmental prefects to meet with US governors.</p>
<p>The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), founded as a semi-public institute during the Reagan years, has been particularly active in Bolivia. It funds a number of groups and organizations with a clear political bias, among them the Institute of Pedagogical and Social Investigation. The Institute opposed Morales in the 2005 elections, declaring in a project summary report to the U.S. embassy that Morales and MAS are an “anti-democratic, radical opposition” that doesn’t represent the majority. NED support of the Institute’s activities continued into 2006, when the Institute filed a report saying it intended to “contribute to improved municipal development through efficient and effective social monitoring.” (6) In the Media Luna, USAID tried to organize Indians opposed to the Confederation of the Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), which is allied with MAS and Morales. Media Luna leaders were particularly concerned about CIBOD’s capacity to mobilize and move in from the countryside to encircle departmental capitals when the prefect’s leaders orchestrated activities against the Morales government, particularly in the department of Santa Cruz. Working out of the U.S. embassy, the Strategy and Operations Office and the Strategic Team of Integral Development for USAID set up a meeting between Ambassador Goldberg and Indian groups in February, 2007. Internal emails from USAID officers who helped organize the event reveal that they only invited Indians opposed to CIDOB who “lacked experience and were immature politically.” One of the officers recommended that these Indians be given field radios “to facilitate communications.”</p>
<p>In late 2007, the US embassy began moving openly to meet with the right-wing opposition in Media Luna. Ambassador Goldberg was photographed in Santa Cruz with a leading business magnate who backs the autonomy movement, and a well-known Colombian narco-trafficker who had been detained by the local police. Morales, in revealing the photo, said the trafficker was linked to right wing para-military organizations in Colombia. In response, the US embassy asserted that it couldn’t vet everyone who appeared in a photo with the ambassador.</p>
<p>Then in January, 2008, the Embassy was caught giving aid to a special intelligence unit of the Bolivian police force. The embassy rationalized its assistance by saying “the U.S. government has a long history of helping the National Police of Bolivia in diverse programs.” U.S.-Bolivian relations were next roiled in February, when it was revealed that Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar had been pressured by an embassy official to keep tabs on Venezuelans and Cubans in the country. This violated the founding statutes of the Peace Corps, which prohibit any intelligence activities by volunteers.</p>
<p>During 2007, political tensions in Bolivia had centered on the Constituent Assembly meeting in Sucre that had been mandated by a national referendum to draw up a new constitution to transform the country’s institutions. When the Assembly began voting on the final draft in December 2007, the opposition violently took over the streets and all of the major public buildings in Sucre, using dynamite and Molotov cocktails, demanding the resignation of “the shitty Indian Morales.” Parts of the city were in flames, and members of the assembly, including its President Silvia Lazarte, were assaulted in the streets.</p>
<p>Then the political leaders and business organizations in Santa Cruz and other cities in the Media Luna began to openly call for autonomy and secession from the central Bolivian government. Branko Marinkovic, the leading business magnate and largest landowner in the Media Luna, led the opposition as head of the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee, declaring, “the fight has begun for our autonomy and liberty.” Along with Santa Cruz, civic committees in the other major cities of Media Luna joined the call and began meeting together along with the prefects.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, the Bush administration “first brandished the aid weapon to show its support of the civic committees opposed to the government,” says Guzman. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), set up in 2004 as a U.S. government agency “to work with some of the poorest countries in the world,” had been on the brink of approving $584 million to fund the construction of a major highway linking northern Bolivia to the rest of the country, as well as to make investments in agricultural projects.</p>
<p>Yet in a letter to Morales in December 2007, the MCC stated that while it “recognizes your country’s performance on our 17 indicators…the current state of the U.S.-Bolivian relationship is not consistent with such a working partnership.” A separate report by the MCC was even more blunt: The project “was postponed because of adverse conditions, including unrest surrounding the Constitution Assembly process”.</p>
<p>When the Constituent Assembly approved the final draft of the new constitution in December 2007, the Bolivian Congress needed to approve it with a national referendum. Knowing that he did not have the votes, Morales declared&#160; “dead or alive, I will have a new constitution for the country,” and called for public pressure on Congress. Asserting he was acting as a “dictator,” the civic committees and the departmental prefects of Media Luna, along with their political allies in the Bolivian Senate, refused to schedule the referendum. They instead organized departmental referendums for autonomy, which they overwhelmingly won in May. The referendums were ruled unconstitutional by the National Electoral Council, and the voting conditions were less than auspicious, with no official electoral monitors and pro-autonomy forces intimidating and physically assaulting those who opposed the vote.</p>
<p>Choosing the democratic road rather than force to annul the departmental referendums, Morales then put his presidency on the line with a recall referendum in which his mandate, as well as those of the prefects seeking autonomy, could be revoked. On August 10, 2008, voters gave Morales a resounding two-thirds of the national vote, with even the Media Luna department of Pando giving him just over 50 percent. However, the insurgent prefects also had their mandates renewed. Basing their actions on the illegal May plebiscites, the prefects then decided to strike for autonomy, moving first to take control of Santa Cruz, the richest of the four departments. The Cruceno Youth Union (UJC), shock troops allied with the Civic Committee, roamed the streets of the departmental capital and surrounding towns, attacking and repressing any opposition by local social movements and MAS-allied organizations, and sacking government buildings, including the agrarian reform office.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, the Civic Committees began sewing economic instability, seeking to weaken the Morales government much like the CIA-backed opposition did against Chilean President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s. As in Chile, the business elites and allied truckers engaged in “strikes,” withholding or refusing to ship produce to urban markets in the western Andes (where the Indian population is concentrated), while selling commodities on the black market at high prices. The Confederation of Private Businesses of Bolivia called for a national producers’ shutdown if the government refused “to change its economic policies”.</p>
<p>This became known as an attempt at a “civic coup.” The strategy of the autonomy movement was to take complete control of the Media Luna, provoke a national crisis to destabilize the government, and convince the army to remain neutral or move against Morales. The major of Santa Cruz, Percy Fernandez, had already called on the military to overthrow Morales’ “useless government” just before the August referendum.</p>
<p>The United States was openly involved in orchestrating this rebellion. Ambassador Goldberg flew to Santa Cruz on August 25 to meet with Ruben Costas, Morales’ main antagonist and the prefect of Santa Cruz, who became the de facto leader of the rebellious prefects and the autonomy movement in general. After Goldberg left, Costas declared himself “governor” of the autonomous department of Santa Cruz, and ordered the take over of national government offices, including those collecting tax revenues. It was this visit with Costas that Morales cited as the reason for declaring Ambassador Goldberg “persona non grata” on September 10. “After his expulsion, the rebellion began to unravel,” notes Guzman.</p>
<p>On September 11, in the department of Pando, a para-military militia with machine guns attacked pro-Morales Indians near the capital of El Cobija, resulting in at least 13 deaths. In a separate action, three policemen were kidnapped. The next day Morales declared a state of siege in Pando, and dispatched the army to move on Cobija in order to retake its airport, which had been occupied by right wing bands. Army units were also sent to guard the natural gas oleoducts, one of which had been seized by the autonomy movement, cutting the flow of gas to neighboring Brazil and Argentina.</p>
<p>The violent attacks in Pando precipitated a national mobilization of indigenous peoples and social movements, as well as a sense of outrage in neighboring countries. On September 15, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called an emergency meeting in Santiago of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to discuss the Bolivian crisis. The resulting “Declaration of La Moneda,” signed by the twelve UNASUR governments, expressed their “full and decided support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales,” and warned that their respective governments “will not recognize any situation that entails an attempt for a civil coup that ruptures the institutional order, or that compromises the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia”. Morales, who participated in the meeting, thanked UNASUR for its support, declaring: “For the first time in South American’s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems without the presence of the United States.”</p>
<p>Paying no attention to the declaration of support by UNASUR, President Bush upped the ante the following week by suspending the Andean Trade Preference Act, asserting “Bolivia has failed to cooperate with the United States on important efforts to fight drug trafficking.” The trade act, dating from 1991, eliminates tariffs on imports of textiles, jewelry, wood and other products from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, in exchange for cooperation with the US war on drugs. It is estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 workers will lose their jobs, and more than $70 million in exports will be priced out of the US market.</p>
<p>Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed there was “no ideological test for cooperation and friendship with the United States” that led to the trade cutoff with Bolivia. This statement was a diplomatic lie: For 2006, Morales’ first year in office, the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that coca cultivation was “statistically unchanged as compared to the 2005 estimate”. For 2007 the United Nations reported an increase of just 5 percent in, “Coca Cultivation in the Andean Region: A Survey of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.” This data, however, stood in sharp contrast to Colombia, which registered an increase of coca cultivation by 27 percent, despite the Colombian government’s strong alliance with the U.S. on coca eradication efforts.</p>
<p>The UNASUR declaration, along with the state of siege in Pando and the nationwide repudiation of the massacre of Indians, compelled the prefects of Media Luna to call off their rebellion. They agreed to a “dialogue” with Morales over the new constitution and the issue of autonomy. But the discussions in late September went nowhere, even though the Morales’ government agreed to incorporate some limited amendments concerning departmental autonomy into the new constitution. The department prefects also demanded that the agrarian reform clauses in the new constitution be eliminated, but on this point Morales, backed by MAS and the social movements, refused to back down. On October 5, the negotiations collapsed.</p>
<p>Morales then announced that he would ask Congress to set the date for the public referendum on the new constitution. The social movements mobilized from around the country, and over 50,000 demonstrators descended on La Paz, surrounding Congress as it was meeting. The right wing fragmented, and on Oct. 20, Congress approved the referendum on the new constitution, which is scheduled for Jan. 25, 2009.</p>
<p>Then on November 1, Morales released a bomb shell by announcing the indefinite suspension of the activities of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Bolivia, and the expulsion of the 37 DEA agents from the country. “Agents of the DEA carried out political espionage, including the financing of delinquent groups,” Morales declared. He pointed toa key U.S. operative involved in these activities: “Steven Faucette, the regional agent of the DEA in Santa Cruz, who on a diplomatic mission of the U.S. embassy made trips to Trinidad and Riberalta [cities in the Media Luna provinces of Beni and Pando, respectively] with the objective of financing the Civics who were committed to carrying out a civic coup.”</p>
<p>Morales went on to disclose that a plane with North American registry called Super King had flown to airports in the Media Luna without registering flight plans or providing notification of “the cargo it transferred to pick up vehicles when it landed on the runway, in clear violation of our national sovereignty.” Bolivian intelligence also discovered seven security houses run by the US “that carried out political espionage,” including telephone surveillance of political, police and military authorities.</p>
<p>The DEA and its 37 agents were expelled from the country. The Bolivian government appropriated what amounted to a DEA military arsenal, including airplanes, boats, ground transport vehicles, communications equipment and one thousand M-16 machine guns.</p>
<p>The civic coup has failed. No longer able to turn to the US embassy, the opposition is in disarray, with the leading rightwing party split into four factions. The referendum on the constitution will likely be approved by a wide margin. Evo has rallied the social movements and the country to break US historic domination of Bolivia. With his trip to Washington D.C., Morales is hoping to open up a dialogue with the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama that will lead to a restoration of full trade relations, a recognition of Bolivia’s right to determine its own policies on drugs, agrarian reform and gas nationalization, and mutual respect between the two nations.</p>
<p>ROGER BURBACH is Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA. He has written extensively on Latin America and is the author of “ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842774352/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice.</a>”</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia | true | https://counterpunch.org/2008/11/18/orchestrating-a-civic-coup-in-bolivia/ | 2008-11-18 | 4left
| 3,056 | Evo Morales is the latest democraticallyelected Latin American president to be the target of a US plot to destabilize and overthrow his government On September 10 2008 Morales expelled US Ambassador Philip Goldberg because 8220he is conspiring against democracy and seeking the division of Bolivia8221 Observers of USLatin American policy tend to view the crisis in USBolivian relations as due to a policy of neglect and ineptness towards Latin America because of US involvement in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia In fact the Bolivia coup attempt was a conscious policy rooted in US hostility towards Morales his political party the Movement Towards Socialism MAS and the social movements that are aligned with him 8220The US embassy is historically used to calling the shots in Bolivia violating our sovereignty treating us like a banana republic8221 says Gustavo Guzman who was expelled as Bolivian ambassador to Washington following Goldberg8217s removal In 2002 when Morales narrowly lost his first bid for the presidency US ambassador Manuel Rocha openly campaigned against him threatening 8220 if you elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again this will endanger the future of US assistance to Bolivia8221 Because he led the Cocaleros Federation prior to assuming the presidency the US State Department called Morales an 8220illegal coca agitator8221Morales advocated 8220Coca Yes Cocaine No8221 and called which for an end to violent USsponsored coca eradication raids and for the right of Bolivian peasants to grow coca for domestic consumption medicinal uses and even for export as an herb in tea and other products 8220When Morales triumphed in the next presidential election8221 says Guzman 8220it represented a defeat for the United States8221 Shortly after his inauguration Morales received a call from George Bush offering to help 8220bring a better life to Bolivians8221 Morales asked Bush to reduce US trade barriers for Bolivian products and suggested that he come for a visit Bush did not reply As Guzman notes 8220the United States was trying to woo Morales with polite and banal comments to keep him from aligning with Venezuelan President Hugo Ch225vez8221 David Greenlee the US ambassador prior to Goldberg expressed his 8220preoccupation8221 with Bolivia8217s foreign alliances while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others at the Pentagon began talking about 8220security concerns8221 in Bolivia Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon the highest ranking US official to attend Morales8217 inauguration declared a willingness to dialogue with Morales In fact what followed were almost three years of diplomatic wrangling while the US provided direct and covert assistance to the opposition movement centered in the four eastern departments of Bolivia known as 8220La Media Luna8221 Dominated by agroindustrial interests the departments began a drive for regional autonomy soon after Morales the first Indian president in Bolivian history took office About 55 of the country8217s population is Indian Headed by departmental prefects governors and large landowners the autonomy movement has been determined to stymie Morales8217 plans for national agrarian reform and bent on taking control of the substantial hydrocarbon resources located in the Media Luna The Bush administration has pursued a twotrack policy similar to the strategy the United States employed to overthrow the democraticallyelected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 The diplomatic negotiations initiated by Shannon centered almost exclusively on differences over drug policies with the Bush administration continually threatening to cut or curtail economic assistance and preferential trade if Bolivia did not abide by the US policy of coca eradication and criminalization At the same time the United States through its embassy in La Paz and the Agency for International Development USAID funded political forces that opposed Morales and MAS The US Drug Enforcement Administration DEA with 37 incountry agents appears to have acted like the CIA in Bolivia gathering intelligence and engaging in clandestine political operations with the opposition Intervention is evident from the very start of the Morales administration with early USAID activities through the Office of Transition Initiatives OTI After Morales took office USAID documents state the OTI set out 8220to provide support to fledgling regional governments8221 Altogether the OTI funneled 116 grants for 4451249 8220to help departmental governments operate more strategically8221 In an effort to establish expedient political ties the OTI also brought departmental prefects to meet with US governors The National Endowment for Democracy NED founded as a semipublic institute during the Reagan years has been particularly active in Bolivia It funds a number of groups and organizations with a clear political bias among them the Institute of Pedagogical and Social Investigation The Institute opposed Morales in the 2005 elections declaring in a project summary report to the US embassy that Morales and MAS are an 8220antidemocratic radical opposition8221 that doesn8217t represent the majority NED support of the Institute8217s activities continued into 2006 when the Institute filed a report saying it intended to 8220contribute to improved municipal development through efficient and effective social monitoring8221 6 In the Media Luna USAID tried to organize Indians opposed to the Confederation of the Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia CIDOB which is allied with MAS and Morales Media Luna leaders were particularly concerned about CIBOD8217s capacity to mobilize and move in from the countryside to encircle departmental capitals when the prefect8217s leaders orchestrated activities against the Morales government particularly in the department of Santa Cruz Working out of the US embassy the Strategy and Operations Office and the Strategic Team of Integral Development for USAID set up a meeting between Ambassador Goldberg and Indian groups in February 2007 Internal emails from USAID officers who helped organize the event reveal that they only invited Indians opposed to CIDOB who 8220lacked experience and were immature politically8221 One of the officers recommended that these Indians be given field radios 8220to facilitate communications8221 In late 2007 the US embassy began moving openly to meet with the rightwing opposition in Media Luna Ambassador Goldberg was photographed in Santa Cruz with a leading business magnate who backs the autonomy movement and a wellknown Colombian narcotrafficker who had been detained by the local police Morales in revealing the photo said the trafficker was linked to right wing paramilitary organizations in Colombia In response the US embassy asserted that it couldn8217t vet everyone who appeared in a photo with the ambassador Then in January 2008 the Embassy was caught giving aid to a special intelligence unit of the Bolivian police force The embassy rationalized its assistance by saying 8220the US government has a long history of helping the National Police of Bolivia in diverse programs8221 USBolivian relations were next roiled in February when it was revealed that Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar had been pressured by an embassy official to keep tabs on Venezuelans and Cubans in the country This violated the founding statutes of the Peace Corps which prohibit any intelligence activities by volunteers During 2007 political tensions in Bolivia had centered on the Constituent Assembly meeting in Sucre that had been mandated by a national referendum to draw up a new constitution to transform the country8217s institutions When the Assembly began voting on the final draft in December 2007 the opposition violently took over the streets and all of the major public buildings in Sucre using dynamite and Molotov cocktails demanding the resignation of 8220the shitty Indian Morales8221 Parts of the city were in flames and members of the assembly including its President Silvia Lazarte were assaulted in the streets Then the political leaders and business organizations in Santa Cruz and other cities in the Media Luna began to openly call for autonomy and secession from the central Bolivian government Branko Marinkovic the leading business magnate and largest landowner in the Media Luna led the opposition as head of the ProSanta Cruz Civic Committee declaring 8220the fight has begun for our autonomy and liberty8221 Along with Santa Cruz civic committees in the other major cities of Media Luna joined the call and began meeting together along with the prefects Simultaneously the Bush administration 8220first brandished the aid weapon to show its support of the civic committees opposed to the government8221 says Guzman The Millennium Challenge Corporation MCC set up in 2004 as a US government agency 8220to work with some of the poorest countries in the world8221 had been on the brink of approving 584 million to fund the construction of a major highway linking northern Bolivia to the rest of the country as well as to make investments in agricultural projects Yet in a letter to Morales in December 2007 the MCC stated that while it 8220recognizes your country8217s performance on our 17 indicators8230the current state of the USBolivian relationship is not consistent with such a working partnership8221 A separate report by the MCC was even more blunt The project 8220was postponed because of adverse conditions including unrest surrounding the Constitution Assembly process8221 When the Constituent Assembly approved the final draft of the new constitution in December 2007 the Bolivian Congress needed to approve it with a national referendum Knowing that he did not have the votes Morales declaredamp160 8220dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country8221 and called for public pressure on Congress Asserting he was acting as a 8220dictator8221 the civic committees and the departmental prefects of Media Luna along with their political allies in the Bolivian Senate refused to schedule the referendum They instead organized departmental referendums for autonomy which they overwhelmingly won in May The referendums were ruled unconstitutional by the National Electoral Council and the voting conditions were less than auspicious with no official electoral monitors and proautonomy forces intimidating and physically assaulting those who opposed the vote Choosing the democratic road rather than force to annul the departmental referendums Morales then put his presidency on the line with a recall referendum in which his mandate as well as those of the prefects seeking autonomy could be revoked On August 10 2008 voters gave Morales a resounding twothirds of the national vote with even the Media Luna department of Pando giving him just over 50 percent However the insurgent prefects also had their mandates renewed Basing their actions on the illegal May plebiscites the prefects then decided to strike for autonomy moving first to take control of Santa Cruz the richest of the four departments The Cruceno Youth Union UJC shock troops allied with the Civic Committee roamed the streets of the departmental capital and surrounding towns attacking and repressing any opposition by local social movements and MASallied organizations and sacking government buildings including the agrarian reform office Simultaneously the Civic Committees began sewing economic instability seeking to weaken the Morales government much like the CIAbacked opposition did against Chilean President Salvador Allende in the early 1970s As in Chile the business elites and allied truckers engaged in 8220strikes8221 withholding or refusing to ship produce to urban markets in the western Andes where the Indian population is concentrated while selling commodities on the black market at high prices The Confederation of Private Businesses of Bolivia called for a national producers8217 shutdown if the government refused 8220to change its economic policies8221 This became known as an attempt at a 8220civic coup8221 The strategy of the autonomy movement was to take complete control of the Media Luna provoke a national crisis to destabilize the government and convince the army to remain neutral or move against Morales The major of Santa Cruz Percy Fernandez had already called on the military to overthrow Morales8217 8220useless government8221 just before the August referendum The United States was openly involved in orchestrating this rebellion Ambassador Goldberg flew to Santa Cruz on August 25 to meet with Ruben Costas Morales8217 main antagonist and the prefect of Santa Cruz who became the de facto leader of the rebellious prefects and the autonomy movement in general After Goldberg left Costas declared himself 8220governor8221 of the autonomous department of Santa Cruz and ordered the take over of national government offices including those collecting tax revenues It was this visit with Costas that Morales cited as the reason for declaring Ambassador Goldberg 8220persona non grata8221 on September 10 8220After his expulsion the rebellion began to unravel8221 notes Guzman On September 11 in the department of Pando a paramilitary militia with machine guns attacked proMorales Indians near the capital of El Cobija resulting in at least 13 deaths In a separate action three policemen were kidnapped The next day Morales declared a state of siege in Pando and dispatched the army to move on Cobija in order to retake its airport which had been occupied by right wing bands Army units were also sent to guard the natural gas oleoducts one of which had been seized by the autonomy movement cutting the flow of gas to neighboring Brazil and Argentina The violent attacks in Pando precipitated a national mobilization of indigenous peoples and social movements as well as a sense of outrage in neighboring countries On September 15 Chilean President Michelle Bachelet called an emergency meeting in Santiago of the Union of South American Nations UNASUR to discuss the Bolivian crisis The resulting 8220Declaration of La Moneda8221 signed by the twelve UNASUR governments expressed their 8220full and decided support for the constitutional government of President Evo Morales8221 and warned that their respective governments 8220will not recognize any situation that entails an attempt for a civil coup that ruptures the institutional order or that compromises the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia8221 Morales who participated in the meeting thanked UNASUR for its support declaring 8220For the first time in South American8217s history the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems without the presence of the United States8221 Paying no attention to the declaration of support by UNASUR President Bush upped the ante the following week by suspending the Andean Trade Preference Act asserting 8220Bolivia has failed to cooperate with the United States on important efforts to fight drug trafficking8221 The trade act dating from 1991 eliminates tariffs on imports of textiles jewelry wood and other products from Colombia Ecuador Peru and Bolivia in exchange for cooperation with the US war on drugs It is estimated that 20000 to 30000 workers will lose their jobs and more than 70 million in exports will be priced out of the US market Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed there was 8220no ideological test for cooperation and friendship with the United States8221 that led to the trade cutoff with Bolivia This statement was a diplomatic lie For 2006 Morales8217 first year in office the US Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that coca cultivation was 8220statistically unchanged as compared to the 2005 estimate8221 For 2007 the United Nations reported an increase of just 5 percent in 8220Coca Cultivation in the Andean Region A Survey of Bolivia Colombia and Peru8221 This data however stood in sharp contrast to Colombia which registered an increase of coca cultivation by 27 percent despite the Colombian government8217s strong alliance with the US on coca eradication efforts The UNASUR declaration along with the state of siege in Pando and the nationwide repudiation of the massacre of Indians compelled the prefects of Media Luna to call off their rebellion They agreed to a 8220dialogue8221 with Morales over the new constitution and the issue of autonomy But the discussions in late September went nowhere even though the Morales8217 government agreed to incorporate some limited amendments concerning departmental autonomy into the new constitution The department prefects also demanded that the agrarian reform clauses in the new constitution be eliminated but on this point Morales backed by MAS and the social movements refused to back down On October 5 the negotiations collapsed Morales then announced that he would ask Congress to set the date for the public referendum on the new constitution The social movements mobilized from around the country and over 50000 demonstrators descended on La Paz surrounding Congress as it was meeting The right wing fragmented and on Oct 20 Congress approved the referendum on the new constitution which is scheduled for Jan 25 2009 Then on November 1 Morales released a bomb shell by announcing the indefinite suspension of the activities of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Bolivia and the expulsion of the 37 DEA agents from the country 8220Agents of the DEA carried out political espionage including the financing of delinquent groups8221 Morales declared He pointed toa key US operative involved in these activities 8220Steven Faucette the regional agent of the DEA in Santa Cruz who on a diplomatic mission of the US embassy made trips to Trinidad and Riberalta cities in the Media Luna provinces of Beni and Pando respectively with the objective of financing the Civics who were committed to carrying out a civic coup8221 Morales went on to disclose that a plane with North American registry called Super King had flown to airports in the Media Luna without registering flight plans or providing notification of 8220the cargo it transferred to pick up vehicles when it landed on the runway in clear violation of our national sovereignty8221 Bolivian intelligence also discovered seven security houses run by the US 8220that carried out political espionage8221 including telephone surveillance of political police and military authorities The DEA and its 37 agents were expelled from the country The Bolivian government appropriated what amounted to a DEA military arsenal including airplanes boats ground transport vehicles communications equipment and one thousand M16 machine guns The civic coup has failed No longer able to turn to the US embassy the opposition is in disarray with the leading rightwing party split into four factions The referendum on the constitution will likely be approved by a wide margin Evo has rallied the social movements and the country to break US historic domination of Bolivia With his trip to Washington DC Morales is hoping to open up a dialogue with the incoming administration of Presidentelect Barack Obama that will lead to a restoration of full trade relations a recognition of Bolivia8217s right to determine its own policies on drugs agrarian reform and gas nationalization and mutual respect between the two nations ROGER BURBACH is Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas CENSA based in Berkeley CA He has written extensively on Latin America and is the author of 8220 The Pinochet Affair State Terrorism and Global Justice8221 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 | Evo/PROPN Morales/PROPN is/AUX the/DET latest/ADJ democraticallyelected/VERB Latin/ADJ American/ADJ president/NOUN to/PART be/AUX the/DET target/NOUN of/ADP a/DET US/PROPN plot/NOUN to/PART destabilize/VERB and/CCONJ overthrow/VERB his/PRON government/NOUN 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<p>Illustration: Guy Billot</p>
<p />
<p>If the Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending a lot of money tracking terrorists, not much of it is being squandered on frills, judging from the looks of the FBI’s ramshackle field office in the federal building high above Chicago’s Loop. Workstations in the sprawling suite occupied by the FBIÕs Joint Terrorism Task Force are shoved together chockablock, and the place looks, well, lived in. files are strewn over battered desks, where rows of agents sit gazing at computer screens and talking quietly on the phone. “We call it the trailer park, because it’s such a mess,” says John Raucci, a 16-year FBI veteran who runs the task force.</p>
<p>But the modest appearance is deceiving. Though seemingly cobbled together, the task force is the business end of an ambitious anti-terrorist and domestic spying apparatus that is rapidly being assembled by the federal government. It’s a system that seeks to merge the powers of domestic law enforcement, including the FBI, with those of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security. Originally envisioned to catch Al Qaeda-style terrorists, it has been given the authority to vacuum up vast amounts of information and to analyze and file intelligence on individuals and organizations, including political and religious groups and citizens not suspected of any crime.</p>
<p>Authorities can now more easily gain access to phone and email logs, travel information, credit files, library records, and reams of other personal data. Using new law-enforcement powers created by the 2001 Patriot Act and an order by Attorney General John Ashcroft easing restrictions on FBI investigations, they can find out which websites people visit and which classes they’re taking, infiltrate political meetings and worship services, tap phone lines, monitor postings in online chat rooms, even secretly search homes and businesses. Since 9/11, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of surveillance warrants — which allow government agencies to spy on individuals and organizations without judicial review — as well as far-reaching subpoenas that require businesses to disclose information about their customers. And the government is working to combine information on individuals that is now scattered in countless public and private computer files into one huge database that could be used to look for patterns in people’s financial or travel habits.</p>
<p>Most of these efforts are taking place in secret, making it nearly impossible to find out exactly how extensively the new intelligence-gathering network is being used. But a few specifics have emerged. At the University of Massachusetts, for example, the FBI, working with a campus police officer recruited to the local terrorism task force, questioned faculty and students about their political views; nationwide, the bureau now has broad access to student records. Some public libraries have begun destroying their records after being contacted by the FBI about the reading habits of patrons. According to one University of Illinois survey, 550 libraries report having received such requests; the FBI says that its agents have contacted no more than 50 libraries. And last year, the owners of a Beverly Hills dive shop went public about an FBI effort to collect the names of everyone who had ever taken scuba lessons at diving schools or YMCA pools.</p>
<p>The intelligence network is growing fast. “We’ve doubled, even tripled here since 9/11,” says Raucci, whose Chicago terrorism task force — one of 66 around the nation — consists of 125 FBI officers as well as representatives of the CIA and the Internal Revenue Service; postal, customs, and immigration inspectors; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and firearms; and city, county, and state police. Of the task force’s five squads, two are dedicated to investigating Al Qaeda and other Islamist networks, while another exclusively targets domestic groups — “Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nation, the Church of the Creator, and extremists like the animal-liberation groups,” says Raucci; in addition, the FBI is providing intelligence training for thousands of officers at 200 police departments in the Chicago suburbs. The CIA has won new authority to engage in domestic spying, something it was long prohibited from doing; new domestic intelligence departments have been created at the Pentagon’s Northern Command and the Department of Homeland Security, and key lawmakers are debating the creation of a massive “National Intelligence Agency” along the lines of Britain’s MI5.</p>
<p>Together, the Bush administration’s measures are unraveling the web of safeguards placed on law enforcement in the 1970s, after it was revealed that the FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. Army had conducted covert operations against campus radicals, anti-war groups, and civil rights organizations. And, critics warn, they stand to make government surveillance of citizens — once considered a temporary, post-September 11 phenomenon — a permanent, routine aspect of law enforcement. “A combination of lightning-fast technological innovations and the erosion of privacy protections,” warned an American Civil Liberties Union report in January, “threatens to transform Big Brother from an oft-cited but remote threat into a very real part of American life.”</p>
<p>In the streets of Chicago, the power of the new intelligence apparatus is already being felt — and not by terrorists. “Everything has changed since 9/11,” says Emile Schepers, a longtime local activist and head of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights.</p>
<p>Schepers looks like a protester out of central casting. On a blustery cold and snowy day in early April, his bulky frame is sheathed in a tattered raincoat and he’s unshaven, with a shaggy mustache and long, unkempt hair. “Last month,” he says, “we organized a large anti-war demonstration, at which a police photographer came up to me and, right in my face, snapped a picture.”</p>
<p>At the protest, police made more than 800 arrests. “What suggests heightened intelligence and surveillance,” Schepers says, “is that the police went into the crowd and selected activists and leaders, and arrested them.”</p>
<p>Until recently, the Chicago Police Department was prohibited from photographing or videotaping political demonstrations. But in 2001, in a move that cleared the way for closer cooperation between police and the FBI, the department won a decades-long effort to rid itself of a court-imposed consent decree that had restricted its ability to spy on political and religious groups. The prohibition dated back to 1982, when a court forced Chicago to abandon its political spying unit, the heir to the old Red Squad that had harassed left-wing, civil rights, and anti-war activists from the 1950s to the ‘70s. Now, Chicago police are free to amass files on organizations, keep track of their members, infiltrate meetings, and record demonstrations, all on nothing more than the suspicion that a group might be inclined toward violence.</p>
<p>Larry Rosenthal, an attorney for the city of Chicago, insists that police will respect Chicagoans’ first Amendment rights. Officers, he says, are still prohibited from “intelligence gathering not motivated by a law-enforcement purpose or which is intended to punish, harass, or retaliate.” But he pointedly notes that under the new rules the police can keep track of organizations like act up, the militant aids group, or anti-abortion activists. “Take a mainline anti-abortion group with fringe members who plant bombs,” he says. “If a bomb goes off, at least you know who the members are, because they’re in an intelligence database.” Rosenthal says the Chicago police hope to integrate their criminal and intelligence databases more closely with those of the FBI and police departments in other cities, meaning that information collected anywhere in the United States will be instantly accessible to a long list of federal and local agencies. “Take the case of a demonstration against the World Trade Organization,” he says. “The responsible thing to do is to find out if any of the people coming [to Chicago] caused trouble in other cities.”</p>
<p>It won’t just be unruly demonstrators, however, who end up in intelligence files. Police around the nation, from large cities to small towns, are being trained in how to gather intelligence on everyday activity in their communities. In Joliet (population 106,221), 35 miles southwest of Chicago, officers have been through more than 4,000 hours of anti-terrorism training with the FBI since 9/11, says Fred Hayes, the city’s deputy chief of police. Joliet’s intelligence unit has also set up a liaison to the police intelligence division in New York City, which is led by a former CIA chief of covert operations.</p>
<p>Bill Fitzgerald, a former Joliet police chief, runs the Institute for Public Safety Partnerships, a branch of the Justice Department that conducts training for local police. Under the new system, Fitzgerald explains, someone in Joliet might report a neighbor to the police for suspicious behavior. A police officer may then visit the person, fill out a “field interview card,” and pass it to the intelligence officer in his department who would send it to the FBI task force. The process could begin with something as innocuous as a jittery citizen reporting a man in a turban loading boxes into a car — the kind of tip that, in fact, led to the arrests of numerous Arabs and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. If that man is seen a week later at, say, a protest in Des Moines, police could access the FBI’s database and call up the Joliet report. “At least they tell us it’s supposed to work that way,” says Fitzgerald.</p>
<p>Which is exactly what worries Harvey Grossman, legal director for the ACLU of Illinois. Slight and soft-spoken, the graying civil libertarian sits in his cluttered office in the warrenlike ACLU headquarters, poring over legal papers. “If you’re involved in a street demonstration, you don’t have any expectation that you are going to be part of a government file,” he says. Even the mere threat of such a file, he notes, can put a chill on political dissent: Government workers, people who might want security clearances or whose background might be investigated for a future job, or people who simply want to remain anonymous while participating in protests all have reason to fear the inclusion of their name in a police file, especially since such files are increasingly being shared among government agencies.</p>
<p>The ACLU is especially concerned about the FBI and police gathering information on the political views of people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. After the 1991 Gulf War, the FBI interviewed Arab American leaders about terrorism and, in the process, asked their views about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, about Middle East politics, and about a Palestinian homeland. In the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, a judge later ordered the records destroyed. Now, worries Grossman, the FBI may be using its new powers to compile similar dossiers on countless Americans — and, given the intense secrecy that surrounds the war on terrorism, it will be a lot harder to uncover them.</p>
<p>Already, there are indications that police in some cities have sought to collect information on individuals’ political beliefs. In New York this past February, police intelligence officers interrogated anti-war pro- testers about their political affiliations and past protest activities, then entered the information into a database. Under pressure from the ACLU, the program was halted — as was a more extensive spying program, begun in the late 1990s by the Denver Police Department, in which police amassed files on 3,200 individuals and 208 organizations, including Amnesty International and the American Friends Service Committee, many of which were characterized as “criminal extremist.”</p>
<p>Under a Justice Department training curriculum, police are taught to pay attention to citizens’ political affiliations and to look out for “enemies in our own backyard.” Police are directed to collect information on the “structure, philosophy, number of members, [and] locations” of groups including “the Green Movement,” which is defined as “environmental activism that is aimed at political and social reform with the explicit attempt to develop environmentally friendly policy, law, and behavior.”</p>
<p>David Carter, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University who developed the Justice Department curriculum, says it’s important for police to investigate even groups that so far have not engaged in any violent acts. Violence or terrorism could emerge from a wide range of movements, he says, including “the groups involved in the [World Economic Forum] protests in New York, or the World Trade Organization protesters,” along with other “social-extremist groups,” black separatists, and militias. “In the 1950s we said we were after communist sympathizers,” Carter explains. “Now, we say terrorist sympathizers.” For the FBI, putting together a national intelligence network is more than a new mandate: It’s the bureau’s chance to redeem itself after being widely castigated for missing clues in advance of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Leading members of Congress, think tanks, and government commissions have called for the establishment of a national intelligence agency to take over the bureau’s anti-terrorism efforts; President Bush’s national security team has discussed that option, but so far has not made a decision. “We’re either going to create a working, effective, substantial domestic intelligence unit in the FBI or create a new agency,” says Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who until recently chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee.</p>
<p>In response to such pressure, the FBI is scrambling to beef up its intelligence division. “We’ve shifted intelligence analysts from the criminal side,” says Raucci, of the Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force. “The lion’s share work on the terrorism side now, and we are making strides to recruit more trained intelligence people, including from the military services.” At headquarters in Washington, FBI Director Robert Mueller has established a “super squad” of terrorism specialists, opened a new Office of Intelligence, and asked Congress for a dramatic budget increase — a total of $4.6 billion for next year, nearly 50 percent more than the $3.1 billion the FBI spent in 2000. The new focus on terrorism has led the FBI to nearly abandon the war on drugs, leaving that mission to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and to significantly scale back efforts against organized crime, white-collar crime, and gangs.</p>
<p>The FBI and other branches of the Justice Department are also making ample use of the new powers granted them under the Patriot Act. They have filed at least 18,000 anti-terrorism subpoenas and search warrants since September 11, 2001, and conducted more than 1,000 surveillance operations with permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court — a special court that can grant warrants without evidence that the person being investigated is engaged in criminal activity.</p>
<p>During the same period, Ashcroft requested 170 emergency spying warrants, which allow the FBI to investigate individuals without judicial review; in the 23 years since the court had been established, a total of only 47 emergency warrants had been issued. In addition, the FBI has stepped up its use of national-security letters — subpoenas that can be used to compel businesses such as banks, Internet service providers, and airlines to turn over large amounts of customer data. When the ACLU sued to force the bureau to reveal how often it has used such letters, the FBI released a list that filled five pages, but with most of the information blacked out.</p>
<p>So far, all of this has netted the government few, if any, coups in the fight against terrorism. Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, based on Department of Justice numbers, show that in 2002, federal prosecutors nationwide charged 1,208 individuals with terrorism-related crimes. But the average sentence for those convicted on such charges was just two months — signaling that the crimes were mostly minor. Indeed, most of them reportedly involved offenses such as violating immigration rules, using a fake Social Security number, even getting drunk on an airplane.</p>
<p>Still, the Bush administration has launched a campaign to further extend federal spying powers by asking Congress to make the Patriot Act — parts of which are scheduled to expire in 2005 — permanent, and by drawing up plans for a measure dubbed “Patriot II.” The proposal would further lower the standards for court approval of FBI searches and surveillance, and it would allow agents to subpoena library, Internet, and bookstore records without going to court at all; it would also create a DNA database with samples from anyone suspected of being connected to a terrorist group. In addition, the association that represents state motor vehicle departments nationwide is creating the equivalent of a national ID card by combining driver’s license records from all 50 states; besides names, addresses, and photos, the database could include a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint or retinal scan.</p>
<p>The CIA, meanwhile, is establishing a much closer relationship with U.S. law enforcement. CIA officials are leading the new federal agency in charge of coordinating anti-terrorist activity, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, where FBI agents work side by side with CIA analysts. According to John Rizzo, senior deputy general counsel for the CIA, the agency has also deployed officers to many of the FBI’s terrorism task forces, where they have begun working with local police, helping to set investigative priorities and identify targets for surveillance.</p>
<p>“Previously, this kind of activity would have been considered unpalatable,” says Rizzo, because of the rules keeping law enforcement and intelligence apart. “The CIA has never dealt with state and local officials,” he adds, “but we are going to have to learn to do so.”</p>
<p>Even the federal government’s sophisticated spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping equipment can be used against U.S. targets and U.S. citizens. Under an existing, though little-known, law, such high-tech gear can be directed against Americans as long as it is temporarily placed under the control of the FBI or another law-enforcement agency, according to a former high-ranking CIA official. “If the intelligence community has a technology that law enforcement thinks is of use to it,” the official says, “it can just be seconded to the law-enforcement agency.”</p>
<p>During the sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area last fall, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency met to consider whether spy satellites might be useful in trying to find the snipers. Richard Schiffrin, the acting general counsel for the Defense Intelligence Agency, took part in those meetings. Participants, he recalls, kept harking back to the thriller starring Will Smith as an attorney under surveillance by a government agency that uses everything from infrared heat-seeking devices to listening gadgets to reconnaissance satellites. “Enemy of the State,” he says, “came up in every discussion.”</p>
<p /> | The Watchful and the Wary | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2003/07/watchful-wary/ | 2018-07-01 | 4left
| 3,056 | Illustration Guy Billot If the Federal Bureau of Investigation is spending a lot of money tracking terrorists not much of it is being squandered on frills judging from the looks of the FBI8217s ramshackle field office in the federal building high above Chicago8217s Loop Workstations in the sprawling suite occupied by the FBI213s Joint Terrorism Task Force are shoved together chockablock and the place looks well lived in files are strewn over battered desks where rows of agents sit gazing at computer screens and talking quietly on the phone 8220We call it the trailer park because it8217s such a mess8221 says John Raucci a 16year FBI veteran who runs the task force But the modest appearance is deceiving Though seemingly cobbled together the task force is the business end of an ambitious antiterrorist and domestic spying apparatus that is rapidly being assembled by the federal government It8217s a system that seeks to merge the powers of domestic law enforcement including the FBI with those of the Central Intelligence Agency the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security Originally envisioned to catch Al Qaedastyle terrorists it has been given the authority to vacuum up vast amounts of information and to analyze and file intelligence on individuals and organizations including political and religious groups and citizens not suspected of any crime Authorities can now more easily gain access to phone and email logs travel information credit files library records and reams of other personal data Using new lawenforcement powers created by the 2001 Patriot Act and an order by Attorney General John Ashcroft easing restrictions on FBI investigations they can find out which websites people visit and which classes they8217re taking infiltrate political meetings and worship services tap phone lines monitor postings in online chat rooms even secretly search homes and businesses Since 911 there has been a dramatic increase in the use of surveillance warrants 8212 which allow government agencies to spy on individuals and organizations without judicial review 8212 as well as farreaching subpoenas that require businesses to disclose information about their customers And the government is working to combine information on individuals that is now scattered in countless public and private computer files into one huge database that could be used to look for patterns in people8217s financial or travel habits Most of these efforts are taking place in secret making it nearly impossible to find out exactly how extensively the new intelligencegathering network is being used But a few specifics have emerged At the University of Massachusetts for example the FBI working with a campus police officer recruited to the local terrorism task force questioned faculty and students about their political views nationwide the bureau now has broad access to student records Some public libraries have begun destroying their records after being contacted by the FBI about the reading habits of patrons According to one University of Illinois survey 550 libraries report having received such requests the FBI says that its agents have contacted no more than 50 libraries And last year the owners of a Beverly Hills dive shop went public about an FBI effort to collect the names of everyone who had ever taken scuba lessons at diving schools or YMCA pools The intelligence network is growing fast 8220We8217ve doubled even tripled here since 9118221 says Raucci whose Chicago terrorism task force 8212 one of 66 around the nation 8212 consists of 125 FBI officers as well as representatives of the CIA and the Internal Revenue Service postal customs and immigration inspectors the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and firearms and city county and state police Of the task force8217s five squads two are dedicated to investigating Al Qaeda and other Islamist networks while another exclusively targets domestic groups 8212 8220Posse Comitatus the Aryan Nation the Church of the Creator and extremists like the animalliberation groups8221 says Raucci in addition the FBI is providing intelligence training for thousands of officers at 200 police departments in the Chicago suburbs The CIA has won new authority to engage in domestic spying something it was long prohibited from doing new domestic intelligence departments have been created at the Pentagon8217s Northern Command and the Department of Homeland Security and key lawmakers are debating the creation of a massive 8220National Intelligence Agency8221 along the lines of Britain8217s MI5 Together the Bush administration8217s measures are unraveling the web of safeguards placed on law enforcement in the 1970s after it was revealed that the FBI the CIA and the US Army had conducted covert operations against campus radicals antiwar groups and civil rights organizations And critics warn they stand to make government surveillance of citizens 8212 once considered a temporary postSeptember 11 phenomenon 8212 a permanent routine aspect of law enforcement 8220A combination of lightningfast technological innovations and the erosion of privacy protections8221 warned an American Civil Liberties Union report in January 8220threatens to transform Big Brother from an oftcited but remote threat into a very real part of American life8221 In the streets of Chicago the power of the new intelligence apparatus is already being felt 8212 and not by terrorists 8220Everything has changed since 9118221 says Emile Schepers a longtime local activist and head of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights Schepers looks like a protester out of central casting On a blustery cold and snowy day in early April his bulky frame is sheathed in a tattered raincoat and he8217s unshaven with a shaggy mustache and long unkempt hair 8220Last month8221 he says 8220we organized a large antiwar demonstration at which a police photographer came up to me and right in my face snapped a picture8221 At the protest police made more than 800 arrests 8220What suggests heightened intelligence and surveillance8221 Schepers says 8220is that the police went into the crowd and selected activists and leaders and arrested them8221 Until recently the Chicago Police Department was prohibited from photographing or videotaping political demonstrations But in 2001 in a move that cleared the way for closer cooperation between police and the FBI the department won a decadeslong effort to rid itself of a courtimposed consent decree that had restricted its ability to spy on political and religious groups The prohibition dated back to 1982 when a court forced Chicago to abandon its political spying unit the heir to the old Red Squad that had harassed leftwing civil rights and antiwar activists from the 1950s to the 821670s Now Chicago police are free to amass files on organizations keep track of their members infiltrate meetings and record demonstrations all on nothing more than the suspicion that a group might be inclined toward violence Larry Rosenthal an attorney for the city of Chicago insists that police will respect Chicagoans8217 first Amendment rights Officers he says are still prohibited from 8220intelligence gathering not motivated by a lawenforcement purpose or which is intended to punish harass or retaliate8221 But he pointedly notes that under the new rules the police can keep track of organizations like act up the militant aids group or antiabortion activists 8220Take a mainline antiabortion group with fringe members who plant bombs8221 he says 8220If a bomb goes off at least you know who the members are because they8217re in an intelligence database8221 Rosenthal says the Chicago police hope to integrate their criminal and intelligence databases more closely with those of the FBI and police departments in other cities meaning that information collected anywhere in the United States will be instantly accessible to a long list of federal and local agencies 8220Take the case of a demonstration against the World Trade Organization8221 he says 8220The responsible thing to do is to find out if any of the people coming to Chicago caused trouble in other cities8221 It won8217t just be unruly demonstrators however who end up in intelligence files Police around the nation from large cities to small towns are being trained in how to gather intelligence on everyday activity in their communities In Joliet population 106221 35 miles southwest of Chicago officers have been through more than 4000 hours of antiterrorism training with the FBI since 911 says Fred Hayes the city8217s deputy chief of police Joliet8217s intelligence unit has also set up a liaison to the police intelligence division in New York City which is led by a former CIA chief of covert operations Bill Fitzgerald a former Joliet police chief runs the Institute for Public Safety Partnerships a branch of the Justice Department that conducts training for local police Under the new system Fitzgerald explains someone in Joliet might report a neighbor to the police for suspicious behavior A police officer may then visit the person fill out a 8220field interview card8221 and pass it to the intelligence officer in his department who would send it to the FBI task force The process could begin with something as innocuous as a jittery citizen reporting a man in a turban loading boxes into a car 8212 the kind of tip that in fact led to the arrests of numerous Arabs and Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 911 If that man is seen a week later at say a protest in Des Moines police could access the FBI8217s database and call up the Joliet report 8220At least they tell us it8217s supposed to work that way8221 says Fitzgerald Which is exactly what worries Harvey Grossman legal director for the ACLU of Illinois Slight and softspoken the graying civil libertarian sits in his cluttered office in the warrenlike ACLU headquarters poring over legal papers 8220If you8217re involved in a street demonstration you don8217t have any expectation that you are going to be part of a government file8221 he says Even the mere threat of such a file he notes can put a chill on political dissent Government workers people who might want security clearances or whose background might be investigated for a future job or people who simply want to remain anonymous while participating in protests all have reason to fear the inclusion of their name in a police file especially since such files are increasingly being shared among government agencies The ACLU is especially concerned about the FBI and police gathering information on the political views of people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing After the 1991 Gulf War the FBI interviewed Arab American leaders about terrorism and in the process asked their views about Iraq8217s invasion of Kuwait about Middle East politics and about a Palestinian homeland In the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU a judge later ordered the records destroyed Now worries Grossman the FBI may be using its new powers to compile similar dossiers on countless Americans 8212 and given the intense secrecy that surrounds the war on terrorism it will be a lot harder to uncover them Already there are indications that police in some cities have sought to collect information on individuals8217 political beliefs In New York this past February police intelligence officers interrogated antiwar pro testers about their political affiliations and past protest activities then entered the information into a database Under pressure from the ACLU the program was halted 8212 as was a more extensive spying program begun in the late 1990s by the Denver Police Department in which police amassed files on 3200 individuals and 208 organizations including Amnesty International and the American Friends Service Committee many of which were characterized as 8220criminal extremist8221 Under a Justice Department training curriculum police are taught to pay attention to citizens8217 political affiliations and to look out for 8220enemies in our own backyard8221 Police are directed to collect information on the 8220structure philosophy number of members and locations8221 of groups including 8220the Green Movement8221 which is defined as 8220environmental activism that is aimed at political and social reform with the explicit attempt to develop environmentally friendly policy law and behavior8221 David Carter a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University who developed the Justice Department curriculum says it8217s important for police to investigate even groups that so far have not engaged in any violent acts Violence or terrorism could emerge from a wide range of movements he says including 8220the groups involved in the World Economic Forum protests in New York or the World Trade Organization protesters8221 along with other 8220socialextremist groups8221 black separatists and militias 8220In the 1950s we said we were after communist sympathizers8221 Carter explains 8220Now we say terrorist sympathizers8221 For the FBI putting together a national intelligence network is more than a new mandate It8217s the bureau8217s chance to redeem itself after being widely castigated for missing clues in advance of the September 11 terrorist attacks Leading members of Congress think tanks and government commissions have called for the establishment of a national intelligence agency to take over the bureau8217s antiterrorism efforts President Bush8217s national security team has discussed that option but so far has not made a decision 8220We8217re either going to create a working effective substantial domestic intelligence unit in the FBI or create a new agency8221 says Senator Richard Shelby RAla who until recently chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee In response to such pressure the FBI is scrambling to beef up its intelligence division 8220We8217ve shifted intelligence analysts from the criminal side8221 says Raucci of the Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Force 8220The lion8217s share work on the terrorism side now and we are making strides to recruit more trained intelligence people including from the military services8221 At headquarters in Washington FBI Director Robert Mueller has established a 8220super squad8221 of terrorism specialists opened a new Office of Intelligence and asked Congress for a dramatic budget increase 8212 a total of 46 billion for next year nearly 50 percent more than the 31 billion the FBI spent in 2000 The new focus on terrorism has led the FBI to nearly abandon the war on drugs leaving that mission to the Drug Enforcement Administration and to significantly scale back efforts against organized crime whitecollar crime and gangs The FBI and other branches of the Justice Department are also making ample use of the new powers granted them under the Patriot Act They have filed at least 18000 antiterrorism subpoenas and search warrants since September 11 2001 and conducted more than 1000 surveillance operations with permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court 8212 a special court that can grant warrants without evidence that the person being investigated is engaged in criminal activity During the same period Ashcroft requested 170 emergency spying warrants which allow the FBI to investigate individuals without judicial review in the 23 years since the court had been established a total of only 47 emergency warrants had been issued In addition the FBI has stepped up its use of nationalsecurity letters 8212 subpoenas that can be used to compel businesses such as banks Internet service providers and airlines to turn over large amounts of customer data When the ACLU sued to force the bureau to reveal how often it has used such letters the FBI released a list that filled five pages but with most of the information blacked out So far all of this has netted the government few if any coups in the fight against terrorism Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse based on Department of Justice numbers show that in 2002 federal prosecutors nationwide charged 1208 individuals with terrorismrelated crimes But the average sentence for those convicted on such charges was just two months 8212 signaling that the crimes were mostly minor Indeed most of them reportedly involved offenses such as violating immigration rules using a fake Social Security number even getting drunk on an airplane Still the Bush administration has launched a campaign to further extend federal spying powers by asking Congress to make the Patriot Act 8212 parts of which are scheduled to expire in 2005 8212 permanent and by drawing up plans for a measure dubbed 8220Patriot II8221 The proposal would further lower the standards for court approval of FBI searches and surveillance and it would allow agents to subpoena library Internet and bookstore records without going to court at all it would also create a DNA database with samples from anyone suspected of being connected to a terrorist group In addition the association that represents state motor vehicle departments nationwide is creating the equivalent of a national ID card by combining driver8217s license records from all 50 states besides names addresses and photos the database could include a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint or retinal scan The CIA meanwhile is establishing a much closer relationship with US law enforcement CIA officials are leading the new federal agency in charge of coordinating antiterrorist activity the Terrorist Threat Integration Center where FBI agents work side by side with CIA analysts According to John Rizzo senior deputy general counsel for the CIA the agency has also deployed officers to many of the FBI8217s terrorism task forces where they have begun working with local police helping to set investigative priorities and identify targets for surveillance 8220Previously this kind of activity would have been considered unpalatable8221 says Rizzo because of the rules keeping law enforcement and intelligence apart 8220The CIA has never dealt with state and local officials8221 he adds 8220but we are going to have to learn to do so8221 Even the federal government8217s sophisticated spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping equipment can be used against US targets and US citizens Under an existing though littleknown law such hightech gear can be directed against Americans as long as it is temporarily placed under the control of the FBI or another lawenforcement agency according to a former highranking CIA official 8220If the intelligence community has a technology that law enforcement thinks is of use to it8221 the official says 8220it can just be seconded to the lawenforcement agency8221 During the sniper attacks in the Washington DC area last fall the Pentagon and the National Security Agency met to consider whether spy satellites might be useful in trying to find the snipers Richard Schiffrin the acting general counsel for the Defense Intelligence Agency took part in those meetings Participants he recalls kept harking back to the thriller starring Will Smith as an attorney under surveillance by a government agency that uses everything from infrared heatseeking devices to listening gadgets to reconnaissance satellites 8220Enemy of the State8221 he says 8220came up in every discussion8221 | Illustration/PROPN Guy/PROPN Billot/PROPN If/SCONJ the/DET Federal/PROPN Bureau/PROPN of/ADP Investigation/PROPN is/AUX spending/VERB a/DET lot/NOUN of/ADP money/NOUN tracking/VERB terrorists/NOUN not/PART much/ADJ of/ADP it/PRON is/AUX being/AUX squandered/VERB on/ADP frills/NOUN judging/VERB from/ADP the/DET looks/NOUN of/ADP the/DET FBI8217s/PROPN ramshackle/ADJ field/NOUN office/NOUN in/ADP the/DET federal/ADJ building/NOUN high/ADV above/ADP Chicago8217s/PROPN Loop/PROPN Workstations/PROPN in/ADP the/DET sprawling/VERB suite/NOUN occupied/VERB by/ADP the/DET FBI213s/PROPN Joint/PROPN 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<p>MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s most brutal drug cartel leader built a business empire stretching from the Southwest United States to Central America, but Miguel Angel Trevino Morales’ final days of freedom were spent lying low in the hinterlands of Tamaulipas state, traveling only at night over back roads as Mexican marines closed in on his trail.</p>
<p>The last of the Zetas drug cartel’s old-guard leaders saw fate swoop in on him in the pre-dawn hours Monday when a military Black Hawk helicopter flew low over his pickup truck, then almost touching the ground, faced down the vehicle with its guns, Mexico Federal Security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said.</p>
<p>The vehicle stopped, and three men emerged. Two hit the ground while the third tried to run. All were captured by marine ground forces who had been watching the movements of 40-year-old Trevino Morales, Sanchez told The Associated Press Tuesday. Not a single shot was fired.</p>
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<p>Time was clearly running out for the cartel leader better known — and feared — by his nickname, “Z-40,” a play on police radio code for a commander. Mexico’s navy, which has brought down a number of top drug lords, “found out that he had been traveling in the early morning hours on dirt roads. They had been corralling him in little by little,” Sanchez said.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales had $2 million in cash and eight rifles with him when marines caught him outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo, long the Zetas’ base of operations. He was taken to Mexico City for questioning, but unlike the days of former President Felipe Calderon, there was no perp walk by a handcuffed suspect or piles of cash and guns put on display for the TV cameras.</p>
<p>Instead, the government released a single video of a rumpled-looking, un-handcuffed Trevino Morales walking through prosecutors’ headquarters, saying it wanted to avoid glamorizing drug traffickers or risk rights violations that could lead to a dismissal of charges. Authorities didn’t even refer to his nickname, Z-40.</p>
<p>The Zetas are Mexico’s most violent, if not richest, cartel, with the largest turf. A New York indictment against Trevino Morales estimates he received $10 million per month in income from cocaine sales alone, not to mention the money brought in by the cartel’s myriad other illicit activities, including kidnapping, extortion, migrant trafficking, weapons trafficking, even theft of oil from state pipelines.</p>
<p>His arrest was particularly pleasing for the United States. Trevino Morales allegedly orchestrated a series of killings on the U.S. side of the border, including several by a group of young U.S. citizens who gunned down their victims on the streets of Laredo. His gang was also believed to be responsible for the slayings of U.S. ICE Agent Jaime Zapata in 2011 and American citizen David Hartley in 2010 on Falcon Lake, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border.</p>
<p>President Barack Obama praised the Mexican government and vowed to continue supporting the country’s fight against drug traffickers.</p>
<p>“I think what it shows is that the new administration of President Pena Nieto is serious about continuing the efforts to break up these transnational drug operations,” Obama said in an interview with Univision Tuesday.</p>
<p>“We have to continue doing our part here in the United States to reduce demand, reduce the flow of guns and cash down south,” Obama added. “That’s the kind of cooperation that I think President Pena Nieto is looking for.”</p>
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<p>Trevino Morales is “one of the most significant Mexican cartel leaders to be apprehended in several years,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said. “His ruthless leadership has now come to an end.”</p>
<p>The Zetas have kidnapped or held tens of thousands of migrants, often demanding ransoms of $3,000 each. Federal officials say the Zetas stole and smuggled at least $46 million worth of Mexican oil to U.S. refineries. Trevino Morales channeled about $16 million to his brother in the United States to buy, train and race horses.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales’ methods, like those of Zetas leaders before him, led to a “Zetanization” of how cartels do their fighting, said George Grayson, an expert on the group and a professor of government at the College of William &amp; Mary.</p>
<p>“Inflicting fear into the heart of your target is an extremely efficient way to get what you want,” Grayson said. “That genie is out of the box.”</p>
<p>Trevino Morales was being held for questioning along with a bodyguard and accountant captured in Monday’s raid. Sanchez said government forces “have been able to obtain information on the possible movements of his other accomplices,” and phones or computers carried by traffickers often provide such information, even if the suspects themselves don’t talk.</p>
<p>U.S. Congressman Henry Cuellar, who represents Laredo, Texas, and was briefed on the arrest by U.S. and Mexican officials, noted: “The U.S. was very involved in this.”</p>
<p>“The U.S. has been helping in trying to track him for a while. There have been some close calls,” Cuellar said. “Here you have U.S. intelligence combined with the (Mexican) marines implementing it.”</p>
<p>While Trevino Morales is wanted on several counts in the U.S., it was unclear whether Mexico would try him first at home or extradite him. He will probably be held at a top security prison near Mexico City, where no escapes have occurred.</p>
<p>It was a surprising end for a capo so violent he soaked rivals in diesel fuel and burned them alive in 55-gallon drums. Many had thought he would go down with guns blazing, but Sanchez said the precision raid apparently caught him by surprise.</p>
<p>For the group most terrorized by Trevino Morales, Central American migrants who were kidnapped, beaten and extorted by the tens of thousands, the arrest “will certainly be a relief,” said the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde. The Roman Catholic priest runs a migrant shelter in the state of Oaxaca and has spent much of the last decade living under death threats from the Zetas.</p>
<p>“This was a blow, but it’s only skin deep,” Solalinde said. “The Zetas operate in almost 20 states of Mexico. They have a lot of public servants on their payroll, a lot of police.”</p>
<p>Solalinde said that in southern Mexico, the Zetas have used their ties in Honduras and Guatemala, where they also ship cocaine and grow opium, to recruit street gang members to kidnap and kill Central American migrants in Mexico.</p>
<p>The Zetas forcibly recruit some migrants, kill those who won’t join and increasingly kidnap young girls, who are forced into prostitution at Zeta-run bars or are made to distribute Zeta drugs.</p>
<p>“We’re talking about human trafficking, organ trafficking, kidnappings, forced recruitment, everything,” Solalinde said.</p>
<p>The Zetas have run their enormous turf with almost unbelievable brutality since the founders, a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers, splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico.</p>
<p>The Zetas were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of Mexico’s drug war, including the slaughter of 72 Central and South American migrants in the northern town of San Fernando in 2010, authorities said.</p>
<p>The following year, federal officials announced the discovery of 193 bodies buried in San Fernando, most of them migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas, some because they refused to work as drug mules. Sanchez said Trevino Morales is charged with ordering those crimes.</p>
<p>In 2011, a woman who angered the Zetas by blogging about crime and violence on a Nuevo Laredo website was found decapitated, her head placed atop a computer keyboard, with a message warning fellow bloggers about speaking out.</p>
<p>Experts say the arrest is unlikely to diminish the violence in the short term.</p>
<p>“The international experience … demonstrates that there is a danger of greater atomization, and extremely violent armed conflict, if the hundreds of legal businesses that the Zetas run are not frozen or seized,” said organized crime analyst Edgardo Buscaglia. He noted the many firms set up by the cartel “are where the Zetas real financial power is located.”</p>
<p>The Zetas operate in 16 different lines of business, both legal and illegal, he said, including pirated goods, importing contraband consumer goods and weapons trafficking. The Zetas reportedly use their turf in Cancun to smuggle Cuban migrants into Mexico, and their bases in northern Mexico to steal oil from government pipelines and sell it to refineries.</p>
<p>Sanchez said officials were on alert for possible flare-ups of violence following the arrest, and it was unclear who could be in line to replace him.</p>
<p>The Zetas remain active in Nuevo Laredo, the nearby border state of Coahuila, the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, as well as parts of north central Mexico and Central America, although Trevino Morales’ arrest means the gang has become “a franchise operation, not a vertical organization,” Grayson said.</p>
<p>One possible successor is Trevino Morales’ younger brother, Omar, a former low-ranking turf boss who’s seen as a far weaker figure. There are some reports that Omar is also suffering from a chronic illness that would weaken his chances of taking over.</p>
<p>In the past, the arrest or death of top Mexican capos have led some cartels, like the Beltran Leyva gang, to splinter into smaller, vicious warring gangs with small patches of turf. Others, like the Arellano Felix cartel, have largely been subsumed by the usual winner in these disputes, the Sinaloa cartel.</p>
<p>Any debilitation of the Zetas could strengthen the country’s most-wanted man, Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from suspected hideouts in rugged western Mexico.</p>
<p>One thing is certain: The Zetas’ success has spawned imitators.</p>
<p>“Today, there are probably people calling themselves Zetas who don’t necessarily have any real link to the organization,” Sanchez said.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Alicia Caldwell in Washington and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed to this report.</p>
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<p>5:21am 7/16/13 — Zetas leader’s arrest unlikely to halt terror</p>
<p>By Michael Weissenstein and Olga R. Rodriguez/The Associated Press</p>
<p>Undated file photo shows Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, alias Z-40, the reputed leader of the Zetas drug cartel, who was captured by Mexican authorities on Monday. (AP Photo/Mexican Attorney General’s Office website)</p>
<p>MEXICO CITY (AP) — The capture of the notoriously brutal Zetas leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a serious blow to Mexico’s most feared drug cartel but experts cautioned that taking down the group’s command structure is unlikely to diminish violence in the border states where it dominates through terror.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales, 40, was captured before dawn Monday by Mexican Marines who intercepted a pickup truck with $2 million in cash on a dirt road in the countryside outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo, which has long served as the Zetas’ base of operations. The truck was halted by a Marine helicopter and Trevino Morales was taken into custody along with a bodyguard and an accountant and eight guns, government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told reporters.</p>
<p>It was the first major blow against an organized crime leader by a Mexican administration struggling to drive down persistently high levels of violence. Experts on the Zetas said that the arrest, at least the eighth capture or killing of a high-ranking Zeta since 2011, could leave behind a series of cells scattered across northern Mexico without a central command but with the same appetite for kidnapping, extortion and other crimes against innocent people.</p>
<p>“It’s another link in the destruction of the Zetas as a coherent, identifiable organization,” said Alejandro Hope, a former member of Mexico’s domestic intelligence service. “There will still be people who call themselves Zetas, bands of individuals who maintain the same modus operandi. There will be fights over illegal networks.”</p>
<p>The Zetas remain active in Nuevo Laredo, the nearby border state of Coahuila, the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, parts of north central Mexico and Central America, although Trevino Morales’ arrest means the gang has become “a franchise operation not a vertical organization,” said George Grayson, an expert on the Zetas and professor of government at the College of William &amp; Mary.</p>
<p>The Zetas leader and his alleged accomplices were flown to Mexico City, where they are expected to eventually be tried in a closed system that usually takes years to prosecute cases, particularly high-profile ones.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales, known as “Z-40,” is uniformly described as one of the two most powerful cartel heads in Mexico, the leader of a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers, splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico, expanding from drug dealing into extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking.</p>
<p>Along the way, the Zetas authored some of the worst atrocities of Mexico’s drug war, leaving hundreds of bodies beheaded on roadsides or hanging from bridges, earning a reputation as perhaps the most terrifying of the country’s numerous ruthless cartels.</p>
<p>On Trevino Morales’ watch, 72 Central and South American migrants were slaughtered by the Zetas in the northern town of San Fernando in 2010, authorities said. By the following year, federal officials announced finding 193 bodies buried in San Fernando, most belonging to migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas for various reasons, including their refusal to work as drug mules.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales is charged with ordering the kidnapping and killing of the 265 migrants, along with numerous other charges of murder, torture and other crimes, Sanchez said.</p>
<p>President Enrique Pena Nieto came into office promising to drive down levels of homicide, extortion and kidnapping but has struggled to make a credible dent in crime figures. And his pledge to focus on citizen safety over other crimes has sparked worries among U.S. authorities that he would ease back on predecessor Felipe Calderon’s U.S.-backed strategy aimed above all at decapitating drug cartels.</p>
<p>The arrest of Trevino, a man widely blamed for both massive northbound drug trafficking and the deaths of untold scores of Mexicans and Central American migrants, will almost certainly earn praise from Pena Nieto’s U.S. and Mexican critics alike.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales’ capture adds to the long list of Zetas’ leaders who have been arrested or killed in recent years, including Zeta head Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, whose fatal shooting by authorities last year left Trevino Morales in charge.</p>
<p>The debilitation of the Zetas has been widely seen as strengthening the country’s most-wanted man, Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from hideouts believed to lie in rugged western Mexico.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales is expected to be succeeded by his brother, Omar, a former low-ranking turf boss seen as far weaker than his older brother.</p>
<p>Miguel Angel Trevino Morales began his career as a teenage gofer for the Los Tejas gang, which controlled most crime in his hometown across the border from Laredo, Texas. He soon graduated from washing cars and running errands to running drugs across the border, and was recruited into the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales’ brother, sister and mother lived in Dallas but he had many relatives around Nuevo Laredo and, while moving frequently to avoid authorities, he was believed to often return to his hometown, the U.S. official said.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales joined the Zetas, a group of Mexican special forces deserters who defected to work as hit men and bodyguards for the Gulf cartel in the late 1990s.</p>
<p>Stories about the brutality of “El Cuarenta,” or “40” as Trevino Morales became known, quickly became well-known among his men, his rivals and Nuevo Laredo citizens terrified of incurring his anger.</p>
<p>One technique favored by Trevino Morales was the “guiso,” or stew, in which enemies would be placed in 55-gallon (208-liter) drums and burned alive, said a U.S. law-enforcement official in Mexico City, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. Others who crossed the Zeta commander would be beaten with wooden planks, the official said.</p>
<p>Around 2005, Trevino Morales was promoted to boss of the Nuevo Laredo territory, or “plaza,” and given responsibility for fighting off the Sinaloa cartel’s attempt to seize control of its drug-smuggling routes, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. He orchestrated a series of killings on the U.S. side of the border, several by a group of young U.S. citizens who gunned down their victims on the streets of Laredo.</p>
<p>In 2006, the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas defeated the Sinaloa cartel in Nuevo Laredo, a victory that emboldened them as they began spreading south to towns and cities that had never before seen extensive organized crime. They set up criminal networks to control transit routes for drugs, migrants, extortion, kidnapping, contraband of pirated DVDs and CDs, and countless other criminal activities, intimidating local residents and committing gruesome murders as an example to the uncooperative.</p>
<p>According to the U.S. official, Trevino Morales was in charge of Nuevo Leon, Piedras Negras and other areas until March 2007, when he was sent to the city of Veracruz following the death of a leading Zeta in a gunbattle there.</p>
<p>That same year, Trevino Morales and Lazcano began pushing for independence from the Gulf cartel after cartel head Osielo Cardenas Guillen’s extradition to the U.S.</p>
<p>The Zetas split from the Gulf cartel and by 2008 had operations in 28 major Mexican cities, according to an analysis by Grupo Savant, a Washington-based security think tank.</p>
<p>In February 2008, Lazcano sent Trevino Morales to Guatemala, where he was responsible for eliminating local competitors and establish the Zetas’ control of smuggling routes. Trevino Morales was then named by Lazcano as national commander of the Zetas across Mexico despite his lack of military background, earning him the resentment of some of the original ex-military members of the Zetas, the official said.</p>
<p>The promotion involved Trevino Morales in virtually every decision by the Zetas, the official said.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales rose to the top of the Zetas last year after leader Lazcano died in a shootout with Mexican marines in Coahuila state.</p>
<p>Trevino Morales was indicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges in New York in 2009 and Washington in 2010, and the U.S. government issued a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.</p>
<p>According to the indictments, Trevino Morales coordinated the shipment of hundreds of pounds of cocaine and marijuana each week from Mexico into the U.S., much of which had passed through Guatemala.</p>
<p>Alicia Caldwell contributed to this report from Washington, D.C. Rodriguez and E. Eduardo Castillo contributed from Mexico City.</p> | UPDATED: No shots fired in precision operation that caught Zetas leader | false | https://abqjournal.com/222303/updated-precision-operation-caught-zetas-leader.html | 2013-07-17 | 2least
| 3,056 | MEXICO CITY AP 8212 Mexico8217s most brutal drug cartel leader built a business empire stretching from the Southwest United States to Central America but Miguel Angel Trevino Morales8217 final days of freedom were spent lying low in the hinterlands of Tamaulipas state traveling only at night over back roads as Mexican marines closed in on his trail The last of the Zetas drug cartel8217s oldguard leaders saw fate swoop in on him in the predawn hours Monday when a military Black Hawk helicopter flew low over his pickup truck then almost touching the ground faced down the vehicle with its guns Mexico Federal Security spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said The vehicle stopped and three men emerged Two hit the ground while the third tried to run All were captured by marine ground forces who had been watching the movements of 40yearold Trevino Morales Sanchez told The Associated Press Tuesday Not a single shot was fired ADVERTISEMENT Time was clearly running out for the cartel leader better known 8212 and feared 8212 by his nickname 8220Z408221 a play on police radio code for a commander Mexico8217s navy which has brought down a number of top drug lords 8220found out that he had been traveling in the early morning hours on dirt roads They had been corralling him in little by little8221 Sanchez said Trevino Morales had 2 million in cash and eight rifles with him when marines caught him outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo long the Zetas8217 base of operations He was taken to Mexico City for questioning but unlike the days of former President Felipe Calderon there was no perp walk by a handcuffed suspect or piles of cash and guns put on display for the TV cameras Instead the government released a single video of a rumpledlooking unhandcuffed Trevino Morales walking through prosecutors8217 headquarters saying it wanted to avoid glamorizing drug traffickers or risk rights violations that could lead to a dismissal of charges Authorities didn8217t even refer to his nickname Z40 The Zetas are Mexico8217s most violent if not richest cartel with the largest turf A New York indictment against Trevino Morales estimates he received 10 million per month in income from cocaine sales alone not to mention the money brought in by the cartel8217s myriad other illicit activities including kidnapping extortion migrant trafficking weapons trafficking even theft of oil from state pipelines His arrest was particularly pleasing for the United States Trevino Morales allegedly orchestrated a series of killings on the US side of the border including several by a group of young US citizens who gunned down their victims on the streets of Laredo His gang was also believed to be responsible for the slayings of US ICE Agent Jaime Zapata in 2011 and American citizen David Hartley in 2010 on Falcon Lake which straddles the USMexico border President Barack Obama praised the Mexican government and vowed to continue supporting the country8217s fight against drug traffickers 8220I think what it shows is that the new administration of President Pena Nieto is serious about continuing the efforts to break up these transnational drug operations8221 Obama said in an interview with Univision Tuesday 8220We have to continue doing our part here in the United States to reduce demand reduce the flow of guns and cash down south8221 Obama added 8220That8217s the kind of cooperation that I think President Pena Nieto is looking for8221 ADVERTISEMENT Trevino Morales is 8220one of the most significant Mexican cartel leaders to be apprehended in several years8221 the US Drug Enforcement Administration said 8220His ruthless leadership has now come to an end8221 The Zetas have kidnapped or held tens of thousands of migrants often demanding ransoms of 3000 each Federal officials say the Zetas stole and smuggled at least 46 million worth of Mexican oil to US refineries Trevino Morales channeled about 16 million to his brother in the United States to buy train and race horses Trevino Morales8217 methods like those of Zetas leaders before him led to a 8220Zetanization8221 of how cartels do their fighting said George Grayson an expert on the group and a professor of government at the College of William ampamp Mary 8220Inflicting fear into the heart of your target is an extremely efficient way to get what you want8221 Grayson said 8220That genie is out of the box8221 Trevino Morales was being held for questioning along with a bodyguard and accountant captured in Monday8217s raid Sanchez said government forces 8220have been able to obtain information on the possible movements of his other accomplices8221 and phones or computers carried by traffickers often provide such information even if the suspects themselves don8217t talk US Congressman Henry Cuellar who represents Laredo Texas and was briefed on the arrest by US and Mexican officials noted 8220The US was very involved in this8221 8220The US has been helping in trying to track him for a while There have been some close calls8221 Cuellar said 8220Here you have US intelligence combined with the Mexican marines implementing it8221 While Trevino Morales is wanted on several counts in the US it was unclear whether Mexico would try him first at home or extradite him He will probably be held at a top security prison near Mexico City where no escapes have occurred It was a surprising end for a capo so violent he soaked rivals in diesel fuel and burned them alive in 55gallon drums Many had thought he would go down with guns blazing but Sanchez said the precision raid apparently caught him by surprise For the group most terrorized by Trevino Morales Central American migrants who were kidnapped beaten and extorted by the tens of thousands the arrest 8220will certainly be a relief8221 said the Rev Alejandro Solalinde The Roman Catholic priest runs a migrant shelter in the state of Oaxaca and has spent much of the last decade living under death threats from the Zetas 8220This was a blow but it8217s only skin deep8221 Solalinde said 8220The Zetas operate in almost 20 states of Mexico They have a lot of public servants on their payroll a lot of police8221 Solalinde said that in southern Mexico the Zetas have used their ties in Honduras and Guatemala where they also ship cocaine and grow opium to recruit street gang members to kidnap and kill Central American migrants in Mexico The Zetas forcibly recruit some migrants kill those who won8217t join and increasingly kidnap young girls who are forced into prostitution at Zetarun bars or are made to distribute Zeta drugs 8220We8217re talking about human trafficking organ trafficking kidnappings forced recruitment everything8221 Solalinde said The Zetas have run their enormous turf with almost unbelievable brutality since the founders a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico The Zetas were responsible for some of the worst atrocities of Mexico8217s drug war including the slaughter of 72 Central and South American migrants in the northern town of San Fernando in 2010 authorities said The following year federal officials announced the discovery of 193 bodies buried in San Fernando most of them migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas some because they refused to work as drug mules Sanchez said Trevino Morales is charged with ordering those crimes In 2011 a woman who angered the Zetas by blogging about crime and violence on a Nuevo Laredo website was found decapitated her head placed atop a computer keyboard with a message warning fellow bloggers about speaking out Experts say the arrest is unlikely to diminish the violence in the short term 8220The international experience 8230 demonstrates that there is a danger of greater atomization and extremely violent armed conflict if the hundreds of legal businesses that the Zetas run are not frozen or seized8221 said organized crime analyst Edgardo Buscaglia He noted the many firms set up by the cartel 8220are where the Zetas real financial power is located8221 The Zetas operate in 16 different lines of business both legal and illegal he said including pirated goods importing contraband consumer goods and weapons trafficking The Zetas reportedly use their turf in Cancun to smuggle Cuban migrants into Mexico and their bases in northern Mexico to steal oil from government pipelines and sell it to refineries Sanchez said officials were on alert for possible flareups of violence following the arrest and it was unclear who could be in line to replace him The Zetas remain active in Nuevo Laredo the nearby border state of Coahuila the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz as well as parts of north central Mexico and Central America although Trevino Morales8217 arrest means the gang has become 8220a franchise operation not a vertical organization8221 Grayson said One possible successor is Trevino Morales8217 younger brother Omar a former lowranking turf boss who8217s seen as a far weaker figure There are some reports that Omar is also suffering from a chronic illness that would weaken his chances of taking over In the past the arrest or death of top Mexican capos have led some cartels like the Beltran Leyva gang to splinter into smaller vicious warring gangs with small patches of turf Others like the Arellano Felix cartel have largely been subsumed by the usual winner in these disputes the Sinaloa cartel Any debilitation of the Zetas could strengthen the country8217s mostwanted man Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin 8220El Chapo8221 Guzman who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from suspected hideouts in rugged western Mexico One thing is certain The Zetas8217 success has spawned imitators 8220Today there are probably people calling themselves Zetas who don8217t necessarily have any real link to the organization8221 Sanchez said ___ Alicia Caldwell in Washington and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed to this report amp160 521am 71613 8212 Zetas leader8217s arrest unlikely to halt terror By Michael Weissenstein and Olga R RodriguezThe Associated Press Undated file photo shows Miguel Angel Trevino Morales alias Z40 the reputed leader of the Zetas drug cartel who was captured by Mexican authorities on Monday AP PhotoMexican Attorney General8217s Office website MEXICO CITY AP 8212 The capture of the notoriously brutal Zetas leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales is a serious blow to Mexico8217s most feared drug cartel but experts cautioned that taking down the group8217s command structure is unlikely to diminish violence in the border states where it dominates through terror Trevino Morales 40 was captured before dawn Monday by Mexican Marines who intercepted a pickup truck with 2 million in cash on a dirt road in the countryside outside the border city of Nuevo Laredo which has long served as the Zetas8217 base of operations The truck was halted by a Marine helicopter and Trevino Morales was taken into custody along with a bodyguard and an accountant and eight guns government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez told reporters It was the first major blow against an organized crime leader by a Mexican administration struggling to drive down persistently high levels of violence Experts on the Zetas said that the arrest at least the eighth capture or killing of a highranking Zeta since 2011 could leave behind a series of cells scattered across northern Mexico without a central command but with the same appetite for kidnapping extortion and other crimes against innocent people 8220It8217s another link in the destruction of the Zetas as a coherent identifiable organization8221 said Alejandro Hope a former member of Mexico8217s domestic intelligence service 8220There will still be people who call themselves Zetas bands of individuals who maintain the same modus operandi There will be fights over illegal networks8221 The Zetas remain active in Nuevo Laredo the nearby border state of Coahuila the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz parts of north central Mexico and Central America although Trevino Morales8217 arrest means the gang has become 8220a franchise operation not a vertical organization8221 said George Grayson an expert on the Zetas and professor of government at the College of William ampamp Mary The Zetas leader and his alleged accomplices were flown to Mexico City where they are expected to eventually be tried in a closed system that usually takes years to prosecute cases particularly highprofile ones Trevino Morales known as 8220Z408221 is uniformly described as one of the two most powerful cartel heads in Mexico the leader of a corps of special forces defectors who went to work for drug traffickers splintered off into their own cartel in 2010 and metastasized across Mexico expanding from drug dealing into extortion kidnapping and human trafficking Along the way the Zetas authored some of the worst atrocities of Mexico8217s drug war leaving hundreds of bodies beheaded on roadsides or hanging from bridges earning a reputation as perhaps the most terrifying of the country8217s numerous ruthless cartels On Trevino Morales8217 watch 72 Central and South American migrants were slaughtered by the Zetas in the northern town of San Fernando in 2010 authorities said By the following year federal officials announced finding 193 bodies buried in San Fernando most belonging to migrants kidnapped off buses and killed by the Zetas for various reasons including their refusal to work as drug mules Trevino Morales is charged with ordering the kidnapping and killing of the 265 migrants along with numerous other charges of murder torture and other crimes Sanchez said President Enrique Pena Nieto came into office promising to drive down levels of homicide extortion and kidnapping but has struggled to make a credible dent in crime figures And his pledge to focus on citizen safety over other crimes has sparked worries among US authorities that he would ease back on predecessor Felipe Calderon8217s USbacked strategy aimed above all at decapitating drug cartels The arrest of Trevino a man widely blamed for both massive northbound drug trafficking and the deaths of untold scores of Mexicans and Central American migrants will almost certainly earn praise from Pena Nieto8217s US and Mexican critics alike Trevino Morales8217 capture adds to the long list of Zetas8217 leaders who have been arrested or killed in recent years including Zeta head Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano whose fatal shooting by authorities last year left Trevino Morales in charge The debilitation of the Zetas has been widely seen as strengthening the country8217s mostwanted man Sinaloa cartel head Joaquin 8220El Chapo8221 Guzman who has overseen a vicious turf war with the Zetas from hideouts believed to lie in rugged western Mexico Trevino Morales is expected to be succeeded by his brother Omar a former lowranking turf boss seen as far weaker than his older brother Miguel Angel Trevino Morales began his career as a teenage gofer for the Los Tejas gang which controlled most crime in his hometown across the border from Laredo Texas He soon graduated from washing cars and running errands to running drugs across the border and was recruited into the Matamorosbased Gulf cartel Trevino Morales8217 brother sister and mother lived in Dallas but he had many relatives around Nuevo Laredo and while moving frequently to avoid authorities he was believed to often return to his hometown the US official said Trevino Morales joined the Zetas a group of Mexican special forces deserters who defected to work as hit men and bodyguards for the Gulf cartel in the late 1990s Stories about the brutality of 8220El Cuarenta8221 or 8220408221 as Trevino Morales became known quickly became wellknown among his men his rivals and Nuevo Laredo citizens terrified of incurring his anger One technique favored by Trevino Morales was the 8220guiso8221 or stew in which enemies would be placed in 55gallon 208liter drums and burned alive said a US lawenforcement official in Mexico City who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic Others who crossed the Zeta commander would be beaten with wooden planks the official said Around 2005 Trevino Morales was promoted to boss of the Nuevo Laredo territory or 8220plaza8221 and given responsibility for fighting off the Sinaloa cartel8217s attempt to seize control of its drugsmuggling routes according to US and Mexican officials He orchestrated a series of killings on the US side of the border several by a group of young US citizens who gunned down their victims on the streets of Laredo In 2006 the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas defeated the Sinaloa cartel in Nuevo Laredo a victory that emboldened them as they began spreading south to towns and cities that had never before seen extensive organized crime They set up criminal networks to control transit routes for drugs migrants extortion kidnapping contraband of pirated DVDs and CDs and countless other criminal activities intimidating local residents and committing gruesome murders as an example to the uncooperative According to the US official Trevino Morales was in charge of Nuevo Leon Piedras Negras and other areas until March 2007 when he was sent to the city of Veracruz following the death of a leading Zeta in a gunbattle there That same year Trevino Morales and Lazcano began pushing for independence from the Gulf cartel after cartel head Osielo Cardenas Guillen8217s extradition to the US The Zetas split from the Gulf cartel and by 2008 had operations in 28 major Mexican cities according to an analysis by Grupo Savant a Washingtonbased security think tank In February 2008 Lazcano sent Trevino Morales to Guatemala where he was responsible for eliminating local competitors and establish the Zetas8217 control of smuggling routes Trevino Morales was then named by Lazcano as national commander of the Zetas across Mexico despite his lack of military background earning him the resentment of some of the original exmilitary members of the Zetas the official said The promotion involved Trevino Morales in virtually every decision by the Zetas the official said Trevino Morales rose to the top of the Zetas last year after leader Lazcano died in a shootout with Mexican marines in Coahuila state Trevino Morales was indicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges in New York in 2009 and Washington in 2010 and the US government issued a 5 million reward for information leading to his arrest According to the indictments Trevino Morales coordinated the shipment of hundreds of pounds of cocaine and marijuana each week from Mexico into the US much of which had passed through Guatemala Alicia Caldwell contributed to this report from Washington DC Rodriguez and E Eduardo Castillo contributed from Mexico City | MEXICO/PROPN CITY/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Mexico8217s/X most/ADV brutal/ADJ drug/NOUN cartel/NOUN leader/NOUN built/VERB a/DET 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<p>(Reuters) - Exiled Zimbabwe opposition leader Roy Bennett and four other people were killed in a helicopter crash in a remote northern part of the U.S. state of New Mexico, officials and his political party said on Thursday.</p> File photo: Roy Bennett arrives at the high court in Harare January 13, 2010. REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo
<p>The crash of a private Huey helicopter in rugged terrain near Raton, New Mexico, on Wednesday evening killed Bennett, 60, along with his wife, Heather Bennett, 55, James Coleman Dodd, 57, of Colorado, Charles Ryland Burnett, 61, of Texas and Paul Cobb, 67, of Texas, New Mexico State Police said.</p>
<p>Bennett, a former treasurer general of the opposition MDC party, was an important figure in Zimbabwean politics and served time in prison under former President Robert Mugabe. He recently told CNN that his country would never again let itself be ruled by a dictatorship.</p>
<p>“Roy was a resolute and committed fighter for democratic change in Zimbabwe,” the MDC said in a statement.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>The party described Bennett as a charismatic grassroots politician and successful farmer in the country’s eastern Chimanimani District. He was fluent in Zimbabwe’s Shona language, it said, and had helped hundreds of impoverished villagers pay school fees for their children.</p>
<p>Though white, Bennett fought for the rights of black Zimbabweans, the party said, and had the nickname “Pachedu,” a Shona word that translates as “together” or “one of us.”</p>
<p>The National Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating the crash 15 miles (24 km) east of Raton.</p>
<p>Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Daniel Wallis</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>YANBIAN, China (Reuters) - I sat on a metal bench, the chill seeping through my down jacket, as a Chinese government official towered above me, shouting.</p> Policemen control a check point after preventing Reuters reporters from driving through, near the border of China and North Korea, just outside the village of Sanhe, China, November 25, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj
<p>It was a Saturday morning in March, just after daybreak. I was on China’s border with North Korea, trying to follow up on reports that the country was making preparations for a large-scale influx of North Korean refugees. As usually happens when I report from this part of the world, the Chinese authorities were telling me to go away.</p>
<p>Cui Changwan, the local government official who had been called in when border guards stopped me, shoved a document into my hands and jabbed his finger on the page which stated that “without approval, foreigners are not permitted to enter areas out of bounds to foreigners.”</p>
<p>I asked him to show me the rule that said I was in such a place.</p>
<p>“It’s an internal document which you’re not allowed to see,” he replied, spittle flying at me. In the office behind us, a colleague of his played video games.</p>
<p>China has long posted military and police along its border with North Korea. The border is marked by two rivers which often freeze over in the winter, making it easier for North Koreans to cross - a particular concern for China’s state security.</p>
<p>Despite a recent thaw in relations between North Korea and both China and the United States, locals say that over the past six months, China has stepped up military patrols here. Media reports in South Korea and elsewhere say China has been bolstering its defences along the border - some have said as many as 300,000 troops have been added.</p>
<p>Two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters the number of Chinese military on the border could be up to 200,000 or possibly 300,000. This would be an increase from just 100,000 in August last year. China’s foreign ministry declined to respond to a question on the numbers or the intensified activity.</p>
<p>Many of the military bases are in Yanbian, an area which includes Sanhe village, where the authorities had detained me.</p>
<p>On assignment in November with photographer Damir Sagolj, we documented the ways some people who live on the frontier say they interact across it. Spots like this village underline how Beijing also maintains a wary eye on its neighbor.</p>
<p>Chinese border control staff called in at our hotel. We were prevented from continuing our trip along the border at three separate roadblocks around Tumen. At one point, plain clothes police hovered as Damir took photos of tourists. They followed us in two cars.</p>
<p>“We have secret military installations here,” one soldier told me in November. A declassified CIA document from May 1970 says China had begun constructing personnel trenches - with possible forward firing positions facing the border - in 1969.</p>
<p>Tens of thousands of North Koreans have already traveled through China as they left one of the world’s poorest countries. Around 31,000 of them eventually sought refuge in South Korea. Others have stayed in China.</p>
<p>Both China and North Korea have bolstered efforts to prevent North Koreans from making the journey to South Korea through countries including Laos and Thailand, according to Human Rights Watch. Last year, it said, Chinese authorities intensified their crackdown on arriving North Koreans and the networks which help them. China says it handles North Korean arrivals in accordance with humanitarian principles; North Korea’s mission to the United Nations didn’t respond to a request for comment.</p>
<p>If war were to break out in North Korea, the Chinese have made extensive plans to respond and are likely to intervene in some way, two diplomatic sources said. China’s foreign ministry told us it consistently supports denuclearisation and peace on the Korean peninsula and believes in the need for dialogue.</p>
<p>Late last year, a document that appeared to be from a Chinese state-owned company was leaked online, outlining plans for China to build refugee camps along its border with North Korea. At the time, neither the company or the government made any comment on the plans.</p>
<p>Around 20 people I spoke to who live along or near the border said they had seen no sign of camps being built. But none doubted plans were being made.</p>
<p>Many locals said the government’s focus was fortifying its military presence. If North Korea were to collapse and millions were to rush into China, the Chinese government could easily convert abandoned homes in villages all along the border into temporary accommodation, they told me.</p>
<p>“Border regions anywhere in the world are sensitive, but it’s particularly sensitive up here because the river is narrower and historically there has been a lot of interaction between the two sides,” said Li Zhonglin, a China-North Korea specialist at Yanbian University.</p>
<p>In recent years, Chinese media have reported that villagers have been killed by North Koreans sneaking across the border, often in search of food.</p>
<p>China is more likely to look at the issue of North Koreans rushing across its border as a military threat rather than a humanitarian disaster, some Chinese academics say.</p>
<p>Yang Guosheng tends to 100 cows near China’s border with Russia and North Korea. He said Chinese border control personnel come by at least 10 times every day, night and day. There are cameras at the edge of his property, which hugs the bank of the Tumen river.</p>
<p>All along the border, signs remind people to be on the lookout for spies and other suspicious activities.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin in Seoul; Edited by Sara Ledwith</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia urged the United States and its allies on Thursday to refrain from military action against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack and said he “cannot exclude” war between Washington and Moscow.</p> Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia (L) and Bolivia's Ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Sergio Llorenty Soliz speak to the media outside Security Council chambers at the U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
<p>Speaking after a closed-door U.N. Security Council meeting requested by Bolivia over threats of military action in Syria by U.S. President Donald Trump, Nebenzia said the situation was even more dangerous because Russian troops are in Syria.</p>
<p>“The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war,” he told reporters. “We hope there will be no point of no return.”</p> Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia (L) and Bolivia's Ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Sergio Llorenty Soliz speak to the media outside Security Council chambers at the U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
<p>When asked if he was referring to a war between the United States and Russia, he said, “We cannot exclude any possibilities, unfortunately, because we saw messages that are coming from Washington. They were very bellicose.”</p>
<p>Trump said he was holding meetings on Thursday on Syria, and expected to make decisions “fairly soon.”</p>
<p>Russia called a meeting of the Security Council for Friday on Syria and has asked for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to publicly brief the body.</p> Slideshow (4 Images)
<p>In a bid to avoid an escalation, Sweden proposed a Security Council resolution on Thursday, seen by Reuters, that would ask Guterres to send a high-level disarmament team to Syria to address “all outstanding issues on the use of chemical weapons once and for all.”</p>
<p>Some U.N. diplomats said there was little interest among the council’s 15 member countries to pursue the proposal.</p>
<p>Nebenzia thanked Sweden for its efforts, but added, “Frankly in the circumstances we find ourselves now, this is not an immediate priority.”</p>
<p>The council failed on Tuesday to approve three draft resolutions on chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Russia vetoed a U.S. text, while two Russian-drafted resolutions failed to get a minimum nine votes to pass.</p>
<p>Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are traveling to Syria to determine whether a toxic gas was used in the town of Douma, the site of the April 7 incident, and will start work on Saturday. They are not mandated to assign blame.</p>
<p>Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari told reporters on Thursday, “We’re ready to escort them to where they want, whenever they want, anytime they want.”</p>
<p>“Any delay or disruption in the visit will be a result of the political pressure exercised on the OPCW from a very well-known state, as the Syrian government expressed its readiness to facilitate this visit,” Ja’afari said.</p>
<p>Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Will Dunham</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea should not expect rewards from talks with the United States until it takes irreversible steps to give up its nuclear weapons, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, said on Thursday.</p> North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads a party meeting in this photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang April 9, 2018. KCNA/via Reuters
<p>Pompeo said the historical analysis was “not optimistic,” when asked at his Senate confirmation hearing if he believed North Korea would agree to dismantle its nuclear program. He said that in past negotiations the United States and the world had relaxed sanctions too quickly.</p>
<p>“It is the intention of the president and the administration not to do that this time to make sure that … before we provide rewards, we get the outcome permanently, irreversibly, that it is that we hope to achieve,” Pompeo said.</p>
<p>“It is a tall order, but I am hopeful that President Trump can achieve that through sound diplomacy,” he said.</p>
<p>Trump has said he plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in May or early June and hopes the discussions will ultimately lead to an end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which Washington sees as its most pressing security threat.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Trump said meetings were being set up between him and Kim and said the United States would approach the talks respectfully.</p>
<p>He thanked China for its help in trying to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States. “They’ve been really terrific at helping us get to some kind of settlement,” Trump said.</p>
<p>“Meetings are being set up right now between myself and Kim Jong Un. I think it will be terrific. I think we’ll go in with a lot of respect and we’ll see what happens,” he said.</p>
<p>Trump also said trade “negotiations” between Washington and Beijing were going well, conflicting with China’s statements since the president’s announcements of plans to impose billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese goods, which have fed fears of an all-out trade war.</p>
<p>“We are getting along very well, think we’re going to do some great things,” Trump said, adding that getting rid of nuclear weapons was “very good for them, good for everybody.”</p> NO ILLUSIONS
<p>Pompeo said he was optimistic a course could be set at the Trump-Kim summit for a diplomatic outcome with North Korea, but added that no one was under any illusion that a comprehensive deal could be reached at that meeting.</p>
<p>He brushed aside concerns that the administration’s moves to modify a nuclear deal with Iran could make an agreement with North Korea more difficult. He argued that Kim would be looking to his own interests, including his country’s economy and the “sustainment of his regime,” not other historical agreements.</p>
<p>Pompeo stressed that the aim of a Trump-Kim summit was to get North Korea to “step away.” Under questioning, he would not take any option off the table, including military ones.</p>
<p>At the same time, Pompeo said he was not advocating regime change for North Korea and had never done so.</p>
<p>Last year, North Korea accused Pompeo of favoring such a policy after he told a forum in July it was important to separate the country’s nuclear weapons from the “character who holds the control over them.”</p> U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with governors and members of Congress at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 12, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
<p>In May, North Korea accused the CIA and South Korea’s intelligence service of a failed plot to assassinate Kim at a military parade in Pyongyang.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, met separately with South Korea’s National Security Office director, Chung Eui-yong, who led a South Korean delegation that met Kim Jong Un last month, and his Japanese counterpart Shotaro Yachi.</p>
<p>“The national security advisers committed to continue coordinating closely,” a White House official said.</p>
<p>A South Korean diplomat said Chung had a “very useful” meeting with Bolton on preparations for South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s scheduled April 27 summit with Kim Jong Un and the planned Trump-Kim meeting, but gave no details.</p>
<p>“We had very informative discussions,” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted Chung as saying. “We had a wide-ranging exchange of views on various ways to make (the summits) a success and peacefully achieve denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”</p>
<p>Bolton, who took up his post on Monday, has called for North Korea regime change in the past and has previously been rejected as a negotiating partner by Pyongyang.</p>
<p>At a separate congressional hearing, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the aim was for a negotiated solution to the North Korean crisis.</p>
<p>“We’re all cautiously optimistic that we may be on the right path for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” he told the House of Representative Armed Services Committee.</p>
<p>Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland, Doina Chiacu, Lesley Wroughton and Idrees Ali; Writing by David Brunnstrom and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Leslie Adler</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to arrest an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor if she conducts activities in his country, arguing it was no longer an ICC member so the court had no right to do any investigating.</p> Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gestures as he delivers a speech during the 121st founding anniversary of the Philippine Army (PA) at Taguig city, Metro Manila, Philippines March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco
<p>Hitting out at what he said was an international effort to paint him as a “ruthless and heartless violator of human rights”, Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC’s Rome Statute a month ago and promised to continue his crackdown on drugs, in which thousands have been killed.</p>
<p>ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in February announced the start of a preliminary examination into a complaint by a Philippine lawyer which accuses Duterte and top officials of crimes against humanity, and of killing criminals as a policy.</p>
<p>Duterte has cited numerous reasons why he believes the ICC has no jurisdiction over him, and on Friday suggested that any doubts about that should have been dispelled by his withdrawal.</p>
<p>“What is your authority now? If we are not members of the treaty, why are you ... in this country?,” told reporters, in comments aimed at Bensouda.</p>
<p>“You cannot exercise any proceedings here without basis. That is illegal and I will arrest you.”</p>
<p>It is not clear whether Bensouda or the ICC has carried out any activities in the Philippines related to the complaint against Duterte.</p>
<p>The office of the prosecutor in The Hague and the Philippine foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>Police have since July 2016 killed more than 4,000 people they say are drug dealers who resisted arrest. Activists say many of those were executions, which police deny.</p>
<p>Duterte has told security forces not to cooperate with any foreign investigators and last month said he would convince other ICC members to withdraw.</p>
<p>Duterte had earlier vowed to face the ICC and critics say pulling out is futile, because the ICC has jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes committed in the period from when the Philippines joined in 2011 to when its withdrawal takes effect in March 2019.</p>
<p>Under the Rome Statute, the ICC can step in and exercise jurisdiction if states are unable or unwilling to investigate suspected crimes.</p>
<p>But the mercurial former mayor and his legal aides argue that technically, the Philippines never actually joined the ICC, because it was not announced in the country’s official gazette.</p>
<p>“If there is no publication, it is as if there is no law at all,” Duterte said on Friday.</p>
<p>Reporting by Martin Petty and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Robert Birsel</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | Zimbabwe opposition leader Roy Bennett killed in U.S. helicopter crash Edgy times on China's border with North Korea Russia U.N. envoy 'cannot exclude' war between Russia, U.S. No reward for North Korea without irreversible denuclearization: Pompeo 'I will arrest you': Duterte warns ICC lawyer to steer clear of Philippines | false | https://reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-bennett/zimbabwe-opposition-leader-roy-bennett-killed-in-us-helicopter-crash-idUSKBN1F731X | 2018-01-18 | 2least
| 3,056 | Reuters Exiled Zimbabwe opposition leader Roy Bennett and four other people were killed in a helicopter crash in a remote northern part of the US state of New Mexico officials and his political party said on Thursday File photo Roy Bennett arrives at the high court in Harare January 13 2010 REUTERSPhilimon Bulawayo The crash of a private Huey helicopter in rugged terrain near Raton New Mexico on Wednesday evening killed Bennett 60 along with his wife Heather Bennett 55 James Coleman Dodd 57 of Colorado Charles Ryland Burnett 61 of Texas and Paul Cobb 67 of Texas New Mexico State Police said Bennett a former treasurer general of the opposition MDC party was an important figure in Zimbabwean politics and served time in prison under former President Robert Mugabe He recently told CNN that his country would never again let itself be ruled by a dictatorship 8220Roy was a resolute and committed fighter for democratic change in Zimbabwe8221 the MDC said in a statement Slideshow 2 Images The party described Bennett as a charismatic grassroots politician and successful farmer in the country8217s eastern Chimanimani District He was fluent in Zimbabwe8217s Shona language it said and had helped hundreds of impoverished villagers pay school fees for their children Though white Bennett fought for the rights of black Zimbabweans the party said and had the nickname 8220Pachedu8221 a Shona word that translates as 8220together8221 or 8220one of us8221 The National Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating the crash 15 miles 24 km east of Raton Reporting by Sharon Bernstein Editing by Daniel Wallis Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles YANBIAN China Reuters I sat on a metal bench the chill seeping through my down jacket as a Chinese government official towered above me shouting Policemen control a check point after preventing Reuters reporters from driving through near the border of China and North Korea just outside the village of Sanhe China November 25 2017 REUTERSDamir Sagolj It was a Saturday morning in March just after daybreak I was on China8217s border with North Korea trying to follow up on reports that the country was making preparations for a largescale influx of North Korean refugees As usually happens when I report from this part of the world the Chinese authorities were telling me to go away Cui Changwan the local government official who had been called in when border guards stopped me shoved a document into my hands and jabbed his finger on the page which stated that 8220without approval foreigners are not permitted to enter areas out of bounds to foreigners8221 I asked him to show me the rule that said I was in such a place 8220It8217s an internal document which you8217re not allowed to see8221 he replied spittle flying at me In the office behind us a colleague of his played video games China has long posted military and police along its border with North Korea The border is marked by two rivers which often freeze over in the winter making it easier for North Koreans to cross a particular concern for China8217s state security Despite a recent thaw in relations between North Korea and both China and the United States locals say that over the past six months China has stepped up military patrols here Media reports in South Korea and elsewhere say China has been bolstering its defences along the border some have said as many as 300000 troops have been added Two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters the number of Chinese military on the border could be up to 200000 or possibly 300000 This would be an increase from just 100000 in August last year China8217s foreign ministry declined to respond to a question on the numbers or the intensified activity Many of the military bases are in Yanbian an area which includes Sanhe village where the authorities had detained me On assignment in November with photographer Damir Sagolj we documented the ways some people who live on the frontier say they interact across it Spots like this village underline how Beijing also maintains a wary eye on its neighbor Chinese border control staff called in at our hotel We were prevented from continuing our trip along the border at three separate roadblocks around Tumen At one point plain clothes police hovered as Damir took photos of tourists They followed us in two cars 8220We have secret military installations here8221 one soldier told me in November A declassified CIA document from May 1970 says China had begun constructing personnel trenches with possible forward firing positions facing the border in 1969 Tens of thousands of North Koreans have already traveled through China as they left one of the world8217s poorest countries Around 31000 of them eventually sought refuge in South Korea Others have stayed in China Both China and North Korea have bolstered efforts to prevent North Koreans from making the journey to South Korea through countries including Laos and Thailand according to Human Rights Watch Last year it said Chinese authorities intensified their crackdown on arriving North Koreans and the networks which help them China says it handles North Korean arrivals in accordance with humanitarian principles North Korea8217s mission to the United Nations didn8217t respond to a request for comment If war were to break out in North Korea the Chinese have made extensive plans to respond and are likely to intervene in some way two diplomatic sources said China8217s foreign ministry told us it consistently supports denuclearisation and peace on the Korean peninsula and believes in the need for dialogue Late last year a document that appeared to be from a Chinese stateowned company was leaked online outlining plans for China to build refugee camps along its border with North Korea At the time neither the company or the government made any comment on the plans Around 20 people I spoke to who live along or near the border said they had seen no sign of camps being built But none doubted plans were being made Many locals said the government8217s focus was fortifying its military presence If North Korea were to collapse and millions were to rush into China the Chinese government could easily convert abandoned homes in villages all along the border into temporary accommodation they told me 8220Border regions anywhere in the world are sensitive but it8217s particularly sensitive up here because the river is narrower and historically there has been a lot of interaction between the two sides8221 said Li Zhonglin a ChinaNorth Korea specialist at Yanbian University In recent years Chinese media have reported that villagers have been killed by North Koreans sneaking across the border often in search of food China is more likely to look at the issue of North Koreans rushing across its border as a military threat rather than a humanitarian disaster some Chinese academics say Yang Guosheng tends to 100 cows near China8217s border with Russia and North Korea He said Chinese border control personnel come by at least 10 times every day night and day There are cameras at the edge of his property which hugs the bank of the Tumen river All along the border signs remind people to be on the lookout for spies and other suspicious activities Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin in Seoul Edited by Sara Ledwith Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles UNITED NATIONS Reuters Russia8217s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia urged the United States and its allies on Thursday to refrain from military action against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack and said he 8220cannot exclude8221 war between Washington and Moscow Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia L and Bolivias Ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Sergio Llorenty Soliz speak to the media outside Security Council chambers at the UN headquarters in New York US April 12 2018 REUTERSShannon Stapleton Speaking after a closeddoor UN Security Council meeting requested by Bolivia over threats of military action in Syria by US President Donald Trump Nebenzia said the situation was even more dangerous because Russian troops are in Syria 8220The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war8221 he told reporters 8220We hope there will be no point of no return8221 Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia L and Bolivias Ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Sergio Llorenty Soliz speak to the media outside Security Council chambers at the UN headquarters in New York US April 12 2018 REUTERSShannon Stapleton When asked if he was referring to a war between the United States and Russia he said 8220We cannot exclude any possibilities unfortunately because we saw messages that are coming from Washington They were very bellicose8221 Trump said he was holding meetings on Thursday on Syria and expected to make decisions 8220fairly soon8221 Russia called a meeting of the Security Council for Friday on Syria and has asked for UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres to publicly brief the body Slideshow 4 Images In a bid to avoid an escalation Sweden proposed a Security Council resolution on Thursday seen by Reuters that would ask Guterres to send a highlevel disarmament team to Syria to address 8220all outstanding issues on the use of chemical weapons once and for all8221 Some UN diplomats said there was little interest among the council8217s 15 member countries to pursue the proposal Nebenzia thanked Sweden for its efforts but added 8220Frankly in the circumstances we find ourselves now this is not an immediate priority8221 The council failed on Tuesday to approve three draft resolutions on chemical weapons attacks in Syria Russia vetoed a US text while two Russiandrafted resolutions failed to get a minimum nine votes to pass Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are traveling to Syria to determine whether a toxic gas was used in the town of Douma the site of the April 7 incident and will start work on Saturday They are not mandated to assign blame Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Ja8217afari told reporters on Thursday 8220We8217re ready to escort them to where they want whenever they want anytime they want8221 8220Any delay or disruption in the visit will be a result of the political pressure exercised on the OPCW from a very wellknown state as the Syrian government expressed its readiness to facilitate this visit8221 Ja8217afari said Reporting by Michelle Nichols Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Will Dunham Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles WASHINGTON Reuters North Korea should not expect rewards from talks with the United States until it takes irreversible steps to give up its nuclear weapons President Donald Trump8217s nominee for secretary of state CIA Director Mike Pompeo said on Thursday North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads a party meeting in this photo released by North Koreas Korean Central News Agency KCNA in Pyongyang April 9 2018 KCNAvia Reuters Pompeo said the historical analysis was 8220not optimistic8221 when asked at his Senate confirmation hearing if he believed North Korea would agree to dismantle its nuclear program He said that in past negotiations the United States and the world had relaxed sanctions too quickly 8220It is the intention of the president and the administration not to do that this time to make sure that 8230 before we provide rewards we get the outcome permanently irreversibly that it is that we hope to achieve8221 Pompeo said 8220It is a tall order but I am hopeful that President Trump can achieve that through sound diplomacy8221 he said Trump has said he plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in May or early June and hopes the discussions will ultimately lead to an end of North Korea8217s nuclear weapons program which Washington sees as its most pressing security threat On Thursday Trump said meetings were being set up between him and Kim and said the United States would approach the talks respectfully He thanked China for its help in trying to resolve the crisis over North Korea8217s development of nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States 8220They8217ve been really terrific at helping us get to some kind of settlement8221 Trump said 8220Meetings are being set up right now between myself and Kim Jong Un I think it will be terrific I think we8217ll go in with a lot of respect and we8217ll see what happens8221 he said Trump also said trade 8220negotiations8221 between Washington and Beijing were going well conflicting with China8217s statements since the president8217s announcements of plans to impose billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese goods which have fed fears of an allout trade war 8220We are getting along very well think we8217re going to do some great things8221 Trump said adding that getting rid of nuclear weapons was 8220very good for them good for everybody8221 NO ILLUSIONS Pompeo said he was optimistic a course could be set at the TrumpKim summit for a diplomatic outcome with North Korea but added that no one was under any illusion that a comprehensive deal could be reached at that meeting He brushed aside concerns that the administration8217s moves to modify a nuclear deal with Iran could make an agreement with North Korea more difficult He argued that Kim would be looking to his own interests including his country8217s economy and the 8220sustainment of his regime8221 not other historical agreements Pompeo stressed that the aim of a TrumpKim summit was to get North Korea to 8220step away8221 Under questioning he would not take any option off the table including military ones At the same time Pompeo said he was not advocating regime change for North Korea and had never done so Last year North Korea accused Pompeo of favoring such a policy after he told a forum in July it was important to separate the country8217s nuclear weapons from the 8220character who holds the control over them8221 US President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with governors and members of Congress at the White House in Washington US April 12 2018 REUTERSKevin Lamarque In May North Korea accused the CIA and South Korea8217s intelligence service of a failed plot to assassinate Kim at a military parade in Pyongyang On Thursday Trump8217s new national security adviser John Bolton met separately with South Korea8217s National Security Office director Chung Euiyong who led a South Korean delegation that met Kim Jong Un last month and his Japanese counterpart Shotaro Yachi 8220The national security advisers committed to continue coordinating closely8221 a White House official said A South Korean diplomat said Chung had a 8220very useful8221 meeting with Bolton on preparations for South Korean President Moon Jaein8217s scheduled April 27 summit with Kim Jong Un and the planned TrumpKim meeting but gave no details 8220We had very informative discussions8221 South Korea8217s Yonhap news agency quoted Chung as saying 8220We had a wideranging exchange of views on various ways to make the summits a success and peacefully achieve denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula8221 Bolton who took up his post on Monday has called for North Korea regime change in the past and has previously been rejected as a negotiating partner by Pyongyang At a separate congressional hearing Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the aim was for a negotiated solution to the North Korean crisis 8220We8217re all cautiously optimistic that we may be on the right path for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula8221 he told the House of Representative Armed Services Committee Additional reporting by Jeff Mason Steve Holland Doina Chiacu Lesley Wroughton and Idrees Ali Writing by David Brunnstrom and Doina Chiacu Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Leslie Adler Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles MANILA Reuters Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to arrest an International Criminal Court ICC prosecutor if she conducts activities in his country arguing it was no longer an ICC member so the court had no right to do any investigating Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte gestures as he delivers a speech during the 121st founding anniversary of the Philippine Army PA at Taguig city Metro Manila Philippines March 20 2018 REUTERSRomeo Ranoco Hitting out at what he said was an international effort to paint him as a 8220ruthless and heartless violator of human rights8221 Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC8217s Rome Statute a month ago and promised to continue his crackdown on drugs in which thousands have been killed ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in February announced the start of a preliminary examination into a complaint by a Philippine lawyer which accuses Duterte and top officials of crimes against humanity and of killing criminals as a policy Duterte has cited numerous reasons why he believes the ICC has no jurisdiction over him and on Friday suggested that any doubts about that should have been dispelled by his withdrawal 8220What is your authority now If we are not members of the treaty why are you in this country8221 told reporters in comments aimed at Bensouda 8220You cannot exercise any proceedings here without basis That is illegal and I will arrest you8221 It is not clear whether Bensouda or the ICC has carried out any activities in the Philippines related to the complaint against Duterte The office of the prosecutor in The Hague and the Philippine foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment Police have since July 2016 killed more than 4000 people they say are drug dealers who resisted arrest Activists say many of those were executions which police deny Duterte has told security forces not to cooperate with any foreign investigators and last month said he would convince other ICC members to withdraw Duterte had earlier vowed to face the ICC and critics say pulling out is futile because the ICC has jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes committed in the period from when the Philippines joined in 2011 to when its withdrawal takes effect in March 2019 Under the Rome Statute the ICC can step in and exercise jurisdiction if states are unable or unwilling to investigate suspected crimes But the mercurial former mayor and his legal aides argue that technically the Philippines never actually joined the ICC because it was not announced in the country8217s official gazette 8220If there is no publication it is as if there is no law at all8221 Duterte said on Friday Reporting by Martin Petty and Neil Jerome Morales Editing by Robert Birsel Our Standards The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles | Reuters/PROPN Exiled/PROPN Zimbabwe/PROPN opposition/NOUN leader/NOUN Roy/PROPN Bennett/PROPN and/CCONJ four/NUM other/ADJ people/NOUN were/AUX killed/VERB in/ADP a/DET helicopter/NOUN crash/NOUN in/ADP a/DET remote/ADJ northern/ADJ part/NOUN of/ADP the/DET US/PROPN state/NOUN of/ADP New/PROPN Mexico/PROPN 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<p>Speaking to the AIPAC conference on Sunday, the president <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/obama-seeks-to-reassure-israel-on-mideast-policy-in-speech-at-aipac-conference/2011/05/22/AFDYQH9G_story.html" type="external">said</a> “The status quo is unsustainable” and “Delay will undermine Israel’s security and the peace that the Israeli people deserve.” He also softened his call in a Thursday speech for a return to the 1967 borders, which didn’t go over well with Israel’s hard-liners — like the prime minister.</p>
<p>Transcript via the White House:</p>
<p>The White House</p>
<p>Office of the Press Secretary</p>
<p />
<p>For Immediate Release May 22, 2011 Remarks by the President at the AIPAC Policy Conference 2011</p>
<p>Walter E. Washington Convention Center Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>10:56 A.M. EDT</p>
<p>THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Good morning. Thank you. Thank you so much. Please, have a seat. Thank you.</p>
<p>What a remarkable, remarkable crowd. Thank you, Rosy, for your very kind introduction. I did not know you played basketball. (Laughter.) I will take your word for it. (Laughter.) Rosy, thank you for your many years of friendship. Back in Chicago, when I was just getting started in national politics, I reached out to a lot of people for advice and counsel, and Rosy was one of the very first. When I made my first visit to Israel, after entering the Senate, Rosy, you were at my side every step of that profound journey through the Holy Land. So I want to thank you for your enduring friendship, your leadership, and for your warm introduction today.</p>
<p>I also want to thank David Victor, Howard Kohr and all the board of directors. And let me say that it is wonderful to look out and see so many great friends, including a very large delegation from Chicago. (Applause.) Alan Solow, Howard Green. Thank you all.</p>
<p>I want to thank the members of Congress who are joining you today — who do so much to sustain the bonds between the United States and Israel, including Eric Cantor — (applause) — Steny Hoyer — (applause) — and the tireless leader I was proud to appoint as the new chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (Applause.)</p>
<p>We’re joined by Israel’s representative to the United States, Ambassador Michael Oren. (Applause.) And we’re joined by one of my top advisors on Israel and the Middle East for the past four years and who I know is going to be an outstanding ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro. (Applause.) Dan has always been a close and trusted advisor and friend, and I know that he will do a terrific job.</p>
<p>And at a time when so many young people around the world are standing up and making their voices heard, I also want to acknowledge all the college students from across the country who are here today. (Applause.) No one has a greater stake in the outcome of events that are unfolding today than your generation, and it’s inspiring to see you devote your time and energy to help shape that future.</p>
<p>Now, I’m not here to subject you to a long policy speech. I gave one on Thursday in which I said that the United States sees the historic changes sweeping the Middle East and North Africa as a moment of great challenge, but also a moment of opportunity for greater peace and security for the entire region, including the State of Israel.</p>
<p>On Friday, I was joined at the White House by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and we reaffirmed — (applause) — we reaffirmed that fundamental truth that has guided our presidents and prime ministers for more than 60 years — that even while we may at times disagree, as friends sometimes will, the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable — (applause) — and the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad. (Applause.)</p>
<p>A strong and secure Israel is in the national security interest of the United States not simply because we share strategic interests, although we do both seek a region where families and children can live free from the threat of violence. It’s not simply because we face common dangers, although there can be no denying that terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons are grave threats to both our nations.</p>
<p>America’s commitment to Israel’s security flows from a deeper place — and that’s the values we share. As two people who struggled to win our freedom against overwhelming odds, we understand that preserving the security for which our forefathers — and foremothers — fought must be the work of every generation. As two vibrant democracies, we recognize that the liberties and freedoms we cherish must be constantly nurtured. And as the nation that recognized the State of Israel moments after its independence, we have a profound commitment to its survival as a strong, secure homeland for the Jewish people. (Applause.)</p>
<p>We also know how difficult that search for security can be, especially for a small nation like Israel living in a very tough neighborhood. I’ve seen it firsthand. When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones, I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland. When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket, and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map — face of the Earth.</p>
<p>Because we understand the challenges Israel faces, I and my administration have made the security of Israel a priority. It’s why we’ve increased cooperation between our militaries to unprecedented levels. It’s why we’re making our most advanced technologies available to our Israeli allies. (Applause.) It’s why, despite tough fiscal times, we’ve increased foreign military financing to record levels. (Applause.) And that includes additional support –- beyond regular military aid -– for the Iron Dome anti-rocket system. (Applause.) A powerful example of American-Israeli cooperation — a powerful example of American-Israeli cooperation which has already intercepted rockets from Gaza and helped saved Israeli lives. So make no mistake, we will maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge. (Applause.)</p>
<p>You also see our commitment to our shared security in our determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. (Applause.) Here in the United States, we’ve imposed the toughest sanctions ever on the Iranian regime. (Applause.) At the United Nations, under our leadership, we’ve secured the most comprehensive international sanctions on the regime, which have been joined by allies and partners around the world. Today, Iran is virtually cut off from large parts of the international financial system, and we’re going to keep up the pressure. So let me be absolutely clear –- we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. (Applause.)</p>
<p>Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses. As I said on Thursday, the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality. Moreover, Iran continues to support terrorism across the region, including providing weapons and funds to terrorist organizations. So we will continue to work to prevent these actions, and we will stand up to groups like Hezbollah, who exercise political assassination and seek to impose their will through rockets and car bombs.</p>
<p>You also see our commitment to Israel’s security in our steadfast opposition to any attempt to de-legitimize the State of Israel. (Applause.) As I said at the United Nations last year, “Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate,” and “efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States.” (Applause.)</p>
<p>So when the Durban Review Conference advanced anti-Israel sentiment, we withdrew. In the wake of the Goldstone Report, we stood up strongly for Israel’s right to defend itself. (Applause.) When an effort was made to insert the United Nations into matters that should be resolved through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, we vetoed it. (Applause.)</p>
<p>And so, in both word and deed, we have been unwavering in our support of Israel’s security. (Applause.) And it is precisely because of our commitment to Israel’s long-term security that we have worked to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians. (Applause.)</p>
<p>Now, I have said repeatedly that core issues can only be negotiated in direct talks between the parties. (Applause.) And I indicated on Thursday that the recent agreement between Fatah and Hamas poses an enormous obstacle to peace. (Applause.) No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction. (Applause.) And we will continue to demand that Hamas accept the basic responsibilities of peace, including recognizing Israel’s right to exist and rejecting violence and adhering to all existing agreements. (Applause.) And we once again call on Hamas to release Gilad Shalit, who has been kept from his family for five long years. (Applause.)</p>
<p>And yet, no matter how hard it may be to start meaningful negotiations under current circumstances, we must acknowledge that a failure to try is not an option. The status quo is unsustainable. And that is why on Thursday I stated publicly the principles that the United States believes can provide a foundation for negotiations toward an agreement to end the conflict and all claims — the broad outlines of which have been known for many years, and have been the template for discussions between the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians since at least the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>I know that stating these principles — on the issues of territory and security — generated some controversy over the past few days. (Laughter.) I wasn’t surprised. I know very well that the easy thing to do, particularly for a President preparing for reelection, is to avoid any controversy. I don’t need Rahm to tell me that. Don’t need Axelrod to tell me that. But I said to Prime Minister Netanyahu, I believe that the current situation in the Middle East does not allow for procrastination. I also believe that real friends talk openly and honestly with one another. (Applause.) So I want to share with you some of what I said to the Prime Minister.</p>
<p>Here are the facts we all must confront. First, the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian Territories. This will make it harder and harder — without a peace deal — to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state.</p>
<p>Second, technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself in the absence of a genuine peace.</p>
<p>Third, a new generation of Arabs is reshaping the region. A just and lasting peace can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders. Going forward, millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained.</p>
<p>And just as the context has changed in the Middle East, so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years. There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab World — in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.</p>
<p>And those are the facts. I firmly believe, and I repeated on Thursday, that peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict. No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state. And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum. (Applause.) Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. That is my commitment; that is my pledge to all of you. (Applause.)</p>
<p>Moreover, we know that peace demands a partner –- which is why I said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist. (Applause.) And we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and for their rhetoric. (Applause.)</p>
<p>But the march to isolate Israel internationally — and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations –- will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative. And for us to have leverage with the Palestinians, to have leverage with the Arab States and with the international community, the basis for negotiations has to hold out the prospect of success. And so, in advance of a five-day trip to Europe in which the Middle East will be a topic of acute interest, I chose to speak about what peace will require.</p>
<p>There was nothing particularly original in my proposal; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations. Since questions have been raised, let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday — not what I was reported to have said.</p>
<p>I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps — (applause) — so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.</p>
<p>As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself –- by itself -– against any threat. (Applause.) Provisions must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism, to stop the infiltration of weapons, and to provide effective border security. (Applause.) And a full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign and non-militarized state. (Applause.) And the duration of this transition period must be agreed, and the effectiveness of security arrangements must be demonstrated. (Applause.)</p>
<p>Now, that is what I said. And it was my reference to the 1967 lines — with mutually agreed swaps — that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now. And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what “1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” means.</p>
<p>By definition, it means that the parties themselves -– Israelis and Palestinians -– will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. (Applause.) That’s what mutually agreed-upon swaps means. It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation. It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years. (Applause.) It allows the parties themselves to take account of those changes, including the new demographic realities on the ground, and the needs of both sides. The ultimate goal is two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people — (applause) — and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people — each state in joined self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace. (Applause.)</p>
<p>If there is a controversy, then, it’s not based in substance. What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately. I’ve done so because we can’t afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades to achieve peace. (Applause.) The world is moving too fast. The world is moving too fast. The extraordinary challenges facing Israel will only grow. Delay will undermine Israel’s security and the peace that the Israeli people deserve.</p>
<p>Now, I know that some of you will disagree with this assessment. I respect that. And as fellow Americans and friends of Israel, I know we can have this discussion.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it is the right and the responsibility of the Israeli government to make the hard choices that are necessary to protect a Jewish and democratic state for which so many generations have sacrificed. (Applause.) And as a friend of Israel, I’m committed to doing our part to see that this goal is realized. And I will call not just on Israel, but on the Palestinians, on the Arab States, and the international community to join us in this effort, because the burden of making hard choices must not be Israel’s alone. (Applause.)</p>
<p>But even as we do all that’s necessary to ensure Israel’s security, even as we are clear-eyed about the difficult challenges before us, and even as we pledge to stand by Israel through whatever tough days lie ahead, I hope we do not give up on that vision of peace. For if history teaches us anything, if the story of Israel teaches us anything, it is that with courage and resolve, progress is possible. Peace is possible.</p>
<p>The Talmud teaches us that, “So long as a person still has life, they should never abandon faith.” And that lesson seems especially fitting today.</p>
<p>For so long as there are those across the Middle East and beyond who are standing up for the legitimate rights and freedoms which have been denied by their governments, the United States will never abandon our support for those rights that are universal.</p>
<p>And so long as there are those who long for a better future, we will never abandon our pursuit of a just and lasting peace that ends this conflict with two states living side by side in peace and security. This is not idealism; it is not naïveté. It is a hard-headed recognition that a genuine peace is the only path that will ultimately provide for a peaceful Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people and a Jewish state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. (Applause.) That is my goal, and I look forward to continuing to work with AIPAC to achieve that goal.</p>
<p>Thank you. God bless you. God bless Israel, and God bless the United States of America. (Applause.) Thank you.</p>
<p>END 11:21 P.M. EDT</p> | Time for Peace Is Running Out, Obama Tells Israel Lobby | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/time-for-peace-is-running-out-obama-tells-israel-lobby/ | 2011-05-23 | 4left
| 3,057 | Speaking to the AIPAC conference on Sunday the president said 8220The status quo is unsustainable8221 and 8220Delay will undermine Israel8217s security and the peace that the Israeli people deserve8221 He also softened his call in a Thursday speech for a return to the 1967 borders which didn8217t go over well with Israel8217s hardliners 8212 like the prime minister Transcript via the White House The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release May 22 2011 Remarks by the President at the AIPAC Policy Conference 2011 Walter E Washington Convention Center Washington DC 1056 AM EDT THE PRESIDENT Good morning Thank you very much Applause Good morning Thank you Thank you so much Please have a seat Thank you What a remarkable remarkable crowd Thank you Rosy for your very kind introduction I did not know you played basketball Laughter I will take your word for it Laughter Rosy thank you for your many years of friendship Back in Chicago when I was just getting started in national politics I reached out to a lot of people for advice and counsel and Rosy was one of the very first When I made my first visit to Israel after entering the Senate Rosy you were at my side every step of that profound journey through the Holy Land So I want to thank you for your enduring friendship your leadership and for your warm introduction today I also want to thank David Victor Howard Kohr and all the board of directors And let me say that it is wonderful to look out and see so many great friends including a very large delegation from Chicago Applause Alan Solow Howard Green Thank you all I want to thank the members of Congress who are joining you today 8212 who do so much to sustain the bonds between the United States and Israel including Eric Cantor 8212 applause 8212 Steny Hoyer 8212 applause 8212 and the tireless leader I was proud to appoint as the new chair of the DNC Debbie Wasserman Schultz Applause We8217re joined by Israel8217s representative to the United States Ambassador Michael Oren Applause And we8217re joined by one of my top advisors on Israel and the Middle East for the past four years and who I know is going to be an outstanding ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro Applause Dan has always been a close and trusted advisor and friend and I know that he will do a terrific job And at a time when so many young people around the world are standing up and making their voices heard I also want to acknowledge all the college students from across the country who are here today Applause No one has a greater stake in the outcome of events that are unfolding today than your generation and it8217s inspiring to see you devote your time and energy to help shape that future Now I8217m not here to subject you to a long policy speech I gave one on Thursday in which I said that the United States sees the historic changes sweeping the Middle East and North Africa as a moment of great challenge but also a moment of opportunity for greater peace and security for the entire region including the State of Israel On Friday I was joined at the White House by Prime Minister Netanyahu and we reaffirmed 8212 applause 8212 we reaffirmed that fundamental truth that has guided our presidents and prime ministers for more than 60 years 8212 that even while we may at times disagree as friends sometimes will the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable 8212 applause 8212 and the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad Applause A strong and secure Israel is in the national security interest of the United States not simply because we share strategic interests although we do both seek a region where families and children can live free from the threat of violence It8217s not simply because we face common dangers although there can be no denying that terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons are grave threats to both our nations America8217s commitment to Israel8217s security flows from a deeper place 8212 and that8217s the values we share As two people who struggled to win our freedom against overwhelming odds we understand that preserving the security for which our forefathers 8212 and foremothers 8212 fought must be the work of every generation As two vibrant democracies we recognize that the liberties and freedoms we cherish must be constantly nurtured And as the nation that recognized the State of Israel moments after its independence we have a profound commitment to its survival as a strong secure homeland for the Jewish people Applause We also know how difficult that search for security can be especially for a small nation like Israel living in a very tough neighborhood I8217ve seen it firsthand When I touched my hand against the Western Wall and placed my prayer between its ancient stones I thought of all the centuries that the children of Israel had longed to return to their ancient homeland When I went to Sderot and saw the daily struggle to survive in the eyes of an eightyearold boy who lost his leg to a Hamas rocket and when I walked among the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map 8212 face of the Earth Because we understand the challenges Israel faces I and my administration have made the security of Israel a priority It8217s why we8217ve increased cooperation between our militaries to unprecedented levels It8217s why we8217re making our most advanced technologies available to our Israeli allies Applause It8217s why despite tough fiscal times we8217ve increased foreign military financing to record levels Applause And that includes additional support 8211 beyond regular military aid 8211 for the Iron Dome antirocket system Applause A powerful example of AmericanIsraeli cooperation 8212 a powerful example of AmericanIsraeli cooperation which has already intercepted rockets from Gaza and helped saved Israeli lives So make no mistake we will maintain Israel8217s qualitative military edge Applause You also see our commitment to our shared security in our determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons Applause Here in the United States we8217ve imposed the toughest sanctions ever on the Iranian regime Applause At the United Nations under our leadership we8217ve secured the most comprehensive international sanctions on the regime which have been joined by allies and partners around the world Today Iran is virtually cut off from large parts of the international financial system and we8217re going to keep up the pressure So let me be absolutely clear 8211 we remain committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons Applause Its illicit nuclear program is just one challenge that Iran poses As I said on Thursday the Iranian government has shown its hypocrisy by claiming to support the rights of protesters while treating its own people with brutality Moreover Iran continues to support terrorism across the region including providing weapons and funds to terrorist organizations So we will continue to work to prevent these actions and we will stand up to groups like Hezbollah who exercise political assassination and seek to impose their will through rockets and car bombs You also see our commitment to Israel8217s security in our steadfast opposition to any attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel Applause As I said at the United Nations last year 8220Israel8217s existence must not be a subject for debate8221 and 8220efforts to chip away at Israel8217s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States8221 Applause So when the Durban Review Conference advanced antiIsrael sentiment we withdrew In the wake of the Goldstone Report we stood up strongly for Israel8217s right to defend itself Applause When an effort was made to insert the United Nations into matters that should be resolved through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians we vetoed it Applause And so in both word and deed we have been unwavering in our support of Israel8217s security Applause And it is precisely because of our commitment to Israel8217s longterm security that we have worked to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians Applause Now I have said repeatedly that core issues can only be negotiated in direct talks between the parties Applause And I indicated on Thursday that the recent agreement between Fatah and Hamas poses an enormous obstacle to peace Applause No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction Applause And we will continue to demand that Hamas accept the basic responsibilities of peace including recognizing Israel8217s right to exist and rejecting violence and adhering to all existing agreements Applause And we once again call on Hamas to release Gilad Shalit who has been kept from his family for five long years Applause And yet no matter how hard it may be to start meaningful negotiations under current circumstances we must acknowledge that a failure to try is not an option The status quo is unsustainable And that is why on Thursday I stated publicly the principles that the United States believes can provide a foundation for negotiations toward an agreement to end the conflict and all claims 8212 the broad outlines of which have been known for many years and have been the template for discussions between the United States Israel and the Palestinians since at least the Clinton administration I know that stating these principles 8212 on the issues of territory and security 8212 generated some controversy over the past few days Laughter I wasn8217t surprised I know very well that the easy thing to do particularly for a President preparing for reelection is to avoid any controversy I don8217t need Rahm to tell me that Don8217t need Axelrod to tell me that But I said to Prime Minister Netanyahu I believe that the current situation in the Middle East does not allow for procrastination I also believe that real friends talk openly and honestly with one another Applause So I want to share with you some of what I said to the Prime Minister Here are the facts we all must confront First the number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian Territories This will make it harder and harder 8212 without a peace deal 8212 to maintain Israel as both a Jewish state and a democratic state Second technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself in the absence of a genuine peace Third a new generation of Arabs is reshaping the region A just and lasting peace can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders Going forward millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained And just as the context has changed in the Middle East so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years There8217s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process or the absence of one not just in the Arab World 8212 in Latin America in Asia and in Europe And that impatience is growing and it8217s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world And those are the facts I firmly believe and I repeated on Thursday that peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum Applause Israel8217s legitimacy is not a matter for debate That is my commitment that is my pledge to all of you Applause Moreover we know that peace demands a partner 8211 which is why I said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Palestinians who do not recognize its right to exist Applause And we will hold the Palestinians accountable for their actions and for their rhetoric Applause But the march to isolate Israel internationally 8212 and the impulse of the Palestinians to abandon negotiations 8211 will continue to gain momentum in the absence of a credible peace process and alternative And for us to have leverage with the Palestinians to have leverage with the Arab States and with the international community the basis for negotiations has to hold out the prospect of success And so in advance of a fiveday trip to Europe in which the Middle East will be a topic of acute interest I chose to speak about what peace will require There was nothing particularly original in my proposal this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties including previous US administrations Since questions have been raised let me repeat what I actually said on Thursday 8212 not what I was reported to have said I said that the United States believes that negotiations should result in two states with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel Jordan and Egypt and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps 8212 applause 8212 so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves and reach their potential in a sovereign and contiguous state As for security every state has the right to selfdefense and Israel must be able to defend itself 8211 by itself 8211 against any threat Applause Provisions must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism to stop the infiltration of weapons and to provide effective border security Applause And a full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign and nonmilitarized state Applause And the duration of this transition period must be agreed and the effectiveness of security arrangements must be demonstrated Applause Now that is what I said And it was my reference to the 1967 lines 8212 with mutually agreed swaps 8212 that received the lion8217s share of the attention including just now And since my position has been misrepresented several times let me reaffirm what 82201967 lines with mutually agreed swaps8221 means By definition it means that the parties themselves 8211 Israelis and Palestinians 8211 will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4 1967 Applause That8217s what mutually agreedupon swaps means It is a wellknown formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years Applause It allows the parties themselves to take account of those changes including the new demographic realities on the ground and the needs of both sides The ultimate goal is two states for two people Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people 8212 applause 8212 and the State of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people 8212 each state in joined selfdetermination mutual recognition and peace Applause If there is a controversy then it8217s not based in substance What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately I8217ve done so because we can8217t afford to wait another decade or another two decades or another three decades to achieve peace Applause The world is moving too fast The world is moving too fast The extraordinary challenges facing Israel will only grow Delay will undermine Israel8217s security and the peace that the Israeli people deserve Now I know that some of you will disagree with this assessment I respect that And as fellow Americans and friends of Israel I know we can have this discussion Ultimately it is the right and the responsibility of the Israeli government to make the hard choices that are necessary to protect a Jewish and democratic state for which so many generations have sacrificed Applause And as a friend of Israel I8217m committed to doing our part to see that this goal is realized And I will call not just on Israel but on the Palestinians on the Arab States and the international community to join us in this effort because the burden of making hard choices must not be Israel8217s alone Applause But even as we do all that8217s necessary to ensure Israel8217s security even as we are cleareyed about the difficult challenges before us and even as we pledge to stand by Israel through whatever tough days lie ahead I hope we do not give up on that vision of peace For if history teaches us anything if the story of Israel teaches us anything it is that with courage and resolve progress is possible Peace is possible The Talmud teaches us that 8220So long as a person still has life they should never abandon faith8221 And that lesson seems especially fitting today For so long as there are those across the Middle East and beyond who are standing up for the legitimate rights and freedoms which have been denied by their governments the United States will never abandon our support for those rights that are universal And so long as there are those who long for a better future we will never abandon our pursuit of a just and lasting peace that ends this conflict with two states living side by side in peace and security This is not idealism it is not na239vet233 It is a hardheaded recognition that a genuine peace is the only path that will ultimately provide for a peaceful Palestine as the homeland of the Palestinian people and a Jewish state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people Applause That is my goal and I look forward to continuing to work with AIPAC to achieve that goal Thank you God bless you God bless Israel and God bless the United States of America Applause Thank you END 1121 PM EDT | 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<p>Photo by Nicolas Raymond | <a href="" type="internal">CC BY 2.0</a></p>
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<p>The stratospheric rise of Mike Lofgren’s “deep state” critique has been matched only by its meteoric fall into the pits of conspiracy theory and caricature. What started off as a potentially interesting analytical framework, which sought to spotlight the U.S. corporate-national security-intelligence apparatus, has quickly devolved into a cartoonish absurdity. This decline was predictable considering that the “deep state” analysis provided by Lofgren was such an expansive, vague concept from the start. The “deep state” framework lacked the nuance of previous versions of “elite theory” developed over the decades, so its adoption by various rightwing partisan stooges and conspiracy theorists doesn’t surprise me. We have now reached the point where the “deep state” rhetoric is no longer useful, and has even become harmful to informed political discourse on American politics.</p>
<p>I will say from the outset that I admire Mike Lofgren, a former Congressman, for drawing attention to the rise of corporate power and the ever-expanding, runaway military state. His book, <a href="" type="internal">The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government</a>, appears to be a genuine, heartfelt effort to fight back against the reactionary forces that control American politics. And his main concerns with the American political system are warranted. He is right to focus on the dangers of the growing national security state, coordinated largely through the NSA and other agencies, and to condemn their assault on citizens’ privacy rights. Lofgren adopts the metaphor of the panopticon to describe the security state, referring to Jeremy Bentham’s conceptual prison design, which was comprised of a circular structure with a central “watchman” tower. The structure is designed so that prisoners cannot tell whether a guard can see them at any given time, despite the central location of the tower, which suggests that the state could be watching you at any moment. <a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>The use of the panopticon as a symbol of the modern-day surveillance state is apt. The NSA, while not recording every phone call in the United States, keeps records of these calls, allowing for closer inspections of conversations on a case-by-case basis. Even if the state is not technically recording every word we speak, it always has its eye on the American people, and is ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. Drawing on the panopticon, Lofgren refers to the rise of “militarized authoritarianism” via the growing power of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and I find it hard to disagree with him.</p>
<p>Lofgren is also right to emphasize other threats to American democracy. He laments the rise of corporate profiteering in the “War on Terror,” calling back to warnings from decades’ past about the U.S. military industrial complex. Corporate and political actors profit from hundreds of billions a year spent on a bloated “national security” state, at the expense of social spending on education, health care, and infrastructural needs. In an era of record inequality, the fixation of U.S. political and economic elites on militarism exacts a huge cost, draining much needed financial resources that could be allocated toward rebuilding the country and providing for the basic needs of the citizenry.</p>
<p>Finally, Lofgren’s concern with the rise of Wall Street power, which has coincided with the financialization of the U.S. economy, is timely and welcome. Financial deregulation is one of the greatest threats to our economy, and the failure of both political parties to limit the power of financial elites is one of the great tragedies of modern times. The American banking system has historically been a parasitic force in the American economy. Wall Street’s speculation on vital goods such as oil, housing, internet stocks, and other goods has fed stock market bubbles, the collapse of which wreak havoc on the economy and American workers, draining their retirement savings, and fueling the rise of unemployment and underemployment. Financialization undermines the economy – which is now largely driven by speculators and characterized by anemic to non-existent economic growth. What profit gains exist are now largely captured by financial and other corporate elites. Meanwhile, the masses of Americans find themselves working longer hours, with increased productivity, for stagnating to declining wages, amidst huge increases in cost-of-living via out-of-control health care and education costs.</p>
<p>Despite the serious and legitimate concerns that Lofgren raises, there are several serious problems with the “deep state” framework. These problems become harder to deny as Lofgren’s work gains prominence among American pundits, intellectuals, and political elites. Lofgren popularized the “deep state” term, referring to “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies, plus key parts of other branches whose roles given them membership. The Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department are all part of the Deep State.” But the “deep state” concept lacked nuance and clarity, making it ripe for adoption by partisan hacks and conspiracy theorists. This is not to attack Lofgren for promoting a conspiracy theory, as he is clear in his book that he is providing an institutional analysis of the threats to American democracy. In fact, I find claims that Lofgren is a conspiracy theorist to be rather bizarre and ill-informed. If anything, his analysis comes off as somewhat tame within the broader intellectual history of elite theory, in that he fails to identify corporate capitalism as the primary threat to the U.S. economy and to the American public. Lofgren is no socialist or Marxist, and his analysis is somewhat pedestrian and conservative in that he eschews traditional efforts at institutional analysis that incorporate Marxian tools for spotlighting systemic repression such as alienated labor, economic determinism, hegemony, and commodity fetishism.</p>
<p>Because of the vague nature of the “deep state,” it has become a Rorschach test for American pundits and citizens alike. It is something upon which they can impute whatever beliefs or values they have. It can mean whatever one wants it to mean. Reactionary partisan hacks like Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Andrew Napolitano, and Sean Spicer freely adopt the term to refer to allegedly pro-Obama elements within the U.S. government and intelligence apparatus. Hannity takes aim at “the liberal media” and “American intelligence agencies,” the latter of which he claims is dominated by a “deep state swamp of Obama holdover DC lifers” who are “hell-bent on destroying Trump.” Of course, Hannity has raised no concern with an emerging deep state swamp of Trump DC lifers populated by plutocratic billionaires, as the president moves to populate the federal bureaucracy with his preferred political supporters and hacks.</p>
<p>We have also seen the rise of conspiratorial rhetoric on “the left” regarding the ominous “deep state.” I’ll refrain from identifying any specific person by name (fratricide is not an endearing trait), but the depth of conspiracy-mongering “deep state” absurdity has clearly afflicted various leftist critics of the American political system. Over the last year, various leftists framed the “deep state” as a secret shadow government, impervious to any controls or regulation by elected officials. It is said to represent a miniature government within the larger government, and it is so nefariously effective that it ensures the American people have zero political influence over American politics. Forget about social movements or protests. They’re pointless. The secret paper-pushers of the “deep state” have already ensured that representation of the masses is a fiction. Don’t even bother with protest or social action – there’s really nothing you can do to promote progressive political change. Furthermore, forget about efforts to stifle U.S. militarism abroad. The “deep state” shadow government secretly pulls the strings of political officials such as Barack Obama, forcing him to escalate wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, despite growing anti-war sentiment at home.</p>
<p>It should be clear from anyone who studies American history how absurd these claims are. While those on the left have long known that the U.S. political system is captured by corporate power and wealth, to suggest that social movement activism and opposition to the status quo are bound to fail is a horrifically misinformed position, and is contradicted by history itself. The last century of U.S. political activism demonstrates that large numbers of social movements were able to fundamentally transform American culture and politics, as seen in the women’s rights movement, the struggle for civil rights, the rise of modern environmentalism and the struggle against nuclear power, the successes of organized labor activism, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and numerous other progressive uprisings.</p>
<p>Furthermore, to claim that appointed “deep state” bureaucrats hold all the power in Washington, at the expense of elected officials, is equally outlandish. Lofgren doesn’t even try to make this claim in his book, as he refers to “deep state” operatives in the U.S. bureaucracy as largely “order-takers,” serving those who visibly hold power as elected officials or as heads of “national security-related” federal agencies.</p>
<p>Lofgren is right not to frame elected officials as slaves to faceless bureaucrats, and one can see the silliness of such depictions when looking at recent history. For example, looking at the case of the 2009 escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the troop “surge” (which occurred in phases throughout the year) was explicitly supported by Obama when he ran in the 2008 election. Furthermore, anyone closely paying attention to the news at the time could have recognized that the fight between Obama and General Stanley McChrystal (and other elements of U.S. military leadership) was not over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan, but over how quickly to escalate and drawdown the war, and over how many forces would be committed. In other words, the “fight” was over strategy and logistics, not principle or substance. It should be pointed out, by the way, that Obama won this logistical battle with the generals, announcing a smaller infusion of troops than McChrystal wanted, attached to a date (of 2011) in which a drawdown was supposed to begin. This deadline was opposed by the generals (for the story on the surge, see: Peter Baker, “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan,” New York Times, December 5, 2009).</p>
<p>I don’t mean to marginalize concerns that the U.S. is witnessing a creeping authoritarianism, via the growing strength of our institutionalized military-intelligence state. I agree that this is occurring, and is a serious threat to the country. But depictions of U.S. elected leaders as puppets of the bureaucracy – the latter of which retain all the power in U.S. politics – are outlandish caricatures of how the political system really works. Furthermore, we insult the victims of the fully-fledged dictatorships of the world by depicting Americans as suffering under some sort of comparable military dictatorship (remember the “deep state” terminology was originally developed in reference to Turkey). There is simply no equivalent in the United States to the mass torture and mass killings engaged in by brutal dictatorships of history run by Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria, or Erdogan in Turkey, among others. Certainly the U.S. has its own unique and repressive version of a militarized police system, which has long been used to criminalize and suppress minorities and protesters. But to ignore the obvious differences between the U.S. and dictatorships regarding the presence of basic political freedoms to say what one wishes, and to openly disagree with government, is to engage in a distortion of epic proportions.</p>
<p>As an aside, it is also worth pointing out that the U.S. intelligence community is nowhere near as uniform as “deep state” conspiracies claim. Members of the U.S. “security” state have at times sought to pressure elected officials, with harmful effects on democracy. A few recent examples include the hysteria voiced by agencies like the CIA over Russia’s alleged interference in the U.S. election, and in which Democrats have claimed, without presenting evidence, that Vladimir Putin effectively threw the election in favor of Trump. Another example of wheeling and dealing by the intelligence community is the Afghanistan surge. It seems clear, despite Obama’s pro-surge inclinations, that the attacks from McChrystal and the U.S. military did create additional pressure on the Obama administration to escalate war.</p>
<p>Recognizing that the U.S. intelligence community and military apparatus have power in the political process, however, does not mean that these officials always serve state power or imperial interests. One can look no further than the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which represented a collective middle finger to the Bush administration from the intelligence community, on the issue of whether Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Members of the intelligence community were clearly angry at the egg left on their faces following the embarrassment that was the 2002 NIE, which sugar-coated the Bush administration’s case for war with Iraq. Subsequent historical accounts documented how the intelligence community, particularly analysts at the CIA, were bullied by high-level members of the Bush administration in the pre-war period to “get behind” the president and the war effort. The 2007 NIE represented a comprehensive effort on the part of the intelligence community to pump the breaks on Bush’s imperial war agenda, and it was effective in defusing the case for war. The push against war with Iran was not an isolated incident, either. It should be clear by taking a longer historical view recognizing the many intelligence analysts willing to question U.S. militarism and imperialism by leaking sensitive and classified information to the press. Whether one is talking about “Deep Throat” (Mark Felt) or Daniel Ellsberg in the Nixon era, or anonymous intelligence analysts feeding critical information to news outlets like Knight Ridder prior to the 2003 Iraq war, or more recent whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the U.S. intelligence community is not all of one mind about U.S. militarism and empire.</p>
<p>As a scholar, I’ve struggled with the rise of “deep state” rhetoric in public discourse. Despite Lofgren raising legitimate points about the perversion of power in America, it’s not clear to me what additional analytical value comes with simply referring to U.S. intelligence agencies and the military apparatus as a “deep state.” Many intellectuals and scholars over the decades have offered a variety of “elite theory” frameworks that incorporate U.S. militarism and go well beyond simply examining the “security” related aspects of American plutocracy. So it’s unclear what additional insights Lofgren and his supporters are contributing. To provide a brief run-down of previous theoretical frameworks, consider the following:</p>
<p>In the 1950s, the sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of a “power elite” comprised of political, business, and military leaders. The American political system was captured, Mills warned, through a hegemonic system in which affluent Americans were socialized – as part of the upper-class – to embrace elitist political and economic beliefs, which later drove their decisions as they ran for, and took over major positions in government. Whereas Mills provided a way to understand how affluent Americans are socialized to embrace elite views (since they themselves are elites), no focus on the hegemonic powers of education, the mass media, and political propaganda appear in any serious way in Lofgren’s book.</p>
<p>In the late 1960s, political scientist Ted Lowi warned that the U.S. political process was dominated by a system of “clientelism,” in which multiple groups of economic elites – representing different industries and sectors of the economy, exercised control over specific aspects of public policy. Lowi’s description of multiple elites and various “subgovernments” driven by specific business groups was much more nuanced than Lofgren’s single “deep state,” which fails to discuss how various industries outside of Wall Street and military profiteers manipulate public policy.</p>
<p>In the early 1980s, the political scientist Charles Lindblom offered a compelling analysis of American power, in which he likened the capitalist marketplace to a prison. U.S. corporations exercised power over communities, much like Kings do over feudal serfs, by exercising ownership over the means of production in the U.S. economy. They command worker loyalty due to their ability to hire and fire Americans and provide basic benefits such as health care or 401k and pension benefits. But corporations also possess the power to destroy people’s lives via capital flight. Simply by threatening to leave a community and move factories abroad in pursuit of higher profits and weaker environmental regulations, corporations hold citizens hostage, and can destroy entire cities and states, in pursuit of ever-greater profits. The marketplace is a prison, Lindblom warned, because these corporations ultimately control the levers of the U.S. economy, and control the life outcomes of American workers.</p>
<p>Most recently, a cottage industry of empirical studies document precisely how business elites maintain control over public policy, utilizing the military state, Congress, the White House, and state and local government officials to pervert policy in favor of the interests of the wealthy. Notable in these studies are various books, including Daniel Butler’s Representing the Advantaged, Nicholas Carnes’ White Collar Government, Martin Gilens’ Affluence and Influence, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All-Politics, Rebecca Thorpe’s The American Warfare State, and Martin Gilens’ and Ben Pages’ article, “Testing Theories of American Politics.” All these works provide far richer, nuanced documentation of how business elites manipulate policy outcomes in favor of the top 1 to 20 percent of American income earners.</p>
<p>To put it simply, elite theory has come a long way over the last half-century, and especially since the 2008 economic crash. Because of the explosion in the last decade of studies of elite power, we know more about the American plutocracy than ever before. Considering this new informational environment, Lofgren’s book provides an interesting reflection on the experiences of one man in Congress over the decades, and it is a welcome addition to the discussion of elitism in government. But it is not clear how much his “deep state” framework tells us about U.S. policy than we already knew.</p>
<p>I’ve refrained from referring to the “deep state,” seeing the term as more of a faddish framework for studying political power. The term’s value in political discourse appears to be dwindling, as various pundits caricature the original points offered by Lofgren. The concept has come to mean whatever people want it to mean, independent of any clear-headed analysis of the political power structure. Cliched references to the “deep state” will grow in coming months and years, but I’d suggest it’s time to start looking for a more coherent, informed analyses than what is being offered by various conspiracy theorists on the left and right.</p> | Ditching the “Deep State”: The Rise of a New Conspiracy Theory in American Politics | true | https://counterpunch.org/2017/03/24/ditching-the-deep-state-the-rise-of-a-new-conspiracy-theory-in-american-politics/ | 2017-03-24 | 4left
| 3,057 | Photo by Nicolas Raymond CC BY 20 The stratospheric rise of Mike Lofgren8217s 8220deep state8221 critique has been matched only by its meteoric fall into the pits of conspiracy theory and caricature What started off as a potentially interesting analytical framework which sought to spotlight the US corporatenational securityintelligence apparatus has quickly devolved into a cartoonish absurdity This decline was predictable considering that the 8220deep state8221 analysis provided by Lofgren was such an expansive vague concept from the start The 8220deep state8221 framework lacked the nuance of previous versions of 8220elite theory8221 developed over the decades so its adoption by various rightwing partisan stooges and conspiracy theorists doesn8217t surprise me We have now reached the point where the 8220deep state8221 rhetoric is no longer useful and has even become harmful to informed political discourse on American politics I will say from the outset that I admire Mike Lofgren a former Congressman for drawing attention to the rise of corporate power and the everexpanding runaway military state His book The Deep State The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government appears to be a genuine heartfelt effort to fight back against the reactionary forces that control American politics And his main concerns with the American political system are warranted He is right to focus on the dangers of the growing national security state coordinated largely through the NSA and other agencies and to condemn their assault on citizens8217 privacy rights Lofgren adopts the metaphor of the panopticon to describe the security state referring to Jeremy Bentham8217s conceptual prison design which was comprised of a circular structure with a central 8220watchman8221 tower The structure is designed so that prisoners cannot tell whether a guard can see them at any given time despite the central location of the tower which suggests that the state could be watching you at any moment The use of the panopticon as a symbol of the modernday surveillance state is apt The NSA while not recording every phone call in the United States keeps records of these calls allowing for closer inspections of conversations on a casebycase basis Even if the state is not technically recording every word we speak it always has its eye on the American people and is ready to intervene at a moment8217s notice Drawing on the panopticon Lofgren refers to the rise of 8220militarized authoritarianism8221 via the growing power of the US intelligence apparatus and I find it hard to disagree with him Lofgren is also right to emphasize other threats to American democracy He laments the rise of corporate profiteering in the 8220War on Terror8221 calling back to warnings from decades8217 past about the US military industrial complex Corporate and political actors profit from hundreds of billions a year spent on a bloated 8220national security8221 state at the expense of social spending on education health care and infrastructural needs In an era of record inequality the fixation of US political and economic elites on militarism exacts a huge cost draining much needed financial resources that could be allocated toward rebuilding the country and providing for the basic needs of the citizenry Finally Lofgren8217s concern with the rise of Wall Street power which has coincided with the financialization of the US economy is timely and welcome Financial deregulation is one of the greatest threats to our economy and the failure of both political parties to limit the power of financial elites is one of the great tragedies of modern times The American banking system has historically been a parasitic force in the American economy Wall Street8217s speculation on vital goods such as oil housing internet stocks and other goods has fed stock market bubbles the collapse of which wreak havoc on the economy and American workers draining their retirement savings and fueling the rise of unemployment and underemployment Financialization undermines the economy 8211 which is now largely driven by speculators and characterized by anemic to nonexistent economic growth What profit gains exist are now largely captured by financial and other corporate elites Meanwhile the masses of Americans find themselves working longer hours with increased productivity for stagnating to declining wages amidst huge increases in costofliving via outofcontrol health care and education costs Despite the serious and legitimate concerns that Lofgren raises there are several serious problems with the 8220deep state8221 framework These problems become harder to deny as Lofgren8217s work gains prominence among American pundits intellectuals and political elites Lofgren popularized the 8220deep state8221 term referring to 8220a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies plus key parts of other branches whose roles given them membership The Department of Defense the Department of State the Department of Homeland Security the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department are all part of the Deep State8221 But the 8220deep state8221 concept lacked nuance and clarity making it ripe for adoption by partisan hacks and conspiracy theorists This is not to attack Lofgren for promoting a conspiracy theory as he is clear in his book that he is providing an institutional analysis of the threats to American democracy In fact I find claims that Lofgren is a conspiracy theorist to be rather bizarre and illinformed If anything his analysis comes off as somewhat tame within the broader intellectual history of elite theory in that he fails to identify corporate capitalism as the primary threat to the US economy and to the American public Lofgren is no socialist or Marxist and his analysis is somewhat pedestrian and conservative in that he eschews traditional efforts at institutional analysis that incorporate Marxian tools for spotlighting systemic repression such as alienated labor economic determinism hegemony and commodity fetishism Because of the vague nature of the 8220deep state8221 it has become a Rorschach test for American pundits and citizens alike It is something upon which they can impute whatever beliefs or values they have It can mean whatever one wants it to mean Reactionary partisan hacks like Sean Hannity Newt Gingrich Andrew Napolitano and Sean Spicer freely adopt the term to refer to allegedly proObama elements within the US government and intelligence apparatus Hannity takes aim at 8220the liberal media8221 and 8220American intelligence agencies8221 the latter of which he claims is dominated by a 8220deep state swamp of Obama holdover DC lifers8221 who are 8220hellbent on destroying Trump8221 Of course Hannity has raised no concern with an emerging deep state swamp of Trump DC lifers populated by plutocratic billionaires as the president moves to populate the federal bureaucracy with his preferred political supporters and hacks We have also seen the rise of conspiratorial rhetoric on 8220the left8221 regarding the ominous 8220deep state8221 I8217ll refrain from identifying any specific person by name fratricide is not an endearing trait but the depth of conspiracymongering 8220deep state8221 absurdity has clearly afflicted various leftist critics of the American political system Over the last year various leftists framed the 8220deep state8221 as a secret shadow government impervious to any controls or regulation by elected officials It is said to represent a miniature government within the larger government and it is so nefariously effective that it ensures the American people have zero political influence over American politics Forget about social movements or protests They8217re pointless The secret paperpushers of the 8220deep state8221 have already ensured that representation of the masses is a fiction Don8217t even bother with protest or social action 8211 there8217s really nothing you can do to promote progressive political change Furthermore forget about efforts to stifle US militarism abroad The 8220deep state8221 shadow government secretly pulls the strings of political officials such as Barack Obama forcing him to escalate wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere despite growing antiwar sentiment at home It should be clear from anyone who studies American history how absurd these claims are While those on the left have long known that the US political system is captured by corporate power and wealth to suggest that social movement activism and opposition to the status quo are bound to fail is a horrifically misinformed position and is contradicted by history itself The last century of US political activism demonstrates that large numbers of social movements were able to fundamentally transform American culture and politics as seen in the women8217s rights movement the struggle for civil rights the rise of modern environmentalism and the struggle against nuclear power the successes of organized labor activism the gay and lesbian rights movement and numerous other progressive uprisings Furthermore to claim that appointed 8220deep state8221 bureaucrats hold all the power in Washington at the expense of elected officials is equally outlandish Lofgren doesn8217t even try to make this claim in his book as he refers to 8220deep state8221 operatives in the US bureaucracy as largely 8220ordertakers8221 serving those who visibly hold power as elected officials or as heads of 8220national securityrelated8221 federal agencies Lofgren is right not to frame elected officials as slaves to faceless bureaucrats and one can see the silliness of such depictions when looking at recent history For example looking at the case of the 2009 escalation of the war in Afghanistan the troop 8220surge8221 which occurred in phases throughout the year was explicitly supported by Obama when he ran in the 2008 election Furthermore anyone closely paying attention to the news at the time could have recognized that the fight between Obama and General Stanley McChrystal and other elements of US military leadership was not over whether to expand the war in Afghanistan but over how quickly to escalate and drawdown the war and over how many forces would be committed In other words the 8220fight8221 was over strategy and logistics not principle or substance It should be pointed out by the way that Obama won this logistical battle with the generals announcing a smaller infusion of troops than McChrystal wanted attached to a date of 2011 in which a drawdown was supposed to begin This deadline was opposed by the generals for the story on the surge see Peter Baker 8220How Obama Came to Plan for 8216Surge8217 in Afghanistan8221 New York Times December 5 2009 I don8217t mean to marginalize concerns that the US is witnessing a creeping authoritarianism via the growing strength of our institutionalized militaryintelligence state I agree that this is occurring and is a serious threat to the country But depictions of US elected leaders as puppets of the bureaucracy 8211 the latter of which retain all the power in US politics 8211 are outlandish caricatures of how the political system really works Furthermore we insult the victims of the fullyfledged dictatorships of the world by depicting Americans as suffering under some sort of comparable military dictatorship remember the 8220deep state8221 terminology was originally developed in reference to Turkey There is simply no equivalent in the United States to the mass torture and mass killings engaged in by brutal dictatorships of history run by Mubarak in Egypt Assad in Syria or Erdogan in Turkey among others Certainly the US has its own unique and repressive version of a militarized police system which has long been used to criminalize and suppress minorities and protesters But to ignore the obvious differences between the US and dictatorships regarding the presence of basic political freedoms to say what one wishes and to openly disagree with government is to engage in a distortion of epic proportions As an aside it is also worth pointing out that the US intelligence community is nowhere near as uniform as 8220deep state8221 conspiracies claim Members of the US 8220security8221 state have at times sought to pressure elected officials with harmful effects on democracy A few recent examples include the hysteria voiced by agencies like the CIA over Russia8217s alleged interference in the US election and in which Democrats have claimed without presenting evidence that Vladimir Putin effectively threw the election in favor of Trump Another example of wheeling and dealing by the intelligence community is the Afghanistan surge It seems clear despite Obama8217s prosurge inclinations that the attacks from McChrystal and the US military did create additional pressure on the Obama administration to escalate war Recognizing that the US intelligence community and military apparatus have power in the political process however does not mean that these officials always serve state power or imperial interests One can look no further than the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate which represented a collective middle finger to the Bush administration from the intelligence community on the issue of whether Iran was developing nuclear weapons Members of the intelligence community were clearly angry at the egg left on their faces following the embarrassment that was the 2002 NIE which sugarcoated the Bush administration8217s case for war with Iraq Subsequent historical accounts documented how the intelligence community particularly analysts at the CIA were bullied by highlevel members of the Bush administration in the prewar period to 8220get behind8221 the president and the war effort The 2007 NIE represented a comprehensive effort on the part of the intelligence community to pump the breaks on Bush8217s imperial war agenda and it was effective in defusing the case for war The push against war with Iran was not an isolated incident either It should be clear by taking a longer historical view recognizing the many intelligence analysts willing to question US militarism and imperialism by leaking sensitive and classified information to the press Whether one is talking about 8220Deep Throat8221 Mark Felt or Daniel Ellsberg in the Nixon era or anonymous intelligence analysts feeding critical information to news outlets like Knight Ridder prior to the 2003 Iraq war or more recent whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden the US intelligence community is not all of one mind about US militarism and empire As a scholar I8217ve struggled with the rise of 8220deep state8221 rhetoric in public discourse Despite Lofgren raising legitimate points about the perversion of power in America it8217s not clear to me what additional analytical value comes with simply referring to US intelligence agencies and the military apparatus as a 8220deep state8221 Many intellectuals and scholars over the decades have offered a variety of 8220elite theory8221 frameworks that incorporate US militarism and go well beyond simply examining the 8220security8221 related aspects of American plutocracy So it8217s unclear what additional insights Lofgren and his supporters are contributing To provide a brief rundown of previous theoretical frameworks consider the following In the 1950s the sociologist C Wright Mills warned of a 8220power elite8221 comprised of political business and military leaders The American political system was captured Mills warned through a hegemonic system in which affluent Americans were socialized 8211 as part of the upperclass 8211 to embrace elitist political and economic beliefs which later drove their decisions as they ran for and took over major positions in government Whereas Mills provided a way to understand how affluent Americans are socialized to embrace elite views since they themselves are elites no focus on the hegemonic powers of education the mass media and political propaganda appear in any serious way in Lofgren8217s book In the late 1960s political scientist Ted Lowi warned that the US political process was dominated by a system of 8220clientelism8221 in which multiple groups of economic elites 8211 representing different industries and sectors of the economy exercised control over specific aspects of public policy Lowi8217s description of multiple elites and various 8220subgovernments8221 driven by specific business groups was much more nuanced than Lofgren8217s single 8220deep state8221 which fails to discuss how various industries outside of Wall Street and military profiteers manipulate public policy In the early 1980s the political scientist Charles Lindblom offered a compelling analysis of American power in which he likened the capitalist marketplace to a prison US corporations exercised power over communities much like Kings do over feudal serfs by exercising ownership over the means of production in the US economy They command worker loyalty due to their ability to hire and fire Americans and provide basic benefits such as health care or 401k and pension benefits But corporations also possess the power to destroy people8217s lives via capital flight Simply by threatening to leave a community and move factories abroad in pursuit of higher profits and weaker environmental regulations corporations hold citizens hostage and can destroy entire cities and states in pursuit of evergreater profits The marketplace is a prison Lindblom warned because these corporations ultimately control the levers of the US economy and control the life outcomes of American workers Most recently a cottage industry of empirical studies document precisely how business elites maintain control over public policy utilizing the military state Congress the White House and state and local government officials to pervert policy in favor of the interests of the wealthy Notable in these studies are various books including Daniel Butler8217s Representing the Advantaged Nicholas Carnes8217 White Collar Government Martin Gilens8217 Affluence and Influence Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson8217s WinnerTakeAllPolitics Rebecca Thorpe8217s The American Warfare State and Martin Gilens8217 and Ben Pages8217 article 8220Testing Theories of American Politics8221 All these works provide far richer nuanced documentation of how business elites manipulate policy outcomes in favor of the top 1 to 20 percent of American income earners To put it simply elite theory has come a long way over the last halfcentury and especially since the 2008 economic crash Because of the explosion in the last decade of studies of elite power we know more about the American plutocracy than ever before Considering this new informational environment Lofgren8217s book provides an interesting reflection on the experiences of one man in Congress over the decades and it is a welcome addition to the discussion of elitism in government But it is not clear how much his 8220deep state8221 framework tells us about US policy than we already knew I8217ve refrained from referring to the 8220deep state8221 seeing the term as more of a faddish framework for studying political power The term8217s value in political discourse appears to be dwindling as various pundits caricature the original points offered by Lofgren The concept has come to mean whatever people want it to mean independent of any clearheaded analysis of the political power structure Cliched references to the 8220deep state8221 will grow in coming months and years but I8217d suggest it8217s time to start looking for a more coherent informed analyses than what is being offered by various conspiracy theorists on the left and right | Photo/NOUN by/ADP Nicolas/PROPN Raymond/PROPN CC/PROPN BY/PROPN 20/NUM The/DET stratospheric/ADJ rise/NOUN of/ADP Mike/PROPN Lofgren8217s/PROPN 8220deep/PROPN state8221/NOUN critique/NOUN has/AUX been/AUX matched/VERB 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<p>Striding into Kyoto in December of 1997 claiming to be a mighty warrior in the battle against global warming was a familiar beast, the nuclear power industry. Some of the industry’s biggest lobbyists, men such as James Curtis (a former deputy secretary of energy during the Reagan years), prowled the streets and sushi bars of this ancient city (itself running on juice from an aging nuke) angling for some positive words in the treaty for their troubled enterprise. The big reactor makers, GE, Westinghouse, and Combustion Engineering, were there too, dissing the oil and coal lobby, downplaying the long-term viability of natural gas and generally treating the eco-summit as if it were an international trade show.</p>
<p>On the eve of the Climate Change summit, I was slipped a copy of the nuclear industry’s Kyoto briefing book prepared by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a $100 million a year trade organization. The book was written by researchers at Bechtel, the giant construction firm that has built dozens of nuclear plants across the globe. The document touts the latest “advanced light water nuclear reactor” as the most ecologically benign engineering feat since the solar panel and argues that only realistic way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in the next ten years is to bring on-line at least an additional 50 reactors. “Nuclear energy has been the largest single contributor to reduced air pollution in the world over the past 20 years,” the NEI’s Kyoto global warming book boasts. “And it promises to play an even greater role in the future, especially in developing countries, like India and China, which need to increase their electricity supplies to accommodate their expanding populations and economies.”</p>
<p>The NEI book tactfully avoids the unsavory subject of radioactive waste, but does go to some lengths to argue on behalf of China’s vigilance in the battle against nuclear proliferation. China, the NEI suggests, would never secretly export nuclear technology because it “has expressed strong concern over the possibility of nuclear-armed neighbors.” More significantly, the NEI warns that China “plans to standardize its nuclear generating technology, selecting one or two standardized reactor designs for future construction. If U.S. reactor manufacturers are barred from competing, China will not have the option of selecting the safest technology in the world, and the market will be permanently closed to U.S. suppliers.”</p>
<p>With China and other Asian countries planning to build more than 70 nuclear plants by 2025 years, the financial stakes are staggering. American companies, such as GE, Westinghouse and Bechtel, desperately crave those multi-billion dollar contracts. “In theory these could all be US plants,” boasted Ian Butterfield, CBS’s vice-president for international affairs. With a little help from the US government.</p>
<p>The NEI’s Kyoto packet includes a long list of endorsements ranging from Tom Clancy and the Pope to Hazel O’Leary and green guru James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis, who is quoted as saying, “Nuclear power has an important contribution to make.” Also proudly displayed for the Kyoto conferees was a statement by Al Gore’s good friend, Rep. Bob Clement, Democrat from Tennessee, who pronounced, “With the implementation of the Clean Air Act and the administration’s increased concern about global climate change and acid rain, renewed attention has been focused on nuclear energy’s significant environmental benefits. Environmental awareness coupled with increased basic needs for electricity are becoming critical in certain regions of the country. Nuclear energy, along with a strong conservation program and energy efficiency programs, is a smart choice.”</p>
<p>Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of the more eye-grabbing numbers in the NEI’s report simply don’t check out. For example, the nuclear industry claims that the world’s 447 nuclear plants reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent. But the true villain behind global warming is carbon. Existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total carbon emissions, hardly much of a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, nuclear power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that “even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem.”</p>
<p>The activities of the Nuclear Energy Institute do not meet with universal approbation in the nuclear industry. The dues are onerous-the Tennessee Valley Authority is reputed to fork up no less than $10 million a year-while the results are in some cases at least, risible. Some years ago, for example, the watchdogs of the industry noted that The Simpsons, the enormously popular cartoon series, was depicting nuclear power in an unfavorable light. Bart Simpson’s father Homer works at a local nuclear plant where the reactors are held together with chewing gum and a river fed by waste water from the plant is rife with three-eyed trout and other mutations. The NEI sprang into action, sponsoring intensive briefings and tours of reassuringly shiny nuclear facilities for the Simpson’s creative team-all without any discernible effect on Homer Simpson, who continues to absent-mindedly drop radioactive fuel rods into his pocket at work and then toss them out of the car on the way home.</p>
<p>In many ways, the NEI’s global warming initiative is largely a replay of their attempt to profit off of acid rain legislation in the late 1980s, a campaign which miserably failed to attract much sympathy from legislators and only seemed to anger the public. But in Clintontime the NEI encountered a somewhat warmer reception in the White House and on the Hill. Indeed, the weeks before the Kyoto conclave the nuclear industry has scored series of amazing triumphs not seen since the waning days of the Reagan administration.</p>
<p>One reason for its renewed success may be that the NEI began putting its money into more profitable investments than its campaign to greenwash The Simpsons, namely into the coffers of the DNC and RNC. In the four years before Kyoto the NEI and its members doled out $13 million in political contributions to key senate and house members, including John Dingell ($122,700) Tom Delay ($106.500), Dick Gephardt ($104,000) Thomas Bliley ($100,000), and David Bonior ($80,075).</p>
<p>Another reason is that the nuclear lobby has enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with both Clinton and Gore. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry’s most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation’s outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company’s Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.</p>
<p>First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called “full scope safeguards” spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act. The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of “dual use” technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the President that “China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction” worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be “a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants” and will be “a great opportunity for American vendors”-that is, Westinghouse.</p>
<p>A day later Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.</p>
<p>In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made “a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies.” Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as “a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future.” Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way “to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development.”</p>
<p>One the eve of the Kyoto meetings, the nuclear industry secured another startling windfall, this time a promise of nearly $400 million in research and development subsidies. The key man here was one of Al Gore’s intellectual Svengalis, John P. Holdren. While a professor at Berkeley, Holdren portrayed himself as a mighty foe of nuclear weapons. His popularity among Berkeley students soared after he gave ecological backing to Carl Sagan’s scary scenarios about nuclear winter. Now Holdren is ensconced at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he presides as the John and Teresa Heinz professor of environmental policy. Yes, that Teresa Heinz, she of the $2 billion fortune, wife of John Kerry, and head of a $200 million foundation which gives money for “practical solutions to global environmental problems.” She is also a long-time board member of the nuke-happy Environmental Defense Fund.</p>
<p>Holdren was tapped by Gore and Clinton’s science advisor Jack Gibbons to head a task force on energy and climate policy as part of the Presidential Commission on Science and Technology. Holdren’s panel was well stocked with allies of the nuclear lobby, headlined by Bechtel’s Lawrence Papay and William Fulkerson, former associate director of the Oak Ridge National Lab and a senior fellow at the Gore-endowed Joint Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of Tennessee. Masquerading as an academic was Charles Vest, a former president of MIT and a driving force behind the American Nuclear Society’s Eagle Alliance.</p>
<p>Another prominent spot went to the person who must hold the all-time record for appointments to presidential commissions involving environmental matters, Virginia Weldon, chief flack for Monsanto. Weldon rarely misses an opportunity to praise irradiation as a cure for all of the dangers lurking in the US food supply.</p>
<p>Environmentalists were given two slots. One went to Daniel Lashof, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The other was reserved for one of Lashof’s biggest funders, Hal Harvey, executive director of the Energy Foundation. In 1996, both Lashof and Harvey supported the disastrous bail out of the California nuclear industry.</p>
<p>With this roster of advisers, it’s not surprising that the Gore-Holdren report largely parroted the line advanced by the Nuclear Energy Institute, calling for increased research and development subsidies for fusion and fission, export of US nuclear technology and the creation of a new Nuclear Energy Research Initiative to underwrite “new reactor designs with higher-efficiency, lower-cost and improved safety to compete in the global market.”</p>
<p>Holdren’s panel recommended that federal spending for research and development on commercial nuclear reactors be tripled from $40 million to $120 million, a bigger percentage increase than is recommended for either renewables or energy efficiency. The money is essentially a direct subsidy to help nuclear companies and utilities deal with the industries two biggest problems: radioactive waste disposal and aging reactors. “The interest is not so much in building new nukes in the US, but in finding a way to keep the old reactors up and running so that they can be relicensed,” says Auke Piersma of the Critical Mass Energy Project. “It’s a shame that people like Holdren use global warming as way to justify this handout.”</p>
<p>“Nuclear energy currently generates about 17 percent of the world’s electricity,” Holdren writes. “If this electricity were generated instead by coal, world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption would be almost 10 percent larger than they currently are. Given the desirability of stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is important to establish fission energy as a widely viable and expandable option. World leadership in nuclear energy technologies and the underlying science is also vital to the United States from the perspective of national security, international influence and global stability.”</p>
<p>Incredibly, Holdren and his gang also recommended spending $280 million on fusion research, a proven waste of money in terms of energy production. Under even the most optimistic scenarios, fusion reactors will be able to generate electricity for about 50 cents per kilowatt hour, ten times more than the cost of natural gas turbines. But a boost in fusion research can go a long way toward solving a problem that has vexed the nuclear industry and the defense lobby: How to keep testing nuclear weapons technology under the restrictions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty The answer: funnel fusion energy research money to places like the Lawrence Livermore Labs and its mammoth National Ignition Facility.</p>
<p>The Department of Energy didn’t sit by idly either. Ever on the lookout for any opportunity to advance the cause of nuclear power was Dr. Terry Lash, the Energy Department’s director of nuclear operations under Clinton and Gore. Lash as the man who almost single-handedly kept Hanford’s Fast Flux Breeder Reactor humming along on “hot standby” until it can once again be fired up to make tritium for H-bombs and, in some distant future, be put to the more humanitarian use of making medical isotopes. To fund the Fast Flux project, Lash diverted $40 million a year from the strapped cleanup budget for Hanford, which the DOE itself calls the most toxic site in North America.</p>
<p>Lash also promoted nuclear power’s global mission, fervently lobbying inside the DOE for nuclear trade pacts with China, India, Argentina and Brazil. “Lash was a shrewd and incredibly calculating operator,” a senior DOE staffer told me. “He’d employ any argument for the cause of nuclear power. He pressed for sales of reactors to Brazil and China, saying that it was vital to combat the greenhouse effect.”</p>
<p>Lash also played a key role in stuffing the annual clean air budgets with lavish handouts to the nuclear industry. Sources say Lash originally pushed for a $50 million “clean air” subsidy to utilities laden with nuclear plants, but the figure was eventually scaled back to $30 million by deficit hawks at the Office of Management and Budget.</p>
<p>Longtime anti-nuke activists remember Lash from his days as a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council in the 1970s, when the group touted itself as a fierce foe of nuclear power and raised millions off the Three Mile Island disaster. During his tenure there, Lash co-wrote a book for NRDC on nuclear waste. Lash’s co-author was none other than John Bryson, a co-founder of the group. Bryson went on to become the CEO of Edison International (formerly Southern California Edison), which operates the San Onofre nuclear plant. In 1997, Bryson was fresh off an amazing victory, where he and his pals convinced the California legislature to stick ratepayers and taxpayers with $26 billion in “stranded costs” to make his company’s nuke’s “more competitive in the deregulated electricity market.”</p>
<p>One last goal remained for the nuclear lobby: split the environmental community on nuclear power. There was every reason for optimism. Nuclear energy had divided the greens in the past, most spectacularly in 1969 when David Brower publicly attacked fellow Sierra Club leaders who helped Pacific Gas &amp; Electric pick the Nippomo Dunes as the site for the company’s Diablo Canyon reactor. This principled stance led to Brower’s ouster as the Club’s executive director. In 1990 scientists from the EDF and NRDC joined a onto a statement saying that nuclear power had an essential role to play in curbing air pollution.</p>
<p>As Al Gore packed his day pack for his whirlwind trip to Kyoto, a full-page ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal that must have warmed the hearts of the men at the NEI. Under the headline, “A Business Climate Challenge: America Needs to Get Serious About Climate Change,” 60 corporate executives, led by Nike, Mitsubishi, CalEnergy, Pacific Energy, Mitchell Energy, and Ted Turner endorsed the need for a strong climate change treaty. The ad was also signed by Enron and Bechtel, two companies with interests in nuclear power. The companies had been rounded up by three environmental groups, World Wildlife Fund, Ozone Action and NRDC. “The idea for this really came from the Clinton administration,” Brandon MacGillis tells me. “They said if we wanted to see a good treaty we needed to show that property owners and Republican business leaders cared about global warming.”</p>
<p>Using a grant from the Ford Foundation, money from Ozone Action and contributions from Nike and Mitchell Energy, the groups began asking corporate leaders to sign on the ad. “We asked everyone we could think of,” MacGillis says. MacGillis admits that they environmental reputation of the companies wasn’t a factor. “Sure some wanted onto the ad purely for economic or pr reasons,” MacGillis confessed. “But other companies really think they can make a difference. Nike, for example, believes that by improving air quality in its factories it can increase productivity.” (This is a staggering admission. Up till then, Nike has rigorously claimed it has no control over the operations of its Asian factories.)</p>
<p>As all of this was going on, a coalition of environmental groups, spearheaded by Critical Mass Energy Project, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, drafted a letter to Clinton and Gore on the subject of nuclear power. The letter harshly denounced the Holdren report, DOE’s budget for nuclear power and all “proposals to use nuclear power to reduce greenhouse emissions.” More than forty groups signed the letter. One major group refused: NRDC.</p>
<p>JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is the author of <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature</a> and <a href="" type="internal">Grand Theft Pentagon</a>. His newest book is <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate</a>, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:sitka@comcast.net" type="external">sitka@comcast.net</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Nuclear Saviors? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/03/24/nuclear-saviors-2/ | 2007-03-24 | 4left
| 3,058 | Striding into Kyoto in December of 1997 claiming to be a mighty warrior in the battle against global warming was a familiar beast the nuclear power industry Some of the industry8217s biggest lobbyists men such as James Curtis a former deputy secretary of energy during the Reagan years prowled the streets and sushi bars of this ancient city itself running on juice from an aging nuke angling for some positive words in the treaty for their troubled enterprise The big reactor makers GE Westinghouse and Combustion Engineering were there too dissing the oil and coal lobby downplaying the longterm viability of natural gas and generally treating the ecosummit as if it were an international trade show On the eve of the Climate Change summit I was slipped a copy of the nuclear industry8217s Kyoto briefing book prepared by the Nuclear Energy Institute a 100 million a year trade organization The book was written by researchers at Bechtel the giant construction firm that has built dozens of nuclear plants across the globe The document touts the latest 8220advanced light water nuclear reactor8221 as the most ecologically benign engineering feat since the solar panel and argues that only realistic way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in the next ten years is to bring online at least an additional 50 reactors 8220Nuclear energy has been the largest single contributor to reduced air pollution in the world over the past 20 years8221 the NEI8217s Kyoto global warming book boasts 8220And it promises to play an even greater role in the future especially in developing countries like India and China which need to increase their electricity supplies to accommodate their expanding populations and economies8221 The NEI book tactfully avoids the unsavory subject of radioactive waste but does go to some lengths to argue on behalf of China8217s vigilance in the battle against nuclear proliferation China the NEI suggests would never secretly export nuclear technology because it 8220has expressed strong concern over the possibility of nucleararmed neighbors8221 More significantly the NEI warns that China 8220plans to standardize its nuclear generating technology selecting one or two standardized reactor designs for future construction If US reactor manufacturers are barred from competing China will not have the option of selecting the safest technology in the world and the market will be permanently closed to US suppliers8221 With China and other Asian countries planning to build more than 70 nuclear plants by 2025 years the financial stakes are staggering American companies such as GE Westinghouse and Bechtel desperately crave those multibillion dollar contracts 8220In theory these could all be US plants8221 boasted Ian Butterfield CBS8217s vicepresident for international affairs With a little help from the US government The NEI8217s Kyoto packet includes a long list of endorsements ranging from Tom Clancy and the Pope to Hazel O8217Leary and green guru James Lovelock inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis who is quoted as saying 8220Nuclear power has an important contribution to make8221 Also proudly displayed for the Kyoto conferees was a statement by Al Gore8217s good friend Rep Bob Clement Democrat from Tennessee who pronounced 8220With the implementation of the Clean Air Act and the administration8217s increased concern about global climate change and acid rain renewed attention has been focused on nuclear energy8217s significant environmental benefits Environmental awareness coupled with increased basic needs for electricity are becoming critical in certain regions of the country Nuclear energy along with a strong conservation program and energy efficiency programs is a smart choice8221 Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby some of the more eyegrabbing numbers in the NEI8217s report simply don8217t check out For example the nuclear industry claims that the world8217s 447 nuclear plants reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent But the true villain behind global warming is carbon Existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total carbon emissions hardly much of a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power Moreover the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coalfired plants rather renewables such as solar wind and geothermal Even when compared to coal nuclear power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that 8220even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity efficiency is found to be 25 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2abatement Thus to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem8221 The activities of the Nuclear Energy Institute do not meet with universal approbation in the nuclear industry The dues are onerousthe Tennessee Valley Authority is reputed to fork up no less than 10 million a yearwhile the results are in some cases at least risible Some years ago for example the watchdogs of the industry noted that The Simpsons the enormously popular cartoon series was depicting nuclear power in an unfavorable light Bart Simpson8217s father Homer works at a local nuclear plant where the reactors are held together with chewing gum and a river fed by waste water from the plant is rife with threeeyed trout and other mutations The NEI sprang into action sponsoring intensive briefings and tours of reassuringly shiny nuclear facilities for the Simpson8217s creative teamall without any discernible effect on Homer Simpson who continues to absentmindedly drop radioactive fuel rods into his pocket at work and then toss them out of the car on the way home In many ways the NEI8217s global warming initiative is largely a replay of their attempt to profit off of acid rain legislation in the late 1980s a campaign which miserably failed to attract much sympathy from legislators and only seemed to anger the public But in Clintontime the NEI encountered a somewhat warmer reception in the White House and on the Hill Indeed the weeks before the Kyoto conclave the nuclear industry has scored series of amazing triumphs not seen since the waning days of the Reagan administration One reason for its renewed success may be that the NEI began putting its money into more profitable investments than its campaign to greenwash The Simpsons namely into the coffers of the DNC and RNC In the four years before Kyoto the NEI and its members doled out 13 million in political contributions to key senate and house members including John Dingell 122700 Tom Delay 106500 Dick Gephardt 104000 Thomas Bliley 100000 and David Bonior 80075 Another reason is that the nuclear lobby has enjoyed a long and profitable relationship with both Clinton and Gore Al Gore who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry8217s most problematic enterprises the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs And of course Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation8217s outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company8217s Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China announced during Jiang Zemin8217s 1997 visit Washington even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the socalled 8220full scope safeguards8221 spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton8217s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger who cited repeated exports by China of 8220dual use8221 technologies to Iran Pakistan and Iraq The CIA also weighed in against the deal pointing out in a report to the President that 8220China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction8221 worldwide In a press conference on the deal Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be 8220a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coalfired plants8221 and will be 8220a great opportunity for American vendors8221that is Westinghouse A day later Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978 when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements In a letter to congress Clinton vouched for the South American countries saying they had made 8220a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies8221 Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as 8220a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future8221 Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way 8220to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development8221 One the eve of the Kyoto meetings the nuclear industry secured another startling windfall this time a promise of nearly 400 million in research and development subsidies The key man here was one of Al Gore8217s intellectual Svengalis John P Holdren While a professor at Berkeley Holdren portrayed himself as a mighty foe of nuclear weapons His popularity among Berkeley students soared after he gave ecological backing to Carl Sagan8217s scary scenarios about nuclear winter Now Holdren is ensconced at Harvard8217s Kennedy School of Government where he presides as the John and Teresa Heinz professor of environmental policy Yes that Teresa Heinz she of the 2 billion fortune wife of John Kerry and head of a 200 million foundation which gives money for 8220practical solutions to global environmental problems8221 She is also a longtime board member of the nukehappy Environmental Defense Fund Holdren was tapped by Gore and Clinton8217s science advisor Jack Gibbons to head a task force on energy and climate policy as part of the Presidential Commission on Science and Technology Holdren8217s panel was well stocked with allies of the nuclear lobby headlined by Bechtel8217s Lawrence Papay and William Fulkerson former associate director of the Oak Ridge National Lab and a senior fellow at the Goreendowed Joint Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of Tennessee Masquerading as an academic was Charles Vest a former president of MIT and a driving force behind the American Nuclear Society8217s Eagle Alliance Another prominent spot went to the person who must hold the alltime record for appointments to presidential commissions involving environmental matters Virginia Weldon chief flack for Monsanto Weldon rarely misses an opportunity to praise irradiation as a cure for all of the dangers lurking in the US food supply Environmentalists were given two slots One went to Daniel Lashof a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council The other was reserved for one of Lashof8217s biggest funders Hal Harvey executive director of the Energy Foundation In 1996 both Lashof and Harvey supported the disastrous bail out of the California nuclear industry With this roster of advisers it8217s not surprising that the GoreHoldren report largely parroted the line advanced by the Nuclear Energy Institute calling for increased research and development subsidies for fusion and fission export of US nuclear technology and the creation of a new Nuclear Energy Research Initiative to underwrite 8220new reactor designs with higherefficiency lowercost and improved safety to compete in the global market8221 Holdren8217s panel recommended that federal spending for research and development on commercial nuclear reactors be tripled from 40 million to 120 million a bigger percentage increase than is recommended for either renewables or energy efficiency The money is essentially a direct subsidy to help nuclear companies and utilities deal with the industries two biggest problems radioactive waste disposal and aging reactors 8220The interest is not so much in building new nukes in the US but in finding a way to keep the old reactors up and running so that they can be relicensed8221 says Auke Piersma of the Critical Mass Energy Project 8220It8217s a shame that people like Holdren use global warming as way to justify this handout8221 8220Nuclear energy currently generates about 17 percent of the world8217s electricity8221 Holdren writes 8220If this electricity were generated instead by coal world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption would be almost 10 percent larger than they currently are Given the desirability of stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions it is important to establish fission energy as a widely viable and expandable option World leadership in nuclear energy technologies and the underlying science is also vital to the United States from the perspective of national security international influence and global stability8221 Incredibly Holdren and his gang also recommended spending 280 million on fusion research a proven waste of money in terms of energy production Under even the most optimistic scenarios fusion reactors will be able to generate electricity for about 50 cents per kilowatt hour ten times more than the cost of natural gas turbines But a boost in fusion research can go a long way toward solving a problem that has vexed the nuclear industry and the defense lobby How to keep testing nuclear weapons technology under the restrictions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty The answer funnel fusion energy research money to places like the Lawrence Livermore Labs and its mammoth National Ignition Facility The Department of Energy didn8217t sit by idly either Ever on the lookout for any opportunity to advance the cause of nuclear power was Dr Terry Lash the Energy Department8217s director of nuclear operations under Clinton and Gore Lash as the man who almost singlehandedly kept Hanford8217s Fast Flux Breeder Reactor humming along on 8220hot standby8221 until it can once again be fired up to make tritium for Hbombs and in some distant future be put to the more humanitarian use of making medical isotopes To fund the Fast Flux project Lash diverted 40 million a year from the strapped cleanup budget for Hanford which the DOE itself calls the most toxic site in North America Lash also promoted nuclear power8217s global mission fervently lobbying inside the DOE for nuclear trade pacts with China India Argentina and Brazil 8220Lash was a shrewd and incredibly calculating operator8221 a senior DOE staffer told me 8220He8217d employ any argument for the cause of nuclear power He pressed for sales of reactors to Brazil and China saying that it was vital to combat the greenhouse effect8221 Lash also played a key role in stuffing the annual clean air budgets with lavish handouts to the nuclear industry Sources say Lash originally pushed for a 50 million 8220clean air8221 subsidy to utilities laden with nuclear plants but the figure was eventually scaled back to 30 million by deficit hawks at the Office of Management and Budget Longtime antinuke activists remember Lash from his days as a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council in the 1970s when the group touted itself as a fierce foe of nuclear power and raised millions off the Three Mile Island disaster During his tenure there Lash cowrote a book for NRDC on nuclear waste Lash8217s coauthor was none other than John Bryson a cofounder of the group Bryson went on to become the CEO of Edison International formerly Southern California Edison which operates the San Onofre nuclear plant In 1997 Bryson was fresh off an amazing victory where he and his pals convinced the California legislature to stick ratepayers and taxpayers with 26 billion in 8220stranded costs8221 to make his company8217s nuke8217s 8220more competitive in the deregulated electricity market8221 One last goal remained for the nuclear lobby split the environmental community on nuclear power There was every reason for optimism Nuclear energy had divided the greens in the past most spectacularly in 1969 when David Brower publicly attacked fellow Sierra Club leaders who helped Pacific Gas ampamp Electric pick the Nippomo Dunes as the site for the company8217s Diablo Canyon reactor This principled stance led to Brower8217s ouster as the Club8217s executive director In 1990 scientists from the EDF and NRDC joined a onto a statement saying that nuclear power had an essential role to play in curbing air pollution As Al Gore packed his day pack for his whirlwind trip to Kyoto a fullpage ad appeared in the Wall Street Journal that must have warmed the hearts of the men at the NEI Under the headline 8220A Business Climate Challenge America Needs to Get Serious About Climate Change8221 60 corporate executives led by Nike Mitsubishi CalEnergy Pacific Energy Mitchell Energy and Ted Turner endorsed the need for a strong climate change treaty The ad was also signed by Enron and Bechtel two companies with interests in nuclear power The companies had been rounded up by three environmental groups World Wildlife Fund Ozone Action and NRDC 8220The idea for this really came from the Clinton administration8221 Brandon MacGillis tells me 8220They said if we wanted to see a good treaty we needed to show that property owners and Republican business leaders cared about global warming8221 Using a grant from the Ford Foundation money from Ozone Action and contributions from Nike and Mitchell Energy the groups began asking corporate leaders to sign on the ad 8220We asked everyone we could think of8221 MacGillis says MacGillis admits that they environmental reputation of the companies wasn8217t a factor 8220Sure some wanted onto the ad purely for economic or pr reasons8221 MacGillis confessed 8220But other companies really think they can make a difference Nike for example believes that by improving air quality in its factories it can increase productivity8221 This is a staggering admission Up till then Nike has rigorously claimed it has no control over the operations of its Asian factories As all of this was going on a coalition of environmental groups spearheaded by Critical Mass Energy Project Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth drafted a letter to Clinton and Gore on the subject of nuclear power The letter harshly denounced the Holdren report DOE8217s budget for nuclear power and all 8220proposals to use nuclear power to reduce greenhouse emissions8221 More than forty groups signed the letter One major group refused NRDC JEFFREY ST CLAIR is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon His newest book is End Times the Death of the Fourth Estate cowritten with Alexander Cockburn He can be reached at sitkacomcastnet amp160 | Striding/VERB into/ADP Kyoto/PROPN in/ADP December/PROPN of/ADP 1997/NUM claiming/VERB to/PART be/AUX a/DET mighty/ADJ warrior/NOUN in/ADP the/DET battle/NOUN against/ADP global/ADJ warming/NOUN was/AUX a/DET familiar/ADJ beast/NOUN the/DET nuclear/ADJ power/NOUN industry/NOUN Some/PRON of/ADP the/DET industry8217s/PROPN biggest/ADJ lobbyists/NOUN men/NOUN such/ADJ as/ADP James/PROPN Curtis/PROPN a/DET former/ADJ deputy/NOUN secretary/NOUN of/ADP energy/NOUN during/ADP the/DET Reagan/PROPN years/NOUN prowled/VERB the/DET streets/NOUN and/CCONJ sushi/ADJ bars/NOUN of/ADP this/DET ancient/ADJ city/NOUN itself/PRON running/VERB on/ADP juice/NOUN from/ADP an/DET aging/VERB nuke/ADJ angling/NOUN for/ADP some/DET positive/ADJ words/NOUN in/ADP the/DET treaty/NOUN for/ADP their/PRON troubled/ADJ 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Paul Bocuse, the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world, a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities, has died at 91, French officials announced.</p>
<p>Often referred to as the “pope of French cuisine,” Bocuse was a tireless pioneer, the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics — branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe. His imposing physical stature and his larger-than-life personality matched his bold dreams and his far-flung accomplishments.</p>
<p>Bocuse died Saturday at Collonges-au-Mont-d’or, the place where he was born and had his restaurant, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.</p>
<p>“French gastronomy loses a mythical figure ... The chefs cry in their kitchens, at the Elysee (presidential palace) and everywhere in France,” Macron said.</p>
<p>Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that “Mister Paul was France. Simplicity and generosity. Excellence and art de vivre.”</p>
<p>Bocuse, who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005, had also been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s temple to French gastronomy, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France, has held three stars — without interruption — since 1965 in the Michelin guide, the bible of gastronomes.</p>
<p>As early as 1982, Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, headed by his son Jerome, also a chef. In recent years, Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon.</p>
<p>“He has been a leader. He took the cook out of the kitchen,” said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse, speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse. More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion — one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years.</p>
<p>“Monsieur Paul,” as he was known, was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified “The French Genius.” Shown in his trademark pose — arms folded over his crisp white apron, a tall chef’s hat, or “toque,” atop his head — he was winged by Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel, among other French luminaries.</p>
<p>While excelling in the business of cooking, Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love, creating a top class, quintessentially French meal. He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs.</p>
<p>“In cooking, there are those who are rap and those who are concerto,” he told the French newsmagazine L’Express before his 2005 biography, adding that he tended toward the concerto.</p>
<p>In traditional cooking like his, he said, there is no room for guess work.</p>
<p>“One must be immutable, unattackable, monumental,” he declared.</p>
<p>Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s, Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his world-famous restaurant even in retirement, keeping an eye on guests, sometimes greeting them at table.</p>
<p>The red-and-green Auberge by the Saone River, his name boldly set atop the roof, is a temple to Bocuse — who was born there — and to other great chefs. Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a “tromp l’oeuil” painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home. Renowned chefs, some of whom he worked with, are portrayed in a giant mural.</p>
<p>In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms. “But I changed the sheets,” he added with characteristic wry humor.</p>
<p>Born on Feb. 11, 1926, Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16. He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon, then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols, Fernand Point, whose cooking was a precursor to France’s nouvelle cuisine movement, with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s career in the kitchen traversed the ages. He went from apprenticeships and cooking “brigades,” as kitchen teams are known, when stoves were coal-fired and chefs also served as scullery maids, to the ultra-modern kitchen of his Auberge.</p>
<p>“There was rigor,” Bocuse told the AP. “(At La Mere Brazier) you had to wake up early and milk the cows, feed the pigs, do the laundry and cook .... It was a very tough school of hard knocks.”</p>
<p>“Today, the profession has changed enormously. There’s no more coal. You push a button and you have heat,” he said.</p>
<p>Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times, making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958, a second in 1960 and a third in 1965. Since then, his cooking has been defined by superlatives.</p>
<p>In 1989, Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault &amp; Millau, a noted guidebook. In 2011, the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century, opening a restaurant for students in his name. He maintained a special pride, however, in the blue, white and red stripes on his chef’s collar holding a large medal, attesting to his selection in 1961 as a “Meilleur Ouvrier de France,” a sought-after distinction for chefs and other artisans.</p>
<p>The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse’s L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition: simple, authentic food that was “identifiable” in its nature.</p>
<p>Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for then-French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, which is served to this day. Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken — from France’s Bresse region, which is famed for its poultry — served in cream with morilles, a spring mushroom.</p>
<p>And his favorite ingredient? Butter.</p>
<p>“(It’s a) magical product,” he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America. “Nothing replaces butter.”</p>
<p>Three other cooking must-haves, according to the chef, are fresh produce (his was from his own garden), good, trusted kitchen staff and happy diners.</p>
<p>“It’s the client who runs the house,” Bocuse said in the AP interview.</p>
<p>He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine, although he incorporated aspects of it. And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age. Georges Auguste Escoffier, who gave classic French cuisine a world profile, remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse’s table.</p>
<p>“Escoffier was the master of us all,” Bocuse has said.</p>
<p>World War II interrupted his kitchen duties. He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces, was wounded and cared for at a U.S. field hospital.</p>
<p>“I always say I have American blood in my veins because ... I had transfusions of American blood,” he told the AP. An American flag still flies outside his restaurant.</p>
<p>The war had a lasting impact on the chef.</p>
<p>“(It) forges the character,” he said. “You no longer have the same idea of life.”</p>
<p>Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets. Instead, he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food.</p>
<p>He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997. He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel. He planted restaurants in the south of France, in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan, where eight Bocuse brasseries, cafes and other establishments were opened.</p>
<p>But his pride is transmitting his savoir-faire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse, established in Lyon in 2004. His Bocuse d’Or, or gold award — an international competition for young chefs — has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987.</p>
<p>While Bocuse’s kitchens were meticulously in order, his personal life was on the unorthodox side. He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women — simultaneously — each with a pivotal role in his life.</p>
<p>“I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points,” Bocuse said before publication of “Paul Bocuse: The Sacred Fire.” “Even if it seems a bit macho, I love women.”</p>
<p>He put an upbeat spin on his private life.</p>
<p>“If I calculate the number of years I’ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life, I get 145 years,” he is quoted as saying in “The Sacred Fire,” which was written by Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu — daughter of the most recent woman in his life, Patricia, whom he met in 1972.</p>
<p>Yet it is his wife Raymonde, with whom Bocuse had a daughter, Francoise, who helps watch over his restaurant.</p>
<p>Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy, Bocuse saw a restaurant’s reservation book as the real measure of any chef’s talent.</p>
<p>“If the restaurant works, if it’s full of clients ... whatever the cuisine, he (the chef) is right,” he said.</p>
<p>He is survived by his wife Raymonde, their daughter Francoise and a son, Jerome.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed.</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Paul Bocuse, the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world, a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities, has died at 91, French officials announced.</p>
<p>Often referred to as the “pope of French cuisine,” Bocuse was a tireless pioneer, the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics — branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe. His imposing physical stature and his larger-than-life personality matched his bold dreams and his far-flung accomplishments.</p>
<p>Bocuse died Saturday at Collonges-au-Mont-d’or, the place where he was born and had his restaurant, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.</p>
<p>“French gastronomy loses a mythical figure ... The chefs cry in their kitchens, at the Elysee (presidential palace) and everywhere in France,” Macron said.</p>
<p>Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that “Mister Paul was France. Simplicity and generosity. Excellence and art de vivre.”</p>
<p>Bocuse, who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005, had also been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s temple to French gastronomy, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France, has held three stars — without interruption — since 1965 in the Michelin guide, the bible of gastronomes.</p>
<p>As early as 1982, Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, headed by his son Jerome, also a chef. In recent years, Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon.</p>
<p>“He has been a leader. He took the cook out of the kitchen,” said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse, speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse. More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion — one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years.</p>
<p>“Monsieur Paul,” as he was known, was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified “The French Genius.” Shown in his trademark pose — arms folded over his crisp white apron, a tall chef’s hat, or “toque,” atop his head — he was winged by Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel, among other French luminaries.</p>
<p>While excelling in the business of cooking, Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love, creating a top class, quintessentially French meal. He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs.</p>
<p>“In cooking, there are those who are rap and those who are concerto,” he told the French newsmagazine L’Express before his 2005 biography, adding that he tended toward the concerto.</p>
<p>In traditional cooking like his, he said, there is no room for guess work.</p>
<p>“One must be immutable, unattackable, monumental,” he declared.</p>
<p>Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s, Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his world-famous restaurant even in retirement, keeping an eye on guests, sometimes greeting them at table.</p>
<p>The red-and-green Auberge by the Saone River, his name boldly set atop the roof, is a temple to Bocuse — who was born there — and to other great chefs. Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a “tromp l’oeuil” painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home. Renowned chefs, some of whom he worked with, are portrayed in a giant mural.</p>
<p>In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms. “But I changed the sheets,” he added with characteristic wry humor.</p>
<p>Born on Feb. 11, 1926, Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16. He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon, then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols, Fernand Point, whose cooking was a precursor to France’s nouvelle cuisine movement, with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s career in the kitchen traversed the ages. He went from apprenticeships and cooking “brigades,” as kitchen teams are known, when stoves were coal-fired and chefs also served as scullery maids, to the ultra-modern kitchen of his Auberge.</p>
<p>“There was rigor,” Bocuse told the AP. “(At La Mere Brazier) you had to wake up early and milk the cows, feed the pigs, do the laundry and cook .... It was a very tough school of hard knocks.”</p>
<p>“Today, the profession has changed enormously. There’s no more coal. You push a button and you have heat,” he said.</p>
<p>Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times, making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958, a second in 1960 and a third in 1965. Since then, his cooking has been defined by superlatives.</p>
<p>In 1989, Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault &amp; Millau, a noted guidebook. In 2011, the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century, opening a restaurant for students in his name. He maintained a special pride, however, in the blue, white and red stripes on his chef’s collar holding a large medal, attesting to his selection in 1961 as a “Meilleur Ouvrier de France,” a sought-after distinction for chefs and other artisans.</p>
<p>The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse’s L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition: simple, authentic food that was “identifiable” in its nature.</p>
<p>Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for then-French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, which is served to this day. Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken — from France’s Bresse region, which is famed for its poultry — served in cream with morilles, a spring mushroom.</p>
<p>And his favorite ingredient? Butter.</p>
<p>“(It’s a) magical product,” he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America. “Nothing replaces butter.”</p>
<p>Three other cooking must-haves, according to the chef, are fresh produce (his was from his own garden), good, trusted kitchen staff and happy diners.</p>
<p>“It’s the client who runs the house,” Bocuse said in the AP interview.</p>
<p>He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine, although he incorporated aspects of it. And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age. Georges Auguste Escoffier, who gave classic French cuisine a world profile, remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse’s table.</p>
<p>“Escoffier was the master of us all,” Bocuse has said.</p>
<p>World War II interrupted his kitchen duties. He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces, was wounded and cared for at a U.S. field hospital.</p>
<p>“I always say I have American blood in my veins because ... I had transfusions of American blood,” he told the AP. An American flag still flies outside his restaurant.</p>
<p>The war had a lasting impact on the chef.</p>
<p>“(It) forges the character,” he said. “You no longer have the same idea of life.”</p>
<p>Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets. Instead, he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food.</p>
<p>He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997. He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel. He planted restaurants in the south of France, in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan, where eight Bocuse brasseries, cafes and other establishments were opened.</p>
<p>But his pride is transmitting his savoir-faire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse, established in Lyon in 2004. His Bocuse d’Or, or gold award — an international competition for young chefs — has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987.</p>
<p>While Bocuse’s kitchens were meticulously in order, his personal life was on the unorthodox side. He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women — simultaneously — each with a pivotal role in his life.</p>
<p>“I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points,” Bocuse said before publication of “Paul Bocuse: The Sacred Fire.” “Even if it seems a bit macho, I love women.”</p>
<p>He put an upbeat spin on his private life.</p>
<p>“If I calculate the number of years I’ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life, I get 145 years,” he is quoted as saying in “The Sacred Fire,” which was written by Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu — daughter of the most recent woman in his life, Patricia, whom he met in 1972.</p>
<p>Yet it is his wife Raymonde, with whom Bocuse had a daughter, Francoise, who helps watch over his restaurant.</p>
<p>Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy, Bocuse saw a restaurant’s reservation book as the real measure of any chef’s talent.</p>
<p>“If the restaurant works, if it’s full of clients ... whatever the cuisine, he (the chef) is right,” he said.</p>
<p>He is survived by his wife Raymonde, their daughter Francoise and a son, Jerome.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed.</p> | Paul Bocuse, globe-trotting master of French cuisine, dies | false | https://apnews.com/a3e45e0f8fd44ca7b51e026b8b3dbbee | 2018-01-20 | 2least
| 3,058 | PARIS AP 8212 Paul Bocuse the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities has died at 91 French officials announced Often referred to as the 8220pope of French cuisine8221 Bocuse was a tireless pioneer the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics 8212 branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe His imposing physical stature and his largerthanlife personality matched his bold dreams and his farflung accomplishments Bocuse died Saturday at CollongesauMontd8217or the place where he was born and had his restaurant French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement 8220French gastronomy loses a mythical figure The chefs cry in their kitchens at the Elysee presidential palace and everywhere in France8221 Macron said Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that 8220Mister Paul was France Simplicity and generosity Excellence and art de vivre8221 Bocuse who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005 had also been suffering from Parkinson8217s disease Bocuse8217s temple to French gastronomy L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France has held three stars 8212 without interruption 8212 since 1965 in the Michelin guide the bible of gastronomes As early as 1982 Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World8217s Epcot Center in Orlando Florida headed by his son Jerome also a chef In recent years Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon 8220He has been a leader He took the cook out of the kitchen8221 said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion 8212 one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years 8220Monsieur Paul8221 as he was known was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified 8220The French Genius8221 Shown in his trademark pose 8212 arms folded over his crisp white apron a tall chef8217s hat or 8220toque8221 atop his head 8212 he was winged by Marie Curie Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel among other French luminaries While excelling in the business of cooking Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love creating a top class quintessentially French meal He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs 8220In cooking there are those who are rap and those who are concerto8221 he told the French newsmagazine L8217Express before his 2005 biography adding that he tended toward the concerto In traditional cooking like his he said there is no room for guess work 8220One must be immutable unattackable monumental8221 he declared Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his worldfamous restaurant even in retirement keeping an eye on guests sometimes greeting them at table The redandgreen Auberge by the Saone River his name boldly set atop the roof is a temple to Bocuse 8212 who was born there 8212 and to other great chefs Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a 8220tromp l8217oeuil8221 painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home Renowned chefs some of whom he worked with are portrayed in a giant mural In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms 8220But I changed the sheets8221 he added with characteristic wry humor Born on Feb 11 1926 Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16 He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols Fernand Point whose cooking was a precursor to France8217s nouvelle cuisine movement with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables Bocuse8217s career in the kitchen traversed the ages He went from apprenticeships and cooking 8220brigades8221 as kitchen teams are known when stoves were coalfired and chefs also served as scullery maids to the ultramodern kitchen of his Auberge 8220There was rigor8221 Bocuse told the AP 8220At La Mere Brazier you had to wake up early and milk the cows feed the pigs do the laundry and cook It was a very tough school of hard knocks8221 8220Today the profession has changed enormously There8217s no more coal You push a button and you have heat8221 he said Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958 a second in 1960 and a third in 1965 Since then his cooking has been defined by superlatives In 1989 Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault ampamp Millau a noted guidebook In 2011 the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century opening a restaurant for students in his name He maintained a special pride however in the blue white and red stripes on his chef8217s collar holding a large medal attesting to his selection in 1961 as a 8220Meilleur Ouvrier de France8221 a soughtafter distinction for chefs and other artisans The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse8217s L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition simple authentic food that was 8220identifiable8221 in its nature Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for thenFrench President Valery Giscard d8217Estaing which is served to this day Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken 8212 from France8217s Bresse region which is famed for its poultry 8212 served in cream with morilles a spring mushroom And his favorite ingredient Butter 8220It8217s a magical product8221 he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America 8220Nothing replaces butter8221 Three other cooking musthaves according to the chef are fresh produce his was from his own garden good trusted kitchen staff and happy diners 8220It8217s the client who runs the house8221 Bocuse said in the AP interview He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine although he incorporated aspects of it And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age Georges Auguste Escoffier who gave classic French cuisine a world profile remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse8217s table 8220Escoffier was the master of us all8221 Bocuse has said World War II interrupted his kitchen duties He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces was wounded and cared for at a US field hospital 8220I always say I have American blood in my veins because I had transfusions of American blood8221 he told the AP An American flag still flies outside his restaurant The war had a lasting impact on the chef 8220It forges the character8221 he said 8220You no longer have the same idea of life8221 Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets Instead he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997 He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel He planted restaurants in the south of France in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan where eight Bocuse brasseries cafes and other establishments were opened But his pride is transmitting his savoirfaire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse established in Lyon in 2004 His Bocuse d8217Or or gold award 8212 an international competition for young chefs 8212 has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987 While Bocuse8217s kitchens were meticulously in order his personal life was on the unorthodox side He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women 8212 simultaneously 8212 each with a pivotal role in his life 8220I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points8221 Bocuse said before publication of 8220Paul Bocuse The Sacred Fire8221 8220Even if it seems a bit macho I love women8221 He put an upbeat spin on his private life 8220If I calculate the number of years I8217ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life I get 145 years8221 he is quoted as saying in 8220The Sacred Fire8221 which was written by EveMarie ZizzaLalu 8212 daughter of the most recent woman in his life Patricia whom he met in 1972 Yet it is his wife Raymonde with whom Bocuse had a daughter Francoise who helps watch over his restaurant Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy Bocuse saw a restaurant8217s reservation book as the real measure of any chef8217s talent 8220If the restaurant works if it8217s full of clients whatever the cuisine he the chef is right8221 he said He is survived by his wife Raymonde their daughter Francoise and a son Jerome ___ Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed PARIS AP 8212 Paul Bocuse the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities has died at 91 French officials announced Often referred to as the 8220pope of French cuisine8221 Bocuse was a tireless pioneer the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics 8212 branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe His imposing physical stature and his largerthanlife personality matched his bold dreams and his farflung accomplishments Bocuse died Saturday at CollongesauMontd8217or the place where he was born and had his restaurant French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement 8220French gastronomy loses a mythical figure The chefs cry in their kitchens at the Elysee presidential palace and everywhere in France8221 Macron said Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that 8220Mister Paul was France Simplicity and generosity Excellence and art de vivre8221 Bocuse who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005 had also been suffering from Parkinson8217s disease Bocuse8217s temple to French gastronomy L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France has held three stars 8212 without interruption 8212 since 1965 in the Michelin guide the bible of gastronomes As early as 1982 Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World8217s Epcot Center in Orlando Florida headed by his son Jerome also a chef In recent years Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon 8220He has been a leader He took the cook out of the kitchen8221 said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion 8212 one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years 8220Monsieur Paul8221 as he was known was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified 8220The French Genius8221 Shown in his trademark pose 8212 arms folded over his crisp white apron a tall chef8217s hat or 8220toque8221 atop his head 8212 he was winged by Marie Curie Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel among other French luminaries While excelling in the business of cooking Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love creating a top class quintessentially French meal He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs 8220In cooking there are those who are rap and those who are concerto8221 he told the French newsmagazine L8217Express before his 2005 biography adding that he tended toward the concerto In traditional cooking like his he said there is no room for guess work 8220One must be immutable unattackable monumental8221 he declared Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his worldfamous restaurant even in retirement keeping an eye on guests sometimes greeting them at table The redandgreen Auberge by the Saone River his name boldly set atop the roof is a temple to Bocuse 8212 who was born there 8212 and to other great chefs Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a 8220tromp l8217oeuil8221 painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home Renowned chefs some of whom he worked with are portrayed in a giant mural In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms 8220But I changed the sheets8221 he added with characteristic wry humor Born on Feb 11 1926 Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16 He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols Fernand Point whose cooking was a precursor to France8217s nouvelle cuisine movement with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables Bocuse8217s career in the kitchen traversed the ages He went from apprenticeships and cooking 8220brigades8221 as kitchen teams are known when stoves were coalfired and chefs also served as scullery maids to the ultramodern kitchen of his Auberge 8220There was rigor8221 Bocuse told the AP 8220At La Mere Brazier you had to wake up early and milk the cows feed the pigs do the laundry and cook It was a very tough school of hard knocks8221 8220Today the profession has changed enormously There8217s no more coal You push a button and you have heat8221 he said Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958 a second in 1960 and a third in 1965 Since then his cooking has been defined by superlatives In 1989 Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault ampamp Millau a noted guidebook In 2011 the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century opening a restaurant for students in his name He maintained a special pride however in the blue white and red stripes on his chef8217s collar holding a large medal attesting to his selection in 1961 as a 8220Meilleur Ouvrier de France8221 a soughtafter distinction for chefs and other artisans The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse8217s L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition simple authentic food that was 8220identifiable8221 in its nature Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for thenFrench President Valery Giscard d8217Estaing which is served to this day Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken 8212 from France8217s Bresse region which is famed for its poultry 8212 served in cream with morilles a spring mushroom And his favorite ingredient Butter 8220It8217s a magical product8221 he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America 8220Nothing replaces butter8221 Three other cooking musthaves according to the chef are fresh produce his was from his own garden good trusted kitchen staff and happy diners 8220It8217s the client who runs the house8221 Bocuse said in the AP interview He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine although he incorporated aspects of it And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age Georges Auguste Escoffier who gave classic French cuisine a world profile remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse8217s table 8220Escoffier was the master of us all8221 Bocuse has said World War II interrupted his kitchen duties He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces was wounded and cared for at a US field hospital 8220I always say I have American blood in my veins because I had transfusions of American blood8221 he told the AP An American flag still flies outside his restaurant The war had a lasting impact on the chef 8220It forges the character8221 he said 8220You no longer have the same idea of life8221 Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets Instead he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997 He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel He planted restaurants in the south of France in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan where eight Bocuse brasseries cafes and other establishments were opened But his pride is transmitting his savoirfaire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse established in Lyon in 2004 His Bocuse d8217Or or gold award 8212 an international competition for young chefs 8212 has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987 While Bocuse8217s kitchens were meticulously in order his personal life was on the unorthodox side He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women 8212 simultaneously 8212 each with a pivotal role in his life 8220I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points8221 Bocuse said before publication of 8220Paul Bocuse The Sacred Fire8221 8220Even if it seems a bit macho I love women8221 He put an upbeat spin on his private life 8220If I calculate the number of years I8217ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life I get 145 years8221 he is quoted as saying in 8220The Sacred Fire8221 which was written by EveMarie ZizzaLalu 8212 daughter of the most recent woman in his life Patricia whom he met in 1972 Yet it is his wife Raymonde with whom Bocuse had a daughter Francoise who helps watch over his restaurant Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy Bocuse saw a restaurant8217s reservation book as the real measure of any chef8217s talent 8220If the restaurant works if it8217s full of clients whatever the cuisine he the chef is right8221 he said He is survived by his wife Raymonde their daughter Francoise and a son Jerome ___ Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Paul/PROPN Bocuse/PROPN the/DET master/NOUN chef/NOUN who/PRON defined/VERB French/ADJ cuisine/NOUN for/ADP more/ADJ than/ADP half/DET a/PRON century/NOUN and/CCONJ put/VERB it/PRON on/ADP tables/NOUN around/ADP the/DET world/NOUN a/DET man/NOUN who/PRON raised/VERB the/DET profile/NOUN of/ADP top/ADJ chefs/NOUN from/ADP invisible/ADJ kitchen/NOUN artists/NOUN to/ADP international/ADJ celebrities/NOUN has/AUX died/VERB at/ADP 91/NUM French/ADJ officials/NOUN announced/VERB Often/ADV referred/VERB to/ADP as/SCONJ the/DET 8220pope/NOUN of/ADP French/ADJ cuisine8221/PROPN Bocuse/PROPN was/AUX a/DET tireless/ADJ pioneer/NOUN the/DET first/ADJ chef/NOUN to/PART blend/VERB the/DET art/NOUN of/ADP cooking/VERB with/ADP savvy/ADJ business/NOUN tactics/NOUN 8212/NUM branding/VERB his/PRON cuisine/NOUN and/CCONJ his/PRON image/NOUN to/PART 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<p>Fed chief Ben Bernanke has embarked on a radical and ruinous financial rescue plan. According to Bloomberg News, the Fed has already lent or committed $12.8 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the the bursting of Wall Street’s speculative mega-bubble. Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole, by creating programs that will provide up to $2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans. The Fed’s generous terms are expected to generate a flurry of speculation which will help strengthen the banking system while leaving the taxpayer to bear the losses.&#160; It is impossible to know what the long-term effects of Bernanke’s excessive spending will be, but his plan has the potential to trigger hyperinflation or spark a run on the dollar.</p>
<p>Bernanke’s zero-percent interest rates, multi-trillion dollar lending facilities and bank bailouts do not fit within the Fed’s narrow mandate of “price stability and full employment”. There are also myriad problems with Bernanke’s lending facilities which are nothing more than a crafty way of transferring wealth from the Fed to private industry via low interest loans. The Central Bank is not supposed to “pick winners” as it is blatantly doing. Businesses outside the financial sector cannot exchange their downgraded garbage with the Fed for semi-permanent, rotating loans; so why should underwater investment banks and hedge funds get special treatment? The facilities represent a gift to financial institutions giving them an unfair advantage.</p>
<p>Besides the $2 trillion for the Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility (TALF) and the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP), the Fed will also provide a multi-billion dollar backstop for the FDIC as bank closures continue to snowball and more reserves are needed to shore up the system. That means that the Fed’s balance sheet could mushroom to over $4 trillion by the end of 2010.&#160; The Treasury has already agreed in principle to assume full responsibility for the Fed’s lending facilities (as well as the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns) as soon as the financial system stabilizes. By providing loans and US Treasuries to failing companies, instead of capital, Bernanke has sidestepped Congress, thus, undermining the spirit and the letter of the law. Congress has approved a mere $1.5 trillion of the nearly $13 trillion for which taxpayers are now responsible.</p>
<p>The recent 22 percent uptick in the stock market is a sign that Bernanke’s monetary stimulus is beginning to kick in. Oil rose from $33 per barrel to over $50 in little more than a month. Other raw materials have followed oil. The dollar has plunged every time the stock market has gone up. These are all signs of nascent inflation which is likely to accelerate after the current period of deleveraging ends. Food and energy prices will rise sharply and the dollar will come under greater and greater pressure. This is Bernanke’s nightmare scenario; a surge in inflation that forces him to raise rates and kill the recovery before it ever begins. The Fed’s unwillingness to be proactive in dealing with credit bubbles has created a situation where there are no easy answers or pain-free solutions.</p>
<p>Bernanke’s approach to the crisis has been wrongheaded from the get-go. It makes no sense to commit nearly $13 trillion to prop up a grossly oversized financial system while providing less than $900 billion stimulus for the real economy. The whole plan is upside-down. It’s consumers, homeowners and workers that create demand (consumer spending is 72 per cent of GDP) and yet, they’ve been left to twist in the wind while the bulk of the resources has been directed to financial speculators who are responsible for the mess. Middle class families have seen their retirements slashed in half and their home equity vanish, while their jobs become increasingly less secure. The Fed and the Treasury should be focused on debt relief, mortgage cram-downs, jobs programs and open-ended support for state and local governments. Rebuilding the financial infrastructure for extending more credit to people that are already underwater is beyond shortsighted; it’s cruel. The financial system needs to shrink to fit the new reality of a smaller economy. That means that Bernanke should aggressively mark-down the dodgy collateral he’s been accepting (the collateral should reflect current market prices) and force many of the weaker institutions into bankruptcy. This is the fairest and fastest way to shake the deadwood from the financial system.&#160; Keeping asset prices artificially inflated only puts off the inevitable day of reckoning.</p>
<p>The IMF Communique to the G 20:</p>
<p>“The prolonged financial crisis has battered global activity beyond what was previously anticipated. Global GDP is estimated to have fallen by&#160; unprecedented 5 per cent in the fourth quarter, led by the advanced economies, which contracted by 7 per cent. GDP declined by around 6 per cent in both the United States and Europe, while it plummeted at a post-war record of 13 per cent in Japan. Growth also plunged across a broad swath of emerging economies … against this backdrop, global activity is expected to contract in 2009 for the first time in 60 years.”</p>
<p>Bernanke’s monetary stimulus strategy will do little to mitigate the severity of the contraction which has already gripped every sector of the economy. Credit more than doubled in the first few years of the new millennium. In fact,&#160; total system credit jumped from $1.75 trillion in 2000 to $4.4 trillion in 2007. At the same time, the Current Account Deficit–which averaged about $100 billion per year during the 1990s– ballooned to $788 billion in 2006. Clearly, the Fed’s flood of low interest credit coupled with unsustainable deficits put the country on course for a major catastrophe. (Greenspan still says he never saw it coming) Now that the bubble has burst,&#160; Bernanke, has gone into panic-mode, is frantically firehosing the entire financial system with&#160; liquidity, but with little effect. Here’s the economist Henry Liu:</p>
<p>&#160; “Globally, the dollar-denominated financial system has seen its equity market capitalization value fall by between 40-60 per cent by February 2009….On October 31, 2007, the total market value of publicly-traded companies around the world was $62.6 trillion.&#160; By December 31, 2008, the value had dropped nearly half to $31.7 trillion.&#160; The gap of lost wealth, $30.9 trillion, is approximately the combined annual Gross Domestic Product of the US, Western Europe, and Japan….&#160; Family net worth hit a record high of $64.36 trillion in 2nd quarter of 2007. By 4th quarter 2008, it fell to $51.48 trillion, a loss of $12.88 trillion.</p>
<p>To restore the wealth lost in the current financial crisis, the Treasury would have to monetize some $30 trillion of toxic assets, almost ten times what the Geithner Treasury is currently contemplating, and twice the size of current US annual GDP. Add to that about $10 trillion of value lost in the collapse of commodity prices and another $10 trillion in real property values, and we have a wealth loss of $50 trillion.” (Obama’s Politics of Change and US Policy on China, Asia Times.)</p>
<p>Nearly half of the world’s wealth has been consumed in one gigantic capital bonfire. No amount of “quantitative easing” will undo the damage to the economy. Here’s a clip from Merrill Lynch’s David Rosenberg adding more perspective to Liu’s comments:</p>
<p>“Government cannot prevent nature from taking its course. While an additional $1.15 trillion expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet is large as a stand-alone event, it really is just a drop in the bucket when one considers that there is still almost $8 trillion of combined household and business sector credit that must be unwound in order to mean-revert the private sector-to-GDP ratio (which is still close to a record-high). Once again, the government is cushioning the blow, but cannot prevent nature from taking its course.</p>
<p>(We) feel much more confident that corporate earnings are going to slide again this year….The economy continues to contract … job losses, declining equity and housing wealth, and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending. Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment. US exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession”. This is with the Fed funds rate effectively at zero. It’s pretty clear that the Fed does not see any flicker of light at the end of the tunnel just yet. Mr. Market may be in for yet another surprise.” (Interview with David Rosenberg, Tech Ticker)</p>
<p>The system-wide contraction can’t be stopped by supporting financial institutions that made bad bets or took on perilous amounts of debt leaving them deep in the red. Fed lending should be aimed at companies that need temporary help only, like rolling over loans or getting through a rough patch while inventories are trimmed and consumers retrench. Similarly, the stimulus (monetary or fiscal) shouldn’t be used to reflate assets or to try to reverse the market correction, but to maintain aggregate demand, take up slack in the sluggish economy, create jobs, and soften the blow for the victims of Wall Street’s bubblenomics. Bernanke has used monetary stimulus in precisely the way it should not be used, to keep asset prices artificially high despite the cooling off in the stock market, falling corporate profits, and the steeply rising unemployment. There should be a sharp reduction in the amount lending to financial institutions, reflecting the decline in the value of the underlying assets which are now priced at roughly 30 cents on the dollar. Bernanke’s job is to wind-down these positions, not perpetuate the problem at the taxpayer’s expense.</p>
<p>According to Bloomberg:</p>
<p>“The Federal Reserve’s top two officials assured that they will pull back their emergency- credit programs once the crisis fades, even as they prepare to flood the system further with an excess of $1 trillion.</p>
<p>Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday in Charlotte, North Carolina that the Fed must retain the flexibility to withdraw its record cash injections to restrain prices. Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said in Wooster, Ohio, “the trick will be unwinding this balance sheet in a timely way to avoid inflation.”</p>
<p>This is pure fiction. Bernanke has no exit strategy because the collateral the Fed now holds on its books will never regain anything near its original value. Securitization turned 80 per cent of shaky subprime loans into AAA assets for which the Fed is now providing full value vis a vis its low interest loans. The Fed chief has made the same bad bet that the financial institutions made, and is now adding to that mistake by buying $750 billion in junk loans from Fannie and Freddie and $300 billion in US Treasurys to push investors out of the safety of cash back into the market. It’s lunacy. All of this is putting more and more pressure on the dollar which could experience severe dislocation if Bernanke does not make a reasonable attempt to do what is necessary to resolve the banks, shore up consumer spending, shut down underwater financial institutions (auction their toxic assets through a RTC government-run facility) and stop trying to reassemble a broken system.</p>
<p>Bernanke has no plan for expanding conventional lending or strengthening the parts of the system that still work. All his efforts have been focused on salvaging insolvent banks and restarting securitization. Securitization–transforming pools of loans into securities—was Wall Street’s Golden Goose, a privately-owned credit-generating mechanism which created windfall profits by selling radioactive waste to over-trustful investors. Securitization is the epicenter of the shadow banking system, the mostly-unregulated universe of opaque debt-instruments, off balance sheet operations, and massively over-leveraged financial institutions. Securitization broke down after subprime mortgages began defaulting in record numbers sending risk-adverse investors scuttling for the exits. To illustrate how frozen the securitzation market is at present, here’s the Wall Street Journal:</p>
<p>“Outside the market where the Fed is a buyer for securities backed by mortgage loans that conform to Fannie and Freddie standards, there hasn’t been a new deal since 2007, according to FTN Financial, a fixed-income broker dealer.” (Wall Street Journal, Credit Markets Still Navigate in a Choppy Sea of Liquidity)</p>
<p>Repeat: “No new deals since 2007.”</p>
<p>Again from the Wall Street Journal:</p>
<p>“Banks and other finance companies making loans for autos, credit cards and college tuition are having virtually no success in selling those loans to other investors, a potent sign of just how tight credit markets remain.</p>
<p>The market for selling such loans — by packaging, or securitizing, them into bonds — had just one $500 million deal for all of October, according to Barclays Capital. That compares with $50.7 billion worth of deals made one year earlier, according to market-research firm Dealogic.” (Bond Woes Choke off some Credit to Consumers, Wall Street Journal, Robin Sidel)</p>
<p>Securitzation is dead, and yet, Bernanke and Geithner want to shovel another $2 trillion into this black hole hoping to lure investors back to the market. Why? Because Wall Street financiers and bank mandarins see securitization as an efficient model that can be exported into any market around the world. The repackaging of debt into complex instruments, that can be stealthily created in off balance sheet operations requiring smaller and smaller slices of capital, is the essential flimflam product that Wall Street intends to use to dominate global financial markets. Keeping securitization alive is ultimately about economic power. That is why Bernanke will spare no expense trying to resuscitate this failed system.</p>
<p>What’s so destructive about securitzation&#160;is that it allows the banks to create credit out of thin air through unregulated, clandestine operations, which eliminate transparency and makes it impossible for the Fed to control the money supply. David Roache explains how this works in an excerpt from his book “New Monetarism” which appeared in the Wall Street Journal:</p>
<p>“The reason for the exponential growth in credit, but not in broad money, was simply that banks didn’t keep their loans on their books any more-and only loans on bank balance sheets get counted as money. Now, as soon as banks made a loan, they “securitized” it and moved it off their balance sheet.</p>
<p>There were two ways of doing this. One was to sell the securitized loan as a bond. The other was “synthetic” securitization: for example, using derivatives to get rid of the default risk (with credit default swaps) and lock in the interest rate due on the loan (with interest-rate swaps). Both forms of securitization meant that the lending bank was free to make new loans without using up any of its lending capacity once its existing loans had been “securitized.”</p>
<p>So, to redefine liquidity under what I call New Monetarism, one must add, to the traditional definition of broad money, all the credit being created and moved off banks’ balance sheets and onto the balance sheets of nonbank financial intermediaries. This new form of liquidity changed the very nature of the credit beast. What now determined credit growth was risk appetite: the readiness of companies and individuals to run their businesses with higher levels of debt. (Wall Street Journal)</p>
<p>The banks have been creating trillions of dollars of credit&#160; without maintaining adequate capital reserves to back them up. That explains why the banks were so eager to provide mortgages to millions of loan applicants who had no documentation, no income, no collateral and a bad credit history. They believed there was no risk, because they were making enormous profits without tying up any of their capital.</p>
<p>THE ECONOMY’S LIFE’S BLOOD IN PRIVATE HANDS</p>
<p>As Barack Obama says, “Credit is the economy’s life’s-blood”. It should not be part of a secretive process which is kept off-book and controlled by men whose solitary goal is fattening the bottom line for short-term gain. The reason securitization failed is because the banks put profit above their responsibility to perform due diligence on their loans. In other words, securitization created incentives for fraud, which is why the system eventually collapsed. Still, Bernanke is determined to do Wall Street’s bidding and spend another $2 trillion trying to rev up the securitization engine.</p>
<p>A&#160; recent letter by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “Fed Confronts Financial Crisis by Expanding Its Role as Lender of Last Resort” helps to shed some light on the Fed’s real intentions:</p>
<p>“In a modern financial system, securities-funded lending has replaced the banking system as the predominant credit source for households and nonfinancial firms. Because of this development, it can be appropriate to extend the lender of last resort role to temporarily support some nonbank credit sources….</p>
<p>It’s against this backdrop that the Fed has extended its role as lender of last resort beyond banks. Since late 2007, the central bank has supported key credit flows funded by securities, extending loans on nonfinancial corporations’ commercial paper, residential mortgage-backed securities and nonbank financial companies’ loans to consumers and businesses.</p>
<p>The Fed actions recognize the dramatic shift toward debt funded through securities markets. At the end of 1979, securities funded about 33 percent of household, nonfinancial corporate and nonfarm business debt. By the third quarter of 2008, that figure had risen to around 64 percent .</p>
<p>A closer look reveals that household debt became significantly more dependent on market funding, largely reflecting the increased importance of asset-backed securities (ABS) in funding mortgages and consumer loans. Even the share of nonfinancial corporate debt funded by securities rose considerably over the same period—from 57 per cent to 76 per cent.”</p>
<p>76 percent! Is it any wonder why the global economy has been sucked into a bottomless abyss; why auto sales are down 40 per cent or more, why global trade is down 35 per cent or more, why unemployment is skyrocketing, manufacturing is stalling and consumer confidence is plunging?</p>
<p>The Fed has allowed an unregulated and untested privately-controlled “credit generating” shadow banking system to infect the broader economy and create a nation of credit addicts which are entirely at the mercy of unpredictable market fluctuations. Is this how the economy’s “life’s blood” should be distributed?</p>
<p>The only reason this occult system was allowed to flourish–with the tacit support of the Fed and the Treasury– was because it threw open the profit-sluicegates for the banks and Wall Street speculators who made more money than anyone ever thought possible. Clearly, this is what motivates Bernanke and Geithner. These are their real constituents.</p>
<p>MIKE WHITNEY can be reached at <a href="mailto:fergiewhitney@msn.com" type="external">fergiewhitney@msn.com</a></p> | Bernanke’s Financial Rescue Plan | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/04/06/bernanke-s-financial-rescue-plan/ | 2009-04-06 | 4left
| 3,058 | Fed chief Ben Bernanke has embarked on a radical and ruinous financial rescue plan According to Bloomberg News the Fed has already lent or committed 128 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the the bursting of Wall Street8217s speculative megabubble Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole by creating programs that will provide up to 2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans The Fed8217s generous terms are expected to generate a flurry of speculation which will help strengthen the banking system while leaving the taxpayer to bear the lossesamp160 It is impossible to know what the longterm effects of Bernanke8217s excessive spending will be but his plan has the potential to trigger hyperinflation or spark a run on the dollar Bernanke8217s zeropercent interest rates multitrillion dollar lending facilities and bank bailouts do not fit within the Fed8217s narrow mandate of 8220price stability and full employment8221 There are also myriad problems with Bernanke8217s lending facilities which are nothing more than a crafty way of transferring wealth from the Fed to private industry via low interest loans The Central Bank is not supposed to 8220pick winners8221 as it is blatantly doing Businesses outside the financial sector cannot exchange their downgraded garbage with the Fed for semipermanent rotating loans so why should underwater investment banks and hedge funds get special treatment The facilities represent a gift to financial institutions giving them an unfair advantage Besides the 2 trillion for the Term AssetBacked Lending Facility TALF and the PublicPrivate Investment Program PPIP the Fed will also provide a multibillion dollar backstop for the FDIC as bank closures continue to snowball and more reserves are needed to shore up the system That means that the Fed8217s balance sheet could mushroom to over 4 trillion by the end of 2010amp160 The Treasury has already agreed in principle to assume full responsibility for the Fed8217s lending facilities as well as the bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns as soon as the financial system stabilizes By providing loans and US Treasuries to failing companies instead of capital Bernanke has sidestepped Congress thus undermining the spirit and the letter of the law Congress has approved a mere 15 trillion of the nearly 13 trillion for which taxpayers are now responsible The recent 22 percent uptick in the stock market is a sign that Bernanke8217s monetary stimulus is beginning to kick in Oil rose from 33 per barrel to over 50 in little more than a month Other raw materials have followed oil The dollar has plunged every time the stock market has gone up These are all signs of nascent inflation which is likely to accelerate after the current period of deleveraging ends Food and energy prices will rise sharply and the dollar will come under greater and greater pressure This is Bernanke8217s nightmare scenario a surge in inflation that forces him to raise rates and kill the recovery before it ever begins The Fed8217s unwillingness to be proactive in dealing with credit bubbles has created a situation where there are no easy answers or painfree solutions Bernanke8217s approach to the crisis has been wrongheaded from the getgo It makes no sense to commit nearly 13 trillion to prop up a grossly oversized financial system while providing less than 900 billion stimulus for the real economy The whole plan is upsidedown It8217s consumers homeowners and workers that create demand consumer spending is 72 per cent of GDP and yet they8217ve been left to twist in the wind while the bulk of the resources has been directed to financial speculators who are responsible for the mess Middle class families have seen their retirements slashed in half and their home equity vanish while their jobs become increasingly less secure The Fed and the Treasury should be focused on debt relief mortgage cramdowns jobs programs and openended support for state and local governments Rebuilding the financial infrastructure for extending more credit to people that are already underwater is beyond shortsighted it8217s cruel The financial system needs to shrink to fit the new reality of a smaller economy That means that Bernanke should aggressively markdown the dodgy collateral he8217s been accepting the collateral should reflect current market prices and force many of the weaker institutions into bankruptcy This is the fairest and fastest way to shake the deadwood from the financial systemamp160 Keeping asset prices artificially inflated only puts off the inevitable day of reckoning The IMF Communique to the G 20 8220The prolonged financial crisis has battered global activity beyond what was previously anticipated Global GDP is estimated to have fallen byamp160 unprecedented 5 per cent in the fourth quarter led by the advanced economies which contracted by 7 per cent GDP declined by around 6 per cent in both the United States and Europe while it plummeted at a postwar record of 13 per cent in Japan Growth also plunged across a broad swath of emerging economies 8230 against this backdrop global activity is expected to contract in 2009 for the first time in 60 years8221 Bernanke8217s monetary stimulus strategy will do little to mitigate the severity of the contraction which has already gripped every sector of the economy Credit more than doubled in the first few years of the new millennium In factamp160 total system credit jumped from 175 trillion in 2000 to 44 trillion in 2007 At the same time the Current Account Deficit8211which averaged about 100 billion per year during the 1990s8211 ballooned to 788 billion in 2006 Clearly the Fed8217s flood of low interest credit coupled with unsustainable deficits put the country on course for a major catastrophe Greenspan still says he never saw it coming Now that the bubble has burstamp160 Bernanke has gone into panicmode is frantically firehosing the entire financial system withamp160 liquidity but with little effect Here8217s the economist Henry Liu amp160 8220Globally the dollardenominated financial system has seen its equity market capitalization value fall by between 4060 per cent by February 20098230On October 31 2007 the total market value of publiclytraded companies around the world was 626 trillionamp160 By December 31 2008 the value had dropped nearly half to 317 trillionamp160 The gap of lost wealth 309 trillion is approximately the combined annual Gross Domestic Product of the US Western Europe and Japan8230amp160 Family net worth hit a record high of 6436 trillion in 2nd quarter of 2007 By 4th quarter 2008 it fell to 5148 trillion a loss of 1288 trillion To restore the wealth lost in the current financial crisis the Treasury would have to monetize some 30 trillion of toxic assets almost ten times what the Geithner Treasury is currently contemplating and twice the size of current US annual GDP Add to that about 10 trillion of value lost in the collapse of commodity prices and another 10 trillion in real property values and we have a wealth loss of 50 trillion8221 Obama8217s Politics of Change and US Policy on China Asia Times Nearly half of the world8217s wealth has been consumed in one gigantic capital bonfire No amount of 8220quantitative easing8221 will undo the damage to the economy Here8217s a clip from Merrill Lynch8217s David Rosenberg adding more perspective to Liu8217s comments 8220Government cannot prevent nature from taking its course While an additional 115 trillion expansion of the Fed8217s balance sheet is large as a standalone event it really is just a drop in the bucket when one considers that there is still almost 8 trillion of combined household and business sector credit that must be unwound in order to meanrevert the private sectortoGDP ratio which is still close to a recordhigh Once again the government is cushioning the blow but cannot prevent nature from taking its course We feel much more confident that corporate earnings are going to slide again this year8230The economy continues to contract 8230 job losses declining equity and housing wealth and tight credit conditions have weighed on consumer sentiment and spending Weaker sales prospects and difficulties in obtaining credit have led businesses to cut back on inventories and fixed investment US exports have slumped as a number of major trading partners have also fallen into recession8221 This is with the Fed funds rate effectively at zero It8217s pretty clear that the Fed does not see any flicker of light at the end of the tunnel just yet Mr Market may be in for yet another surprise8221 Interview with David Rosenberg Tech Ticker The systemwide contraction can8217t be stopped by supporting financial institutions that made bad bets or took on perilous amounts of debt leaving them deep in the red Fed lending should be aimed at companies that need temporary help only like rolling over loans or getting through a rough patch while inventories are trimmed and consumers retrench Similarly the stimulus monetary or fiscal shouldn8217t be used to reflate assets or to try to reverse the market correction but to maintain aggregate demand take up slack in the sluggish economy create jobs and soften the blow for the victims of Wall Street8217s bubblenomics Bernanke has used monetary stimulus in precisely the way it should not be used to keep asset prices artificially high despite the cooling off in the stock market falling corporate profits and the steeply rising unemployment There should be a sharp reduction in the amount lending to financial institutions reflecting the decline in the value of the underlying assets which are now priced at roughly 30 cents on the dollar Bernanke8217s job is to winddown these positions not perpetuate the problem at the taxpayer8217s expense According to Bloomberg 8220The Federal Reserve8217s top two officials assured that they will pull back their emergency credit programs once the crisis fades even as they prepare to flood the system further with an excess of 1 trillion Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday in Charlotte North Carolina that the Fed must retain the flexibility to withdraw its record cash injections to restrain prices Vice Chairman Donald Kohn said in Wooster Ohio 8220the trick will be unwinding this balance sheet in a timely way to avoid inflation8221 This is pure fiction Bernanke has no exit strategy because the collateral the Fed now holds on its books will never regain anything near its original value Securitization turned 80 per cent of shaky subprime loans into AAA assets for which the Fed is now providing full value vis a vis its low interest loans The Fed chief has made the same bad bet that the financial institutions made and is now adding to that mistake by buying 750 billion in junk loans from Fannie and Freddie and 300 billion in US Treasurys to push investors out of the safety of cash back into the market It8217s lunacy All of this is putting more and more pressure on the dollar which could experience severe dislocation if Bernanke does not make a reasonable attempt to do what is necessary to resolve the banks shore up consumer spending shut down underwater financial institutions auction their toxic assets through a RTC governmentrun facility and stop trying to reassemble a broken system Bernanke has no plan for expanding conventional lending or strengthening the parts of the system that still work All his efforts have been focused on salvaging insolvent banks and restarting securitization Securitization8211transforming pools of loans into securities8212was Wall Street8217s Golden Goose a privatelyowned creditgenerating mechanism which created windfall profits by selling radioactive waste to overtrustful investors Securitization is the epicenter of the shadow banking system the mostlyunregulated universe of opaque debtinstruments off balance sheet operations and massively overleveraged financial institutions Securitization broke down after subprime mortgages began defaulting in record numbers sending riskadverse investors scuttling for the exits To illustrate how frozen the securitzation market is at present here8217s the Wall Street Journal 8220Outside the market where the Fed is a buyer for securities backed by mortgage loans that conform to Fannie and Freddie standards there hasn8217t been a new deal since 2007 according to FTN Financial a fixedincome broker dealer8221 Wall Street Journal Credit Markets Still Navigate in a Choppy Sea of Liquidity Repeat 8220No new deals since 20078221 Again from the Wall Street Journal 8220Banks and other finance companies making loans for autos credit cards and college tuition are having virtually no success in selling those loans to other investors a potent sign of just how tight credit markets remain The market for selling such loans 8212 by packaging or securitizing them into bonds 8212 had just one 500 million deal for all of October according to Barclays Capital That compares with 507 billion worth of deals made one year earlier according to marketresearch firm Dealogic8221 Bond Woes Choke off some Credit to Consumers Wall Street Journal Robin Sidel Securitzation is dead and yet Bernanke and Geithner want to shovel another 2 trillion into this black hole hoping to lure investors back to the market Why Because Wall Street financiers and bank mandarins see securitization as an efficient model that can be exported into any market around the world The repackaging of debt into complex instruments that can be stealthily created in off balance sheet operations requiring smaller and smaller slices of capital is the essential flimflam product that Wall Street intends to use to dominate global financial markets Keeping securitization alive is ultimately about economic power That is why Bernanke will spare no expense trying to resuscitate this failed system What8217s so destructive about securitzationamp160is that it allows the banks to create credit out of thin air through unregulated clandestine operations which eliminate transparency and makes it impossible for the Fed to control the money supply David Roache explains how this works in an excerpt from his book 8220New Monetarism8221 which appeared in the Wall Street Journal 8220The reason for the exponential growth in credit but not in broad money was simply that banks didn8217t keep their loans on their books any moreand only loans on bank balance sheets get counted as money Now as soon as banks made a loan they 8220securitized8221 it and moved it off their balance sheet There were two ways of doing this One was to sell the securitized loan as a bond The other was 8220synthetic8221 securitization for example using derivatives to get rid of the default risk with credit default swaps and lock in the interest rate due on the loan with interestrate swaps Both forms of securitization meant that the lending bank was free to make new loans without using up any of its lending capacity once its existing loans had been 8220securitized8221 So to redefine liquidity under what I call New Monetarism one must add to the traditional definition of broad money all the credit being created and moved off banks8217 balance sheets and onto the balance sheets of nonbank financial intermediaries This new form of liquidity changed the very nature of the credit beast What now determined credit growth was risk appetite the readiness of companies and individuals to run their businesses with higher levels of debt Wall Street Journal The banks have been creating trillions of dollars of creditamp160 without maintaining adequate capital reserves to back them up That explains why the banks were so eager to provide mortgages to millions of loan applicants who had no documentation no income no collateral and a bad credit history They believed there was no risk because they were making enormous profits without tying up any of their capital THE ECONOMY8217S LIFE8217S BLOOD IN PRIVATE HANDS As Barack Obama says 8220Credit is the economy8217s life8217sblood8221 It should not be part of a secretive process which is kept offbook and controlled by men whose solitary goal is fattening the bottom line for shortterm gain The reason securitization failed is because the banks put profit above their responsibility to perform due diligence on their loans In other words securitization created incentives for fraud which is why the system eventually collapsed Still Bernanke is determined to do Wall Street8217s bidding and spend another 2 trillion trying to rev up the securitization engine Aamp160 recent letter by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas 8220Fed Confronts Financial Crisis by Expanding Its Role as Lender of Last Resort8221 helps to shed some light on the Fed8217s real intentions 8220In a modern financial system securitiesfunded lending has replaced the banking system as the predominant credit source for households and nonfinancial firms Because of this development it can be appropriate to extend the lender of last resort role to temporarily support some nonbank credit sources8230 It8217s against this backdrop that the Fed has extended its role as lender of last resort beyond banks Since late 2007 the central bank has supported key credit flows funded by securities extending loans on nonfinancial corporations8217 commercial paper residential mortgagebacked securities and nonbank financial companies8217 loans to consumers and businesses The Fed actions recognize the dramatic shift toward debt funded through securities markets At the end of 1979 securities funded about 33 percent of household nonfinancial corporate and nonfarm business debt By the third quarter of 2008 that figure had risen to around 64 percent A closer look reveals that household debt became significantly more dependent on market funding largely reflecting the increased importance of assetbacked securities ABS in funding mortgages and consumer loans Even the share of nonfinancial corporate debt funded by securities rose considerably over the same period8212from 57 per cent to 76 per cent8221 76 percent Is it any wonder why the global economy has been sucked into a bottomless abyss why auto sales are down 40 per cent or more why global trade is down 35 per cent or more why unemployment is skyrocketing manufacturing is stalling and consumer confidence is plunging The Fed has allowed an unregulated and untested privatelycontrolled 8220credit generating8221 shadow banking system to infect the broader economy and create a nation of credit addicts which are entirely at the mercy of unpredictable market fluctuations Is this how the economy8217s 8220life8217s blood8221 should be distributed The only reason this occult system was allowed to flourish8211with the tacit support of the Fed and the Treasury8211 was because it threw open the profitsluicegates for the banks and Wall Street speculators who made more money than anyone ever thought possible Clearly this is what motivates Bernanke and Geithner These are their real constituents MIKE WHITNEY can be reached at fergiewhitneymsncom | Fed/PROPN chief/NOUN Ben/PROPN Bernanke/PROPN has/AUX embarked/VERB on/ADP a/DET radical/ADJ and/CCONJ ruinous/ADJ financial/ADJ rescue/NOUN plan/NOUN According/VERB to/ADP Bloomberg/PROPN News/PROPN the/DET Fed/PROPN has/AUX already/ADV lent/VERB or/CCONJ committed/VERB 128/NUM trillion/NUM trying/VERB to/PART stabilize/VERB the/DET financial/ADJ system/NOUN after/ADP the/DET the/DET bursting/NOUN of/ADP Wall/PROPN Street8217s/PROPN speculative/VERB megabubble/NOUN Now/ADV Bernanke/PROPN wants/VERB to/PART dig/VERB an/DET even/ADV bigger/ADJ hole/NOUN by/ADP creating/VERB programs/NOUN that/PRON will/AUX provide/VERB up/ADP to/PART 2/NUM trillion/NUM of/ADP credit/NOUN to/ADP financial/ADJ institutions/NOUN that/PRON purchase/VERB toxic/ADJ assets/NOUN from/ADP banks/NOUN or/CCONJ securities/NOUN backed/VERB by/ADP 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Paul Bocuse, the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world, a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities, has died at 91, French officials announced.</p>
<p>Often referred to as the “pope of French cuisine,” Bocuse was a tireless pioneer, the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics — branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe. His imposing physical stature and his larger-than-life personality matched his bold dreams and his far-flung accomplishments.</p>
<p>Bocuse died Saturday at Collonges-au-Mont-d’or, the place where he was born and had his restaurant, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.</p>
<p>“French gastronomy loses a mythical figure ... The chefs cry in their kitchens, at the Elysee (presidential palace) and everywhere in France,” Macron said.</p>
<p>Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that “Mister Paul was France. Simplicity and generosity. Excellence and art de vivre.”</p>
<p>Bocuse, who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005, had also been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s temple to French gastronomy, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France, has held three stars — without interruption — since 1965 in the Michelin guide, the bible of gastronomes.</p>
<p>As early as 1982, Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, headed by his son Jerome, also a chef. In recent years, Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon.</p>
<p>“He has been a leader. He took the cook out of the kitchen,” said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse, speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse. More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion — one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years.</p>
<p>“Monsieur Paul,” as he was known, was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified “The French Genius.” Shown in his trademark pose — arms folded over his crisp white apron, a tall chef’s hat, or “toque,” atop his head — he was winged by Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel, among other French luminaries.</p>
<p>While excelling in the business of cooking, Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love, creating a top class, quintessentially French meal. He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs.</p>
<p>“In cooking, there are those who are rap and those who are concerto,” he told the French newsmagazine L’Express before his 2005 biography, adding that he tended toward the concerto.</p>
<p>In traditional cooking like his, he said, there is no room for guess work.</p>
<p>“One must be immutable, unattackable, monumental,” he declared.</p>
<p>Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s, Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his world-famous restaurant even in retirement, keeping an eye on guests, sometimes greeting them at table.</p>
<p>The red-and-green Auberge by the Saone River, his name boldly set atop the roof, is a temple to Bocuse — who was born there — and to other great chefs. Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a “tromp l’oeuil” painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home. Renowned chefs, some of whom he worked with, are portrayed in a giant mural.</p>
<p>In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms. “But I changed the sheets,” he added with characteristic wry humor.</p>
<p>Born on Feb. 11, 1926, Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16. He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon, then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols, Fernand Point, whose cooking was a precursor to France’s nouvelle cuisine movement, with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s career in the kitchen traversed the ages. He went from apprenticeships and cooking “brigades,” as kitchen teams are known, when stoves were coal-fired and chefs also served as scullery maids, to the ultra-modern kitchen of his Auberge.</p>
<p>“There was rigor,” Bocuse told the AP. “(At La Mere Brazier) you had to wake up early and milk the cows, feed the pigs, do the laundry and cook .... It was a very tough school of hard knocks.”</p>
<p>“Today, the profession has changed enormously. There’s no more coal. You push a button and you have heat,” he said.</p>
<p>Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times, making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958, a second in 1960 and a third in 1965. Since then, his cooking has been defined by superlatives.</p>
<p>In 1989, Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault &amp; Millau, a noted guidebook. In 2011, the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century, opening a restaurant for students in his name. He maintained a special pride, however, in the blue, white and red stripes on his chef’s collar holding a large medal, attesting to his selection in 1961 as a “Meilleur Ouvrier de France,” a sought-after distinction for chefs and other artisans.</p>
<p>The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse’s L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition: simple, authentic food that was “identifiable” in its nature.</p>
<p>Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for then-French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, which is served to this day. Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken — from France’s Bresse region, which is famed for its poultry — served in cream with morilles, a spring mushroom.</p>
<p>And his favorite ingredient? Butter.</p>
<p>“(It’s a) magical product,” he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America. “Nothing replaces butter.”</p>
<p>Three other cooking must-haves, according to the chef, are fresh produce (his was from his own garden), good, trusted kitchen staff and happy diners.</p>
<p>“It’s the client who runs the house,” Bocuse said in the AP interview.</p>
<p>He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine, although he incorporated aspects of it. And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age. Georges Auguste Escoffier, who gave classic French cuisine a world profile, remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse’s table.</p>
<p>“Escoffier was the master of us all,” Bocuse has said.</p>
<p>World War II interrupted his kitchen duties. He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces, was wounded and cared for at a U.S. field hospital.</p>
<p>“I always say I have American blood in my veins because ... I had transfusions of American blood,” he told the AP. An American flag still flies outside his restaurant.</p>
<p>The war had a lasting impact on the chef.</p>
<p>“(It) forges the character,” he said. “You no longer have the same idea of life.”</p>
<p>Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets. Instead, he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food.</p>
<p>He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997. He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel. He planted restaurants in the south of France, in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan, where eight Bocuse brasseries, cafes and other establishments were opened.</p>
<p>But his pride is transmitting his savoir-faire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse, established in Lyon in 2004. His Bocuse d’Or, or gold award — an international competition for young chefs — has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987.</p>
<p>While Bocuse’s kitchens were meticulously in order, his personal life was on the unorthodox side. He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women — simultaneously — each with a pivotal role in his life.</p>
<p>“I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points,” Bocuse said before publication of “Paul Bocuse: The Sacred Fire.” “Even if it seems a bit macho, I love women.”</p>
<p>He put an upbeat spin on his private life.</p>
<p>“If I calculate the number of years I’ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life, I get 145 years,” he is quoted as saying in “The Sacred Fire,” which was written by Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu — daughter of the most recent woman in his life, Patricia, whom he met in 1972.</p>
<p>Yet it is his wife Raymonde, with whom Bocuse had a daughter, Francoise, who helps watch over his restaurant.</p>
<p>Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy, Bocuse saw a restaurant’s reservation book as the real measure of any chef’s talent.</p>
<p>“If the restaurant works, if it’s full of clients ... whatever the cuisine, he (the chef) is right,” he said.</p>
<p>He is survived by his wife Raymonde, their daughter Francoise and a son, Jerome.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed.</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Paul Bocuse, the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world, a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities, has died at 91, French officials announced.</p>
<p>Often referred to as the “pope of French cuisine,” Bocuse was a tireless pioneer, the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics — branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe. His imposing physical stature and his larger-than-life personality matched his bold dreams and his far-flung accomplishments.</p>
<p>Bocuse died Saturday at Collonges-au-Mont-d’or, the place where he was born and had his restaurant, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.</p>
<p>“French gastronomy loses a mythical figure ... The chefs cry in their kitchens, at the Elysee (presidential palace) and everywhere in France,” Macron said.</p>
<p>Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that “Mister Paul was France. Simplicity and generosity. Excellence and art de vivre.”</p>
<p>Bocuse, who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005, had also been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s temple to French gastronomy, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France, has held three stars — without interruption — since 1965 in the Michelin guide, the bible of gastronomes.</p>
<p>As early as 1982, Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, headed by his son Jerome, also a chef. In recent years, Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon.</p>
<p>“He has been a leader. He took the cook out of the kitchen,” said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse, speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse. More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion — one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years.</p>
<p>“Monsieur Paul,” as he was known, was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified “The French Genius.” Shown in his trademark pose — arms folded over his crisp white apron, a tall chef’s hat, or “toque,” atop his head — he was winged by Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel, among other French luminaries.</p>
<p>While excelling in the business of cooking, Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love, creating a top class, quintessentially French meal. He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs.</p>
<p>“In cooking, there are those who are rap and those who are concerto,” he told the French newsmagazine L’Express before his 2005 biography, adding that he tended toward the concerto.</p>
<p>In traditional cooking like his, he said, there is no room for guess work.</p>
<p>“One must be immutable, unattackable, monumental,” he declared.</p>
<p>Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s, Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his world-famous restaurant even in retirement, keeping an eye on guests, sometimes greeting them at table.</p>
<p>The red-and-green Auberge by the Saone River, his name boldly set atop the roof, is a temple to Bocuse — who was born there — and to other great chefs. Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a “tromp l’oeuil” painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home. Renowned chefs, some of whom he worked with, are portrayed in a giant mural.</p>
<p>In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms. “But I changed the sheets,” he added with characteristic wry humor.</p>
<p>Born on Feb. 11, 1926, Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16. He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon, then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols, Fernand Point, whose cooking was a precursor to France’s nouvelle cuisine movement, with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables.</p>
<p>Bocuse’s career in the kitchen traversed the ages. He went from apprenticeships and cooking “brigades,” as kitchen teams are known, when stoves were coal-fired and chefs also served as scullery maids, to the ultra-modern kitchen of his Auberge.</p>
<p>“There was rigor,” Bocuse told the AP. “(At La Mere Brazier) you had to wake up early and milk the cows, feed the pigs, do the laundry and cook .... It was a very tough school of hard knocks.”</p>
<p>“Today, the profession has changed enormously. There’s no more coal. You push a button and you have heat,” he said.</p>
<p>Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times, making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958, a second in 1960 and a third in 1965. Since then, his cooking has been defined by superlatives.</p>
<p>In 1989, Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault &amp; Millau, a noted guidebook. In 2011, the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century, opening a restaurant for students in his name. He maintained a special pride, however, in the blue, white and red stripes on his chef’s collar holding a large medal, attesting to his selection in 1961 as a “Meilleur Ouvrier de France,” a sought-after distinction for chefs and other artisans.</p>
<p>The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse’s L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition: simple, authentic food that was “identifiable” in its nature.</p>
<p>Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for then-French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, which is served to this day. Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken — from France’s Bresse region, which is famed for its poultry — served in cream with morilles, a spring mushroom.</p>
<p>And his favorite ingredient? Butter.</p>
<p>“(It’s a) magical product,” he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America. “Nothing replaces butter.”</p>
<p>Three other cooking must-haves, according to the chef, are fresh produce (his was from his own garden), good, trusted kitchen staff and happy diners.</p>
<p>“It’s the client who runs the house,” Bocuse said in the AP interview.</p>
<p>He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine, although he incorporated aspects of it. And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age. Georges Auguste Escoffier, who gave classic French cuisine a world profile, remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse’s table.</p>
<p>“Escoffier was the master of us all,” Bocuse has said.</p>
<p>World War II interrupted his kitchen duties. He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces, was wounded and cared for at a U.S. field hospital.</p>
<p>“I always say I have American blood in my veins because ... I had transfusions of American blood,” he told the AP. An American flag still flies outside his restaurant.</p>
<p>The war had a lasting impact on the chef.</p>
<p>“(It) forges the character,” he said. “You no longer have the same idea of life.”</p>
<p>Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets. Instead, he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food.</p>
<p>He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997. He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel. He planted restaurants in the south of France, in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan, where eight Bocuse brasseries, cafes and other establishments were opened.</p>
<p>But his pride is transmitting his savoir-faire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse, established in Lyon in 2004. His Bocuse d’Or, or gold award — an international competition for young chefs — has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987.</p>
<p>While Bocuse’s kitchens were meticulously in order, his personal life was on the unorthodox side. He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women — simultaneously — each with a pivotal role in his life.</p>
<p>“I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points,” Bocuse said before publication of “Paul Bocuse: The Sacred Fire.” “Even if it seems a bit macho, I love women.”</p>
<p>He put an upbeat spin on his private life.</p>
<p>“If I calculate the number of years I’ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life, I get 145 years,” he is quoted as saying in “The Sacred Fire,” which was written by Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu — daughter of the most recent woman in his life, Patricia, whom he met in 1972.</p>
<p>Yet it is his wife Raymonde, with whom Bocuse had a daughter, Francoise, who helps watch over his restaurant.</p>
<p>Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy, Bocuse saw a restaurant’s reservation book as the real measure of any chef’s talent.</p>
<p>“If the restaurant works, if it’s full of clients ... whatever the cuisine, he (the chef) is right,” he said.</p>
<p>He is survived by his wife Raymonde, their daughter Francoise and a son, Jerome.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed.</p> | Paul Bocuse, globe-trotting master of French cuisine, dies | false | https://apnews.com/a3e45e0f8fd44ca7b51e026b8b3dbbee | 2018-01-20 | 2least
| 3,058 | PARIS AP 8212 Paul Bocuse the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities has died at 91 French officials announced Often referred to as the 8220pope of French cuisine8221 Bocuse was a tireless pioneer the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics 8212 branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe His imposing physical stature and his largerthanlife personality matched his bold dreams and his farflung accomplishments Bocuse died Saturday at CollongesauMontd8217or the place where he was born and had his restaurant French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement 8220French gastronomy loses a mythical figure The chefs cry in their kitchens at the Elysee presidential palace and everywhere in France8221 Macron said Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that 8220Mister Paul was France Simplicity and generosity Excellence and art de vivre8221 Bocuse who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005 had also been suffering from Parkinson8217s disease Bocuse8217s temple to French gastronomy L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France has held three stars 8212 without interruption 8212 since 1965 in the Michelin guide the bible of gastronomes As early as 1982 Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World8217s Epcot Center in Orlando Florida headed by his son Jerome also a chef In recent years Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon 8220He has been a leader He took the cook out of the kitchen8221 said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion 8212 one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years 8220Monsieur Paul8221 as he was known was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified 8220The French Genius8221 Shown in his trademark pose 8212 arms folded over his crisp white apron a tall chef8217s hat or 8220toque8221 atop his head 8212 he was winged by Marie Curie Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel among other French luminaries While excelling in the business of cooking Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love creating a top class quintessentially French meal He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs 8220In cooking there are those who are rap and those who are concerto8221 he told the French newsmagazine L8217Express before his 2005 biography adding that he tended toward the concerto In traditional cooking like his he said there is no room for guess work 8220One must be immutable unattackable monumental8221 he declared Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his worldfamous restaurant even in retirement keeping an eye on guests sometimes greeting them at table The redandgreen Auberge by the Saone River his name boldly set atop the roof is a temple to Bocuse 8212 who was born there 8212 and to other great chefs Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a 8220tromp l8217oeuil8221 painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home Renowned chefs some of whom he worked with are portrayed in a giant mural In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms 8220But I changed the sheets8221 he added with characteristic wry humor Born on Feb 11 1926 Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16 He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols Fernand Point whose cooking was a precursor to France8217s nouvelle cuisine movement with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables Bocuse8217s career in the kitchen traversed the ages He went from apprenticeships and cooking 8220brigades8221 as kitchen teams are known when stoves were coalfired and chefs also served as scullery maids to the ultramodern kitchen of his Auberge 8220There was rigor8221 Bocuse told the AP 8220At La Mere Brazier you had to wake up early and milk the cows feed the pigs do the laundry and cook It was a very tough school of hard knocks8221 8220Today the profession has changed enormously There8217s no more coal You push a button and you have heat8221 he said Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958 a second in 1960 and a third in 1965 Since then his cooking has been defined by superlatives In 1989 Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault ampamp Millau a noted guidebook In 2011 the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century opening a restaurant for students in his name He maintained a special pride however in the blue white and red stripes on his chef8217s collar holding a large medal attesting to his selection in 1961 as a 8220Meilleur Ouvrier de France8221 a soughtafter distinction for chefs and other artisans The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse8217s L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition simple authentic food that was 8220identifiable8221 in its nature Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for thenFrench President Valery Giscard d8217Estaing which is served to this day Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken 8212 from France8217s Bresse region which is famed for its poultry 8212 served in cream with morilles a spring mushroom And his favorite ingredient Butter 8220It8217s a magical product8221 he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America 8220Nothing replaces butter8221 Three other cooking musthaves according to the chef are fresh produce his was from his own garden good trusted kitchen staff and happy diners 8220It8217s the client who runs the house8221 Bocuse said in the AP interview He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine although he incorporated aspects of it And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age Georges Auguste Escoffier who gave classic French cuisine a world profile remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse8217s table 8220Escoffier was the master of us all8221 Bocuse has said World War II interrupted his kitchen duties He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces was wounded and cared for at a US field hospital 8220I always say I have American blood in my veins because I had transfusions of American blood8221 he told the AP An American flag still flies outside his restaurant The war had a lasting impact on the chef 8220It forges the character8221 he said 8220You no longer have the same idea of life8221 Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets Instead he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997 He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel He planted restaurants in the south of France in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan where eight Bocuse brasseries cafes and other establishments were opened But his pride is transmitting his savoirfaire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse established in Lyon in 2004 His Bocuse d8217Or or gold award 8212 an international competition for young chefs 8212 has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987 While Bocuse8217s kitchens were meticulously in order his personal life was on the unorthodox side He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women 8212 simultaneously 8212 each with a pivotal role in his life 8220I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points8221 Bocuse said before publication of 8220Paul Bocuse The Sacred Fire8221 8220Even if it seems a bit macho I love women8221 He put an upbeat spin on his private life 8220If I calculate the number of years I8217ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life I get 145 years8221 he is quoted as saying in 8220The Sacred Fire8221 which was written by EveMarie ZizzaLalu 8212 daughter of the most recent woman in his life Patricia whom he met in 1972 Yet it is his wife Raymonde with whom Bocuse had a daughter Francoise who helps watch over his restaurant Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy Bocuse saw a restaurant8217s reservation book as the real measure of any chef8217s talent 8220If the restaurant works if it8217s full of clients whatever the cuisine he the chef is right8221 he said He is survived by his wife Raymonde their daughter Francoise and a son Jerome ___ Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed PARIS AP 8212 Paul Bocuse the master chef who defined French cuisine for more than half a century and put it on tables around the world a man who raised the profile of top chefs from invisible kitchen artists to international celebrities has died at 91 French officials announced Often referred to as the 8220pope of French cuisine8221 Bocuse was a tireless pioneer the first chef to blend the art of cooking with savvy business tactics 8212 branding his cuisine and his image to create an empire of restaurants around the globe His imposing physical stature and his largerthanlife personality matched his bold dreams and his farflung accomplishments Bocuse died Saturday at CollongesauMontd8217or the place where he was born and had his restaurant French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement 8220French gastronomy loses a mythical figure The chefs cry in their kitchens at the Elysee presidential palace and everywhere in France8221 Macron said Interior Minister Gerard Collomb tweeted that 8220Mister Paul was France Simplicity and generosity Excellence and art de vivre8221 Bocuse who underwent a triple heart bypass in 2005 had also been suffering from Parkinson8217s disease Bocuse8217s temple to French gastronomy L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges outside the city of Lyon in southeastern France has held three stars 8212 without interruption 8212 since 1965 in the Michelin guide the bible of gastronomes As early as 1982 Bocuse opened a restaurant in the France Pavilion in Walt Disney World8217s Epcot Center in Orlando Florida headed by his son Jerome also a chef In recent years Bocuse even dabbled in fast food with two outlets in his home base of Lyon 8220He has been a leader He took the cook out of the kitchen8221 said celebrity French chef Alain Ducasse speaking at a 2013 gathering to honor Bocuse More than 100 chefs from around the world traveled to Lyon for the occasion 8212 one of a string of such honors bestowed on Bocuse in recent years 8220Monsieur Paul8221 as he was known was placed right in the center of 2013 cover of the newsweekly Le Point that exemplified 8220The French Genius8221 Shown in his trademark pose 8212 arms folded over his crisp white apron a tall chef8217s hat or 8220toque8221 atop his head 8212 he was winged by Marie Curie Louis Pasteur and Coco Chanel among other French luminaries While excelling in the business of cooking Bocuse never flagged in his devotion to his first love creating a top class quintessentially French meal He eschewed the fads and experiments that captivated many other top chefs 8220In cooking there are those who are rap and those who are concerto8221 he told the French newsmagazine L8217Express before his 2005 biography adding that he tended toward the concerto In traditional cooking like his he said there is no room for guess work 8220One must be immutable unattackable monumental8221 he declared Born into a family of cooks that he dates to the 1700s Bocuse stood guard over the kitchen of his worldfamous restaurant even in retirement keeping an eye on guests sometimes greeting them at table The redandgreen Auberge by the Saone River his name boldly set atop the roof is a temple to Bocuse 8212 who was born there 8212 and to other great chefs Bocuse waves to arriving guests in a 8220tromp l8217oeuil8221 painting on an outside wall and peers at them from a large portrait inside the cozy Auberge that once belonged to his parents and remained his home Renowned chefs some of whom he worked with are portrayed in a giant mural In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press Bocuse said he slept in the room where he was born above the dining rooms 8220But I changed the sheets8221 he added with characteristic wry humor Born on Feb 11 1926 Bocuse entered his first apprenticeship at 16 He worked at the famed La Mere Brazier in Lyon then spent eight years with one of his culinary idols Fernand Point whose cooking was a precursor to France8217s nouvelle cuisine movement with lighter sauces and lightly cooked fresh vegetables Bocuse8217s career in the kitchen traversed the ages He went from apprenticeships and cooking 8220brigades8221 as kitchen teams are known when stoves were coalfired and chefs also served as scullery maids to the ultramodern kitchen of his Auberge 8220There was rigor8221 Bocuse told the AP 8220At La Mere Brazier you had to wake up early and milk the cows feed the pigs do the laundry and cook It was a very tough school of hard knocks8221 8220Today the profession has changed enormously There8217s no more coal You push a button and you have heat8221 he said Bocuse adapted seamlessly to the changing times making his mark with a first coveted Michelin star in 1958 a second in 1960 and a third in 1965 Since then his cooking has been defined by superlatives In 1989 Bocuse was named Cook of the Century by Gault ampamp Millau a noted guidebook In 2011 the Culinary Institute of America named him Chef of the Century opening a restaurant for students in his name He maintained a special pride however in the blue white and red stripes on his chef8217s collar holding a large medal attesting to his selection in 1961 as a 8220Meilleur Ouvrier de France8221 a soughtafter distinction for chefs and other artisans The gastronomic offerings at Bocuse8217s L8217Auberge du Pont de Collonges are rooted in the French culinary tradition simple authentic food that was 8220identifiable8221 in its nature Emblematic of that was a crock of truffle soup topped with a golden bubble of pastry he created in 1975 for thenFrench President Valery Giscard d8217Estaing which is served to this day Another classic is fricassee of Bresse chicken 8212 from France8217s Bresse region which is famed for its poultry 8212 served in cream with morilles a spring mushroom And his favorite ingredient Butter 8220It8217s a magical product8221 he said during a visit to the Culinary Institute of America 8220Nothing replaces butter8221 Three other cooking musthaves according to the chef are fresh produce his was from his own garden good trusted kitchen staff and happy diners 8220It8217s the client who runs the house8221 Bocuse said in the AP interview He disparaged the notion that his culinary offerings amounted to nouvelle cuisine although he incorporated aspects of it And he scoffed at critics who contended that his food is stuck in a bygone age Georges Auguste Escoffier who gave classic French cuisine a world profile remains a solid inspiration at Bocuse8217s table 8220Escoffier was the master of us all8221 Bocuse has said World War II interrupted his kitchen duties He worked in the First Division of the Free French Forces was wounded and cared for at a US field hospital 8220I always say I have American blood in my veins because I had transfusions of American blood8221 he told the AP An American flag still flies outside his restaurant The war had a lasting impact on the chef 8220It forges the character8221 he said 8220You no longer have the same idea of life8221 Bocuse might have settled for being a renowned French chef worthy of a pilgrimage by food lovers with deep pockets Instead he parlayed his culinary skills into a conglomerate of food operations that span the globe and range from haute cuisine to fast food He opened two brasseries in Lyon in 1995 and 1997 He added three other eateries in the city and even a hotel He planted restaurants in the south of France in Geneva and hopped across the world to Japan where eight Bocuse brasseries cafes and other establishments were opened But his pride is transmitting his savoirfaire to a young generation through the Foundation Paul Bocuse established in Lyon in 2004 His Bocuse d8217Or or gold award 8212 an international competition for young chefs 8212 has grown into a major culinary showcase since 1987 While Bocuse8217s kitchens were meticulously in order his personal life was on the unorthodox side He acknowledged in a 2005 biography that he had been quietly sharing his life with three women 8212 simultaneously 8212 each with a pivotal role in his life 8220I think cuisine and sex have lots of common points8221 Bocuse said before publication of 8220Paul Bocuse The Sacred Fire8221 8220Even if it seems a bit macho I love women8221 He put an upbeat spin on his private life 8220If I calculate the number of years I8217ve been faithful to the three women who count in my life I get 145 years8221 he is quoted as saying in 8220The Sacred Fire8221 which was written by EveMarie ZizzaLalu 8212 daughter of the most recent woman in his life Patricia whom he met in 1972 Yet it is his wife Raymonde with whom Bocuse had a daughter Francoise who helps watch over his restaurant Despite accolades from the world of gastronomy Bocuse saw a restaurant8217s reservation book as the real measure of any chef8217s talent 8220If the restaurant works if it8217s full of clients whatever the cuisine he the chef is right8221 he said He is survived by his wife Raymonde their daughter Francoise and a son Jerome ___ Sylvie Corbet in Paris also contributed | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Paul/PROPN Bocuse/PROPN the/DET master/NOUN chef/NOUN who/PRON defined/VERB French/ADJ cuisine/NOUN for/ADP more/ADJ than/ADP half/DET a/PRON century/NOUN and/CCONJ put/VERB it/PRON on/ADP tables/NOUN around/ADP the/DET world/NOUN a/DET man/NOUN who/PRON raised/VERB the/DET profile/NOUN of/ADP top/ADJ chefs/NOUN from/ADP invisible/ADJ kitchen/NOUN artists/NOUN to/ADP international/ADJ celebrities/NOUN has/AUX died/VERB at/ADP 91/NUM French/ADJ officials/NOUN announced/VERB Often/ADV referred/VERB to/ADP as/SCONJ the/DET 8220pope/NOUN of/ADP French/ADJ cuisine8221/PROPN Bocuse/PROPN was/AUX a/DET tireless/ADJ pioneer/NOUN the/DET first/ADJ chef/NOUN to/PART blend/VERB the/DET art/NOUN of/ADP cooking/VERB with/ADP savvy/ADJ business/NOUN tactics/NOUN 8212/NUM branding/VERB his/PRON cuisine/NOUN and/CCONJ his/PRON image/NOUN to/PART 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<p>Some thoughts on the political legacy of Andy Griffith. &#160;Griffith, who was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina, on June 1, 1926, died on July 3 at the age of 86 in the town of Manteo.</p>
<p>“Funerals are for the living,” my mother is quick to say, but Griffith barely had one. They buried him so fast – he passed away around 7 a.m. and was lowered into the ground on Roanoke Island at about 11:30 a.m. – that it didn’t give many of the living adequate chance to reflect on the loss.</p>
<p>I posted Griffith’s obit to my social network page and a 30-ish West Coast black fellow surprised me by responding, “You liked that redneck cracker?” A few days later a 50-something Jewish guy from New York astonished me more by saying that he’d never heard of Griffith, nor seen&#160;The Andy Griffith Show, which ran from 1960-1968 and has been on television almost every single day for 52 years, or&#160;Matlock, with Griffith playing a defense attorney, which ran from 1986 to 1992.</p>
<p>Clearly, some fundamentals of Southern political culture have completely escaped people outside the region, because Andy Griffith was the prototype North Carolina liberal. His show and his offstage role in the state’s politics in fact help explain why North Carolina is a swing state today.</p>
<p>At almost any hour on any day of the week in the South, if you turn on your TV and channel surf there’s a better than even chance you’ll find Griffith either as Mayberry’s Sheriff Andy Taylor, single dad to Opie (Ron Howard), or as “country lawyer” Ben Matlock. And not just on cable, but free TV as well. &#160;&#160;On the day after he died my local CBS affiliate, which still airsThe Andy Griffith Show&#160;daily, broadcasted their evening news in black and white and dedicated most of the half-hour to Griffith. &#160;I’m not much of a&#160;Matlock&#160;fan, but I watched&#160;The Andy Griffith Show&#160;religiously in its original run, and even now I get at least a glimpse of it once or twice a week. I know all the characters: Deputy Barney (Bernard P.) Fife, Aunt Bee, Opie, Otis Campbell the “town drunk,” Gomer, Goober, Floyd, Miss. Helen Crump, Ellie, Thelma Lou, Ernest T. Bass, The Darlings and many others.</p>
<p>Griffith graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1949 with a degree in music. Politically, he was a lifelong Democrat, the Tar Heel state party’s trump card in hard-fought campaigns from the 1980s on, helping Democrats remain competitive there while the rest of the South went Republican. To me, his influence in North Carolina’s modern political history is as great as, if not greater than, that of the Rev. Billy Graham, Jesse Helms and Sam Ervin, the original “blue-dog” Democrat who served in the U.S. Senate from 1954 to 1974 and is best remembered for his role as chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices – known more popularly as the “Ervin Committee” – that investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.</p>
<p>In the convergence of political and social influence, only Dean Smith, the UNC Chapel Hill basketball coach from 1961 to 1997, rivals Andy Griffith. &#160;Most people know that Smith coached Michael Jordan, but his history goes way beyond sports. In 1964 Smith joined a local pastor and a black theology student to integrate The Pines, a Chapel Hill restaurant. In 1966 he integrated the Tar Heels basketball team, making Charlie Scott the first black scholarship athlete at UNC. Smith helped a black graduate student purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood. He opposed the Vietnam War. In the early 1980s he publicly advocated for a freeze on nuclear weapons. During the George Bush presidency he opposed the war in Iraq, and in 2008 endorsed Barack Obama for president. Today, he campaigns against the death penalty and supports GLBT rights.</p>
<p>A lot of factors help explain North Carolina’s liberal image compared with other Southern states. Doubtless the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area’s reinvention of itself as the “research triangle” is one. So is Charlotte’s position as home to the big bank HQs and the state’s only professional sports team, and its distinction, in 1983, as one of the first majority-white Southern cities to elect a black mayor, Harvey Gantt, a South Carolina native. All figure into why Obama won the state in 2008 and stands a chance to do it again in 2012. Yet Griffith, along with Smith and, to lesser degrees, Ervin and Graham, helped transform North Carolina long before new residents were drawn to the research triangle and Charlotte.</p>
<p>Griffith influenced the nation’s racial expectations from the moment&#160;The Andy Griffith Show&#160;hit the airwaves. And he did it without many black characters being on his show. There was the occasional black woman in the crowd in the early “black and white” years, and Opie’s classical piano-playing football coach Flip Conroy, played by an ex-New York Giant, Rockne Tarkington, in the seventh season. In the late 60s spin-off show,&#160;Mayberry RFD, which coincided with widespread Southern school desegregation, the widower farmer Sam Jones had as his next door neighbor a black character named Ralph, played by Charles Lampkin. Griffith said he regretted excluding blacks from the original regular cast, saying blacks did not want to play servant roles at the time, and “there is no way in some small town in the South that white people were going to flock to a black doctor or lawyer.”</p>
<p>What mattered most was that Sheriff Taylor’s image defied the stereotype of Southerners as backward, ignorant, heartless bigots and redneck thugs. Taylor, the “sheriff without a gun,” was a different type of lawman from the 1930s-40s real-life types like Police Chief “Big Jesse” Helms, Sr., father of the ultra-right Senator Jesse Helms Jr. “Big Jesse” ran things in the small town of Monroe, just north of the border with South Carolina. An admirer recalled that he “had the sharpest shoe in town and he didn’t mind using it.” In Timothy Tyson’s&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Radio Free Dixie:&#160;Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power</a>, Williams, also from Monroe, recalled as a young kid watching as the senior Helms “flattened a black woman with his huge fists, then ‘dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey.’”</p>
<p>On the national stage, TV Sheriff Andy was a hero, while Eugene “Bull” Connor, the real-life Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama, was a villain. The fictional sheriff acted with a sense of decency and humanity. The real-life sheriff was a racist brute who allowed the Ku Klux Klan to beat the Freedom Riders while his police officers stood by. In the streets Connor used fire hoses and attack dogs on protesting children before he locked them up. On television Taylor’s policing technique was “the Golden Rule,” which included allowing the town drunk to lock himself up and let himself out once he sobered up.</p>
<p>Oftentimes folks say that&#160;The Andy Griffith Show&#160;is popular in the South today because it “reminds us of another, kinder, gentler time where common sense and a smile ruled the day,” or because “Sheriff Taylor was a person who you could trust — trust to be honest and trust to always do the right thing,” and “the people of Mayberry cared about each other.”</p>
<p>There are always people, usually white, who see the Jim Crow era as a “kinder, gentler time.” That points to both the illusion and importance of Griffith’s show on the Southern psyche. As news coverage was exposing the ugliness of Southern racism to the world, with clashes over integration, brutality and murder of civil rights workers, Griffith’s show allowed whites to see themselves as being like the residents of Mayberry: “decent white people,” as older blacks back in the day would refer to Southern whites that didn’t “Lawd over you with their color.” Mayberry may have let some whites carry on with their pretenses, but it gave others a model, and license, for their own humanity.</p>
<p>Economically and socially, the show also took a bit of the sting out of being “from the mountains” at about the time the state began promoting tourism on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Mount Airy, the town after which Mayberry is patterned, is just ten minutes from the Parkway in the northwest corner of the state – in “The Hollows” or the valley between the mountains. I had family that lived around and mixed with the whites and native Cherokee on the southern end of the Parkway near Hendersonville and Asheville. &#160;My relatives were migrant workers who picked beans and apples, so not being afraid to travel through the “hicks and hollows” where the “po white trash” supposedly lived, and learning to know and appreciate mountain culture, was a must. My father loved Sunday drives up to the mountains whenever we visited family. &#160;I still travel the Parkway today when I get the chance. &#160;It helps to see that first and foremost, mountain people love the beauty of the mountains. &#160;That’s why they live there. &#160;And that’s good.</p>
<p>Now, North Carolina in the 60s wasn’t Mayberry-esque. When Helms junior, in opposition to&#160;the creation of the North Carolina Zoo, suggested they “just put a fence around Chapel Hill,” when he referred to UNC as the “University of Negroes and Communists,” the translation was: “Once you leave Chapel Hill you’re in North Carolina.” Or, as my family saw it, “once you leave Charlotte you’re in Concord,” the town just beyond, well known as a speed trap for black motorists passing through.</p>
<p>Still, that didn’t stop a kid from trying to find the mythical Mayberry on a road map. And when you couldn’t find it, you settled for Siler City, which does exist or Pilot Mountain, which was called Mt. Pilot on the show, and the other small towns mentioned on the show.</p>
<p>In the sixties, despite reality, the two Carolinas seemed as different as night and day. On the bright side, the Tar Heel state was where four black college students in Greensboro initiated the sit-in movement the same year that Griffith’s show began airing; in April of that year, 200 students met at Shaw University in Raleigh to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On the dark side, when some of those black students in SNCC crossed the border into Rock Hill, South Carolina, a year later, the group of seven black and six white people, including now Congressman John Lewis, were met at the Greyhound bus station by a mob of twenty angry whites ready to pummel them back in their places. &#160;We all took note of Chuck Berry’s 1964 song &#160;“Promised Land” where a poor black boy boarded a Greyhound bus that stopped in Charlotte but “bypassed Rock Hill.”</p>
<p>Race relations in North Carolina seemed to worsen in the 1970s. The decade started with open racial strife in Wilmington, when Ben Chavis and nine others wound up in jail on trumped-up charges, and it ended with five protest marchers killed by members of the KKK and American Nazi Party, with police collusion, in Greensboro. But the state still had stalwarts Griffith and Billy Graham – who once admitted he had been a registered Democrat for most of his voting life, though he supported Richard Nixon in 1968.</p>
<p>I believe that Griffith’s role as Lonesome Rhodes, a narcissistic megalomaniac in Elia Kaman’s 1957 film&#160;A Face in the Crowd, hugely influenced&#160;Graham. &#160;Thinking about the force he [Graham] had become, Rhodes could have been speaking to him when he said: “I’m not just an entertainer. &#160;I’m an influence … a wielder of opinion … a force – a force!” &#160;About his adoring fans, Rhodes says: “They’re mine. I own ’em. They think like I do. But they’re even more stupid than I am. So I gotta think for ’em!” He threatens, “If the president tries to stop me, I’ll flood the White House with millions of telegrams!” Graham certainly liked his access to the politically powerful but he didn’t become a caricature of Rhodes. &#160;In his early years folks were more prone to liken Graham to Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, “a con with a collar” but Graham never became that type of demagogue con man either.</p>
<p>Movie characters and Nixon aside, during the civil rights era Graham had a close relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr. &#160;When Graham invited King to appear at his 1957 evangelistic crusade in New York City, he took a lot of heat from segregationists. King credited Graham with playing a significant part in reducing the tension between whites and blacks in the South. The two men split over the Vietnam War, but what blacks in the rural South heard was “the Rev. Billy Graham supports the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.” &#160;Graham had integrated religious services, with Myrtle Hall, a black woman and native of Greenville, South Carolina, singing with the Crusade, which still regularly airs across the South.</p>
<p>Most whites in early 60s South were Democrats. But I always suspected that Sheriff Andy and his sidekick, Deputy Barney Fife, were “John Kennedy,” liberal Democrats as opposed to Strom Thurmond-Jesse Helms Dixiecrats and most certainly not Nixon Republicans. In one episode Andy tells Barney, “That’s how democracy works,” and immediately Barney, misconstruing what ‘democracy’ meant, becomes agitated, thinking Andy knows how he voted, only to tell Andy after his brief pout, “If you tell me who you voted for, I’ll tell you who I voted for.”</p>
<p>The real-life Andy campaigned for Democrats like Governor Jim Hunt in his 1984 race against Senator Helms. Helms won re-election, bringing in Moses, actor Charlton Heston, to appear in a TV commercial for him. In 1989, Griffith was asked to run against Helms after the polling outfit Mason-Dixon had him leading the incumbent by nine points, 48 percent to 39 percent. Supporters even printed up “Run, Andy, Run” bumper stickers. But Griffith wasn’t interested in a political career. Former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt became the Democratic standard bearer, and race became a central issue when Helms ran his infamous “Hands” ad.</p>
<p>In 2000 and 2004 Griffith campaigned for Mike Easley in the governor’s race, even as Dean Smith backslid a bit, cutting an ad in 2000 for Republican and former Charlotte mayor Richard Vinroot, one of Smith’s former players. Easley’s victory was dubbed “the Mayberry Miracle” because of Griffith’s endorsement ad.</p>
<p>Throughout the 1980s and 90s Griffith played the role of “country lawyer” Ben Matlock. Some say the Matlock character was loosely based on Senator Sam Ervin, who also liked to call himself “just a country lawyer.” &#160;Maybe it was, but maybe not. &#160;Early in his career Ervin was all at once a defender of civil liberties, Jim Crow racial segregation and immigrant nationality quotas. &#160;On the civil liberties front, he served on the investigation committees that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 at a time Graham embraced the red scare.&#160;&#160;Graham said of McCarthy: “… I thank God for men who, in the face of public denouncement and ridicule, go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle and from that vantage point try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known — communism.”&#160; But in 1956&#160;Ervin&#160;helped organize resistance to Brown v. Board of Education&#160;and helped draft the segregationist Southern Manifesto. &#160;Ervin said he later changed his mind on the&#160;Brown&#160;school desegregation decision, stating “to the extent it eliminated mandatory segregation, [it] was correct, but … forced integration, required under later decisions, was improper.” Ervin argued that Americans were entitled to “their prejudices as well as their allergies.” Later in his career he opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. &#160;But as a civil libertarian he opposed “no-knock” search laws, thought lie-detector tests were an invasion of privacy, opposed compulsory school prayer and supported the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment, which made illegally seized evidence inadmissible in criminal trials.</p>
<p>Just maybe, Sheriff Andy of Mayberry and Ervin influenced each other on civil liberties. &#160;In one of my favorite episodes, called “The Tape Recorder,” Opie secretly records a bank robber confessing to his lawyer where he hid the money, against Andy’s strict orders.&#160; Opie gives his dad the tape, and Andy erases it without listening to it, explaining to his son the privacy rights of the accused, due process and the rule of law. That TV lesson sounds like a quaint ideal today in light of the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and all the other civil liberties limitations brought on by the “war on terror.”</p>
<p>After the passing of Don&#160;Knotts, who played Barney Fife, in 2006, my mom, a big fan of both men, said, “Well, now that ‘Barn’ is gone ‘Ang’ (the on-screen nicknames of the two) won’t be too far behind.” Andy lasted a half-dozen more years, actively backing both Bev Perdue in the 2008 governor’s race and candidate Obama. In 2010 he promoted Obama’s Affordable Care Act in the face of complaints from at least five GOP senators, including North Carolina’s Richard Burr, who wrote human resources secretary Kathleen Sebelius demanding that Griffith’s publicly funded ad be pulled.</p>
<p>So when you think of great white Southerners like Mississippi’s Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, or Alabama’s Harper E. Lee, whose 1960&#160; <a href="" type="internal">To Kill a Mockingbird</a>&#160;exposed the racist nature of Southern justice, or President Jimmy Carter of Georgia, or former Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, it is no stretch to add Andy Griffith’s name to the list. Because while we every now and then read the works of the great writers, praise or condemn Carter, and regularly forget or ignore that Hollings was the last of the great Southern liberal lawmakers, we see Griffith’s work everyday. Andy Griffith to a Southerner is like grits and soul food. It will be interesting to see how Southern Democrats and liberals fare without Andy in the flesh.</p>
<p>Kevin Alexander Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina and author of&#160; <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">Waiting for Lightning to Strike! The Fundamentals of Black Politics</a>&#160;(CounterPunch/AK Press) and a contributor to&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a>. He can be reached at&#160; <a href="mailto:kagamba@bellsouth.net" type="external">kagamba@bellsouth.net</a>.</p> | Why North Carolina is a Swing State | true | https://counterpunch.org/2012/07/20/why-north-carolina-is-a-swing-state/ | 2012-07-20 | 4left
| 3,058 | Some thoughts on the political legacy of Andy Griffith amp160Griffith who was born in Mount Airy North Carolina on June 1 1926 died on July 3 at the age of 86 in the town of Manteo 8220Funerals are for the living8221 my mother is quick to say but Griffith barely had one They buried him so fast 8211 he passed away around 7 am and was lowered into the ground on Roanoke Island at about 1130 am 8211 that it didn8217t give many of the living adequate chance to reflect on the loss I posted Griffith8217s obit to my social network page and a 30ish West Coast black fellow surprised me by responding 8220You liked that redneck cracker8221 A few days later a 50something Jewish guy from New York astonished me more by saying that he8217d never heard of Griffith nor seenamp160The Andy Griffith Show which ran from 19601968 and has been on television almost every single day for 52 years oramp160Matlock with Griffith playing a defense attorney which ran from 1986 to 1992 Clearly some fundamentals of Southern political culture have completely escaped people outside the region because Andy Griffith was the prototype North Carolina liberal His show and his offstage role in the state8217s politics in fact help explain why North Carolina is a swing state today At almost any hour on any day of the week in the South if you turn on your TV and channel surf there8217s a better than even chance you8217ll find Griffith either as Mayberry8217s Sheriff Andy Taylor single dad to Opie Ron Howard or as 8220country lawyer8221 Ben Matlock And not just on cable but free TV as well amp160amp160On the day after he died my local CBS affiliate which still airsThe Andy Griffith Showamp160daily broadcasted their evening news in black and white and dedicated most of the halfhour to Griffith amp160I8217m not much of aamp160Matlockamp160fan but I watchedamp160The Andy Griffith Showamp160religiously in its original run and even now I get at least a glimpse of it once or twice a week I know all the characters Deputy Barney Bernard P Fife Aunt Bee Opie Otis Campbell the 8220town drunk8221 Gomer Goober Floyd Miss Helen Crump Ellie Thelma Lou Ernest T Bass The Darlings and many others Griffith graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1949 with a degree in music Politically he was a lifelong Democrat the Tar Heel state party8217s trump card in hardfought campaigns from the 1980s on helping Democrats remain competitive there while the rest of the South went Republican To me his influence in North Carolina8217s modern political history is as great as if not greater than that of the Rev Billy Graham Jesse Helms and Sam Ervin the original 8220bluedog8221 Democrat who served in the US Senate from 1954 to 1974 and is best remembered for his role as chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices 8211 known more popularly as the 8220Ervin Committee8221 8211 that investigated the 1972 Watergate breakin that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon In the convergence of political and social influence only Dean Smith the UNC Chapel Hill basketball coach from 1961 to 1997 rivals Andy Griffith amp160Most people know that Smith coached Michael Jordan but his history goes way beyond sports In 1964 Smith joined a local pastor and a black theology student to integrate The Pines a Chapel Hill restaurant In 1966 he integrated the Tar Heels basketball team making Charlie Scott the first black scholarship athlete at UNC Smith helped a black graduate student purchase a home in an allwhite neighborhood He opposed the Vietnam War In the early 1980s he publicly advocated for a freeze on nuclear weapons During the George Bush presidency he opposed the war in Iraq and in 2008 endorsed Barack Obama for president Today he campaigns against the death penalty and supports GLBT rights A lot of factors help explain North Carolina8217s liberal image compared with other Southern states Doubtless the RaleighDurhamChapel Hill area8217s reinvention of itself as the 8220research triangle8221 is one So is Charlotte8217s position as home to the big bank HQs and the state8217s only professional sports team and its distinction in 1983 as one of the first majoritywhite Southern cities to elect a black mayor Harvey Gantt a South Carolina native All figure into why Obama won the state in 2008 and stands a chance to do it again in 2012 Yet Griffith along with Smith and to lesser degrees Ervin and Graham helped transform North Carolina long before new residents were drawn to the research triangle and Charlotte Griffith influenced the nation8217s racial expectations from the momentamp160The Andy Griffith Showamp160hit the airwaves And he did it without many black characters being on his show There was the occasional black woman in the crowd in the early 8220black and white8221 years and Opie8217s classical pianoplaying football coach Flip Conroy played by an exNew York Giant Rockne Tarkington in the seventh season In the late 60s spinoff showamp160Mayberry RFD which coincided with widespread Southern school desegregation the widower farmer Sam Jones had as his next door neighbor a black character named Ralph played by Charles Lampkin Griffith said he regretted excluding blacks from the original regular cast saying blacks did not want to play servant roles at the time and 8220there is no way in some small town in the South that white people were going to flock to a black doctor or lawyer8221 What mattered most was that Sheriff Taylor8217s image defied the stereotype of Southerners as backward ignorant heartless bigots and redneck thugs Taylor the 8220sheriff without a gun8221 was a different type of lawman from the 1930s40s reallife types like Police Chief 8220Big Jesse8221 Helms Sr father of the ultraright Senator Jesse Helms Jr 8220Big Jesse8221 ran things in the small town of Monroe just north of the border with South Carolina An admirer recalled that he 8220had the sharpest shoe in town and he didn8217t mind using it8221 In Timothy Tyson8217samp160 Radio Free Dixieamp160Robert F Williams and the Roots of Black Power Williams also from Monroe recalled as a young kid watching as the senior Helms 8220flattened a black woman with his huge fists then 8216dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse her dress up over her head the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey82178221 On the national stage TV Sheriff Andy was a hero while Eugene 8220Bull8221 Connor the reallife Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham Alabama was a villain The fictional sheriff acted with a sense of decency and humanity The reallife sheriff was a racist brute who allowed the Ku Klux Klan to beat the Freedom Riders while his police officers stood by In the streets Connor used fire hoses and attack dogs on protesting children before he locked them up On television Taylor8217s policing technique was 8220the Golden Rule8221 which included allowing the town drunk to lock himself up and let himself out once he sobered up Oftentimes folks say thatamp160The Andy Griffith Showamp160is popular in the South today because it 8220reminds us of another kinder gentler time where common sense and a smile ruled the day8221 or because 8220Sheriff Taylor was a person who you could trust 8212 trust to be honest and trust to always do the right thing8221 and 8220the people of Mayberry cared about each other8221 There are always people usually white who see the Jim Crow era as a 8220kinder gentler time8221 That points to both the illusion and importance of Griffith8217s show on the Southern psyche As news coverage was exposing the ugliness of Southern racism to the world with clashes over integration brutality and murder of civil rights workers Griffith8217s show allowed whites to see themselves as being like the residents of Mayberry 8220decent white people8221 as older blacks back in the day would refer to Southern whites that didn8217t 8220Lawd over you with their color8221 Mayberry may have let some whites carry on with their pretenses but it gave others a model and license for their own humanity Economically and socially the show also took a bit of the sting out of being 8220from the mountains8221 at about the time the state began promoting tourism on the Blue Ridge Parkway Mount Airy the town after which Mayberry is patterned is just ten minutes from the Parkway in the northwest corner of the state 8211 in 8220The Hollows8221 or the valley between the mountains I had family that lived around and mixed with the whites and native Cherokee on the southern end of the Parkway near Hendersonville and Asheville amp160My relatives were migrant workers who picked beans and apples so not being afraid to travel through the 8220hicks and hollows8221 where the 8220po white trash8221 supposedly lived and learning to know and appreciate mountain culture was a must My father loved Sunday drives up to the mountains whenever we visited family amp160I still travel the Parkway today when I get the chance amp160It helps to see that first and foremost mountain people love the beauty of the mountains amp160That8217s why they live there amp160And that8217s good Now North Carolina in the 60s wasn8217t Mayberryesque When Helms junior in opposition toamp160the creation of the North Carolina Zoo suggested they 8220just put a fence around Chapel Hill8221 when he referred to UNC as the 8220University of Negroes and Communists8221 the translation was 8220Once you leave Chapel Hill you8217re in North Carolina8221 Or as my family saw it 8220once you leave Charlotte you8217re in Concord8221 the town just beyond well known as a speed trap for black motorists passing through Still that didn8217t stop a kid from trying to find the mythical Mayberry on a road map And when you couldn8217t find it you settled for Siler City which does exist or Pilot Mountain which was called Mt Pilot on the show and the other small towns mentioned on the show In the sixties despite reality the two Carolinas seemed as different as night and day On the bright side the Tar Heel state was where four black college students in Greensboro initiated the sitin movement the same year that Griffith8217s show began airing in April of that year 200 students met at Shaw University in Raleigh to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC On the dark side when some of those black students in SNCC crossed the border into Rock Hill South Carolina a year later the group of seven black and six white people including now Congressman John Lewis were met at the Greyhound bus station by a mob of twenty angry whites ready to pummel them back in their places amp160We all took note of Chuck Berry8217s 1964 song amp1608220Promised Land8221 where a poor black boy boarded a Greyhound bus that stopped in Charlotte but 8220bypassed Rock Hill8221 Race relations in North Carolina seemed to worsen in the 1970s The decade started with open racial strife in Wilmington when Ben Chavis and nine others wound up in jail on trumpedup charges and it ended with five protest marchers killed by members of the KKK and American Nazi Party with police collusion in Greensboro But the state still had stalwarts Griffith and Billy Graham 8211 who once admitted he had been a registered Democrat for most of his voting life though he supported Richard Nixon in 1968 I believe that Griffith8217s role as Lonesome Rhodes a narcissistic megalomaniac in Elia Kaman8217s 1957 filmamp160A Face in the Crowd hugely influencedamp160Graham amp160Thinking about the force he Graham had become Rhodes could have been speaking to him when he said 8220I8217m not just an entertainer amp160I8217m an influence 8230 a wielder of opinion 8230 a force 8211 a force8221 amp160About his adoring fans Rhodes says 8220They8217re mine I own 8217em They think like I do But they8217re even more stupid than I am So I gotta think for 8217em8221 He threatens 8220If the president tries to stop me I8217ll flood the White House with millions of telegrams8221 Graham certainly liked his access to the politically powerful but he didn8217t become a caricature of Rhodes amp160In his early years folks were more prone to liken Graham to Burt Lancaster8217s Elmer Gantry 8220a con with a collar8221 but Graham never became that type of demagogue con man either Movie characters and Nixon aside during the civil rights era Graham had a close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr amp160When Graham invited King to appear at his 1957 evangelistic crusade in New York City he took a lot of heat from segregationists King credited Graham with playing a significant part in reducing the tension between whites and blacks in the South The two men split over the Vietnam War but what blacks in the rural South heard was 8220the Rev Billy Graham supports the Rev Dr Martin Luther King8221 amp160Graham had integrated religious services with Myrtle Hall a black woman and native of Greenville South Carolina singing with the Crusade which still regularly airs across the South Most whites in early 60s South were Democrats But I always suspected that Sheriff Andy and his sidekick Deputy Barney Fife were 8220John Kennedy8221 liberal Democrats as opposed to Strom ThurmondJesse Helms Dixiecrats and most certainly not Nixon Republicans In one episode Andy tells Barney 8220That8217s how democracy works8221 and immediately Barney misconstruing what 8216democracy8217 meant becomes agitated thinking Andy knows how he voted only to tell Andy after his brief pout 8220If you tell me who you voted for I8217ll tell you who I voted for8221 The reallife Andy campaigned for Democrats like Governor Jim Hunt in his 1984 race against Senator Helms Helms won reelection bringing in Moses actor Charlton Heston to appear in a TV commercial for him In 1989 Griffith was asked to run against Helms after the polling outfit MasonDixon had him leading the incumbent by nine points 48 percent to 39 percent Supporters even printed up 8220Run Andy Run8221 bumper stickers But Griffith wasn8217t interested in a political career Former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt became the Democratic standard bearer and race became a central issue when Helms ran his infamous 8220Hands8221 ad In 2000 and 2004 Griffith campaigned for Mike Easley in the governor8217s race even as Dean Smith backslid a bit cutting an ad in 2000 for Republican and former Charlotte mayor Richard Vinroot one of Smith8217s former players Easley8217s victory was dubbed 8220the Mayberry Miracle8221 because of Griffith8217s endorsement ad Throughout the 1980s and 90s Griffith played the role of 8220country lawyer8221 Ben Matlock Some say the Matlock character was loosely based on Senator Sam Ervin who also liked to call himself 8220just a country lawyer8221 amp160Maybe it was but maybe not amp160Early in his career Ervin was all at once a defender of civil liberties Jim Crow racial segregation and immigrant nationality quotas amp160On the civil liberties front he served on the investigation committees that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 at a time Graham embraced the red scareamp160amp160Graham said of McCarthy 82208230 I thank God for men who in the face of public denouncement and ridicule go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle and from that vantage point try in every subtle undercover way to bring comfort aid and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known 8212 communism8221amp160 But in 1956amp160Ervinamp160helped organize resistance to Brown v Board of Educationamp160and helped draft the segregationist Southern Manifesto amp160Ervin said he later changed his mind on theamp160Brownamp160school desegregation decision stating 8220to the extent it eliminated mandatory segregation it was correct but 8230 forced integration required under later decisions was improper8221 Ervin argued that Americans were entitled to 8220their prejudices as well as their allergies8221 Later in his career he opposed the Equal Rights Amendment amp160But as a civil libertarian he opposed 8220noknock8221 search laws thought liedetector tests were an invasion of privacy opposed compulsory school prayer and supported the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment which made illegally seized evidence inadmissible in criminal trials Just maybe Sheriff Andy of Mayberry and Ervin influenced each other on civil liberties amp160In one of my favorite episodes called 8220The Tape Recorder8221 Opie secretly records a bank robber confessing to his lawyer where he hid the money against Andy8217s strict ordersamp160 Opie gives his dad the tape and Andy erases it without listening to it explaining to his son the privacy rights of the accused due process and the rule of law That TV lesson sounds like a quaint ideal today in light of the Patriot Act the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and all the other civil liberties limitations brought on by the 8220war on terror8221 After the passing of Donamp160Knotts who played Barney Fife in 2006 my mom a big fan of both men said 8220Well now that 8216Barn8217 is gone 8216Ang8217 the onscreen nicknames of the two won8217t be too far behind8221 Andy lasted a halfdozen more years actively backing both Bev Perdue in the 2008 governor8217s race and candidate Obama In 2010 he promoted Obama8217s Affordable Care Act in the face of complaints from at least five GOP senators including North Carolina8217s Richard Burr who wrote human resources secretary Kathleen Sebelius demanding that Griffith8217s publicly funded ad be pulled So when you think of great white Southerners like Mississippi8217s Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner or Alabama8217s Harper E Lee whose 1960amp160 To Kill a Mockingbirdamp160exposed the racist nature of Southern justice or President Jimmy Carter of Georgia or former Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina it is no stretch to add Andy Griffith8217s name to the list Because while we every now and then read the works of the great writers praise or condemn Carter and regularly forget or ignore that Hollings was the last of the great Southern liberal lawmakers we see Griffith8217s work everyday Andy Griffith to a Southerner is like grits and soul food It will be interesting to see how Southern Democrats and liberals fare without Andy in the flesh Kevin Alexander Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina and author ofamp160 Waiting for Lightning to Strike The Fundamentals of Black Politicsamp160CounterPunchAK Press and a contributor toamp160 Hopeless Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion He can be reached atamp160 kagambabellsouthnet | Some/DET thoughts/NOUN on/ADP the/DET political/ADJ legacy/NOUN of/ADP Andy/PROPN Griffith/PROPN amp160Griffith/ADP who/PRON was/AUX born/VERB in/ADP Mount/PROPN Airy/PROPN North/PROPN Carolina/PROPN on/ADP June/PROPN 1/NUM 1926/NUM died/VERB on/ADP July/PROPN 3/NUM at/ADP the/DET age/NOUN of/ADP 86/NUM in/ADP the/DET town/NOUN of/ADP Manteo/PROPN 8220Funerals/NUM are/AUX for/ADP the/DET living8221/NOUN my/PRON mother/NOUN is/AUX quick/ADJ to/PART say/VERB but/CCONJ Griffith/PROPN barely/ADV had/VERB one/NUM They/PRON buried/VERB him/PRON so/ADV fast/ADJ 8211/NUM he/PRON passed/VERB away/ADV around/ADP 7/NUM am/NOUN and/CCONJ was/AUX lowered/VERB into/ADP the/DET ground/NOUN on/ADP Roanoke/PROPN Island/PROPN at/ADP about/ADP 1130/NUM am/AUX 8211/NUM that/SCONJ it/PRON didn8217/PROPN t/NOUN give/VERB many/ADJ of/ADP the/DET living/VERB adequate/ADJ chance/NOUN to/PART reflect/VERB on/ADP the/DET loss/NOUN I/PRON posted/VERB Griffith8217s/PROPN obit/NOUN to/ADP my/PRON social/ADJ network/NOUN page/NOUN and/CCONJ a/DET 30ish/ADJ West/PROPN Coast/PROPN black/ADJ fellow/NOUN surprised/VERB me/PRON by/ADP responding/VERB 8220You/NUM liked/VERB that/DET redneck/NOUN cracker8221/NOUN A/DET few/ADJ days/NOUN later/ADV a/DET 50something/NUM Jewish/ADJ guy/NOUN from/ADP New/PROPN York/PROPN 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state/NOUN party8217s/NOUN trump/NOUN card/NOUN in/ADP hardfought/ADJ campaigns/NOUN from/ADP the/DET 1980s/NOUN on/ADP helping/VERB Democrats/PROPN remain/VERB competitive/ADJ there/ADV while/SCONJ the/DET rest/NOUN of/ADP the/DET South/PROPN went/VERB Republican/PROPN To/ADP me/PRON his/PRON influence/NOUN in/ADP North/PROPN Carolina8217s/PROPN modern/ADJ political/ADJ history/NOUN is/AUX as/ADV great/ADJ as/SCONJ if/SCONJ not/PART greater/ADJ than/ADP that/PRON of/ADP the/DET Rev/PROPN Billy/PROPN Graham/PROPN Jesse/PROPN Helms/PROPN and/CCONJ Sam/PROPN Ervin/PROPN the/DET original/ADJ 8220bluedog8221/NUM Democrat/PROPN who/PRON served/VERB in/ADP the/DET US/PROPN Senate/PROPN from/ADP 1954/NUM to/ADP 1974/NUM and/CCONJ is/AUX best/ADV remembered/VERB for/ADP his/PRON role/NOUN as/ADP chairman/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Senate/PROPN Select/PROPN Committee/PROPN to/PART Investigate/VERB Campaign/PROPN Practices/PROPN 8211/NUM known/VERB more/ADV popularly/ADV as/ADP the/DET 8220Ervin/PROPN Committee8221/PROPN 8211/NUM that/PRON investigated/VERB the/DET 1972/NUM Watergate/PROPN breakin/NOUN that/PRON led/VERB to/ADP the/DET resignation/NOUN of/ADP President/PROPN Richard/PROPN Nixon/PROPN In/ADP the/DET convergence/NOUN of/ADP political/ADJ and/CCONJ social/ADJ influence/NOUN only/ADV Dean/PROPN Smith/PROPN the/DET UNC/PROPN Chapel/PROPN Hill/PROPN basketball/NOUN coach/NOUN from/ADP 1961/NUM to/ADP 1997/NUM rivals/NOUN Andy/PROPN Griffith/PROPN amp160Most/ADV people/NOUN know/VERB that/SCONJ Smith/PROPN coached/VERB Michael/PROPN Jordan/PROPN but/CCONJ his/PRON history/NOUN goes/VERB way/NOUN beyond/ADP sports/NOUN In/ADP 1964/NUM Smith/PROPN joined/VERB a/DET local/ADJ pastor/NOUN and/CCONJ a/DET black/ADJ theology/NOUN student/NOUN to/PART integrate/VERB The/DET Pines/PROPN a/DET Chapel/PROPN Hill/PROPN restaurant/NOUN In/ADP 1966/NUM he/PRON integrated/VERB the/DET Tar/PROPN Heels/PROPN basketball/NOUN team/NOUN making/VERB Charlie/PROPN Scott/PROPN the/DET first/ADJ 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the/DET 8220research/NUM triangle8221/NOUN is/AUX one/NUM So/ADV is/AUX Charlotte8217s/PROPN position/NOUN as/ADP home/NOUN to/ADP the/DET big/ADJ bank/NOUN HQs/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET state8217s/PROPN only/ADV professional/ADJ sports/NOUN team/NOUN and/CCONJ its/PRON distinction/NOUN in/ADP 1983/NUM as/ADP one/NUM of/ADP the/DET first/ADJ majoritywhite/PROPN Southern/ADJ cities/NOUN to/PART elect/VERB a/DET black/ADJ mayor/NOUN Harvey/PROPN Gantt/PROPN a/DET South/PROPN Carolina/PROPN native/ADJ All/DET figure/NOUN into/ADP why/SCONJ Obama/PROPN won/VERB the/DET state/NOUN in/ADP 2008/NUM and/CCONJ stands/VERB a/DET chance/NOUN to/PART do/AUX it/PRON again/ADV in/ADP 2012/NUM Yet/CCONJ Griffith/PROPN along/ADP with/ADP Smith/PROPN and/CCONJ to/ADP lesser/ADJ degrees/NOUN Ervin/PROPN and/CCONJ Graham/PROPN helped/VERB transform/VERB North/PROPN Carolina/PROPN long/ADV before/SCONJ new/ADJ residents/NOUN were/AUX drawn/VERB to/ADP the/DET research/NOUN triangle/NOUN and/CCONJ 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<p>We have only a little knowledge how the federal government intervenes in financial markets. What we do know is that since the fall, US Treasury and Federal Reserve policy makers have been flying blind, sailing in uncharted waters: pick whatever metaphor you choose to dissolve the fabrication of markets based on supply and demand, and, free.</p>
<p>In fact, one’s metaphor is an excellent place to start. Comparing two seemingly unrelated subjects is a perfect way to begin decoding how wrong we were to trust that fiscal prudence guided the nation’s premier financial institutions.</p>
<p>The power of metaphor explains in part the value of gold (as distinguished from price). Gold is the currency whose price is being suppressed: a rapid bull run in gold means a run on credibility and order. The value of gold endures and reflects the same lack of confidence that somber fiscal conservatives once assigned to excessive regulation by government. Put another way, there has been metaphorical gold in demonizing government.</p>
<p>Now, in consideration of the failure of financial institutions, there is need for a new understanding. Perhaps that understanding also starts with metaphor and not necessarily the belief that a trillion dollar investment will re-package the good times.</p>
<p>There is a chance Congress and the White House will get it right. But there is equally a chance they won’t, and given the stakes, it is imperative that time and thoughtfulness take into account what a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus without clear and adequate controls will do.</p>
<p>So in respect to the power of metaphor, presumably not carried by President-elect Obama in one of his two overstuffed briefcases, consider the federal court sentencing hearing scheduled for Monday of Jorge and Carlos de Cespedes.</p>
<p>The de Cespedes brothers are facing prison time for using their Miami-based company, Pharmed, once one of the largest Hispanic businesses in America, to bilk millions from the Kendall Regional Medical Center. The federal judge has received more than 180 letters expressing support of a lenient sentence (‘180 letters urge leniency for former Pharmed owners in fraud charge’, Miami Herald, Jan. 2, 2009).</p>
<p>The Miami Herald article describing the de Cespedes’ travails notes that in 1998– the year Jeb Bush became governor of Florida– Carlos de Cespedes was one of “25 community leaders who signed a public letter decrying corruption in South Florida.” (The connection between the Cespedes, big Republican donors, and Jeb Bush is not incidental.)</p>
<p>The Jeb Bush “laissez faire” doctrine of government is in tatters; the result of the misplaced faith that commerce could do better than government in protecting free markets. Gov. Bush described what he believed to be the foundation for Florida’s future in his 2003 inaugural speech: “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”</p>
<p>His audience did not mistake his meaning: get the regulators out of the way of progress.</p>
<p>In its outstanding 2008 eight month investigation, “Borrowers Betrayed”, The Miami Herald details the lack of regulatory supervision of mortgage brokers by the state of Florida, allowing convicted felons easy access to prey. Miami Herald editors unfortunately kept the series’ focus on poor victims exploited by greedy mortgage brokers and lax bureaucrats; they pointedly did not trace that corruption up the political food chain. Had they done so, they would have tracked readers straight to the governor’s mansion and powerful Republicans banking on a permanent majority in Congress and the White House.</p>
<p>In the New York Times, Michael Lewis puts this reality in appropriate context of the calamity: “Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics.” (‘The End of the Financial World as We Know It, NY Times, January 4, 2009)</p>
<p>The history of political malfeasance in places like Miami rarely rises to volumes of criminal prosecutions, but the bits and pieces – like the 1998 letter from the signatories of the Mesa Rodonda against corruption– should be scrutinized for what it says about the capacity of wealthy, well-heeled lawyers, lobbyists, and speculators to game the system.</p>
<p>The point to consider: how misdirection by state leaders like Jeb Bush in furtherance promoted the blurring of edges, made it larger and instead of bright lines– lines like Miami’s Urban Development Boundary separating developable land from land unfavorable to development—and allowed corruption to flourish. In many respects, the equation is intact and thriving; spending down principal until help arrives.</p>
<p>That help? The trillion dollars of your money and mine.</p>
<p>“We believe there is much we can do as a community to clean up our act”, proclaimed Hispanic business leaders in June 1998 under the umbrella of Mesa Rodonda to express outrage against rampant corruption in Miami-Dade County. “We have had it!” begins their letter. “Once regarded as the crime capital of America, we are now perceived as its corruption capital.” (“Hispanic business leaders call summit to fight corruption”, Miami Herald, June 2, 1998) Carlos de Cespedes was among the signers.</p>
<p>A week later the Miami Dade State Attorney’s Office announced: the arrest of Antonio J. Reyes, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Thermoplastic &amp; Signs, Inc., in connection with a joint investigation by the State Attorney’s Office and the Miami-Dade Police Department Public Corruption Unit. “(Investigators) uncovered numerous circumstances wherein Reyes and his company submitted bills, under the County’s paving contract, with Church &amp; Tower, for roadway striping work that was never done. Reyes’ company was hired as a sub-contractor under the County contract to do this work and submitted invoices for payment to the Contractor, and ultimately the County. These instances of over billing resulted in an overpayment by the County in excess of $1,000,000.” (June 10, 1998)</p>
<p>Church and Tower is a division of the corporate interests of the family of the late Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. Mas Canosa’s son, Jorge Mas, was another signer of the Mesa Rodunda letter. Another was Sergio Pino, listed as president of Century Plumbing. Plumbing, in this case, is a metaphor of its own. Slightly more than a year later, The Miami Herald would amplify:</p>
<p>“Miami International Airport, rated among America’s worst for passengers, is being used by Miami-Dade politicians as a billion-dollar piggy bank to enrich their friends and campaign contributors. They manipulate rules so favored firms get airport deals. … Key findings: Virtually all major deals at MIA go to companies that give political contributions and employ lobbyists who are key fund-raisers and advisors for county politicians. (“The airport mess: Miami’s tourism industry is threatened by politicians”, Miami Herald, October 17, 1999)</p>
<p>The Herald continues, “If passengers aren’t winning at MIA, who is? Often, it’s a small group of political insiders who reap millions in airport spoils without ever showing up for work, investing significant cash or bringing industry experience to the table. Developer Sergio Pino is one of the main fund-raisers for Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas and has contributed to at least 11 of the 13 commissioners. Last year, at Penelas’ request, he hosted a $238,000 fund-raiser for Commissioner Miriam Alonso.”</p>
<p>“In 1998, Miami-Dade Commissioner Miriam Alonso penned an editorial bemoaning the plague of corruption scandals then afflicting the county, and lashing out at “the venality of certain corrupt officials.” On Thursday, some eight years later, Alonso’s own venality was finally laid bare: She pleaded guilty to 20 felonies for looting campaign accounts in 1998 and 1999 and trying to cover up the crimes. (“Alonso pleads guilty, says she is sorry”, Miami Herald, Oct. 27, 2006)</p>
<p>In “Airport Mess”, the Herald noted, “One of South Florida’s biggest builders, Pino owns a waterfront home and a 54-foot yacht and has a net worth of at least $19 million. Yet in 1995, he was cut into the airport’s duty-free shops as a “disadvantaged businessman” to meet airport rules requiring minority partners. With his business interests now pulling in more than $32 million a year, Pino no longer qualifies as a minority entrepreneur, but he has kept his place in the duty-free deal: The county decided he could stay in under a grandfather clause. Pino readily acknowledges his political ties, but said his team won because it offered the best return. His inclusion as a disadvantaged businessman? “I didn’t make the rules,” he said. “I played by the law. . . . To me, it was a business opportunity.”</p>
<p>Back in 1998, Pino’s key business colleagues were in the midst of a pitched battle on the no-bid 99 year lease they had secured from the county commission, before the US military had even decided how to dispose of the property, for the former Homestead Air Force Base: Greenberg Traurig attorney Miguel De Grandy was the principal lawyer representing HABDI; a newly formed company constituted from board members of the Latin Builders Association. Ramon Rasco, now chairman of US Century Bank that Pino founded in 2002, was a principal organizer of the HABDI fiasco.</p>
<p>Caesar Alvarez, managing partner of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was another signer of the Mesa Roduna letter. Today, Alvarez is chairman of the charitable John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The foundation, a premier institution defending independent journalism, failed to censure one of its grantees in 2008—the Miami International Film Festival—when last year, at the last minute, the festival director refused to air a documentary highly critical of Dominican Republic sugar operations owned by Miami’s billionaire Fanjul family interests.</p>
<p>Another signatory of the Mesa Rodunda letter, US Century board member Jose Cancela, a lobbyist to move the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade for development projects that are partly owned by other US Century board members including Rodney Barreto (Gov. Bush’s appointee, now chairman, of the Florida Wildlife Commission), Armando Guerra and the Herran brothers.</p>
<p>In 1998, political corruption was seemingly everywhere. Miami City Commissioner Humberto Hernandez did time in the Big House. Former state senator Al Gutman was indicted in 1999, along with his wife and 23 others, on charges of Medicaid fraud and conspiracy despite allegations swirling around his successful re-election bid a year earlier, supported by the panoply of Florida business campaign contributors. Gutman, who was chairman of the Florida Senate Health Care Committee, pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy charges that he helped set up home health care companies that never did any legitimate business, got names of purported patients from voter lists, and received over $800,000 in Medicare payments. He resigned from the Florida Senate as part of the plea bargain and was sentenced in 2000 to five years in prison.</p>
<p>Pino, in 2006, turned up in a federal probe of Miami Dade County Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz. The investigation resulted in no charges. It centered on a fishing trip that Diaz took to Cancun aboard Pino’s private jet. Carlos de Cespedes was the other passenger on the trip (“Pepe Diaz Cancun Visit is Probed”, Miami Herald, June 10, 2006). A few months after the trip, Diaz and the rest of the commission voted for a Pino development project called Grand Bay. The Herald political blog noted, “Miami-Dade Commissioner Jose ”Pepe” Diaz received $20,000 in 2004 from what federal prosecutors describe as a shell company used to conceal fraudulent proceeds from a hospital kickback scheme — a payment the commissioner says was a legitimate bonus. The company, Kaufman Medical Products, was cited in a document filed in federal court Tuesday about healthcare fraud charges against Carlos and Jorge de Céspedes, owners of the bankrupt Doral medical-supply firm Pharmed. Diaz listed on his 2004 public disclosure form that he had received $19,795 from Kaufman. Diaz said Wednesday the money was a bonus for work performed for the de Céspedes brothers’ venture capital firm, Astri Group.” (‘Naked Politics’, Miami Herald, July 24, 2008)</p>
<p>“In a separate matter, the Miami Daily Business Review reported last week that it had obtained corporate bank records showing that Pino’s companies may have reimbursed $29.500 to 59 contributors to Governor Jeb Bush’s 2002 re-election campaign. It is a violation of Florida election law for a person to make a donation in another person’s name.” (‘Crist ally cuts ties amid grand jury investigation’, St. Pete Times, July 27, 2006) Pino was a Bush-Cheney “Ranger” for having raised at least $200,000 for the president’s 2004 re-election campaign and, according to the St. Pete Times, “is a major donor to Gov. Bush’s non-profit educational foundation.”</p>
<p>1998 was a key year in the building and housing asset bubble: the politics of laissez faire “libertarianism” in service of the free market were angling to meet up with the lowest interest rates in US history (at that time); the response to the crashing dot.com bubble and the 9/11 event. Nothing could go wrong as long as free enterprise was allowed to reign. Think about what happened in Florida the decade after Cespedes put his name to the letter against corruption in Miami.</p>
<p>The business leaders who put their name to a letter in 1998 against corruption were about to be propelled into the boom in housing and construction that turned single digit millionaires into centi-millionaires. Pull the threads from platted subdivisions in West Miami, to infrastructure like Miami International Airport or Miami road paving contracts and the fabric of the US economy unravels straight up to the executive suites of Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Indymac, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for example. Between 1999 and 2003 in Florida, the US Army Corps of Engineers approved more than 12,000 wetlands permits and rejected one. During the same period, 84,000 acres of wetlands vanished. (“They won’t say no”, St. Pete Times, May 22, 2005)</p>
<p>“All we are looking to do is find a balance between residential needs and environmental needs,” Commissioner Pepe Diaz told Time Magazine in reference to moving the Urban Development Boundary last year. (‘Lowe’s eyes the Everglades’, Time Magazine, April 28, 2008) This notion of balance between the environment and economy is a multi-generational Ponzi scheme of its own; using later adopters to mask the shifting baselines that had been sold to an earlier generation of compromise. Put another way, it is all one mesa rotonda, forcing politics to reside a centimeter of the edge of the law while, those close to the edge blur the edge so that centimeter becomes a matter of continuous, revolving dispute; a banner crop pre-fertilized with campaign contributions for harvesting by engineering firms, consultants, and big law firms.</p>
<p>Again, the environment provides a clear example in Florida. In 1994, the State of Florida incorporated the settlement agreement with the federal government related to its failure to enforce against pollution of the Everglades by mandating a phosphorous standard of 10 parts per billion. The measure was to be in effect by 2006. By 2003, Gov. Bush agreed to modify the hard and fast standard with an amendment to Florida law allowing for mixing zones and numerical calculations that decimated the agreement between the state and feds. The sugar industry flooded the state capital so that as the bill was being heard in the Senate, there were more lobbyists than legislators in the halls. Bush sent his chief environmental lieutenant, environmental secretary David Struhs, to the Miami courthouse steps to falsely claim that federal agencies were in agreement. In July 2008, a federal court issued a stinging rebuke against the Florida law and said the US EPA had turned a “blind eye” to the state’s blurred standard. (‘Judge: Glades cleanup ignored’, Miami Herald, July 30, 2008)</p>
<p>By extension, if reasonable people can’t agree on protecting wetlands from too much fertilizer, or only agree that the line of pollution should be blurred by jimmying the scales with arithmetic averages and mixing zones, why should anyone care about bond credit ratings or risk analyses that allow insiders to fleece the nation’s financial institutions while getting paid billions and a Grade A report card for doing it? Few in public office cared while so much money was flowing outside and inside the edges of the law and into political campaigns. In key respects, this behavior is still reinforced by a permanent incumbency, insulated by gerrymandered districts, and a fading media.</p>
<p>So here is the point: in the first months of the Obama administration, one trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus will pour from taxpayer obligations to the states. Since everything that can go wrong in financial markets—misplaced risk, horrendous analyses by men judged to be too brilliant to fail, matched up to greed and ingenuity in the evasion of regulations and ethics; then it is not only possible but even likely to predict the worst result of the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus.</p>
<p>The first consideration, then, of the Obama administration should be to acknowledge the likely consequences. We have experienced—in financial markets—the radical and unexpected. So President-elect Obama must admit that the fiscal stimulus plan will put American taxpayers at even greater risk to white collar bankers who have contrived their way into the US treasury.</p>
<p>Not a single red cent should be appropriated by Congress for a fiscal stimulus until audit controls, checks, and balances are in place to flush fraud and systematic corruption from the distribution of government funds to private industry. That is a tall order. Making sure that the tsunami of taxpayer dollars will not end up in the pockets of the same interests who created the crisis, papering purchase orders, contracts, and further political IOU’s requires more than ethics classes. And it better get done properly or there will be strong potential for social unrest. Gov. Jeb Bush wanted to empty Tallahassee of regulators: in important respects he got what he wanted.</p>
<p>As a result of allowing the regulatory capacity of government to wither, we will need to quickly build from the ground-up, a civil service and accountability that rewards success and penalizes failure. New federal laws and budgets for enforcement must give teeth to public corruption investigations and prosecutions. To this I would add, “to keep democracy safe”. It shouldn’t be an after-thought, but the way things are going who can deny what we value as gold has been sold for pennies?</p>
<p>ALAN FARAGO, who writes on the environment and politics from Coral Gables, Florida, and can be reached at <a href="mailto:alanfarago@yahoo.com" type="external">alanfarago@yahoo.com</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | After the Fall | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/01/06/after-the-fall-2/ | 2009-01-06 | 4left
| 3,058 | We have only a little knowledge how the federal government intervenes in financial markets What we do know is that since the fall US Treasury and Federal Reserve policy makers have been flying blind sailing in uncharted waters pick whatever metaphor you choose to dissolve the fabrication of markets based on supply and demand and free In fact one8217s metaphor is an excellent place to start Comparing two seemingly unrelated subjects is a perfect way to begin decoding how wrong we were to trust that fiscal prudence guided the nation8217s premier financial institutions The power of metaphor explains in part the value of gold as distinguished from price Gold is the currency whose price is being suppressed a rapid bull run in gold means a run on credibility and order The value of gold endures and reflects the same lack of confidence that somber fiscal conservatives once assigned to excessive regulation by government Put another way there has been metaphorical gold in demonizing government Now in consideration of the failure of financial institutions there is need for a new understanding Perhaps that understanding also starts with metaphor and not necessarily the belief that a trillion dollar investment will repackage the good times There is a chance Congress and the White House will get it right But there is equally a chance they won8217t and given the stakes it is imperative that time and thoughtfulness take into account what a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus without clear and adequate controls will do So in respect to the power of metaphor presumably not carried by Presidentelect Obama in one of his two overstuffed briefcases consider the federal court sentencing hearing scheduled for Monday of Jorge and Carlos de Cespedes The de Cespedes brothers are facing prison time for using their Miamibased company Pharmed once one of the largest Hispanic businesses in America to bilk millions from the Kendall Regional Medical Center The federal judge has received more than 180 letters expressing support of a lenient sentence 8216180 letters urge leniency for former Pharmed owners in fraud charge8217 Miami Herald Jan 2 2009 The Miami Herald article describing the de Cespedes8217 travails notes that in 19988211 the year Jeb Bush became governor of Florida8211 Carlos de Cespedes was one of 822025 community leaders who signed a public letter decrying corruption in South Florida8221 The connection between the Cespedes big Republican donors and Jeb Bush is not incidental The Jeb Bush 8220laissez faire8221 doctrine of government is in tatters the result of the misplaced faith that commerce could do better than government in protecting free markets Gov Bush described what he believed to be the foundation for Florida8217s future in his 2003 inaugural speech 8220There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill8221 His audience did not mistake his meaning get the regulators out of the way of progress In its outstanding 2008 eight month investigation 8220Borrowers Betrayed8221 The Miami Herald details the lack of regulatory supervision of mortgage brokers by the state of Florida allowing convicted felons easy access to prey Miami Herald editors unfortunately kept the series8217 focus on poor victims exploited by greedy mortgage brokers and lax bureaucrats they pointedly did not trace that corruption up the political food chain Had they done so they would have tracked readers straight to the governor8217s mansion and powerful Republicans banking on a permanent majority in Congress and the White House In the New York Times Michael Lewis puts this reality in appropriate context of the calamity 8220Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role financial lunatics8221 8216The End of the Financial World as We Know It NY Times January 4 2009 The history of political malfeasance in places like Miami rarely rises to volumes of criminal prosecutions but the bits and pieces 8211 like the 1998 letter from the signatories of the Mesa Rodonda against corruption8211 should be scrutinized for what it says about the capacity of wealthy wellheeled lawyers lobbyists and speculators to game the system The point to consider how misdirection by state leaders like Jeb Bush in furtherance promoted the blurring of edges made it larger and instead of bright lines8211 lines like Miami8217s Urban Development Boundary separating developable land from land unfavorable to development8212and allowed corruption to flourish In many respects the equation is intact and thriving spending down principal until help arrives That help The trillion dollars of your money and mine 8220We believe there is much we can do as a community to clean up our act8221 proclaimed Hispanic business leaders in June 1998 under the umbrella of Mesa Rodonda to express outrage against rampant corruption in MiamiDade County 8220We have had it8221 begins their letter 8220Once regarded as the crime capital of America we are now perceived as its corruption capital8221 8220Hispanic business leaders call summit to fight corruption8221 Miami Herald June 2 1998 Carlos de Cespedes was among the signers A week later the Miami Dade State Attorney8217s Office announced the arrest of Antonio J Reyes Director and Chief Operating Officer of Thermoplastic ampamp Signs Inc in connection with a joint investigation by the State Attorney8217s Office and the MiamiDade Police Department Public Corruption Unit 8220Investigators uncovered numerous circumstances wherein Reyes and his company submitted bills under the County8217s paving contract with Church ampamp Tower for roadway striping work that was never done Reyes8217 company was hired as a subcontractor under the County contract to do this work and submitted invoices for payment to the Contractor and ultimately the County These instances of over billing resulted in an overpayment by the County in excess of 10000008221 June 10 1998 Church and Tower is a division of the corporate interests of the family of the late Jorge Mas Canosa founder of the Cuban American National Foundation Mas Canosa8217s son Jorge Mas was another signer of the Mesa Rodunda letter Another was Sergio Pino listed as president of Century Plumbing Plumbing in this case is a metaphor of its own Slightly more than a year later The Miami Herald would amplify 8220Miami International Airport rated among America8217s worst for passengers is being used by MiamiDade politicians as a billiondollar piggy bank to enrich their friends and campaign contributors They manipulate rules so favored firms get airport deals 8230 Key findings Virtually all major deals at MIA go to companies that give political contributions and employ lobbyists who are key fundraisers and advisors for county politicians 8220The airport mess Miami8217s tourism industry is threatened by politicians8221 Miami Herald October 17 1999 The Herald continues 8220If passengers aren8217t winning at MIA who is Often it8217s a small group of political insiders who reap millions in airport spoils without ever showing up for work investing significant cash or bringing industry experience to the table Developer Sergio Pino is one of the main fundraisers for MiamiDade Mayor Alex Penelas and has contributed to at least 11 of the 13 commissioners Last year at Penelas8217 request he hosted a 238000 fundraiser for Commissioner Miriam Alonso8221 8220In 1998 MiamiDade Commissioner Miriam Alonso penned an editorial bemoaning the plague of corruption scandals then afflicting the county and lashing out at 8220the venality of certain corrupt officials8221 On Thursday some eight years later Alonso8217s own venality was finally laid bare She pleaded guilty to 20 felonies for looting campaign accounts in 1998 and 1999 and trying to cover up the crimes 8220Alonso pleads guilty says she is sorry8221 Miami Herald Oct 27 2006 In 8220Airport Mess8221 the Herald noted 8220One of South Florida8217s biggest builders Pino owns a waterfront home and a 54foot yacht and has a net worth of at least 19 million Yet in 1995 he was cut into the airport8217s dutyfree shops as a 8220disadvantaged businessman8221 to meet airport rules requiring minority partners With his business interests now pulling in more than 32 million a year Pino no longer qualifies as a minority entrepreneur but he has kept his place in the dutyfree deal The county decided he could stay in under a grandfather clause Pino readily acknowledges his political ties but said his team won because it offered the best return His inclusion as a disadvantaged businessman 8220I didn8217t make the rules8221 he said 8220I played by the law To me it was a business opportunity8221 Back in 1998 Pino8217s key business colleagues were in the midst of a pitched battle on the nobid 99 year lease they had secured from the county commission before the US military had even decided how to dispose of the property for the former Homestead Air Force Base Greenberg Traurig attorney Miguel De Grandy was the principal lawyer representing HABDI a newly formed company constituted from board members of the Latin Builders Association Ramon Rasco now chairman of US Century Bank that Pino founded in 2002 was a principal organizer of the HABDI fiasco Caesar Alvarez managing partner of Greenberg Traurig one of the nation8217s largest law firms was another signer of the Mesa Roduna letter Today Alvarez is chairman of the charitable John S and James L Knight Foundation The foundation a premier institution defending independent journalism failed to censure one of its grantees in 20088212the Miami International Film Festival8212when last year at the last minute the festival director refused to air a documentary highly critical of Dominican Republic sugar operations owned by Miami8217s billionaire Fanjul family interests Another signatory of the Mesa Rodunda letter US Century board member Jose Cancela a lobbyist to move the Urban Development Boundary in MiamiDade for development projects that are partly owned by other US Century board members including Rodney Barreto Gov Bush8217s appointee now chairman of the Florida Wildlife Commission Armando Guerra and the Herran brothers In 1998 political corruption was seemingly everywhere Miami City Commissioner Humberto Hernandez did time in the Big House Former state senator Al Gutman was indicted in 1999 along with his wife and 23 others on charges of Medicaid fraud and conspiracy despite allegations swirling around his successful reelection bid a year earlier supported by the panoply of Florida business campaign contributors Gutman who was chairman of the Florida Senate Health Care Committee pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy charges that he helped set up home health care companies that never did any legitimate business got names of purported patients from voter lists and received over 800000 in Medicare payments He resigned from the Florida Senate as part of the plea bargain and was sentenced in 2000 to five years in prison Pino in 2006 turned up in a federal probe of Miami Dade County Commissioner Jose 8220Pepe8221 Diaz The investigation resulted in no charges It centered on a fishing trip that Diaz took to Cancun aboard Pino8217s private jet Carlos de Cespedes was the other passenger on the trip 8220Pepe Diaz Cancun Visit is Probed8221 Miami Herald June 10 2006 A few months after the trip Diaz and the rest of the commission voted for a Pino development project called Grand Bay The Herald political blog noted 8220MiamiDade Commissioner Jose 8221Pepe8221 Diaz received 20000 in 2004 from what federal prosecutors describe as a shell company used to conceal fraudulent proceeds from a hospital kickback scheme 8212 a payment the commissioner says was a legitimate bonus The company Kaufman Medical Products was cited in a document filed in federal court Tuesday about healthcare fraud charges against Carlos and Jorge de C233spedes owners of the bankrupt Doral medicalsupply firm Pharmed Diaz listed on his 2004 public disclosure form that he had received 19795 from Kaufman Diaz said Wednesday the money was a bonus for work performed for the de C233spedes brothers8217 venture capital firm Astri Group8221 8216Naked Politics8217 Miami Herald July 24 2008 8220In a separate matter the Miami Daily Business Review reported last week that it had obtained corporate bank records showing that Pino8217s companies may have reimbursed 29500 to 59 contributors to Governor Jeb Bush8217s 2002 reelection campaign It is a violation of Florida election law for a person to make a donation in another person8217s name8221 8216Crist ally cuts ties amid grand jury investigation8217 St Pete Times July 27 2006 Pino was a BushCheney 8220Ranger8221 for having raised at least 200000 for the president8217s 2004 reelection campaign and according to the St Pete Times 8220is a major donor to Gov Bush8217s nonprofit educational foundation8221 1998 was a key year in the building and housing asset bubble the politics of laissez faire 8220libertarianism8221 in service of the free market were angling to meet up with the lowest interest rates in US history at that time the response to the crashing dotcom bubble and the 911 event Nothing could go wrong as long as free enterprise was allowed to reign Think about what happened in Florida the decade after Cespedes put his name to the letter against corruption in Miami The business leaders who put their name to a letter in 1998 against corruption were about to be propelled into the boom in housing and construction that turned single digit millionaires into centimillionaires Pull the threads from platted subdivisions in West Miami to infrastructure like Miami International Airport or Miami road paving contracts and the fabric of the US economy unravels straight up to the executive suites of Citigroup Merrill Lynch AIG Bear Stearns Lehman Brothers Indymac Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for example Between 1999 and 2003 in Florida the US Army Corps of Engineers approved more than 12000 wetlands permits and rejected one During the same period 84000 acres of wetlands vanished 8220They won8217t say no8221 St Pete Times May 22 2005 8220All we are looking to do is find a balance between residential needs and environmental needs8221 Commissioner Pepe Diaz told Time Magazine in reference to moving the Urban Development Boundary last year 8216Lowe8217s eyes the Everglades8217 Time Magazine April 28 2008 This notion of balance between the environment and economy is a multigenerational Ponzi scheme of its own using later adopters to mask the shifting baselines that had been sold to an earlier generation of compromise Put another way it is all one mesa rotonda forcing politics to reside a centimeter of the edge of the law while those close to the edge blur the edge so that centimeter becomes a matter of continuous revolving dispute a banner crop prefertilized with campaign contributions for harvesting by engineering firms consultants and big law firms Again the environment provides a clear example in Florida In 1994 the State of Florida incorporated the settlement agreement with the federal government related to its failure to enforce against pollution of the Everglades by mandating a phosphorous standard of 10 parts per billion The measure was to be in effect by 2006 By 2003 Gov Bush agreed to modify the hard and fast standard with an amendment to Florida law allowing for mixing zones and numerical calculations that decimated the agreement between the state and feds The sugar industry flooded the state capital so that as the bill was being heard in the Senate there were more lobbyists than legislators in the halls Bush sent his chief environmental lieutenant environmental secretary David Struhs to the Miami courthouse steps to falsely claim that federal agencies were in agreement In July 2008 a federal court issued a stinging rebuke against the Florida law and said the US EPA had turned a 8220blind eye8221 to the state8217s blurred standard 8216Judge Glades cleanup ignored8217 Miami Herald July 30 2008 By extension if reasonable people can8217t agree on protecting wetlands from too much fertilizer or only agree that the line of pollution should be blurred by jimmying the scales with arithmetic averages and mixing zones why should anyone care about bond credit ratings or risk analyses that allow insiders to fleece the nation8217s financial institutions while getting paid billions and a Grade A report card for doing it Few in public office cared while so much money was flowing outside and inside the edges of the law and into political campaigns In key respects this behavior is still reinforced by a permanent incumbency insulated by gerrymandered districts and a fading media So here is the point in the first months of the Obama administration one trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus will pour from taxpayer obligations to the states Since everything that can go wrong in financial markets8212misplaced risk horrendous analyses by men judged to be too brilliant to fail matched up to greed and ingenuity in the evasion of regulations and ethics then it is not only possible but even likely to predict the worst result of the trillion dollar fiscal stimulus The first consideration then of the Obama administration should be to acknowledge the likely consequences We have experienced8212in financial markets8212the radical and unexpected So Presidentelect Obama must admit that the fiscal stimulus plan will put American taxpayers at even greater risk to white collar bankers who have contrived their way into the US treasury Not a single red cent should be appropriated by Congress for a fiscal stimulus until audit controls checks and balances are in place to flush fraud and systematic corruption from the distribution of government funds to private industry That is a tall order Making sure that the tsunami of taxpayer dollars will not end up in the pockets of the same interests who created the crisis papering purchase orders contracts and further political IOU8217s requires more than ethics classes And it better get done properly or there will be strong potential for social unrest Gov Jeb Bush wanted to empty Tallahassee of regulators in important respects he got what he wanted As a result of allowing the regulatory capacity of government to wither we will need to quickly build from the groundup a civil service and accountability that rewards success and penalizes failure New federal laws and budgets for enforcement must give teeth to public corruption investigations and prosecutions To this I would add 8220to keep democracy safe8221 It shouldn8217t be an afterthought but the way things are going who can deny what we value as gold has been sold for pennies ALAN FARAGO who writes on the environment and politics from Coral 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<p>I went for a walk around Lake Gregory this past Sunday afternoon searching for peace, the freedom that comes with peace of mind. The sun’s heat spread through the cobalt blue sky over this lake that sits five thousand feet up in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, while sparklets of light glistened on the lake’s surface that nibbled slowly at the shore … a glorious day in mid March here in the mountains.</p>
<p>I went to the lake to find peace, this being the week the president gave one of his rare prime time press conferences, the only opportunity we, the public, get to see him perform. It’s also the week America goes to war. I went to the lake to find peace of mind, the ultimate state that comes with freedom, the state of being that is the primary goal of all religions, the end mystics dream of achieving and eastern faiths call Nirvana. I went to the lake to find the freedom Dubya claims others want to take from me, the freedom promised in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: freedom to believe as my conscience dictates, freedom to accept the beliefs of others most especially those who differ with me, freedom to pursue my talents and respect the right of others to pursue theirs, freedom to live a healthful life, to speak freely, to learn, and to seek just protection before the law. I went to find freedom; I found none. I found no peace of mind.</p>
<p>As I walked around the lake, I could not help but think that this was Sunday, the day God rested from His labors. Three faiths worship that God of Abraham including 90% of Americans, some are Jews, some Christians, and some Muslims. In a few years more Americans will declare the Koran their book of faith than those who declare the Torah. With all these people worshiping the same God, why do we have such division in this country? As I walked the path around the lake, it occurred to me that it’s the leaders who cause the problems. Consider Jerry Falwell, Pat Robinson, Hal Lindsey, Dale Evans, Frederick Graham and his father Billy (to name a few), who deride the prophet Mohammad and declare the Muslim faith to be one of violence. Consider also how they use the Jews to bring about their belief in the Book of Revelation, needing the Jews to establish themselves in Israel if the Second Coming is to happen. Consider how they call upon the Christians of the world to unite to fulfill God’s master plan even if it means a nuclear holocaust. These are the weapons of mass destruction! Minds filled with the certitude that only belief in myth can allow. And Sunday is the day Christians set aside to worship that God. This Christian God, this Jesus, asked His followers to “turn the other cheek,” to perform the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, in short to care for all God’s creatures. Yet this Sunday as I walked about the lake watching children toss their fishing lines out from shore, as others played “T” ball in the park, as young lovers cooed by the side of the lake, as the old and infirm watched from their bench above the path, I heard the whistle of the missiles slam into Baghdad and saw the mothers grasp their children to their breasts as they fled in horror at the searing flames and saw the walls of their homes shatter before their eyes. I saw this born-again Christian president order American boys and girls to “take up the cross” in defense of their homeland: to defend America against those who have inflicted no harm on America; who have in 12 years not molested any nation; who have claimed they possess no WMD and no nuclear capability verified by international inspectors to be the case; who occupy no other people’s lands; who have been subjugated to eleven years of deprivation by a coalition of nations that deprive them of basic medical, sanitation, health and economic necessities; who live in daily fear of American and British war planes that arbitrarily destroy their defenses and kill innocent civilians; and who are surrounded by the greatest massed force of destruction ever assembled in the history of humankind.</p>
<p>This president claims that he will bring freedom to the Iraqi people, not America’s gift of freedom, but God’s! This president will liberate the Iraqi people even as he slaughters an estimated 500,000 innocents, a liberation of questionable value one suspects. This president will bring democracy to Iraq whether they want it or not, a gift that Americans don’t even enjoy when he is president by selection of five judges! This president will decide the conscience of the American people since he disregards their voice both at the voting booth and in the streets. This president elevated Iraq to the stage of enemy number one by claiming it had connections with the terrorists that caused 9/11, a contention proved to be a lie. This president claimed that Iraq had biological weapons of mass destruction, but failed to tell the American people that his own father sold Saddam those weapons illegally and surreptitiously. This president claimed that Saddam gassed his own people, the Kurds, and Iranians against international law and the Geneva Conventions, but failed to tell the American people that the government at the time, the Reagan/Bush government, not only did not object to this action but provided the means to do it. This president claimed that Saddam did not comply with Resolution 1441 when he submitted a 12,000 page report, but failed to tell the American people that his administration removed 8,000 pages from that document, pages that contained sensitive material including the names of American, British, and German firms that supplied Saddam with the chemicals and equipment needed to produce WMD. This president claimed that Iraq was in a position to acquire nuclear arms within a few months, a potential threat to America, but failed to tell the American people that he would disregard other nations that possessed or would soon possess nuclear arms including two nations of the three that he called the “Axis of evil,” Iran and North Korea. This president claimed that Saddam was a vicious dictator who used torture, oppression o f women, and the jailing of dissidents to stay in power, but failed to tell the American people that his own father let Saddam stay in power because he was a known quantity and any replacement would not necessarily follow America’s orders. Nor did he tell the American people that he would authorize torture if done by another nation for America, or that he would incarcerate people without access to lawyers, trial, or jury, indeed, without even a charge of criminal conduct. And, finally, this president claimed that Iraq must be taken down by force because it defied the 17 UN resolutions that called upon it to disarm and respond to human rights violations, an action that if not taken would result in making the UN irrelevant, but he failed to tell the American people that America supports the state of Israel that has defied 155 UNGA and UNSC resolutions since 1948 and 69 UNSC resolutions (28 vetoed by the US) since the 1967 war, a defiance that far overshadows the 17 resolutions Iraq has defied. How irrelevant can the UN be if this is the criterion? What power does the UN possess to enforce its resolutions? Only the moral will of its members. It has no army; it has only the willing acceptance of the rights of all humans to life, liberty, respect, and dignity as determined by its member states. Thus when the most powerful member state disregards the moral stand of that bodies membership, when it resorts to bribes and coercion to have its way, it denies the only strength the UN can bring to bare on wayward nations. The claim of UN irrelevancy is specious, indeed, each and every contention made by this president has been shown to be demonstratively false. When logics die, leaders lie!</p>
<p>Patriotic platitudes, vapid values, and incongruous ideals cascade from our leaders mouths like waters over the cliffs of Niagara. Witness the recent babbling of Blair, Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice as they resort to condemnation of Iraq for defying the 17 resolutions passed by the UN, defiance that castrates the authority of the UN and cries for resolution by force regardless of the effectiveness of inspections or the will of the world community. Witness their despair that Iraq, after eleven years, will ever succumb to the will of the nations that passed these resolutions. Witness their declamations that the security of the US and the UK depends on immediate action against the treacherous dictator who gassed his own people 15 years ago (without objection by the US or the UK) and carried forth this same warfare against the Iranians with full approval of the US and the UK, indeed to the supplying of the materials. Witness their lamentations over those citizens who would object to a war that would instill “shock and awe” in this terrible enemy even as it liberates an estimated half million Iraqis by slaughtering them, saving them from continued oppression by Saddam. Witness their invoking the twin absolutes of freedom and democracy that will be the offspring of this war even as they prepare to occupy a foreign nation-state and force their will on its people, thus making moot the meaning of freedom and democracy. When logics die, what hypocrisy!</p>
<p>I have waited anxiously for a reporter to question these men and this woman about their resolve to hold Iraq to the authority of the UN resolutions. Why Iraq only? Why now? Why not other countries? Why not Israel and Palestine, for example, since most world leaders and the majority of the people in the nations around the world seem to find the Israeli/Palestinian crisis of greater consequence to peace in the mid-east? Do we not raise the specter of Israeli occupation and aggression against the Palestinians before the world body because we will be condemned as anti-Semitic? Do we not raise the issue of the Palestinian people resorting to suicide bombers because it casts condemnation on the members of the UN for allowing this crisis to continue for over fifty years? When will we invoke the authority of the UN to make both the Israelis and the Palestinians meet the demands of the international community and international law? When will we declare the hypocrisy of our stance before the world that the US and the UK believe wholeheartedly in the ideals of the world body and its authority in matters of international conflict? When logics die, leaders lie.. Lies, deceit, hypocrisy couched in euphemisms as evidence, security concerns, and ideals beneficial to the international community about the imminent threat posed by Iraq dominate the mainstream media effectively hiding the reality of the savagery being waged in Israel and Palestine. Beyond the lies uttered without shame by Blair and Powell justifying war, are those lies of omission that force Iraq to prominence now to hide the administration’s acceptance of Sharon’s war against the Palestinians. Why blanket the truth? Why not speak straightforwardly to the American people? This administration has capitulated to Sharon’s demands even as he cloaks his actions in Bush’s own terms, “defense against terrorists.” As Sharon has told the Knesset, “Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.” Why hide the truth? Tell it like it is: a war against Iraq can bury what is happening in Israel; a war against Iraq will bury the new Sharon coalition that depends on 13 members who are adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state; a war against Iraq will hide the request by Israel to have the US cover 15 billion in loans and grants to bail out their floundering economy even as the US states fall deeper and deeper into the ditch of debt. When logics die, leaders lie!</p>
<p>Contrast the demand that Iraq surrender to UN resolutions with the silence that greets the question, “Why not Israel?” Israel has defied the UN for 55 years, Iraq for 12. Israel has invaded and continues to hold illegally land that belongs to Palestinians, defying UN resolutions for 35 years to return the land; Iraq invaded Kuwait 12 years ago with CIA collusion and went to war with Iran 15 years ago with US approval and support. It occupies no foreign land now and is not considered a threat by its neighbors. Israel has and continues to defy not only UN resolutions that it abide by the Geneva Conventions to protect human rights, but spurns all Human Rights Watch Reports that request investigations into behavior that demeans human dignity and defies international law; Iraq has been forced to release control of its northern territories, that occupied principally by Kurds, and to give up absolute control in the south, a “no fly zone” controlled by the US and the UK.</p>
<p>Israel has used the “war on terror” to define the Palestinian people, thus giving them absolute right to determine who is a criminal and who will die, without trial by jury, without the right to a lawyer, and without appeal, actions all in defiance of international law; the Iraqi people are victims of this same logic that provides for the use of 7 _ times the destruction visited upon Hiroshima to be visited upon the Iraqi people to catch one man. Israel has WMD and openly admits this fact. It also has nuclear weapons and, in the words of one Israeli Professor, will use them on European capitals as well as against Iraq if needed to ensure the existence of Israel. It also occupies and suppresses Palestinians using tanks and bulldozers to destroy property not belonging to them. They also use the third largest military force in the world against a people that have no defense except old rifles, missiles and stones. Iraq has no comparable WMD, nor does it have nuclear capability; it does not occupy any territory owned by another nation and hasn’t in the past 12 years; its military forces are a third of what they were in 1991and incapable of defending the nation against the might of the US.</p>
<p>Israel has visited terror of an indescribable nature on a defenseless people, from refugee camps surrounded by dozens of tanks, thousands of foot soldiers, Apache helicopters, F-16 fighter jets, and the latest in state of the art technology to subdue the defiant few who will use their life as a weapon in a futile effort to turn the tide. Israel creates these suicide bombers by using vengeance to impregnate the deprived and the hopeless. America supports this state run terror with our tax money and our military hardware thus ensuring that America becomes a silent victim of Israeli vengeance. Why Iraq? Why now? Why not line up all who defy UN resolutions and force them to abide by UN authority after we have forced this on Iraq, including US defiance of such resolutions? When logics die, leaders lie! As I walked around the lake on this Sunday before America slips ineluctably into chaos, I could find no sense of freedom here in America. I have as much chance of defying Bush as an Iraqi citizen has of deposing Saddam. I am a victim of a man who can use my tax dollars to do whatever he wishes, whether that be to support Sharon’s savagery or to inflict devastation on Iraq. Freedom to speak is no freedom if those in authority defy the voice of the people. Freedom to representative government is no freedom if our representatives abdicate their responsibility under the Constitution. We do not elect another person’s conscience when we enter the voting booth; we must stand against those who ignore the people even as they march in the streets and declare their desires before the world. There is no freedom if there is no democracy, if the voices of the people are overridden by the corporate voice, the voice of the military/industrial powers, and the wealthy elite who buy their freedom of speech. There is no democracy if we force it in name on other nations of the world because we demand that they “accept God’s gift” regardless of their beliefs and we force America’s gift of consumerism on other nations because it is the way to provide heaven on earth. Ultimately, the Presidency of a democracy must be the laws of the land, not a man who willingly twists the laws to his own end.</p>
<p>I could find no freedom, no peace of mind as I walked about the lake because the Constitution of the United States has been stolen by this administration to be used as a document to control, because it has subverted the freedoms guaranteed in that document and placed our freedom in the hands of a religious zealot that by definition does not accept freedom, because it has preempted freedom by adopting a policy of preemptive strike based on the belief of evil determined by one fanatical man sitting illegally in the White House, and because this administration is oblivious to the plight of the unemployed, the homeless, the elderly, single mothers, and the sick and the dying. I have lived through half a century of slaughter, witnessed America defy itself as it languished in segregation, oppression of women, and governmental inquisition under McCarthy; I have witnessed it justify non-intrusion into genocidal savagery, accept without question the need to carpet bomb whole cities in the cause of peace, and add collateral damage to the lexicon of euphemisms that give credibility to slaughter, but I have always lived with the hope that America’s acceptance of a world court, of values inherent in the Nuremberg trials, of mutual cooperation with other nations would lead to a 21st century of peace and equanimity throughout the world. When logics die, cynicism thrives.</p>
<p>William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His new book, <a href="" type="internal">Psalms for the 21st Century</a>, was just published by Mellen Press. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:cookb@ULV.EDU" type="external">cookb@ULV.EDU</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Rage Against the Regime! | true | https://counterpunch.org/2003/03/13/rage-against-the-regime/ | 2003-03-13 | 4left
| 3,058 | I went for a walk around Lake Gregory this past Sunday afternoon searching for peace the freedom that comes with peace of mind The sun8217s heat spread through the cobalt blue sky over this lake that sits five thousand feet up in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles while sparklets of light glistened on the lake8217s surface that nibbled slowly at the shore 8230 a glorious day in mid March here in the mountains I went to the lake to find peace this being the week the president gave one of his rare prime time press conferences the only opportunity we the public get to see him perform It8217s also the week America goes to war I went to the lake to find peace of mind the ultimate state that comes with freedom the state of being that is the primary goal of all religions the end mystics dream of achieving and eastern faiths call Nirvana I went to the lake to find the freedom Dubya claims others want to take from me the freedom promised in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights freedom to believe as my conscience dictates freedom to accept the beliefs of others most especially those who differ with me freedom to pursue my talents and respect the right of others to pursue theirs freedom to live a healthful life to speak freely to learn and to seek just protection before the law I went to find freedom I found none I found no peace of mind As I walked around the lake I could not help but think that this was Sunday the day God rested from His labors Three faiths worship that God of Abraham including 90 of Americans some are Jews some Christians and some Muslims In a few years more Americans will declare the Koran their book of faith than those who declare the Torah With all these people worshiping the same God why do we have such division in this country As I walked the path around the lake it occurred to me that it8217s the leaders who cause the problems Consider Jerry Falwell Pat Robinson Hal Lindsey Dale Evans Frederick Graham and his father Billy to name a few who deride the prophet Mohammad and declare the Muslim faith to be one of violence Consider also how they use the Jews to bring about their belief in the Book of Revelation needing the Jews to establish themselves in Israel if the Second Coming is to happen Consider how they call upon the Christians of the world to unite to fulfill God8217s master plan even if it means a nuclear holocaust These are the weapons of mass destruction Minds filled with the certitude that only belief in myth can allow And Sunday is the day Christians set aside to worship that God This Christian God this Jesus asked His followers to 8220turn the other cheek8221 to perform the spiritual and corporal works of mercy in short to care for all God8217s creatures Yet this Sunday as I walked about the lake watching children toss their fishing lines out from shore as others played 8220T8221 ball in the park as young lovers cooed by the side of the lake as the old and infirm watched from their bench above the path I heard the whistle of the missiles slam into Baghdad and saw the mothers grasp their children to their breasts as they fled in horror at the searing flames and saw the walls of their homes shatter before their eyes I saw this bornagain Christian president order American boys and girls to 8220take up the cross8221 in defense of their homeland to defend America against those who have inflicted no harm on America who have in 12 years not molested any nation who have claimed they possess no WMD and no nuclear capability verified by international inspectors to be the case who occupy no other people8217s lands who have been subjugated to eleven years of deprivation by a coalition of nations that deprive them of basic medical sanitation health and economic necessities who live in daily fear of American and British war planes that arbitrarily destroy their defenses and kill innocent civilians and who are surrounded by the greatest massed force of destruction ever assembled in the history of humankind This president claims that he will bring freedom to the Iraqi people not America8217s gift of freedom but God8217s This president will liberate the Iraqi people even as he slaughters an estimated 500000 innocents a liberation of questionable value one suspects This president will bring democracy to Iraq whether they want it or not a gift that Americans don8217t even enjoy when he is president by selection of five judges This president will decide the conscience of the American people since he disregards their voice both at the voting booth and in the streets This president elevated Iraq to the stage of enemy number one by claiming it had connections with the terrorists that caused 911 a contention proved to be a lie This president claimed that Iraq had biological weapons of mass destruction but failed to tell the American people that his own father sold Saddam those weapons illegally and surreptitiously This president claimed that Saddam gassed his own people the Kurds and Iranians against international law and the Geneva Conventions but failed to tell the American people that the government at the time the ReaganBush government not only did not object to this action but provided the means to do it This president claimed that Saddam did not comply with Resolution 1441 when he submitted a 12000 page report but failed to tell the American people that his administration removed 8000 pages from that document pages that contained sensitive material including the names of American British and German firms that supplied Saddam with the chemicals and equipment needed to produce WMD This president claimed that Iraq was in a position to acquire nuclear arms within a few months a potential threat to America but failed to tell the American people that he would disregard other nations that possessed or would soon possess nuclear arms including two nations of the three that he called the 8220Axis of evil8221 Iran and North Korea This president claimed that Saddam was a vicious dictator who used torture oppression o f women and the jailing of dissidents to stay in power but failed to tell the American people that his own father let Saddam stay in power because he was a known quantity and any replacement would not necessarily follow America8217s orders Nor did he tell the American people that he would authorize torture if done by another nation for America or that he would incarcerate people without access to lawyers trial or jury indeed without even a charge of criminal conduct And finally this president claimed that Iraq must be taken down by force because it defied the 17 UN resolutions that called upon it to disarm and respond to human rights violations an action that if not taken would result in making the UN irrelevant but he failed to tell the American people that America supports the state of Israel that has defied 155 UNGA and UNSC resolutions since 1948 and 69 UNSC resolutions 28 vetoed by the US since the 1967 war a defiance that far overshadows the 17 resolutions Iraq has defied How irrelevant can the UN be if this is the criterion What power does the UN possess to enforce its resolutions Only the moral will of its members It has no army it has only the willing acceptance of the rights of all humans to life liberty respect and dignity as determined by its member states Thus when the most powerful member state disregards the moral stand of that bodies membership when it resorts to bribes and coercion to have its way it denies the only strength the UN can bring to bare on wayward nations The claim of UN irrelevancy is specious indeed each and every contention made by this president has been shown to be demonstratively false When logics die leaders lie Patriotic platitudes vapid values and incongruous ideals cascade from our leaders mouths like waters over the cliffs of Niagara Witness the recent babbling of Blair Bush Powell Rumsfeld and Rice as they resort to condemnation of Iraq for defying the 17 resolutions passed by the UN defiance that castrates the authority of the UN and cries for resolution by force regardless of the effectiveness of inspections or the will of the world community Witness their despair that Iraq after eleven years will ever succumb to the will of the nations that passed these resolutions Witness their declamations that the security of the US and the UK depends on immediate action against the treacherous dictator who gassed his own people 15 years ago without objection by the US or the UK and carried forth this same warfare against the Iranians with full approval of the US and the UK indeed to the supplying of the materials Witness their lamentations over those citizens who would object to a war that would instill 8220shock and awe8221 in this terrible enemy even as it liberates an estimated half million Iraqis by slaughtering them saving them from continued oppression by Saddam Witness their invoking the twin absolutes of freedom and democracy that will be the offspring of this war even as they prepare to occupy a foreign nationstate and force their will on its people thus making moot the meaning of freedom and democracy When logics die what hypocrisy I have waited anxiously for a reporter to question these men and this woman about their resolve to hold Iraq to the authority of the UN resolutions Why Iraq only Why now Why not other countries Why not Israel and Palestine for example since most world leaders and the majority of the people in the nations around the world seem to find the IsraeliPalestinian crisis of greater consequence to peace in the mideast Do we not raise the specter of Israeli occupation and aggression against the Palestinians before the world body because we will be condemned as antiSemitic Do we not raise the issue of the Palestinian people resorting to suicide bombers because it casts condemnation on the members of the UN for allowing this crisis to continue for over fifty years When will we invoke the authority of the UN to make both the Israelis and the Palestinians meet the demands of the international community and international law When will we declare the hypocrisy of our stance before the world that the US and the UK believe wholeheartedly in the ideals of the world body and its authority in matters of international conflict When logics die leaders lie Lies deceit hypocrisy couched in euphemisms as evidence security concerns and ideals beneficial to the international community about the imminent threat posed by Iraq dominate the mainstream media effectively hiding the reality of the savagery being waged in Israel and Palestine Beyond the lies uttered without shame by Blair and Powell justifying war are those lies of omission that force Iraq to prominence now to hide the administration8217s acceptance of Sharon8217s war against the Palestinians Why blanket the truth Why not speak straightforwardly to the American people This administration has capitulated to Sharon8217s demands even as he cloaks his actions in Bush8217s own terms 8220defense against terrorists8221 As Sharon has told the Knesset 8220Don8217t worry about American pressure on Israel we the Jewish people control America and the Americans know it8221 Why hide the truth Tell it like it is a war against Iraq can bury what is happening in Israel a war against Iraq will bury the new Sharon coalition that depends on 13 members who are adamantly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state a war against Iraq will hide the request by Israel to have the US cover 15 billion in loans and grants to bail out their floundering economy even as the US states fall deeper and deeper into the ditch of debt When logics die leaders lie Contrast the demand that Iraq surrender to UN resolutions with the silence that greets the question 8220Why not Israel8221 Israel has defied the UN for 55 years Iraq for 12 Israel has invaded and continues to hold illegally land that belongs to Palestinians defying UN resolutions for 35 years to return the land Iraq invaded Kuwait 12 years ago with CIA collusion and went to war with Iran 15 years ago with US approval and support It occupies no foreign land now and is not considered a threat by its neighbors Israel has and continues to defy not only UN resolutions that it abide by the Geneva Conventions to protect human rights but spurns all Human Rights Watch Reports that request investigations into behavior that demeans human dignity and defies international law Iraq has been forced to release control of its northern territories that occupied principally by Kurds and to give up absolute control in the south a 8220no fly zone8221 controlled by the US and the UK Israel has used the 8220war on terror8221 to define the Palestinian people thus giving them absolute right to determine who is a criminal and who will die without trial by jury without the right to a lawyer and without appeal actions all in defiance of international law the Iraqi people are victims of this same logic that provides for the use of 7 _ times the destruction visited upon Hiroshima to be visited upon the Iraqi people to catch one man Israel has WMD and openly admits this fact It also has nuclear weapons and in the words of one Israeli Professor will use them on European capitals as well as against Iraq if needed to ensure the existence of Israel It also occupies and suppresses Palestinians using tanks and bulldozers to destroy property not belonging to them They also use the third largest military force in the world against a people that have no defense except old rifles missiles and stones Iraq has no comparable WMD nor does it have nuclear capability it does not occupy any territory owned by another nation and hasn8217t in the past 12 years its military forces are a third of what they were in 1991and incapable of defending the nation against the might of the US Israel has visited terror of an indescribable nature on a defenseless people from refugee camps surrounded by dozens of tanks thousands of foot soldiers Apache helicopters F16 fighter jets and the latest in state of the art technology to subdue the defiant few who will use their life as a weapon in a futile effort to turn the tide Israel creates these suicide bombers by using vengeance to impregnate the deprived and the hopeless America supports this state run terror with our tax money and our military hardware thus ensuring that America becomes a silent victim of Israeli vengeance Why Iraq Why now Why not line up all who defy UN resolutions and force them to abide by UN authority after we have forced this on Iraq including US defiance of such resolutions When logics die leaders lie As I walked around the lake on this Sunday before America slips ineluctably into chaos I could find no sense of freedom here in America I have as much chance of defying Bush as an Iraqi citizen has of deposing Saddam I am a victim of a man who can use my tax dollars to do whatever he wishes whether that be to support Sharon8217s savagery or to inflict devastation on Iraq Freedom to speak is no freedom if those in authority defy the voice of the people Freedom to representative government is no freedom if our representatives abdicate their responsibility under the Constitution We do not elect another person8217s conscience when we enter the voting booth we must stand against those who ignore the people even as they march in the streets and declare their desires before the world There is no freedom if there is no democracy if the voices of the people are overridden by the corporate voice the voice of the militaryindustrial powers and the wealthy elite who buy their freedom of speech There is no democracy if we force it in name on other nations of the world because we demand that they 8220accept God8217s gift8221 regardless of their beliefs and we force America8217s gift of consumerism on other nations because it is the way to provide heaven on earth Ultimately the Presidency of a democracy must be the laws of the land not a man who willingly twists the laws to his own end I could find no freedom no peace of mind as I walked about the lake because the Constitution of the United States has been stolen by this administration to be used as a document to control because it has subverted the freedoms guaranteed in that document and placed our freedom in the hands of a religious zealot that by definition does not accept freedom because it has preempted freedom by adopting a policy of preemptive strike based on the belief of evil determined by one fanatical man sitting illegally in the White House and because this administration is oblivious to the plight of the unemployed the homeless the elderly single mothers and the sick and the dying I have lived through half a century of slaughter witnessed America defy itself as it languished in segregation oppression of women and governmental inquisition under McCarthy I have witnessed it justify nonintrusion into genocidal savagery accept without question the need to carpet bomb whole cities in the cause of peace and add collateral damage to the lexicon of euphemisms that give credibility to slaughter but I have always lived with the hope that America8217s acceptance of a world court of values inherent in the Nuremberg trials of mutual cooperation with other nations would lead to a 21st century of peace and equanimity throughout the world When logics die cynicism thrives William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California His new book Psalms for the 21st Century was just published by Mellen Press He can be reached at cookbULVEDU amp160 | I/PRON went/VERB for/ADP a/DET walk/NOUN around/ADP Lake/PROPN Gregory/PROPN this/DET past/ADJ Sunday/PROPN afternoon/NOUN searching/VERB for/ADP peace/NOUN the/DET freedom/NOUN that/PRON comes/VERB with/ADP peace/NOUN of/ADP mind/NOUN The/DET sun8217s/PROPN heat/NOUN spread/VERB through/ADP the/DET cobalt/NOUN blue/ADJ sky/NOUN over/ADP this/DET lake/NOUN 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<p>Now that President George W. Bush has outlined his plans to “bring freedom to the world,” it would seem urgent that the world look closely at what Bush calls his successful mission to bring freedom to Haiti in 2004. Yet with Iraq dominating the news, most media ignore Haiti. When there is coverage, as when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell visited in December to celebrate the U.S. and U.N. “success,” it is brief and distorted. Recent international documentation of extreme human rights abuses by the U.S.-backed de-facto Haitian government should wake up the media.</p>
<p>Liberals–and liberal media–are spot-lighting and decrying what they rightly identify as a campaign of pre-emptive and unilateral intervention world-wide to eliminate all regimes deemed hostile to U.S. interests and influence. They correctly point out that Bush will not challenge the extremely oppressive regimes–like Egypt and Saudi Arabia or Israel and China–that are its political allies and/or economic partners. They are quick to show that U.S. campaigns to “liberate” Afghanistan and Iraq have brought more violence and oppression than they claim to have dispelled. Why, then, have liberals either wholly ignored the case of Haiti–or, worse, praised the U.S. for its role there last year?</p>
<p>Last February 29, U.S. diplomats–backed by marines–forcibly escorted Haiti’s first democratically-elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to a waiting U.S. military plane. Without telling him where they were headed, they dumped him unceremoniously in the Central African Republic–a country the State Department itself called one of the most violent and corrupt in the world. At the time, extreme right-wing former military and para-military “rebels,” who themselves admit massive funding from U.S. sources, had seized Gonaives, Cap Haitien and several other Haitian cities–committing now documented rapes, murders and other atrocities.</p>
<p>A coalition of elite Haitian business interests and university “student groups” –put together by U.S. AID “democracy enhancement” teams, was demanding Aristide’s ouster for alleged corruption and human rights violations. The most they could point to were three unsolved murders of journalists and several cases of obvious political arrests. Wholly ignored were on-going attacks on activists within Aristide’s Lavalas party, as well as ambushes and assassinations of judges and other government officials. The “opposition” coalition, self-named “the 184,” claimed that elections for President and the Haitian parliament in 2000 were deeply flawed. In fact, only a few Senatorial elections were clouded by controversy, and the OAS and even the U.S. accepted as valid the Presidential election in which Aristide received more than 90% of the vote in a 60% turnout.*</p>
<p>With U.S., Canadian and French troops already on the ground, the United Nations was obliged after the fact to endorse what amounted to a coup d’etat and invasion. A de-facto government was quickly installed, which consisted almost entirely of U.N. and other international agency employees living in exile, and dedicated to neo-liberal programs of structural adjustment recognized by most progressives as devastating to programs of social justice in poor countries around the world. Gerard Latortue was chosen as interim Prime Minister. Latortue had lived for more than a decade in a luxurious villa in Boca Raton, Florida. Latortue called the right-wing rebels “freedom fighters.” These included some convicted of mass murder and other human rights violations from the previous coup against Aristide in 1991, when at least 5,000 Lavalas supporters had been killed.</p>
<p>The U.S. backed coup was applauded by some progressive elements in Haiti, and many of the non-governmental organizations in the U.S. that backed them. They criticized Aristide for not fulfilling his own populist programs of land reform and poverty alleviation. They were particularly critical of “free trade zones,” accepted by Aristide, that were pushed by the U.S. and the World Bank, and would forcibly remove peasants in areas along the Dominican border, to work in Dominican-owned sweat shops. These “radical” groups did not seem bothered by the odd coincidence that the opposition to Aristide was led by owners of the worst Haitian sweat shops. Some, like Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, of the MPP–the largest peasant group in Haiti–gave support to some of the former military who had once driven his family out of the Central Plateau and destroyed MPP headquarters there. Jean-Baptiste went so far as to accept a position in the new government. Grassroots International, based in Boston, which funds MPP, continued to take the position that Aristide’s removal was justified.</p>
<p>Yet Haiti is in far worse condition today than before the coup last February. Arguably, it is in worse shape than during the previous coup or under the Duvaliers. Poverty–already the worst in the hemisphere–has deepened. Now even the U.S. military, in a report last November for it’s Southern Command, called the current government a “failed regime.” A plan hatched by Canadian and other officials in a secret Quebec meeting in early 2003 for a U.N. “Trusteeship” of Haiti as a “failed state” is seen even by some “progressives” as an alternative to the current mayhem.</p>
<p>Now a new human rights report from the Center for the Study of Human Rights (CSHR) at the University of Miami (Florida) has documented some of the worst abuses committed directly by the Haitian National Police (HNP), and in some cases by the UN forces (MINUSTAH) accompanying them. The noted Philadelphia attorney, Thomas Griffin, and other investigators include horrendous photos they took of boys as young as twelve, lying unattended in pools of their own blood in the General Hospital, where doctors refused to treat them. Other photos show bodies left in the street and dozens of bodies rotting and piled high at the morgue after police and UN invasions of Port au Prince slums targeted as Aristide strongholds. Interviews with police and others make it clear that there has been a systematic campaign of political repression and assassination aimed at Aristide’s Lavalas Party. The report ties the abuse directly to “sensitization” of many sectors of Haitian society–human rights groups, judges, students and police alike–by U.S. non governmental organizations like IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems) with support from USAID. (See www.ijdg.org/cshrhaitireport.pdf).</p>
<p>Extensive interviews with staff of CARLI, a Haitian human rights organization, revealed that IFES funded CARLI during the lead-up to the ouster of Aristide– with technical support and as much as $54,000 during 2003. CARLI staff revealed that it was instructed to provide lists of alleged Lalavals human rights violators, which were then read out on Haitian commercial radio. (Twenty of the twenty-five commercial stations and several of the Haitian daily and weekly newspapers are owned by members of the “184” anti-Aristide coalition.) It is now feared that these lists have been used since the coup to target Lavalas leaders for summary arrest, attacks on property, and even death. With IFES funding slowly removed during 2004, CARLI began to report on fraudulent human rights cases put forward by the government, and on violent campaigns against Lavalas and other community groups who refused to endorse the removal of Aristide. It investigated the claim of Latortue that Lavalas had ordered decapitation of police officers in a campaign dubbed “Operation Baghdad.” These accusations were picked up and spread uncritically by Haitian and U.S. media. CARLI now says no such campaign by Lavalas existed, and that the only two decapitations of police were committed by former Haitian army officers, not Lavalas. Such disinformation played a major role during the previous coup as well as during the campaign to vilify Aristide.</p>
<p>On January 14, eyewitnesses say Haitian police murdered Abdias Jean, journalist for Miami radio station WKAT, after he witnessed police execution of two or more young boys in such a police operation in the Port au Prince neighborhood, Village de Dieu. IAPA (Inter-American Press Association) has condemned the murder and demanded an immediate investigation. It is particularly ironic that among those strongly condemning this murder, as well as the lack of coverage in the commercial Haitian media, is Joseph Guy Delva, President of the Haitian Journalists Association. Delva was a leader among journalists who condemned Aristide. The CSHR investigators report that Delva told them “if a journalist was arrested during Aristide’s government, there would be a public outcry from print and radio journalists. ‘Now,’ said Delva, “when a journalist is arrested, the newspapers and radio stations applaud.'” De-facto Prime Minister Latortue contacted the Reuters news-service to complain about an article written by Delva concerning the murder of Jean. The Haiti Support Group in Britain, critical both of the Aristide government and the U.S. intervention, has protested Latortue’s intervention as a threat to Delva as well as freedom of the press.</p>
<p>The human rights investigators quoted a Quebec police officer who is a commander of the UN unit, CIVPOL. He told them he was “in shock” with the conditions he faces in attempting to train the Haitian National police, “Our mandate is to coach, to train and to provide information, but all we’ve done is engage in daily guerrilla warfare….Where are the newspaper reporters?” he asked.</p>
<p>The CSHR reports credible evidence that raids began on Port au Prince’s poorest neighborhoods immediately after the landing of U.S. troops, and that these sped up after major pro-Aristide demonstrations in September illustrated continuing wide support for his return. The human rights investigators themselves witnessed events immediately before and after one such raid on Nov. 18 in the neighborhood of Bel Air, near the Presidential palace. They photographed and interviewed Haitian National Police and MINUSTAH as they entered the neighborhood They photographed bodies of those killed–including women and teenagers–during the operation, and interviewed some of the severely wounded–including at least one who identified the MINUSTAH (UN) soldiers who shot him. Police and residents alike told them such raids had taken place almost daily since September–with deaths and injuries. One police officer said that they were pushed to target specific individuals for assassination, but that for every ten killed, six were merely witnesses or bystanders. Residents were afraid to take the wounded to the General Hospital, where doctors often refused to treat patients without money (the former staff of Cuban volunteer doctors was expelled after the coup), and where the HNP often came to seize such victims who subsequently disappeared.</p>
<p>The CSHR report now documents beyond doubt what other human rights delegations and the Lavalas activists have been claiming all year: the puppet regime installed by the “international community” (the U.S., France and Canada) has committed far more human rights abuses than even the worst claims against Aristide’s government. In a New Year’s message from South African exile, Aristide claimed 10,000 have been killed and 1,000 of his supporters illegally detained since his “modern-style kidnapping” last February. Mainstream media have documented some 200 murders of Aristide supporters since September, and there were as many as 700 political prisoners by late last fall.</p>
<p>In November, Amnesty International issued an appeal to the Haitian government and to MINUSTAH to investigate police massacres in pro-Lavalas neighborhoods, as well as detentions for long periods without charges. Among those detained were world-renowned human rights leaders like Father Gerard Jean-Juste, violently snatched by masked men while distributing food to poor children in his Port au Prince parish, as well as the former Prime Minister, the President of the Haitian Senate and the former President of the House of Deputies. After a world-wide outcry, Father Jean-Juste and the parliamentary leaders were released–but many, including journalists and activists–as well as Prime Minister Yvon Neptune–remain behind bars, most without having even seen a judge.</p>
<p>Then on December 1, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell touted U.S. policy at the Haitian Presidential palace, a riot broke out in the penitentiary several blocks away. Gunfire could be heard by Powell and reporters accompanying him. The mainstream media reported that Aristide supporters did the shooting. Yet the anti-Aristide human rights group, NCHR (National Council on Haitian Rights) documented that Haitian National Police had killed seven and shot or beaten nearly fifty prisoners, three of whom died from wounds. Journalist Reed Lindsay, in the January 2 San Francisco Chronicle, reported interviews he held inside the penitentiary in December. Prisoners claimed between thirty and 110 prisoners were slain in the massacre, and scores injured.</p>
<p>The Institute for Justice &amp; Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) issued a detailed report on the massacre, documenting incredibly dire prison conditions, and the likelihood that many, many prisoners were killed. The IJDH report emphasizes that “for most of the dead, their assassination was the last in a long string of human rights violations. Only one in fifty is likely to have actually been convicted of committing a crime. The vast majority were likely arrested illegally without a warrant and detained on vague charges with no evidence in their file and no chance of judicial review of the detention.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, former Haitian military who led the violent revolt against Aristide last January continue to control several small cities. They include convicted murderers and human rights offenders who broke out of prison during the coup. Their commander, Remissainthes Revix, holds press conferences in the up-scale neighborhood of Petionville. He refuses to disarm and calls for violent opposition to U.N.-led disarmament. After a recent take-over of Aristide’s former residence by Revix and other former soldiers, the Haitian government arranged payments of nearly $5000 to each former officer, beginning with those who participated in the take-over, and eventually to include some 6000 former soldiers. This is an astounding potential sum of $30 million for a cash-strapped government. The money is ostensibly compensation for Aristide’s “un-Constitutional” disbanding of the army during his first term–a move highly popular in Haiti and praised internationally by human rights and peace organizations.</p>
<p>At the same time, the Latortue government has not re-opened many schools for the January session (some for lack of cash, some for political reasons), and has failed to pay doctors and other professionals at hospitals and clinics. More than sixty doctors and other health workers at the largest hospital in Port au Prince have gone on strike.</p>
<p>The role of Brazil, which heads MINUSTAH, remains ambiguous. Brazil’s President Lula was long known for opposition to U.S. hegemony in Latin America, and his social program is similar to that of Lavalas. Yet the Brazil-dominated force has accompanied the Haitian National Police in several attacks on Lavalas neighborhoods, at least present during killings, if not participating. Brazil has long complained that the promised international aid has not materialized (less than $100 million of the 1.2 billion pledged as of December), and that the international force is under-manned. Only in December, however, did a rift between Brazil and the U.S. come into the open. Brazilian commander, General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro, insisted, “We are not an occupying force…yet we are under extreme pressure (from the U.S., France and Canada) to use violence.”</p>
<p>As Haiti slips further and further into chaos, as violence and human rights abuses escalate, and as the de-facto government fails to function in more and more areas, groups like the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), which have criticized U.S. policies and the Latortue government, urge that Brazil be given a new mandate: to lead a 10-year United Nations protectorate–the very scheme proposed in Quebec two years ago.</p>
<p>On the other hand, U.S. officials like the ultra-right-wing Roger Noriega (Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs), continue to express support for Latortue. “Haiti is on the right track,” he insisted recently. The U.S. announced jointly with Canada, France and the Haitian government, that $41 million will be given to support Haitian elections next fall. “The elections will go forward,” Noriega insists–a refrain heard nowadays in that other U.S. protectorate, Iraq. Charles Arthur, of the U.K.-based Haiti Support Group, says the timing of this announcement of elections while serious human rights abuse charges have not been addressed is suspicious.</p>
<p>Brian Concannon, of the IJDH, an American attorney who successfully prosecuted human rights abusers from the previous coup, does not agree that the options are either the current mess or a U.N. protectorate. “The great majority of Haitian people prefer democracy. In any truly democratic elections, most observers believe, including recently the Canadian Ambassador, the Lavalas party would win again.”</p>
<p>It was recently announced in South Africa that two former Nobel Peace Prize winners from the African National Congress and Inkatha movements will travel to Haiti to work toward a resolution to the crisis that would include Aristide’s Lavalas party. South Africa continues to treat Aristide as the legitimate President of Haiti, and to demand that he be allowed to complete his term of office. CARICOM (the organization of Caribbean nations) and many African nations continue to refuse to recognize the Latortue government–despite extreme U.S. pressure–and to demand investigations of the original removal of Aristide as well as on-going human rights violations. These would seem to be the only glimmers of hope on the bleak Haitian political landscape.</p>
<p>The question remains: why have NPR and the CBC and most other liberal or even most “progressive” media not covered any of this? How can Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin get away with claiming Haiti as a major success of Canadian foreign policy–with no outcry in either Parliament or the Canadian press? Where are the American non-governmental organizations that funded grassroots groups in Haiti now? Recently, I forwarded information from the CSHR report to U.S. Haiti solidarity leaders who were strong critics of Aristide and who gave reluctant support to the U.S. intervention last year. One wrote me, “We were wrong about our hopes for the U.S. installed government. We have no confidence now at all” in the Haitian police and interim government. Yet this activist added that he was depressed about Haiti, with no idea about what to do. Unless we are to give up altogether and let Bush have a free-hand in building up the American empire and installing it’s repressive, violent version of “freedom” world-wide, there is something very urgent that we must all do: expose the U.S. game everywhere for what it is: blatant tyranny. Nowhere is that plainer than in Haiti.</p>
<p>TOM REEVES is a retired Caribbean studies professor from Boston.</p>
<p>To keep up with Haiti, visit these web sites: <a href="http://www.ijdh.org/" type="external">www.ijdh.org;</a> <a href="http://www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org/" type="external">www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org</a>; <a href="http://www.haitiaction.net/" type="external">www.haitiaction.net</a>; <a href="http://www.coha.org/" type="external">www.coha.org</a>.</p>
<p>*See articles in 2003-4 by Kevin Pina in the Black Commentator, by Anthony Fenton in Z and elsewhere, and my own articles in Z, CounterPunch, Dollars &amp; Sense, the NACLA Report, Interconnect, the Montréal Gazette and Rabble.Ca., and go to coverage by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now Radio; or Flashpoints (Pacifica Radio).</p> | How Bush Brings Freedom to the World | true | https://counterpunch.org/2005/01/29/how-bush-brings-freedom-to-the-world/ | 2005-01-29 | 4left
| 3,059 | Now that President George W Bush has outlined his plans to 8220bring freedom to the world8221 it would seem urgent that the world look closely at what Bush calls his successful mission to bring freedom to Haiti in 2004 Yet with Iraq dominating the news most media ignore Haiti When there is coverage as when US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited in December to celebrate the US and UN 8220success8221 it is brief and distorted Recent international documentation of extreme human rights abuses by the USbacked defacto Haitian government should wake up the media Liberals8211and liberal media8211are spotlighting and decrying what they rightly identify as a campaign of preemptive and unilateral intervention worldwide to eliminate all regimes deemed hostile to US interests and influence They correctly point out that Bush will not challenge the extremely oppressive regimes8211like Egypt and Saudi Arabia or Israel and China8211that are its political allies andor economic partners They are quick to show that US campaigns to 8220liberate8221 Afghanistan and Iraq have brought more violence and oppression than they claim to have dispelled Why then have liberals either wholly ignored the case of Haiti8211or worse praised the US for its role there last year Last February 29 US diplomats8211backed by marines8211forcibly escorted Haiti8217s first democraticallyelected President Jean Bertrand Aristide to a waiting US military plane Without telling him where they were headed they dumped him unceremoniously in the Central African Republic8211a country the State Department itself called one of the most violent and corrupt in the world At the time extreme rightwing former military and paramilitary 8220rebels8221 who themselves admit massive funding from US sources had seized Gonaives Cap Haitien and several other Haitian cities8211committing now documented rapes murders and other atrocities A coalition of elite Haitian business interests and university 8220student groups8221 8211put together by US AID 8220democracy enhancement8221 teams was demanding Aristide8217s ouster for alleged corruption and human rights violations The most they could point to were three unsolved murders of journalists and several cases of obvious political arrests Wholly ignored were ongoing attacks on activists within Aristide8217s Lavalas party as well as ambushes and assassinations of judges and other government officials The 8220opposition8221 coalition selfnamed 8220the 1848221 claimed that elections for President and the Haitian parliament in 2000 were deeply flawed In fact only a few Senatorial elections were clouded by controversy and the OAS and even the US accepted as valid the Presidential election in which Aristide received more than 90 of the vote in a 60 turnout With US Canadian and French troops already on the ground the United Nations was obliged after the fact to endorse what amounted to a coup d8217etat and invasion A defacto government was quickly installed which consisted almost entirely of UN and other international agency employees living in exile and dedicated to neoliberal programs of structural adjustment recognized by most progressives as devastating to programs of social justice in poor countries around the world Gerard Latortue was chosen as interim Prime Minister Latortue had lived for more than a decade in a luxurious villa in Boca Raton Florida Latortue called the rightwing rebels 8220freedom fighters8221 These included some convicted of mass murder and other human rights violations from the previous coup against Aristide in 1991 when at least 5000 Lavalas supporters had been killed The US backed coup was applauded by some progressive elements in Haiti and many of the nongovernmental organizations in the US that backed them They criticized Aristide for not fulfilling his own populist programs of land reform and poverty alleviation They were particularly critical of 8220free trade zones8221 accepted by Aristide that were pushed by the US and the World Bank and would forcibly remove peasants in areas along the Dominican border to work in Dominicanowned sweat shops These 8220radical8221 groups did not seem bothered by the odd coincidence that the opposition to Aristide was led by owners of the worst Haitian sweat shops Some like Chavannes JeanBaptiste of the MPP8211the largest peasant group in Haiti8211gave support to some of the former military who had once driven his family out of the Central Plateau and destroyed MPP headquarters there JeanBaptiste went so far as to accept a position in the new government Grassroots International based in Boston which funds MPP continued to take the position that Aristide8217s removal was justified Yet Haiti is in far worse condition today than before the coup last February Arguably it is in worse shape than during the previous coup or under the Duvaliers Poverty8211already the worst in the hemisphere8211has deepened Now even the US military in a report last November for it8217s Southern Command called the current government a 8220failed regime8221 A plan hatched by Canadian and other officials in a secret Quebec meeting in early 2003 for a UN 8220Trusteeship8221 of Haiti as a 8220failed state8221 is seen even by some 8220progressives8221 as an alternative to the current mayhem Now a new human rights report from the Center for the Study of Human Rights CSHR at the University of Miami Florida has documented some of the worst abuses committed directly by the Haitian National Police HNP and in some cases by the UN forces MINUSTAH accompanying them The noted Philadelphia attorney Thomas Griffin and other investigators include horrendous photos they took of boys as young as twelve lying unattended in pools of their own blood in the General Hospital where doctors refused to treat them Other photos show bodies left in the street and dozens of bodies rotting and piled high at the morgue after police and UN invasions of Port au Prince slums targeted as Aristide strongholds Interviews with police and others make it clear that there has been a systematic campaign of political repression and assassination aimed at Aristide8217s Lavalas Party The report ties the abuse directly to 8220sensitization8221 of many sectors of Haitian society8211human rights groups judges students and police alike8211by US non governmental organizations like IFES International Foundation for Electoral Systems with support from USAID See wwwijdgorgcshrhaitireportpdf Extensive interviews with staff of CARLI a Haitian human rights organization revealed that IFES funded CARLI during the leadup to the ouster of Aristide8211 with technical support and as much as 54000 during 2003 CARLI staff revealed that it was instructed to provide lists of alleged Lalavals human rights violators which were then read out on Haitian commercial radio Twenty of the twentyfive commercial stations and several of the Haitian daily and weekly newspapers are owned by members of the 82201848221 antiAristide coalition It is now feared that these lists have been used since the coup to target Lavalas leaders for summary arrest attacks on property and even death With IFES funding slowly removed during 2004 CARLI began to report on fraudulent human rights cases put forward by the government and on violent campaigns against Lavalas and other community groups who refused to endorse the removal of Aristide It investigated the claim of Latortue that Lavalas had ordered decapitation of police officers in a campaign dubbed 8220Operation Baghdad8221 These accusations were picked up and spread uncritically by Haitian and US media CARLI now says no such campaign by Lavalas existed and that the only two decapitations of police were committed by former Haitian army officers not Lavalas Such disinformation played a major role during the previous coup as well as during the campaign to vilify Aristide On January 14 eyewitnesses say Haitian police murdered Abdias Jean journalist for Miami radio station WKAT after he witnessed police execution of two or more young boys in such a police operation in the Port au Prince neighborhood Village de Dieu IAPA InterAmerican Press Association has condemned the murder and demanded an immediate investigation It is particularly ironic that among those strongly condemning this murder as well as the lack of coverage in the commercial Haitian media is Joseph Guy Delva President of the Haitian Journalists Association Delva was a leader among journalists who condemned Aristide The CSHR investigators report that Delva told them 8220if a journalist was arrested during Aristide8217s government there would be a public outcry from print and radio journalists 8216Now8217 said Delva 8220when a journalist is arrested the newspapers and radio stations applaud8221 Defacto Prime Minister Latortue contacted the Reuters newsservice to complain about an article written by Delva concerning the murder of Jean The Haiti Support Group in Britain critical both of the Aristide government and the US intervention has protested Latortue8217s intervention as a threat to Delva as well as freedom of the press The human rights investigators quoted a Quebec police officer who is a commander of the UN unit CIVPOL He told them he was 8220in shock8221 with the conditions he faces in attempting to train the Haitian National police 8220Our mandate is to coach to train and to provide information but all we8217ve done is engage in daily guerrilla warfare8230Where are the newspaper reporters8221 he asked The CSHR reports credible evidence that raids began on Port au Prince8217s poorest neighborhoods immediately after the landing of US troops and that these sped up after major proAristide demonstrations in September illustrated continuing wide support for his return The human rights investigators themselves witnessed events immediately before and after one such raid on Nov 18 in the neighborhood of Bel Air near the Presidential palace They photographed and interviewed Haitian National Police and MINUSTAH as they entered the neighborhood They photographed bodies of those killed8211including women and teenagers8211during the operation and interviewed some of the severely wounded8211including at least one who identified the MINUSTAH UN soldiers who shot him Police and residents alike told them such raids had taken place almost daily since September8211with deaths and injuries One police officer said that they were pushed to target specific individuals for assassination but that for every ten killed six were merely witnesses or bystanders Residents were afraid to take the wounded to the General Hospital where doctors often refused to treat patients without money the former staff of Cuban volunteer doctors was expelled after the coup and where the HNP often came to seize such victims who subsequently disappeared The CSHR report now documents beyond doubt what other human rights delegations and the Lavalas activists have been claiming all year the puppet regime installed by the 8220international community8221 the US France and Canada has committed far more human rights abuses than even the worst claims against Aristide8217s government In a New Year8217s message from South African exile Aristide claimed 10000 have been killed and 1000 of his supporters illegally detained since his 8220modernstyle kidnapping8221 last February Mainstream media have documented some 200 murders of Aristide supporters since September and there were as many as 700 political prisoners by late last fall In November Amnesty International issued an appeal to the Haitian government and to MINUSTAH to investigate police massacres in proLavalas neighborhoods as well as detentions for long periods without charges Among those detained were worldrenowned human rights leaders like Father Gerard JeanJuste violently snatched by masked men while distributing food to poor children in his Port au Prince parish as well as the former Prime Minister the President of the Haitian Senate and the former President of the House of Deputies After a worldwide outcry Father JeanJuste and the parliamentary leaders were released8211but many including journalists and activists8211as well as Prime Minister Yvon Neptune8211remain behind bars most without having even seen a judge Then on December 1 as US Secretary of State Colin Powell touted US policy at the Haitian Presidential palace a riot broke out in the penitentiary several blocks away Gunfire could be heard by Powell and reporters accompanying him The mainstream media reported that Aristide supporters did the shooting Yet the antiAristide human rights group NCHR National Council on Haitian Rights documented that Haitian National Police had killed seven and shot or beaten nearly fifty prisoners three of whom died from wounds Journalist Reed Lindsay in the January 2 San Francisco Chronicle reported interviews he held inside the penitentiary in December Prisoners claimed between thirty and 110 prisoners were slain in the massacre and scores injured The Institute for Justice ampamp Democracy in Haiti IJDH issued a detailed report on the massacre documenting incredibly dire prison conditions and the likelihood that many many prisoners were killed The IJDH report emphasizes that 8220for most of the dead their assassination was the last in a long string of human rights violations Only one in fifty is likely to have actually been convicted of committing a crime The vast majority were likely arrested illegally without a warrant and detained on vague charges with no evidence in their file and no chance of judicial review of the detention8221 Meanwhile former Haitian military who led the violent revolt against Aristide last January continue to control several small cities They include convicted murderers and human rights offenders who broke out of prison during the coup Their commander Remissainthes Revix holds press conferences in the upscale neighborhood of Petionville He refuses to disarm and calls for violent opposition to UNled disarmament After a recent takeover of Aristide8217s former residence by Revix and other former soldiers the Haitian government arranged payments of nearly 5000 to each former officer beginning with those who participated in the takeover and eventually to include some 6000 former soldiers This is an astounding potential sum of 30 million for a cashstrapped government The money is ostensibly compensation for Aristide8217s 8220unConstitutional8221 disbanding of the army during his first term8211a move highly popular in Haiti and praised internationally by human rights and peace organizations At the same time the Latortue government has not reopened many schools for the January session some for lack of cash some for political reasons and has failed to pay doctors and other professionals at hospitals and clinics More than sixty doctors and other health workers at the largest hospital in Port au Prince have gone on strike The role of Brazil which heads MINUSTAH remains ambiguous Brazil8217s President Lula was long known for opposition to US hegemony in Latin America and his social program is similar to that of Lavalas Yet the Brazildominated force has accompanied the Haitian National Police in several attacks on Lavalas neighborhoods at least present during killings if not participating Brazil has long complained that the promised international aid has not materialized less than 100 million of the 12 billion pledged as of December and that the international force is undermanned Only in December however did a rift between Brazil and the US come into the open Brazilian commander General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro insisted 8220We are not an occupying force8230yet we are under extreme pressure from the US France and Canada to use violence8221 As Haiti slips further and further into chaos as violence and human rights abuses escalate and as the defacto government fails to function in more and more areas groups like the Council on Hemispheric Affairs COHA which have criticized US policies and the Latortue government urge that Brazil be given a new mandate to lead a 10year United Nations protectorate8211the very scheme proposed in Quebec two years ago On the other hand US officials like the ultrarightwing Roger Noriega Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs continue to express support for Latortue 8220Haiti is on the right track8221 he insisted recently The US announced jointly with Canada France and the Haitian government that 41 million will be given to support Haitian elections next fall 8220The elections will go forward8221 Noriega insists8211a refrain heard nowadays in that other US protectorate Iraq Charles Arthur of the UKbased Haiti Support Group says the timing of this announcement of elections while serious human rights abuse charges have not been addressed is suspicious Brian Concannon of the IJDH an American attorney who successfully prosecuted human rights abusers from the previous coup does not agree that the options are either the current mess or a UN protectorate 8220The great majority of Haitian people prefer democracy In any truly democratic elections most observers believe including recently the Canadian Ambassador the Lavalas party would win again8221 It was recently announced in South Africa that two former Nobel Peace Prize winners from the African National Congress and Inkatha movements will travel to Haiti to work toward a resolution to the crisis that would include Aristide8217s Lavalas party South Africa continues to treat Aristide as the legitimate President of Haiti and to demand that he be allowed to complete his term of office CARICOM the organization of Caribbean nations and many African nations continue to refuse to recognize the Latortue government8211despite extreme US pressure8211and to demand investigations of the original removal of Aristide as well as ongoing human rights violations These would seem to be the only glimmers of hope on the bleak Haitian political landscape The question remains why have NPR and the CBC and most other liberal or even most 8220progressive8221 media not covered any of this How can Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin get away with claiming Haiti as a major success of Canadian foreign policy8211with no outcry in either Parliament or the Canadian press Where are the American nongovernmental organizations that funded grassroots groups in Haiti now Recently I forwarded information from the CSHR report to US Haiti solidarity leaders who were strong critics of Aristide and who gave reluctant support to the US intervention last year One wrote me 8220We were wrong about our hopes for the US installed government We have no confidence now at all8221 in the Haitian police and interim government Yet this activist added that he was depressed about Haiti with no idea about what to do Unless we are to give up altogether and let Bush have a freehand in building up the American empire and installing it8217s repressive violent version of 8220freedom8221 worldwide there is something very urgent that we must all do expose the US game everywhere for what it is blatant tyranny Nowhere is that plainer than in Haiti TOM REEVES is a retired Caribbean studies professor from Boston To keep up with Haiti visit these web sites wwwijdhorg wwwhaitisupportgnapcorg wwwhaitiactionnet wwwcohaorg See articles in 20034 by Kevin Pina in the Black Commentator by Anthony Fenton in Z and elsewhere and my own articles in Z CounterPunch Dollars ampamp Sense the NACLA Report Interconnect the Montr233al Gazette and RabbleCa and go to coverage by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now Radio or Flashpoints Pacifica Radio | Now/INTJ that/SCONJ President/PROPN George/PROPN W/PROPN Bush/PROPN has/AUX outlined/VERB his/PRON plans/NOUN to/PART 8220bring/VERB freedom/NOUN to/ADP the/DET world8221/NOUN it/PRON would/AUX seem/VERB urgent/ADJ that/SCONJ the/DET world/NOUN look/VERB closely/ADV at/ADP what/PRON 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to/PART eliminate/VERB all/DET regimes/NOUN deemed/VERB hostile/ADJ to/ADP US/PROPN interests/NOUN and/CCONJ influence/NOUN They/PRON correctly/ADV point/VERB out/ADP that/SCONJ Bush/PROPN will/AUX not/PART challenge/VERB the/DET extremely/ADV oppressive/ADJ regimes8211like/ADJ Egypt/PROPN and/CCONJ Saudi/PROPN Arabia/PROPN or/CCONJ Israel/PROPN and/CCONJ China8211that/PRON are/AUX its/PRON political/ADJ allies/NOUN andor/ADJ economic/ADJ partners/NOUN They/PRON are/AUX quick/ADJ to/PART show/VERB that/SCONJ US/PROPN campaigns/NOUN to/ADP 8220liberate8221/NOUN Afghanistan/PROPN and/CCONJ Iraq/PROPN have/AUX brought/VERB more/ADJ violence/NOUN and/CCONJ oppression/NOUN than/SCONJ they/PRON claim/VERB to/PART have/AUX dispelled/VERB Why/SCONJ then/ADV have/VERB liberals/NOUN either/CCONJ wholly/ADV ignored/VERB the/DET case/NOUN of/ADP Haiti8211or/PROPN worse/ADV praised/VERB the/DET US/PROPN for/ADP its/PRON role/NOUN there/ADV last/ADJ year/NOUN Last/ADJ February/PROPN 29/NUM US/PROPN 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while/SCONJ serious/ADJ human/ADJ rights/NOUN abuse/NOUN charges/NOUN have/AUX not/PART been/AUX addressed/VERB is/AUX suspicious/ADJ Brian/PROPN Concannon/PROPN of/ADP the/DET IJDH/PROPN an/DET American/ADJ attorney/NOUN who/PRON successfully/ADV prosecuted/VERB human/ADJ rights/NOUN abusers/NOUN from/ADP the/DET previous/ADJ coup/NOUN does/AUX not/PART agree/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET options/NOUN are/AUX either/CCONJ the/DET current/ADJ mess/NOUN or/CCONJ a/DET UN/PROPN protectorate/NOUN 8220The/NUM great/ADJ majority/NOUN of/ADP Haitian/ADJ people/NOUN prefer/VERB democracy/NOUN In/ADP any/DET truly/ADV democratic/ADJ elections/NOUN most/ADJ observers/NOUN believe/VERB including/VERB recently/ADV the/DET Canadian/ADJ Ambassador/PROPN the/DET Lavalas/PROPN party/NOUN would/AUX win/VERB again8221/PROPN It/PRON was/AUX recently/ADV announced/VERB in/ADP South/PROPN Africa/PROPN that/SCONJ two/NUM former/ADJ Nobel/PROPN Peace/PROPN Prize/PROPN winners/NOUN from/ADP the/DET African/PROPN 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seem/VERB to/PART be/AUX the/DET only/ADJ glimmers/NOUN of/ADP hope/NOUN on/ADP the/DET bleak/ADJ Haitian/ADJ political/ADJ landscape/NOUN The/DET question/NOUN remains/VERB why/SCONJ have/AUX NPR/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET CBC/PROPN and/CCONJ most/ADJ other/ADJ liberal/ADJ or/CCONJ even/ADV most/ADV 8220progressive8221/NUM media/NOUN not/PART covered/VERB any/PRON of/ADP this/PRON How/SCONJ can/AUX Canadian/ADJ Prime/PROPN Minister/PROPN Paul/PROPN Martin/PROPN get/VERB away/ADV with/ADP claiming/VERB Haiti/PROPN as/ADP a/DET major/ADJ success/NOUN of/ADP Canadian/ADJ foreign/ADJ policy8211with/PROPN no/DET outcry/NOUN in/ADP either/CCONJ Parliament/PROPN or/CCONJ the/DET Canadian/ADJ press/NOUN Where/SCONJ are/AUX the/DET American/ADJ nongovernmental/ADJ organizations/NOUN that/PRON funded/VERB grassroots/ADJ groups/NOUN in/ADP Haiti/PROPN now/ADV Recently/ADV I/PRON forwarded/VERB information/NOUN from/ADP the/DET CSHR/PROPN report/NOUN to/ADP US/PROPN Haiti/PROPN solidarity/NOUN leaders/NOUN who/PRON were/AUX strong/ADJ critics/NOUN of/ADP Aristide/PROPN and/CCONJ who/PRON gave/VERB reluctant/ADJ support/NOUN to/ADP the/DET US/PROPN intervention/NOUN last/ADJ year/NOUN One/NUM wrote/VERB me/PRON 8220We/NOUN were/AUX wrong/ADJ about/ADP our/PRON hopes/NOUN for/ADP the/DET US/PROPN installed/VERB government/NOUN We/PRON have/VERB no/DET confidence/NOUN now/ADV at/ADP all8221/NOUN in/ADP the/DET Haitian/ADJ police/NOUN and/CCONJ interim/ADJ government/NOUN Yet/CCONJ this/DET activist/NOUN added/VERB that/SCONJ he/PRON was/AUX depressed/ADJ about/ADP Haiti/PROPN with/ADP no/DET idea/NOUN about/ADP what/PRON to/PART do/AUX Unless/SCONJ we/PRON are/AUX to/PART give/VERB up/ADP altogether/ADV and/CCONJ let/VERB Bush/PROPN have/VERB a/DET freehand/NOUN in/ADP building/VERB up/ADP the/DET American/ADJ empire/NOUN and/CCONJ installing/VERB it8217s/PROPN repressive/ADJ violent/ADJ version/NOUN of/ADP 8220freedom8221/NOUN worldwide/ADV there/PRON is/VERB something/PRON very/ADV urgent/ADJ that/SCONJ we/PRON must/AUX all/ADV do/AUX expose/VERB the/DET US/PROPN game/NOUN everywhere/ADV for/ADP what/PRON it/PRON is/AUX blatant/ADJ tyranny/NOUN Nowhere/ADV is/AUX that/DET plainer/NOUN than/ADP in/ADP Haiti/PROPN TOM/PROPN REEVES/PROPN is/AUX a/DET retired/VERB Caribbean/ADJ studies/NOUN professor/NOUN from/ADP Boston/PROPN To/PART keep/VERB up/ADP with/ADP Haiti/PROPN visit/VERB these/DET web/NOUN sites/NOUN wwwijdhorg/ADJ wwwhaitisupportgnapcorg/PROPN wwwhaitiactionnet/PROPN wwwcohaorg/ADJ See/PROPN articles/NOUN in/ADP 20034/NUM by/ADP Kevin/PROPN Pina/PROPN in/ADP the/DET Black/PROPN Commentator/PROPN by/ADP Anthony/PROPN Fenton/PROPN in/ADP Z/PROPN and/CCONJ elsewhere/ADV and/CCONJ my/PRON own/ADJ articles/NOUN in/ADP Z/PROPN CounterPunch/PROPN Dollars/NOUN ampamp/ADV Sense/NOUN the/DET NACLA/PROPN Report/PROPN Interconnect/VERB the/DET Montr233al/PROPN Gazette/PROPN and/CCONJ RabbleCa/PROPN and/CCONJ go/VERB to/ADP coverage/NOUN by/ADP Amy/PROPN Goodman/PROPN on/ADP Democracy/PROPN Now/ADV Radio/PROPN or/CCONJ Flashpoints/PROPN Pacifica/PROPN Radio/PROPN |
<p>**A copy of the charts included in this article can be downloaded <a href="" type="internal">here</a>. A&#160;pdf copy&#160;with&#160;the&#160;charts&#160;embedded in the article can be downloaded <a href="" type="internal">here</a>.**</p>
<p>The&#160;most disturbing aspect of the current financial crisis is that no U.S. official has correctly identified its primary cause. Experts variously attribute the economic reverses to subprime lending, derivative trading, excessive leverage, and regulation that was either too lax or too strict (take your pick), but these are symptoms rather than causes. Ignored is the main culprit: the dollar’s role as the world’s main official reserve currency. Though he almost certainly doesn’t realize it yet, President-elect Barack Obama will either set the dollar’s reserve-currency status on the path to extinction or risk becoming the next victim of what we call “the reserve-currency curse.”</p>
<p>Official reserves are money held by governments and central banks for the settlement of international payments. A Spanish bank may not want to accept Indian rupees, and it might be inconvenient for Qatar Petroleum to accept Mexican pesos for a million barrels of oil. An official reserve currency is also one everybody agrees to accept, and right now that currency is the dollar. But foreign-exchange reserves are commonly held in the form of government debts of the nation that issued the currency. In the case of the United States, that includes all those government bonds piling up in China and elsewhere. The problem is that, unlike gold, official dollar reserves increase the money supply in one country without decreasing it in another. When reserves are being increased, the effect is inflation. When reserves are liquidated, the effect is deflation — potentially dangerous deflation.</p>
<p>To understand how the dollar’s reserve-currency role helped cause the recent bubbles, and the ensuing crisis in the world financial system, we must apply the analysis of the great French economist and central banker Jacques Rueff, who was the first to explain the process. As a financial attaché in London in the early 1930s, Rueff witnessed the collapse of the post–World War I monetary system. He correctly diagnosed the stock-market boom of the 1920s, and the subsequent crash and price deflation, as the result of massive official accumulation — and subsequent liquidation — of foreign-exchange reserves. Foreign countries’ dollar reserves were certainly not the only factor involved, but before and during the Depression they were large enough to play a decisive role.</p>
<p>Many years later, in the 1960s, Rueff correctly predicted (and tried to prevent) the breakdown of the dollar-based Bretton Woods system. This 1944 agreement made the gold-convertible U.S. dollar the official reserve currency of the world monetary regime; it also fixed exchange rates within narrow limits. When the U.S. abandoned gold convertibility in 1971, thereby eliminating fixed exchange rates, the dollar’s reserve-currency role expanded sharply; other countries may not have liked it, but without gold there was no practical alternative. Rueff died in 1978, but today’s international monetary system — based on the paper dollar, which is backed by nothing but faith in the American economy — has the same potentially fatal flaw that he pointed out in two earlier gold-exchange standards. As was true in the 1920s and the 1960s, the dollar’s reserve-currency role has led to the main pathologies that now plague the world economy: the speculative “hot money” flows that first inflated and then deflated stock, bond, and real-estate prices; the sharp rise and fall of commodity prices, especially of oil and other energy commodities; Congress’s apparently incorrigible fiscal irresponsibility; and the mushrooming U.S. deficit in international trade and payments.</p>
<p>The key difference between a reserve-currency system and the gold standard is that foreign-exchange reserves, in the form of government bonds, are not only assets of the national authority that holds them, as gold was; they are also (unlike gold) debts of the country that issues them. Thus, when foreign monetary authorities acquire U.S. debt securities as reserves, U.S. monetary authorities are, in effect, borrowing the same amount.</p>
<p>We all hold our wealth in one of three forms: money, goods (including services), or securities (which are in effect claims on future goods). It is therefore a fundamental truth of accounting that the net international payments for official reserves (money), current account (trade in goods and services), and private-capital account (securities) must equal zero: That is, a surplus or deficit in one account requires an offsetting surplus or deficit in the other two combined. Simply put, if you trade $100 in currency for $50 in goods and $50 in securities, somebody else has traded $50 in goods and $50 in securities for $100 in currency. Payments have to balance out. When foreign countries increase their dollar reserves, it means that U.S. residents buy that much more foreign wealth than they have sold. The result is a net outflow of capital known as “hot money” because it is highly mobile, speculative, and very sensitive to fluctuations in interest and exchange rates.</p>
<p>The overall U.S. balance-of-payments deficit has persisted almost continuously since 1960, and within the last few years has reached its highest levels ever. This growth in U.S. demand for goods and securities, stoked by central-bank financing, has taken place without a matching growth in supply of goods and services to soak it up. The result is inflation: more money chasing the same amount of goods. And it works both ways: When official reserves are sold, the process is thrown into reverse and deflation can result, as in the Depression.</p>
<p>It now typically takes about two and a half years for these effects to work their way through the economy, as one sector responds to another and the hierarchy of prices adjusts to (positive or negative) excess monetary demand. As happened in 1973–74, 1979–80, and 1990–91, the massive 2002–08 commodity-price surge was set in motion by the previous massive expansion of what we defined in the 1980s as the “world dollar base”: the sum of U.S. currency, commercial-bank dollar reserves, and foreign official dollar reserves. These reserves are sometimes called “high powered” dollars because they permit private banks to expand their lending by a multiple of their reserves. When reserves disappear, lending has to contract by a similar multiple.</p>
<p>By observing the growth of the world dollar base and tracking its impact on the markets, our firm was able to predict correctly in 2005 that crude oil would hit $100 a barrel by the end of 2007 — and then, as rising production costs squeezed profit margins, to warn investors to shift from equities to Treasury bills. Retail gasoline prices ultimately more than quadrupled — not because energy supplies fell, but because the world supply of “high-powered dollars” (money available to be multiplied through bank lending) had expanded much faster than world energy supplies.</p>
<p>MONEY PLUS CONGRESS EQUALS DANGER Congress has become increasingly addicted to reserve-currency finance by a kind of fiscal version of Parkinson’s Law: Public spending expands to absorb all available tax revenues. Working in tandem with this is Parkinson’s Debt Corollary: Public borrowing expands to absorb all available means of finance. In other words, the government will borrow as much as it can from whoever will lend to it. If tax revenues are Congress’s “allowance” (as Milton Friedman, envisioning Congress as a spendthrift teenager, once put it), then purchases of Treasury securities (by U.S. government trust funds and by the domestic and foreign banking sys tems) are its “credit cards.” But the congressional teenager’s spending won’t be constrained by a cut in allowance unless the indulgent parents also cut up the credit cards.</p>
<p>Consider the evidence. Not including the debt absorbed by federal trust funds (particularly Social Security), the federal government’s general operating deficit from 1980 through 2007 has averaged 4.2 percent of GDP. Federal investment in government-owned assets like office buildings and warships represented about 1.3 percent of GDP; this part of the deficit was almost exactly equaled by federal borrowing from non-bank private investors. Current federal consumption of goods and services, meanwhile, has accounted for the remaining 2.9 percent of GDP. About a third of this was funded by (mostly) foreign central banks, and two thirds by spending government trust-fund surpluses to fund the general operating budget — thus expanding the budget while masking the deficit.</p>
<p>Relying on currency-reserve financing to expand government spending for current consumption is bad enough in itself. What made it much worse this time around was that Treasury bonds were joined in the mix by mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and implicitly backed by the government. This funneled inflation (and then deflation) into residential real estate at the very time when Congress was forcing Fannie and Freddie to lower the quality of their mortgage loans drastically to promote homeownership. In the fall of 2007 Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said: “I’m not worried about Fannie and Freddie’s health. I’m worried that they won’t do enough to help out the economy. That’s why I’ve supported them all these years — so that they can help at a time like this.” The result: Fannie and Freddie became insolvent and were nationalized, while Frank continued (as he still continues) his role as financial “watchdog.”</p>
<p>The housing deflation hasn’t stopped yet, partly because foreign monetary authorities (and recently the Federal Reserve) have been selling Fannie and Freddie’s securities (as an analysis of the recent Federal Reserve balance sheet shows). If these sales continue, it will trigger more deflation of real estate, stocks, and commodities, as happened in the U.S. after 1928 and Japan after 1989. The current crisis did not strike suddenly and unexpectedly; signs of its approach were abundantly clear for years before. Despite these signs and the historical precedents, the Federal Reserve had neither the understanding, nor the interest, nor the will to stop the massive, inflationary accumulation or the subsequent sale of dollar reserves abroad.</p>
<p>Similar facts explain why U.S. international trade has swung from a chronic surplus in the early 1960s to a chronic and growing deficit ever since. Increased American consumption and reduced saving have caused an increasing U.S. current-account deficit, and therefore an equal surplus in countries that acquire dollar reserves.</p>
<p>These international imbalances consist almost entirely of goods and services purchased from foreign producers, ultimately paid for by federal deficit spending and financed largely by U.S. official borrowing from foreign monetary institutions. But the private investment position — the money U.S. citizens owe to and are owed by foreigners — actually shows a net surplus, proving that the dollar’s reserve-currency status and the related federal deficit spending, rather than American consumers’ private profligacy, are the driving force behind U.S. international-payments deficits.</p>
<p>The dollar’s reserve-currency status provides short-term political advantages to U.S. congressmen seeking reelection, but these are far outweighed by the perennial disruptions it has caused to the world and U.S. economy and to financial markets. There has also been a heavy political cost for presidents whose well-intentioned and sophisticated advisers have not, for two generations, grasped the perversities of the dollar-based world monetary system. This is why the Fed has been surprised repeatedly by large changes in U.S. prices, including housing-price deflation, stock-market selloffs, and commodity-price gyrations.</p>
<p>Ben Bernanke, for example, was a respected economics professor who specialized in the Great Depression before becoming a member, and now chairman, of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. Responding to Milton Friedman’s thesis that the Federal Reserve had turned a mild recession into the Great Depression by permitting the U.S. domestic money supply to decline, in 2002 Bernanke addressed Friedman with these words: “Regarding the Great Depression: You’re right, we [the Federal Reserve] did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” However, with all respect to that great economist, it must be said that Friedman was wrong on a crucial point: believing that only domestic official monetary liabilities (currency and commercial-bank reserves) matter — a view that Bernanke and Tim Geithner, the New York Fed president and Barack Obama’s nominee for treasury secretary, seem so far to share. Excluding the role of foreign dollar reserves assumes the model of a closed economy, not an integrated global trading system.</p>
<p>The evidence we have reviewed shows that, exactly as Rueff argued, official dollar reserves are a form of high-powered money — adding up to a sum now several times the Fed’s own holdings. The Treasury and federal-agency debt securities held by foreign monetary authorities substantially exceed those held by the Federal Reserve itself, approximately by a factor of five.</p>
<p>A TESTED SOLUTION How can we end the reserve-currency curse? While acknowledging the complexity of the century-old problem, we must in this article simplify the necessary remedies. The essential requirement for restoring a stable international monetary system is that the major countries agree to replace all official foreign-exchange reserves with an independent monetary asset that is not ultimately some particular nation’s liability. Many standards are theoretically possible, but monetary authorities still hold nearly 900 million ounces of gold, and the simplest, most effective, and most tested solution is a modernized international gold standard. This would require changes in U.S. law and an international monetary agreement.</p>
<p>There are two primary conditions for the success of such a reform. First, the gold values of all national currencies must be properly chosen to preclude the deflationary mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s. This requirement now suggests a gold price not less than $1,000, but a more precise calculation will be necessary when the reform is to take effect. Second, existing foreign-exchange reserves must be removed from the balance sheets of national monetary authorities by consolidating them into long-term government-to-government debts that will be repaid over several decades — much as the Washington-Hamilton administration funded domestic and foreign Revolutionary War debt.</p>
<p>Similar proposals have been made repeatedly — in the 1920s, in the 1960s, and in the 1980s — but in each case they were rejected by “experts” who predicted that raising the gold “price” (from $20 to $35 in the 1920s, from $35 to $70 in the 1960s, or, still later, from $300 to $500 in the 1980s) would be wildly inflationary. The deflationary collapse of the 1930s, the inflationary collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, and the recent financial crisis were all consequences of this shortsightedness. The gold price soared from $35 in 1971 to nearly $200 by the end of 1974, and hit $1,000 an ounce in March 2008 (it is now around $800).</p>
<p>The proposed reform would bring many advantages. First, it is worth remembering that convertibility of major currencies to gold produced by far the best performance of price stability in American history. From 1879 to 1914, average annual CPI inflation was 0.2 percent, with ave rage annual volatility (up or down) of only 2.2 percent. No other standard comes close in combining low average inflation with low volatility. The volatility in the period from 1971 to the present (2.8 percent) is a close second to the classical gold standard, but it has had the worst average inflation: 4.6 percent. The 1862–79 Greenback period had the lowest average inflation (0.1 percent) but the worst volatility (8.8 percent).</p>
<p>Second, the plan would provide not just an American but a vast worldwide countercyclical “stimulus package” — one not financed by yet more government debt — since when all other prices declined, the gold “price” would stay constant, stimulating gold mining (in which America now rivals South Africa). Third, relieved of its reserve-currency burden of being the world’s “spender of last resort,” America would see the competitiveness of U.S. industry quickly restored and the chronic U.S. trade deficit quickly return to chronic surpluses. Fourth, since the whole world would have what amounts to a trade surplus with itself, equal to the increase in official gold reserves, pressure for trade protectionism would diminish sharply. Fifth, the chaos of floating currencies would end along with the reserve-currency curse. The gold standard best integrates the world trading system, by bringing about prompt adjustment of balance-of-payments deficits.</p>
<p>Sixth, the reform would halt the proliferation of debt resulting from the current currency system. Seventh, not the least benefit would be to recapitalize the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System itself. In the course of its massive bailout of private institutions, the Federal Reserve’s loan-to-capital ratio has risen to about 50 to 1 — worse than the troubled major private banks it is trying to save! Revaluing U.S. gold reserves from the current $42.22 to at least $1,000 an ounce could bring this ratio down to 7 to 1, providing the liquidity necessary to deal effectively with the crisis.</p>
<p>Finally, ending the dollar’s reserve-currency “privilege,” and its inflationary financing of the federal budget, would make it not only necessary to limit budget deficits — which could no longer be financed by foreign central banks — but also for the first time politically and economically practicable to do so. We joined in proposing a comprehensive (but never enacted) plan to the 1995 National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform, based on the Reagan strategy of combining a low-rate, broad-based income tax with a balanced, pay-as-you-go Social Security system. The plan remains eminently feasible.</p>
<p>Neither reforming the international monetary system nor balancing the federal budget could be done without serious national and international discussion. But the technical problems have been long studied and are relatively straightforward. The main action item for President Obama should be to put the reserve-currency addiction on the way to extinction before — not after — its congressional and foreign monetary co-dependents irreparably harm themselves and all the innocents they have heedlessly placed in harm’s way.</p>
<p>Doing so would require Obama to overcome objections from the dominant factions in both parties. Yet putting the common good ahead of political expediency is what distinguishes a great president from a mediocre one. The challenge is great, but so is the reward for doing the right thing.</p>
<p>— Mr. Lehrman and Mr. Mueller are principals of the financial-markets consulting firm LBMC LLC. Mr. Lehrman is also the author, most recently, of Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point, and manager of an investment partnership. Mr. Mueller is also director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. [This version restores minor textual corrections dropped at deadline, and corrects the retail gasoline price series in the final chart: the wholesale price had inadvertently been substituted.]</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Go Forward to Gold | false | https://eppc.org/publications/go-forward-to-gold/ | 1right-center
| 3,059 | A copy of the charts included in this article can be downloaded here Aamp160pdf copyamp160withamp160theamp160chartsamp160embedded in the article can be downloaded here Theamp160most disturbing aspect of the current financial crisis is that no US official has correctly identified its primary cause Experts variously attribute the economic reverses to subprime lending derivative trading excessive leverage and regulation that was either too lax or too strict take your pick but these are symptoms rather than causes Ignored is the main culprit the dollar8217s role as the world8217s main official reserve currency Though he almost certainly doesn8217t realize it yet Presidentelect Barack Obama will either set the dollar8217s reservecurrency status on the path to extinction or risk becoming the next victim of what we call 8220the reservecurrency curse8221 Official reserves are money held by governments and central banks for the settlement of international payments A Spanish bank may not want to accept Indian rupees and it might be inconvenient for Qatar Petroleum to accept Mexican pesos for a million barrels of oil An official reserve currency is also one everybody agrees to accept and right now that currency is the dollar But foreignexchange reserves are commonly held in the form of government debts of the nation that issued the currency In the case of the United States that includes all those government bonds piling up in China and elsewhere The problem is that unlike gold official dollar reserves increase the money supply in one country without decreasing it in another When reserves are being increased the effect is inflation When reserves are liquidated the effect is deflation 8212 potentially dangerous deflation To understand how the dollar8217s reservecurrency role helped cause the recent bubbles and the ensuing crisis in the world financial system we must apply the analysis of the great French economist and central banker Jacques Rueff who was the first to explain the process As a financial attach233 in London in the early 1930s Rueff witnessed the collapse of the post8211World War I monetary system He correctly diagnosed the stockmarket boom of the 1920s and the subsequent crash and price deflation as the result of massive official accumulation 8212 and subsequent liquidation 8212 of foreignexchange reserves Foreign countries8217 dollar reserves were certainly not the only factor involved but before and during the Depression they were large enough to play a decisive role Many years later in the 1960s Rueff correctly predicted and tried to prevent the breakdown of the dollarbased Bretton Woods system This 1944 agreement made the goldconvertible US dollar the official reserve currency of the world monetary regime it also fixed exchange rates within narrow limits When the US abandoned gold convertibility in 1971 thereby eliminating fixed exchange rates the dollar8217s reservecurrency role expanded sharply other countries may not have liked it but without gold there was no practical alternative Rueff died in 1978 but today8217s international monetary system 8212 based on the paper dollar which is backed by nothing but faith in the American economy 8212 has the same potentially fatal flaw that he pointed out in two earlier goldexchange standards As was true in the 1920s and the 1960s the dollar8217s reservecurrency role has led to the main pathologies that now plague the world economy the speculative 8220hot money8221 flows that first inflated and then deflated stock bond and realestate prices the sharp rise and fall of commodity prices especially of oil and other energy commodities Congress8217s apparently incorrigible fiscal irresponsibility and the mushrooming US deficit in international trade and payments The key difference between a reservecurrency system and the gold standard is that foreignexchange reserves in the form of government bonds are not only assets of the national authority that holds them as gold was they are also unlike gold debts of the country that issues them Thus when foreign monetary authorities acquire US debt securities as reserves US monetary authorities are in effect borrowing the same amount We all hold our wealth in one of three forms money goods including services or securities which are in effect claims on future goods It is therefore a fundamental truth of accounting that the net international payments for official reserves money current account trade in goods and services and privatecapital account securities must equal zero That is a surplus or deficit in one account requires an offsetting surplus or deficit in the other two combined Simply put if you trade 100 in currency for 50 in goods and 50 in securities somebody else has traded 50 in goods and 50 in securities for 100 in currency Payments have to balance out When foreign countries increase their dollar reserves it means that US residents buy that much more foreign wealth than they have sold The result is a net outflow of capital known as 8220hot money8221 because it is highly mobile speculative and very sensitive to fluctuations in interest and exchange rates The overall US balanceofpayments deficit has persisted almost continuously since 1960 and within the last few years has reached its highest levels ever This growth in US demand for goods and securities stoked by centralbank financing has taken place without a matching growth in supply of goods and services to soak it up The result is inflation more money chasing the same amount of goods And it works both ways When official reserves are sold the process is thrown into reverse and deflation can result as in the Depression It now typically takes about two and a half years for these effects to work their way through the economy as one sector responds to another and the hierarchy of prices adjusts to positive or negative excess monetary demand As happened in 1973821174 1979821180 and 1990821191 the massive 2002821108 commodityprice surge was set in motion by the previous massive expansion of what we defined in the 1980s as the 8220world dollar base8221 the sum of US currency commercialbank dollar reserves and foreign official dollar reserves These reserves are sometimes called 8220high powered8221 dollars because they permit private banks to expand their lending by a multiple of their reserves When reserves disappear lending has to contract by a similar multiple By observing the growth of the world dollar base and tracking its impact on the markets our firm was able to predict correctly in 2005 that crude oil would hit 100 a barrel by the end of 2007 8212 and then as rising production costs squeezed profit margins to warn investors to shift from equities to Treasury bills Retail gasoline prices ultimately more than quadrupled 8212 not because energy supplies fell but because the world supply of 8220highpowered dollars8221 money available to be multiplied through bank lending had expanded much faster than world energy supplies MONEY PLUS CONGRESS EQUALS DANGER Congress has become increasingly addicted to reservecurrency finance by a kind of fiscal version of Parkinson8217s Law Public spending expands to absorb all available tax revenues Working in tandem with this is Parkinson8217s Debt Corollary Public borrowing expands to absorb all available means of finance In other words the government will borrow as much as it can from whoever will lend to it If tax revenues are Congress8217s 8220allowance8221 as Milton Friedman envisioning Congress as a spendthrift teenager once put it then purchases of Treasury securities by US government trust funds and by the domestic and foreign banking sys tems are its 8220credit cards8221 But the congressional teenager8217s spending won8217t be constrained by a cut in allowance unless the indulgent parents also cut up the credit cards Consider the evidence Not including the debt absorbed by federal trust funds particularly Social Security the federal government8217s general operating deficit from 1980 through 2007 has averaged 42 percent of GDP Federal investment in governmentowned assets like office buildings and warships represented about 13 percent of GDP this part of the deficit was almost exactly equaled by federal borrowing from nonbank private investors Current federal consumption of goods and services meanwhile has accounted for the remaining 29 percent of GDP About a third of this was funded by mostly foreign central banks and two thirds by spending government trustfund surpluses to fund the general operating budget 8212 thus expanding the budget while masking the deficit Relying on currencyreserve financing to expand government spending for current consumption is bad enough in itself What made it much worse this time around was that Treasury bonds were joined in the mix by mortgagebacked securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and implicitly backed by the government This funneled inflation and then deflation into residential real estate at the very time when Congress was forcing Fannie and Freddie to lower the quality of their mortgage loans drastically to promote homeownership In the fall of 2007 Rep Barney Frank chairman of the House Financial Services Committee said 8220I8217m not worried about Fannie and Freddie8217s health I8217m worried that they won8217t do enough to help out the economy That8217s why I8217ve supported them all these years 8212 so that they can help at a time like this8221 The result Fannie and Freddie became insolvent and were nationalized while Frank continued as he still continues his role as financial 8220watchdog8221 The housing deflation hasn8217t stopped yet partly because foreign monetary authorities and recently the Federal Reserve have been selling Fannie and Freddie8217s securities as an analysis of the recent Federal Reserve balance sheet shows If these sales continue it will trigger more deflation of real estate stocks and commodities as happened in the US after 1928 and Japan after 1989 The current crisis did not strike suddenly and unexpectedly signs of its approach were abundantly clear for years before Despite these signs and the historical precedents the Federal Reserve had neither the understanding nor the interest nor the will to stop the massive inflationary accumulation or the subsequent sale of dollar reserves abroad Similar facts explain why US international trade has swung from a chronic surplus in the early 1960s to a chronic and growing deficit ever since Increased American consumption and reduced saving have caused an increasing US currentaccount deficit and therefore an equal surplus in countries that acquire dollar reserves These international imbalances consist almost entirely of goods and services purchased from foreign producers ultimately paid for by federal deficit spending and financed largely by US official borrowing from foreign monetary institutions But the private investment position 8212 the money US citizens owe to and are owed by foreigners 8212 actually shows a net surplus proving that the dollar8217s reservecurrency status and the related federal deficit spending rather than American consumers8217 private profligacy are the driving force behind US internationalpayments deficits The dollar8217s reservecurrency status provides shortterm political advantages to US congressmen seeking reelection but these are far outweighed by the perennial disruptions it has caused to the world and US economy and to financial markets There has also been a heavy political cost for presidents whose wellintentioned and sophisticated advisers have not for two generations grasped the perversities of the dollarbased world monetary system This is why the Fed has been surprised repeatedly by large changes in US prices including housingprice deflation stockmarket selloffs and commodityprice gyrations Ben Bernanke for example was a respected economics professor who specialized in the Great Depression before becoming a member and now chairman of the Federal Reserve8217s board of governors Responding to Milton Friedman8217s thesis that the Federal Reserve had turned a mild recession into the Great Depression by permitting the US domestic money supply to decline in 2002 Bernanke addressed Friedman with these words 8220Regarding the Great Depression You8217re right we the Federal Reserve did it We8217re very sorry But thanks to you we won8217t do it again8221 However with all respect to that great economist it must be said that Friedman was wrong on a crucial point believing that only domestic official monetary liabilities currency and commercialbank reserves matter 8212 a view that Bernanke and Tim Geithner the New York Fed president and Barack Obama8217s nominee for treasury secretary seem so far to share Excluding the role of foreign dollar reserves assumes the model of a closed economy not an integrated global trading system The evidence we have reviewed shows that exactly as Rueff argued official dollar reserves are a form of highpowered money 8212 adding up to a sum now several times the Fed8217s own holdings The Treasury and federalagency debt securities held by foreign monetary authorities substantially exceed those held by the Federal Reserve itself approximately by a factor of five A TESTED SOLUTION How can we end the reservecurrency curse While acknowledging the complexity of the centuryold problem we must in this article simplify the necessary remedies The essential requirement for restoring a stable international monetary system is that the major countries agree to replace all official foreignexchange reserves with an independent monetary asset that is not ultimately some particular nation8217s liability Many standards are theoretically possible but monetary authorities still hold nearly 900 million ounces of gold and the simplest most effective and most tested solution is a modernized international gold standard This would require changes in US law and an international monetary agreement There are two primary conditions for the success of such a reform First the gold values of all national currencies must be properly chosen to preclude the deflationary mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s This requirement now suggests a gold price not less than 1000 but a more precise calculation will be necessary when the reform is to take effect Second existing foreignexchange reserves must be removed from the balance sheets of national monetary authorities by consolidating them into longterm governmenttogovernment debts that will be repaid over several decades 8212 much as the WashingtonHamilton administration funded domestic and foreign Revolutionary War debt Similar proposals have been made repeatedly 8212 in the 1920s in the 1960s and in the 1980s 8212 but in each case they were rejected by 8220experts8221 who predicted that raising the gold 8220price8221 from 20 to 35 in the 1920s from 35 to 70 in the 1960s or still later from 300 to 500 in the 1980s would be wildly inflationary The deflationary collapse of the 1930s the inflationary collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the recent financial crisis were all consequences of this shortsightedness The gold price soared from 35 in 1971 to nearly 200 by the end of 1974 and hit 1000 an ounce in March 2008 it is now around 800 The proposed reform would bring many advantages First it is worth remembering that convertibility of major currencies to gold produced by far the best performance of price stability in American history From 1879 to 1914 average annual CPI inflation was 02 percent with ave rage annual volatility up or down of only 22 percent No other standard comes close in combining low average inflation with low volatility The volatility in the period from 1971 to the present 28 percent is a close second to the classical gold standard but it has had the worst average inflation 46 percent The 1862821179 Greenback period had the lowest average inflation 01 percent but the worst volatility 88 percent Second the plan would provide not just an American but a vast worldwide countercyclical 8220stimulus package8221 8212 one not financed by yet more government debt 8212 since when all other prices declined the gold 8220price8221 would stay constant stimulating gold mining in which America now rivals South Africa Third relieved of its reservecurrency burden of being the world8217s 8220spender of last resort8221 America would see the competitiveness of US industry quickly restored and the chronic US trade deficit quickly return to chronic surpluses Fourth since the whole world would have what amounts to a trade surplus with itself equal to the increase in official gold reserves pressure for trade protectionism would diminish sharply Fifth the chaos of floating currencies would end along with the reservecurrency curse The gold standard best integrates the world trading system by bringing about prompt adjustment of balanceofpayments deficits Sixth the reform would halt the proliferation of debt resulting from the current currency system Seventh not the least benefit would be to recapitalize the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System itself In the course of its massive bailout of private institutions the Federal Reserve8217s loantocapital ratio has risen to about 50 to 1 8212 worse than the troubled major private banks it is trying to save Revaluing US gold reserves from the current 4222 to at least 1000 an ounce could bring this ratio down to 7 to 1 providing the liquidity necessary to deal effectively with the crisis Finally ending the dollar8217s reservecurrency 8220privilege8221 and its inflationary financing of the federal budget would make it not only necessary to limit budget deficits 8212 which could no longer be financed by foreign central banks 8212 but also for the first time politically and economically practicable to do so We joined in proposing a comprehensive but never enacted plan to the 1995 National Commission on Economic Growth and Tax Reform based on the Reagan strategy of combining a lowrate broadbased income tax with a balanced payasyougo Social Security system The plan remains eminently feasible Neither reforming the international monetary system nor balancing the federal budget could be done without serious national and international discussion But the technical problems have been long studied and are relatively straightforward The main action item for President Obama should be to put the reservecurrency addiction on the way to extinction before 8212 not after 8212 its congressional and foreign monetary codependents irreparably harm themselves and all the innocents they have heedlessly placed in harm8217s way Doing so would require Obama to overcome objections from the dominant factions in both parties Yet putting the common good ahead of political expediency is what distinguishes a great president from a mediocre one The challenge is great but so is the reward for doing the right thing 8212 Mr Lehrman and Mr Mueller are principals of the financialmarkets consulting firm LBMC LLC Mr Lehrman is also the author most recently of Lincoln at Peoria The Turning Point and manager of an investment partnership Mr Mueller is also director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center This version restores minor textual corrections dropped at deadline and corrects the retail gasoline price series in the final chart the wholesale price had inadvertently been substituted amp160 | A/DET copy/NOUN of/ADP the/DET charts/NOUN included/VERB in/ADP this/DET article/NOUN can/AUX be/AUX downloaded/VERB here/ADV Aamp160pdf/ADV copyamp160withamp160theamp160chartsamp160embedded/VERB in/ADP the/DET article/NOUN can/AUX be/AUX downloaded/VERB here/ADV Theamp160most/ADV disturbing/VERB aspect/NOUN of/ADP the/DET current/ADJ financial/ADJ crisis/NOUN is/AUX that/SCONJ no/DET US/PROPN official/NOUN has/AUX correctly/ADV identified/VERB its/PRON primary/ADJ cause/NOUN Experts/NOUN 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|
<p>On Thursday June 14, the High Constitutional Court in Egypt will rule on two pending motions that may radically change the future course of Egypt and determine the fate of its remarkable – but unfinished- revolution. The two motions are the constitutionality of the political ban on the former regime senior officials, such as Gen. Ahmad Shafiq, the undeclared military’s candidate for president, and the constitutionality of last winter’s parliamentary elections. Each decision might drastically alter the power structure in the country, and possibly propel another revolution whose fate remains unclear.</p>
<p>But how did we get to this point of complete uncertainty?</p>
<p>History will show that the unity displayed by the Egyptian people during the eighteen revolutionary days in early 2011 was decisive in convincing the Egyptian military to dump Mubarak and side with the people. Although the revolution was initially called for and led by the youth groups on January 25, soon after most political and social movements, religious and secular, and civil society groups including labor unions, professional syndicates, students, as well as the common man and woman in the street were demonstrating across Egypt by the millions, demanding the ouster of their dictator and the end of his corrupt regime.</p>
<p>By the time Mubarak was overthrown on February 11, 2011, the Egyptian people were divided into two camps: an overwhelming majority that celebrated the triumph of the revolution, and a tiny minority that comprised the remnants of the old regime, which included party bosses of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), his sons’ corrupt businessmen and cronies who looted billions of dollars from Egypt’s economy, and the resilient structure of the deep state that, for decades, ruled Egyptians through fear, intimidation, and propaganda including the top echelons of the military, intelligence services, state security apparatuses, as well as state media conglomerates.</p>
<p>It was also abundantly clear that, by the second week of the massive demonstrations across the country, the U.S. government encouraged the Egyptian military leaders to take matters into their hands after reaching the conclusion that the best way to keep Egypt in the U.S. orbit was to abandon Mubarak. Ever since that fateful day, the plan by the counter-revolutionary forces -internally and externally- has been to break up the unity of the revolutionary groups and gradually restore the old regime minus its most corrupt public faces.</p>
<p>The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which took the reign of power from Mubarak, recognized early on that the most powerful organized group within the revolutionary forces was the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). As a cautious social and religious movement, the MB is more reformist in nature than revolutionary. For decades, its objective has been to gradually reform the society towards an Islamically-oriented system of government based on its interpretation of Shari’a or Islamic law.</p>
<p>Realizing that it has a huge organizational advantage over other political parties especially the nascent revolutionary youth movements, the MB quickly broke ranks from these groups and reached a tacit understanding with SCAF to push for parliamentary elections ahead of rewriting the constitution or cleansing the state institutions from the loyal remnants of the old regime or the fulool. By March 2011, Egyptians were split almost 3 to 1 in favor of the Islamist position to hold elections before writing the constitution.</p>
<p>Throughout last summer and fall most of the youth revolutionary groups were in the streets protesting the excesses of SCAF, including holding over 12,000 military trials for civilians, carrying out several bloody crackdowns against the protesters, protecting the fulool of the old regime from accountability, and appointing a government made up of many Mubarak loyalists.</p>
<p>But by the end of the year, Egyptians went again to the polls to elect 678 representatives in the upper and lower chambers of Parliament. Once again, the electorate chose Islamic candidates over their liberal and leftist counterparts by a margin of 3 to 1.</p>
<p>Feeling empowered the Islamic parties led by the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) ignored most other political parties and formed a tacit alliance with the more conservative Salafi Al-Noor party to form the constitution-writing committee. Soon after, the FJP reneged on its one-year old promise not to field a presidential candidate, thus creating a major distrust between the revolution’s Islamic and secular followers.</p>
<p>As the religious and secular revolutionary groups were quarreling over the discourse of the revolution and the nature of the state, the fulool, supported by SCAF and the deep security state, were quietly regrouping behind the scenes. Meanwhile, the SCAF-appointed government created many hardships that disrupted the daily life of common Egyptians while the state-run media, still controlled by Mubarak loyalists, as well as other private media outlets run by corrupt businesspeople, blamed the newly elected Parliament for the country’s deterioration in security and the near-collapse of the economy.</p>
<p>When the FJP demanded to form a coalition government to deal with the struggling economy, SCAF not only scoffed at the request, but also humiliated and threatened the group in public. Soon after, its preferred candidate, Mubarak’s last Prime Minster, Shafiq, was propped up throughout the country and promoted as the next president by the fulool and the former NDP machinery, as well as by the operatives of the intelligence services. Initially, no one took his candidacy seriously, believing that Shafiq could not be elected by the same people who overwhelmingly overthrew his boss just a year earlier.</p>
<p>At first, the fulool hoped that if they only elevated their candidate to reach the second round they would then have a strong chance to win the election one-on-one. In their view their best chance was to face the MB’s divisive candidate, Dr. Muhammad Mursi, in the runoff since it would be easier to attack him as the candidate of&#160; “the religious state,” rather than a candidate representing the revolutionary groups. They knew that if they face any of the other viable revolutionary candidates, such as Dr. Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh or Hamdein Sabahi, their candidate would be easily routed. So in the final two weeks of the first round in May every effort was made to promote Sabahi at the expense of Abol Fotouh, who was ahead in most credible polls, so as to force the split of the pro-revolution votes and defeat both candidates who were preferred by the revolutionary groups. Combined Abol Futouh and Sabahi gained 39 percent of the total vote in the first round, while Mursi and Shafiq garnered 25 and 24 percent, respectively.</p>
<p>In effect, the state’s scheme to sell Shafiq as Egypt’s savior was quietly in motion since at least last February. Hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on his campaign (although officially the total allowed budget for each campaign was 10 million or $1.7M). His signposts alone cost 22 million pounds, while dozens of ads ran on TV with each costing 200 thousand pounds or more. Furthermore, credible reports have surfaced that demonstrated the payments of millions of pounds to local officials in the delta region to secure the votes of the peasants. In one poor village, all of its more than 5000 votes were cast for Shafiq. In one scene circulating on the Internet and clandestinely videotaped by a cell phone, a former NDP official was boasting how the banned party machinery turned out the votes for Shafiq in upper Egypt by reviving their old methods of “convincing” the people to vote for their preferred candidate (read intimidation and bribery.)</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the campaign to attack Shafiq’s opponents was in full swing. Independent and nationalist, Abdel Halim Kandil, who is a newspaper editor and columnist, has recently exposed the extent of the scheme. Kandil, also well-known for being not only anti-Mubarak, but also very critical of the MB, revealed that he was told by a senior intelligence officer that soon the MB would not only be defeated and ousted from power, but that the group would also be on the run. He further stated that a division within the intelligence service called the “Rumor Spreading” section was in charge of the latest vicious attacks against the MB and its candidate, Mursi. For over a month, relentless attacks against the Islamic group have been in full force in the media spearheaded by public figures and propagated by “anonymous sources.”</p>
<p>Lately, Shafiq and the state’s propaganda machine have even accused the MB of orchestrating the battle of the Camel where dozens of the revolutionary youth were killed on Feb. 2 in Tahrir Square. Not only have all the former senior and junior security officials been acquitted in court, as demonstrated on June 2 by the Mubarak verdicts, but astonishingly the victims have now been turned into villains. Although all revolutionary groups, including those who despise the MB, have declared that it was in fact the youth of the MB that saved the revolution that day by standing their ground and fending off the vicious attacks by the goons of the former regime, the accusations by Shafiq and the fulool have intensified in recent days and the fabricated lies spread.</p>
<p>Similarly, the MB realized before the first round of elections that their candidate would have a tough time beating the other revolutionary candidates had any of them gotten to the second round. In fact, several reports from the field have recently surfaced that showed the MB field workers tacitly hoping on elections day to face either Shafiq or Amr Mousa (Mubarak’s former foreign minister). When Shafiq came in second the MB was initially confident that it could defeat him. But when the margin between the two candidates was declared few days later to be less than one percent the MB was stunned.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the mistrust among the religious and secular pro-revolution groups is so deep that all attempts to unite behind Mursi have so far not succeeded. The antagonism of many secular groups toward political Islam seems to be deeper than their desire to see the revolution and its ideals realized. Equally, the partisanship and self-interest of the main Islamic group appears to be stronger than its commitment to the objectives of the revolution. Some of the demands by the secularists, such as the voluntary dissolution of the MB, were so ridiculous as to deem them frivolous. Similarly, the MB was slow and reluctant in giving assurances to the secular and other revolutionary groups, casting major doubts on its sincerity.</p>
<p>Hence, the revolutionary forces were once again split. Some, such as the Islamic and moderate parties of Al-Noor and Al-Wasat endorsed Mursi. Abol Fotouh and the April 6 movement also gave their support to Mursi, arguing that the main objective is now to defeat the fulool candidate (the far worse of two bad options as Abol Fotouh put it). But other revolutionary groups led by Sabahi and several liberal and leftist parties called for elections’ boycott or the invalidation of the votes since in their view both options are equally bad. They claim that Shafiq would attempt to resurrect the old regime, while they unconvincingly argue that Mursi would create a religious-based state. Unfortunately, the net result of this division is to permit the apparatus of the deep state to engineer a Shafiq victory.</p>
<p>According to a well-informed Egyptian political analyst, when SCAF allowed for free and fair parliamentary elections last winter, its plan was to allow the groups associated with political Islam to get elected, since their popularity was indisputable. But more importantly SCAF never intended to transfer any meaningful executive or governmental power to the FJP or their allies so as to demonstrate to the electorate their impotence once in Parliament. In due course as the revolutionary spirit starts to wane and the support to the Islamic groups weakens, the plan was to invalidate last winter’s parliamentary elections and call for new ones in order to restore some of the power back to the fulool and other secular forces, thus substantially reducing the support and power of the Islamic groups.</p>
<p>So shortly after the elections, several lawsuits by the fulool and secular groups were filed challenging the constitutionality of the elections’ law based on the fact that the parties were allowed to contest with independents the one-third parliamentary seats reserved for individuals. Although there was a near-consensus on this law by all the political parties at the time, it has been used by the adversaries of the winners of the elections as a back-up plan that could be utilized to dissolve parliament at the appropriate time. According to Parliament’s speaker and senior FJP official, Dr. Saad Katatni, SCAF deputy commander Gen. Sami Anan and Prime Minister Kamal Ganzouri told him last March that if the MB persists on its demand of forming the government, the dissolution of parliament was a distinct possibility that could be set in motion at any moment.</p>
<p>Realizing this grave threat, instead of uniting the revolutionary groups to stand up to SCAF, the MB responded by fielding its own candidate in order to seriously challenge SCAF’s threat, albeit for the first time since the triumph of the revolution. Furthermore, the parliament (dominated by the FJP and its allies) immediately passed a law to ban from any political activity any candidate affiliated with the old regime. After massive popular demonstrations that compelled SCAF to sign the law, the Elections Committee refused to apply it and disqualify Shafiq. Instead it referred the law to the High Constitutional Court (HCC) in order to decide on its constitutionality. Furthermore, although the lawsuit against the parliamentary elections has been pending for months, the HCC chose to schedule a hearing and rule on both motions this Thursday, two days before the runoff elections.</p>
<p>On the first issue, a report submitted this week to the HCC by legal experts was issued that concluded that the Elections Committee had no jurisdiction to refer the law to the HCC since it is an administrative body and not a judicial one. If adopted the ruling would result in forcing the Elections Committee to disqualify Shafiq from running in the second round next week. Such decision would then compel the runoff elections to be cancelled and the first round elections to be held again.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the experts committee also said in its report that if the HCC accepts jurisdiction, then its recommendation was to deem the political banning law unconstitutional, and thus to hold the runoff elections next week between Mursi and Shafiq, the top two contenders of the first round. On the second motion the committee recommended that the parliamentary elections law be deemed unconstitutional, and thus the HCC must decide to either dissolve the Parliament or hold new elections for a third of its members. In either case, the Parliament would no longer be functional.</p>
<p>In short, there are four possible scenarios with regard to the outcome of the HCC rulings this week. Each one would most likely benefit a distinct and different political faction. They are:</p>
<p>Scenario 1: The HCC rules that it has jurisdiction over the banning law and deems it unconstitutional. In addition, it rules that the parliamentary elections law was constitutional. In this instance, which is the status quo, the MB and their presidential candidate would be the beneficiaries since such outcome would favor them as they keep their majority in the Parliament. Furthermore, absent massive elections’ fraud by the security agencies, the MB believes its candidate will win the presidential elections against Shafiq with the group’s adept organizational machine and massive mobilization efforts across the country.</p>
<p>Scenario 2:&#160; The HCC asserts jurisdiction and upholds Shafiq’s candidacy by ruling the banning law as unconstitutional. It also decides to dissolve Parliament or invalidate the elections of one-third of its members. This ruling would clearly be favored by SCAF and the fulool since the power of the MB and the other Islamic parties would immediately be curtailed, which in their view would be very difficult to regain in new parliamentary elections (this time it may or may not be free and fair.) The fulool also believe that with such a ruling they would have the momentum to get Shafiq elected by this Sunday’s presidential runoff and thus completely defeat and obliterate the revolution and roll back its most significant gains.</p>
<p>Scenario 3: The HCC bans Shafiq, and dissolves parliament. This scenario is favored by the secular revolutionary groups. Having clipped the wings of the Islamic parties by dissolving the Parliament, the secular groups hope to have another opportunity to challenge them at the polls. They also think that by repeating the first round elections their candidate (whether Sabahi or even Mousa) would defeat the MB candidate in the runoff, as he would be supported not only by the secular revolutionary groups but also by Shafiq’s and Mousa’s supporters.</p>
<p>Scenario 4: The HCC bans Shafiq but keeps the Parliament. This scenario is favored by the moderate and liberal Islamic and pro-revolutionary groups, the majority of which supported Abol Fotouh for president in the first round. In this scenario, the only political institution established by the revolution, namely the Parliament, would remain viable and strong. The supporters of this outcome also hope to unite the revolutionary forces behind Abol Fotouh or even form a single ticket that would include Abol Fotouh and Sabahi in order to defeat the MB candidate in a potential runoff election.</p>
<p>It is evident that SCAF has for over a year outfoxed all revolutionary groups, Islamic or secular. Depending on what scenario prevails on Thursday, it is equally clear that SCAF will have to either force their candidate on the Egyptians using all the tools of the “democratic process”, or take the country back to square one through a clever judicial ruse.</p>
<p>No matter what the military decides, the youth this time are determined not to put their trust in either the military or the political class but on their capacity to stay the revolutionary course until all their objectives are achieved. Hundreds of their pioneers, led by dozens of women including Asmaa Mahfouz and Nawwara Nagm, among the first to call for the January 25 demonstration that sparked the revolution, have been on hunger strike and continuous sit-in for over a week in the middle of Tahrir Square.</p>
<p>But now they are determined not to leave until their revolution is revived, the fulool are defeated, and the military return to their barracks.</p>
<p>Esam Al-Amin can be contacted at <a href="mailto:alamin1919@gmail.com" type="external">alamin1919@gmail.com</a></p> | Back to Square One in Egypt? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2012/06/13/back-to-square-one-in-egypt/ | 2012-06-13 | 4left
| 3,059 | On Thursday June 14 the High Constitutional Court in Egypt will rule on two pending motions that may radically change the future course of Egypt and determine the fate of its remarkable 8211 but unfinished revolution The two motions are the constitutionality of the political ban on the former regime senior officials such as Gen Ahmad Shafiq the undeclared military8217s candidate for president and the constitutionality of last winter8217s parliamentary elections Each decision might drastically alter the power structure in the country and possibly propel another revolution whose fate remains unclear But how did we get to this point of complete uncertainty History will show that the unity displayed by the Egyptian people during the eighteen revolutionary days in early 2011 was decisive in convincing the Egyptian military to dump Mubarak and side with the people Although the revolution was initially called for and led by the youth groups on January 25 soon after most political and social movements religious and secular and civil society groups including labor unions professional syndicates students as well as the common man and woman in the street were demonstrating across Egypt by the millions demanding the ouster of their dictator and the end of his corrupt regime By the time Mubarak was overthrown on February 11 2011 the Egyptian people were divided into two camps an overwhelming majority that celebrated the triumph of the revolution and a tiny minority that comprised the remnants of the old regime which included party bosses of Mubarak8217s National Democratic Party NDP his sons8217 corrupt businessmen and cronies who looted billions of dollars from Egypt8217s economy and the resilient structure of the deep state that for decades ruled Egyptians through fear intimidation and propaganda including the top echelons of the military intelligence services state security apparatuses as well as state media conglomerates It was also abundantly clear that by the second week of the massive demonstrations across the country the US government encouraged the Egyptian military leaders to take matters into their hands after reaching the conclusion that the best way to keep Egypt in the US orbit was to abandon Mubarak Ever since that fateful day the plan by the counterrevolutionary forces internally and externally has been to break up the unity of the revolutionary groups and gradually restore the old regime minus its most corrupt public faces The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces SCAF which took the reign of power from Mubarak recognized early on that the most powerful organized group within the revolutionary forces was the Muslim Brotherhood MB As a cautious social and religious movement the MB is more reformist in nature than revolutionary For decades its objective has been to gradually reform the society towards an Islamicallyoriented system of government based on its interpretation of Shari8217a or Islamic law Realizing that it has a huge organizational advantage over other political parties especially the nascent revolutionary youth movements the MB quickly broke ranks from these groups and reached a tacit understanding with SCAF to push for parliamentary elections ahead of rewriting the constitution or cleansing the state institutions from the loyal remnants of the old regime or the fulool By March 2011 Egyptians were split almost 3 to 1 in favor of the Islamist position to hold elections before writing the constitution Throughout last summer and fall most of the youth revolutionary groups were in the streets protesting the excesses of SCAF including holding over 12000 military trials for civilians carrying out several bloody crackdowns against the protesters protecting the fulool of the old regime from accountability and appointing a government made up of many Mubarak loyalists But by the end of the year Egyptians went again to the polls to elect 678 representatives in the upper and lower chambers of Parliament Once again the electorate chose Islamic candidates over their liberal and leftist counterparts by a margin of 3 to 1 Feeling empowered the Islamic parties led by the MB8217s Freedom and Justice Party FJP ignored most other political parties and formed a tacit alliance with the more conservative Salafi AlNoor party to form the constitutionwriting committee Soon after the FJP reneged on its oneyear old promise not to field a presidential candidate thus creating a major distrust between the revolution8217s Islamic and secular followers As the religious and secular revolutionary groups were quarreling over the discourse of the revolution and the nature of the state the fulool supported by SCAF and the deep security state were quietly regrouping behind the scenes Meanwhile the SCAFappointed government created many hardships that disrupted the daily life of common Egyptians while the staterun media still controlled by Mubarak loyalists as well as other private media outlets run by corrupt businesspeople blamed the newly elected Parliament for the country8217s deterioration in security and the nearcollapse of the economy When the FJP demanded to form a coalition government to deal with the struggling economy SCAF not only scoffed at the request but also humiliated and threatened the group in public Soon after its preferred candidate Mubarak8217s last Prime Minster Shafiq was propped up throughout the country and promoted as the next president by the fulool and the former NDP machinery as well as by the operatives of the intelligence services Initially no one took his candidacy seriously believing that Shafiq could not be elected by the same people who overwhelmingly overthrew his boss just a year earlier At first the fulool hoped that if they only elevated their candidate to reach the second round they would then have a strong chance to win the election oneonone In their view their best chance was to face the MB8217s divisive candidate Dr Muhammad Mursi in the runoff since it would be easier to attack him as the candidate ofamp160 8220the religious state8221 rather than a candidate representing the revolutionary groups They knew that if they face any of the other viable revolutionary candidates such as Dr Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh or Hamdein Sabahi their candidate would be easily routed So in the final two weeks of the first round in May every effort was made to promote Sabahi at the expense of Abol Fotouh who was ahead in most credible polls so as to force the split of the prorevolution votes and defeat both candidates who were preferred by the revolutionary groups Combined Abol Futouh and Sabahi gained 39 percent of the total vote in the first round while Mursi and Shafiq garnered 25 and 24 percent respectively In effect the state8217s scheme to sell Shafiq as Egypt8217s savior was quietly in motion since at least last February Hundreds of millions of pounds were spent on his campaign although officially the total allowed budget for each campaign was 10 million or 17M His signposts alone cost 22 million pounds while dozens of ads ran on TV with each costing 200 thousand pounds or more Furthermore credible reports have surfaced that demonstrated the payments of millions of pounds to local officials in the delta region to secure the votes of the peasants In one poor village all of its more than 5000 votes were cast for Shafiq In one scene circulating on the Internet and clandestinely videotaped by a cell phone a former NDP official was boasting how the banned party machinery turned out the votes for Shafiq in upper Egypt by reviving their old methods of 8220convincing8221 the people to vote for their preferred candidate read intimidation and bribery Meanwhile the campaign to attack Shafiq8217s opponents was in full swing Independent and nationalist Abdel Halim Kandil who is a newspaper editor and columnist has recently exposed the extent of the scheme Kandil also wellknown for being not only antiMubarak but also very critical of the MB revealed that he was told by a senior intelligence officer that soon the MB would not only be defeated and ousted from power but that the group would also be on the run He further stated that a division within the intelligence service called the 8220Rumor Spreading8221 section was in charge of the latest vicious attacks against the MB and its candidate Mursi For over a month relentless attacks against the Islamic group have been in full force in the media spearheaded by public figures and propagated by 8220anonymous sources8221 Lately Shafiq and the state8217s propaganda machine have even accused the MB of orchestrating the battle of the Camel where dozens of the revolutionary youth were killed on Feb 2 in Tahrir Square Not only have all the former senior and junior security officials been acquitted in court as demonstrated on June 2 by the Mubarak verdicts but astonishingly the victims have now been turned into villains Although all revolutionary groups including those who despise the MB have declared that it was in fact the youth of the MB that saved the revolution that day by standing their ground and fending off the vicious attacks by the goons of the former regime the accusations by Shafiq and the fulool have intensified in recent days and the fabricated lies spread Similarly the MB realized before the first round of elections that their candidate would have a tough time beating the other revolutionary candidates had any of them gotten to the second round In fact several reports from the field have recently surfaced that showed the MB field workers tacitly hoping on elections day to face either Shafiq or Amr Mousa Mubarak8217s former foreign minister When Shafiq came in second the MB was initially confident that it could defeat him But when the margin between the two candidates was declared few days later to be less than one percent the MB was stunned Unfortunately the mistrust among the religious and secular prorevolution groups is so deep that all attempts to unite behind Mursi have so far not succeeded The antagonism of many secular groups toward political Islam seems to be deeper than their desire to see the revolution and its ideals realized Equally the partisanship and selfinterest of the main Islamic group appears to be stronger than its commitment to the objectives of the revolution Some of the demands by the secularists such as the voluntary dissolution of the MB were so ridiculous as to deem them frivolous Similarly the MB was slow and reluctant in giving assurances to the secular and other revolutionary groups casting major doubts on its sincerity Hence the revolutionary forces were once again split Some such as the Islamic and moderate parties of AlNoor and AlWasat endorsed Mursi Abol Fotouh and the April 6 movement also gave their support to Mursi arguing that the main objective is now to defeat the fulool candidate the far worse of two bad options as Abol Fotouh put it But other revolutionary groups led by Sabahi and several liberal and leftist parties called for elections8217 boycott or the invalidation of the votes since in their view both options are equally bad They claim that Shafiq would attempt to resurrect the old regime while they unconvincingly argue that Mursi would create a religiousbased state Unfortunately the net result of this division is to permit the apparatus of the deep state to engineer a Shafiq victory According to a wellinformed Egyptian political analyst when SCAF allowed for free and fair parliamentary elections last winter its plan was to allow the groups associated with political Islam to get elected since their popularity was indisputable But more importantly SCAF never intended to transfer any meaningful executive or governmental power to the FJP or their allies so as to demonstrate to the electorate their impotence once in Parliament In due course as the revolutionary spirit starts to wane and the support to the Islamic groups weakens the plan was to invalidate last winter8217s parliamentary elections and call for new ones in order to restore some of the power back to the fulool and other secular forces thus substantially reducing the support and power of the Islamic groups So shortly after the elections several lawsuits by the fulool and secular groups were filed challenging the constitutionality of the elections8217 law based on the fact that the parties were allowed to contest with independents the onethird parliamentary seats reserved for individuals Although there was a nearconsensus on this law by all the political parties at the time it has been used by the adversaries of the winners of the elections as a backup plan that could be utilized to dissolve parliament at the appropriate time According to Parliament8217s speaker and senior FJP official Dr Saad Katatni SCAF deputy commander Gen Sami Anan and Prime Minister Kamal Ganzouri told him last March that if the MB persists on its demand of forming the government the dissolution of parliament was a distinct possibility that could be set in motion at any moment Realizing this grave threat instead of uniting the revolutionary groups to stand up to SCAF the MB responded by fielding its own candidate in order to seriously challenge SCAF8217s threat albeit for the first time since the triumph of the revolution Furthermore the parliament dominated by the FJP and its allies immediately passed a law to ban from any political activity any candidate affiliated with the old regime After massive popular demonstrations that compelled SCAF to sign the law the Elections Committee refused to apply it and disqualify Shafiq Instead it referred the law to the High Constitutional Court HCC in order to decide on its constitutionality Furthermore although the lawsuit against the parliamentary elections has been pending for months the HCC chose to schedule a hearing and rule on both motions this Thursday two days before the runoff elections On the first issue a report submitted this week to the HCC by legal experts was issued that concluded that the Elections Committee had no jurisdiction to refer the law to the HCC since it is an administrative body and not a judicial one If adopted the ruling would result in forcing the Elections Committee to disqualify Shafiq from running in the second round next week Such decision would then compel the runoff elections to be cancelled and the first round elections to be held again On the other hand the experts committee also said in its report that if the HCC accepts jurisdiction then its recommendation was to deem the political banning law unconstitutional and thus to hold the runoff elections next week between Mursi and Shafiq the top two contenders of the first round On the second motion the committee recommended that the parliamentary elections law be deemed unconstitutional and thus the HCC must decide to either dissolve the Parliament or hold new elections for a third of its members In either case the Parliament would no longer be functional In short there are four possible scenarios with regard to the outcome of the HCC rulings this week Each one would most likely benefit a distinct and different political faction They are Scenario 1 The HCC rules that it has jurisdiction over the banning law and deems it unconstitutional In addition it rules that the parliamentary elections law was constitutional In this instance which is the status quo the MB and their presidential candidate would be the beneficiaries since such outcome would favor them as they keep their majority in the Parliament Furthermore absent massive elections8217 fraud by the security agencies the MB believes its candidate will win the presidential elections against Shafiq with the group8217s adept organizational machine and massive mobilization efforts across the country Scenario 2amp160 The HCC asserts jurisdiction and upholds Shafiq8217s candidacy by ruling the banning law as unconstitutional It also decides to dissolve Parliament or invalidate the elections of onethird of its members This ruling would clearly be favored by SCAF and the fulool since the power of the MB and the other Islamic parties would immediately be curtailed which in their view would be very difficult to regain in new parliamentary elections this time it may or may not be free and fair The fulool also believe that with such a ruling they would have the momentum to get Shafiq elected by this Sunday8217s presidential runoff and thus completely defeat and obliterate the revolution and roll back its most significant gains Scenario 3 The HCC bans Shafiq and dissolves parliament This scenario is favored by the secular revolutionary groups Having clipped the wings of the Islamic parties by dissolving the Parliament the secular groups hope to have another opportunity to challenge them at the polls They also think that by repeating the first round elections their candidate whether Sabahi or even Mousa would defeat the MB candidate in the runoff as he would be supported not only by the secular revolutionary groups but also by Shafiq8217s and Mousa8217s supporters Scenario 4 The HCC bans Shafiq but keeps the Parliament This scenario is favored by the moderate and liberal Islamic and prorevolutionary groups the majority of which supported Abol Fotouh for president in the first round In this scenario the only political institution established by the revolution namely the Parliament would remain viable and strong The supporters of this outcome also hope to unite the revolutionary forces behind Abol Fotouh or even form a single ticket that would include Abol Fotouh and Sabahi in order to defeat the MB candidate in a potential runoff election It is evident that SCAF has for over a year outfoxed all revolutionary groups Islamic or secular Depending on what scenario prevails on Thursday it is equally clear that SCAF will have to either force their candidate on the Egyptians using all the tools of the 8220democratic process8221 or take the country back to square one through a clever judicial ruse No matter what the military decides the youth this time are determined not to put their trust in either the military or the political class but on their capacity to stay the revolutionary course until all their objectives are achieved Hundreds of their pioneers led by dozens of women including Asmaa Mahfouz and Nawwara Nagm among the first to call for the January 25 demonstration that sparked the revolution have been on hunger strike and continuous sitin for over a week in the middle of Tahrir Square But now they are determined not to leave until their revolution is revived the fulool are defeated and the military return to their barracks Esam AlAmin can be contacted at alamin1919gmailcom | On/ADP Thursday/PROPN June/PROPN 14/NUM the/DET High/PROPN Constitutional/PROPN Court/PROPN in/ADP Egypt/PROPN will/AUX rule/VERB on/ADP two/NUM pending/VERB motions/NOUN that/PRON may/AUX radically/ADV change/VERB the/DET future/ADJ 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<p>"Fat Tone" at California's Calipatria prison, December 1993.Courtesy The Atavist</p>
<p>The following is an adapted excerpt from <a href="https://www.atavist.com/stories/stray-bullet/" type="external">Stray Bullet</a>, Gary Rivlin’s new Atavist single.</p>
<p>Five months after his wedding ceremony—conducted through the Plexiglas partition of a prison visiting room—Tony Davis was finally ready to face his parole board. He would be judged by two officials from a stable of roving commissioners. There would be a deputy prosecutor representing the people of Alameda County, and, in Tony’s corner, a state-provided defense lawyer. But the most crucial advocate would be Tony himself, head shaved, dressed in prison blues, and wearing his government-issue steel-framed glasses.</p>
<p>Gone was the lingering dread that had plagued him since his first parole hearing, the one he’d botched so badly 10 years before. Three years had passed since his last serious write-up. He was a married man now and right with God—a reformed sinner.</p>
<p>The argument for keeping Tony locked up could be made in one sentence: He killed a boy. He would claim that he had meant only to scare the kids when he fired a .45 five times from the back of a moving car. But it was the misfortune of 13-year-old Kevin Reed that one of the bullets had ricocheted off the pavement and perforated his groin—he bled to death by the time the ambulance arrived. Tony’s impulsive act sent two other children, both 14, to the hospital with gunshot wounds. Listen to this snippet from his confession:</p>
<p />
<p />
<p />
<p>That was Tony at 19, nine months after the shooting. The Tony Davis who would face the parole board in 2012 was nothing like the messed up teen whose mother was on heroin before she turned to crack, whose father he’d met only a few times. Nothing like the oversized, sad-faced kid raised by a grandmother who was already exhausted from raising eight of her own, as well as a pair of Tony’s younger siblings. Nothing like the kid whose teachers stuck him in remedial classes at age 10, and who, at age 13, was set up in the crack trade by an adult neighbor and a pair of slightly older uncles. Nothing like the boy who called himself “Fat Tone” and ran his own corner crew.</p>
<p>The episode that led to Tony’s incarceration began one summer day in 1990, when Kevin Reed’s brother Shannon and his friend London, both 14, mistook “Junebug,” a kid from Tony’s crew, for a boy who had threatened to beat them up earlier that week. They jumped him, and stole his bike for good measure.</p>
<p>The next night, Junebug and his friend Aaron went looking for payback. After spotting London and a kid they thought was Shannon—it was Kevin—they fetched Fat Tone, who had been drinking and smoking pot all day. Tony grabbed his gun and slipped into the backseat of Aaron’s car. “I ain’t fit to kill nobody,” he remembers telling the others after the shooting. And maybe he wasn’t. But now he had.</p>
<p>Nine months later, the police finally tracked the boys down. Tony ended up confessing. Allowed his one phone call, he called his grandmother’s house. Listen:</p>
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<p>I first met tony davis in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for an Oakland-based alternative weekly. The city was a hot spot in the nation’s crack epidemic, and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring. I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens, which is how I met Tony, who was two years into an 18-to-life sentence for Kevin Reed’s murder. That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.</p>
<p>We kept in touch, and somewhere along the way, Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend. Over the years, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls. Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall. “He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,” Tony tells them.</p>
<p>To describe Tony as remorseful doesn’t begin to capture it. For&#160;years, I couldn’t talk to him without him somehow bringing&#160;up the night of the murder.&#160;At one point he referred to it as an “incident,” and then quickly corrected himself. “The night I killed that young man,” he said, more carefully. “I killed a boy. I know that. Kevin Reed. I’m not going to try and hide it by calling it an ‘incident,’ because it was a murder and someone—Kevin—lost his life.”</p>
<p>I was raised on Long Island in a stable middle-class family, and yet it was easy for me to put myself in Tony’s shoes. My older brother took bets on pro football games in high school, and so I got into the business as well. What if the cooler, older kids in my neighborhood had been selling crack instead? “Prison is not easy,” Tony told me a few years back. “It’s not like we sitting in here looking at cable, getting fed the best food in the world. It’s misery. It’s a horrible experience. And anyone who says you sit around on your rear end and have it light is lying.”</p>
<p>Our friendship advanced one conversation at a time. Tony would call, and I would drop whatever I was doing and accept the charges.</p>
<p>One of his calls, about a year after the publication of Drive-By, came at a particularly crazy time. My wife’s mother had recently passed away, and I was behind on everything. But rather than rush him off the phone, I found myself talking about my late mother-in-law, who had strangely been drawn to Tony’s plight.</p>
<p>She was the type of person, I told Tony, who up until a few years earlier would have advocated 2,000 volts for the likes of him. But that changed the day she overheard me transcribing one of our conversations. She began asking after Tony, and at one point even offered to contribute to a Christmas care package for him.</p>
<p>The subject of my mother-in-law’s passing got Tony talking about his own mother. The last I had heard, she was back in jail, but now she was out and enrolled in a drug-treatment program. My inner cynic told me she probably just got arrested again and took treatment to avoid jail time—she had done this before. But Tony couldn’t have been happier. “My mother and I have always been close, even though she was never there for me,” he said. “I mean, she did a lot of messed up things. But out of all the people in my family, she was the only one that really understood me.”</p>
<p>Tony liked to gripe, but he also was a good listener. I was never reluctant to share bad news with him. I figured even a bad day on the outside was better than a good day in prison, and I was glad to remind him that even greener pastures have ruts.</p>
<p>In one call, not long after the September 11 attacks, I’d been expecting a forlorn phone companion. He must have written me one of his down letters, because I started off, “You feelin’ better than you were when you wrote that note?”</p>
<p>“You know how it goes,” he said.</p>
<p>“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean you know we all have our up days and our down days. You’re actually calling me in a…”</p>
<p>“Exactly.”</p>
<p>“I’ve had a down few weeks,” I admitted. At the time, I was living off freelance magazine work. Things had been going great—until the attacks.</p>
<p>“Everything has dried up after September 11,” I told Tony. “Like I don’t write about the stuff that people want to hear about right now.”&#160;</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“So suddenly I’m having a hard time getting work.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, I understand.”</p>
<p>Later in that conversation, Tony talked about how the attacks were received by his fellow prisoners. Around half the inmates were like him, he said: angry that America had been attacked. But the other half were happy the twin towers had fallen.</p>
<p>“Happy?”</p>
<p>“I’m just trying to be honest with you.”</p>
<p>By this point in my career, I had switched over to writing mainly about technology, and was on the move a lot thanks to changing life circumstances and the boom-and-bust economy. Even so, I managed to stay connected with Tony, whose world remained no wider than the five cellblocks that prison designers had arranged in a ring to create a secure gated community.</p>
<p>He could call at the most inconvenient times—often I would be on the phone with an editor or in the middle of interviewing some tech executive. But I took his calls even when it meant having to explain myself after the fact. It always made for an interesting conversation once I got those people back on the line. Invariably, the men would bring up prison rape. (Tony thinks popular culture greatly exaggerates the extent of rape in prison, and that most prison sex is consensual.) Then I would need to steer the conversation back to the topic at hand—the future of social networking, say, or the state of venture investing.</p>
<p>There was something gratifying in watching him “mature up,” as Tony called it.&#160;“I’m trying to learn that I don’t have to always be using my hands, because I can use my mind,” he said early on. “It used to be like I used my hands if I wanted to get someone’s attention, but now I’m trying to use my mind and my mouth.” Sure, I was watching friends trying to impart the same lesson to their toddlers, but so what? If anything, it was more impressive to watch Tony come to this realization on his own. &#160;</p>
<p>“When I was on the streets, I was mentally dead,” he told me during a reflective moment. “I didn’t know anything about nothing. When I came to prison, I started reading and looking and learning and seeing, and started&#160;understanding what the world was about. It took me a long time to really embrace that.&#160;Because I still wanted to just be angry, negative, and blame everybody.”</p>
<p>In January 2008, the two of us got to talking about the presidential race. Obama had just won the Iowa caucus, and I was wondering if the results had changed his mind. Tony had previously declared himself a Hillary man because, he said, he admired her steely toughness. He was wavering now, but still not ready to jump sides.</p>
<p>“Really?” I asked him. “You wouldn’t vote for Obama?”&#160;</p>
<p>“I haven’t really decided yet.”&#160;</p>
<p>I was incredulous. “You’re a young black man. Here’s an impressive black man who can become president.”</p>
<p>“I would vote for Barack,” he said, “but the thing that really’s got me hesitating is his lack of experience.”</p>
<p>The more he talked, the more clear it was to me that he was paying as much attention to the election as I was—even though, as a convicted felon serving time in California, he was <a href="" type="internal">barred from voting</a>. He’d read both of Obama’s books and faithfully perused hand-me-down USA Todays borrowed from an inmate with a subscription.</p>
<p>And that’s when I interrupted the flow of our conversation and—this is the problem with taping yourself—said something stupid. I asked him whether he watched the presidential debates in a prison common area or alone—in his “room.”</p>
<p>I tried to laugh off my faux pas, but Tony wasn’t about to let me slide. “Hell, no,” he said. “I will never get comfortable to the point I call my cell my room.” Later during that same conversation, he noted that he’d been in prison just about as long as he’d lived on the outside: “I’ll be 37 in August. I can’t dwell on what happened, how I got here, or how long I’ve been here. I can’t be mad, because being mad ain’t going to help.”</p>
<p />
<p>In early 2010, Tony started talking about his next parole hearing, scheduled for 2012. If only he could persuade the parole board that he was a new man, he’d be free, assuming the governor didn’t reverse the decision.</p>
<p>Even the men and women who had watched Tony pass through the system on his way to prison had detected something different about him. The 250-pound boy with the flat top just seemed out of place. A county probation officer put this in her report: “We want to add that this case seems particularly tragic and that this defendant appears, by hindsight, to truly understand his mistakes and poor judgment.” It was doubtful, she wrote, that it would take even 10 years to rehabilitate Tony.</p>
<p>Al Hymer, Tony’s public defender, had handled hundreds of murders. Tony stood out because he only wanted to talk about the terrible thing he had done, not what Hymer could do to lessen his punishment. When Hymer wanted to challenge the admissibility of Tony’s confession, Tony told him not to bother. He was so remorseful that he took a deal that had him pleading guilty to second-degree murder, even though it meant an indefinite life sentence.</p>
<p>With time, Tony would regret that decision, given the slim odds that he would win parole. All around him, lifers had given up all hope of gaining their release and it was no wonder. Of the roughly 6,000 lifers appearing before the parole board each year, only about 6 percent are approved. But fewer than 1 percent are actually released, because the governor, since 1988, has had the power to overturn the board’s decisions. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed about 75 percent of the paroles granted during his two terms. Gray Davis, his predecessor, reversed 99 percent. &#160;</p>
<p>What’s more, Tony had found it all but impossible to pursue the self-improvements the parole board wanted to see. Between lockdowns and teacher turnover, his GED classes were canceled for 8 of his first 12 months at one prison; at another, classes were often suspended due to warring gangs and teachers who would resign and not be replaced for months. “My soul is dead,” he wrote after one long stretch of lockdowns. “I been curse since birth…I’m in hell Gary I relly am.”</p>
<p>He would declare 2005—the year he turned 34—the worst of his life, and 2006 wasn’t looking much better. “To relly be honest,” Tony wrote me that April, “I wish at times they would have kill me instead of letting me go through this misery.”</p>
<p>But fate intervened. With good behavior, Tony was deemed eligible for a transfer to Solano, a medium-security prison near San Francisco. It was still prison. His new cell was no larger than the maximum-security ones, and the guards were still plenty mean. “It’s like a lot of them come to work every day basically so they can act like bullies,” he says. “They have this one lady who works in our building. She’s the most miserable—I have never in my life hated someone like I hate her. Hate is a messed up word to use. But this lady, it’s like she goes out of her way to mess with people.”&#160;</p>
<p>Even so, Solano meant far less violence and a lot more freedom of movement. Tony enrolled in an intensive psychotherapy regimen and a 12-step program. He grew more serious about religion and finally, at age 36, earned his GED—”Davis has worked exceptionally hard to improve himself,” one of his instructors wrote. Several years later, he’s only a few credits shy of an associate degree. It was at Solano that a fellow inmate introduced him to a woman named Candace, a devout Christian who had three daughters and ran a day care center out of her home. “I sensed right away that he had a good heart,” she later told me.</p>
<p>Tony would need all the support he could get in 2010, when a guard caught him talking on a cellphone—a serious violation. When Tony told me about it, my heart sank: I was, in a small way, complicit. I knew about the phone. It made our conversations easier. And I have to admit that I had turned off the critical part of my brain that would have asked the obvious: How was Tony able to afford it?</p>
<p>The answer was more bad news. Tony, it emerged, had been busted not only for the phone, but also for drug possession. He wasn’t using or selling, he insisted, but merely stashing extra product for a dealer he knew. His punishment was 12 months in the hole and a three-year ban on contact visits. More critically, he would have to explain the whole thing to a parole board. &#160;</p>
<p>When Tony first started talking about his 2012 parole hearing, he would alternate between anticipation and dread. After nearly 20 years in prison, even the crime for which he was incarcerated seemed like an anachronism: Crack has fallen out of fashion, drive-by shootings are far less common, and the national youth homicide rate is half what it was. Tony committed his crime as a teenager. Now he was 40. Wasn’t it time to give him a second chance?</p>
<p>Brian Thiem, the homicide cop who had arrested Tony, thought so. When I tracked him down last year, he pointed out that Tony’s crime was “an unfortunate accident based on the impulses and action of kids.” He then added, “Twenty years for what he did? God, I say let him out.”&#160;</p>
<p>For once, politics seemed to be working in Tony’s favor. In the spring of 2011, the Supreme Court deemed California’s prisons unconstitutionally overcrowded and ordered the state to release more than 30,000 inmates—about one-fifth—by 2014. To me, Tony seemed like the perfect candidate, especially with the state slashing billions of dollars to tame its deficit, yet spending $47,000 per inmate each year. For the first time since his incarceration, I felt excited about his prospects.</p>
<p>“The thing that really hit me is that there’s a lot of guys in here that’s worse off than I am,” Tony told me a few years back. These men came from abysmal beginnings, he said, but now they were among the gentlest, most morally sound individuals he knew. And that gave him hope.</p>
<p>“You&#160;just have to have faith and stay strong,” he went on, “and not let the situation&#160;get you so bitter to where you give up.”</p>
<p>Read more: Will the parole board give Tony a break? To find out, download Gary Rivlin’s Stray Bullet from <a href="https://www.atavist.com/stories/stray-bullet/" type="external">The Atavist.</a></p> | How a Convicted Killer Became My Friend | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/atavist-stray-bullet-gary-rivlin-drive-by-tony-davis/ | 2013-06-04 | 4left
| 3,060 | Fat Tone at Californias Calipatria prison December 1993Courtesy The Atavist The following is an adapted excerpt from Stray Bullet Gary Rivlin8217s new Atavist single Five months after his wedding ceremony8212conducted through the Plexiglas partition of a prison visiting room8212Tony Davis was finally ready to face his parole board He would be judged by two officials from a stable of roving commissioners There would be a deputy prosecutor representing the people of Alameda County and in Tony8217s corner a stateprovided defense lawyer But the most crucial advocate would be Tony himself head shaved dressed in prison blues and wearing his governmentissue steelframed glasses Gone was the lingering dread that had plagued him since his first parole hearing the one he8217d botched so badly 10 years before Three years had passed since his last serious writeup He was a married man now and right with God8212a reformed sinner The argument for keeping Tony locked up could be made in one sentence He killed a boy He would claim that he had meant only to scare the kids when he fired a 45 five times from the back of a moving car But it was the misfortune of 13yearold Kevin Reed that one of the bullets had ricocheted off the pavement and perforated his groin8212he bled to death by the time the ambulance arrived Tony8217s impulsive act sent two other children both 14 to the hospital with gunshot wounds Listen to this snippet from his confession That was Tony at 19 nine months after the shooting The Tony Davis who would face the parole board in 2012 was nothing like the messed up teen whose mother was on heroin before she turned to crack whose father he8217d met only a few times Nothing like the oversized sadfaced kid raised by a grandmother who was already exhausted from raising eight of her own as well as a pair of Tony8217s younger siblings Nothing like the kid whose teachers stuck him in remedial classes at age 10 and who at age 13 was set up in the crack trade by an adult neighbor and a pair of slightly older uncles Nothing like the boy who called himself 8220Fat Tone8221 and ran his own corner crew The episode that led to Tony8217s incarceration began one summer day in 1990 when Kevin Reed8217s brother Shannon and his friend London both 14 mistook 8220Junebug8221 a kid from Tony8217s crew for a boy who had threatened to beat them up earlier that week They jumped him and stole his bike for good measure The next night Junebug and his friend Aaron went looking for payback After spotting London and a kid they thought was Shannon8212it was Kevin8212they fetched Fat Tone who had been drinking and smoking pot all day Tony grabbed his gun and slipped into the backseat of Aaron8217s car 8220I ain8217t fit to kill nobody8221 he remembers telling the others after the shooting And maybe he wasn8217t But now he had Nine months later the police finally tracked the boys down Tony ended up confessing Allowed his one phone call he called his grandmother8217s house Listen I first met tony davis in the early 1990s when I was a young reporter for an Oaklandbased alternative weekly The city was a hot spot in the nation8217s crack epidemic and turf warfare had sent its homicide rate soaring I wanted to put a human face on the issue of teens killing teens which is how I met Tony who was two years into an 18tolife sentence for Kevin Reed8217s murder That shooting would become the focus of my 1995 book DriveBy We kept in touch and somewhere along the way Tony ceased to be my subject and became my friend Over the years we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters and shared countless phone calls Inmates sometimes ask him about the white man whose picture is on his cell wall 8220He8217s like the only real best friend that I8217ve had in years8221 Tony tells them To describe Tony as remorseful doesn8217t begin to capture it Foramp160years I couldn8217t talk to him without him somehow bringingamp160up the night of the murderamp160At one point he referred to it as an 8220incident8221 and then quickly corrected himself 8220The night I killed that young man8221 he said more carefully 8220I killed a boy I know that Kevin Reed I8217m not going to try and hide it by calling it an 8216incident8217 because it was a murder and someone8212Kevin8212lost his life8221 I was raised on Long Island in a stable middleclass family and yet it was easy for me to put myself in Tony8217s shoes My older brother took bets on pro football games in high school and so I got into the business as well What if the cooler older kids in my neighborhood had been selling crack instead 8220Prison is not easy8221 Tony told me a few years back 8220It8217s not like we sitting in here looking at cable getting fed the best food in the world It8217s misery It8217s a horrible experience And anyone who says you sit around on your rear end and have it light is lying8221 Our friendship advanced one conversation at a time Tony would call and I would drop whatever I was doing and accept the charges One of his calls about a year after the publication of DriveBy came at a particularly crazy time My wife8217s mother had recently passed away and I was behind on everything But rather than rush him off the phone I found myself talking about my late motherinlaw who had strangely been drawn to Tony8217s plight She was the type of person I told Tony who up until a few years earlier would have advocated 2000 volts for the likes of him But that changed the day she overheard me transcribing one of our conversations She began asking after Tony and at one point even offered to contribute to a Christmas care package for him The subject of my motherinlaw8217s passing got Tony talking about his own mother The last I had heard she was back in jail but now she was out and enrolled in a drugtreatment program My inner cynic told me she probably just got arrested again and took treatment to avoid jail time8212she had done this before But Tony couldn8217t have been happier 8220My mother and I have always been close even though she was never there for me8221 he said 8220I mean she did a lot of messed up things But out of all the people in my family she was the only one that really understood me8221 Tony liked to gripe but he also was a good listener I was never reluctant to share bad news with him I figured even a bad day on the outside was better than a good day in prison and I was glad to remind him that even greener pastures have ruts In one call not long after the September 11 attacks I8217d been expecting a forlorn phone companion He must have written me one of his down letters because I started off 8220You feelin8217 better than you were when you wrote that note8221 8220You know how it goes8221 he said 8220Yeah yeah yeah I mean you know we all have our up days and our down days You8217re actually calling me in a82308221 8220Exactly8221 8220I8217ve had a down few weeks8221 I admitted At the time I was living off freelance magazine work Things had been going great8212until the attacks 8220Everything has dried up after September 118221 I told Tony 8220Like I don8217t write about the stuff that people want to hear about right now8221amp160 8220Yeah8221 8220So suddenly I8217m having a hard time getting work8221 8220Yeah I understand8221 Later in that conversation Tony talked about how the attacks were received by his fellow prisoners Around half the inmates were like him he said angry that America had been attacked But the other half were happy the twin towers had fallen 8220Happy8221 8220I8217m just trying to be honest with you8221 By this point in my career I had switched over to writing mainly about technology and was on the move a lot thanks to changing life circumstances and the boomandbust economy Even so I managed to stay connected with Tony whose world remained no wider than the five cellblocks that prison designers had arranged in a ring to create a secure gated community He could call at the most inconvenient times8212often I would be on the phone with an editor or in the middle of interviewing some tech executive But I took his calls even when it meant having to explain myself after the fact It always made for an interesting conversation once I got those people back on the line Invariably the men would bring up prison rape Tony thinks popular culture greatly exaggerates the extent of rape in prison and that most prison sex is consensual Then I would need to steer the conversation back to the topic at hand8212the future of social networking say or the state of venture investing There was something gratifying in watching him 8220mature up8221 as Tony called itamp1608220I8217m trying to learn that I don8217t have to always be using my hands because I can use my mind8221 he said early on 8220It used to be like I used my hands if I wanted to get someone8217s attention but now I8217m trying to use my mind and my mouth8221 Sure I was watching friends trying to impart the same lesson to their toddlers but so what If anything it was more impressive to watch Tony come to this realization on his own amp160 8220When I was on the streets I was mentally dead8221 he told me during a reflective moment 8220I didn8217t know anything about nothing When I came to prison I started reading and looking and learning and seeing and startedamp160understanding what the world was about It took me a long time to really embrace thatamp160Because I still wanted to just be angry negative and blame everybody8221 In January 2008 the two of us got to talking about the presidential race Obama had just won the Iowa caucus and I was wondering if the results had changed his mind Tony had previously declared himself a Hillary man because he said he admired her steely toughness He was wavering now but still not ready to jump sides 8220Really8221 I asked him 8220You wouldn8217t vote for Obama8221amp160 8220I haven8217t really decided yet8221amp160 I was incredulous 8220You8217re a young black man Here8217s an impressive black man who can become president8221 8220I would vote for Barack8221 he said 8220but the thing that really8217s got me hesitating is his lack of experience8221 The more he talked the more clear it was to me that he was paying as much attention to the election as I was8212even though as a convicted felon serving time in California he was barred from voting He8217d read both of Obama8217s books and faithfully perused handmedown USA Todays borrowed from an inmate with a subscription And that8217s when I interrupted the flow of our conversation and8212this is the problem with taping yourself8212said something stupid I asked him whether he watched the presidential debates in a prison common area or alone8212in his 8220room8221 I tried to laugh off my faux pas but Tony wasn8217t about to let me slide 8220Hell no8221 he said 8220I will never get comfortable to the point I call my cell my room8221 Later during that same conversation he noted that he8217d been in prison just about as long as he8217d lived on the outside 8220I8217ll be 37 in August I can8217t dwell on what happened how I got here or how long I8217ve been here I can8217t be mad because being mad ain8217t going to help8221 In early 2010 Tony started talking about his next parole hearing scheduled for 2012 If only he could persuade the parole board that he was a new man he8217d be free assuming the governor didn8217t reverse the decision Even the men and women who had watched Tony pass through the system on his way to prison had detected something different about him The 250pound boy with the flat top just seemed out of place A county probation officer put this in her report 8220We want to add that this case seems particularly tragic and that this defendant appears by hindsight to truly understand his mistakes and poor judgment8221 It was doubtful she wrote that it would take even 10 years to rehabilitate Tony Al Hymer Tony8217s public defender had handled hundreds of murders Tony stood out because he only wanted to talk about the terrible thing he had done not what Hymer could do to lessen his punishment When Hymer wanted to challenge the admissibility of Tony8217s confession Tony told him not to bother He was so remorseful that he took a deal that had him pleading guilty to seconddegree murder even though it meant an indefinite life sentence With time Tony would regret that decision given the slim odds that he would win parole All around him lifers had given up all hope of gaining their release and it was no wonder Of the roughly 6000 lifers appearing before the parole board each year only about 6 percent are approved But fewer than 1 percent are actually released because the governor since 1988 has had the power to overturn the board8217s decisions Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed about 75 percent of the paroles granted during his two terms Gray Davis his predecessor reversed 99 percent amp160 What8217s more Tony had found it all but impossible to pursue the selfimprovements the parole board wanted to see Between lockdowns and teacher turnover his GED classes were canceled for 8 of his first 12 months at one prison at another classes were often suspended due to warring gangs and teachers who would resign and not be replaced for months 8220My soul is dead8221 he wrote after one long stretch of lockdowns 8220I been curse since birth8230I8217m in hell Gary I relly am8221 He would declare 20058212the year he turned 348212the worst of his life and 2006 wasn8217t looking much better 8220To relly be honest8221 Tony wrote me that April 8220I wish at times they would have kill me instead of letting me go through this misery8221 But fate intervened With good behavior Tony was deemed eligible for a transfer to Solano a mediumsecurity prison near San Francisco It was still prison His new cell was no larger than the maximumsecurity ones and the guards were still plenty mean 8220It8217s like a lot of them come to work every day basically so they can act like bullies8221 he says 8220They have this one lady who works in our building She8217s the most miserable8212I have never in my life hated someone like I hate her Hate is a messed up word to use But this lady it8217s like she goes out of her way to mess with people8221amp160 Even so Solano meant far less violence and a lot more freedom of movement Tony enrolled in an intensive psychotherapy regimen and a 12step program He grew more serious about religion and finally at age 36 earned his GED82128221Davis has worked exceptionally hard to improve himself8221 one of his instructors wrote Several years later he8217s only a few credits shy of an associate degree It was at Solano that a fellow inmate introduced him to a woman named Candace a devout Christian who had three daughters and ran a day care center out of her home 8220I sensed right away that he had a good heart8221 she later told me Tony would need all the support he could get in 2010 when a guard caught him talking on a cellphone8212a serious violation When Tony told me about it my heart sank I was in a small way complicit I knew about the phone It made our conversations easier And I have to admit that I had turned off the critical part of my brain that would have asked the obvious How was Tony able to afford it The answer was more bad news Tony it emerged had been busted not only for the phone but also for drug possession He wasn8217t using or selling he insisted but merely stashing extra product for a dealer he knew His punishment was 12 months in the hole and a threeyear ban on contact visits More critically he would have to explain the whole thing to a parole board amp160 When Tony first started talking about his 2012 parole hearing he would alternate between anticipation and dread After nearly 20 years in prison even the crime for which he was incarcerated seemed like an anachronism Crack has fallen out of fashion driveby shootings are far less common and the national youth homicide rate is half what it was Tony committed his crime as a teenager Now he was 40 Wasn8217t it time to give him a second chance Brian Thiem the homicide cop who had arrested Tony thought so When I tracked him down last year he pointed out that Tony8217s crime was 8220an unfortunate accident based on the impulses and action of kids8221 He then added 8220Twenty years for what he did God I say let him out8221amp160 For once politics seemed to be working in Tony8217s favor In the spring of 2011 the Supreme Court deemed California8217s prisons unconstitutionally overcrowded and ordered the state to release more than 30000 inmates8212about onefifth8212by 2014 To me Tony seemed like the perfect candidate especially with the state slashing billions of dollars to tame its deficit yet spending 47000 per inmate each year For the first time since his incarceration I felt excited about his prospects 8220The thing that really hit me is that there8217s a lot of guys in here that8217s worse off than I am8221 Tony told me a few years back These men came from abysmal beginnings he said but now they were among the gentlest most morally sound individuals he knew And that gave him hope 8220Youamp160just have to have faith and stay strong8221 he went on 8220and not let the situationamp160get you so bitter to where you give up8221 Read more Will the parole board give Tony a break To find out download Gary Rivlin8217s Stray Bullet from The Atavist | Fat/PROPN Tone/PROPN at/ADP Californias/PROPN Calipatria/PROPN prison/NOUN December/PROPN 1993Courtesy/NUM The/DET Atavist/PROPN The/DET following/NOUN is/AUX an/DET adapted/ADJ excerpt/NOUN from/ADP Stray/PROPN Bullet/PROPN Gary/PROPN Rivlin8217s/PROPN new/ADJ Atavist/PROPN single/ADJ Five/NUM months/NOUN after/SCONJ his/PRON wedding/NOUN ceremony8212conducted/VERB through/ADP the/DET Plexiglas/PROPN partition/NOUN of/ADP a/DET prison/NOUN visiting/VERB room8212Tony/PUNCT Davis/PROPN was/AUX finally/ADV ready/ADJ to/PART face/VERB his/PRON parole/NOUN 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<p>First of all my sympathies to those in Chile who have lost their houses, their livelihoods, their family members, and their sense of stability. Last weekend’s earthquake was unquestionably damaging. At 8.8 on the Richter scale, it was also almost a hundred times more powerful than January’s quake in Haiti. Thankfully its epicenter was farther from large urban centers. Thankfully also Chile has slowly recovered from its violent coup d’état that ushered in a round of neoliberalism (In fact Chile was its first laboratory – U of Chicago economist Milton Friedman was the official economic advisor to dictator Augusto Pinochet just months after the coup). While Haiti fades from the headlines, the situation on the ground in Haiti remains urgent, as only a third of the survivors have their needs for a temporary dry shelter met.</p>
<p>While it is absolutely true that Chile, like the U.S., has its share of poverty and inequality, Haiti’s development indicators are and were much worse than Chile’s. For example, Haiti’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP, total value of goods and services) per person was $428 in 2005, while Chile’s per capita GDP was $8,350 in 2007. Half of Haiti’s people earn $1 per day or less, whereas only 2 percent of Chile’s citizens live under the “international poverty line” of $1.25 per day. The latest figures for child mortality are instructive: 74 children out of 1,000 die in Haiti whereas only 9 do in Chile. For all these reasons, Haiti ranked 149th out of 182 countries on the U.N.’s Human Development Index (HDI), whereas Chile ranked 44th.</p>
<p>The explanations for these differences are many, but they cluster around two major themes. The first theme, much more widely researched, repeated, published, spread, promoted, and believed by international agencies, mainstream media, and most members of certain academic disciplines is that Haiti’s failures of development are because of an unbroken legacy of dictators, Haiti’s “kleptocracy” (Fatton, 2002; Rotberg, 2003). There is an implicit binary frame of a “good” civil society and a “bad” state. Missing from this discussion is the role of foreign actors.</p>
<p>Another binary frame which talks past this first comes from Haiti solidarity advocates and other scholars who have closer relationships on the ground, that Haiti has been the victim of numerous occupations, a usurious debt that France claimed in exchange for its recognition of Haiti’s independence, etc. Close observers of the last coup in Haiti would note that it was France’s Chirac, not Bush, that first called for Aristide to resign. Many believe that this is because of Aristide’s demand that France pay some $22 billion in reparations for this extortion.</p>
<p>The problem with some variants of this analysis is that if we do not acknowledge the role of Haiti’s state we are powerless to respond to softball questions from the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and others. The recent news item that the government of Haiti has begun taxing aid coming into Haiti is a good case for the need for a more appropriate frame of analysis, that most people within Haiti have, that acknowledges three sets of actors: the world system in all its guises, the elites and Haiti’s state apparatus, and Haiti’s people organized in social movements and what might be called “civil society.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Haiti’s crisis continues though it has faded from mainstream media coverage. It has literally disappeared from the front page, even of progressive websites like CommonDreams. We may be entering a world of “aid fatigue.” Monday was the last day for donations to emergency relief efforts to count on individuals’ 2009 taxes. The funds raised – though small compared to the urgent and long-term reconstruction needs – are indeed generous. As of a month after the earthquake the estimate of aid donated is $600 million for Haiti relief efforts (compare this to the $20 billion in Wall Street bonuses).</p>
<p>And yet, there are still an estimated 600,000 people today who are not covered when the rainy seasons come. According to aid agencies’ own estimates, only 35% of the needs for tents and tarps in Port-au-Prince are being met – and this up from 30% a week and a half ago. While the rains haven’t come yet, they surely will. I join many others in asking why this is, especially given this outpouring of generosity.</p>
<p>One problem appears to be on its way to be resolved: the lack of coordination. The U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti has created a website that allows donors, NGOs, and grassroots organizations to coordinate their efforts. It does have a wiki function which means that the groups doing the work can post what they are doing, and smaller, grassroots efforts are invited to use this tool as well as the large NGOs. It behooves everyone who is offering aid to use this tool, a directory of Civil Society Organizations: <a href="http://csohaiti.org/" type="external">http://csohaiti.org/</a></p>
<p>This is only a single tool, and it can’t solve everything by itself. Still left to be addressed is the communication with the survivors receiving the aid. More than a month and a half after the earthquake there are still many people who do not know if the aid is trickling their way. Some people like my friend Lesley wonder whether this isn’t part of some big plan to wipe poor people out of Port-au-Prince altogether. Already the government is telling people to leave Champs-de-Mars, the “National Mall” which houses the National Palace and return to their neighborhoods (that presumably they left because aid was not arriving). And donors and grassroots efforts alike seem to be telling people to quit the city of Port-au-Prince. This is irresponsible for a couple of reasons. First, many Port-au-Prince residents, particularly the youth in the shantytowns, grew up in Port-au-Prince. Half of the country’s population is 15 or younger. Secondly, without quick and sustainable job creation, this migration simply displaces the problem of food security into the remote rural areas, already marginalized because of communications and physical infrastructure.</p>
<p>A second challenge we need to issue the NGOs that have been entrusted by our government and generous citizens is to also answer some basic questions about the aid they are delivering. Particularly in face of this aid fatigue, NGOs and other groups who are collecting money must do things differently than they have in the past. The first thing this particular NGO researcher and Haiti solidarity activist would like to see immediately stop is what we community organizers used to call “poverty pimping” or what could be called lately “disaster voyeurism.” The seemingly innocent “real world” depictions of the actually existing poverty have real material consequences. True, a naked child with a distended belly or the overwhelming image of a city in ruins might trigger generosity in the moment. But it does Haitian people, particularly the survivors, a disservice in the short, medium, and long term. First and foremost it continues in the unbroken tradition since the Haitian Revolution of reviling, “monkeying,” belittling, infantilizing, and further brutalizing Haitian people. Haiti’s bad press is powerful: of 1200 people I polled in guest lectures before I stopped this practice, only 1 had a positive first impression of Haiti. This belief that Haiti is unfit to govern itself and is not deserving of urgently needed aid may be contributing to a backlash, at the very least a drying up of private donations. I hope not. At the very least this discourse has also justified several foreign occupations.</p>
<p>Another reason this practice of framing Haiti within this poverty voyeurism narrative is that it hides critical, life-saving information about the plan on the ground, what exact aid will actually arrive in Haiti and what its impact will be. In my first public post after the earthquake, before I went to Haiti, I offered a list of questions for people to ask when considering donating to Haiti. Given the proliferation of fundraising efforts, this is becoming even more crucial. Before giving direct aid to Haiti or choosing a group to receive funds, we need to do our homework. It is our responsibility to really think through these questions:</p>
<p>1) Who, exactly, is on the ground delivering aid in Port-au-Prince? How do they select partners and leaders within these groups?</p>
<p>2) What is the group’s capacity to get aid to Haiti and directly to the impacted groups?</p>
<p>3) What relationships do they have with the community and community groups? Who sets the priorities? Do they have long-term partnerships or are they grasping at straws?</p>
<p>4) What percent of funds will actually get to Haiti? What percent is overhead?</p>
<p>5) What is the plan? Does it address the current needs (medical first, food, water and shelter)?</p>
<p>6) Is it offering direct response or is it an “umbrella” group funding local partners? How are local partners chosen?</p>
<p>Until these questions are all answered it is frankly irresponsible to collect funds. For those NGOs and mission groups collecting funds, it would be good to include this information on the website to make it easier for people who would like to contribute or organize fundraisers. Also in the interests of accountability it would be good to post the organization’s most recent 990 form required by U.S. law for all nonprofit groups in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. This form – already required by law to be furnished to all U.S. taxpayers who ask for it – lists the major sources of income and expenses for the organization.</p>
<p>I know this sounds harsh, especially to people who never think to question their generosity. At a recent conference in New Orleans (more on this for another post) senior scholar in another field critiqued a 12-minute presentation based on my previous post that an anthropologist who is “too close to the field” could not be “scientific” or at least “methodical.” My response to him and the audience is, like it or not, the data are clear: neoliberalism has failed Haiti. All development indicators have seen a steady decline from 1980 to 2007, as of the last data I methodically examined, except for two. These two indicators – the incidence of HIV/AIDS and literacy – are exceptions precisely because they were mutual priorities of the elected governments of Haiti and donor groups. Since the 1995 Dole Amendment, USAID was prevented from funding the government of Haiti, a manifestation of a divided U.S. government and the U.S. government’s mistrust of Haiti’s elected governments of Aristide and Préval. However, because it was a priority, USAID was allowed to work with Haiti’s government on HIV/AIDS. Haiti’s success in combating the disease is a ray of hope: in just over a decade since 1993, the seroprevalence went from 6.2 percent to about 3.2 percent.</p>
<p>This political conflict added fuel to the already-hot fire of neoliberalism, in the so-called “Washington Consensus” that donor groups like the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and USAID imposed on countries in the Global South like Haiti. One major plank in neoliberalism is a distrust of states and a preference for private-sector initiatives and the elusive concept of “civil society.” Since the 1980s, NGOs have proliferated in Haiti and elsewhere. The 1990s saw a tenfold increase in their numbers, from 6,000 worldwide in 1990 to an estimated 60,000 by 1998 (Economist, cited in Regan 2003:3). Currently, there are so many NGOs that we can’t even guess at their number (Riddell, 2007:53). This rise in the number of NGOs is matched with an increase in funding through them. Globally, in 2005, it is estimated that NGOs channeled anywhere from 3.7 to 7.8 billion U.S. dollars of “humanitarian assistance” (Development Initiatives, 2006:47), and 24 billion in overall development funding (Riddell, 2007:259).</p>
<p>The pattern is true in Haiti, with only 74 NGOs out of an official count of 343 being present before the dechoukaj, before the ouster of foreign-supported dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. Noted above, all of USAID funds go through NGOs. A senior U.N. official recently estimated that for all donors 90 percent of aid goes directly to NGOs. Haitian researcher Sauveur Pierre Étienne called this situation an “Invasion.” All this is to say, whereas NGOs may not have created this neoliberal framework, they accepted in infusion of official government aid – known in the field as “Overseas Development Assistance.” Like it or not, the fact that NGOs accepted and continue to seek out more of this aid to preside over the development system makes NGOs accountable for its clear failure in Haiti.</p>
<p>With all due respect to my conference discussant and a wave of newly-minted Haiti “experts,” the facts not only speak for themselves, they shout. As a structure – yes, there are notable exceptions – NGOs have failed Haiti, particularly the pèp la, Haiti’s poor majority. Most pèp la I know are deeply suspicious of NGOs: they have the biggest houses, biggest offices, biggest white SUVs, newest computers, etc. Many people have commented on a steady rise in housing costs as a direct result of occupying forces and NGOs paying inflated rents. NGOs have become the backbone of the middle class – in fact, they are becoming a new status group, an “NGO class” in the eyes of many. As my friend Télèfe said, “as long as the aid passes through the bigwigs, we poor won’t see a cent.”</p>
<p>I can almost hear people retort with the popular refrain: but what about the failures of the Haitian state, the kleptocracy? With all due respect to certain members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that is not our affair and responsibility but Haitian peoples’ particularly the survivors. To enter a sovereign country’s political sphere – even or some would say especially bringing aid – is imperialist. One way out of this approach is to take the lead of the people who have lived this long-term crisis, and adopt a more sophisticated, nuanced solidarity, a tripartite analysis like the one discussed above.</p>
<p>Given the multitudes of perspectives, anyone offering easy answers, especially now, should be suspect. But the long-term solution requires a rebuilt, accountable, democratic, but functioning state that receives donors’ support. Partners in Health and the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights have published a report about the urgent need for a rights-based approach to development that includes this basic respect for the government of Haiti. An ad-hoc coalition of Washington-based NGOs has made the same point. See the CEPR blog for these and other reports.</p>
<p>But the subject of reconstruction can wait for another essay.</p>
<p>In the mean time, where are the tents?</p>
<p>If Haiti hasn’t erupted into violence, it is because despite the racist misunderstandings of Haiti and Haiti’s people, the survivors have the dignity, determination, community orientation, and togetherness that frankly we here in the U.S. need to learn: one needs only to witness televised conflicts over the last snow shovel at Walmart (and if the conflict involves African Americans or people of darker hues, a tagline like “looting”).</p>
<p>I have more hope than ever that Haitian people will survive this crisis because I have seen what Haitian people are accomplishing on their own, together. For the moment at least, in my neighborhood at least, both political and economic divisions have become the ancien régime. Every report back from the grassroots confirms this as well. By themselves, people on my block set up a medical clinic and an information gathering apparatus under a tarp my Belgian roommate left. They somehow managed to connect to the internet, and have a team of people listening to the radio. All I had to do was suggest a meeting and my neighbors drew up a map of Christ-Roi, some 25,000 people, and went about / continued collecting information about who was alive, who was dead; whose body was still trapped, whose home was still standing; what the urgent needs were, exactly how much water they had, exactly how much food, who had a car, and who had buckets to transport water, etc. And with very minimal assistance from this blan, they did get the water delivered and had lights at night.</p>
<p>There are approaches to offer solidarity-based assistance to survivors, who need to be directing this process. It is a very complex, difficult, heart-rending process that requires humility, self-critique, dialogue, fostering long-term relationships, and knowing our place. But it is possible. Flights to Haiti are scheduled to resume within the week. The overland route through the Dominican Republic has opened up and there are grassroots efforts beginning to work. Last week there was a conference of scores of grassroots organizations in Port-au-Prince coordinated by KONPAY to discuss strategy. In addition to her critical on-the-ground reporting, longtime Haiti solidarity activist Beverly Bell has organized an effort called Other Worlds, after the slogan of the World Social Forum. And after some fifty hours with three people and countless phone calls and e-mails, donations for the grassroots groups in documentary film Poto Mitan are finally going to Haiti through fiscal agent Lambi Fund.</p>
<p>But it is the Haitian survivors who are the heroes of this story, whose perspective needs to be central throughout this process. Their needs articulated (like tents, tarps, and/or more solid makeshift homes, and food Haitian people would prepare themselves) need to direct the aid that is coming.</p>
<p>This difference in perspective, this fault line, is not merely an intellectual concern. We who plan on standing by the side of Haitian people who are rebuilding their country need to learn our place and to learn how to offer this aid in the way that the survivors want.</p>
<p>Hopefully, the fault lines will not grow throughout the reconstruction process.</p>
<p>MARK SCHULLER is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at York College, the City University of New York. He co-edited <a href="" type="internal">Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction</a> and co-directed documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. He is completing a book about foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti.</p>
<p>Notes</p>
<p>Development Initiatives. (2006). Global Humanitarian Assistance 2006. London: Development Initiatives.</p>
<p>Fatton, R., Jr. (2002). Haiti’s Predatory Republic: the Unending Transition to Democracy. Boudler, CO: Lynne Reiner Publishers.</p>
<p>Regan, J., &amp; (ICKL), I. C. K. L. (2003). ONG “altènatif” – zanmi oswa ennmi lit radikal? Port-au-Prince: Institute Culturel Karl Leveque.</p>
<p>Riddell, R. (2007). Does Foreign Aid Really Work? Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Rotberg, R. (2003). Haiti’s Turmoil: Politics and Policy Under Aristide and Clinton. Cambridge, Mass: World Peace Foundation.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | Fault Lines | true | https://counterpunch.org/2010/03/05/fault-lines/ | 2010-03-05 | 4left
| 3,060 | First of all my sympathies to those in Chile who have lost their houses their livelihoods their family members and their sense of stability Last weekend8217s earthquake was unquestionably damaging At 88 on the Richter scale it was also almost a hundred times more powerful than January8217s quake in Haiti Thankfully its epicenter was farther from large urban centers Thankfully also Chile has slowly recovered from its violent coup d8217233tat that ushered in a round of neoliberalism In fact Chile was its first laboratory 8211 U of Chicago economist Milton Friedman was the official economic advisor to dictator Augusto Pinochet just months after the coup While Haiti fades from the headlines the situation on the ground in Haiti remains urgent as only a third of the survivors have their needs for a temporary dry shelter met While it is absolutely true that Chile like the US has its share of poverty and inequality Haiti8217s development indicators are and were much worse than Chile8217s For example Haiti8217s Gross Domestic Product GDP total value of goods and services per person was 428 in 2005 while Chile8217s per capita GDP was 8350 in 2007 Half of Haiti8217s people earn 1 per day or less whereas only 2 percent of Chile8217s citizens live under the 8220international poverty line8221 of 125 per day The latest figures for child mortality are instructive 74 children out of 1000 die in Haiti whereas only 9 do in Chile For all these reasons Haiti ranked 149th out of 182 countries on the UN8217s Human Development Index HDI whereas Chile ranked 44th The explanations for these differences are many but they cluster around two major themes The first theme much more widely researched repeated published spread promoted and believed by international agencies mainstream media and most members of certain academic disciplines is that Haiti8217s failures of development are because of an unbroken legacy of dictators Haiti8217s 8220kleptocracy8221 Fatton 2002 Rotberg 2003 There is an implicit binary frame of a 8220good8221 civil society and a 8220bad8221 state Missing from this discussion is the role of foreign actors Another binary frame which talks past this first comes from Haiti solidarity advocates and other scholars who have closer relationships on the ground that Haiti has been the victim of numerous occupations a usurious debt that France claimed in exchange for its recognition of Haiti8217s independence etc Close observers of the last coup in Haiti would note that it was France8217s Chirac not Bush that first called for Aristide to resign Many believe that this is because of Aristide8217s demand that France pay some 22 billion in reparations for this extortion The problem with some variants of this analysis is that if we do not acknowledge the role of Haiti8217s state we are powerless to respond to softball questions from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and others The recent news item that the government of Haiti has begun taxing aid coming into Haiti is a good case for the need for a more appropriate frame of analysis that most people within Haiti have that acknowledges three sets of actors the world system in all its guises the elites and Haiti8217s state apparatus and Haiti8217s people organized in social movements and what might be called 8220civil society8221 Meanwhile Haiti8217s crisis continues though it has faded from mainstream media coverage It has literally disappeared from the front page even of progressive websites like CommonDreams We may be entering a world of 8220aid fatigue8221 Monday was the last day for donations to emergency relief efforts to count on individuals8217 2009 taxes The funds raised 8211 though small compared to the urgent and longterm reconstruction needs 8211 are indeed generous As of a month after the earthquake the estimate of aid donated is 600 million for Haiti relief efforts compare this to the 20 billion in Wall Street bonuses And yet there are still an estimated 600000 people today who are not covered when the rainy seasons come According to aid agencies8217 own estimates only 35 of the needs for tents and tarps in PortauPrince are being met 8211 and this up from 30 a week and a half ago While the rains haven8217t come yet they surely will I join many others in asking why this is especially given this outpouring of generosity One problem appears to be on its way to be resolved the lack of coordination The UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti has created a website that allows donors NGOs and grassroots organizations to coordinate their efforts It does have a wiki function which means that the groups doing the work can post what they are doing and smaller grassroots efforts are invited to use this tool as well as the large NGOs It behooves everyone who is offering aid to use this tool a directory of Civil Society Organizations httpcsohaitiorg This is only a single tool and it can8217t solve everything by itself Still left to be addressed is the communication with the survivors receiving the aid More than a month and a half after the earthquake there are still many people who do not know if the aid is trickling their way Some people like my friend Lesley wonder whether this isn8217t part of some big plan to wipe poor people out of PortauPrince altogether Already the government is telling people to leave ChampsdeMars the 8220National Mall8221 which houses the National Palace and return to their neighborhoods that presumably they left because aid was not arriving And donors and grassroots efforts alike seem to be telling people to quit the city of PortauPrince This is irresponsible for a couple of reasons First many PortauPrince residents particularly the youth in the shantytowns grew up in PortauPrince Half of the country8217s population is 15 or younger Secondly without quick and sustainable job creation this migration simply displaces the problem of food security into the remote rural areas already marginalized because of communications and physical infrastructure A second challenge we need to issue the NGOs that have been entrusted by our government and generous citizens is to also answer some basic questions about the aid they are delivering Particularly in face of this aid fatigue NGOs and other groups who are collecting money must do things differently than they have in the past The first thing this particular NGO researcher and Haiti solidarity activist would like to see immediately stop is what we community organizers used to call 8220poverty pimping8221 or what could be called lately 8220disaster voyeurism8221 The seemingly innocent 8220real world8221 depictions of the actually existing poverty have real material consequences True a naked child with a distended belly or the overwhelming image of a city in ruins might trigger generosity in the moment But it does Haitian people particularly the survivors a disservice in the short medium and long term First and foremost it continues in the unbroken tradition since the Haitian Revolution of reviling 8220monkeying8221 belittling infantilizing and further brutalizing Haitian people Haiti8217s bad press is powerful of 1200 people I polled in guest lectures before I stopped this practice only 1 had a positive first impression of Haiti This belief that Haiti is unfit to govern itself and is not deserving of urgently needed aid may be contributing to a backlash at the very least a drying up of private donations I hope not At the very least this discourse has also justified several foreign occupations Another reason this practice of framing Haiti within this poverty voyeurism narrative is that it hides critical lifesaving information about the plan on the ground what exact aid will actually arrive in Haiti and what its impact will be In my first public post after the earthquake before I went to Haiti I offered a list of questions for people to ask when considering donating to Haiti Given the proliferation of fundraising efforts this is becoming even more crucial Before giving direct aid to Haiti or choosing a group to receive funds we need to do our homework It is our responsibility to really think through these questions 1 Who exactly is on the ground delivering aid in PortauPrince How do they select partners and leaders within these groups 2 What is the group8217s capacity to get aid to Haiti and directly to the impacted groups 3 What relationships do they have with the community and community groups Who sets the priorities Do they have longterm partnerships or are they grasping at straws 4 What percent of funds will actually get to Haiti What percent is overhead 5 What is the plan Does it address the current needs medical first food water and shelter 6 Is it offering direct response or is it an 8220umbrella8221 group funding local partners How are local partners chosen Until these questions are all answered it is frankly irresponsible to collect funds For those NGOs and mission groups collecting funds it would be good to include this information on the website to make it easier for people who would like to contribute or organize fundraisers Also in the interests of accountability it would be good to post the organization8217s most recent 990 form required by US law for all nonprofit groups in order to maintain their taxexempt status This form 8211 already required by law to be furnished to all US taxpayers who ask for it 8211 lists the major sources of income and expenses for the organization I know this sounds harsh especially to people who never think to question their generosity At a recent conference in New Orleans more on this for another post senior scholar in another field critiqued a 12minute presentation based on my previous post that an anthropologist who is 8220too close to the field8221 could not be 8220scientific8221 or at least 8220methodical8221 My response to him and the audience is like it or not the data are clear neoliberalism has failed Haiti All development indicators have seen a steady decline from 1980 to 2007 as of the last data I methodically examined except for two These two indicators 8211 the incidence of HIVAIDS and literacy 8211 are exceptions precisely because they were mutual priorities of the elected governments of Haiti and donor groups Since the 1995 Dole Amendment USAID was prevented from funding the government of Haiti a manifestation of a divided US government and the US government8217s mistrust of Haiti8217s elected governments of Aristide and Pr233val However because it was a priority USAID was allowed to work with Haiti8217s government on HIVAIDS Haiti8217s success in combating the disease is a ray of hope in just over a decade since 1993 the seroprevalence went from 62 percent to about 32 percent This political conflict added fuel to the alreadyhot fire of neoliberalism in the socalled 8220Washington Consensus8221 that donor groups like the World Bank the InterAmerican Development Bank and USAID imposed on countries in the Global South like Haiti One major plank in neoliberalism is a distrust of states and a preference for privatesector initiatives and the elusive concept of 8220civil society8221 Since the 1980s NGOs have proliferated in Haiti and elsewhere The 1990s saw a tenfold increase in their numbers from 6000 worldwide in 1990 to an estimated 60000 by 1998 Economist cited in Regan 20033 Currently there are so many NGOs that we can8217t even guess at their number Riddell 200753 This rise in the number of NGOs is matched with an increase in funding through them Globally in 2005 it is estimated that NGOs channeled anywhere from 37 to 78 billion US dollars of 8220humanitarian assistance8221 Development Initiatives 200647 and 24 billion in overall development funding Riddell 2007259 The pattern is true in Haiti with only 74 NGOs out of an official count of 343 being present before the dechoukaj before the ouster of foreignsupported dictator JeanClaude Duvalier Noted above all of USAID funds go through NGOs A senior UN official recently estimated that for all donors 90 percent of aid goes directly to NGOs Haitian researcher Sauveur Pierre 201tienne called this situation an 8220Invasion8221 All this is to say whereas NGOs may not have created this neoliberal framework they accepted in infusion of official government aid 8211 known in the field as 8220Overseas Development Assistance8221 Like it or not the fact that NGOs accepted and continue to seek out more of this aid to preside over the development system makes NGOs accountable for its clear failure in Haiti With all due respect to my conference discussant and a wave of newlyminted Haiti 8220experts8221 the facts not only speak for themselves they shout As a structure 8211 yes there are notable exceptions 8211 NGOs have failed Haiti particularly the p232p la Haiti8217s poor majority Most p232p la I know are deeply suspicious of NGOs they have the biggest houses biggest offices biggest white SUVs newest computers etc Many people have commented on a steady rise in housing costs as a direct result of occupying forces and NGOs paying inflated rents NGOs have become the backbone of the middle class 8211 in fact they are becoming a new status group an 8220NGO class8221 in the eyes of many As my friend T233l232fe said 8220as long as the aid passes through the bigwigs we poor won8217t see a cent8221 I can almost hear people retort with the popular refrain but what about the failures of the Haitian state the kleptocracy With all due respect to certain members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is not our affair and responsibility but Haitian peoples8217 particularly the survivors To enter a sovereign country8217s political sphere 8211 even or some would say especially bringing aid 8211 is imperialist One way out of this approach is to take the lead of the people who have lived this longterm crisis and adopt a more sophisticated nuanced solidarity a tripartite analysis like the one discussed above Given the multitudes of perspectives anyone offering easy answers especially now should be suspect But the longterm solution requires a rebuilt accountable democratic but functioning state that receives donors8217 support Partners in Health and the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights have published a report about the urgent need for a rightsbased approach to development that includes this basic respect for the government of Haiti An adhoc coalition of Washingtonbased NGOs has made the same point See the CEPR blog for these and other reports But the subject of reconstruction can wait for another essay In the mean time where are the tents If Haiti hasn8217t erupted into violence it is because despite the racist misunderstandings of Haiti and Haiti8217s people the survivors have the dignity determination community orientation and togetherness that frankly we here in the US need to learn one needs only to witness televised conflicts over the last snow shovel at Walmart and if the conflict involves African Americans or people of darker hues a tagline like 8220looting8221 I have more hope than ever that Haitian people will survive this crisis because I have seen what Haitian people are accomplishing on their own together For the moment at least in my neighborhood at least both political and economic divisions have become the ancien r233gime Every report back from the grassroots confirms this as well By themselves people on my block set up a medical clinic and an information gathering apparatus under a tarp my Belgian roommate left They somehow managed to connect to the internet and have a team of people listening to the radio All I had to do was suggest a meeting and my neighbors drew up a map of ChristRoi some 25000 people and went about continued collecting information about who was alive who was dead whose body was still trapped whose home was still standing what the urgent needs were exactly how much water they had exactly how much food who had a car and who had buckets to transport water etc And with very minimal assistance from this blan they did get the water delivered and had lights at night There are approaches to offer solidaritybased assistance to survivors who need to be directing this process It is a very complex difficult heartrending process that requires humility selfcritique dialogue fostering longterm relationships and knowing our place But it is possible Flights to Haiti are scheduled to resume within the week The overland route through the Dominican Republic has opened up and there are grassroots efforts beginning to work Last week there was a conference of scores of grassroots organizations in PortauPrince coordinated by KONPAY to discuss strategy In addition to her critical ontheground reporting longtime Haiti solidarity activist Beverly Bell has organized an effort called Other Worlds after the slogan of the World Social Forum And after some fifty hours with three people and countless phone calls and emails donations for the grassroots groups in documentary film Poto Mitan are finally going to Haiti through fiscal agent Lambi Fund But it is the Haitian survivors who are the heroes of this story whose perspective needs to be central throughout this process Their needs articulated like tents tarps andor more solid makeshift homes and food Haitian people would prepare themselves need to direct the aid that is coming This difference in perspective this fault line is not merely an intellectual concern We who plan on standing by the side of Haitian people who are rebuilding their country need to learn our place and to learn how to offer this aid in the way that the survivors want Hopefully the fault lines will not grow throughout the reconstruction process MARK SCHULLER is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at York College the City University of New York He coedited Capitalizing on Catastrophe Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reconstruction and codirected documentary Poto Mitan Haitian Women Pillars of the Global Economy He is completing a book about foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti Notes Development Initiatives 2006 Global Humanitarian Assistance 2006 London Development Initiatives Fatton R Jr 2002 Haiti8217s Predatory Republic the Unending Transition to Democracy Boudler CO Lynne Reiner Publishers Regan J ampamp ICKL I C K L 2003 ONG 8220alt232natif8221 8211 zanmi oswa ennmi lit radikal PortauPrince Institute Culturel Karl Leveque Riddell R 2007 Does Foreign Aid Really Work Oxford Oxford University Press Rotberg R 2003 Haiti8217s Turmoil Politics and Policy Under Aristide and Clinton Cambridge Mass World Peace Foundation amp160 | First/ADV of/ADP all/PRON my/PRON sympathies/NOUN to/ADP those/PRON in/ADP Chile/PROPN who/PRON have/AUX lost/VERB their/PRON houses/NOUN their/PRON livelihoods/NOUN their/PRON family/NOUN members/NOUN and/CCONJ their/PRON sense/NOUN of/ADP stability/NOUN Last/ADJ weekend8217s/NUM earthquake/NOUN was/AUX unquestionably/ADV damaging/ADJ At/ADP 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<p>While publics around the world are showing signs of apprehension about China’s growing economic power, its role in foreign affairs and the safety of the products it exports, the Chinese are confident that the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will change the way their country is viewed. By nearly unanimous margins, Chinese respondents say their country will be a successful host and that the Olympic Games will help China’s image around the world.</p>
<p>Olympic contenders flocking to Beijing from all corners of world will be greeted by a people who currently express extraordinary levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation’s economy. With more than eight-in-ten having a positive view of both, China ranks number one among 24 countries on both measures in the 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Global Attitudes Project.1 Although levels of personal satisfaction are lower, and by global standards Chinese contentment with family, income and jobs is not especially high, these findings represent a dramatic improvement in national contentment from earlier in the decade when the Chinese people were not nearly as positive about the course of their nation and its economy.</p>
<p>In addition to seeing the Beijing Olympics as good for their country, an overwhelming majority of Chinese across all demographic groups say the event is important to them personally. Those who live in the host city are especially likely to say that is the case.</p>
<p>There is also broad optimism about the performance of China’s athletes among the Chinese public. Yet, despite the widespread excitement about the Olympics, some in China say their country is paying too much attention to the games, and the percentage who expresses that opinion has increased since Pew Research last asked the question in 2006.</p>
<p>The Chinese are enthusiastic about hosting the Summer Olympics. More than nine-in-ten say their country will be successful as a host (96%), including 56% who say it will be very successful. A similar share is convinced that the games, which will take place in August in Beijing, will help China’s image around the world (93%), unchanged from two years ago.</p>
<p>The view that China will be a successful Olympics host and that the country’s image will improve as a result is shared by men and women, the young and the old, and the rich and the poor alike. Moreover, those who do not live in Beijing are just as likely as those who live in the host city to say that China will be a successful host (96% vs. 98%).</p>
<p>Positive feelings about the Summer Olympics extend beyond the belief that the event will be good for China. Nearly eight-in-ten Chinese (79%) say the Olympics will be important to them personally, while just 17% say it will not be important to them.</p>
<p>Solid majorities across all demographic groups say the Olympics impact them personally, but those in the host city are considerably more likely than those in other cities and provinces to express that view. Fully nine-in-ten in Beijing say the Olympics are important to them, compared with 79% in other parts of the country.</p>
<p>Opinions about whether the Olympics are important on a personal level also vary somewhat by age, income, and education. Fully 78% of Chinese respondents who are ages 50 or older say the Olympics are important to them, but an even higher percentage of those who are under 30 say that is the case (83%). Among those with low household incomes, three-quarters see the Olympics as important to them personally and 21% say it is not important. By contrast, 87% of Chinese respondents with high incomes say the event is important to them and just 12% say it is not.</p>
<p>The Chinese have confidence that their country’s athletes will perform well at the games. Three-quarters say China, which finished third in the medal count, behind the United States and Russia, at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, will win the most medals this summer. Only 15% think the U.S. will take home the most medals.</p>
<p>Women are somewhat more likely than men to say China will perform better than any other country. About eight-in-ten women (78%) say their country will win the most medals, compared with 72% of men. Those with less than a high school education, and those in the middle and lower income groups, are also more optimistic about China’s chances.</p>
<p>Beijing residents are the least confident that Chinese athletes will outperform their opponents. Fewer than six-in-ten (58%) say China will win the most medals and more than four-in-ten (42%) think the United States will. Outside of the host city, 76% name China and 14% name the U.S. as the country that will take home the most prizes.</p>
<p>Overall, more Chinese respondents say people in China are paying the right amount of attention to the Olympics than say they are paying too much or too little attention. But the percentage saying they are paying too much attention has increased since 2006. More than one-in-three Chinese (34%) now say that people in China are paying too much attention to the Olympics; just one-in-four shared that view two years ago. About one-in-five (18%) say the Chinese are not paying enough attention to the games.</p>
<p>The opinion that there is too much focus on the Olympics is more prevalent in the host city than in other parts of the country. Beijing residents are nearly evenly split — 46% say people are paying too much attention to the Olympics and 51% say they are paying the right amount of attention. Only 2% in Beijing say that not enough attention is being paid. Outside of Beijing, however, 33% say people are paying too much attention, 19% say they are paying too little attention, and 43% say they are paying the right amount of attention to the games.</p>
<p>The survey finds that international opinion largely approves of holding the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in China. Majorities in 14 of 23 countries say the decision to hold the games there was a good one.</p>
<p>However, European publics are notably less enthusiastic. In France, home to large demonstrations when the Olympic torch passed through the country, a clear 55%-majority calls the decision to hold the games in China a mistake. On balance, the British and Spanish approve of holding the event in China, while Germans, Americans and Poles are more divided on this question. And, unlike in other Asian nations, opposition to the Beijing Games runs high in Japan — 55% of Japanese disapprove of the decision to hold the Olympics there, while just 39% approve.</p>
<p>The following sections describe other findings from the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey on how nations around the world view China, its policies and its people.</p>
<p>As the international spotlight turns to China and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, international publics are showing signs of apprehension about the country and its growing power. Overall, favorable views of China have declined slightly over the last year, and this is especially true in Asia, as well as in Western nations, where enthusiasm for the Beijing Games is muted and concern about China’s increasing military strength is on the rise.2</p>
<p>For most publics included in the survey, a familiar complaint about American foreign policy — that it tends to be unilateralist — rings true for China as well. The perception that China fails to consider the interests of others when making foreign policy decisions is widespread, particularly in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and among China’s neighbors South Korea, Japan and Australia. On this and other measures, Japanese attitudes toward China are among the most negative.</p>
<p>In addition to anxieties about China’s role in foreign affairs, there is significant concern about China’s growing economy in some countries, especially the U.S. and Western Europe. Even more widespread, however, are worries about the safety of Chinese products. The recent scandals involving recalls of Chinese exports are well known to many, and in most of the nations surveyed, relatively few believe products made in China are as safe as those made elsewhere.</p>
<p>In many ways, the survey reflects China’s ascendance as a major power. In both the developing and developed world, people see China having a significant influence in their own countries. In Western Europe, majorities believe either that China has already replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or that it will at some point replace the U.S. Few Chinese think their country has already supplanted the U.S., but most think it will eventually do so.</p>
<p>Majorities in seven of the survey’s 23 nations give China a favorable rating. This is the same number of countries in which majorities rate the United States positively. China’s popularity has declined somewhat since last year in nine of 21 countries where trends are available, while increasing in only two countries and remaining basically stable in 10.</p>
<p>American public opinion regarding China is roughly divided between those with a favorable (39%) and those with an unfavorable (42%) view. U.S. attitudes toward China have changed little since 2007, when 42% had a positive and 39% a negative opinion.</p>
<p>Ratings for China are decidedly negative in three of the four Western European countries included in the survey. Fewer than one-in-three respondents in Germany, France or Spain express a positive opinion. Moreover, attitudes toward China have grown more negative in all three countries since last year. This is especially true in France, where China’s favorability rating has plummeted from 47% to 28%. This year’s decline continues a slide among Western Europeans over the last few years — since 2005, China’s favorability score has dropped 30 percentage points in France, 26 points in Spain, and 20 points in Germany. And while a plurality in Great Britain continues to express a positive view, opinions of China there are down significantly from 2005, when 65% offered a positive rating.</p>
<p>In Asia, opinions about China vary considerably. China is overwhelmingly popular among Pakistanis — roughly three-in-four (76%) express a positive opinion, while just 8% hold a negative view. A clear majority of Indonesians (58%) also have a positive view, although China’s favorability rating has dropped seven percentage points among Indonesians over the last year. On balance, Australians take a positive view of China, while both South Koreans and Indians are divided on this question. On the other hand, the Japanese are more negative than any other public included on the survey — just 14% offer a positive assessment of China, down 15 points from an already low 29% in last year’s survey. Of course, China and Japan have a long and often difficult history with one another, but as recently as 2002 a majority of Japanese (55%) voiced a positive view of their longtime rival.</p>
<p>Middle Eastern views of China are mixed. In both Egypt and Lebanon, positive views outweigh negative ones, but in Jordan negative ratings are slightly more common. Similarly, opinions are mixed in Latin America, and many in the region are unable to offer either a positive or negative assessment.</p>
<p>More than 70% of both Nigerians and Tanzanians take a positive view of China, but public opinion is quite different in South Africa, where China’s favorability rating is just 37%.</p>
<p>Majorities in only nine of the 23 countries surveyed express a favorable view of the Chinese people. Some of the highest ratings come from neighboring countries, including Pakistan (78% favorable), Australia (73%) and Indonesia (59%). Elsewhere in Asia, views are mixed, in South Korea and India, and decidedly negative in Japan, where 73% have an unfavorable opinion, by far the most negative assessment of the Chinese people in the survey.</p>
<p>In most countries, views of the Chinese closely resemble views of China as a nation. For instance, this is true in the three African nations included in the survey: Tanzanians and Nigerians have overwhelmingly positive views of the Chinese people, while South Africans lean toward a negative assessment, the same pattern that characterizes opinions of China itself in these countries.</p>
<p>In the U.S. and Western Europe, however, there is a gap between perceptions of China and perceptions of its people. This is similar to the gap that characterizes attitudes toward the U.S. and its people throughout much of the world.</p>
<p>In Britain, only 47% hold a positive view of China, but 65% have a favorable view of the Chinese people. An even larger gap exists in the U.S., where just 39% express a favorable opinion of China, but 64% express a positive opinion of the Chinese. Smaller, but still substantial, gaps exist in Spain, France and Germany.</p>
<p>In most of the countries surveyed, majorities or pluralities think of China as neither a partner nor an enemy of their country. In six nations, the balance of opinion is that China is a partner, while no public included in the study characterizes China as an enemy. This stands in stark contrast to the results from this same question when it was asked about the United States –people are much more likely to label the U.S. as either a partner or an enemy.</p>
<p>The way in which people characterize their nation’s relationship with China varies extensively across regions. Pakistanis are especially likely to say China is a partner to their country, as are Nigerians and Tanzanians. A slim majority of South Africans also call China a partner. In neighboring Russia, about half of those surveyed (49%) say China is a partner.</p>
<p>Fewer than one-quarter of those in the survey’s five European Union countries — Britain, France, Germany, Poland and Spain — consider China a partner. However, Americans are the least likely to say China is a partner of their country, and fully 20% characterize it as an enemy. China is rated as an enemy by significant minorities in other countries as well, including South Korea (28%), Turkey (25%), Egypt (24%), Japan (23%) and Mexico (22%).</p>
<p>Among the publics included in this survey, there is a widely held view that China acts unilaterally in international affairs. Majorities in 14 of 23 countries say that China does not take into account the interests of countries like theirs when making foreign policy decisions.</p>
<p>This view is prevalent in the U.S. and among EU nations — more than seven-in-ten in France, Spain and Britain, and somewhat smaller majorities in Poland, the U.S. and Germany, think China generally ignores their interests. Majorities in the Middle East also agree with this perspective.</p>
<p>Opinions differ among the six Asian and Pacific countries — Indians, Pakistanis and Indonesians tend to believe China does consider the interests of countries like theirs, while South Koreans, Australians, and Japanese overwhelmingly disagree.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, Mexicans and Brazilians are divided on this question, while Argentines tend to think China acts unilaterally. In all three African nations, on the other hand, majorities believe China takes their interests into account.</p>
<p>While most of the publics in the survey believe China generally acts unilaterally, the Chinese tend to have a very different impression of their country’s approach to foreign policy. When asked whether China takes into account the interests of other countries when making foreign policy decisions, 83% of Chinese say they believe it does consider other countries a great deal or a fair amount.</p>
<p>In 2007, high profile recalls of toys and other Chinese-made products generated considerable media attention in the United States and other countries, and as the results of this poll demonstrate, in many countries there is a high level of awareness about these controversies.</p>
<p>With near unanimity (96%), the Japanese say they are aware of the recalls of food and goods manufactured in China over the last year. More than eight-in-ten in both South Korea and the U.S. have also heard a lot or a little about this issue.</p>
<p>Awareness is also widespread in Germany (72% a lot or a little), Australia (66%), and Indonesia (66%). And majorities in Nigeria, Britain, Spain, France, Russia and India are familiar with this issue.</p>
<p>Few, however, in Latin America know about the recalls — just 27% of Brazilians, 26% of Mexicans and 14% in Argentina have heard something about this. Awareness is also low in Pakistan (17%).</p>
<p>The survey finds considerable skepticism about the quality of Chinese products, and this is true even in many countries where awareness of recalls of Chinese projects is low. In 19 of 24 countries, at least half of those surveyed say Chinese products are generally less safe than those produced elsewhere.</p>
<p>There is a consensus throughout much of the West that Chinese products are not as safe, although here again, Britain is something of an outlier — just 50% of the British think Chinese projects are inferior to others in terms of safety. Nearly three-in-four Americans equate “Made in China” with safety risks.</p>
<p>The South Koreans and Japanese are the least likely to say China’s products are as safe. In both countries roughly nine-in-ten say they are generally less safe than those produced elsewhere.</p>
<p>Opinions are quite different, however, in China itself. Overwhelmingly, the Chinese public has confidence in its products — 65% say they are as safe as those from other countries, while just 18% say they are less safe.</p>
<p>Within China there have been several high-profile recalls of Chinese-made products over the last year. However, relatively few among the Chinese public are aware of these domestic recalls. Only 1% have heard a lot about this issue, while another 15% say they have heard a little. About four-in-ten (41%) say they have not heard much and 27% report hearing nothing at all.</p>
<p>In contrast, in many other nations, large majorities are familiar with recent recalls of Chinese products in their countries. Indeed, 96% of Japanese, 88% of South Koreans, 81% of Americans, and 72% of Germans have heard about this issue.</p>
<p>1 For more on attitudes toward and within China, as well as opinions on other political, economic and cultural topics, see 24-Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey, Report 1: <a href="http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=260" type="external">Global Economic Gloom – China And India Notable Exceptions</a>, June 12, 2008 and Report 2: <a href="http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=261" type="external">The Chinese Celebrate Their Roaring Economy, As They Struggle With Its Costs</a>, July 22, 2008 from both of which this summary is excerpted.</p>
<p>2 The survey in China was conducted from March 17-April 21, 2008, following the onset of civil unrest on Tibet, which began on March 10, and prior to the May 12 earthquake in China’s Sichuan province.</p> | An Enthusiastic China Welcomes the Olympics | false | http://pewresearch.org/2008/08/05/an-enthusiastic-china-welcomes-the-olympics/ | 2008-08-05 | 2least
| 3,060 | While publics around the world are showing signs of apprehension about China8217s growing economic power its role in foreign affairs and the safety of the products it exports the Chinese are confident that the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will change the way their country is viewed By nearly unanimous margins Chinese respondents say their country will be a successful host and that the Olympic Games will help China8217s image around the world Olympic contenders flocking to Beijing from all corners of world will be greeted by a people who currently express extraordinary levels of satisfaction with the way things are going in their country and with their nation8217s economy With more than eightinten having a positive view of both China ranks number one among 24 countries on both measures in the 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center8217s Pew Global Attitudes Project1 Although levels of personal satisfaction are lower and by global standards Chinese contentment with family income and jobs is not especially high these findings represent a dramatic improvement in national contentment from earlier in the decade when the Chinese people were not nearly as positive about the course of their nation and its economy In addition to seeing the Beijing Olympics as good for their country an overwhelming majority of Chinese across all demographic groups say the event is important to them personally Those who live in the host city are especially likely to say that is the case There is also broad optimism about the performance of China8217s athletes among the Chinese public Yet despite the widespread excitement about the Olympics some in China say their country is paying too much attention to the games and the percentage who expresses that opinion has increased since Pew Research last asked the question in 2006 The Chinese are enthusiastic about hosting the Summer Olympics More than nineinten say their country will be successful as a host 96 including 56 who say it will be very successful A similar share is convinced that the games which will take place in August in Beijing will help China8217s image around the world 93 unchanged from two years ago The view that China will be a successful Olympics host and that the country8217s image will improve as a result is shared by men and women the young and the old and the rich and the poor alike Moreover those who do not live in Beijing are just as likely as those who live in the host city to say that China will be a successful host 96 vs 98 Positive feelings about the Summer Olympics extend beyond the belief that the event will be good for China Nearly eightinten Chinese 79 say the Olympics will be important to them personally while just 17 say it will not be important to them Solid majorities across all demographic groups say the Olympics impact them personally but those in the host city are considerably more likely than those in other cities and provinces to express that view Fully nineinten in Beijing say the Olympics are important to them compared with 79 in other parts of the country Opinions about whether the Olympics are important on a personal level also vary somewhat by age income and education Fully 78 of Chinese respondents who are ages 50 or older say the Olympics are important to them but an even higher percentage of those who are under 30 say that is the case 83 Among those with low household incomes threequarters see the Olympics as important to them personally and 21 say it is not important By contrast 87 of Chinese respondents with high incomes say the event is important to them and just 12 say it is not The Chinese have confidence that their country8217s athletes will perform well at the games Threequarters say China which finished third in the medal count behind the United States and Russia at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens will win the most medals this summer Only 15 think the US will take home the most medals Women are somewhat more likely than men to say China will perform better than any other country About eightinten women 78 say their country will win the most medals compared with 72 of men Those with less than a high school education and those in the middle and lower income groups are also more optimistic about China8217s chances Beijing residents are the least confident that Chinese athletes will outperform their opponents Fewer than sixinten 58 say China will win the most medals and more than fourinten 42 think the United States will Outside of the host city 76 name China and 14 name the US as the country that will take home the most prizes Overall more Chinese respondents say people in China are paying the right amount of attention to the Olympics than say they are paying too much or too little attention But the percentage saying they are paying too much attention has increased since 2006 More than oneinthree Chinese 34 now say that people in China are paying too much attention to the Olympics just oneinfour shared that view two years ago About oneinfive 18 say the Chinese are not paying enough attention to the games The opinion that there is too much focus on the Olympics is more prevalent in the host city than in other parts of the country Beijing residents are nearly evenly split 8212 46 say people are paying too much attention to the Olympics and 51 say they are paying the right amount of attention Only 2 in Beijing say that not enough attention is being paid Outside of Beijing however 33 say people are paying too much attention 19 say they are paying too little attention and 43 say they are paying the right amount of attention to the games The survey finds that international opinion largely approves of holding the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in China Majorities in 14 of 23 countries say the decision to hold the games there was a good one However European publics are notably less enthusiastic In France home to large demonstrations when the Olympic torch passed through the country a clear 55majority calls the decision to hold the games in China a mistake On balance the British and Spanish approve of holding the event in China while Germans Americans and Poles are more divided on this question And unlike in other Asian nations opposition to the Beijing Games runs high in Japan 8212 55 of Japanese disapprove of the decision to hold the Olympics there while just 39 approve The following sections describe other findings from the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey on how nations around the world view China its policies and its people As the international spotlight turns to China and the 2008 Beijing Olympics international publics are showing signs of apprehension about the country and its growing power Overall favorable views of China have declined slightly over the last year and this is especially true in Asia as well as in Western nations where enthusiasm for the Beijing Games is muted and concern about China8217s increasing military strength is on the rise2 For most publics included in the survey a familiar complaint about American foreign policy 8212 that it tends to be unilateralist 8212 rings true for China as well The perception that China fails to consider the interests of others when making foreign policy decisions is widespread particularly in the US Europe the Middle East and among China8217s neighbors South Korea Japan and Australia On this and other measures Japanese attitudes toward China are among the most negative In addition to anxieties about China8217s role in foreign affairs there is significant concern about China8217s growing economy in some countries especially the US and Western Europe Even more widespread however are worries about the safety of Chinese products The recent scandals involving recalls of Chinese exports are well known to many and in most of the nations surveyed relatively few believe products made in China are as safe as those made elsewhere In many ways the survey reflects China8217s ascendance as a major power In both the developing and developed world people see China having a significant influence in their own countries In Western Europe majorities believe either that China has already replaced the US as the world8217s leading superpower or that it will at some point replace the US Few Chinese think their country has already supplanted the US but most think it will eventually do so Majorities in seven of the survey8217s 23 nations give China a favorable rating This is the same number of countries in which majorities rate the United States positively China8217s popularity has declined somewhat since last year in nine of 21 countries where trends are available while increasing in only two countries and remaining basically stable in 10 American public opinion regarding China is roughly divided between those with a favorable 39 and those with an unfavorable 42 view US attitudes toward China have changed little since 2007 when 42 had a positive and 39 a negative opinion Ratings for China are decidedly negative in three of the four Western European countries included in the survey Fewer than oneinthree respondents in Germany France or Spain express a positive opinion Moreover attitudes toward China have grown more negative in all three countries since last year This is especially true in France where China8217s favorability rating has plummeted from 47 to 28 This year8217s decline continues a slide among Western Europeans over the last few years 8212 since 2005 China8217s favorability score has dropped 30 percentage points in France 26 points in Spain and 20 points in Germany And while a plurality in Great Britain continues to express a positive view opinions of China there are down significantly from 2005 when 65 offered a positive rating In Asia opinions about China vary considerably China is overwhelmingly popular among Pakistanis 8212 roughly threeinfour 76 express a positive opinion while just 8 hold a negative view A clear majority of Indonesians 58 also have a positive view although China8217s favorability rating has dropped seven percentage points among Indonesians over the last year On balance Australians take a positive view of China while both South Koreans and Indians are divided on this question On the other hand the Japanese are more negative than any other public included on the survey 8212 just 14 offer a positive assessment of China down 15 points from an already low 29 in last year8217s survey Of course China and Japan have a long and often difficult history with one another but as recently as 2002 a majority of Japanese 55 voiced a positive view of their longtime rival Middle Eastern views of China are mixed In both Egypt and Lebanon positive views outweigh negative ones but in Jordan negative ratings are slightly more common Similarly opinions are mixed in Latin America and many in the region are unable to offer either a positive or negative assessment More than 70 of both Nigerians and Tanzanians take a positive view of China but public opinion is quite different in South Africa where China8217s favorability rating is just 37 Majorities in only nine of the 23 countries surveyed express a favorable view of the Chinese people Some of the highest ratings come from neighboring countries including Pakistan 78 favorable Australia 73 and Indonesia 59 Elsewhere in Asia views are mixed in South Korea and India and decidedly negative in Japan where 73 have an unfavorable opinion by far the most negative assessment of the Chinese people in the survey In most countries views of the Chinese closely resemble views of China as a nation For instance this is true in the three African nations included in the survey Tanzanians and Nigerians have overwhelmingly positive views of the Chinese people while South Africans lean toward a negative assessment the same pattern that characterizes opinions of China itself in these countries In the US and Western Europe however there is a gap between perceptions of China and perceptions of its people This is similar to the gap that characterizes attitudes toward the US and its people throughout much of the world In Britain only 47 hold a positive view of China but 65 have a favorable view of the Chinese people An even larger gap exists in the US where just 39 express a favorable opinion of China but 64 express a positive opinion of the Chinese Smaller but still substantial gaps exist in Spain France and Germany In most of the countries surveyed majorities or pluralities think of China as neither a partner nor an enemy of their country In six nations the balance of opinion is that China is a partner while no public included in the study characterizes China as an enemy This stands in stark contrast to the results from this same question when it was asked about the United States 8211people are much more likely to label the US as either a partner or an enemy The way in which people characterize their nation8217s relationship with China varies extensively across regions Pakistanis are especially likely to say China is a partner to their country as are Nigerians and Tanzanians A slim majority of South Africans also call China a partner In neighboring Russia about half of those surveyed 49 say China is a partner Fewer than onequarter of those in the survey8217s five European Union countries 8212 Britain France Germany Poland and Spain 8212 consider China a partner However Americans are the least likely to say China is a partner of their country and fully 20 characterize it as an enemy China is rated as an enemy by significant minorities in other countries as well including South Korea 28 Turkey 25 Egypt 24 Japan 23 and Mexico 22 Among the publics included in this survey there is a widely held view that China acts unilaterally in international affairs Majorities in 14 of 23 countries say that China does not take into account the interests of countries like theirs when making foreign policy decisions This view is prevalent in the US and among EU nations 8212 more than seveninten in France Spain and Britain and somewhat smaller majorities in Poland the US and Germany think China generally ignores their interests Majorities in the Middle East also agree with this perspective Opinions differ among the six Asian and Pacific countries 8212 Indians Pakistanis and Indonesians tend to believe China does consider the interests of countries like theirs while South Koreans Australians and Japanese overwhelmingly disagree Elsewhere Mexicans and Brazilians are divided on this question while Argentines tend to think China acts unilaterally In all three African nations on the other hand majorities believe China takes their interests into account While most of the publics in the survey believe China generally acts unilaterally the Chinese tend to have a very different impression of their country8217s approach to foreign policy When asked whether China takes into account the interests of other countries when making foreign policy decisions 83 of Chinese say they believe it does consider other countries a great deal or a fair amount In 2007 high profile recalls of toys and other Chinesemade products generated considerable media attention in the United States and other countries and as the results of this poll demonstrate in many countries there is a high level of awareness about these controversies With near unanimity 96 the Japanese say they are aware of the recalls of food and goods manufactured in China over the last year More than eightinten in both South Korea and the US have also heard a lot or a little about this issue Awareness is also widespread in Germany 72 a lot or a little Australia 66 and Indonesia 66 And majorities in Nigeria Britain Spain France Russia and India are familiar with this issue Few however in Latin America know about the recalls 8212 just 27 of Brazilians 26 of Mexicans and 14 in Argentina have heard something about this Awareness is also low in Pakistan 17 The survey finds considerable skepticism about the quality of Chinese products and this is true even in many countries where awareness of recalls of Chinese projects is low In 19 of 24 countries at least half of those surveyed say Chinese products are generally less safe than those produced elsewhere There is a consensus throughout much of the West that Chinese products are not as safe although here again Britain is something of an outlier 8212 just 50 of the British think Chinese projects are inferior to others in terms of safety Nearly threeinfour Americans equate 8220Made in China8221 with safety risks The South Koreans and Japanese are the least likely to say China8217s products are as safe In both countries roughly nineinten say they are generally less safe than those produced elsewhere Opinions are quite different however in China itself Overwhelmingly the Chinese public has confidence in its products 8212 65 say they are as safe as those from other countries while just 18 say they are less safe Within China there have been several highprofile recalls of Chinesemade products over the last year However relatively few among the Chinese public are aware of these domestic recalls Only 1 have heard a lot about this issue while another 15 say they have heard a little About fourinten 41 say they have not heard much and 27 report hearing nothing at all In contrast in many other nations large majorities are familiar with recent recalls of Chinese products in their countries Indeed 96 of Japanese 88 of South Koreans 81 of Americans and 72 of Germans have heard about this issue 1 For more on attitudes toward and within China as well as opinions on other political economic and cultural topics see 24Nation Pew Global Attitudes Survey Report 1 Global Economic Gloom 8211 China And India Notable Exceptions June 12 2008 and Report 2 The Chinese Celebrate Their Roaring Economy As They Struggle With Its Costs July 22 2008 from both of which this summary is excerpted 2 The survey in China was conducted from March 17April 21 2008 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<p>The war in Iraq passed a significant but little remarked anniversary this summer. The conflict that President Bush announced was effectively over on May 1, 2003 has now gone on longer than the First World War. Like that great conflict almost a century ago the Iraqi war has been marked by repeated claims that progress is being made and a final breakthrough is in the offing.</p>
<p>In 1917 the French commander General Robert Nivelle proudly announced “we have the formula for victory” before launching the French armies on a catastrophic offensive in which they were massacred. Units ordered to the front brayed like donkeys to show they saw themselves as being like animals led to the slaughter. Soon the soldiers broke into open mutiny.</p>
<p>On January 10 this year President Bush announced that he too now believed he had the formula for victory. In an address to the American nation he announced a new strategy for Iraq that became known as “the surge”. He said he was sending a further 20,000 US troops to Iraq.</p>
<p>With the same misguided enthusiasm as Gen Nivelle once expressed in his plan President Bush explained why “our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed” and why the new American formula would succeed: In the past US and Iraqi troops had cleared areas but when they moved on guerrillas returned. He said that in future American and allied troops would stay put.</p>
<p>As if the US was not facing enough enemies in Iraq Mr Bush pointed to Iran and Syria as the hidden hand sustaining the insurgency. “These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq,” he said. “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” He added in his State of the Union address on January 23 that Shia extremists are “just as hostile to America [as al Qaida], and are also determined to dominate the Middle East.” The implication was that US troops were going to move into areas like Sadr city, home to two million Shia Iraqis, in pursuit of the powerful Shia militia, the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.</p>
<p>Six months after the surge was launched on 14 February it has failed as dismally as so many First World War offensives. The US Defense Department says that this June the average number of attacks on US and Iraqi forces, civilian forces and infrastructure peaked at 177.8 per day, higher than in any month since the end of May 2003. The US has failed to gain control of Baghdad. The harvest of bodies picked up every morning first fell and then rose again. This may be because the Mehdi Army militia, who provided most of the Shia death squads, was stood down by Sadr.</p>
<p>Nobody in Baghdad has much doubt that they could be back in business any time they want. Whatever Mr Bush might say the US military commanders in Iraq clearly did not want to take on the Mehdi Army and the Shia community when they were barely holding their own against the Sunni.</p>
<p>The surge is now joining a host of discredited formulae for success and fake turning points that the US has promoted in Iraq over the last 52 months. In December 2003 there was the capture of Saddam Hussein. Six months later in June 2004 there was the return of Iraqi sovereignty to Iraq. “Let freedom reign,” said Mr Bush in a highly-publicised response though the present Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki claims he cannot move a company of soldiers without American permission.</p>
<p>In 2005 there were two elections that were both won handsomely by Shia and Kurdish parties. “Despite endess threats from the killers in Their midst,” exulted Mr Bush, “nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to Vote in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget.” In fact he himself forgot this almost immediately. A year later the US forced out the first democratically elected Shia prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, saying Mr Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, and doesn’t accept that Jaafari should form the next government.”</p>
<p>Fresh US initiatives in Iraq seemed to succeed each other about every six months. Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was not going anywhere very fast there came good news from Anbar province in west Iraq. The Sunni tribes were rising against al Qaida in Iraq which had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for insurgents called the Islamic State of Iraq.</p>
<p>In Sunni areas it was killing garbage collectors on the grounds they worked for the government, shooting women in the face because they were not wearing a veil and trying to draft one young man from each family into its forces. Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al Qaida in insurgent strongholds like Ramadi and attacks on US troops there fell away dramatically.</p>
<p>The US administration could portray this as a fresh turning point. It Had always pretended that the insurrection in Iraq was conducted largely by al Qaida. In reality, Anthony H. Cordesman, an Iraqi specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, points out that al Qaida’s attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in Iraq though they launch 80-90 per cent of the suicide bombings.</p>
<p>As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by the White House, the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is not quite what it seems. In practice it is a tactic fraught with dangers. In areas where they operate police are finding more and more bodies according to the Interior Ministry. Victims often appear to have been killed solely because they were Shia. The gunmen from the tribes are under American command and this weakens the authority of the the Iraqi government, army and police, institutions that the US is supposedly seeking to foster.</p>
<p>A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a cell phone and later appeared on Iraqi web sites. It shows a small man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group of angry men with sub-machine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers beneath their blows, trying to shield his face with his hands. One of his captors, who seems to be in command, asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called ‘Khalid’. After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a patch of waste ground 30 yards away and is executed with a burst of machine gunfire to the chest.</p>
<p>It is a measure of the desperation of the White House to show that the surge is having some success that it is now looking for succor to these Sunni fighters. Often they are former members of anti-American resistance groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Army of Islam whom Mr Bush has spent four years denouncing as murderous enemies of the Iraqi people.</p>
<p>To many Iraqi Shia and Kurds, 80 per cent of Iraqis, the US appears to be building up its own Sunni militia. So far from preventing civil war, a main justification for continued occupation, it is arming sectarian killers engaged in a sectarian murder campaign that is tearing Iraq apart.</p>
<p>The White House says it is too early to know if the surge is succeeding and it will wait for a security report due in September from Gen David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Iraq, and the US ambassador Ryan Crocker.</p>
<p>But the new strategy was never going to turn the tide in Iraq. Its main advantage for Mr Bush is that it puts off the moment when failure has to be admitted, a potentially disastrous confession for Republicans standing for election next year. If an American withdrawal can be postponed until after the poll then the neo-cons can blame the Democrats for a stab in the back, pulling out the troops at the very moment when victory was almost in their grasp.</p>
<p>I was in Baghdad in January when Mr Bush made his State of the Union speech outlining his plans for the surge. Iraqis were pessimistic from the beginning about its chances of success. A friend called Ismail gloomily remarked: “An extra 16,000 [sic] US troops are not going to be enough.” A Sunni, he had recently fled his house in the west of the capital because he was frightened of being arrested and tortured by the paramilitary police commandos whom he, like most Sunni, regarded as uniformed Shia death squads.</p>
<p>Baghdad was paralysed by fear.Drivers were terrified of being stopped at impromptu checkpoints where they might be dragged out of their car and killed for belonging to the wrong religion. Conversation was dominated by accounts of hare-breath escapes. Most people had at least one fake ID card so they could claim, depending on circumstance, to be either Sunni or Shia. This might not be enough. Some Shia checkpoints had a list of theological questions drawn up by a religious scholar which they would use to interrogate people whom they suspected of lying about being Shia.</p>
<p>It was extraordinary how little control the US forces and the Iraqi Army exercised over the very centre of the capital. There was black smoke rising from Haifa Street, a two mile long Sunni corridor just north of the Green Zone, which US forces had repeatedly invaded but failed to secure. A helicopter belonging to the security company Blackwater was shot down or crash-landed in the al-Fadhil district in the centre of Baghdad and the survivors were executed by insurgents before US forces could get to them. Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when al Qaida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians. It escalated over the next two years, but it was the bomb that destroyed the Shia shrine at Samarra on February 22, 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in Baghdad in which 1,300 Sunni were killed in a few days. A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest of the year and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it. My surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army, often used as a catch all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions, would launch a final ‘battle of Baghdad’ towipe out the remaining Sunni enclaves.</p>
<p>A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers. It reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US which were then passed on or sold to the insurgents.</p>
<p>US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet. In Baquba, a provincial capital north-east of Baghdad, US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link. Chiding media critics for their pessimism the generals claimed: “The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumors circulated by bad people.” Within hours Sunni insurgents, possibly irked by these self-congratulatory words, stormed Baquba, kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office.</p>
<p>The surge got underway in February and from the beginning Iraqi sceptics seemed to be in the right. Its most positive impact was that Muqtada al-Sadr decided not to risk an all out military confrontation between his Mehdi Army and the US army. He sent many of his senior lieutenants out of Baghdad, stood down his men and disappeared either to Iran, as the US claimed, or the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf, according to his followers.</p>
<p>The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad. Districts like al- Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off. But this probably achieved less than was intended because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in which half the people who work there live elsewhere. Joint security stations were set up in every neighborhood manned by US and Iraqi forces but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down many troops.</p>
<p>There was intense pressure on the US military and civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving they were forced to doff their helmets and body armor when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator’s assertions.</p>
<p>When Vice President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone the sirens giving early warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were deliberately kept silent during an attack to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America.</p>
<p>By the end of May I found it a little easier to drive through Central Baghdad. But the danger was still extreme. I sat in the back of the car with my jacket hanging on a hook just inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers to see me. Our car was pulled over by an army checkpoint. A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was. We were lucky. He looked a little surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly: “Keep well hidden.”</p>
<p>Back in my hotel I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was close to the government. “Be very careful,” he warned sharply. “Be very careful and above all do not trust the army and police.” There was an example of what he meant a few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry. They entered the building and calmly abducted five British Security men who have not been seen since. The kidnappers may be linked to a specialized unit of the Mehdi Army.</p>
<p>The surge has changed very little in Baghdad. It was always a cvollection of tactics rather than a strategy. All the main players – Sunni insurgents, Shia militiamen, Iraqi government, Kurds, Iran and Syria – are still in game.</p>
<p>One real bench-mark of progress or lack of it is the number of Iraqis who have fled for their lives and this figure is still going up. Over one million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) since the Samarra bombing according to the Red Crescent. A further 2.2 million people have fled the country. This exodus is bigger than anything ever seen in the Middle East, exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. A true sign of progress in Iraq will be when the number of refugees, inside and outside the country, starts to go down. The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace. It always made sense in terms of American but not Iraqi politics. It has become a cliche for US politicians to say there is a Washington clock and a Baghdad clock and they do not operate at the same speed. This has the patronising implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix problems within their country while the Americans are all get-up-and-go. But the reality is that it is not the clocks but the agendas that are different. The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary things.</p>
<p>The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him, something they were bound to do in fair elections because they are 60 per cent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran, America’s arch-enemy in the Middle East. This was the main reason why the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam Hussein’s armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him to savagely crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces.</p>
<p>Ever since 2003 the US has wrestled with this same problem. Unwittingly the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime. The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy but George W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order. This is why the US and Britain opted for a thorough going occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. They put off elections as long as they could. When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose a Shia-Kurdish government Washington tried to keep it under tight control.</p>
<p>“The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing but it is unsuccessful,” says Ahmed Chalabi, out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq. “Now the Americans and British want to disengage but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass: Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq.”</p>
<p>The hidden history of the last four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish government to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other. The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget but by the CIA.</p>
<p>Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realizes. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq Washington is ensuring that this vicious war goes on with no end in sight.</p>
<p>PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of ‘ <a href="" type="internal">The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq</a>‘, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. <a href="" type="internal" /></p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p /> | Why the Surge Has Failed | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/08/07/why-the-surge-has-failed/ | 2007-08-07 | 4left
| 3,060 | The war in Iraq passed a significant but little remarked anniversary this summer The conflict that President Bush announced was effectively over on May 1 2003 has now gone on longer than the First World War Like that great conflict almost a century ago the Iraqi war has been marked by repeated claims that progress is being made and a final breakthrough is in the offing In 1917 the French commander General Robert Nivelle proudly announced 8220we have the formula for victory8221 before launching the French armies on a catastrophic offensive in which they were massacred Units ordered to the front brayed like donkeys to show they saw themselves as being like animals led to the slaughter Soon the soldiers broke into open mutiny On January 10 this year President Bush announced that he too now believed he had the formula for victory In an address to the American nation he announced a new strategy for Iraq that became known as 8220the surge8221 He said he was sending a further 20000 US troops to Iraq With the same misguided enthusiasm as Gen Nivelle once expressed in his plan President Bush explained why 8220our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed8221 and why the new American formula would succeed In the past US and Iraqi troops had cleared areas but when they moved on guerrillas returned He said that in future American and allied troops would stay put As if the US was not facing enough enemies in Iraq Mr Bush pointed to Iran and Syria as the hidden hand sustaining the insurgency 8220These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq8221 he said 8220Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops8221 He added in his State of the Union address on January 23 that Shia extremists are 8220just as hostile to America as al Qaida and are also determined to dominate the Middle East8221 The implication was that US troops were going to move into areas like Sadr city home to two million Shia Iraqis in pursuit of the powerful Shia militia the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada alSadr Six months after the surge was launched on 14 February it has failed as dismally as so many First World War offensives The US Defense Department says that this June the average number of attacks on US and Iraqi forces civilian forces and infrastructure peaked at 1778 per day higher than in any month since the end of May 2003 The US has failed to gain control of Baghdad The harvest of bodies picked up every morning first fell and then rose again This may be because the Mehdi Army militia who provided most of the Shia death squads was stood down by Sadr Nobody in Baghdad has much doubt that they could be back in business any time they want Whatever Mr Bush might say the US military commanders in Iraq clearly did not want to take on the Mehdi Army and the Shia community when they were barely holding their own against the Sunni The surge is now joining a host of discredited formulae for success and fake turning points that the US has promoted in Iraq over the last 52 months In December 2003 there was the capture of Saddam Hussein Six months later in June 2004 there was the return of Iraqi sovereignty to Iraq 8220Let freedom reign8221 said Mr Bush in a highlypublicised response though the present Iraqi prime minister Nouri alMaliki claims he cannot move a company of soldiers without American permission In 2005 there were two elections that were both won handsomely by Shia and Kurdish parties 8220Despite endess threats from the killers in Their midst8221 exulted Mr Bush 8220nearly 12 million Iraqi citizens came out to Vote in a show of hope and solidarity that we should never forget8221 In fact he himself forgot this almost immediately A year later the US forced out the first democratically elected Shia prime minister Ibrahim alJaafari with the US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad saying Mr Bush 8220doesn8217t want doesn8217t support and doesn8217t accept that Jaafari should form the next government8221 Fresh US initiatives in Iraq seemed to succeed each other about every six months Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was not going anywhere very fast there came good news from Anbar province in west Iraq The Sunni tribes were rising against al Qaida in Iraq which had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for insurgents called the Islamic State of Iraq In Sunni areas it was killing garbage collectors on the grounds they worked for the government shooting women in the face because they were not wearing a veil and trying to draft one young man from each family into its forces Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al Qaida in insurgent strongholds like Ramadi and attacks on US troops there fell away dramatically The US administration could portray this as a fresh turning point It Had always pretended that the insurrection in Iraq was conducted largely by al Qaida In reality Anthony H Cordesman an Iraqi specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington points out that al Qaida8217s attacks make up only 15 per cent of the total in Iraq though they launch 8090 per cent of the suicide bombings As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by the White House the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is not quite what it seems In practice it is a tactic fraught with dangers In areas where they operate police are finding more and more bodies according to the Interior Ministry Victims often appear to have been killed solely because they were Shia The gunmen from the tribes are under American command and this weakens the authority of the the Iraqi government army and police institutions that the US is supposedly seeking to foster A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a cell phone and later appeared on Iraqi web sites It shows a small man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group of angry men with submachine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers beneath their blows trying to shield his face with his hands One of his captors who seems to be in command asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called 8216Khalid8217 After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a patch of waste ground 30 yards away and is executed with a burst of machine gunfire to the chest It is a measure of the desperation of the White House to show that the surge is having some success that it is now looking for succor to these Sunni fighters Often they are former members of antiAmerican resistance groups such as the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Army of Islam whom Mr Bush has spent four years denouncing as murderous enemies of the Iraqi people To many Iraqi Shia and Kurds 80 per cent of Iraqis the US appears to be building up its own Sunni militia So far from preventing civil war a main justification for continued occupation it is arming sectarian killers engaged in a sectarian murder campaign that is tearing Iraq apart The White House says it is too early to know if the surge is succeeding and it will wait for a security report due in September from Gen David Petraeus the top US military commander in Iraq and the US ambassador Ryan Crocker But the new strategy was never going to turn the tide in Iraq Its main advantage for Mr Bush is that it puts off the moment when failure has to be admitted a potentially disastrous confession for Republicans standing for election next year If an American withdrawal can be postponed until after the poll then the neocons can blame the Democrats for a stab in the back pulling out the troops at the very moment when victory was almost in their grasp I was in Baghdad in January when Mr Bush made his State of the Union speech outlining his plans for the surge Iraqis were pessimistic from the beginning about its chances of success A friend called Ismail gloomily remarked 8220An extra 16000 sic US troops are not going to be enough8221 A Sunni he had recently fled his house in the west of the capital because he was frightened of being arrested and tortured by the paramilitary police commandos whom he like most Sunni regarded as uniformed Shia death squads Baghdad was paralysed by fearDrivers were terrified of being stopped at impromptu checkpoints where they might be dragged out of their car and killed for belonging to the wrong religion Conversation was dominated by accounts of harebreath escapes Most people had at least one fake ID card so they could claim depending on circumstance to be either Sunni or Shia This might not be enough Some Shia checkpoints had a list of theological questions drawn up by a religious scholar which they would use to interrogate people whom they suspected of lying about being Shia It was extraordinary how little control the US forces and the Iraqi Army exercised over the very centre of the capital There was black smoke rising from Haifa Street a two mile long Sunni corridor just north of the Green Zone which US forces had repeatedly invaded but failed to secure A helicopter belonging to the security company Blackwater was shot down or crashlanded in the alFadhil district in the centre of Baghdad and the survivors were executed by insurgents before US forces could get to them Sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni began in August 2003 when al Qaida suicide bombers started targeting Shia civilians It escalated over the next two years but it was the bomb that destroyed the Shia shrine at Samarra on February 22 2006 that unleashed a Shia pogrom in Baghdad in which 1300 Sunni were killed in a few days A struggle for the capital was waged between the two sects for the rest of the year and by January 2007 the Shia had largely won it My surviving Sunni friends were terrified that the Mehdi Army often used as a catch all phrase to describe Shia militiamen of all descriptions would launch a final 8216battle of Baghdad8217 towipe out the remaining Sunni enclaves A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents Outside Kurdistan it has no dependable allies Among Iraqi Arabs both Shia and Sunni the occupation is unpopular A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers It reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US which were then passed on or sold to the insurgents US commanders are often cheery believers in their own propaganda even as the ground is giving way beneath their feet In Baquba a provincial capital northeast of Baghdad US and Iraqi army commanders praised their own achievements at a press conference held over a video link Chiding media critics for their pessimism the generals claimed 8220The situation in Baquba is reassuring and is under control but there are some rumors circulated by bad people8221 Within hours Sunni insurgents possibly irked by these selfcongratulatory words stormed Baquba kidnapped the mayor and blew up his office The surge got underway in February and from the beginning Iraqi sceptics seemed to be in the right Its most positive impact was that Muqtada alSadr decided not to risk an all out military confrontation between his Mehdi Army and the US army He sent many of his senior lieutenants out of Baghdad stood down his men and disappeared either to Iran as the US claimed or the holy cities of Kufa and Najaf according to his followers The Sunni bore the brunt of the surge in Baghdad Districts like al Adhamiyah in east Baghdad were sealed off But this probably achieved less than was intended because Adhamiyah is a commercial district in which half the people who work there live elsewhere Joint security stations were set up in every neighborhood manned by US and Iraqi forces but these posts seem ineffectual and tie down many troops There was intense pressure on the US military and civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding US embassy staff complained that when prowar Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving they were forced to doff their helmets and body armor when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator8217s assertions When Vice President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone the sirens giving early warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were deliberately kept silent during an attack to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America By the end of May I found it a little easier to drive through Central Baghdad But the danger was still extreme I sat in the back of the car with my jacket hanging on a hook just inside the window so it was difficult for other drivers to see me Our car was pulled over by an army checkpoint A soldier leaned in the window and asked who I was We were lucky He looked a little surprised when told I was a foreign journalist and said softly 8220Keep well hidden8221 Back in my hotel I phoned an Iraqi friend in the Green Zone who was close to the government 8220Be very careful8221 he warned sharply 8220Be very careful and above all do not trust the army and police8221 There was an example of what he meant a few days later when a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying 40 uniformed policemen arrived in the forecourt of the Finance Ministry They entered the building and calmly abducted five British Security men who have not been seen since The kidnappers may be linked to a specialized unit of the Mehdi Army The surge has changed very little in Baghdad It was always a cvollection of tactics rather than a strategy All the main players 8211 Sunni insurgents Shia militiamen Iraqi government Kurds Iran and Syria 8211 are still in game One real benchmark of progress or lack of it is the number of Iraqis who have fled for their lives and this figure is still going up Over one million Iraqis have become Internally Displaced Persons IDPs since the Samarra bombing according to the Red Crescent A further 22 million people have fled the country This exodus is bigger than anything ever seen in the Middle East exceeding in size even the flight or expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 A true sign of progress in Iraq will be when the number of refugees inside and outside the country starts to go down The surge was never going to bring Iraq nearer to peace It always made sense in terms of American but not Iraqi politics It has become a cliche for US politicians to say there is a Washington clock and a Baghdad clock and they do not operate at the same speed This has the patronising implication that Iraqis are slothful in moving to fix problems within their country while the Americans are all getupandgo But the reality is that it is not the clocks but the agendas that are different The Americans and the Iraqis want contrary things The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him something they were bound to do in fair elections because they are 60 per cent of the population Worse the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran America8217s archenemy in the Middle East This was the main reason why the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam Hussein8217s armies in Kuwait in 1991 It then allowed him to savagely crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces Ever since 2003 the US has wrestled with this same problem Unwittingly the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime The Bush family has always been close to the Saudi monarchy but George W Bush dismantled a cornerstone of the Sunni Arab security order This is why the US and Britain opted for a thorough going occupation of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein They put off elections as long as they could When elections were held in 2005 and voters overwhelmingly chose a ShiaKurdish government Washington tried to keep it under tight control 8220The US and Britain have a policy of trying to fill the vacuum left by the Baath disappearing but it is unsuccessful8221 says Ahmed Chalabi out of office but still one of the most astute political minds in Iraq 8220Now the Americans and British want to disengage but if they do so the worst fears of their Arab allies will come to pass Shia control and strong Iranian influence in Iraq8221 The hidden history of the last four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the ShiaKurdish government to win a total victory It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget but by the CIA Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realizes The US is trying to limit the extent of the ShiaKurdish victory but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq Washington is ensuring that this vicious war goes on with no end in sight PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of 8216 The Occupation War resistance and daily life in Iraq8216 a finalist for the National Book Critics8217 Circle Award for best nonfiction book of 2006 | The/DET war/NOUN in/ADP Iraq/PROPN passed/VERB a/DET significant/ADJ but/CCONJ little/ADJ remarked/VERB anniversary/NOUN this/DET summer/NOUN The/DET conflict/NOUN that/PRON President/PROPN Bush/PROPN announced/VERB was/AUX effectively/ADV over/ADV on/ADP May/PROPN 1/NUM 2003/NUM has/AUX now/ADV gone/VERB on/ADP longer/ADV than/ADP the/DET First/PROPN World/PROPN War/PROPN Like/ADP that/DET great/ADJ conflict/NOUN almost/ADV a/PRON century/NOUN ago/ADV the/DET Iraqi/ADJ war/NOUN has/AUX been/AUX marked/VERB by/ADP repeated/VERB claims/NOUN that/SCONJ progress/NOUN is/AUX 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<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The Latest on Wednesday from the Australian Open (all times local):</p>
<p>10:50 p.m.</p>
<p>Top-seeded Andy Murray tumbled to the ground and hurt his right ankle early in the third set of his second-round win over Andrey Rublev at the Australian Open on Wednesday night.</p>
<p>He spoke to the trainer after that game, but didn’t need medical attention and went on to win 6-3, 6-0, 6-2.</p>
<p>A five-time runner-up at the season’s first major, Murray caught the sole of his right shoe on the court and tripped to the ground during the third game. He clutched his right ankle as he rolled on to the court and later was checked out by an ATP trainer during a medical time out.</p>
<p>After taking a 4-1 lead in the final set, Murray went to his courtside chair and said: “I’m all right.”</p>
<p>“It’s a little bit sore, not too serious,” he said in his post-match interview. “I definitely rolled it (but) I was moving OK toward the end, so that’s positive.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>9:35 p.m.</p>
<p>Andreas Seppi rallied from two sets down and saved a match point to beat an unpredictable Nick Kyrgios 1-6, 6-7 (1), 6-4, 6-2, 10-8 in a second-round match Wednesday at the Australian Open.</p>
<p>No. 14-seeded Kyrgios was broken in the 11th game of the final set. Serving for the match at 6-5, Seppi was broken in a game that started with a high-risk, between-the-legs shot by Kyrgios. The Australian won the point.</p>
<p>Two games later, Seppi saved a match point with a stunning forehand down the line and then held. The pressure was back on Kyrgios, who double-faulted on break point to hand Seppi a 9-8 lead.</p>
<p>The 89th-ranked Seppi clinched 3 hour, 9 minute match with an ace in the next game.</p>
<p>Kyrgios, tipped to have all the talent to win a Grand Slam title but not the temperament, was suspended by the ATP Tour following the Shanghai Masters in October when he sped through a match against Mischa Zverev with little effort or apparent care whether he won or lost.</p>
<p>Krygios was fined more than US$40,000 and suspended for eight weeks, a period that was later reduced to three when he agreed to consult with a sports psychologist.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>8:55 p.m.</p>
<p>French Open champion Garbine Muguruza has advanced to the third round at the Australian Open with a 7-5, 6-4 win over American Samantha Crawford. Muguruza clinched the match on her first match point when Crawford netted a forehand.</p>
<p>The Spaniard will play Anastasija Sevastova in the third round.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>6:35 p.m.</p>
<p>It’s been a disappointing day for the American men at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>John Isner, the highest-seeded U.S. player in the men’s draw, wasted a two-set-to-none lead and lost in the second round to Mischa Zverev of Germany, 6-7 (4), 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (7), 9-7.</p>
<p>Isner had 98 winners in the 4-hour, 10-minute match, but only converted one of 17 breakpoint chances against Zverev.</p>
<p>Isner was joined on the sidelines by Steve Johnson, Noah Rubin and Ryan Harrison — all second-round losers on Wednesday afternoon.</p>
<p>The one bright spot for the U.S. was 31st-seeded Sam Querrey, who advanced with a 7-6 (5), 6-0, 6-1 win over Australian wild card Alex De Minaur.</p>
<p>Jack Sock, the 23rd seed, was playing later against Karen Khachanov of Russia.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>5:35 p.m.</p>
<p>After winning the first two sets of his second-round match, Roger Federer had to really go to work in the third, recovering from 5-2 down and fending off two set points to defeat American qualifier Noah Rubin 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (3).</p>
<p>He held serve at love to force the tiebreaker and, after it got to 3-3, reeled off the last four points to clinch the match in 2 hours, 4 minutes.</p>
<p>Federer is a four-time Australian Open champion but hasn’t lifted the trophy since 2010. In 18 trips to Melbourne Park, he’s never failed to reach the third round.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>5:15 p.m.</p>
<p>Eugenie Bouchard is back in the third round at Melbourne Park for the first time in two years, defeating China’s Peng Shuai 7-6 (5), 6-2.</p>
<p>Bouchard, who reached the semifinals of the Australian Open in 2014, finally closed it out after Peng saved three match points on the Canadian’s serve at 5-1 in the second set.</p>
<p>Following her break-out year in 2014, which also saw her reach the Wimbledon final, Bouchard struggled to make it past the fourth round at the slams. Her best result last year was the third round at Wimbledon.</p>
<p>Her next opponent will be either CoCo Vandeweghe or Pauline Parmentier, who played later Wednesday.</p>
<p>“Overall, I’m feeling better with each passing day,” Bouchard said.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>4:35 p.m.</p>
<p>Fourth-seeded Stan Wawrinka is into the third round of the Australian Open for the ninth consecutive year after a 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 win over American Steve Johnson on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Wawrinka won his first Grand Slam title at Melbourne Park in 2014 and has followed that up with two more majors — the French Open in 2015 and the U.S. Open last year.</p>
<p>The 31-year-old Wawrinka labored through five sets to win his first-round match against Martin Klizan in 3 hours, 24 minutes. He had a much easier time in the second round, beating Johnson in 1 hour, 52 minutes.</p>
<p>Wawrinka will next play either Viktor Troicki or Paolo Lorenzi.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>3:15 p.m.</p>
<p>Defending champion Angelique Kerber marked her 29th birthday — angrily at times — with a 6-2, 6-7 (3), 6-2 win Wednesday over fellow German Carina Witthoeft.</p>
<p>Kerber, who beat Serena Williams in the Australian Open final last year, then won the U.S. Open in September, was her own worst enemy in the tiebreaker, double-faulting twice to turn a 3-2 lead into a 4-3 deficit.</p>
<p>Witthoeft, who had won a long rally which caused Kerber to swipe her racket toward the court just ahead of the double faults, won the next three points to level the match.</p>
<p>Kerber also started poorly in the third set, dropping her service, but rebounded to take a 4-1 lead, saving two break points in the fifth game, before closing out the match in 2 hours, 8 minutes.</p>
<p>She will next play the winner of Wednesday’s second-round match between Kristyna Pliskova and Irina-Camelia Begu.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>1:55 p.m.</p>
<p>Serena and Venus Williams have pulled out of their scheduled first-round doubles match because of a right elbow injury to Venus, who won her singles match earlier Wednesday in straight sets over Stefanie Voegele.</p>
<p>The Williams sisters were set to play Timea Babos and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in a Show Court 2 match on Wednesday afternoon. The Australian Open confirmed the withdrawal on social media.</p>
<p>The American pair also withdrew from their first-round doubles match in 2015 at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>The Williams sisters have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together, including four at the Australian Open.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>1:20 p.m.</p>
<p>Kei Nishikori advanced to the third round in a far more straightforward manner than his five-set opener earlier this week.</p>
<p>The fifth-seeded Nishikori defeated Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 in just over two hours to reach the third round for the seventh consecutive year.</p>
<p>On Monday, he needed 3 1-2 hours before beating Andrey Kuznetsov in the first round.</p>
<p>“(I) was definitely playing much better than first round today,” he said Wednesday. “There were many ups and downs, still too many break points for me. Great to finish in three sets.”</p>
<p>Nishikori has reached the quarterfinals three times at Melbourne Park, but has never advanced beyond that stage. He could play top-seeded Andy Murray in the quarterfinals this year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>12:40 p.m.</p>
<p>Venus Williams, a first-round loser in 2016 at Melbourne Park, is one of the first players into the third round this year after beating Stefanie Voegele 6-3, 6-2 to begin play at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Williams maintained a perfect 3-0 record against the Swiss player, having beaten her on clay at Madrid, grass at Wimbledon and now hard courts in the year’s first Grand Slam tournament.</p>
<p>Voegele wasn’t helped by four double-faults in the opening set. In the second, Williams broke Voegele’s service with a blistering forehand to the open court to take a 3-1 lead, then broke her serve again in the final game.</p>
<p>Williams lost to eventual semifinalist Johanna Konta in the opening round last year.</p>
<p>The older sister of Serena Williams, Venus Williams has never won the Australian Open. She lost the 2003 final to Serena. Venus’ best recent finish here was a quarterfinal appearance in 2015.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>11:15 a.m.</p>
<p>Defending champion Angelique Kerber and top-seeded Andy Murray play their second-round matches on Wednesday in much more pleasant temperatures at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>A cool change hit the city overnight, dropping temperatures from 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday afternoon to about 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) when play began Wednesday.</p>
<p>Venus Williams was first up on Rod Laver Arena, playing Stefanie Voegele of Switzerland. Kerber was to follow against fellow German Carina Witthoeft, followed by Roger Federer against American qualifier Noah Rubin.</p>
<p>Murray was scheduled to play the last match on Wednesday night at Rod Laver.</p>
<p>Venus and Serena Williams were scheduled to play their opening doubles match on Wednesday afternoon.</p>
<p>MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — The Latest on Wednesday from the Australian Open (all times local):</p>
<p>10:50 p.m.</p>
<p>Top-seeded Andy Murray tumbled to the ground and hurt his right ankle early in the third set of his second-round win over Andrey Rublev at the Australian Open on Wednesday night.</p>
<p>He spoke to the trainer after that game, but didn’t need medical attention and went on to win 6-3, 6-0, 6-2.</p>
<p>A five-time runner-up at the season’s first major, Murray caught the sole of his right shoe on the court and tripped to the ground during the third game. He clutched his right ankle as he rolled on to the court and later was checked out by an ATP trainer during a medical time out.</p>
<p>After taking a 4-1 lead in the final set, Murray went to his courtside chair and said: “I’m all right.”</p>
<p>“It’s a little bit sore, not too serious,” he said in his post-match interview. “I definitely rolled it (but) I was moving OK toward the end, so that’s positive.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>9:35 p.m.</p>
<p>Andreas Seppi rallied from two sets down and saved a match point to beat an unpredictable Nick Kyrgios 1-6, 6-7 (1), 6-4, 6-2, 10-8 in a second-round match Wednesday at the Australian Open.</p>
<p>No. 14-seeded Kyrgios was broken in the 11th game of the final set. Serving for the match at 6-5, Seppi was broken in a game that started with a high-risk, between-the-legs shot by Kyrgios. The Australian won the point.</p>
<p>Two games later, Seppi saved a match point with a stunning forehand down the line and then held. The pressure was back on Kyrgios, who double-faulted on break point to hand Seppi a 9-8 lead.</p>
<p>The 89th-ranked Seppi clinched 3 hour, 9 minute match with an ace in the next game.</p>
<p>Kyrgios, tipped to have all the talent to win a Grand Slam title but not the temperament, was suspended by the ATP Tour following the Shanghai Masters in October when he sped through a match against Mischa Zverev with little effort or apparent care whether he won or lost.</p>
<p>Krygios was fined more than US$40,000 and suspended for eight weeks, a period that was later reduced to three when he agreed to consult with a sports psychologist.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>8:55 p.m.</p>
<p>French Open champion Garbine Muguruza has advanced to the third round at the Australian Open with a 7-5, 6-4 win over American Samantha Crawford. Muguruza clinched the match on her first match point when Crawford netted a forehand.</p>
<p>The Spaniard will play Anastasija Sevastova in the third round.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>6:35 p.m.</p>
<p>It’s been a disappointing day for the American men at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>John Isner, the highest-seeded U.S. player in the men’s draw, wasted a two-set-to-none lead and lost in the second round to Mischa Zverev of Germany, 6-7 (4), 6-7 (4), 6-4, 7-6 (7), 9-7.</p>
<p>Isner had 98 winners in the 4-hour, 10-minute match, but only converted one of 17 breakpoint chances against Zverev.</p>
<p>Isner was joined on the sidelines by Steve Johnson, Noah Rubin and Ryan Harrison — all second-round losers on Wednesday afternoon.</p>
<p>The one bright spot for the U.S. was 31st-seeded Sam Querrey, who advanced with a 7-6 (5), 6-0, 6-1 win over Australian wild card Alex De Minaur.</p>
<p>Jack Sock, the 23rd seed, was playing later against Karen Khachanov of Russia.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>5:35 p.m.</p>
<p>After winning the first two sets of his second-round match, Roger Federer had to really go to work in the third, recovering from 5-2 down and fending off two set points to defeat American qualifier Noah Rubin 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (3).</p>
<p>He held serve at love to force the tiebreaker and, after it got to 3-3, reeled off the last four points to clinch the match in 2 hours, 4 minutes.</p>
<p>Federer is a four-time Australian Open champion but hasn’t lifted the trophy since 2010. In 18 trips to Melbourne Park, he’s never failed to reach the third round.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>5:15 p.m.</p>
<p>Eugenie Bouchard is back in the third round at Melbourne Park for the first time in two years, defeating China’s Peng Shuai 7-6 (5), 6-2.</p>
<p>Bouchard, who reached the semifinals of the Australian Open in 2014, finally closed it out after Peng saved three match points on the Canadian’s serve at 5-1 in the second set.</p>
<p>Following her break-out year in 2014, which also saw her reach the Wimbledon final, Bouchard struggled to make it past the fourth round at the slams. Her best result last year was the third round at Wimbledon.</p>
<p>Her next opponent will be either CoCo Vandeweghe or Pauline Parmentier, who played later Wednesday.</p>
<p>“Overall, I’m feeling better with each passing day,” Bouchard said.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>4:35 p.m.</p>
<p>Fourth-seeded Stan Wawrinka is into the third round of the Australian Open for the ninth consecutive year after a 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 win over American Steve Johnson on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Wawrinka won his first Grand Slam title at Melbourne Park in 2014 and has followed that up with two more majors — the French Open in 2015 and the U.S. Open last year.</p>
<p>The 31-year-old Wawrinka labored through five sets to win his first-round match against Martin Klizan in 3 hours, 24 minutes. He had a much easier time in the second round, beating Johnson in 1 hour, 52 minutes.</p>
<p>Wawrinka will next play either Viktor Troicki or Paolo Lorenzi.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>3:15 p.m.</p>
<p>Defending champion Angelique Kerber marked her 29th birthday — angrily at times — with a 6-2, 6-7 (3), 6-2 win Wednesday over fellow German Carina Witthoeft.</p>
<p>Kerber, who beat Serena Williams in the Australian Open final last year, then won the U.S. Open in September, was her own worst enemy in the tiebreaker, double-faulting twice to turn a 3-2 lead into a 4-3 deficit.</p>
<p>Witthoeft, who had won a long rally which caused Kerber to swipe her racket toward the court just ahead of the double faults, won the next three points to level the match.</p>
<p>Kerber also started poorly in the third set, dropping her service, but rebounded to take a 4-1 lead, saving two break points in the fifth game, before closing out the match in 2 hours, 8 minutes.</p>
<p>She will next play the winner of Wednesday’s second-round match between Kristyna Pliskova and Irina-Camelia Begu.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>1:55 p.m.</p>
<p>Serena and Venus Williams have pulled out of their scheduled first-round doubles match because of a right elbow injury to Venus, who won her singles match earlier Wednesday in straight sets over Stefanie Voegele.</p>
<p>The Williams sisters were set to play Timea Babos and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in a Show Court 2 match on Wednesday afternoon. The Australian Open confirmed the withdrawal on social media.</p>
<p>The American pair also withdrew from their first-round doubles match in 2015 at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>The Williams sisters have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together, including four at the Australian Open.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>1:20 p.m.</p>
<p>Kei Nishikori advanced to the third round in a far more straightforward manner than his five-set opener earlier this week.</p>
<p>The fifth-seeded Nishikori defeated Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 in just over two hours to reach the third round for the seventh consecutive year.</p>
<p>On Monday, he needed 3 1-2 hours before beating Andrey Kuznetsov in the first round.</p>
<p>“(I) was definitely playing much better than first round today,” he said Wednesday. “There were many ups and downs, still too many break points for me. Great to finish in three sets.”</p>
<p>Nishikori has reached the quarterfinals three times at Melbourne Park, but has never advanced beyond that stage. He could play top-seeded Andy Murray in the quarterfinals this year.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>12:40 p.m.</p>
<p>Venus Williams, a first-round loser in 2016 at Melbourne Park, is one of the first players into the third round this year after beating Stefanie Voegele 6-3, 6-2 to begin play at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Williams maintained a perfect 3-0 record against the Swiss player, having beaten her on clay at Madrid, grass at Wimbledon and now hard courts in the year’s first Grand Slam tournament.</p>
<p>Voegele wasn’t helped by four double-faults in the opening set. In the second, Williams broke Voegele’s service with a blistering forehand to the open court to take a 3-1 lead, then broke her serve again in the final game.</p>
<p>Williams lost to eventual semifinalist Johanna Konta in the opening round last year.</p>
<p>The older sister of Serena Williams, Venus Williams has never won the Australian Open. She lost the 2003 final to Serena. Venus’ best recent finish here was a quarterfinal appearance in 2015.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>11:15 a.m.</p>
<p>Defending champion Angelique Kerber and top-seeded Andy Murray play their second-round matches on Wednesday in much more pleasant temperatures at Melbourne Park.</p>
<p>A cool change hit the city overnight, dropping temperatures from 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) on Tuesday afternoon to about 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) when play began Wednesday.</p>
<p>Venus Williams was first up on Rod Laver Arena, playing Stefanie Voegele of Switzerland. Kerber was to follow against fellow German Carina Witthoeft, followed by Roger Federer against American qualifier Noah Rubin.</p>
<p>Murray was scheduled to play the last match on Wednesday night at Rod Laver.</p>
<p>Venus and Serena Williams were scheduled to play their opening doubles match on Wednesday afternoon.</p> | The Latest: Murray turns ankle during win, appears to be OK | false | https://apnews.com/61d554c6e9ea445a8888ade6cfcc718f | 2017-01-18 | 2least
| 3,060 | MELBOURNE Australia AP 8212 The Latest on Wednesday from the Australian Open all times local 1050 pm Topseeded Andy Murray tumbled to the ground and hurt his right ankle early in the third set of his secondround win over Andrey Rublev at the Australian Open on Wednesday night He spoke to the trainer after that game but didn8217t need medical attention and went on to win 63 60 62 A fivetime runnerup at the season8217s first major Murray caught the sole of his right shoe on the court and tripped to the ground during the third game He clutched his right ankle as he rolled on to the court and later was checked out by an ATP trainer during a medical time out After taking a 41 lead in the final set Murray went to his courtside chair and said 8220I8217m all right8221 8220It8217s a little bit sore not too serious8221 he said in his postmatch interview 8220I definitely rolled it but I was moving OK toward the end so that8217s positive8221 ___ 935 pm Andreas Seppi rallied from two sets down and saved a match point to beat an unpredictable Nick Kyrgios 16 67 1 64 62 108 in a secondround match Wednesday at the Australian Open No 14seeded Kyrgios was broken in the 11th game of the final set Serving for the match at 65 Seppi was broken in a game that started with a highrisk betweenthelegs shot by Kyrgios The Australian won the point Two games later Seppi saved a match point with a stunning forehand down the line and then held The pressure was back on Kyrgios who doublefaulted on break point to hand Seppi a 98 lead The 89thranked Seppi clinched 3 hour 9 minute match with an ace in the next game Kyrgios tipped to have all the talent to win a Grand Slam title but not the temperament was suspended by the ATP Tour following the Shanghai Masters in October when he sped through a match against Mischa Zverev with little effort or apparent care whether he won or lost Krygios was fined more than US40000 and suspended for eight weeks a period that was later reduced to three when he agreed to consult with a sports psychologist ___ 855 pm French Open champion Garbine Muguruza has advanced to the third round at the Australian Open with a 75 64 win over American Samantha Crawford Muguruza clinched the match on her first match point when Crawford netted a forehand The Spaniard will play Anastasija Sevastova in the third round ___ 635 pm It8217s been a disappointing day for the American men at Melbourne Park John Isner the highestseeded US player in the men8217s draw wasted a twosettonone lead and lost in the second round to Mischa Zverev of Germany 67 4 67 4 64 76 7 97 Isner had 98 winners in the 4hour 10minute match but only converted one of 17 breakpoint chances against Zverev Isner was joined on the sidelines by Steve Johnson Noah Rubin and Ryan Harrison 8212 all secondround losers on Wednesday afternoon The one bright spot for the US was 31stseeded Sam Querrey who advanced with a 76 5 60 61 win over Australian wild card Alex De Minaur Jack Sock the 23rd seed was playing later against Karen Khachanov of Russia ___ 535 pm After winning the first two sets of his secondround match Roger Federer had to really go to work in the third recovering from 52 down and fending off two set points to defeat American qualifier Noah Rubin 75 63 76 3 He held serve at love to force the tiebreaker and after it got to 33 reeled off the last four points to clinch the match in 2 hours 4 minutes Federer is a fourtime Australian Open champion but hasn8217t lifted the trophy since 2010 In 18 trips to Melbourne Park he8217s never failed to reach the third round ___ 515 pm Eugenie Bouchard is back in the third round at Melbourne Park for the first time in two years defeating China8217s Peng Shuai 76 5 62 Bouchard who reached the semifinals of the Australian Open in 2014 finally closed it out after Peng saved three match points on the Canadian8217s serve at 51 in the second set Following her breakout year in 2014 which also saw her reach the Wimbledon final Bouchard struggled to make it past the fourth round at the slams Her best result last year was the third round at Wimbledon Her next opponent will be either CoCo Vandeweghe or Pauline Parmentier who played later Wednesday 8220Overall I8217m feeling better with each passing day8221 Bouchard said ___ 435 pm Fourthseeded Stan Wawrinka is into the third round of the Australian Open for the ninth consecutive year after a 63 64 64 win over American Steve Johnson on Wednesday Wawrinka won his first Grand Slam title at Melbourne Park in 2014 and has followed that up with two more majors 8212 the French Open in 2015 and the US Open last year The 31yearold Wawrinka labored through five sets to win his firstround match against Martin Klizan in 3 hours 24 minutes He had a much easier time in the second round beating Johnson in 1 hour 52 minutes Wawrinka will next play either Viktor Troicki or Paolo Lorenzi ___ 315 pm Defending champion Angelique Kerber marked her 29th birthday 8212 angrily at times 8212 with a 62 67 3 62 win Wednesday over fellow German Carina Witthoeft Kerber who beat Serena Williams in the Australian Open final last year then won the US Open in September was her own worst enemy in the tiebreaker doublefaulting twice to turn a 32 lead into a 43 deficit Witthoeft who had won a long rally which caused Kerber to swipe her racket toward the court just ahead of the double faults won the next three points to level the match Kerber also started poorly in the third set dropping her service but rebounded to take a 41 lead saving two break points in the fifth game before closing out the match in 2 hours 8 minutes She will next play the winner of Wednesday8217s secondround match between Kristyna Pliskova and IrinaCamelia Begu ___ 155 pm Serena and Venus Williams have pulled out of their scheduled firstround doubles match because of a right elbow injury to Venus who won her singles match earlier Wednesday in straight sets over Stefanie Voegele The Williams sisters were set to play Timea Babos and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in a Show Court 2 match on Wednesday afternoon The Australian Open confirmed the withdrawal on social media The American pair also withdrew from their firstround doubles match in 2015 at Melbourne Park The Williams sisters have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together including four at the Australian Open ___ 120 pm Kei Nishikori advanced to the third round in a far more straightforward manner than his fiveset opener earlier this week The fifthseeded Nishikori defeated Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 63 64 63 in just over two hours to reach the third round for the seventh consecutive year On Monday he needed 3 12 hours before beating Andrey Kuznetsov in the first round 8220I was definitely playing much better than first round today8221 he said Wednesday 8220There were many ups and downs still too many break points for me Great to finish in three sets8221 Nishikori has reached the quarterfinals three times at Melbourne Park but has never advanced beyond that stage He could play topseeded Andy Murray in the quarterfinals this year ___ 1240 pm Venus Williams a firstround loser in 2016 at Melbourne Park is one of the first players into the third round this year after beating Stefanie Voegele 63 62 to begin play at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday Williams maintained a perfect 30 record against the Swiss player having beaten her on clay at Madrid grass at Wimbledon and now hard courts in the year8217s first Grand Slam tournament Voegele wasn8217t helped by four doublefaults in the opening set In the second Williams broke Voegele8217s service with a blistering forehand to the open court to take a 31 lead then broke her serve again in the final game Williams lost to eventual semifinalist Johanna Konta in the opening round last year The older sister of Serena Williams Venus Williams has never won the Australian Open She lost the 2003 final to Serena Venus8217 best recent finish here was a quarterfinal appearance in 2015 ___ 1115 am Defending champion Angelique Kerber and topseeded Andy Murray play their secondround matches on Wednesday in much more pleasant temperatures at Melbourne Park A cool change hit the city overnight dropping temperatures from 38 Celsius 100 Fahrenheit on Tuesday afternoon to about 20 Celsius 68 Fahrenheit when play began Wednesday Venus Williams was first up on Rod Laver Arena playing Stefanie Voegele of Switzerland Kerber was to follow against fellow German Carina Witthoeft followed by Roger Federer against American qualifier Noah Rubin Murray was scheduled to play the last match on Wednesday night at Rod Laver Venus and Serena Williams were scheduled to play their opening doubles match on Wednesday afternoon MELBOURNE Australia AP 8212 The Latest on Wednesday from the Australian Open all times local 1050 pm Topseeded Andy Murray tumbled to the ground and hurt his right ankle early in the third set of his secondround win over Andrey Rublev at the Australian Open on Wednesday night He spoke to the trainer after that game but didn8217t need medical attention and went on to win 63 60 62 A fivetime runnerup at the season8217s first major Murray caught the sole of his right shoe on the court and tripped to the ground during the third game He clutched his right ankle as he rolled on to the court and later was checked out by an ATP trainer during a medical time out After taking a 41 lead in the final set Murray went to his courtside chair and said 8220I8217m all right8221 8220It8217s a little bit sore not too serious8221 he said in his postmatch interview 8220I definitely rolled it but I was moving OK toward the end so that8217s positive8221 ___ 935 pm Andreas Seppi rallied from two sets down and saved a match point to beat an unpredictable Nick Kyrgios 16 67 1 64 62 108 in a secondround match Wednesday at the Australian Open No 14seeded Kyrgios was broken in the 11th game of the final set Serving for the match at 65 Seppi was broken in a game that started with a highrisk betweenthelegs shot by Kyrgios The Australian won the point Two games later Seppi saved a match point with a stunning forehand down the line and then held The pressure was back on Kyrgios who doublefaulted on break point to hand Seppi a 98 lead The 89thranked Seppi clinched 3 hour 9 minute match with an ace in the next game Kyrgios tipped to have all the talent to win a Grand Slam title but not the temperament was suspended by the ATP Tour following the Shanghai Masters in October when he sped through a match against Mischa Zverev with little effort or apparent care whether he won or lost Krygios was fined more than US40000 and suspended for eight weeks a period that was later reduced to three when he agreed to consult with a sports psychologist ___ 855 pm French Open champion Garbine Muguruza has advanced to the third round at the Australian Open with a 75 64 win over American Samantha Crawford Muguruza clinched the match on her first match point when Crawford netted a forehand The Spaniard will play Anastasija Sevastova in the third round ___ 635 pm It8217s been a disappointing day for the American men at Melbourne Park John Isner the highestseeded US player in the men8217s draw wasted a twosettonone lead and lost in the second round to Mischa Zverev of Germany 67 4 67 4 64 76 7 97 Isner had 98 winners in the 4hour 10minute match but only converted one of 17 breakpoint chances against Zverev Isner was joined on the sidelines by Steve Johnson Noah Rubin and Ryan Harrison 8212 all secondround losers on Wednesday afternoon The one bright spot for the US was 31stseeded Sam Querrey who advanced with a 76 5 60 61 win over Australian wild card Alex De Minaur Jack Sock the 23rd seed was playing later against Karen Khachanov of Russia ___ 535 pm After winning the first two sets of his secondround match Roger Federer had to really go to work in the third recovering from 52 down and fending off two set points to defeat American qualifier Noah Rubin 75 63 76 3 He held serve at love to force the tiebreaker and after it got to 33 reeled off the last four points to clinch the match in 2 hours 4 minutes Federer is a fourtime Australian Open champion but hasn8217t lifted the trophy since 2010 In 18 trips to Melbourne Park he8217s never failed to reach the third round ___ 515 pm Eugenie Bouchard is back in the third round at Melbourne Park for the first time in two years defeating China8217s Peng Shuai 76 5 62 Bouchard who reached the semifinals of the Australian Open in 2014 finally closed it out after Peng saved three match points on the Canadian8217s serve at 51 in the second set Following her breakout year in 2014 which also saw her reach the Wimbledon final Bouchard struggled to make it past the fourth round at the slams Her best result last year was the third round at Wimbledon Her next opponent will be either CoCo Vandeweghe or Pauline Parmentier who played later Wednesday 8220Overall I8217m feeling better with each passing day8221 Bouchard said ___ 435 pm Fourthseeded Stan Wawrinka is into the third round of the Australian Open for the ninth consecutive year after a 63 64 64 win over American Steve Johnson on Wednesday Wawrinka won his first Grand Slam title at Melbourne Park in 2014 and has followed that up with two more majors 8212 the French Open in 2015 and the US Open last year The 31yearold Wawrinka labored through five sets to win his firstround match against Martin Klizan in 3 hours 24 minutes He had a much easier time in the second round beating Johnson in 1 hour 52 minutes Wawrinka will next play either Viktor Troicki or Paolo Lorenzi ___ 315 pm Defending champion Angelique Kerber marked her 29th birthday 8212 angrily at times 8212 with a 62 67 3 62 win Wednesday over fellow German Carina Witthoeft Kerber who beat Serena Williams in the Australian Open final last year then won the US Open in September was her own worst enemy in the tiebreaker doublefaulting twice to turn a 32 lead into a 43 deficit Witthoeft who had won a long rally which caused Kerber to swipe her racket toward the court just ahead of the double faults won the next three points to level the match Kerber also started poorly in the third set dropping her service but rebounded to take a 41 lead saving two break points in the fifth game before closing out the match in 2 hours 8 minutes She will next play the winner of Wednesday8217s secondround match between Kristyna Pliskova and IrinaCamelia Begu ___ 155 pm Serena and Venus Williams have pulled out of their scheduled firstround doubles match because of a right elbow injury to Venus who won her singles match earlier Wednesday in straight sets over Stefanie Voegele The Williams sisters were set to play Timea Babos and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova in a Show Court 2 match on Wednesday afternoon The Australian Open confirmed the withdrawal on social media The American pair also withdrew from their firstround doubles match in 2015 at Melbourne Park The Williams sisters have won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles together including four at the Australian Open ___ 120 pm Kei Nishikori advanced to the third round in a far more straightforward manner than his fiveset opener earlier this week The fifthseeded Nishikori defeated Frenchman Jeremy Chardy 63 64 63 in just over two hours to reach the third round for the seventh consecutive year On Monday he needed 3 12 hours before beating Andrey Kuznetsov in the first round 8220I was definitely playing much better than first round today8221 he said Wednesday 8220There were many ups and downs still too many break points for me Great to finish in three sets8221 Nishikori has reached the quarterfinals three times at Melbourne Park but has never advanced beyond that stage He could play topseeded Andy Murray in the quarterfinals this year ___ 1240 pm Venus Williams a firstround loser in 2016 at Melbourne Park is one of the first players into the third round this year after beating Stefanie Voegele 63 62 to begin play at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday Williams maintained a perfect 30 record against the Swiss player having beaten her on clay at Madrid grass at Wimbledon and now hard courts in the year8217s first Grand Slam tournament Voegele wasn8217t helped by four doublefaults in the opening set In the second Williams broke Voegele8217s service with a blistering forehand to the open court to take a 31 lead then broke her serve again in the final game Williams lost to eventual semifinalist Johanna Konta in the opening round last year The older sister of Serena Williams Venus Williams has never won the Australian Open She lost the 2003 final to Serena Venus8217 best recent finish here was a quarterfinal appearance in 2015 ___ 1115 am Defending champion Angelique Kerber and topseeded Andy Murray play their secondround matches on Wednesday in much more pleasant temperatures at Melbourne Park A cool change hit the city overnight dropping temperatures from 38 Celsius 100 Fahrenheit on Tuesday afternoon to about 20 Celsius 68 Fahrenheit when play began Wednesday Venus Williams was first up on Rod Laver Arena playing Stefanie Voegele of Switzerland Kerber was to follow against fellow German Carina Witthoeft followed by Roger Federer against American qualifier Noah Rubin Murray was scheduled to play the last match on Wednesday night at Rod Laver Venus and Serena Williams were scheduled to play their opening doubles match on Wednesday afternoon | MELBOURNE/PROPN Australia/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM The/DET Latest/ADJ on/ADP Wednesday/PROPN from/ADP the/DET Australian/ADJ Open/NOUN all/DET times/NOUN local/ADJ 1050/NUM pm/NOUN Topseeded/PROPN Andy/PROPN Murray/PROPN tumbled/VERB to/ADP the/DET ground/NOUN and/CCONJ hurt/VERB his/PRON right/ADJ ankle/NOUN early/ADV in/ADP the/DET third/ADJ set/NOUN of/ADP his/PRON secondround/NOUN win/NOUN over/ADP Andrey/PROPN Rublev/PROPN at/ADP the/DET Australian/ADJ Open/PROPN on/ADP Wednesday/PROPN night/NOUN He/PRON spoke/VERB to/ADP the/DET trainer/NOUN after/ADP that/DET 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<p />
<p>TNS: First question, why were you chosen to be Mimi Soltysik’s running mate?</p>
<p>Mimi reached out to me about the campaign following my run for County Sheriff in Milwaukee. He said that he’d followed&#160;my campaign and really liked the fact that we took a very grassroots, people-centered approach. He felt that I would make a good running mate based on work I was involved in in Milwaukee, and the fact that I ran for sheriff unapologetically as a socialist.</p>
<p>TNS: Which public offices have you previously run for?</p>
<p>I ran for Milwaukee County Sheriff in 2014.</p>
<p>TNS: What did you accomplish by running?</p>
<p>I like to think that we reopened the discussion in Milwaukee about&#160;socialism, and how placing the needs of people at the center of the issues needed to be done, and could be done. We can demand, in very clear terms, the changes we want and agitate for those changes. People just need to be reminded of their power.</p>
<p>TNS: What would you like to accomplish with this current campaign?</p>
<p>I think we’d like to accomplish something similar with the presidential campaign. We want to remind people that they have power, and that worker ownership of their workplaces and communities makes as much sense now as it ever has. At a time when so many people have been victimized by deindustrialization, gentrification and institutional racism, we want people to be reminded that there really is another way to live. It’s not supposed to be this way, and people need to know that.</p>
<p>TNS: What is the difference between the Soltysik/Walker&#160;campaign and the presidential campaigns of other socialists?</p>
<p>I think the difference between our campaign and the campaign of other&#160;socialist&#160;candidates is the fact that we really do center the voices and faces and needs of people in what we are doing. Both Mimi and I agree that showing up and telling folks what they need and what we’ll do for them is insulting and pretentious. By honoring the ideas and input of the people who are involved with the Party, and involved in activist work, and involved with the campaign, we keep ourselves grounded where we need to be. We are focused on building and maintaining relationships between people that will endure beyond November 2016. This work will continue.</p>
<p>TNS: Why didn't the SPUSA just support one of the other&#160;socialist&#160;campaigns, be it Mary Scully’, Gloria La Riva, Monica Moorehead, or some other&#160;socialist?</p>
<p>I believe we decided to do our own thing with this campaign and run our own candidates because we are in a position to speak unapologetically about what it means to be&#160;socialist, and to make the connections between the Party platform&#160;and Black Lives Matter, the movements for immigrant rights, the fight for LGBTQ rights, the struggle for the end of the exploitation of the environment, an end to public school privatization, and so many other issues. We can speak to all of those things because our approach is an intersectional one.”</p>
<p>TNS: Why not support Bernie Sanders?</p>
<p>We need Bernie Sanders to be brave enough to talk explicitly about the need for workers to own their workplaces and what is produced. We are not interested in reforming capitalism, we are interested in destroying it. We understand why Sanders is not discussing that, but Mimi and I are not here for slapping a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound. Call out capitalism for what it has done to the people in this country and abroad. Mainstream candidates will not do that. We can do that.</p>
<p>“TNS: What is your honest opinion of the Sanders campaign?</p>
<p>My honest opinion of the Sanders campaign is that he is doing what is in bounds for a Democrat candidate to do, and saying what it is permissible for them to say. He’s playing the game, it’s politically expedient to do that.</p>
<p>TNS: Is the Soltysik/Walker&#160;campaign expecting to get ballot access anywhere?</p>
<p>The Soltysik/Walker&#160;campaign may get ballot access in some states, while in others it would be an uphill battle. Ballot access has not been our main focus, we want to make the connections with the people doing the work of uplifting their communities, and that is more important to us. The push for ballot access has not been our priority. We’ll get it where we can, and still move our message everywhere else.</p>
<p>TNS: What has the fight for ballot access been like so far?</p>
<p>The current two-party system operates in its own best interest. This country runs on this illusion of choice, and there are entities who are very deeply invested in making sure that nothing changes&#160;or threatens the status quo. If the people of this country truly desire change and would be willing to look past the smoke and mirrors of the current system, things would get interesting.</p>
<p>TNS: Why do you think the current electoral system makes it so hard for independents and third party candidates?</p>
<p>As the Vice Presidential candidate for the SPUSA, I believe that dismantling institutional racism and U.S. imperialism,&#160;honoring the planet we live on by ending our dependency on fossil fuels and aggressively adopting measures that are environmentally responsible and creating environmentally responsible jobs that rebuild the infrastructure of this country and are owned by the people who live here are the most pressing issues for me. Those, and immediately creating a high-quality&#160;single-payer national health system.”</p>
<p>TNS: As the VP candidate on the ticket what are the 3 most important issues, in your opinion, facing this nation?</p>
<p>Ending the system of mass incarceration, detaining and deportation would go a long way towards addressing the damage institutional racism has caused in this country. The legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, with a rider attached that immediately frees all people&#160;currently incarcerated&#160;for nonviolent marijuana offenses is another way. Creating a revenue stream with priority given to people from the communities most harmed by drug policies- Black and Brown marijuana growers and suppliers- is yet another way. Cutting military spending and removing US presence from countries that have been exploited for their resources is something we would address. If we divested from making war on other countries, we could reinvest that revenue in strengthening our public schools through the community schools model, rebuilding our bridges, roadways, and all public transportation systems, and promote affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, using cooperative models for all of these things.</p>
<p>TNS: How would the Soltysik/Walker&#160;administration resolve these issues? If you comrades actually won, what would be the hallmarks of your administration, hypothetically of course?</p>
<p>If we actually won the election, Mimi and I have no illusions about the way we would be treated by Congress. We’d be blocked every step of the way. But the hallmarks of our administration would be the things I mentioned, and a sense of possibility that we believe people aren’t feeling now.</p>
<p>TNS: The American Left is fractured and bogged with sectarianism, how could this be overcome going forward?</p>
<p>The sectarianism of the Left in the United States is problematic, but can definitely be addressed and worked on. Essentially, we are fighting for the same things. Take the egos out of the equation, be willing to be humble and to work cooperatively with other groups, and adopt an intersectional approach so that ALL segments of the population can engage. We can do this.</p>
<p>TNS: Are there any current issues that the various left/socialist&#160;groups could build a united front around?</p>
<p>I think there are plenty of issues that&#160;socialist&#160;groups can unite around. Black Lives Matter, the fight for womyn’s reproductive rights, the struggle for the environment, the fight for a living wage for all people, immigrant justice and the end of borders…so many things. I can’t stress the need for intersectionality enough. If you are about liberation for all people, then you’ll connect your freedom with the right of Indigenous sisters to live without being assaulted and disappeared. You’ll fight against the terrorizing of Muslim sisters and brothers. You’ll see yourself in the children of Flint, Michigan, and you’ll know that the folks who denied clean water to them deserve nothing less than prison time and reparation paying. You’ll know that dropping bombs on people in Syria, that undermining democratic governments in Honduras, poisoning people in the Amazon…you’ll know that those things cannot be allowed to happen. That they’re unacceptable, because your freedom is connected to so many others’ liberation.”</p>
<p>TNS: How do we build a broad left/mass left party, or coalition of parties in the USA?</p>
<p>It’s exhausting, and it’s painful. It forces your heart to be bigger than you ever thought it could. But if we are about liberation, then we have to be about liberation for all people, everywhere. Unity and intersectionality are essential. Unite around the issues. That’s how we build coalitions and a mass Left movement. Leave out the ego.</p>
<p>TNS: Any lessons that you think the America Left could learn from Podemos or Syriza?</p>
<p>I think the Left here could learn a lot about perseverance and flexibility from Podemos and Syriza, and definitely about taking real political power and using&#160;it to move our agenda forward instead of having to stay on the fringes.</p>
<p>TNS: Are there any issues that the radical Left and Right could work on with each other?</p>
<p>With the&#160;polarization of politics and issues in the United States now, I honestly don’t see where there could be honest and respectful collaboration between the radical Left and Right, especially not with the hideousness that is the rise of Donald Trump. No.</p>
<p>TNS: How do third parties,&#160;socialist&#160;parties in particular, break the stranglehold that the Democratic Party has over the Black community?</p>
<p>I think the best way for third parties to loosen the hold the Democratic&#160;Party has on&#160;the Black community in the United States is to let folks know they exist, and that their platforms&#160;address the particular needs of that community. We need to be much more intentional about getting information about third parties into communities where folks aren’t hearing about&#160;them.</p>
<p>TNS: Why don’t we see more Blacks gravitating towards&#160;socialism&#160;and anarchism these days?</p>
<p>I would argue that we are&#160;indeed seeing more Black folks, particularly young Black folks, moving towards socialism&#160;and anarchism&#160;(to a lesser degree).&#160;The Black Panthers and Young Lords were&#160;socialist, and those movements resonate with young people, especially those involved in&#160;the Movement for Black Lives.&#160;People are aware that capitalism is at the bottom of the oppressions our people face, and they are making the connections between Black Liberation and the elimination of the capitalist system.</p>
<p>TNS: What has happened to independent Black political action in the 21st century?</p>
<p>I see&#160;independent Black political action coming out of&#160;Black Lives Matter. The people on the ground are creating the agendas, deciding on action (or inaction in some cases), and&#160;acknowledging the fact that in many places, the current two-party system&#160;has not served our people well and has actually failed us, and that it’s time to talk about alternatives. Those discussions and decisions are happening. The fact that the Movement as a whole is refusing to endorse any candidate in the upcoming elections is big. The fact that young activists are&#160;centering the needs of the Black community&#160;using&#160;candidate debates as a platform is big. I would say independent Black political action in the 21st Century is in the hands of young people, who are very smart and very intentional about direct action and social media and other methods of getting the messages out.</p>
<p>TNS: What are your thoughts on the Black Lives Matter and prison reform movements?</p>
<p>Black Lives Matter is an essential continuation of the struggle that started for Black people in the United States in 1619. It’s an intersectional movement that understands that there is no room for kyriarchy or ageism. It’s a movement that is diverse, nimble on its feet, very exciting and engaging, and unafraid of calling out institutional racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism,&#160;white supremacy, classism, imperialism&#160;and the capitalism that upholds all of that. The fight against mass incarceration is a part of the work Black Lives Matter does, and it’s necessary work. The ending of state-sponsored violence against Black people must happen. The fight to end the abuses of the prison system and this entire system of “justice” is happening, and it’s needed.</p>
<p>TNS: How will we keep the next movement created by a community of color from being co-opted by the Dems?</p>
<p>I think, with a couple of exceptions, that movements like Black Lives Matter have been very vocal about making sure the Democrats know that they’re not here to be subsumed into the Democratic Party or the interests of the mainstream. I believe that grassroots, people-centered and people-led movements have got to be vigilant and vocal about keeping mainstream interests at bay because co-optation is always a real danger. A perfect example of this co-optation was the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011. All of that raw energy that came from the people themselves was co-opted and funneled into a recall effort that left people feeling powerless and depressed. This is unacceptable. So I am excited and happy when I see Black Lives Matter activists being very specific about keeping the Democrats away.</p>
<p>TNS: Do you see mass incarceration as the New Jim Crow? If so, why?</p>
<p>Mass incarceration is absolutely the New Jim Crow. It’s a system of control that impacts the way Black people move and interact in this country. It’s the constant knowledge that as a Black person, your life is worth nothing in this country, unless you are providing the labor that makes the system work. It’s an understanding that you really don’t have any rights under law, and that because of the color of your skin, you are subject to discrimination everywhere and by anyone. It’s the stigma attached with being labeled a felon and not being able to house or support yourself, and ending up back in the system that labeled you. The privatization of public schools, the restriction of access to public resources such as transportation and food stamps and housing, all of these things are linked to the New Jim Crow. The issue of protection and safety, and who deserves those things, that’s also related. Mass incarceration is a system that is pervasive and extends far beyond prison walls.</p>
<p>TNS: As a Black woman, how do you view feminism in relation to the Black female experience?</p>
<p>I believe that mainstream feminism is for White womyn and always has been. Black, Latina, Native and Asian womyn have always had to create their own way of relating to the world and demanding culturally-specific ways of honoring womyn’s experience, because the mainstream movement doesn’t include us. It doesn’t speak to our intersections of race, class, gender,&#160;sexual orientation,&#160;age, ability, and other issues.&#160; Mainstream feminism takes the experiences of White womyn as the only experience to be honored, and that’s exclusive. The lived experiences and needs of womyn of color can only be discussed by womyn of color.</p>
<p>TNS: Do Black Girls Rock? What does that actually mean?</p>
<p>Black Girls Rock simply is that. It’s the assertion that Black womyn are not less than anyone else, that we deserve the same love and care and mobility and respect as anyone else. We have to lift one another up, and constantly affirm our brilliance,&#160;beauty and versatility and diversity in a society that consistently devalues us. And so we do it. Black Girls definitely Rock.”</p>
<p>TNS: Ms.&#160;Walker, what is&#160;socialism&#160;to you?</p>
<p>Socialism, to me, is worker and community ownership of the means of production. If that is a farming community, the folks who live and work in that area own the farm and the tools needed to work it. They decide what is produced. In&#160;an urban setting like Milwaukee, that would be the workers at a factory owning that factory and all that it produces, and&#160;making democratic decisions about what is produced and how it is distributed.&#160;Whatever would be produced is something of use to the workers and the community, and is available to all without profit motive. As a worker, I know that I would be more invested and interested in my workplace if I were a part owner who made valued decisions in that workplace.</p>
<p>TNS: What will the revolution look like in the USA?</p>
<p>My advice to young people interested in&#160;socialism&#160;is to read about it from diverse sources, and look at socialism&#160;from many different perspectives. The&#160;forms that&#160;socialism&#160;takes in Africa and Central and South America are vastly different than the forms&#160;socialism&#160;takes in the United States. I would want them to understand that&#160;socialism&#160;must be intersectional, taking into account all of the differences people bring to the work with them, and understanding that those differences are never weaknesses.&#160; I would want them to know that there is joy possible in this work, and that that joy is something that must be incorporated into what they’re doing. It’s a form of self-care.</p>
<p>TNS: Any advice for young people just entering the&#160;socialist&#160;movement?</p>
<p>I have a hard time picturing what revolution will look like in the United States. People here are very diverse, with diverse needs and viewpoints and life experiences. In my own life, I have no national identity that moves me. For me, revolution is necessary for the liberation of my own people, and others who are oppressed by those forces that hurt and humiliate Black people. I believe that any revolution in this country would be bloody and painful, because there are so many institutions deeply rooted in the domination and exploitation that is the capitalist system. They won’t want that power taken from them, and have proven around the world what they are capable of when their interests are threatened. I don’t have any illusions whatsoever that they won’t come against revolutionaries in this country full force. They have before. I believe revolution is possible, but I don’t know exactly what it will look like.”</p>
<p>TNS: Anything you would like to add?</p>
<p>The only thing I want to add is the reminder that people are powerful, more powerful than they know. I hope folks in the neighborhoods embrace their power, step into it, and use it to build the world they believe in and want, even if that is only in their own small areas. Because they can, and it desperately needs to happen. It’s the only change that we’ll get, and the only change that matters.</p>
<p>TNS: Thank you&#160;Angela, for your time and good luck with the campaign.</p>
<p>Originally posted at&#160; <a href="http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12512" type="external">http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12512</a>.</p>
<p><a href="/filter/tips" type="external">More information about formatting options</a></p> | Q & A with Angela Walker, Socialist Party USA candidate for Vice-President | true | http://newpol.org/content/q-angela-walker-socialist-party-usa-candidate-vice-president | 2016-04-07 | 4left
| 3,061 | TNS First question why were you chosen to be Mimi Soltysik8217s running mate Mimi reached out to me about the campaign following my run for County Sheriff in Milwaukee He said that he8217d followedamp160my campaign and really liked the fact that we took a very grassroots peoplecentered approach He felt that I would make a good running mate based on work I was involved in in Milwaukee and the fact that I ran for sheriff unapologetically as a socialist TNS Which public offices have you previously run for I ran for Milwaukee County Sheriff in 2014 TNS What did you accomplish by running I like to think that we reopened the discussion in Milwaukee aboutamp160socialism and how placing the needs of people at the center of the issues needed to be done and could be done We can demand in very clear terms the changes we want and agitate for those changes People just need to be reminded of their power TNS What would you like to accomplish with this current campaign I think we8217d like to accomplish something similar with the presidential campaign We want to remind people that they have power and that worker ownership of their workplaces and communities makes as much sense now as it ever has At a time when so many people have been victimized by deindustrialization gentrification and institutional racism we want people to be reminded that there really is another way to live It8217s not supposed to be this way and people need to know that TNS What is the difference between the SoltysikWalkeramp160campaign and the presidential campaigns of other socialists I think the difference between our campaign and the campaign of otheramp160socialistamp160candidates is the fact that we really do center the voices and faces and needs of people in what we are doing Both Mimi and I agree that showing up and telling folks what they need and what we8217ll do for them is insulting and pretentious By honoring the ideas and input of the people who are involved with the Party and involved in activist work and involved with the campaign we keep ourselves grounded where we need to be We are focused on building and maintaining relationships between people that will endure beyond November 2016 This work will continue TNS Why didnt the SPUSA just support one of the otheramp160socialistamp160campaigns be it Mary Scully8217 Gloria La Riva Monica Moorehead or some otheramp160socialist I believe we decided to do our own thing with this campaign and run our own candidates because we are in a position to speak unapologetically about what it means to beamp160socialist and to make the connections between the Party platformamp160and Black Lives Matter the movements for immigrant rights the fight for LGBTQ rights the struggle for the end of the exploitation of the environment an end to public school privatization and so many other issues We can speak to all of those things because our approach is an intersectional one8221 TNS Why not support Bernie Sanders We need Bernie Sanders to be brave enough to talk explicitly about the need for workers to own their workplaces and what is produced We are not interested in reforming capitalism we are interested in destroying it We understand why Sanders is not discussing that but Mimi and I are not here for slapping a BandAid on a sucking chest wound Call out capitalism for what it has done to the people in this country and abroad Mainstream candidates will not do that We can do that 8220TNS What is your honest opinion of the Sanders campaign My honest opinion of the Sanders campaign is that he is doing what is in bounds for a Democrat candidate to do and saying what it is permissible for them to say He8217s playing the game it8217s politically expedient to do that TNS Is the SoltysikWalkeramp160campaign expecting to get ballot access anywhere The SoltysikWalkeramp160campaign may get ballot access in some states while in others it would be an uphill battle Ballot access has not been our main focus we want to make the connections with the people doing the work of uplifting their communities and that is more important to us The push for ballot access has not been our priority We8217ll get it where we can and still move our message everywhere else TNS What has the fight for ballot access been like so far The current twoparty system operates in its own best interest This country runs on this illusion of choice and there are entities who are very deeply invested in making sure that nothing changesamp160or threatens the status quo If the people of this country truly desire change and would be willing to look past the smoke and mirrors of the current system things would get interesting TNS Why do you think the current electoral system makes it so hard for independents and third party candidates As the Vice Presidential candidate for the SPUSA I believe that dismantling institutional racism and US imperialismamp160honoring the planet we live on by ending our dependency on fossil fuels and aggressively adopting measures that are environmentally responsible and creating environmentally responsible jobs that rebuild the infrastructure of this country and are owned by the people who live here are the most pressing issues for me Those and immediately creating a highqualityamp160singlepayer national health system8221 TNS As the VP candidate on the ticket what are the 3 most important issues in your opinion facing this nation Ending the system of mass incarceration detaining and deportation would go a long way towards addressing the damage institutional racism has caused in this country The legalization and decriminalization of marijuana with a rider attached that immediately frees all peopleamp160currently incarceratedamp160for nonviolent marijuana offenses is another way Creating a revenue stream with priority given to people from the communities most harmed by drug policies Black and Brown marijuana growers and suppliers is yet another way Cutting military spending and removing US presence from countries that have been exploited for their resources is something we would address If we divested from making war on other countries we could reinvest that revenue in strengthening our public schools through the community schools model rebuilding our bridges roadways and all public transportation systems and promote affordable alternatives to fossil fuels using cooperative models for all of these things TNS How would the SoltysikWalkeramp160administration resolve these issues If you comrades actually won what would be the hallmarks of your administration hypothetically of course If we actually won the election Mimi and I have no illusions about the way we would be treated by Congress We8217d be blocked every step of the way But the hallmarks of our administration would be the things I mentioned and a sense of possibility that we believe people aren8217t feeling now TNS The American Left is fractured and bogged with sectarianism how could this be overcome going forward The sectarianism of the Left in the United States is problematic but can definitely be addressed and worked on Essentially we are fighting for the same things Take the egos out of the equation be willing to be humble and to work cooperatively with other groups and adopt an intersectional approach so that ALL segments of the population can engage We can do this TNS Are there any current issues that the various leftsocialistamp160groups could build a united front around I think there are plenty of issues thatamp160socialistamp160groups can unite around Black Lives Matter the fight for womyn8217s reproductive rights the struggle for the environment the fight for a living wage for all people immigrant justice and the end of borders8230so many things I can8217t stress the need for intersectionality enough If you are about liberation for all people then you8217ll connect your freedom with the right of Indigenous sisters to live without being assaulted and disappeared You8217ll fight against the terrorizing of Muslim sisters and brothers You8217ll see yourself in the children of Flint Michigan and you8217ll know that the folks who denied clean water to them deserve nothing less than prison time and reparation paying You8217ll know that dropping bombs on people in Syria that undermining democratic governments in Honduras poisoning people in the Amazon8230you8217ll know that those things cannot be allowed to happen That they8217re unacceptable because your freedom is connected to so many others8217 liberation8221 TNS How do we build a broad leftmass left party or coalition of parties in the USA It8217s exhausting and it8217s painful It forces your heart to be bigger than you ever thought it could But if we are about liberation then we have to be about liberation for all people everywhere Unity and intersectionality are essential Unite around the issues That8217s how we build coalitions and a mass Left movement Leave out the ego TNS Any lessons that you think the America Left could learn from Podemos or Syriza I think the Left here could learn a lot about perseverance and flexibility from Podemos and Syriza and definitely about taking real political power and usingamp160it to move our agenda forward instead of having to stay on the fringes TNS Are there any issues that the radical Left and Right could work on with each other With theamp160polarization of politics and issues in the United States now I honestly don8217t see where there could be honest and respectful collaboration between the radical Left and Right especially not with the hideousness that is the rise of Donald Trump No TNS How do third partiesamp160socialistamp160parties in particular break the stranglehold that the Democratic Party has over the Black community I think the best way for third parties to loosen the hold the Democraticamp160Party has onamp160the Black community in the United States is to let folks know they exist and that their platformsamp160address the particular needs of that community We need to be much more intentional about getting information about third parties into communities where folks aren8217t hearing aboutamp160them TNS Why don8217t we see more Blacks gravitating towardsamp160socialismamp160and anarchism these days I would argue that we areamp160indeed seeing more Black folks particularly young Black folks moving towards socialismamp160and anarchismamp160to a lesser degreeamp160The Black Panthers and Young Lords wereamp160socialist and those movements resonate with young people especially those involved inamp160the Movement for Black Livesamp160People are aware that capitalism is at the bottom of the oppressions our people face and they are making the connections between Black Liberation and the elimination of the capitalist system TNS What has happened to independent Black political action in the 21st century I seeamp160independent Black political action coming out ofamp160Black Lives Matter The people on the ground are creating the agendas deciding on action or inaction in some cases andamp160acknowledging the fact that in many places the current twoparty systemamp160has not served our people well and has actually failed us and that it8217s time to talk about alternatives Those discussions and decisions are happening The fact that the Movement as a whole is refusing to endorse any candidate in the upcoming elections is big The fact that young activists areamp160centering the needs of the Black communityamp160usingamp160candidate debates as a platform is big I would say independent Black political action in the 21st Century is in the hands of young people who are very smart and very intentional about direct action and social media and other methods of getting the messages out TNS What are your thoughts on the Black Lives Matter and prison reform movements Black Lives Matter is an essential continuation of the struggle that started for Black people in the United States in 1619 It8217s an intersectional movement that understands that there is no room for kyriarchy or ageism It8217s a movement that is diverse nimble on its feet very exciting and engaging and unafraid of calling out institutional racism sexism ableism heterosexismamp160white supremacy classism imperialismamp160and the capitalism that upholds all of that The fight against mass incarceration is a part of the work Black Lives Matter does and it8217s necessary work The ending of statesponsored violence against Black people must happen The fight to end the abuses of the prison system and this entire system of 8220justice8221 is happening and it8217s needed TNS How will we keep the next movement created by a community of color from being coopted by the Dems I think with a couple of exceptions that movements like Black Lives Matter have been very vocal about making sure the Democrats know that they8217re not here to be subsumed into the Democratic Party or the interests of the mainstream I believe that grassroots peoplecentered and peopleled movements have got to be vigilant and vocal about keeping mainstream interests at bay because cooptation is always a real danger A perfect example of this cooptation was the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011 All of that raw energy that came from the people themselves was coopted and funneled into a recall effort that left people feeling powerless and depressed This is unacceptable So I am excited and happy when I see Black Lives Matter activists being very specific about keeping the Democrats away TNS Do you see mass incarceration as the New Jim Crow If so why Mass incarceration is absolutely the New Jim Crow It8217s a system of control that impacts the way Black people move and interact in this country It8217s the constant knowledge that as a Black person your life is worth nothing in this country unless you are providing the labor that makes the system work It8217s an understanding that you really don8217t have any rights under law and that because of the color of your skin you are subject to discrimination everywhere and by anyone It8217s the stigma attached with being labeled a felon and not being able to house or support yourself and ending up back in the system that labeled you The privatization of public schools the restriction of access to public resources such as transportation and food stamps and housing all of these things are linked to the New Jim Crow The issue of protection and safety and who deserves those things that8217s also related Mass incarceration is a system that is pervasive and extends far beyond prison walls TNS As a Black woman how do you view feminism in relation to the Black female experience I believe that mainstream feminism is for White womyn and always has been Black Latina Native and Asian womyn have always had to create their own way of relating to the world and demanding culturallyspecific ways of honoring womyn8217s experience because the mainstream movement doesn8217t include us It doesn8217t speak to our intersections of race class genderamp160sexual orientationamp160age ability and other issuesamp160 Mainstream feminism takes the experiences of White womyn as the only experience to be honored and that8217s exclusive The lived experiences and needs of womyn of color can only be discussed by womyn of color TNS Do Black Girls Rock What does that actually mean Black Girls Rock simply is that It8217s the assertion that Black womyn are not less than anyone else that we deserve the same love and care and mobility and respect as anyone else We have to lift one another up and constantly affirm our brillianceamp160beauty and versatility and diversity in a society that consistently devalues us And so we do it Black Girls definitely Rock8221 TNS Msamp160Walker what isamp160socialismamp160to you Socialism to me is worker and community ownership of the means of production If that is a farming community the folks who live and work in that area own the farm and the tools needed to work it They decide what is produced Inamp160an urban setting like Milwaukee that would be the workers at a factory owning that factory and all that it produces andamp160making democratic decisions about what is produced and how it is distributedamp160Whatever would be produced is something of use to the workers and the community and is available to all without profit motive As a worker I know that I would be more invested and interested in my workplace if I were a part owner who made valued decisions in that workplace TNS What will the revolution look like in the USA My advice to young people interested inamp160socialismamp160is to read about it from diverse sources and look at socialismamp160from many different perspectives Theamp160forms thatamp160socialismamp160takes in Africa and Central and South America are vastly different than the formsamp160socialismamp160takes in the United States I would want them to understand thatamp160socialismamp160must be intersectional taking into account all of the differences people bring to the work with them and understanding that those differences are never weaknessesamp160 I would want them to know that there is joy possible in this work and that that joy is something that must be incorporated into what they8217re doing It8217s a form of selfcare TNS Any advice for young people just entering theamp160socialistamp160movement I have a hard time picturing what revolution will look like in the United States People here are very diverse with diverse needs and viewpoints and life experiences In my own life I have no national identity that moves me For me revolution is necessary for the liberation of my own people and others who are oppressed by those forces that hurt and humiliate Black people I believe that any revolution in this country would be bloody and painful because there are so many institutions deeply rooted in the domination and exploitation that is the capitalist system They won8217t want that power taken from them and have proven around the world what they are capable of when their interests are threatened I don8217t have any illusions whatsoever that they won8217t come against revolutionaries in this country full force They have before I believe revolution is possible but I don8217t know exactly what it will look like8221 TNS Anything you would like to add The only thing I want to add is the reminder that people are powerful more powerful than they know I hope folks in the neighborhoods embrace their power step into it and use it to build the world they believe in and want even if that is only in their own small areas Because they can and it desperately needs to happen It8217s the only change that we8217ll get and the only change that matters TNS Thank youamp160Angela for your time and good luck with the campaign Originally posted atamp160 httpwwwthenorthstarinfop12512 More information about formatting options | TNS/NOUN First/ADJ question/NOUN why/SCONJ were/AUX you/PRON chosen/VERB to/PART be/AUX Mimi/PROPN Soltysik8217s/PROPN 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and/CCONJ communities/NOUN makes/VERB as/ADV much/ADJ sense/NOUN now/ADV as/SCONJ it/PRON ever/ADV has/VERB At/ADP a/DET time/NOUN when/SCONJ so/ADV many/ADJ people/NOUN have/AUX been/AUX victimized/VERB by/ADP deindustrialization/NOUN gentrification/NOUN and/CCONJ institutional/ADJ racism/NOUN we/PRON want/VERB people/NOUN to/PART be/AUX reminded/VERB that/SCONJ there/PRON really/ADV is/AUX another/DET way/NOUN to/PART live/VERB It8217s/PROPN not/PART supposed/VERB to/PART be/AUX this/DET way/NOUN and/CCONJ people/NOUN need/VERB to/PART know/VERB that/SCONJ TNS/PROPN What/PRON is/AUX the/DET difference/NOUN between/ADP the/PRON SoltysikWalkeramp160campaign/PUNCT and/CCONJ the/DET presidential/ADJ campaigns/NOUN of/ADP other/ADJ socialists/NOUN I/PRON think/VERB the/DET difference/NOUN between/ADP our/PRON campaign/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET campaign/NOUN of/ADP otheramp160socialistamp160candidates/PROPN is/AUX the/DET fact/NOUN that/SCONJ we/PRON really/ADV do/AUX center/VERB the/DET 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<p>John Murphy is running an antiwar pro-civil liberties campaign for US Congress from the 16th District of Pennsylvania ( <a href="http://www.johnmurphyforcongress.org)/" type="external">www.johnmurphyforcongress.org)</a>. Murphy, a Green, was denied his party’s endorsement last month because, as Murphy believes, he supported Ralph Nader and was critical of David Cobb in 2004. Murphy recently spoke with JOSHUA FRANK about his campaign as well as the future of the Green Party.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: John, you’ve been a Green Party member for a while now. Can you tell us a bit about what capacity you’ve played in your state’s Green Party?</p>
<p>John Murphy: I never wanted to get involved in the internal operations of the state Green Party. I thought this was better left to younger men and women. I have, however been active in helping campaign for Green candidates at the local level. My political activism took on an interesting form in the last few years. I became what some people call a “photo essayist”. I simply began by writing to my friends and business associates several years ago asking them to contact their senators to prevent an unconstitutional transference of legislative power to the executive branch whereby President Bush would be given unlimited power to wage war at his discretion.</p>
<p>These simple letters to friends became more and more sophisticated as I began to embellish them with editorial cartoons, articles written by other people and then my own comments often spicing up my essays with my own form of editorial cartoons. Now I have lost count of how many thousands of people receive them.</p>
<p>I have been active in the antiwar movement ever since the 60s but the Nader campaign of 2004 gave me the opportunity to use many of the skills I have developed over the last 60 years as an educator, union negotiator and business owner in support of his campaign. Consequently when the Nader campaign needed someone to represent Mr. Nader in a series of debate-like forums throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania they chose me. When they wanted someone to speak prior to his press conferences and fundraisers in Philadelphia, they chose me. When they wanted someone to represent the independent candidacy of Nader/Camejo in the Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition, an organization consisting of the leaders of the “minor parties” organized to change the egregious ballot access laws in Pennsylvania, they again chose me.</p>
<p>My organizational and leadership skills coupled with my seniority were put to much greater use in this capacity than serving in any position as an internal officer in the official state Green Party organization. I paid those kinds of dues many years ago when I held several functional vice-presidencies, including chairman of the board, of a prominent professional association in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: Can you talk a little about what it was like being a Nader supporter in the Green Party during the 2004 elections?</p>
<p>John Murphy: First of all you should keep in mind that the entire reason for my joining the Green Party was that since I voted for Mr. Nader in both 1996 and 2000, I simply decided that if there were a couple of hundred thousand people who felt the way I did, at least I ought to join their party.</p>
<p>I had no idea how intimidated the Greens in leadership positions had become as a result of the scapegoating efforts of the Democratic Party after the 2000 election. As the 2004 election approached, a lot of the Pennsylvania Greens were saying things like “we don’t want our Democratic friends to hold us responsible again for Bush’s election”.</p>
<p>Truthfully I was surprised by that entire line of thinking because I never felt “responsible” nor did I hold Mr. Nader “responsible” for Gore’s loss in 2000. I had always held the Democrats responsible for that. In any event there was no way that I could possibly support someone like John Kerry whose position on the Iraq war, the USA Patriot Act and a dozen or so other issues were diametrically opposed to the values espoused by the Green Party. The GPUS as well as the GPPA supported Kerry through his surrogate candidate David Cobb who told the Greens that it would be all right to vote for him in states like Texas and Massachusetts where it didn’t matter but they should vote for Kerry everywhere else.</p>
<p>In the meantime the leadership of the Pennsylvania Green Party had become completely seduced by the “safe-states” philosophy of David Cobb. I am strained to describe in polite language how anyone could embrace this philosophy; especially people I once would have described as courageous. Suffice it to say that any courage that I once believed existed in the Green Party leadership was ephemeral.</p>
<p>I could understand how the Democrats who, in good conscience, thought they were supporting the antiwar movement through the candidacy of Kucinich or even Dean might have been flimflammed by the ABB (Anybody But Bush) strategy of the Democratic Party but I just couldn’t believe that my fellow Greens had gotten sucked into that black hole.</p>
<p>So while I was gathering signatures for Nader’s nominating petitions, the Green Party was working hand in glove with the Democratic Party whose sole purpose was to subvert Nader’s candidacy by denying him ballot access in Pennsylvania. It’s very spooky to realize that while the Democratic Party challenged every one of Nader’s signatures, not even one of David Cobb’s signatures were challenged by the Democratic Party — not even for the sake of appearances.</p>
<p>I did not stop simply at supporting Mr. Nader. I chastised those who came to be known as the “lesser evil Greens” whenever the opportunity arose. Since I had a pretty powerful Internet presence, that opportunity arose on a pretty regular basis.</p>
<p>The events that began to unfold in Pennsylvania even became more bizarre. The Pennsylvania leadership eventually passed a resolution condemning the safe-states philosophy. When I learned of this I immediately thought, well I guess they’re finally going to dump David Cobb. But they did not. In fact they put him on the ballot in a state where he did not even want any votes!</p>
<p>How could the Pennsylvania Greens take this action? How could they condemn the safe states gospel and then actually put its evangelist on the ballot? How could they have squandered our meager resources in such a way when they were so desperately needed to support Mr. Nader whose position actually reflected what Greens like to call their “ten key values”?</p>
<p>When it became clear that they couldn’t even come up with enough volunteers to collect a sufficient number of signatures for David Cobb the chairman of the Green Party himself financed a private contractor to collect the balance of the necessary signatures. What were these people thinking? Clearly the Pennsylvania Greens didn’t want this guy Cobb but the chairman himself paid to have him put on the ballot!</p>
<p>For some reason I still considered myself a member of the Green Party but I had become part of an internal movement called the “GDI” — Greens for Democracy and Independence which had developed a series of proposals that would prevent another bastardization of the democratic process like the Milwaukee convention where David Cobb who actually had gotten only 12% of the Green Party votes ended up as the official candidate.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: I’ve heard quite a few stories like yours, and there are purportedly a lot of things going on within the Green Party; a split between Cobb Greens and Camejo Greens and even the impeachment of a few Steering Committee members. Not to open up all those issues here, but can you expand more on what has recently happened with your campaign for Congress? Was it more personal than strategic on the part of those who didn’t support you? I’m assuming that the majority of them were, and are, Cobb supporters? Are the Greens in PA trying to dump the Naderites?</p>
<p>John Murphy: Yes, there was a failed effort to impeach five members of the steering committee because they refused to seat a validly elected member of the GDI. It had to do with two separate results from the IRV voting that took place at the plenary meeting of the Green Party in Tulsa last July. Two different programs were used yielding two separate results. But the truth of the matter is they simply did not want to seat a Naderite!</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: Can you tell us more about the GDI?</p>
<p>John Murphy: Sure, for all practical purposes the GDI is composed of former Nader supporters. There may be one or two repentant Cobbites in the group but the “lesser evil Greens” want absolutely nothing to do with the GDI members whom they see as some kind of a radical fringe. There has even been an incredible amount of red-baiting going on. But you’re correct; trying to delve into this business would take quite some time. To make a long story short however if the GDI is not ultimately successful in getting its proposals passed, I find it hard to imagine how the Green Party will survive after 2008.</p>
<p>The Green Party in Pennsylvania decided not to nominate me for House of Representatives in the 16th Congressional District. The reasons leading up to this decision are truly byzantine.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: What is the nominating process like for Greens in Pennsylvania?</p>
<p>John Murphy: In order to receive the nomination of the PA Green Party you must first have the endorsement of your local party. Four members of the Chester County Green Party (my local Green Party) met in secret and decided not to call the local party into session for a period of six months in order to avoid the possibility that I might show up with sufficient supporters to obtain the local party’s endorsement. These four former officers actually admitted this abuse of the democratic process in front of the chairman of the Pennsylvania Green Party, three officers of the Pennsylvania Green Party, nine of my supporters along with my wife and children! There are two ways you can destroy democracy. One way is by preventing people from voting the other is by preventing worthy candidates from ever appearing on the ballot. The Green Party of Pennsylvania has chosen the latter.</p>
<p>When the Chester County Green Party was forced to have a reorganization meeting on January 30, the party chairman tried to cut a deal in order to prevent this disgrace from becoming public. Since they deliberately prohibited the Chester County Green Party from meeting in order to endorse me, the party chairman tried to get a motion passed whereby my endorsement would be deferred to the delegates of the Green Party itself. Although it looked like these four former officers were going to go along with the deal he was trying to cut, a few days later one of them went on the listserv of the Pennsylvania delegates and told them that the Green Party of Chester County could not recommend me for endorsement. A feeding frenzy followed whereby the Cobbites trotted out one red herring after another for condemning my candidacy. At the Green Party convention they would use this as the linchpin upon which they would hang their refusal to grant me their nomination.</p>
<p>Tragically, but not unexpectedly, the Green Party chairman in a monumental act of CYA did not even tell the delegates what he witnessed at the meeting at the Chester County Green Party.</p>
<p>I attended the Pennsylvania state Green Party convention last week (February 25 and 26). It was a cross between a high school pep rally and a meeting of a religious cult. Of course not having a beard and ponytail, as I had back in 1967, made me a bit out of place. Guess I just never recovered form going “clean for Gene” in ’68.</p>
<p>These folks had decided quite some time ago that there was no way they were going to allow my nomination. They even engaged in emotional blackmail. One of the former officers of Chester County Green Party wrote to the Pennsylvania delegates saying that if the Pennsylvania Green Party nominated me it would destroy the Green Party in Chester County and the PA Green Party could forget about getting any signatures on its nominating petitions in Chester County. As a matter of fact, I have more volunteers from the Chester County Green Party in my campaign than have participated in any meeting of the Chester County Green Party for the past two years. Furthermore, because I have been endorsed by the Libertarian Party, they have already arranged to get all the necessary signatures for my nominating petitions! Now ironically the Green Party candidates will have no signatures on their petitions from Chester County. In a year when they need 67,000 signatures they have essentially thrown away the 5000 signatures that my candidacy would have brought them.</p>
<p>If that were not bad enough one person who constitutes an entire hate group all by himself joined the GDI listserv some time ago under false pretenses. When the GDI was considering endorsing me he tried to blackmail them by telling them that if they gave me their endorsement they could forget all about their three proposals ever passing in Pennsylvania. You might get away with that kind of emotional blackmail in Pennsylvania but the GDI would never buy into something like that and I am pleased to say that I have been endorsed by the GDI as well as by Peter Camejo. I expect to have the formal endorsement of Ralph Nader as soon as he returns from Connecticut.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: So what is their public rationale for not endorsing you?</p>
<p>John Murphy: The Green Party here has said they can’t have someone like me represent them because of the way I criticized them for supporting David Cobb. This decision was not strategic; it was personal. Unfortunately, the GPPA and by extension the GPUS, has not yet developed the talent for strategic thought. The Republicans are going to be represented in the 16th Congressional District by a man who took money from Jack Abramoff and who blames Homer Simpson for the decline of fatherhood in the United States. This man of course also supports the war, the Patriot Act and countless other pieces of legislative atrocities.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party is being represented by a retired school administrator who believes that terrorists should be tried by military tribunals instead of civilian courts. She too believes that the occupation of Iraq should continue and gives her support to the Patriot Act along with free-trade agreements like NAFTA. The Democrat does not even support equal rights for gays and lesbians and she thinks that individual countries must be held responsible for acts of terrorism committed by their citizens. The implication being that the United States therefore has the right to invade any such country anytime it chooses. The Green Party of Pennsylvania, however, will not allow an antiwar, pro-civil liberties candidate to represent it because he called them a dirty word two years ago!</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK: On the whole, does this pro-Cobb sect represent the majority of Greens you know?</p>
<p>John Murphy: Most Greens are well-meaning environmentalists who see the Green Party as some kind of a social club where people should sit around and talk about our stinking air and dirty water but should not sink to the level of electoral politics. The Pennsylvania Greens, following the GPUS in the 2004 presidential contest essentially backed off from the whole question of electoral politics. The Pennsylvania Greens again had an opportunity to back a strong antiwar/pro-civil liberties candidate for House of Representatives in the 16th district against the two warmongering candidates, but again it backed off from that race as well.</p>
<p>If the Green Party ever hopes to overcome its characterization as being a fringe group full of tree hugging hippies it’s definitely going to have to stop electing such politically naïve leaders. The Green Party of Pennsylvania refused to support a truly antiwar candidate in the 2004 presidential election deferring to John Kerry through the surrogacy of David Cobb and now they have decided not to field an antiwar Green candidate to run against the two pro war candidates for House of Representatives in the 16th District.</p>
<p>I will be running as an independent and my ballot line will read “Pennsylvania Populist Party”. As you may recall the Green Party of Maryland refused to endorse Mr. Nader consequently he started the Maryland Populist Party. I will run under the Populist banner in honor of Mr. Nader. Fortunately the local Greens — the real Greens in Chester County — will be supporting me. I will also be endorsed by both the Libertarian Party and the Reform Party. Although the Pennsylvania Socialist Party had endorsed me, they had their hands slapped by their own National Committee whose policy does not permit the endorsement of non-socialists. Nevertheless the rank-and-file members of the Socialist Party will be providing me “feet on the street” during my campaign. I have linked my candidacy not only with Kevin Zeese who is running for Senate in Maryland but to a network of non-duopoly antiwar candidates that has sprung up all over the country.</p>
<p>As far as the Green Party actually trying to get rid of the Naderites; I’m afraid it is really true. Most of the Nader supporters have become members of the GDI. One of our proposals requires the complete independence of the Green Party from the two old parties which of course really means the Democratic Party. There is a strong element in the leadership of the Green Party which, in the words of Jody Haug, one of the co-chairs on the National Steering Committee of the Green Party, “we need to keep our options open”. A large majority of the Green Party’s National Committee refuses to declare its independence from the Democratic Party and wishes to retain the option of supporting a Democrat either openly or simply by running no candidate in closely contested elections. Those of us in the GDI, primarily the Nader supporters, feel that this will spell the death of the Green Party.</p>
<p>JOSHUA FRANK edits the radical news blog <a href="http://www.BrickBurner.org/" type="external">www.BrickBurner.org</a> and is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, published by Common Courage Press (2005). Josh can be reached at <a href="mailto:BrickBurner@gmail.com" type="external">BrickBurner@gmail.com</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | How the Green Party Slays Their Own | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/03/10/how-the-green-party-slays-their-own/ | 2006-03-10 | 4left
| 3,061 | amp160 John Murphy is running an antiwar procivil liberties campaign for US Congress from the 16th District of Pennsylvania wwwjohnmurphyforcongressorg Murphy a Green was denied his party8217s endorsement last month because as Murphy believes he supported Ralph Nader and was critical of David Cobb in 2004 Murphy recently spoke with JOSHUA FRANK about his campaign as well as the future of the Green Party JOSHUA FRANK John you8217ve been a Green Party member for a while now Can you tell us a bit about what capacity you8217ve played in your state8217s Green Party John Murphy I never wanted to get involved in the internal operations of the state Green Party I thought this was better left to younger men and women I have however been active in helping campaign for Green candidates at the local level My political activism took on an interesting form in the last few years I became what some people call a 8220photo essayist8221 I simply began by writing to my friends and business associates several years ago asking them to contact their senators to prevent an unconstitutional transference of legislative power to the executive branch whereby President Bush would be given unlimited power to wage war at his discretion These simple letters to friends became more and more sophisticated as I began to embellish them with editorial cartoons articles written by other people and then my own comments often spicing up my essays with my own form of editorial cartoons Now I have lost count of how many thousands of people receive them I have been active in the antiwar movement ever since the 60s but the Nader campaign of 2004 gave me the opportunity to use many of the skills I have developed over the last 60 years as an educator union negotiator and business owner in support of his campaign Consequently when the Nader campaign needed someone to represent Mr Nader in a series of debatelike forums throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania they chose me When they wanted someone to speak prior to his press conferences and fundraisers in Philadelphia they chose me When they wanted someone to represent the independent candidacy of NaderCamejo in the Pennsylvania Ballot Access Coalition an organization consisting of the leaders of the 8220minor parties8221 organized to change the egregious ballot access laws in Pennsylvania they again chose me My organizational and leadership skills coupled with my seniority were put to much greater use in this capacity than serving in any position as an internal officer in the official state Green Party organization I paid those kinds of dues many years ago when I held several functional vicepresidencies including chairman of the board of a prominent professional association in Philadelphia JOSHUA FRANK Can you talk a little about what it was like being a Nader supporter in the Green Party during the 2004 elections John Murphy First of all you should keep in mind that the entire reason for my joining the Green Party was that since I voted for Mr Nader in both 1996 and 2000 I simply decided that if there were a couple of hundred thousand people who felt the way I did at least I ought to join their party I had no idea how intimidated the Greens in leadership positions had become as a result of the scapegoating efforts of the Democratic Party after the 2000 election As the 2004 election approached a lot of the Pennsylvania Greens were saying things like 8220we don8217t want our Democratic friends to hold us responsible again for Bush8217s election8221 Truthfully I was surprised by that entire line of thinking because I never felt 8220responsible8221 nor did I hold Mr Nader 8220responsible8221 for Gore8217s loss in 2000 I had always held the Democrats responsible for that In any event there was no way that I could possibly support someone like John Kerry whose position on the Iraq war the USA Patriot Act and a dozen or so other issues were diametrically opposed to the values espoused by the Green Party The GPUS as well as the GPPA supported Kerry through his surrogate candidate David Cobb who told the Greens that it would be all right to vote for him in states like Texas and Massachusetts where it didn8217t matter but they should vote for Kerry everywhere else In the meantime the leadership of the Pennsylvania Green Party had become completely seduced by the 8220safestates8221 philosophy of David Cobb I am strained to describe in polite language how anyone could embrace this philosophy especially people I once would have described as courageous Suffice it to say that any courage that I once believed existed in the Green Party leadership was ephemeral I could understand how the Democrats who in good conscience thought they were supporting the antiwar movement through the candidacy of Kucinich or even Dean might have been flimflammed by the ABB Anybody But Bush strategy of the Democratic Party but I just couldn8217t believe that my fellow Greens had gotten sucked into that black hole So while I was gathering signatures for Nader8217s nominating petitions the Green Party was working hand in glove with the Democratic Party whose sole purpose was to subvert Nader8217s candidacy by denying him ballot access in Pennsylvania It8217s very spooky to realize that while the Democratic Party challenged every one of Nader8217s signatures not even one of David Cobb8217s signatures were challenged by the Democratic Party 8212 not even for the sake of appearances I did not stop simply at supporting Mr Nader I chastised those who came to be known as the 8220lesser evil Greens8221 whenever the opportunity arose Since I had a pretty powerful Internet presence that opportunity arose on a pretty regular basis The events that began to unfold in Pennsylvania even became more bizarre The Pennsylvania leadership eventually passed a resolution condemning the safestates philosophy When I learned of this I immediately thought well I guess they8217re finally going to dump David Cobb But they did not In fact they put him on the ballot in a state where he did not even want any votes How could the Pennsylvania Greens take this action How could they condemn the safe states gospel and then actually put its evangelist on the ballot How could they have squandered our meager resources in such a way when they were so desperately needed to support Mr Nader whose position actually reflected what Greens like to call their 8220ten key values8221 When it became clear that they couldn8217t even come up with enough volunteers to collect a sufficient number of signatures for David Cobb the chairman of the Green Party himself financed a private contractor to collect the balance of the necessary signatures What were these people thinking Clearly the Pennsylvania Greens didn8217t want this guy Cobb but the chairman himself paid to have him put on the ballot For some reason I still considered myself a member of the Green Party but I had become part of an internal movement called the 8220GDI8221 8212 Greens for Democracy and Independence which had developed a series of proposals that would prevent another bastardization of the democratic process like the Milwaukee convention where David Cobb who actually had gotten only 12 of the Green Party votes ended up as the official candidate JOSHUA FRANK I8217ve heard quite a few stories like yours and there are purportedly a lot of things going on within the Green Party a split between Cobb Greens and Camejo Greens and even the impeachment of a few Steering Committee members Not to open up all those issues here but can you expand more on what has recently happened with your campaign for Congress Was it more personal than strategic on the part of those who didn8217t support you I8217m assuming that the majority of them were and are Cobb supporters Are the Greens in PA trying to dump the Naderites John Murphy Yes there was a failed effort to impeach five members of the steering committee because they refused to seat a validly elected member of the GDI It had to do with two separate results from the IRV voting that took place at the plenary meeting of the Green Party in Tulsa last July Two different programs were used yielding two separate results But the truth of the matter is they simply did not want to seat a Naderite JOSHUA FRANK Can you tell us more about the GDI John Murphy Sure for all practical purposes the GDI is composed of former Nader supporters There may be one or two repentant Cobbites in the group but the 8220lesser evil Greens8221 want absolutely nothing to do with the GDI members whom they see as some kind of a radical fringe There has even been an incredible amount of redbaiting going on But you8217re correct trying to delve into this business would take quite some time To make a long story short however if the GDI is not ultimately successful in getting its proposals passed I find it hard to imagine how the Green Party will survive after 2008 The Green Party in Pennsylvania decided not to nominate me for House of Representatives in the 16th Congressional District The reasons leading up to this decision are truly byzantine JOSHUA FRANK What is the nominating process like for Greens in Pennsylvania John Murphy In order to receive the nomination of the PA Green Party you must first have the endorsement of your local party Four members of the Chester County Green Party my local Green Party met in secret and decided not to call the local party into session for a period of six months in order to avoid the possibility that I might show up with sufficient supporters to obtain the local party8217s endorsement These four former officers actually admitted this abuse of the democratic process in front of the chairman of the Pennsylvania Green Party three officers of the Pennsylvania Green Party nine of my supporters along with my wife and children There are two ways you can destroy democracy One way is by preventing people from voting the other is by preventing worthy candidates from ever appearing on the ballot The Green Party of Pennsylvania has chosen the latter When the Chester County Green Party was forced to have a reorganization meeting on January 30 the party chairman tried to cut a deal in order to prevent this disgrace from becoming public Since they deliberately prohibited the Chester County Green Party from meeting in order to endorse me the party chairman tried to get a motion passed whereby my endorsement would be deferred to the delegates of the Green Party itself Although it looked like these four former officers were going to go along with the deal he was trying to cut a few days later one of them went on the listserv of the Pennsylvania delegates and told them that the Green Party of Chester County could not recommend me for endorsement A feeding frenzy followed whereby the Cobbites trotted out one red herring after another for condemning my candidacy At the Green Party convention they would use this as the linchpin upon which they would hang their refusal to grant me their nomination Tragically but not unexpectedly the Green Party chairman in a monumental act of CYA did not even tell the delegates what he witnessed at the meeting at the Chester County Green Party I attended the Pennsylvania state Green Party convention last week February 25 and 26 It was a cross between a high school pep rally and a meeting of a religious cult Of course not having a beard and ponytail as I had back in 1967 made me a bit out of place Guess I just never recovered form going 8220clean for Gene8221 in 821768 These folks had decided quite some time ago that there was no way they were going to allow my nomination They even engaged in emotional blackmail One of the former officers of Chester County Green Party wrote to the Pennsylvania delegates saying that if the Pennsylvania Green Party nominated me it would destroy the Green Party in Chester County and the PA Green Party could forget about getting any signatures on its nominating petitions in Chester County As a matter of fact I have more volunteers from the Chester County Green Party in my campaign than have participated in any meeting of the Chester County Green Party for the past two years Furthermore because I have been endorsed by the Libertarian Party they have already arranged to get all the necessary signatures for my nominating petitions Now ironically the Green Party candidates will have no signatures on their petitions from Chester County In a year when they need 67000 signatures they have essentially thrown away the 5000 signatures that my candidacy would have brought them If that were not bad enough one person who constitutes an entire hate group all by himself joined the GDI listserv some time ago under false pretenses When the GDI was considering endorsing me he tried to blackmail them by telling them that if they gave me their endorsement they could forget all about their three proposals ever passing in Pennsylvania You might get away with that kind of emotional blackmail in Pennsylvania but the GDI would never buy into something like that and I am pleased to say that I have been endorsed by the GDI as well as by Peter Camejo I expect to have the formal endorsement of Ralph Nader as soon as he returns from Connecticut JOSHUA FRANK So what is their public rationale for not endorsing you John Murphy The Green Party here has said they can8217t have someone like me represent them because of the way I criticized them for supporting David Cobb This decision was not strategic it was personal Unfortunately the GPPA and by extension the GPUS has not yet developed the talent for strategic thought The Republicans are going to be represented in the 16th Congressional District by a man who took money from Jack Abramoff and who blames Homer Simpson for the decline of fatherhood in the United States This man of course also supports the war the Patriot Act and countless other pieces of legislative atrocities The Democratic Party is being represented by a retired school administrator who believes that terrorists should be tried by military tribunals instead of civilian courts She too believes that the occupation of Iraq should continue and gives her support to the Patriot Act along with freetrade agreements like NAFTA The Democrat does not even support equal rights for gays and lesbians and she thinks that individual countries must be held responsible for acts of terrorism committed by their citizens The implication being that the United States therefore has the right to invade any such country anytime it chooses The Green Party of Pennsylvania however will not allow an antiwar procivil liberties candidate to represent it because he called them a dirty word two years ago JOSHUA FRANK On the whole does this proCobb sect represent the majority of Greens you know John Murphy Most Greens are wellmeaning environmentalists who see the Green Party as some kind of a social club where people should sit around and talk about our stinking air and dirty water but should not sink to the level of electoral politics The Pennsylvania Greens following the GPUS in the 2004 presidential contest essentially backed off from the whole question of electoral politics The Pennsylvania Greens again had an opportunity to back a strong antiwarprocivil liberties candidate for House of Representatives in the 16th district against the two warmongering candidates but again it backed off from that race as well If the Green Party ever hopes to overcome its characterization as being a fringe group full of tree hugging hippies it8217s definitely going to have to stop electing such politically na239ve leaders The Green Party of Pennsylvania refused to support a truly antiwar candidate in the 2004 presidential election deferring to John Kerry through the surrogacy of David Cobb and now they have decided not to field an antiwar Green candidate to run against the two pro war candidates for House of Representatives in the 16th District I will be running as an independent and my ballot line will read 8220Pennsylvania Populist Party8221 As you may recall the Green Party of Maryland refused to endorse Mr Nader consequently he started the Maryland Populist Party I will run under the Populist banner in honor of Mr Nader Fortunately the local Greens 8212 the real Greens in Chester County 8212 will be supporting me I will also be endorsed by both the Libertarian Party and the Reform Party Although the Pennsylvania Socialist Party had endorsed me they had their hands slapped by their own National Committee whose policy does not permit the endorsement of nonsocialists Nevertheless the rankandfile members of the Socialist Party will be providing me 8220feet on the street8221 during my campaign I have linked my candidacy not only with Kevin Zeese who is running for Senate in Maryland but to a network of nonduopoly antiwar candidates that has sprung up all over the country As far as the Green Party actually trying to get rid of the Naderites I8217m afraid it is really true Most of the Nader supporters have become members of the GDI One of our proposals requires the complete independence of the Green Party from the two old parties which of course really means the Democratic Party There is a strong element in the leadership of the Green Party which in the words of Jody Haug one of the cochairs on the National Steering Committee of the Green Party 8220we need to keep our options open8221 A large majority of the Green Party8217s National Committee refuses to declare its independence from the Democratic Party and wishes to retain the option of supporting a Democrat either openly or simply by running no candidate in closely contested elections Those of us in the GDI primarily the Nader supporters feel that this will spell the death of the Green Party JOSHUA FRANK edits the radical news blog wwwBrickBurnerorg and is the author of Left Out How Liberals Helped Reelect George W Bush published by Common Courage Press 2005 Josh can be 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wishes/VERB to/PART retain/VERB the/DET option/NOUN of/ADP supporting/VERB a/DET Democrat/PROPN either/ADV openly/ADV or/CCONJ simply/ADV by/ADP running/VERB no/DET candidate/NOUN in/ADP closely/ADV contested/VERB elections/NOUN Those/PRON of/ADP us/PRON in/ADP the/DET GDI/PROPN primarily/ADV the/DET Nader/PROPN supporters/NOUN feel/VERB that/SCONJ this/PRON will/AUX spell/VERB the/DET death/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Green/PROPN Party/PROPN JOSHUA/PROPN FRANK/PROPN edits/VERB the/DET radical/PROPN news/NOUN blog/NOUN wwwBrickBurnerorg/PROPN and/CCONJ is/AUX the/DET author/NOUN of/ADP Left/PROPN Out/ADP How/SCONJ Liberals/NOUN Helped/AUX Reelect/VERB George/PROPN W/PROPN Bush/PROPN published/VERB by/ADP Common/PROPN Courage/PROPN Press/PROPN 2005/NUM Josh/PROPN can/AUX be/AUX reached/VERB at/ADP BrickBurnergmailcom/PROPN amp160/PROPN amp160/PROPN |
<p>What kind of lunacy is going on in Washington?</p>
<p>Hatred of U.S. foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world, but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism.</p>
<p>Instead, the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels, militarize the nation beyond rationality, move toward preemptive warfare as a first-choice instrument of national policy, and, with more arrogance than ever, label as “evil” a variety of nations and groups that oppose U.S. policies. With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security, it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship–a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security–a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB (the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union). To top it off, Bush, flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice, his entire top foreign-policy team except for behind-the-scenes manipulator Cheney, has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader, Yasir Arafat.</p>
<p>Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government’s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years, from the early failures in its “war on terrorism,” and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury. More importantly, this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associates/handlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the U.S.</p>
<p>Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies, but so far they don’t amount to much. Vice President Cheney and other foreign-policy formulators in the White House, the NSC staff, and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States. Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change, but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue. Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle. He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney, the NSC, and the Pentagon (as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove, and his comrade-in-arms Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister). The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell, who after all still has something of an independent political base in the U.S. But, to repeat, at the moment no grounds exist for believing–or hoping–that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation.</p>
<p>All of this means that no changes in U.S. foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration. Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much all-powerful, any new pressures from abroad, at least for the near future, are likely to have little effect.</p>
<p>New pressures from inside the U.S., however, could be considerably more effective. The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration’s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party’s position in Congress this fall, followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush’s own reelection effort in 2004. Similarly, the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall. Right now, then, is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the U.S. should change its internal security, military, and above all foreign policies.</p>
<p>Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current U.S. policies associated with the so-called war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary. So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies. Many of us who agree that Bush’s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important. That’s okay. We have to start somewhere, and the important thing is to start NOW. Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive Bush-Cheney wars will be upon us before we know it, and Attorney General Ashcroft’s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture.</p>
<p>The task is not impossible. Those of us who give public talks on these issues, or participate in radio interviews or talk shows, know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours, and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts. It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush’s foreign policies are immutable. In fact, support for those policies is probably quite shallow. One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize U.S. foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well.</p>
<p>For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the U.S. are rarely influenced by foreign policies, we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about. All the lobbies powerful in U.S. politics–lobbies for Israel, arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates, or any others you want to name–cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration. We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections, never forgetting that the combined targets of G.W. Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004.</p>
<p>Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize. Let’s see more proposals from others. We should probably concentrate on only a few topics, ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in U.S. internal security, military, and foreign policies.</p>
<p>ONE: We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security. We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act, to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes.</p>
<p>As already mentioned, a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB. Even the Soviets avoided that error, out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment. While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization, pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop, and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident. Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oft-expressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department, it’s not hard to believe they could flip-flop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions. To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain. Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new, extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents? Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective?</p>
<p>Given other flip-flops of this administration, particularly on the Israel-Palestine issue (Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go), we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department. But even without changes, the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people–particularly immigrants–than any other arm of the government, except for the armed services, which have full power over military personnel. Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the U.S. after its creation. Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s. Many fear that such a development is possible, and they are right to be fearful. We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born.</p>
<p>Most people don’t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security. That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory. So let’s go out and slay this dragon.</p>
<p>We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now. The Secret Service, for example, is now in the Treasury Department–with no logic at all. But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury. Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants, but as a significant reason for a new cabinet-level department, it flunks. The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security.</p>
<p>TWO. We should urge U.S. voters to oppose the Bush administration’s drive for global hegemony and domination. The Bush approach of “what we say goes” increases worldwide hatreds of the U.S., and in no way benefits a majority of Americans.</p>
<p>The U.S. has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of big-corporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago. The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters, who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world. Average wage earners in the U.S. receive few if any benefits, and some are actually hurt.</p>
<p>The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations. Four months ago, an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly: “If Congress cranks up the Pentagon’s budget as much as President Bush would like, the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined.” These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare, and also make it harder for the U.S. to help alleviate global poverty. This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war. The true cause, however, and we should emphasize this fact to voters, is the pursuit of global domination by the United States. This ultimate goal of U.S. foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable, and it will not in the end be worth the cost, either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed.</p>
<p>In response to arguments that Bush’s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above, you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1, 2002 to the West Point graduating class. In this speech, he explicitly stated that “America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the U.S. plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world.</p>
<p>In the same speech, Bush said, “Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action.” He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment, saying that deterrence “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks,” and that containment “is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies.” A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast U.S. militarization now underway. We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years, and to oppose this preemptive-war strategy with all their might. In fact, we should oppose ever initiating a war, because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants. Furthermore, unless and until the U.S. is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons, other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves. Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of U.S. preemptive actions. We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons, including those of the U.S.</p>
<p>THREE. We should urge the U.S. government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel’s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>A majority of people in almost all countries believe that U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and one-sided in support of Israel. Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the U.S. on this issue, but they are aware of these majority views in their countries. In all Arab and Muslim nations, these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States.</p>
<p>We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves–not only most people in other nations–believe U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years.</p>
<p>Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters. Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of U.S. policy that you are sure are true. Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the U.S. and Israel. If anyone charges you with anti-Semitism, state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-American. You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of anti-Semitism. The charge is spurious.</p>
<p>If anyone asks what you thought of Bush’s statement on June 24, in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene, one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which U.S. governmental policy has long treated the Israel-Palestine issue. Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the U.S. It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator.</p>
<p>In this same statement, Bush also blamed most recent problems in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism. In fact, Israeli terrorism, both by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and by settler groups, has caused more killings of Palestinian non-combatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli non-combatants and children. And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first, while the Israelis only retaliate. Both sides, with equal justification, can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions. Nor can the Israelis claim there is no “moral equivalence” between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli non-combatants, and the “accidental” or “collateral-damage” killings of Palestinian non-combatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions. There is ample evidence, from reliable sources including Israel’s own media, that many Palestinian non-combatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes. There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism. Both are equally inexcusable.</p>
<p>For those of us who believe U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the U.S. and its allies, it is vital to highlight one specific point. More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of U.S. aid is the most important single change that the U.S. government should make in its policy toward Israel. Each year congress and the president approve, with little debate, aid (grants, not loans) to Israel now officially totaling almost $3 billion, but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in, the total is nearer $5 billion annually. That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities. It is the greatest single element of injustice in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine, and Arabs who see U.S. aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the U.S. aid package.</p>
<p>We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel, and to make the answer a major factor in the voter’s choice of a candidate. It is no longer just a “single issue,” not important enough to determine one’s vote. It is now an absolutely critical issue, because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the U.S. increases or gradually subsides. If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel, we should urge people not to vote for any of them, and to make their reasons public. It is that important.</p>
<p>Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.</p> | The Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US, Part 3 | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/07/08/the-disastrous-foreign-policies-of-the-us-part-3/ | 2002-07-08 | 4left
| 3,061 | What kind of lunacy is going on in Washington Hatred of US foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism Instead the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels militarize the nation beyond rationality move toward preemptive warfare as a firstchoice instrument of national policy and with more arrogance than ever label as 8220evil8221 a variety of nations and groups that oppose US policies With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship8211a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security8211a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union To top it off Bush flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice his entire top foreignpolicy team except for behindthescenes manipulator Cheney has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader Yasir Arafat Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government8217s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years from the early failures in its 8220war on terrorism8221 and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury More importantly this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associateshandlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the US Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies but so far they don8217t amount to much Vice President Cheney and other foreignpolicy formulators in the White House the NSC staff and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney the NSC and the Pentagon as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove and his comradeinarms Ariel Sharon Israel8217s Prime Minister The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell who after all still has something of an independent political base in the US But to repeat at the moment no grounds exist for believing8211or hoping8211that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation All of this means that no changes in US foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much allpowerful any new pressures from abroad at least for the near future are likely to have little effect New pressures from inside the US however could be considerably more effective The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration8217s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party8217s position in Congress this fall followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush8217s own reelection effort in 2004 Similarly the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall Right now then is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the US should change its internal security military and above all foreign policies Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current US policies associated with the socalled war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies Many of us who agree that Bush8217s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important That8217s okay We have to start somewhere and the important thing is to start NOW Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive BushCheney wars will be upon us before we know it and Attorney General Ashcroft8217s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture The task is not impossible Those of us who give public talks on these issues or participate in radio interviews or talk shows know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush8217s foreign policies are immutable In fact support for those policies is probably quite shallow One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize US foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the US are rarely influenced by foreign policies we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about All the lobbies powerful in US politics8211lobbies for Israel arms manufacturers energy conglomerates or any others you want to name8211cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections never forgetting that the combined targets of GW Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004 Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize Let8217s see more proposals from others We should probably concentrate on only a few topics ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in US internal security military and foreign policies ONE We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes As already mentioned a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB Even the Soviets avoided that error out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oftexpressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department it8217s not hard to believe they could flipflop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective Given other flipflops of this administration particularly on the IsraelPalestine issue Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department But even without changes the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people8211particularly immigrants8211than any other arm of the government except for the armed services which have full power over military personnel Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the US after its creation Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s Many fear that such a development is possible and they are right to be fearful We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born Most people don8217t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory So let8217s go out and slay this dragon We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now The Secret Service for example is now in the Treasury Department8211with no logic at all But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants but as a significant reason for a new cabinetlevel department it flunks The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security TWO We should urge US voters to oppose the Bush administration8217s drive for global hegemony and domination The Bush approach of 8220what we say goes8221 increases worldwide hatreds of the US and in no way benefits a majority of Americans The US has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of bigcorporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world Average wage earners in the US receive few if any benefits and some are actually hurt The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations Four months ago an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly 8220If Congress cranks up the Pentagon8217s budget as much as President Bush would like the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined8221 These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare and also make it harder for the US to help alleviate global poverty This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war The true cause however and we should emphasize this fact to voters is the pursuit of global domination by the United States This ultimate goal of US foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable and it will not in the end be worth the cost either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed In response to arguments that Bush8217s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1 2002 to the West Point graduating class In this speech he explicitly stated that 8220America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace8221 This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the US plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world In the same speech Bush said 8220Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action8221 He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment saying that deterrence 8220means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks8221 and that containment 8220is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies8221 A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast US militarization now underway We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years and to oppose this preemptivewar strategy with all their might In fact we should oppose ever initiating a war because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants Furthermore unless and until the US is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of US preemptive actions We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons including those of the US THREE We should urge the US government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel8217s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem A majority of people in almost all countries believe that US policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and onesided in support of Israel Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the US on this issue but they are aware of these majority views in their countries In all Arab and Muslim nations these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves8211not only most people in other nations8211believe US policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of US policy that you are sure are true Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the US and Israel If anyone charges you with antiSemitism state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither antiSemitic nor antiAmerican You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of antiSemitism The charge is spurious If anyone asks what you thought of Bush8217s statement on June 24 in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which US governmental policy has long treated the IsraelPalestine issue Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the US It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator In this same statement Bush also blamed most recent problems in the IsraeliPalestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism In fact Israeli terrorism both by the Israel Defense Force IDF and by settler groups has caused more killings of Palestinian noncombatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli noncombatants and children And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first while the Israelis only retaliate Both sides with equal justification can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions Nor can the Israelis claim there is no 8220moral equivalence8221 between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli noncombatants and the 8220accidental8221 or 8220collateraldamage8221 killings of Palestinian noncombatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions There is ample evidence from reliable sources including Israel8217s own media that many Palestinian noncombatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism Both are equally inexcusable For those of us who believe US policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the US and its allies it is vital to highlight one specific point More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of US aid is the most important single change that the US government should make in its policy toward Israel Each year congress and the president approve with little debate aid grants not loans to Israel now officially totaling almost 3 billion but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in the total is nearer 5 billion annually That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities It is the greatest single element of injustice in US policy toward Israel and Palestine and Arabs who see US aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the US aid package We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel and to make the answer a major factor in the voter8217s choice of a candidate It is no longer just a 8220single issue8221 not important enough to determine one8217s vote It is now an absolutely critical issue because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the US increases or gradually subsides If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel we should urge people not to vote for any of them and to make their reasons public It is that important Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950 and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas for at various times Southeast Asia South Asia and Africa Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA8217s Office of Regional and Political Analysis a 250person unit His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA retiring in 1979 Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine | What/DET kind/NOUN of/ADP lunacy/NOUN is/AUX going/VERB on/ADP in/ADP Washington/PROPN Hatred/PROPN of/ADP US/PROPN foreign/ADJ policies/NOUN intensifies/NOUN day/NOUN by/ADP day/NOUN in/ADP much/ADJ of/ADP the/DET world/NOUN but/CCONJ the/DET present/ADJ administration/NOUN is/AUX not/PART even/ADV 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<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The spreading popularity of the 9/11 conspiracy hypothesis is a political phenomenon of some significance. I wish to examine both the causes and the effects, as well as the substance of the hypothesis itself.</p>
<p>Distrust and hatred of the Bush administration and of the “neo-conservatives” of the Program for a New American Century (PNAC).</p>
<p>Their lies and crimes are so great that in purely moral terms, they seem capable of anything. This is the factor that supplies the emotional and moral readiness to believe the worst.</p>
<p>However, the fact that they may well be morally capable of every conceivable crime does not mean that they are necessarily capable in purely practical terms. The test of the conspiracy hypothesis is not the character of the alleged conspirators, but the plausibility of the conspiracy in both practical and political terms.</p>
<p>I should note at the outset that I have an open mind about conspiracy theories in general. History is replete with conspiracies. No hypothesis should be rejected automatically because it involves a conspiracy. But each hypothesis must be judged on its own merits, in terms of solid evidence and plausibility, as well as in comparison with conflicting hypotheses. A scientific attitude requires special skepticism in regard to theories one would like, for various personal or ideological reasons, to believe. The wish to pin the supreme crime on the criminal Bush administration is an initial reason to be skeptical.</p>
<p>Who profits from the crime?</p>
<p>The Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 9/11 to instill paranoid fear in the American public in order to justify a repressive domestic policy and an aggressive war policy abroad. The event seems to have served as the “Pearl Harbor” posited by certain neo-cons as necessary to bring the U.S. public around to their agenda. So the Bush administration can rightly be said to have profited from the crime.</p>
<p>But so did Osama bin Laden, who has become a hero to millions. So did numerous other Islamic extremists, who were inspired by the impact of that event. The plain fact is that the September 11 attacks were greeted rapturously in much of the Arab-Muslim world. They have inspired emulation.</p>
<p>If both sides profited, one profited opportunistically and the other actually designed the attacks to fit its purpose [1]. So the attacks should be examined to see which set of aims it was designed to serve. The targets and the message.</p>
<p>The al Qaeda hypothesis: The choice of 9/11 targets contained an eloquent message that was perfectly understood in most of the world. The World Trade Center stood for America’s economic power in the world, and the Pentagon its military power. Assuming the targets were chosen by bin Laden and his associates, they were meant to show that this overwhelming power was in reality vulnerable, and could be dealt a deadly blow by only a few determined men ready to sacrifice their lives.</p>
<p>The Bushite conspiracy hypothesis: All along, the Bush explanation for the attacks is that “the terrorists hate us because we are free, they want to destroy our freedom”.</p>
<p>But wait a minute: this ignores entirely the symbolism of the targets.</p>
<p>Now, let us suppose that Bushite plotters designed the attacks so that Bush could use them to claim that “they want to destroy us because of our freedom”. The choice of targets should support that claim. Suppose one of the planes had crashed into the Statue of Liberty; that would really carry the message that “they want to destroy our freedom”. For ordinary Americans, it would be just as shocking as the World Trade Center, while costing a lot less to American capitalism (an old gift from France would hardly be missed). For good measure, to show that the terrorists want to kill as many people as possible, they could have crashed into a couple of packed football stadiums. That would have killed more people than in the Twin Towers and the message would have been exactly the one claimed by the Bush administration.</p>
<p>It should be clear that the choice of targets was perfectly suited to express violent opposition to United States economic and military power (and perhaps political power if, as claimed without proof, the fourth plane was heading for the White House), not primarily the American people. The approximately three thousand victims were not the target, but were, as the Americans and Israelis say of their bombing runs, “collateral damage”. W’s goat story.</p>
<p>Was George W. Bush supposed to be part of the plot? Or was he left out of the planning by his handlers? Either way, an entourage clever enough to pull off the 9/11 spectacle should have been clever enough to manipulate the President to get him to play his important role in the scenario. If the whole thing was a set-up, he should have been made to leap into action, rush to the defense of the nation and show himself heroically on the front lines of this new “war”. Instead, looking totally bewildered, he went on reading a goat story, then vanished from sight allowing Mayor Giuliani to hog the limelight. I fail to understand why anyone can interpret that pathetic performance as indication of an “inside job”. The Arab pilots.</p>
<p>In any case, whatever the financial or ideological role of Osama bin Laden, focusing on the mysterious cave dweller distracts attention from the actual perpetrators. According to the official version, these were not cave dwellers, but well educated young men, mostly from Saudi Arabia. To deliver such a strong message to the “evil Empire”, they were ready to give up their lives — and the lives of others. This is standard operating practice for warriors, and makes them heroes in the eyes of those who sympathize with their cause. Considering the hatred that the United States — alongside Israel — has aroused in the Arab world, there is really nothing so amazing about the fact that a certain number of young Arabs would be willing to sacrifice themselves for such a spectacular act. Of course, we are no longer living in those archaic times when it was possible to respect the courage of even the worst enemy. Today we are living in Manichean times — our dualism matches theirs, and enemies can only be “pure evil”. Otherwise, we in the West might do well to drop the obsession with bin Laden and consider what moved those men to do what they did.</p>
<p>One of the conspiracy theories suggests that the planes were actually directed into the Twin Towers by U.S. military guidance systems. It is said that the Towers were too difficult a target for amateur pilots. This does not seem plausible to me: the Towers look like sitting ducks, and the vertical aim could be approximate — unlike an airport runway where both vertical and horizontal precision are necessary.</p>
<p>Demolition.</p>
<p>When the towers went down, it reminded viewers of deliberate building demolitions. That doesn’t prove anything. There are experts who explain why it must have been demolition, and experts who explain why the collapse was due to the structure of the buildings (especially their vertical design). The layman has no way to judge between these expert explanations — but neither do experts, since (as physicist Jean Bricmont points out) scientists cannot be sure of the cause of a single event that cannot be repeated experimentarily. So we are back to the question of plausibility and motivation.</p>
<p>As to plausibility, supposing the airliner attacks were really engineered by the Bushites, why add demolition? Since somebody would have to place explosives in the two towers, this would enlarge the circle of persons involved in the plot, making exposure more likely[2]. And what is the dividend from demolition to make it worth the additional risk of disclosure?.</p>
<p>And why demolish yet another tower? How does that strengthen what is supposed to be the effect of the attacks: to frighten the American people and justify war? The absence of jet fighter intervention.</p>
<p>Anyone who is familiar with the military knows that smooth operations are for political demonstrations to Congressmen and the media. In reality, foul-ups are the rule. But what could U.S. Air Force jets have done in this case? Shoot down loaded airliners over Manhattan — at a time when the hypothesis would have been hijacking rather than suicide attacks on the Twin Towers? It just may be that there was no standard operating defense against such an operation. The Pentagon.</p>
<p>The argument, popularized by Thierry Meyssan, that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than by American Airlines flight 77, rests wholly on photographic evidence, or to be more precise, the absence of photographic evidence clearly showing the wreckage of the airliner embedded in the Pentagon. Because the Pentagon is flat, and outside the main Washington urban area, it is not the object of tourists taking amateur photos, especially not early in the morning. Once again, experts are called upon to explain why the projectile striking the Pentagon, could, or could not, have been an airliner. The fact that the appearance of a crash site is ambiguous is scarcely conclusive evidence of anything. And once again, the layman cannot easily judge these conflicting physical interpretations, but can quite well use common sense to question motives and plausibility.</p>
<p>Most superficially, there is the issue of eye witnesses. Thierry Meyssan maintained that the only people who claim to have seen an airliner crash into the Pentagon are not credible because employed by the Government. This is not correct. There were numerous non-governmental eye witnesses, mostly commuters on the highways which surround the otherwise rather bare area where the Pentagon is located. Many have described how they were first surprised to see the airliner flying in too low to reach nearby Reagan National Airport.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, how many eye witnesses say they saw a missile strike the Pentagon? Even more to the point, how many eye witnesses saw or heard a missile being fired at the Pentagon, if at short range, or traveling in that direction, if at long range?</p>
<p>But the real argument against the Pentagon hypothesis is that it makes no sense politically or practically. Why get rid of an entire airliner full of people, in order to make way for a missile to do the job attributed to the airliner? What is the point? I suppose somebody can come up with an answer, but does it make any sense? An airliner couldn’t hit the Pentagon, so a missile was required? But the Pentagon is a very large target, visible in an open space. It is sturdier than the Twin Towers, having been built to withstand military attack, so destroying it was harder, but hitting it was not such an extraordinary feat.</p>
<p>U.S. military officers may be reactionary, they may even be stupid (no more so than civilian politicians, however), but whatever their faults, they tend to be sincerely patriotic. A lot of them hate Donald Rumsfeld. It is really not credible that U.S. military personnel would follow orders to carry out such a ghastly mission — murder a civil airliner full of passenger, shoot a missile into the Pentagon — without somebody among them blowing the whistle. The United States is not a place where people keep secrets. “Let it all hang out” is the national attitude. In addition to patriotism, any one of the alleged conspirators could have been certain of millions of dollars in royalties for telling the story.</p>
<p>Anthrax.</p>
<p>Then there are the anthrax attacks. But that is quite another story, since there is no indication that the clumsy anthrax attacks were anything but the attempt of some local biowar expert to get into the act. The anthrax attacks are even in total opposition to the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by kamikaze warriors with paper cutters and commercial airliners — no “weapons of mass destruction” needed. And that in itself was a lesson that the U.S. administration refused to heed. September 11 illustrated the futility of WMD, unnecessary for attack, useless for defense. Instead, the administration, with its habitual illogic, exploited 9/11 to demand more WMD to fight against WMD. The anthrax attacks could very well be an inside job designed to bring public attention back to the “WMD threat” so dear to the administration. Political attractiveness of the conspiracy theory.</p>
<p>It seems to me, on balance, that the evidence is so weak for this particular conspiracy theory that its popularity calls for a psychological explanation. After attacking those whom he calls “coincidence nuts” (who reject the conspiracy hypothesis) for “moral cowardice”, Andreas Kargar makes an interesting comment: “But aside from that moral cowardice, the traditional left has always preferred to deal in the abstract generalities of historical processes and concepts, rather than in tangible specifics like hard evidence that can be comprehended by the general public. Perhaps those are the two reasons for the state of disarray in which they find themselves today.”</p>
<p>Now, this is interesting because in this particular case, there is no “hard evidence”, but there is a simple story line that “can be comprehended by the general public”. The left that deals in “abstract generalities of historical processes and concepts” has indeed lost the attention of the general public (if they ever had it, which is most doubtful). But what are the preferences of that “general public”? Polls indicate that a quite considerable proportion of the American public believe in visits to earth by extraterrestrials. The acceptability of a narrative to the general public should not be a criterion of belief by people who are serious, honest and morally courageous.</p>
<p>Mr Kargar asked rather suspiciously “what political objectives” Alexander Cockburn was “trying to achieve by writing this piece?”</p>
<p>I can’t answer for somebody else, but I am quite ready to explain my own motives.</p>
<p>Defend conspiracy theory.</p>
<p>Personally, as mentioned above, I am quite open to reasonable hypotheses of conspiracy. In the case of the John F. Kennedy assassination, for example, I find the theory that it was organized by a conspiracy of anti-Castro fanatics and gangsters plausible both in terms of feasibility and in terms of motive [3].</p>
<p>I feel that the extreme version of the 9/11 conspiracy, complete with demolition and Pentagon missile, gives a bad name to conspiracy theory in general.</p>
<p>Even in the case of 9/11, there is what I would call a “soft” version of the conspiracy theory that deserves investigation, and that is the possible role of secret agents who may have infiltrated the al Qaeda plot enough to know what was afoot, but let it happen. Such an hypothesis involves only a few passive “conspirators”, who, especially if they were from Israeli Mossad, would have had a patriotic motive: to bring the United States fully to the side of Israel in the “war against terror”. But this is only a hypothesis. Of course, if the attacks were not really perpetrated by Arab student pilots, then the Mossad agents reportedly spying on them in Florida could not have known anything.</p>
<p>A full inquiry into this question is difficult for obvious political reasons. So perhaps it is easier, politically, to advance the far more complex and implausible version of an all-out U.S. administration role in staging the 9/11 attacks than to pinpoint a smaller, more plausible, but politically more sensitive target. Against dualistic simplicity.</p>
<p>The most profound motive for criticizing the 9/11 conspiracy theory is that it partakes of the very sort of moral dualism advocated by the Bushites and neo-cons, but just turns it around. Instead of evil Arabs gratuitously attacking innocent Americans, all evil acts are committed by the villains in Washington. The Arabs are innocent of everything. However, I believe it is more intelligent, and more realistic, to acknowledge that Arabs in general are, on the one hand, innocent victims of U.S. and Israeli aggression, and, on the other hand, that some of them (for that very reason) want to strike back at the United States by any means possible. Israelis abuse Palestinians with a clear conscience because they have convinced themselves that all Jews are under perpetual threat of a new Holocaust. This chronic fear leads them to commit crimes. We are nearing a state of war of all against all, in which it is absolutely necessary for the sake of survival to keep a cool head and try to understand why people do the terrible things they do, in order to find solutions. The interaction of causal factors is complex, and often may not easily be “comprehended by the general public”. But the proper task of honest journalists is to try to guide the public through those complexities.</p>
<p>DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of <a href="" type="internal">Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions</a> published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at: <a href="maiilto:/dianajohnstone@compuserve.com" type="external">dianajohnstone@compuserve.com</a> Notes</p>
<p>1. Of course, one feature or conspiracy theories is to stress the connections between Osama bin Laden and the CIA. Their interests and activities converged in the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But Osama bin Laden’s fortune and connections put him out of reach of effective CIA control. And this would scarcely be the unique instance of a temporary collaboration turning into “backlash”.</p>
<p>2. A critic of Cockburn’s piece named Andreas Kargar writes that it is “Standing Operating Procedure” inside the intelligence community to “compartmentalize intelligence” so that a small group can manage a project that involves hundred of people, organized into small teams which know only exactly what they are supposed to be doing, without knowing anything about the overarching big picture. But if assigned to plant demolition explosives in the World Trade Center, even the most isolated operatives would soon catch onto the “big picture” — as would other hypothetical small teams assigned to steer the airliners into the Towers, fire a missile into the Pentagon, and — most delicate of all — dispose of the 58 passengers and crew of American Airlines flight AA77, and their Boeing 747, if it in fact it did not crash into the Pentagon.</p>
<p>3. As to the motive, I do not accept the Oliver Stone cinema version according to which JFK was assassinated because he was too good (wanting to end the war in Vietnam). Rather, I think it was because he wasn’t quite bad enough in the eyes of the Cuban mafia</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | In Defense of Conspiracy | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/09/15/in-defense-of-conspiracy/ | 2006-09-15 | 4left
| 3,061 | amp160 The spreading popularity of the 911 conspiracy hypothesis is a political phenomenon of some significance I wish to examine both the causes and the effects as well as the substance of the hypothesis itself Distrust and hatred of the Bush administration and of the 8220neoconservatives8221 of the Program for a New American Century PNAC Their lies and crimes are so great that in purely moral terms they seem capable of anything This is the factor that supplies the emotional and moral readiness to believe the worst However the fact that they may well be morally capable of every conceivable crime does not mean that they are necessarily capable in purely practical terms The test of the conspiracy hypothesis is not the character of the alleged conspirators but the plausibility of the conspiracy in both practical and political terms I should note at the outset that I have an open mind about conspiracy theories in general History is replete with conspiracies No hypothesis should be rejected automatically because it involves a conspiracy But each hypothesis must be judged on its own merits in terms of solid evidence and plausibility as well as in comparison with conflicting hypotheses A scientific attitude requires special skepticism in regard to theories one would like for various personal or ideological reasons to believe The wish to pin the supreme crime on the criminal Bush administration is an initial reason to be skeptical Who profits from the crime The Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 911 to instill paranoid fear in the American public in order to justify a repressive domestic policy and an aggressive war policy abroad The event seems to have served as the 8220Pearl Harbor8221 posited by certain neocons as necessary to bring the US public around to their agenda So the Bush administration can rightly be said to have profited from the crime But so did Osama bin Laden who has become a hero to millions So did numerous other Islamic extremists who were inspired by the impact of that event The plain fact is that the September 11 attacks were greeted rapturously in much of the ArabMuslim world They have inspired emulation If both sides profited one profited opportunistically and the other actually designed the attacks to fit its purpose 1 So the attacks should be examined to see which set of aims it was designed to serve The targets and the message The al Qaeda hypothesis The choice of 911 targets contained an eloquent message that was perfectly understood in most of the world The World Trade Center stood for America8217s economic power in the world and the Pentagon its military power Assuming the targets were chosen by bin Laden and his associates they were meant to show that this overwhelming power was in reality vulnerable and could be dealt a deadly blow by only a few determined men ready to sacrifice their lives The Bushite conspiracy hypothesis All along the Bush explanation for the attacks is that 8220the terrorists hate us because we are free they want to destroy our freedom8221 But wait a minute this ignores entirely the symbolism of the targets Now let us suppose that Bushite plotters designed the attacks so that Bush could use them to claim that 8220they want to destroy us because of our freedom8221 The choice of targets should support that claim Suppose one of the planes had crashed into the Statue of Liberty that would really carry the message that 8220they want to destroy our freedom8221 For ordinary Americans it would be just as shocking as the World Trade Center while costing a lot less to American capitalism an old gift from France would hardly be missed For good measure to show that the terrorists want to kill as many people as possible they could have crashed into a couple of packed football stadiums That would have killed more people than in the Twin Towers and the message would have been exactly the one claimed by the Bush administration It should be clear that the choice of targets was perfectly suited to express violent opposition to United States economic and military power and perhaps political power if as claimed without proof the fourth plane was heading for the White House not primarily the American people The approximately three thousand victims were not the target but were as the Americans and Israelis say of their bombing runs 8220collateral damage8221 W8217s goat story Was George W Bush supposed to be part of the plot Or was he left out of the planning by his handlers Either way an entourage clever enough to pull off the 911 spectacle should have been clever enough to manipulate the President to get him to play his important role in the scenario If the whole thing was a setup he should have been made to leap into action rush to the defense of the nation and show himself heroically on the front lines of this new 8220war8221 Instead looking totally bewildered he went on reading a goat story then vanished from sight allowing Mayor Giuliani to hog the limelight I fail to understand why anyone can interpret that pathetic performance as indication of an 8220inside job8221 The Arab pilots In any case whatever the financial or ideological role of Osama bin Laden focusing on the mysterious cave dweller distracts attention from the actual perpetrators According to the official version these were not cave dwellers but well educated young men mostly from Saudi Arabia To deliver such a strong message to the 8220evil Empire8221 they were ready to give up their lives 8212 and the lives of others This is standard operating practice for warriors and makes them heroes in the eyes of those who sympathize with their cause Considering the hatred that the United States 8212 alongside Israel 8212 has aroused in the Arab world there is really nothing so amazing about the fact that a certain number of young Arabs would be willing to sacrifice themselves for such a spectacular act Of course we are no longer living in those archaic times when it was possible to respect the courage of even the worst enemy Today we are living in Manichean times 8212 our dualism matches theirs and enemies can only be 8220pure evil8221 Otherwise we in the West might do well to drop the obsession with bin Laden and consider what moved those men to do what they did One of the conspiracy theories suggests that the planes were actually directed into the Twin Towers by US military guidance systems It is said that the Towers were too difficult a target for amateur pilots This does not seem plausible to me the Towers look like sitting ducks and the vertical aim could be approximate 8212 unlike an airport runway where both vertical and horizontal precision are necessary Demolition When the towers went down it reminded viewers of deliberate building demolitions That doesn8217t prove anything There are experts who explain why it must have been demolition and experts who explain why the collapse was due to the structure of the buildings especially their vertical design The layman has no way to judge between these expert explanations 8212 but neither do experts since as physicist Jean Bricmont points out scientists cannot be sure of the cause of a single event that cannot be repeated experimentarily So we are back to the question of plausibility and motivation As to plausibility supposing the airliner attacks were really engineered by the Bushites why add demolition Since somebody would have to place explosives in the two towers this would enlarge the circle of persons involved in the plot making exposure more likely2 And what is the dividend from demolition to make it worth the additional risk of disclosure And why demolish yet another tower How does that strengthen what is supposed to be the effect of the attacks to frighten the American people and justify war The absence of jet fighter intervention Anyone who is familiar with the military knows that smooth operations are for political demonstrations to Congressmen and the media In reality foulups are the rule But what could US Air Force jets have done in this case Shoot down loaded airliners over Manhattan 8212 at a time when the hypothesis would have been hijacking rather than suicide attacks on the Twin Towers It just may be that there was no standard operating defense against such an operation The Pentagon The argument popularized by Thierry Meyssan that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than by American Airlines flight 77 rests wholly on photographic evidence or to be more precise the absence of photographic evidence clearly showing the wreckage of the airliner embedded in the Pentagon Because the Pentagon is flat and outside the main Washington urban area it is not the object of tourists taking amateur photos especially not early in the morning Once again experts are called upon to explain why the projectile striking the Pentagon could or could not have been an airliner The fact that the appearance of a crash site is ambiguous is scarcely conclusive evidence of anything And once again the layman cannot easily judge these conflicting physical interpretations but can quite well use common sense to question motives and plausibility Most superficially there is the issue of eye witnesses Thierry Meyssan maintained that the only people who claim to have seen an airliner crash into the Pentagon are not credible because employed by the Government This is not correct There were numerous nongovernmental eye witnesses mostly commuters on the highways which surround the otherwise rather bare area where the Pentagon is located Many have described how they were first surprised to see the airliner flying in too low to reach nearby Reagan National Airport But on the other hand how many eye witnesses say they saw a missile strike the Pentagon Even more to the point how many eye witnesses saw or heard a missile being fired at the Pentagon if at short range or traveling in that direction if at long range But the real argument against the Pentagon hypothesis is that it makes no sense politically or practically Why get rid of an entire airliner full of people in order to make way for a missile to do the job attributed to the airliner What is the point I suppose somebody can come up with an answer but does it make any sense An airliner couldn8217t hit the Pentagon so a missile was required But the Pentagon is a very large target visible in an open space It is sturdier than the Twin Towers having been built to withstand military attack so destroying it was harder but hitting it was not such an extraordinary feat US military officers may be reactionary they may even be stupid no more so than civilian politicians however but whatever their faults they tend to be sincerely patriotic A lot of them hate Donald Rumsfeld It is really not credible that US military personnel would follow orders to carry out such a ghastly mission 8212 murder a civil airliner full of passenger shoot a missile into the Pentagon 8212 without somebody among them blowing the whistle The United States is not a place where people keep secrets 8220Let it all hang out8221 is the national attitude In addition to patriotism any one of the alleged conspirators could have been certain of millions of dollars in royalties for telling the story Anthrax Then there are the anthrax attacks But that is quite another story since there is no indication that the clumsy anthrax attacks were anything but the attempt of some local biowar expert to get into the act The anthrax attacks are even in total opposition to the 911 attacks which were carried out by kamikaze warriors with paper cutters and commercial airliners 8212 no 8220weapons of mass destruction8221 needed And that in itself was a lesson that the US administration refused to heed September 11 illustrated the futility of WMD unnecessary for attack useless for defense Instead the administration with its habitual illogic exploited 911 to demand more WMD to fight against WMD The anthrax attacks could very well be an inside job designed to bring public attention back to the 8220WMD threat8221 so dear to the administration Political attractiveness of the conspiracy theory It seems to me on balance that the evidence is so weak for this particular conspiracy theory that its popularity calls for a psychological explanation After attacking those whom he calls 8220coincidence nuts8221 who reject the conspiracy hypothesis for 8220moral cowardice8221 Andreas Kargar makes an interesting comment 8220But aside from that moral cowardice the traditional left has always preferred to deal in the abstract generalities of historical processes and concepts rather than in tangible specifics like hard evidence that can be comprehended by the general public Perhaps those are the two reasons for the state of disarray in which they find themselves today8221 Now this is interesting because in this particular case there is no 8220hard evidence8221 but there is a simple story line that 8220can be comprehended by the general public8221 The left that deals in 8220abstract generalities of historical processes and concepts8221 has indeed lost the attention of the general public if they ever had it which is most doubtful But what are the preferences of that 8220general public8221 Polls indicate that a quite considerable proportion of the American public believe in visits to earth by extraterrestrials The acceptability of a narrative to the general public should not be a criterion of belief by people who are serious honest and morally courageous Mr Kargar asked rather suspiciously 8220what political objectives8221 Alexander Cockburn was 8220trying to achieve by writing this piece8221 I can8217t answer for somebody else but I am quite ready to explain my own motives Defend conspiracy theory Personally as mentioned above I am quite open to reasonable hypotheses of conspiracy In the case of the John F Kennedy assassination for example I find the theory that it was organized by a conspiracy of antiCastro fanatics and gangsters plausible both in terms of feasibility and in terms of motive 3 I feel that the extreme version of the 911 conspiracy complete with demolition and Pentagon missile gives a bad name to conspiracy theory in general Even in the case of 911 there is what I would call a 8220soft8221 version of the conspiracy theory that deserves investigation and that is the possible role of secret agents who may have infiltrated the al Qaeda plot enough to know what was afoot but let it happen Such an hypothesis involves only a few passive 8220conspirators8221 who especially if they were from Israeli Mossad would have had a patriotic motive to bring the United States fully to the side of Israel in the 8220war against terror8221 But this is only a hypothesis Of course if the attacks were not really perpetrated by Arab student pilots then the Mossad agents reportedly spying on them in Florida could not have known anything A full inquiry into this question is difficult for obvious political reasons So perhaps it is easier politically to advance the far more complex and implausible version of an allout US administration role in staging the 911 attacks than to pinpoint a smaller more plausible but politically more sensitive target Against dualistic simplicity The most profound motive for criticizing the 911 conspiracy theory is that it partakes of the very sort of moral dualism advocated by the Bushites and neocons but just turns it around Instead of evil Arabs gratuitously attacking innocent Americans all evil acts are committed by the villains in Washington The Arabs are innocent of everything However I believe it is more intelligent and more realistic to acknowledge that Arabs in general are on the one hand innocent victims of US and Israeli aggression and on the other hand that some of them for that very reason want to strike back at the United States by any means possible Israelis abuse Palestinians with a clear conscience because they have convinced themselves that all Jews are under perpetual threat of a new Holocaust This chronic fear leads them to commit crimes We are nearing a state of war of all against all in which it is absolutely necessary for the sake of survival to keep a cool head and try to understand why people do the terrible things they do in order to find solutions The interaction of causal factors is complex and often may not easily be 8220comprehended by the general public8221 But the proper task of honest journalists is to try to guide the public through those complexities DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools8217 Crusade Yugoslavia Nato and Western Delusions published by Monthly Review Press She can be reached at dianajohnstonecompuservecom Notes 1 Of course one feature or conspiracy theories is to stress the connections between Osama bin Laden and the CIA Their interests and activities converged in the war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan But Osama bin Laden8217s fortune and connections put him out of reach of effective CIA control And this would scarcely be the unique instance of a temporary collaboration turning into 8220backlash8221 2 A critic of Cockburn8217s piece named Andreas Kargar writes that it is 8220Standing Operating Procedure8221 inside the intelligence community to 8220compartmentalize intelligence8221 so that a small group can manage a project that involves hundred of people organized into small teams which know only exactly what they are supposed to be doing without knowing anything about the overarching big picture But if assigned to plant demolition explosives in the World Trade Center even the most isolated operatives would soon catch onto the 8220big picture8221 8212 as would other hypothetical small teams assigned to steer the airliners into the Towers fire a missile into the Pentagon and 8212 most delicate of all 8212 dispose of the 58 passengers and crew of American Airlines flight AA77 and their Boeing 747 if it in fact it did not crash into the Pentagon 3 As to the motive I do not accept the Oliver Stone cinema version according to which JFK was assassinated because he was too good wanting to end the war in Vietnam Rather I think it was because he wasn8217t quite bad enough in the eyes of the Cuban mafia amp160 amp160 | amp160/VERB The/DET spreading/VERB popularity/NOUN of/ADP the/DET 911/NUM conspiracy/NOUN hypothesis/NOUN is/AUX a/DET political/ADJ phenomenon/NOUN of/ADP some/DET significance/NOUN I/PRON wish/VERB to/PART examine/VERB both/CCONJ the/DET causes/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET effects/NOUN as/ADV well/ADV as/ADP the/DET substance/NOUN of/ADP the/DET hypothesis/NOUN itself/PRON Distrust/PROPN and/CCONJ hatred/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Bush/PROPN administration/NOUN and/CCONJ of/ADP the/DET 8220neoconservatives8221/NUM of/ADP the/DET Program/PROPN for/ADP a/DET New/PROPN American/PROPN Century/PROPN PNAC/VERB Their/PRON lies/NOUN and/CCONJ crimes/NOUN are/AUX so/ADV great/ADJ that/SCONJ in/ADP purely/ADV moral/ADJ 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<p>What kind of lunacy is going on in Washington?</p>
<p>Hatred of U.S. foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world, but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism.</p>
<p>Instead, the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels, militarize the nation beyond rationality, move toward preemptive warfare as a first-choice instrument of national policy, and, with more arrogance than ever, label as “evil” a variety of nations and groups that oppose U.S. policies. With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security, it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship–a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security–a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB (the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union). To top it off, Bush, flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice, his entire top foreign-policy team except for behind-the-scenes manipulator Cheney, has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader, Yasir Arafat.</p>
<p>Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government’s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years, from the early failures in its “war on terrorism,” and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury. More importantly, this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associates/handlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the U.S.</p>
<p>Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies, but so far they don’t amount to much. Vice President Cheney and other foreign-policy formulators in the White House, the NSC staff, and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States. Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change, but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue. Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle. He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney, the NSC, and the Pentagon (as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove, and his comrade-in-arms Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister). The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell, who after all still has something of an independent political base in the U.S. But, to repeat, at the moment no grounds exist for believing–or hoping–that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation.</p>
<p>All of this means that no changes in U.S. foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration. Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much all-powerful, any new pressures from abroad, at least for the near future, are likely to have little effect.</p>
<p>New pressures from inside the U.S., however, could be considerably more effective. The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration’s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party’s position in Congress this fall, followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush’s own reelection effort in 2004. Similarly, the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall. Right now, then, is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the U.S. should change its internal security, military, and above all foreign policies.</p>
<p>Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current U.S. policies associated with the so-called war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary. So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies. Many of us who agree that Bush’s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important. That’s okay. We have to start somewhere, and the important thing is to start NOW. Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive Bush-Cheney wars will be upon us before we know it, and Attorney General Ashcroft’s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture.</p>
<p>The task is not impossible. Those of us who give public talks on these issues, or participate in radio interviews or talk shows, know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours, and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts. It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush’s foreign policies are immutable. In fact, support for those policies is probably quite shallow. One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize U.S. foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well.</p>
<p>For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the U.S. are rarely influenced by foreign policies, we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about. All the lobbies powerful in U.S. politics–lobbies for Israel, arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates, or any others you want to name–cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration. We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections, never forgetting that the combined targets of G.W. Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004.</p>
<p>Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize. Let’s see more proposals from others. We should probably concentrate on only a few topics, ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in U.S. internal security, military, and foreign policies.</p>
<p>ONE: We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security. We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act, to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes.</p>
<p>As already mentioned, a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB. Even the Soviets avoided that error, out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment. While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization, pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop, and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident. Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oft-expressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department, it’s not hard to believe they could flip-flop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions. To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain. Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new, extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents? Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective?</p>
<p>Given other flip-flops of this administration, particularly on the Israel-Palestine issue (Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go), we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department. But even without changes, the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people–particularly immigrants–than any other arm of the government, except for the armed services, which have full power over military personnel. Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the U.S. after its creation. Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s. Many fear that such a development is possible, and they are right to be fearful. We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born.</p>
<p>Most people don’t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security. That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory. So let’s go out and slay this dragon.</p>
<p>We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now. The Secret Service, for example, is now in the Treasury Department–with no logic at all. But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury. Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants, but as a significant reason for a new cabinet-level department, it flunks. The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security.</p>
<p>TWO. We should urge U.S. voters to oppose the Bush administration’s drive for global hegemony and domination. The Bush approach of “what we say goes” increases worldwide hatreds of the U.S., and in no way benefits a majority of Americans.</p>
<p>The U.S. has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of big-corporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago. The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters, who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world. Average wage earners in the U.S. receive few if any benefits, and some are actually hurt.</p>
<p>The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations. Four months ago, an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly: “If Congress cranks up the Pentagon’s budget as much as President Bush would like, the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined.” These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare, and also make it harder for the U.S. to help alleviate global poverty. This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war. The true cause, however, and we should emphasize this fact to voters, is the pursuit of global domination by the United States. This ultimate goal of U.S. foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable, and it will not in the end be worth the cost, either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed.</p>
<p>In response to arguments that Bush’s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above, you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1, 2002 to the West Point graduating class. In this speech, he explicitly stated that “America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the U.S. plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world.</p>
<p>In the same speech, Bush said, “Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action.” He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment, saying that deterrence “means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks,” and that containment “is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies.” A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast U.S. militarization now underway. We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years, and to oppose this preemptive-war strategy with all their might. In fact, we should oppose ever initiating a war, because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants. Furthermore, unless and until the U.S. is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons, other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves. Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of U.S. preemptive actions. We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons, including those of the U.S.</p>
<p>THREE. We should urge the U.S. government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel’s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.</p>
<p>A majority of people in almost all countries believe that U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and one-sided in support of Israel. Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the U.S. on this issue, but they are aware of these majority views in their countries. In all Arab and Muslim nations, these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States.</p>
<p>We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves–not only most people in other nations–believe U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years.</p>
<p>Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters. Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of U.S. policy that you are sure are true. Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the U.S. and Israel. If anyone charges you with anti-Semitism, state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-American. You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of anti-Semitism. The charge is spurious.</p>
<p>If anyone asks what you thought of Bush’s statement on June 24, in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene, one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which U.S. governmental policy has long treated the Israel-Palestine issue. Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the U.S. It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator.</p>
<p>In this same statement, Bush also blamed most recent problems in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism. In fact, Israeli terrorism, both by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and by settler groups, has caused more killings of Palestinian non-combatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli non-combatants and children. And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first, while the Israelis only retaliate. Both sides, with equal justification, can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions. Nor can the Israelis claim there is no “moral equivalence” between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli non-combatants, and the “accidental” or “collateral-damage” killings of Palestinian non-combatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions. There is ample evidence, from reliable sources including Israel’s own media, that many Palestinian non-combatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes. There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism. Both are equally inexcusable.</p>
<p>For those of us who believe U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the U.S. and its allies, it is vital to highlight one specific point. More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of U.S. aid is the most important single change that the U.S. government should make in its policy toward Israel. Each year congress and the president approve, with little debate, aid (grants, not loans) to Israel now officially totaling almost $3 billion, but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in, the total is nearer $5 billion annually. That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities. It is the greatest single element of injustice in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine, and Arabs who see U.S. aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the U.S. aid package.</p>
<p>We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel, and to make the answer a major factor in the voter’s choice of a candidate. It is no longer just a “single issue,” not important enough to determine one’s vote. It is now an absolutely critical issue, because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the U.S. increases or gradually subsides. If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel, we should urge people not to vote for any of them, and to make their reasons public. It is that important.</p>
<p>Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.</p> | The Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US, Part 3 | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/07/08/the-disastrous-foreign-policies-of-the-us-part-3-2/ | 2002-07-08 | 4left
| 3,061 | What kind of lunacy is going on in Washington Hatred of US foreign policies intensifies day by day in much of the world but the present administration is not even examining the possibility of changing those policies to allay the hatred and reduce the likelihood of future terrorism Instead the response of the Bush administration is to dig in its heels militarize the nation beyond rationality move toward preemptive warfare as a firstchoice instrument of national policy and with more arrogance than ever label as 8220evil8221 a variety of nations and groups that oppose US policies With the alleged aim of enhancing internal security it is taking the first steps down a path that could easily convert the government itself into a dictatorship8211a dictatorship to be administered primarily by the Defense Department and another monstrous bureaucracy to be set up in a Department of Homeland Security8211a new body with the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB the huge internal security and intelligence agencies of the former Soviet Union To top it off Bush flanked before the TV cameras by Colin Powell Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice his entire top foreignpolicy team except for behindthescenes manipulator Cheney has peremptorily demanded the removal of an elected foreign leader Yasir Arafat Part of what the Bush administration is trying to accomplish through this frantic activity is to distract us from the government8217s most alarming intelligence failure in 60 years from the early failures in its 8220war on terrorism8221 and from widening evidence of the personal involvement of some individuals at very high levels of the administration in an Enron debacle that Bush wants to bury More importantly this activity demonstrates once again that Bush and his associateshandlers have no intention whatever of considering changes in the foreign policies that caused the terrorism in the first place and that continue to intensify hatred of the US Certainly some differences exist within the Bush administration in the degree of willingness to consider changes in foreign policies but so far they don8217t amount to much Vice President Cheney and other foreignpolicy formulators in the White House the NSC staff and the Pentagon show no inclination to change any policy as a way of reducing global hatreds against the United States Secretary of State Powell and his advisors seem a little more receptive to change but Powell is clearly reluctant to force a confrontation on the issue Bush himself is by no means neutral in this internecine struggle He leans strongly toward the side of Cheney the NSC and the Pentagon as well as his political advisors like Karl Rove and his comradeinarms Ariel Sharon Israel8217s Prime Minister The only factor restraining him from throwing his full support to these people is probably his own desire to avoid a messy confrontation with Powell who after all still has something of an independent political base in the US But to repeat at the moment no grounds exist for believing8211or hoping8211that Powell would ever allow a policy disagreement with Bush to become a confrontation All of this means that no changes in US foreign policies will occur in coming months unless some powerful new pressure intervenes to influence the administration Given its disdain for foreign governments and its belief that it is pretty much allpowerful any new pressures from abroad at least for the near future are likely to have little effect New pressures from inside the US however could be considerably more effective The strongest motivating force in the Bush administration8217s actions these days is probably the desire to strengthen the Republican Party8217s position in Congress this fall followed immediately by the hope of winning an untarnished nationwide majority in Bush8217s own reelection effort in 2004 Similarly the strongest motivations behind actions of House and Senate candidates right now are probably their desires to win this fall Right now then is the time for a maximum effort to exert political influence by all of us who believe that the US should change its internal security military and above all foreign policies Nothing but clear evidence that voters in this country are turning against current US policies associated with the socalled war on terrorism will bring about changes that many of us think are necessary So we need to start a campaign to influence voters to support new policies Many of us who agree that Bush8217s policies are wrong will have different emphases and will not have identical views on what changes are most important That8217s okay We have to start somewhere and the important thing is to start NOW Otherwise the perpetual and preemptive BushCheney wars will be upon us before we know it and Attorney General Ashcroft8217s destruction of individual freedoms will gradually flood over all of us and drown much that is good in our society and culture The task is not impossible Those of us who give public talks on these issues or participate in radio interviews or talk shows know there are many people out there with beliefs like ours and many more who are willing to change their minds when faced with facts It is difficult to believe that the present poll numbers showing 70 percent or higher support for Bush8217s foreign policies are immutable In fact support for those policies is probably quite shallow One sign of this is that new books now being published that criticize US foreign policies since September 11 are selling very well For those who think the exercise is doomed because votes in the US are rarely influenced by foreign policies we should emphasize that the stringent and even unconstitutional internal security policies that now affect us all are directly related to and caused by the foreign policies we are talking about All the lobbies powerful in US politics8211lobbies for Israel arms manufacturers energy conglomerates or any others you want to name8211cannot prevent us forever from influencing the policies of this benighted administration We should bring as much influence to bear as possible on the 2002 congressional elections never forgetting that the combined targets of GW Bush and yet another congressional election will require an even greater effort in 2004 Here are three suggestions of key points we should emphasize Let8217s see more proposals from others We should probably concentrate on only a few topics ones on which it is most important to gain support among voters for changes in US internal security military and foreign policies ONE We should oppose establishment of a Department of Homeland Security We should in addition press for immediate congressional revisions of the USA Patriot Act to abrogate all provisions therein that the ACLU opposes As already mentioned a new Department of Homeland Security would automatically contain within itself the potential of becoming a combined MVD and KGB Even the Soviets avoided that error out of a desire to prevent establishment of a power center capable of threatening the supreme dictator of the moment While President Bush has so far given lip service in opposition to the inclusion of internal security and foreign intelligence functions in the new organization pressures to do so from within his administration will surely develop and such pressures from elements in the congress are already evident Since Bush and his top advisors backed away from their earlier and oftexpressed opposition to the very creation of a powerful Homeland Security Department it8217s not hard to believe they could flipflop as well on combining internal security and foreign intelligence functions To do so would bring the citizens and legal residents of this country even closer to losing the remnants of political democracy that they so far retain Would covert intelligence operations against American citizens be more widely allowed if the secretary of this new extremely powerful department could give direct orders to both CIA covert operatives and FBI agents Could congressional oversight over such a department be effective Given other flipflops of this administration particularly on the IsraelPalestine issue Arafat must stay becomes Arafat must go we can have little confidence that no more course reversals will occur on this new department But even without changes the department will probably have more power over the daily lives of many people8211particularly immigrants8211than any other arm of the government except for the armed services which have full power over military personnel Imagine how the powers of this department might be expanded by executive order rather than legislation if major new terrorist actions occur within the US after its creation Or if for any reason a new era of witch hunts emerges similar to the McCarthy years of the 1950s Many fear that such a development is possible and they are right to be fearful We should make a maximum effort to abort this new department before it is born Most people don8217t know enough yet to have a firm opinion on a Department of Homeland Security That gives an immediate campaign against it a better chance of victory So let8217s go out and slay this dragon We should not be distracted in this fight by arguments that many of the functions slated for transfer should logically be in a new department rather than where they are now The Secret Service for example is now in the Treasury Department8211with no logic at all But it seems to have done its job pretty well from its pad at Treasury Having a more logical place to put it might please a few pedants but as a significant reason for a new cabinetlevel department it flunks The same can be said for several other functions that are slated for transfer to Homeland Security TWO We should urge US voters to oppose the Bush administration8217s drive for global hegemony and domination The Bush approach of 8220what we say goes8221 increases worldwide hatreds of the US and in no way benefits a majority of Americans The US has markedly accelerated its pursuit of global political domination and its own version of bigcorporation economic globalization since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago The benefits of this domination accrue almost exclusively to the corporate structure that really runs this country and its military and governmental supporters who provide security for the corporate structure and encourage its further expansion around the world Average wage earners in the US receive few if any benefits and some are actually hurt The Bush administration today is militarizing the United States to an unprecedented degree in comparison with other nations Four months ago an editorial in the New York Times on March 3 put it bluntly 8220If Congress cranks up the Pentagon8217s budget as much as President Bush would like the United States will soon be spending more on defense than all the other countries of the world combined8221 These military expenditures will clearly increase the pressure to cut spending on domestic problems such as poverty and healthcare and also make it harder for the US to help alleviate global poverty This administration will tell us that we must reduce other spending because we are at war The true cause however and we should emphasize this fact to voters is the pursuit of global domination by the United States This ultimate goal of US foreign policy is neither necessary nor desirable and it will not in the end be worth the cost either in terms of money or in terms of domestic needs that will be sacrificed In response to arguments that Bush8217s foreign policies are not so extreme as suggested above you should urge that people look at a speech he gave on June 1 2002 to the West Point graduating class In this speech he explicitly stated that 8220America has and intends to keep military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace8221 This is as explicit a statement as you will ever see that the US plans to dominate all other nations and be the policeman of the world In the same speech Bush said 8220Our security will require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action8221 He explicitly rejected the concepts of deterrence and containment saying that deterrence 8220means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks8221 and that containment 8220is not possible when unbalanced dictators can deliver weapons of mass destruction on missiles or provide them to terrorist allies8221 A strategy espousing preemptive war is an integral part of the vast US militarization now underway We should urge voters not to abandon a policy that has worked for over 50 years and to oppose this preemptivewar strategy with all their might In fact we should oppose ever initiating a war because it is as immoral as terrorists killing noncombatants Furthermore unless and until the US is willing to give up its own nuclear weapons other nations and groups around the world will continue trying to obtain such weapons for themselves Some of these efforts will be successful regardless of US preemptive actions We should support instead new multilateral negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement that would abolish all nuclear weapons including those of the US THREE We should urge the US government to change its unjust policy of supporting and enabling Israel8217s continuing occupation and colonization of the West Bank Gaza and East Jerusalem A majority of people in almost all countries believe that US policy on Israel and Palestine is unjust and onesided in support of Israel Many governments around the world are unwilling openly to oppose the US on this issue but they are aware of these majority views in their countries In all Arab and Muslim nations these views are completely dominant and will inevitably encourage more acts of terrorism against the United States We should clearly and unemotionally convey to friends and voters that we ourselves8211not only most people in other nations8211believe US policy toward Israel and Palestine has been unbalanced and unjust for many years Most people likely to support this will not need advice on the factual evidence to present to friends and potential voters Just briefly give those facts about the injustice of US policy that you are sure are true Limit your comments specifically to the policies of the US and Israel If anyone charges you with antiSemitism state categorically that criticism of the policies of the Israeli or the American government is neither antiSemitic nor antiAmerican You should not avoid talking about your honest views because of a possible charge of antiSemitism The charge is spurious If anyone asks what you thought of Bush8217s statement on June 24 in which he practically ordered Arafat to leave the scene one answer would be to say that this is a perfect example of the bias in favor of Israel with which US governmental policy has long treated the IsraelPalestine issue Bush said exactly what Sharon wanted him to say and thereby strengthened his hand with Jewish voters in the US It was by no means the statement of a neutral mediator In this same statement Bush also blamed most recent problems in the IsraeliPalestinian peace process on Palestinian terrorism In fact Israeli terrorism both by the Israel Defense Force IDF and by settler groups has caused more killings of Palestinian noncombatants and children than Palestinian terrorism by suicide bombers has caused of Israeli noncombatants and children And it is not the case that the Palestinians strike first while the Israelis only retaliate Both sides with equal justification can claim retaliation as the motive for their actions Nor can the Israelis claim there is no 8220moral equivalence8221 between Palestinian suicide bombers who deliberately kill Israeli noncombatants and the 8220accidental8221 or 8220collateraldamage8221 killings of Palestinian noncombatants resulting from Israeli military and settler actions There is ample evidence from reliable sources including Israel8217s own media that many Palestinian noncombatants are in fact deliberately killed by Israeli forces or settler vigilantes There is complete moral equivalence between the two types of killings and the two types of terrorism Both are equally inexcusable For those of us who believe US policy on Israel and Palestine is indeed unjust and will increase the likelihood of terrorism against the US and its allies it is vital to highlight one specific point More Americans need to understand that a suspension or at least drastic curtailment of US aid is the most important single change that the US government should make in its policy toward Israel Each year congress and the president approve with little debate aid grants not loans to Israel now officially totaling almost 3 billion but when all price breaks and special benefits to Israel are added in the total is nearer 5 billion annually That aid makes it far easier than would otherwise be the case for Israel to maintain its occupation and continue to expand its colonization and settlement activities It is the greatest single element of injustice in US policy toward Israel and Palestine and Arabs who see US aircraft and other weapons killing Palestinians on Al Jazeera TV are reminded almost every day that these weapons are part of the US aid package We should urge each American voter this fall to question every single candidate for national office about his or her position on aid to Israel and to make the answer a major factor in the voter8217s choice of a candidate It is no longer just a 8220single issue8221 not important enough to determine one8217s vote It is now an absolutely critical issue because it will be a major factor in determining whether future terrorism against the US increases or gradually subsides If all candidates in any electoral race refuse to support the suspension or major curtailment of aid to Israel we should urge people not to vote for any of them and to make their reasons public It is that important Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950 and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas for at various times Southeast Asia South Asia and Africa Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA8217s Office of Regional and Political Analysis a 250person unit His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA retiring in 1979 Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine | What/DET kind/NOUN of/ADP lunacy/NOUN is/AUX going/VERB on/ADP in/ADP Washington/PROPN Hatred/PROPN of/ADP US/PROPN foreign/ADJ policies/NOUN intensifies/NOUN day/NOUN by/ADP day/NOUN in/ADP much/ADJ of/ADP the/DET world/NOUN but/CCONJ the/DET present/ADJ administration/NOUN is/AUX not/PART even/ADV 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<p>The August 20th press release came from Jorn Weisbrodt, Executive Director of Robert Wilson Works:</p>
<p>“Over a year ago Robert Wilson was asked to participate as artistic director for the event celebrating the 30th anniversary of Solidarnosc, the freedom movement that started the fall of the iron curtain. It will be on August 31th in the historic shipyards in Gdansk and is free to the public. I hope that you can join and spread the news”.</p>
<p>The other press release came from the European Solidarity Centre:</p>
<p>“On behalf of Polish President Lech Walesa and the European Solidarity Centre in Poland I would like to invite you to participate in a unique initiative.</p>
<p>“This year on August 31st we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Solidarity movement which fought for freedom, dignity and human rights. In 2005 the European Parliament decided that 31 August is to be celebrated as the Day of Freedom and Solidarity. That is why we have launched an extraordinary initiative – before and on that day we would like some most important people in Poland and around the world to wear the historic “Solidarnosc” badge as a symbol of our solidarity with people from all over the world who are still deprived of freedom, peace and prosperity.</p>
<p>“Please also accept our warm invitation to the spectacular show prepared by world famous American artist Robert Wilson which will take place on August 31st in Poland at the Gdansk Shipyard- the birthplace of the Solidarity Movement. If you wish to participate in this event please click HERE for more information. As the event will be attended by government officials including the President of Poland, there are serious security measures.</p>
<p>Yours sincerely, Lech Walesa <a href="http://www.ecs.gda.pl/" type="external">European Solidarity Centre</a>”</p>
<p>I was artist in residence in the summer of 2009, when this 2010 event was being planned. I was able to observe some of the goings-on at this hub of artistic global activity. At a time when Anti-Muslim Neo-Nativists are embarrassing the United States by exhibiting their ignorant behinds, American artists once again show our country at its best, its noblest, its highest spirit.–IR</p>
<p>Though some of the Senators who grilled Supreme Court Justice Sotomeyer and the American media, up to its old tricks by raising lynch mobs against misunderstood groups, might have problems with diversity, white European and American artists, regardless of their motives, have drawn materials from a variety of cultures for at least one hundred years. Like those Senators, many art critics and academics lack the intellectual curiosity of the artist and refuse to acknowledge the contributions of the world cultures to western art.</p>
<p>The kind of people who call Picasso’s work “Cubist” as a way of denying its African influences.</p>
<p>The private art collections of Picasso and surrealist Andre Breton are filled with art from Africa and the Pacific Islands. So is Robert Wilson’s. Louis Aragon said of Wilson that he was continuing Surrealism’s traditions. The art that was once labeled “primitive” is located in the basement of the main building of Watermill, a community of artists directed by Robert Wilson. Other parts of the collection are dispersed throughout the building and unlike the way that museums might distance their exhibits from the presence of the viewer, the art –chairs, tables, bowls, etc.– are blended into the day’s routine. Precious lamps or chairs might be part of the office furniture.</p>
<p>Among pieces in the collection are footwear that once belonged to Rudolph Nureyev and Marlene Dietrich. Jerome Robbins’ cool sneakers are on display.</p>
<p>I wore mine. Unlike some of the tourists that my daughter, Tennessee and I spotted in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel, who were freezing in their light summer clothing, I was prepared for New York’s hot and muggy August weather. I spent six years during New York Augusts like the 2009 August. I arrived packed with Hawaiian shirts, two of which were sewn by a reader who lives in Hilo.&#160; Me and Truman.</p>
<p>Wilson’s art collection is located at the Watermill Center, founded in 1992 by Wilson. It is described as an international, multi-disciplinary center for studies in the arts and humanities. Wilson is best known for large scale multimedia works, the most famous of which are “Einstein on the Beach” and “the CIVIL WarS.” One of his most recent works is “KOOL, Dancing in my Mind,” based upon collaborations between Wilson, my partner, Oakland choreographer and author Carla Blank and the great Japanese dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi.</p>
<p>Most of the “KOOL “background music is provided by David Byrne. It is a multimedia work in which six dancers perform, two of whom are Merce Cunningham alumni. Blank also did the research and dramaturge for the work that premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in April, 2009, and was reworked and performed on August 8, and 9th of that year at Guild Hall in East Hampton, a town in which there are buildings that date to the 1600s. The Huffington Post called the work “sublime.”&#160;&#160;&#160; “</p>
<p>KOOL,” is in part a tribute to Ms. Hanayagi, now living in a Tokyo nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer’s.</p>
<p>I suggestedthe title “Kool” based upon my study of Japanese. I found that Suzushii meant cool, which certainly describes Suzushi’s temperament. I’d known her since the 1960s, and never did I see her raise her voice or go hot.</p>
<p>Next stops for “KOOL” are the Akademie der Kunste, in Berlin, September 12, 2010. Richard Rutkowski’s twenty- six minute film based on the work will also be shown there August 25th. “KOOL “will happen on December 9th at the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City.</p>
<p>Rutkowski’s projections, which are part of this multi media work, were made in 2008 when Wilson, Blank, and Rutkowski traveled to Osaka, where they visited Ms. Hanayagi.&#160; As a result, her powerful and poignant presence looms over the six dancers.</p>
<p>“KOOL” is just one of the projects that were undertaken by Watermill in 2009. The Watermill Center is a hub of creativity for artists from Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific. Among them are up to 75 participants from over 22 countries, ranging from Israel, Taiwan, Indonesia, to Germany, Denmark, and Mexico.</p>
<p>According to Sue Jane Stoker, the Summer Program Director:</p>
<p>“ABOUT 45 – 50 YOUNG ARTISTS NOT ATTACHED TO A SPECIFIC PROJECT AND ABOUT 20 – 25 MORE MATURE ARTISTS THAT COME FOR A SPECIFIC PROJECT OR PROJECTS”</p>
<p>Among the projects, according to Sue Jane, are the</p>
<p>“STAGING OF IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA (FOR LA SCALA, MILAN),&#160; THE MAKROPOLOUS CASE (FOR NATIONAL THEATER OF PRAGUE),&#160; A VERY DARK MATTER (NEW THEATER PIECE WITH MUSIC BY TOM WAITS, BASED ON THE LIFE OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSON),&#160; HAKAME; FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND (THEATER WORK, MAYBE FILM),&#160; DON JUAN TENORIO (THEATER WORK FOR VALLADOLID, SPAIN),&#160; GDANSK POLAND, 30TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF BEGINNING OF SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT, THE WANDERER (FILM BASED ON THE LIVES OF 3 GENERATIONS OF WYETH PAINTERS), CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT FOR AN EXHIBITION OF THE WATERMILL COLLECTION, CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND STAGING FOR LIGHT LEAVES (THEATER PIECE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA)”</p>
<p>As soon as one group departs another flies in to work on projects with Wilson and his co-workers. I overheard chatter about the projects while standing in the buffet line, where guests were fed with meals designed by Malaysians Zowita Mustapha and Julie Tan. The menu for two days:</p>
<p>On August 8th:&#160; Malaysian chicken satay and beef satay served with a spicy peanut sauce and ketupat (steamed compressed rice cakes that go well with the peanut sauce). There was also some deep-fried tofu for the vegetarians and that was served with the peanut sauce as well as another spicy chili sauce.</p>
<p>The Aug. 9 Sunday Brunch was smoked salmon with capers and red onions, platters of assorted cheeses, assorted fruit boats, scrambled eggs, vegetable frittata, assorted sausages, &#160;roasted potatoes, bread baskets, and mixed greens with a balsamic mustard and honey vinaigrette.</p>
<p>During the daily meetings, the participants sat on the floor on four sides of a long room. Before Wilson entered, his assistant Sue Jane Stoker, who besides being the Summer Program Director is also the Assistant Director and Stage Manager for “KOOL,” went over some housekeeping duties for the participants. I asked Sue Jane about some of the issues covered the day that I attended a meeting.</p>
<p>“ON THE 9TH AS IT WAS A SUNDAY WE WOULD HAVE REMINDED PEOPLE THAT THERE IS NO DINNER PROVIDED THAT EVENING AND THEY GET A $15 MEAL STIPEND, WE TALK ABOUT WHO ARE THE GUESTS WHO WILL BE AT LUNCH (THAT DAY IT WAS A COUPLE OF PEOPLE FROM THE ORIGINAL SCHOOL OF BYRDS, BOB’S ORIGINAL GROUP BACK IN THE 60’S), GO OVER WHO WILL HELP IN THE KITCHEN, IN THE GARDEN, IF THERE ARE CARPENTRY PROJECTS OR ART COLLECTION PROJECTS THAT NEED HELP, WHO WILL DO THE RECYCYLING (ALWAYS SHANG!), AND BECAUSE THERE WERE PEOPLE LEAVING THAT DAY WE REMIND PEOPLE THAT WHEN THEY LEAVE, THEY SHOULD MAKE SURE THAT THEY CHANGE THE SHEETS ON THEIR BED AND LEAVE CLEAN SHEETS AND TOWELS FOR THE NEXT PERSON COMING IN.</p>
<p>“NOT JUST THE YOUNG ARTISTS, EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATES (INCLUDING ME) – EACH PERSON IS PART OF A GROUP, AND ONCE A WEEK EACH GROUP DOES THE FOLLOWING:&#160; BREAKFAST CLEAN UP, VAN CLEAN UP, TOILET CLEAN UP, LUNCH CLEAN UP, OFFICE CLEAN UP, DINNER CLEAN UP.”</p>
<p>In Rutkowski’s film about the making of “KOOL,” there appears a scene of Wilson on a Tokyo train. Slim, suited up and bespectacled, he could be a banker or math teacher. This older fuller Wilson, who enters the room at the conclusion of Ms. Stoker’s remarks, is wearing a black T shirt and pants.</p>
<p>I’ve been brought here to read from my poetry and to discuss my work with vocalists including Cassandra Wilson and Taj Mahal. In Rutkowski’s film, I’m the one who is singing. Toward the end of her career, Suzushi Hanayagi, as part of a Tokyo solo concert, performed to music from Conjure, the CD produced by Kip Hanrahan on which musicians set my words to music. As a gag, I sang “Minnie the Moocher,” a song made famous by Cab Calloway. The portion of her concert in which she used the song is part of the film.</p>
<p>After introducing me, Wilson asked me to sing it but it had been so long that I didn’t remember anything beyond the first few lines and so Sue Jane had to fill in. I thanked her and she said, “No problem, I’ve been listening to the song every night.” &#160;Wilson began the session with a silence which invited the assembled artists to engage in meditation. He then rose and selected four people from the group, including Blank. They began an impromptu movement piece. He bade farewell to a group that had been working on “The Makropolous Case.” They had to catch a plane to Prague. Two people, whose project was “A Very Dark Matter,” were leaving for Germany.</p>
<p>Wilson saluted another dancer from Greece for her work during the summer. Her name is Mariana. She was applauded and responded with tears.&#160; After the meeting, he took us to a room whose floor is covered with stones taken from riverbeds. He discussed his philosophy of architecture, one based upon simplicity. Simplicity is the approach here. Artists at Watermill make do with what is available. They live in dorm-like cubicles or share space in rented houses.</p>
<p>Later, during a tour of the Watermill’s art collection, Sherry Dobbin, Watermill Center’s program director, pointed to an installation located among the trees done by a Japanese artist using only rope. The rope cost $50.00. After the tour, we’re told that if we’re silent we could watch a rehearsal of Claudio Monteverdi’s ”Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria.” It was presided over by the stern eye of Ellen Hammer, the dramaturgist. Wilson instructed the dancers. She was assisted by two young men who followed the dance notations. Wilson requested that I sit in a throne like chair. It consisted of red and black blocks. Later I learned that it was designed by an Italian Futurist.</p>
<p>While I followed the rehearsal of a work that is to be performed in Milan, two years from now, I glanced across the path to what remains of a forest where on a deck, Yuki Kawahisa,&#160; a “KOOL” dancer was doing her warm ups. The small forest is dotted with stone monoliths brought from Indonesia. Performances seemed to constantly spring up on the grounds– grounds that are generously landscaped with pastures of grasses, ferns, pines.</p>
<p>At lunch, Meg Harper, one of the “KOOL” dancers, introduced me to Ritty Burchfield who was with Wilson in the early days. The days before “Einstein On The Beach,” the opera with music composed by Phil Glass. This was the work that established Wilson’s reputation in the United States. Burchfield says that it had been established earlier in Europe with “Deaf Man Glance,” which was influenced by an autistic black youngster named Raymond Andrew. Burchfield performed in some of Wilson’s works including “Life and Times of Joe Stalin.”</p>
<p>Another autistic collaborator is Christopher Knowles, who influenced “Einstein on the Beach.” I was standing next to him in the chow line. I asked him “What is your role here?”</p>
<p>“My role,” he answered. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m an artist,” which really put me in my place. Knowles was consultant for the movie “Rain Man.” &#160;Later Wilson showed me some of Knowles’s prose that your average Language poet would give their eyeteeth to write. &#160;(Wilson was born with learning disabilities. The son of a mayor of Waco, Texas, he didn’t speak until he was five.)</p>
<p>Burchfield was John Cage’s “roadie.” She says that the possibilities of American dance have been expanded as more players participate. She watches popular dance shows like “So You Think That You Can Dance.” She says that Hip Hop dancers are doing moves like triple flips that ballet dancers would envy.</p>
<p>As an example of how everybody pitched in, whether it be cleaning toilets or driving visitors to and fro from their houses, Carla and I were transported to our guest house in the woods by Aram Hausi-Rahbari, who collaborated on several operas including” Mary Queen of Scots” and “The Makropulos Case.” Driving these roads at night reminded me of the final scene in “Pollack” when Jackson Pollack, an early Hampton resident and his terrified passengers are headed for a crash.</p>
<p>Among those who were passengers on our return trip to the center was Illenk Gentille, who also performed in “KOOL.” A dancer from Sulawesi, Indonesia, he gave us an impromptu lecture on Indonesian court dance as we returned to the Center where brain storming was taking place at different locations.</p>
<p>I even found myself pitching in. Though I was invited to discuss my poetry and my work with musicians, it was requested that I stay longer. Wilson wanted me to participate in a session about a huge spectacular multimedia show that will take place in Gdansk on August 31, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poland’s Solidarity Movement. The estimated audience for this show will be 100,000. The plans for the show were presented on laptops and by a huge board covered with pictures.</p>
<p>Examining this display was Father Macie Jzieba, a Catholic priest, and former physicist, who recommended Wilson- -“They wanted Madonna,” he said. He presented a ten minute video which showed Polish history from the Russian and Nazi occupations to the General Strike. On a sheet of paper, Wilson sketched the grounds where performances would be held. I recommended that Polish poets be used, including the work of Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Someone suggested two famous Rock musicians to be part of the spectacular show. &#160;After I left, I sent a note suggesting the most famous Polish musician since Chopin. Lawrence Welk.</p>
<p>Jorn Weisbrodt, Wilson’s Creative Director and Wilson troubleshooter and budget hawk, chimed in from time to time about costs. “KOOL” dancer Jonah Bokaer had drawn a sketch for possible sky writing.</p>
<p>Recommendations were flying throughout the meeting while Wilson sketched ideas for the fireworks which I thought were the perfect image for what goes on at this productive multicultural community of artists. Thought fireworks from minds shooting off at every possible direction. Lighting up brains. During the 1930s there was a similar meeting of multicultural minds.</p>
<p>The right was responsible for closing down the Works Progress Administration, a program that put writers, dancers and actors on salary, some of whom would become our leading artists.</p>
<p>During one red-baiting session before a Congressional committee, a congressman wanted to know, “Who is this Christopher Marlowe fellow?” Now a conservative group called Media Morality is objecting to Stimulus Funds being used to support the arts. The basis for this attitude seems to be that the arts have no value.</p>
<p>A comparatively low budget project like “KOOL,” a masterpiece, whose start-up budget was not more than $30,000, and which requires not much beyond its six performers, stage lighting, a floor to ceiling projection screen and a few sticks and a large ball, making it ready to travel throughout the world in these low budget times, drew full houses at both the Guggenheim and Guild Hall. I’m sure that the fledging restaurant businesses and other local businesses that benefited from the crowds drawn by this work would disagree with this group. Ralph Ellison was one of those writers who was on the WPA payroll. Publishing corporations have made millions over the years from his work, written during his time on a WPA payroll. His book, Invisible Man, is still in print.</p>
<p>Thousands of&#160; artists from all over the world have flocked to New York as a result of its becoming a world center for art, boosting the economy of the city as a result of the works by artists like Jackson Pollack, a recipient of a WPA salary. One of those who came to New York as a result of this artistic firmament was a young dancer named Suzushi Hanayagi.</p>
<p>ISHMAEL REED is the publisher of <a href="http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/" type="external">Konch</a>, which will publish next week an exclusive interview with Lou Gossett Jr. about Jim Crow patterns in liberal Hollywood. Reed’s latest book is <a href="http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/" type="external">Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media</a>. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:Uncleish@aol.com" type="external">Uncleish@aol.com</a> <a href="mailto:Uncleish@aol.com" type="external">.</a></p> | Watermill at Gdansk | true | https://counterpunch.org/2010/08/30/watermill-at-gdansk/ | 2010-08-30 | 4left
| 3,061 | The August 20th press release came from Jorn Weisbrodt Executive Director of Robert Wilson Works 8220Over a year ago Robert Wilson was asked to participate as artistic director for the event celebrating the 30th anniversary of Solidarnosc the freedom movement that started the fall of the iron curtain It will be on August 31th in the historic shipyards in Gdansk and is free to the public I hope that you can join and spread the news8221 The other press release came from the European Solidarity Centre 8220On behalf of Polish President Lech Walesa and the European Solidarity Centre in Poland I would like to invite you to participate in a unique initiative 8220This year on August 31st we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Solidarity movement which fought for freedom dignity and human rights In 2005 the European Parliament decided that 31 August is to be celebrated as the Day of Freedom and Solidarity That is why we have launched an extraordinary initiative 8211 before and on that day we would like some most important people in Poland and around the world to wear the historic 8220Solidarnosc8221 badge as a symbol of our solidarity with people from all over the world who are still deprived of freedom peace and prosperity 8220Please also accept our warm invitation to the spectacular show prepared by world famous American artist Robert Wilson which will take place on August 31st in Poland at the Gdansk Shipyard the birthplace of the Solidarity Movement If you wish to participate in this event please click HERE for more information As the event will be attended by government officials including the President of Poland there are serious security measures Yours sincerely Lech Walesa European Solidarity Centre8221 I was artist in residence in the summer of 2009 when this 2010 event was being planned I was able to observe some of the goingson at this hub of artistic global activity At a time when AntiMuslim NeoNativists are embarrassing the United States by exhibiting their ignorant behinds American artists once again show our country at its best its noblest its highest spirit8211IR Though some of the Senators who grilled Supreme Court Justice Sotomeyer and the American media up to its old tricks by raising lynch mobs against misunderstood groups might have problems with diversity white European and American artists regardless of their motives have drawn materials from a variety of cultures for at least one hundred years Like those Senators many art critics and academics lack the intellectual curiosity of the artist and refuse to acknowledge the contributions of the world cultures to western art The kind of people who call Picasso8217s work 8220Cubist8221 as a way of denying its African influences The private art collections of Picasso and surrealist Andre Breton are filled with art from Africa and the Pacific Islands So is Robert Wilson8217s Louis Aragon said of Wilson that he was continuing Surrealism8217s traditions The art that was once labeled 8220primitive8221 is located in the basement of the main building of Watermill a community of artists directed by Robert Wilson Other parts of the collection are dispersed throughout the building and unlike the way that museums might distance their exhibits from the presence of the viewer the art 8211chairs tables bowls etc8211 are blended into the day8217s routine Precious lamps or chairs might be part of the office furniture Among pieces in the collection are footwear that once belonged to Rudolph Nureyev and Marlene Dietrich Jerome Robbins8217 cool sneakers are on display I wore mine Unlike some of the tourists that my daughter Tennessee and I spotted in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel who were freezing in their light summer clothing I was prepared for New York8217s hot and muggy August weather I spent six years during New York Augusts like the 2009 August I arrived packed with Hawaiian shirts two of which were sewn by a reader who lives in Hiloamp160 Me and Truman Wilson8217s art collection is located at the Watermill Center founded in 1992 by Wilson It is described as an international multidisciplinary center for studies in the arts and humanities Wilson is best known for large scale multimedia works the most famous of which are 8220Einstein on the Beach8221 and 8220the CIVIL WarS8221 One of his most recent works is 8220KOOL Dancing in my Mind8221 based upon collaborations between Wilson my partner Oakland choreographer and author Carla Blank and the great Japanese dancer and choreographer Suzushi Hanayagi Most of the 8220KOOL 8220background music is provided by David Byrne It is a multimedia work in which six dancers perform two of whom are Merce Cunningham alumni Blank also did the research and dramaturge for the work that premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in April 2009 and was reworked and performed on August 8 and 9th of that year at Guild Hall in East Hampton a town in which there are buildings that date to the 1600s The Huffington Post called the work 8220sublime8221amp160amp160amp160 8220 KOOL8221 is in part a tribute to Ms Hanayagi now living in a Tokyo nursing home suffering from Alzheimer8217s I suggestedthe title 8220Kool8221 based upon my study of Japanese I found that Suzushii meant cool which certainly describes Suzushi8217s temperament I8217d known her since the 1960s and never did I see her raise her voice or go hot Next stops for 8220KOOL8221 are the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin September 12 2010 Richard Rutkowski8217s twenty six minute film based on the work will also be shown there August 25th 8220KOOL 8220will happen on December 9th at the Jerome Robbins Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City Rutkowski8217s projections which are part of this multi media work were made in 2008 when Wilson Blank and Rutkowski traveled to Osaka where they visited Ms Hanayagiamp160 As a result her powerful and poignant presence looms over the six dancers 8220KOOL8221 is just one of the projects that were undertaken by Watermill in 2009 The Watermill Center is a hub of creativity for artists from Europe the Americas Asia and the Pacific Among them are up to 75 participants from over 22 countries ranging from Israel Taiwan Indonesia to Germany Denmark and Mexico According to Sue Jane Stoker the Summer Program Director 8220ABOUT 45 8211 50 YOUNG ARTISTS NOT ATTACHED TO A SPECIFIC PROJECT AND ABOUT 20 8211 25 MORE MATURE ARTISTS THAT COME FOR A SPECIFIC PROJECT OR PROJECTS8221 Among the projects according to Sue Jane are the 8220STAGING OF IL RITORNO D8217ULISSE IN PATRIA FOR LA SCALA MILANamp160 THE MAKROPOLOUS CASE FOR NATIONAL THEATER OF PRAGUEamp160 A VERY DARK MATTER NEW THEATER PIECE WITH MUSIC BY TOM WAITS BASED ON THE LIFE OF HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSONamp160 HAKAME FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND THEATER WORK MAYBE FILMamp160 DON JUAN TENORIO THEATER WORK FOR VALLADOLID SPAINamp160 GDANSK POLAND 30TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF BEGINNING OF SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT THE WANDERER FILM BASED ON THE LIVES OF 3 GENERATIONS OF WYETH PAINTERS CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT FOR AN EXHIBITION OF THE WATERMILL COLLECTION CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND STAGING FOR LIGHT LEAVES THEATER PIECE FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA8221 As soon as one group departs another flies in to work on projects with Wilson and his coworkers I overheard chatter about the projects while standing in the buffet line where guests were fed with meals designed by Malaysians Zowita Mustapha and Julie Tan The menu for two days On August 8thamp160 Malaysian chicken satay and beef satay served with a spicy peanut sauce and ketupat steamed compressed rice cakes that go well with the peanut sauce There was also some deepfried tofu for the vegetarians and that was served with the peanut sauce as well as another spicy chili sauce The Aug 9 Sunday Brunch was smoked salmon with capers and red onions platters of assorted cheeses assorted fruit boats scrambled eggs vegetable frittata assorted sausages amp160roasted potatoes bread baskets and mixed greens with a balsamic mustard and honey vinaigrette During the daily meetings the participants sat on the floor on four sides of a long room Before Wilson entered his assistant Sue Jane Stoker who besides being the Summer Program Director is also the Assistant Director and Stage Manager for 8220KOOL8221 went over some housekeeping duties for the participants I asked Sue Jane about some of the issues covered the day that I attended a meeting 8220ON THE 9TH AS IT WAS A SUNDAY WE WOULD HAVE REMINDED PEOPLE THAT THERE IS NO DINNER PROVIDED THAT EVENING AND THEY GET A 15 MEAL STIPEND WE TALK ABOUT WHO ARE THE GUESTS WHO WILL BE AT LUNCH THAT DAY IT WAS A COUPLE OF PEOPLE FROM THE ORIGINAL SCHOOL OF BYRDS BOB8217S ORIGINAL GROUP BACK IN THE 608217S GO OVER WHO WILL HELP IN THE KITCHEN IN THE GARDEN IF THERE ARE CARPENTRY PROJECTS OR ART COLLECTION PROJECTS THAT NEED HELP WHO WILL DO THE RECYCYLING ALWAYS SHANG AND BECAUSE THERE WERE PEOPLE LEAVING THAT DAY WE REMIND PEOPLE THAT WHEN THEY LEAVE THEY SHOULD MAKE SURE THAT THEY CHANGE THE SHEETS ON THEIR BED AND LEAVE CLEAN SHEETS AND TOWELS FOR THE NEXT PERSON COMING IN 8220NOT JUST THE YOUNG ARTISTS EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATES INCLUDING ME 8211 EACH PERSON IS PART OF A GROUP AND ONCE A WEEK EACH GROUP DOES THE FOLLOWINGamp160 BREAKFAST CLEAN UP VAN CLEAN UP TOILET CLEAN UP LUNCH CLEAN UP OFFICE CLEAN UP DINNER CLEAN UP8221 In Rutkowski8217s film about the making of 8220KOOL8221 there appears a scene of Wilson on a Tokyo train Slim suited up and bespectacled he could be a banker or math teacher This older fuller Wilson who enters the room at the conclusion of Ms Stoker8217s remarks is wearing a black T shirt and pants I8217ve been brought here to read from my poetry and to discuss my work with vocalists including Cassandra Wilson and Taj Mahal In Rutkowski8217s film I8217m the one who is singing Toward the end of her career Suzushi Hanayagi as part of a Tokyo solo concert performed to music from Conjure the CD produced by Kip Hanrahan on which musicians set my words to music As a gag I sang 8220Minnie the Moocher8221 a song made famous by Cab Calloway The portion of her concert in which she used the song is part of the film After introducing me Wilson asked me to sing it but it had been so long that I didn8217t remember anything beyond the first few lines and so Sue Jane had to fill in I thanked her and she said 8220No problem I8217ve been listening to the song every night8221 amp160Wilson began the session with a silence which invited the assembled artists to engage in meditation He then rose and selected four people from the group including Blank They began an impromptu movement piece He bade farewell to a group that had been working on 8220The Makropolous Case8221 They had to catch a plane to Prague Two people whose project was 8220A Very Dark Matter8221 were leaving for Germany Wilson saluted another dancer from Greece for her work during the summer Her name is Mariana She was applauded and responded with tearsamp160 After the meeting he took us to a room whose floor is covered with stones taken from riverbeds He discussed his philosophy of architecture one based upon simplicity Simplicity is the approach here Artists at Watermill make do with what is available They live in dormlike cubicles or share space in rented houses Later during a tour of the Watermill8217s art collection Sherry Dobbin Watermill Center8217s program director pointed to an installation located among the trees done by a Japanese artist using only rope The rope cost 5000 After the tour we8217re told that if we8217re silent we could watch a rehearsal of Claudio Monteverdi8217s 8221Il Ritorno d8217Ulisse in Patria8221 It was presided over by the stern eye of Ellen Hammer the dramaturgist Wilson instructed the dancers She was assisted by two young men who followed the dance notations Wilson requested that I sit in a throne like chair It consisted of red and black blocks Later I learned that it was designed by an Italian Futurist While I followed the rehearsal of a work that is to be performed in Milan two years from now I glanced across the path to what remains of a forest where on a deck Yuki Kawahisaamp160 a 8220KOOL8221 dancer was doing her warm ups The small forest is dotted with stone monoliths brought from Indonesia Performances seemed to constantly spring up on the grounds8211 grounds that are generously landscaped with pastures of grasses ferns pines At lunch Meg Harper one of the 8220KOOL8221 dancers introduced me to Ritty Burchfield who was with Wilson in the early days The days before 8220Einstein On The Beach8221 the opera with music composed by Phil Glass This was the work that established Wilson8217s reputation in the United States Burchfield says that it had been established earlier in Europe with 8220Deaf Man Glance8221 which was influenced by an autistic black youngster named Raymond Andrew Burchfield performed in some of Wilson8217s works including 8220Life and Times of Joe Stalin8221 Another autistic collaborator is Christopher Knowles who influenced 8220Einstein on the Beach8221 I was standing next to him in the chow line I asked him 8220What is your role here8221 8220My role8221 he answered 8220I don8217t know what you mean I8217m an artist8221 which really put me in my place Knowles was consultant for the movie 8220Rain Man8221 amp160Later Wilson showed me some of Knowles8217s prose that your average Language poet would give their eyeteeth to write amp160Wilson was born with learning disabilities The son of a mayor of Waco Texas he didn8217t speak until he was five Burchfield was John Cage8217s 8220roadie8221 She says that the possibilities of American dance have been expanded as more players participate She watches popular dance shows like 8220So You Think That You Can Dance8221 She says that Hip Hop dancers are doing moves like triple flips that ballet dancers would envy As an example of how everybody pitched in whether it be cleaning toilets or driving visitors to and fro from their houses Carla and I were transported to our guest house in the woods by Aram HausiRahbari who collaborated on several operas including8221 Mary Queen of Scots8221 and 8220The Makropulos Case8221 Driving these roads at night reminded me of the final scene in 8220Pollack8221 when Jackson Pollack an early Hampton resident and his terrified passengers are headed for a crash Among those who were passengers on our return trip to the center was Illenk Gentille who also performed in 8220KOOL8221 A dancer from Sulawesi Indonesia he gave us an impromptu lecture on Indonesian court dance as we returned to the Center where brain storming was taking place at different locations I even found myself pitching in Though I was invited to discuss my poetry and my work with musicians it was requested that I stay longer Wilson wanted me to participate in a session about a huge spectacular multimedia show that will take place in Gdansk on August 31 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Poland8217s Solidarity Movement The estimated audience for this show will be 100000 The plans for the show were presented on laptops and by a huge board covered with pictures Examining this display was Father Macie Jzieba a Catholic priest and former physicist who recommended Wilson 8220They wanted Madonna8221 he said He presented a ten minute video which showed Polish history from the Russian and Nazi occupations to the General Strike On a sheet of paper Wilson sketched the grounds where performances would be held I recommended that Polish poets be used including the work of Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz Someone suggested two famous Rock musicians to be part of the spectacular show amp160After I left I sent a note suggesting the most famous Polish musician since Chopin Lawrence Welk Jorn Weisbrodt Wilson8217s Creative Director and Wilson troubleshooter and budget hawk chimed in from time to time about costs 8220KOOL8221 dancer Jonah Bokaer had drawn a sketch for possible sky writing Recommendations were flying throughout the meeting while Wilson sketched ideas for the fireworks which I thought were the perfect image for what goes on at this productive multicultural community of artists Thought fireworks from minds shooting off at every possible direction Lighting up brains During the 1930s there was a similar meeting of multicultural minds The right was responsible for closing down the Works Progress Administration a program that put writers dancers and actors on salary some of whom would become our leading artists During one redbaiting session before a Congressional committee a congressman wanted to know 8220Who is this Christopher Marlowe fellow8221 Now a conservative group called Media Morality is objecting to Stimulus Funds being used to support the arts The basis for this attitude seems to be that the arts have no value A comparatively low budget project like 8220KOOL8221 a masterpiece whose startup budget was not more than 30000 and which requires not much beyond its six performers stage lighting a floor to ceiling projection screen and a few sticks and a large ball making it ready to travel throughout the world in these low budget times drew full houses at both the Guggenheim and Guild Hall I8217m sure that the fledging restaurant businesses and other local businesses that benefited from the crowds drawn by this work would disagree with this group Ralph Ellison was one of those writers who was on the WPA payroll Publishing corporations have made millions over the years from his work written during his time on a WPA payroll His book Invisible Man is still in print Thousands ofamp160 artists from all over the world have flocked to New York as a result of its becoming a world center for art boosting the economy of the city as a result of the works by artists like Jackson Pollack a recipient of a WPA salary One of those who came to New York as a result of this artistic firmament was a young dancer named Suzushi Hanayagi ISHMAEL REED is the publisher of Konch which will publish next week an exclusive interview with Lou Gossett Jr about Jim Crow patterns in liberal Hollywood Reed8217s latest book is Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media He can be reached at Uncleishaolcom | The/DET August/PROPN 20th/NOUN press/NOUN release/NOUN came/VERB from/ADP Jorn/PROPN Weisbrodt/PROPN Executive/PROPN Director/PROPN of/ADP Robert/PROPN Wilson/PROPN Works/VERB 8220Over/NOUN a/DET year/NOUN ago/ADV Robert/PROPN Wilson/PROPN was/AUX asked/VERB to/PART participate/VERB as/ADP artistic/ADJ director/NOUN for/ADP the/DET event/NOUN celebrating/VERB the/DET 30th/ADJ anniversary/NOUN of/ADP Solidarnosc/PROPN the/DET freedom/NOUN movement/NOUN that/PRON started/VERB the/DET fall/NOUN of/ADP the/DET iron/NOUN curtain/NOUN It/PRON will/AUX be/AUX on/ADP August/PROPN 31th/NOUN in/ADP the/DET historic/ADJ shipyards/NOUN in/ADP Gdansk/PROPN and/CCONJ is/AUX free/ADJ 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contributions/NOUN of/ADP the/DET world/NOUN cultures/NOUN to/ADP western/ADJ art/NOUN The/DET kind/NOUN of/ADP people/NOUN who/PRON call/VERB Picasso8217s/PROPN work/NOUN 8220Cubist8221/PROPN as/ADP a/DET way/NOUN of/ADP denying/VERB its/PRON African/ADJ influences/NOUN The/DET private/ADJ art/NOUN collections/NOUN of/ADP Picasso/PROPN and/CCONJ surrealist/NOUN Andre/PROPN Breton/PROPN are/AUX filled/VERB with/ADP art/NOUN from/ADP Africa/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET Pacific/PROPN Islands/PROPN So/ADV is/AUX Robert/PROPN Wilson8217s/PROPN Louis/PROPN Aragon/PROPN said/VERB of/ADP Wilson/PROPN that/SCONJ he/PRON was/AUX continuing/VERB Surrealism8217s/PROPN traditions/VERB The/DET art/NOUN that/PRON was/AUX once/ADV labeled/VERB 8220primitive8221/NOUN is/AUX located/VERB in/ADP the/DET basement/NOUN of/ADP the/DET main/ADJ building/NOUN of/ADP Watermill/PROPN a/DET community/NOUN of/ADP artists/NOUN directed/VERB by/ADP Robert/PROPN Wilson/PROPN Other/ADJ parts/NOUN of/ADP the/DET collection/NOUN are/AUX dispersed/VERB throughout/ADP the/DET building/NOUN and/CCONJ unlike/ADP the/DET way/NOUN that/PRON museums/NOUN might/AUX distance/VERB their/PRON exhibits/NOUN from/ADP the/DET presence/NOUN of/ADP the/DET viewer/NOUN the/DET art/NOUN 8211chairs/NUM tables/NOUN bowls/NOUN etc8211/ADV are/AUX blended/VERB into/ADP the/DET day8217s/PROPN routine/ADJ Precious/ADJ lamps/NOUN or/CCONJ chairs/NOUN might/AUX be/AUX part/NOUN of/ADP the/DET office/NOUN furniture/NOUN Among/ADP pieces/NOUN in/ADP the/DET collection/NOUN are/AUX footwear/ADJ that/SCONJ once/ADV belonged/VERB to/ADP Rudolph/PROPN Nureyev/PROPN and/CCONJ Marlene/PROPN Dietrich/PROPN Jerome/PROPN Robbins8217/PROPN cool/ADJ sneakers/NOUN are/AUX on/ADP display/NOUN I/PRON wore/VERB mine/PRON Unlike/ADP some/PRON of/ADP the/DET tourists/NOUN that/SCONJ my/PRON daughter/NOUN Tennessee/PROPN and/CCONJ I/PRON spotted/VERB in/ADP the/DET lobby/NOUN of/ADP a/DET San/PROPN Francisco/PROPN hotel/NOUN who/PRON were/AUX freezing/VERB in/ADP their/PRON light/ADJ summer/NOUN clothing/NOUN I/PRON was/AUX prepared/VERB for/ADP New/PROPN York8217s/PROPN hot/ADJ and/CCONJ muggy/PROPN August/PROPN weather/NOUN I/PRON spent/VERB six/NUM years/NOUN during/ADP New/PROPN York/PROPN Augusts/NOUN like/ADP the/DET 2009/NUM August/PROPN I/PRON arrived/VERB packed/VERB with/ADP Hawaiian/ADJ shirts/NOUN two/NUM of/ADP which/PRON were/AUX sewn/VERB by/ADP a/DET reader/NOUN who/PRON lives/VERB in/ADP Hiloamp160/NUM Me/PRON and/CCONJ Truman/PROPN Wilson8217s/PROPN art/NOUN collection/NOUN is/AUX located/VERB at/ADP the/DET Watermill/PROPN Center/PROPN founded/VERB in/ADP 1992/NUM by/ADP Wilson/PROPN It/PRON is/AUX described/VERB as/ADP an/DET international/ADJ multidisciplinary/ADJ center/NOUN for/ADP studies/NOUN in/ADP the/DET arts/NOUN and/CCONJ humanities/NOUN Wilson/PROPN is/AUX best/ADV known/VERB for/ADP large/ADJ scale/NOUN multimedia/NOUN works/VERB the/DET most/ADV famous/ADJ of/ADP which/PRON are/AUX 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and/CCONJ was/AUX reworked/VERB and/CCONJ performed/VERB on/ADP August/PROPN 8/NUM and/CCONJ 9th/NOUN of/ADP that/DET year/NOUN at/ADP Guild/PROPN Hall/PROPN in/ADP East/PROPN Hampton/PROPN a/DET town/NOUN in/ADP which/PRON there/PRON are/VERB buildings/NOUN that/PRON date/VERB to/ADP the/DET 1600s/NOUN The/DET Huffington/PROPN Post/PROPN called/VERB the/DET work/NOUN 8220sublime8221amp160amp160amp160/PROPN 8220/NUM KOOL8221/PROPN is/AUX in/ADP part/NOUN a/DET tribute/NOUN to/ADP Ms/PROPN Hanayagi/PROPN now/ADV living/VERB in/ADP a/DET Tokyo/PROPN nursing/NOUN home/NOUN suffering/VERB from/ADP Alzheimer8217s/PROPN I/PRON suggestedthe/VERB title/NOUN 8220Kool8221/PROPN based/VERB upon/SCONJ my/PRON study/NOUN of/ADP Japanese/PROPN I/PRON found/VERB that/SCONJ Suzushii/PROPN meant/VERB cool/ADJ which/PRON certainly/ADV describes/VERB Suzushi8217s/PROPN temperament/NOUN I8217d/NOUN known/VERB her/PRON since/SCONJ the/DET 1960s/NOUN and/CCONJ never/ADV did/AUX I/PRON see/VERB her/PRON 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<p />
<p>A little more than a month before Cho Seung-Hui went on a murderous rampage at Virginia Tech, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in a landmark gun rights case, Parker v. District of Columbia, repealing the District’s stringent gun laws. Leading the Second Amendment challenge was Cato Institute senior fellow and constitutional lawyer Dr. Robert Levy, who, despite offers of financial assistance from Cato, has bankrolled the three-year effort himself. Levy wielded a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment to dissolve the strictest gun regulations on the books in any state (or district), arguing that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals, not just militias, to bear arms. Parker marked the first time in history that the Second Amendment broad interpretation has been used to overturn a state gun law. It’s likely that the Supreme Court will eventually review the decision and if the Court upholds the D.C. Circuit court opinion, it will have far-reaching implications nationwide—making state gun laws ever more vulnerable to legal challenges. Interestingly, Levy’s case has not only been a subject of concern among gun control advocates, but to the National Rifle Association as well, which fears the impact of a negative Supreme Court ruling.</p>
<p>From his home in Naples, Florida (where he claims he doesn’t need a gun), Levy talked to Mother Jones about his Second Amendment victory, his frustrations with the National Rifle Association, and the impact of the Virginia Tech shootings on the gun rights movement.</p>
<p>Mother Jones: For the past three years, this lawsuit has been your baby. What made you so passionate about challenging the gun laws in D.C.?</p>
<p>Robert Levy: I’m passionate about a lot of issues. I’ve done work on tort reform and tobacco litigation, post 9-11 civil liberties such as the Patriot act, detention of U.S. citizens, profiling, and NSA wire taps. So the Second Amendment is just one of the many issues that I feel passionate about.</p>
<p>MJ: Why D.C.?</p>
<p>RL: The reason deals with incorporation. When the Constitution was originally ratified for the Bill of Rights, it only applied to the federal government. All of that changed after the Civil War when the 14th amendment was ratified. And since that time, it’s been pretty well settled that most of the Bill of Rights can be applied to the states as well as the federal government, but it hasn’t been resolved whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. To avoid having to deal with that issue, we chose D.C., because it is not a state.</p>
<p>MJ: Are you a gun owner?</p>
<p>RL: No.</p>
<p>MJ: Are you a hunter, or a target shooter?</p>
<p>RL: Nope. I haven’t had a gun since I was in the Air Force in the 1960s.</p>
<p>MJ: From the beginning, were you considering that the Second Amendment challenge to this one law would have such far-reaching implications?</p>
<p>RL: Oh sure. We knew that it would have far-reaching implications because the Supreme Court had not dealt with a Second Amendment case since 1939. Meanwhile, 10 of the 12 judicial circuits, all except the 5th Circuit in Texas and the D.C. Circuit, had determined that Second Amendment did not secure individual right, instead that it applied only to members of the militia. And in some cases they determined that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to states. So we knew that if we were to win in D.C., it would be a major victory with profound implications across the country.</p>
<p>MJ: How likely is it that Parker vs. District of Columbia will go before the Supreme Court?</p>
<p>RL: It is highly likely for a number of reasons—most importantly, this is a very big issue. In addition, this D.C. opinion was the very first opinion of any appellate court in history to overturn a gun control regulation based on the Second Amendment. And it also is highlighted by the fact that all the other circuits, with the exception of the 5th Circuit in Texas, disagree.</p>
<p>MJ: A circuit split is one of the main reasons a case would go before the Supreme Court?</p>
<p>RL: That’s correct. You have a circuit split which means you have different laws that are now applicable across the country. The Supreme Court ordinarily will try to resolve that sort of thing so we have uniform laws across the country.</p>
<p>MJ: If the Supreme Court upholds the decision, how would this ruling affect gun laws on the books in states throughout the nation?</p>
<p>RL: First, we need to look at how will it affect D.C. If they uphold the appellate decision (D.C. has applied for a petition to have the case go before the full-judge panel of the circuit court—the case was heard before a three-judge panel originally), it will say that the D.C. gun ban is unconstitutional.</p>
<p>The task after Parker, assuming Parker is upheld, will be twofold. The first is to determine whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. Assuming the Second Amendment does apply to the states, the next question will be what regulations are permissible and what restrictions are not permissible.</p>
<p>Even the NRA concedes that you can’t have mad men running around with weapons of mass destruction. So there are some restrictions that are permissible and it will be the task of the legislature and the courts to ferret all of that out and draw the lines. I am sure, though, that outright bans on handguns like they have in D.C. won’t be permitted. That is not a reasonable restriction under anybody’s characterization. It is not a restriction, it’s a prohibition.</p>
<p>MJ: Regarding the Parker case, the six plaintiffs were carefully chosen. Can you discuss your selection process?</p>
<p>RL: We wanted gender, racial, economic, and age diversity. We weren’t looking for criminals. We didn’t want a crack head coming into the court as a poster boy for the Second Amendment. Most importantly, we wanted compelling cases.</p>
<p>MJ: You said that Parker v. District of Columbia is the first case where a broad interpretation of the restriction has overturned a state gun law. Have there been previous challenges?</p>
<p>RL: Yes, there have been a ton of challenges. There have been 30, maybe even 40 in the district alone, but they are challenges brought by criminals protesting the fact that they have been charged with a felony in possession of a firearm or that they have committed a crime like robbing a bank and their sentence has been enhanced because they carried a gun. These criminals charge that they should not have their sentence enhanced because they have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun. These cases are nonsense and the courts have properly thrown them out. So this is the first challenge that was compelling on its facts and where folks went out of their way to find plaintiffs with the requisite characteristics that I mentioned.</p>
<p>MJ: Are there similar cases pending in D.C. and in other states?</p>
<p>RL: There are all kinds of cases pending, but I do not know of any case that is imminent and is similar to ours in that it is law-abiding citizens with compelling facts who simply just want to be able to defend themselves.</p>
<p>MJ: Could you talk about the longstanding controversy that has existed over the interpretation of the Second Amendment?</p>
<p>RL: The controversy boils down to this: Does the Second Amendment secure the right of individuals to keep and bear arms or does it simply apply to the right of states to arm the members of their militia? This controversy has raged since 1939 and, of course, it existed even before then.</p>
<p>MJ: Even if the case doesn’t go before the Supreme Court, doesn’t it pretty much turn gun control legislation upside down?</p>
<p>RL: In D.C., something is going to have to be done with existing gun laws. Secondly, and I think more importantly, since D.C. is the residence of the federal government, it means that the federal government can be sued in D.C. no matter where an injury or rights violation takes place. Any challenge to federal gun laws can be brought in D.C. and will be governed by the law in D.C. That means that D.C. has a much bigger impact than other locations.</p>
<p>MJ: Considering the district has the most stringent gun laws on the books, what message does this send out to pro-gun rights people and anti-gun rights people. Does this not show other states the way? Could there be some kind of ripple effect?</p>
<p>RL: This will depend on whether the Second Amendment even applies to states. This is going to be next big issue that comes before the court. My own view is that the arguments are compelling—that the Second Amendment, like every other part of the Bill of Rights, will apply to the state governments. Assuming that’s the case, the state governments will be on notice, just like D.C. is on notice.</p>
<p>MJ: What impact will the Virginia Tech shootings have on your case?</p>
<p>RL: Logically, it shouldn’t have any impact. In Parker, we are not addressing concealed carry and the outdoor usage of guns. We’re talking about a gun in the home for self-defense. And that’s it. So as a matter of cold law, the situation at Virginia Tech is not relevant in terms of the Parker litigation.</p>
<p>Now could it have an effect? Well, of course. People can’t read about an experience of this kind of horror without being affected by it. And judges in the courts are no different. People’s views about gun control, about self-defense, and the Second Amendment are certainly impacted by these practical, real-life experiences. After all, that’s why we look for these compelling facts. We’re not dealing with just an abstract Second Amendment. We’re dealing with a Second Amendment that applies to real-life people, and so I suspect that there will be some effect.</p>
<p>Now the next question is, what effect is it likely to have? There will be one camp that says, “The events at Virginia Tech prove that we have too many guns in the country and what we need is tighter gun control.” And there will be a second camp that is equally vigorous and equally outspoken, and I will be part of it, that says, “What happened at Virginia Tech proves that what we need is for people to be able to defend themselves.”</p>
<p>After all, it is hard to stop somebody from open firing and killing someone. But you sure as heck can stop someone from doing number 31, 32, and 33. Who knows how many lives would have been saved if somebody who had a valid state-issued permit was carrying a gun and put an end to this guy? As to whether it will be read in that manner by judges on the D.C. Circuit or in the Supreme Court, I just don’t know.</p>
<p>MJ: If not more stringent gun control, what do you think makes a difference in the likelihood that a tragedy like this could occur?</p>
<p>RL: With respect to the root causes of violence, I’m no expert but, among other things, it’s illegitimacy, unemployment, dysfunctional schools, teenage pregnancy, and drug and alcohol abuse. And in this case, it was probably none of the above. It was probably just a crazy person. I mean you can’t eliminate all crazy people.</p>
<p>MJ: Are you a proponent of any gun laws?</p>
<p>RL: I’m a proponent of a lot of gun control laws. I support regulations on some type of weapons. We can’t have people having shoulder-launched missiles in every home. That’s ridiculous. I support regulations on some types of persons, the obvious one being felons, the mentally incompetent, and people that are young. I would obviously permit regulations on some types of uses, like murder. It’s clear that these types of regulations have to exist. Where should the line be drawn, what age should it be? I don’t know. I’d have to think about that and I’d like to see more evidence.</p>
<p>MJ: How do you think the Virginia Tech shootings will affect gun rights efforts nationwide?</p>
<p>RL: The laws ought to be changed so that people are able to defend themselves. There will be clamor from the usual suspects to go in the other direction, to have tighter laws. I think the people on the Virginia Tech campus and all the other campuses should be able to do the same thing they do anywhere else in the state of Virginia. And that is if they qualify for a concealed carry permit, they should be able to carry one on campus. And this regulation has not turned Virginia into Dodge City. The real violence has occurred where they can’t have guns, namely on the campus not where they can have guns, namely off the campus.</p>
<p>And it’s not that everybody will rush out to carry a gun. They won’t. In all the states—and as I mentioned there are 45 that have concealed carry rights—only five percent of the population takes out gun permits. The other 95 percent benefit because criminals don’t know who is armed. So a guy who is contemplating an act like what happened on Monday and he thinks the first guy he’s going to encounter is going to blow his brains out, he’s a little hesitant to engage in these sorts of activities. You can’t stop it all, but you can certainly stop some of it, and you could certainly have stopped the multiple killings that occurred systematically at Virginia Tech.</p>
<p>MJ: The media has been all over lawmakers and presidential candidates claiming that an incident like this has no bearing on the political landscape surrounding gun control. Essentially, they are claiming, the tragedy at Virginia Tech will disappear without a legislative trace.</p>
<p>RL: Democrats, who tend to be in favor of stronger gun controls—first of all I think they’re wrong, but even if they’re right—they don’t have the courage of their conviction, because they are politically craven and they are not willing to take a stance on this because they fear their electoral prospects will be impeded. A lot of people who are gun owners and believe in gun ownership are not going to vote for a lawmaker or presidential candidate if they come out foursquare against gun control.</p>
<p>MJ: Is there a tragedy of any magnitude that could change the equation?</p>
<p>RL: Sure, but the question is, in what direction? Does it change the equation in the sense that it convinces people to go for tighter gun laws when the guy’s already violating several gun laws that already exist. I mean, what’s another gun law? He’s violated the law against carrying a gun on campus, violated the law by obliterating the serial number on his gun, and he has violated the law against murder. None of those laws seemed to matter to this guy. So another law is unlikely to make any difference.</p>
<p>MJ: In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, you wrote of repeated attempts by the NRA to derail your litigation. What form did these attempts take and why would the nation’s foremost gun lobby work against litigation that was clearly in line with its interests?</p>
<p>RL: I want to know too. I don’t know the answer to that, but relationships have been smoothed and we are working with the NRA now. The NRA says that they support the Parker litigation and don’t intend to do anything that would derail the litigation. They have said that they think it ought to go to the Supreme Court and that it ought to win. And I am willing to accept their words as gospel until I have reason to believe otherwise.</p>
<p>MJ: You say relationships have been smoothed? What were the disputes?</p>
<p>RL: In 2002, when we first contemplated this suit, their emissaries came to me to try to dissuade me from filing the suit. The asserted reason was they thought it was a good suit and had a good chance of winning. Therefore, it would likely go to the Supreme Court and they didn’t think they had sufficient horsepower in the Supreme Court. They didn’t want to take that gamble.</p>
<p>We didn’t buy that argument because we thought by the time the suit went up to the Supreme Court, the court would look a lot better. We were right. The substitution of Justice Alito for Justice O’Connor is a step in the right direction for those who believe in gun rights. The court looks better than it is going to look for a while with the likely Democratic administration.</p>
<p>MJ: What is the timeline for this case as it heads to Supreme Court?</p>
<p>RL: A petition for the case to be reheard before the full judge panel of the D.C. Circuit court has been filed. If it gets granted, that’s going to add another three to six months onto the case because a lot depends on whether there is going to be a new briefing or whether they are going to use the existing briefs. There are a whole lot of imponderables there. If it doesn’t get granted or if the court doesn’t vote to rehear the case, then the petition to file cert (a document that the losing party files asking the Supreme Court to review a decision by a lower court) will be filed and ruled on over the summer. That means the Supreme Court will hear the case sometime after October of this year and would probably decide the case between January and June of 2008.</p>
<p>MJ: Are you certified to go before the Supreme Court?</p>
<p>RL: Yes, I’m a member of the Supreme Court bar.</p>
<p>MJ: So, you’ll be taking it all the way?</p>
<p>RL: That’s our intent. And we have a very good chance. I think that it is very unlikely that five justices on the Supreme Court are going to say that the Second Amendment means nothing. That’s what they would have to say to uphold the total ban on handguns that exists in Washington D.C.</p>
<p>It is also especially unlikely during the heat of the 2008 election—and that is when it is going to happen—because it would be a rallying cry for the whole pro-gun committee. Just like an abortion decision that overturned Roe v. Wade would animate the pro-choice folks. That kind of political turmoil is something the court is sensitive to.</p>
<p /> | Interview: The Way of the Gun | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/04/interview-way-gun/ | 2007-04-19 | 4left
| 3,062 | A little more than a month before Cho SeungHui went on a murderous rampage at Virginia Tech the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in a landmark gun rights case Parker v District of Columbia repealing the District8217s stringent gun laws Leading the Second Amendment challenge was Cato Institute senior fellow and constitutional lawyer Dr Robert Levy who despite offers of financial assistance from Cato has bankrolled the threeyear effort himself Levy wielded a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment to dissolve the strictest gun regulations on the books in any state or district arguing that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals not just militias to bear arms Parker marked the first time in history that the Second Amendment broad interpretation has been used to overturn a state gun law It8217s likely that the Supreme Court will eventually review the decision and if the Court upholds the DC Circuit court opinion it will have farreaching implications nationwide8212making state gun laws ever more vulnerable to legal challenges Interestingly Levy8217s case has not only been a subject of concern among gun control advocates but to the National Rifle Association as well which fears the impact of a negative Supreme Court ruling From his home in Naples Florida where he claims he doesn8217t need a gun Levy talked to Mother Jones about his Second Amendment victory his frustrations with the National Rifle Association and the impact of the Virginia Tech shootings on the gun rights movement Mother Jones For the past three years this lawsuit has been your baby What made you so passionate about challenging the gun laws in DC Robert Levy I8217m passionate about a lot of issues I8217ve done work on tort reform and tobacco litigation post 911 civil liberties such as the Patriot act detention of US citizens profiling and NSA wire taps So the Second Amendment is just one of the many issues that I feel passionate about MJ Why DC RL The reason deals with incorporation When the Constitution was originally ratified for the Bill of Rights it only applied to the federal government All of that changed after the Civil War when the 14th amendment was ratified And since that time it8217s been pretty well settled that most of the Bill of Rights can be applied to the states as well as the federal government but it hasn8217t been resolved whether the Second Amendment applies to the states To avoid having to deal with that issue we chose DC because it is not a state MJ Are you a gun owner RL No MJ Are you a hunter or a target shooter RL Nope I haven8217t had a gun since I was in the Air Force in the 1960s MJ From the beginning were you considering that the Second Amendment challenge to this one law would have such farreaching implications RL Oh sure We knew that it would have farreaching implications because the Supreme Court had not dealt with a Second Amendment case since 1939 Meanwhile 10 of the 12 judicial circuits all except the 5th Circuit in Texas and the DC Circuit had determined that Second Amendment did not secure individual right instead that it applied only to members of the militia And in some cases they determined that the Second Amendment didn8217t apply to states So we knew that if we were to win in DC it would be a major victory with profound implications across the country MJ How likely is it that Parker vs District of Columbia will go before the Supreme Court RL It is highly likely for a number of reasons8212most importantly this is a very big issue In addition this DC opinion was the very first opinion of any appellate court in history to overturn a gun control regulation based on the Second Amendment And it also is highlighted by the fact that all the other circuits with the exception of the 5th Circuit in Texas disagree MJ A circuit split is one of the main reasons a case would go before the Supreme Court RL That8217s correct You have a circuit split which means you have different laws that are now applicable across the country The Supreme Court ordinarily will try to resolve that sort of thing so we have uniform laws across the country MJ If the Supreme Court upholds the decision how would this ruling affect gun laws on the books in states throughout the nation RL First we need to look at how will it affect DC If they uphold the appellate decision DC has applied for a petition to have the case go before the fulljudge panel of the circuit court8212the case was heard before a threejudge panel originally it will say that the DC gun ban is unconstitutional The task after Parker assuming Parker is upheld will be twofold The first is to determine whether the Second Amendment applies to the states Assuming the Second Amendment does apply to the states the next question will be what regulations are permissible and what restrictions are not permissible Even the NRA concedes that you can8217t have mad men running around with weapons of mass destruction So there are some restrictions that are permissible and it will be the task of the legislature and the courts to ferret all of that out and draw the lines I am sure though that outright bans on handguns like they have in DC won8217t be permitted That is not a reasonable restriction under anybody8217s characterization It is not a restriction it8217s a prohibition MJ Regarding the Parker case the six plaintiffs were carefully chosen Can you discuss your selection process RL We wanted gender racial economic and age diversity We weren8217t looking for criminals We didn8217t want a crack head coming into the court as a poster boy for the Second Amendment Most importantly we wanted compelling cases MJ You said that Parker v District of Columbia is the first case where a broad interpretation of the restriction has overturned a state gun law Have there been previous challenges RL Yes there have been a ton of challenges There have been 30 maybe even 40 in the district alone but they are challenges brought by criminals protesting the fact that they have been charged with a felony in possession of a firearm or that they have committed a crime like robbing a bank and their sentence has been enhanced because they carried a gun These criminals charge that they should not have their sentence enhanced because they have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun These cases are nonsense and the courts have properly thrown them out So this is the first challenge that was compelling on its facts and where folks went out of their way to find plaintiffs with the requisite characteristics that I mentioned MJ Are there similar cases pending in DC and in other states RL There are all kinds of cases pending but I do not know of any case that is imminent and is similar to ours in that it is lawabiding citizens with compelling facts who simply just want to be able to defend themselves MJ Could you talk about the longstanding controversy that has existed over the interpretation of the Second Amendment RL The controversy boils down to this Does the Second Amendment secure the right of individuals to keep and bear arms or does it simply apply to the right of states to arm the members of their militia This controversy has raged since 1939 and of course it existed even before then MJ Even if the case doesn8217t go before the Supreme Court doesn8217t it pretty much turn gun control legislation upside down RL In DC something is going to have to be done with existing gun laws Secondly and I think more importantly since DC is the residence of the federal government it means that the federal government can be sued in DC no matter where an injury or rights violation takes place Any challenge to federal gun laws can be brought in DC and will be governed by the law in DC That means that DC has a much bigger impact than other locations MJ Considering the district has the most stringent gun laws on the books what message does this send out to progun rights people and antigun rights people Does this not show other states the way Could there be some kind of ripple effect RL This will depend on whether the Second Amendment even applies to states This is going to be next big issue that comes before the court My own view is that the arguments are compelling8212that the Second Amendment like every other part of the Bill of Rights will apply to the state governments Assuming that8217s the case the state governments will be on notice just like DC is on notice MJ What impact will the Virginia Tech shootings have on your case RL Logically it shouldn8217t have any impact In Parker we are not addressing concealed carry and the outdoor usage of guns We8217re talking about a gun in the home for selfdefense And that8217s it So as a matter of cold law the situation at Virginia Tech is not relevant in terms of the Parker litigation Now could it have an effect Well of course People can8217t read about an experience of this kind of horror without being affected by it And judges in the courts are no different People8217s views about gun control about selfdefense and the Second Amendment are certainly impacted by these practical reallife experiences After all that8217s why we look for these compelling facts We8217re not dealing with just an abstract Second Amendment We8217re dealing with a Second Amendment that applies to reallife people and so I suspect that there will be some effect Now the next question is what effect is it likely to have There will be one camp that says 8220The events at Virginia Tech prove that we have too many guns in the country and what we need is tighter gun control8221 And there will be a second camp that is equally vigorous and equally outspoken and I will be part of it that says 8220What happened at Virginia Tech proves that what we need is for people to be able to defend themselves8221 After all it is hard to stop somebody from open firing and killing someone But you sure as heck can stop someone from doing number 31 32 and 33 Who knows how many lives would have been saved if somebody who had a valid stateissued permit was carrying a gun and put an end to this guy As to whether it will be read in that manner by judges on the DC Circuit or in the Supreme Court I just don8217t know MJ If not more stringent gun control what do you think makes a difference in the likelihood that a tragedy like this could occur RL With respect to the root causes of violence I8217m no expert but among other things it8217s illegitimacy unemployment dysfunctional schools teenage pregnancy and drug and alcohol abuse And in this case it was probably none of the above It was probably just a crazy person I mean you can8217t eliminate all crazy people MJ Are you a proponent of any gun laws RL I8217m a proponent of a lot of gun control laws I support regulations on some type of weapons We can8217t have people having shoulderlaunched missiles in every home That8217s ridiculous I support regulations on some types of persons the obvious one being felons the mentally incompetent and people that are young I would obviously permit regulations on some types of uses like murder It8217s clear that these types of regulations have to exist Where should the line be drawn what age should it be I don8217t know I8217d have to think about that and I8217d like to see more evidence MJ How do you think the Virginia Tech shootings will affect gun rights efforts nationwide RL The laws ought to be changed so that people are able to defend themselves There will be clamor from the usual suspects to go in the other direction to have tighter laws I think the people on the Virginia Tech campus and all the other campuses should be able to do the same thing they do anywhere else in the state of Virginia And that is if they qualify for a concealed carry permit they should be able to carry one on campus And this regulation has not turned Virginia into Dodge City The real violence has occurred where they can8217t have guns namely on the campus not where they can have guns namely off the campus And it8217s not that everybody will rush out to carry a gun They won8217t In all the states8212and as I mentioned there are 45 that have concealed carry rights8212only five percent of the population takes out gun permits The other 95 percent benefit because criminals don8217t know who is armed So a guy who is contemplating an act like what happened on Monday and he thinks the first guy he8217s going to encounter is going to blow his brains out he8217s a little hesitant to engage in these sorts of activities You can8217t stop it all but you can certainly stop some of it and you could certainly have stopped the multiple killings that occurred systematically at Virginia Tech MJ The media has been all over lawmakers and presidential candidates claiming that an incident like this has no bearing on the political landscape surrounding gun control Essentially they are claiming the tragedy at Virginia Tech will disappear without a legislative trace RL Democrats who tend to be in favor of stronger gun controls8212first of all I think they8217re wrong but even if they8217re right8212they don8217t have the courage of their conviction because they are politically craven and they are not willing to take a stance on this because they fear their electoral prospects will be impeded A lot of people who are gun owners and believe in gun ownership are not going to vote for a lawmaker or presidential candidate if they come out foursquare against gun control MJ Is there a tragedy of any magnitude that could change the equation RL Sure but the question is in what direction Does it change the equation in the sense that it convinces people to go for tighter gun laws when the guy8217s already violating several gun laws that already exist I mean what8217s another gun law He8217s violated the law against carrying a gun on campus violated the law by obliterating the serial number on his gun and he has violated the law against murder None of those laws seemed to matter to this guy So another law is unlikely to make any difference MJ In an oped in the Washington Examiner you wrote of repeated attempts by the NRA to derail your litigation What form did these attempts take and why would the nation8217s foremost gun lobby work against litigation that was clearly in line with its interests RL I want to know too I don8217t know the answer to that but relationships have been smoothed and we are working with the NRA now The NRA says that they support the Parker litigation and don8217t intend to do anything that would derail the litigation They have said that they think it ought to go to the Supreme Court and that it ought to win And I am willing to accept their words as gospel until I have reason to believe otherwise MJ You say relationships have been smoothed What were the disputes RL In 2002 when we first contemplated this suit their emissaries came to me to try to dissuade me from filing the suit The asserted reason was they thought it was a good suit and had a good chance of winning Therefore it would likely go to the Supreme Court and they didn8217t think they had sufficient horsepower in the Supreme Court They didn8217t want to take that gamble We didn8217t buy that argument because we thought by the time the suit went up to the Supreme Court the court would look a lot better We were right The substitution of Justice Alito for Justice O8217Connor is a step in the right direction for those who believe in gun rights The court looks better than it is going to look for a while with the likely Democratic administration MJ What is the timeline for this case as it heads to Supreme Court RL A petition for the case to be reheard before the full judge panel of the DC Circuit court has been filed If it gets granted that8217s going to add another three to six months onto the case because a lot depends on whether there is going to be a new briefing or whether they are going to use the existing briefs There are a whole lot of imponderables there If it doesn8217t get granted or if the court doesn8217t vote to rehear the case then the petition to file cert a document that the losing party files asking the Supreme Court to review a decision by a lower court will be filed and ruled on over the summer That means the Supreme Court will hear the case sometime after October of this year and would probably decide the case between January and June of 2008 MJ Are you certified to go before the Supreme Court RL Yes I8217m a member of the Supreme Court bar MJ So you8217ll be taking it all the way RL That8217s our intent And we have a very good chance I think that it is very unlikely that five justices on the Supreme Court are going to say that the Second Amendment means nothing That8217s what they would have to say to uphold the total ban on handguns that exists in Washington DC It is also especially unlikely during the heat of the 2008 election8212and that is when it is going to happen8212because it would be a rallying cry for the whole 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<p>This past February, as the mammoth snowstorm dubbed “Winter Storm Nemo” bore down on the northeastern United States, all eyes turned to the elected officials in the region. Many of them had done a poor job of handling the effects of such storms in the past, with unhappy political consequences, and even after the expensive and highly publicized relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, many New York and New Jersey households remained in severe distress.</p>
<p>New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was laboring under an especially large cloud of distrust, thanks to his fumbling performance during the blizzard of December 2010, when snow removal was ineffective, ambulances and fire trucks got stuck in the uncleared streets, and there was a backlog of 1,400 emergency calls. So a lot was at stake this time. As Nemo approached, the local CBS affiliate proclaimed, “For Bloomberg, Getting Response to This Storm Right Would Be Redemption.”</p>
<p>Ah yes,&#160;redemption. Meaning deliverance from sin, atonement, expiation, absolution, regeneration, the debt forgiven, release from stigmatization, the ransom paid, the captive set free—a new beginning, a fresh start, a transformation, a liberation from guilt, a new lease on life, even if not an entirely clean slate. It may take more than a snowstorm to penetrate the awareness of the famously self-righteous Bloomberg, the scourge of smokers and soda drinkers and trans fat consumers and other enemies of humanity. It might not yet have occurred to him that he too stood in need of redemption. But most of us understand the need for it, both for ourselves and others. Politicians, as cynosures of the national psyche, may need it rather more than most, or at least the convincing appearance of it, particularly when it is dispensed by the likes of CBS News. Figures as different as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, two men who rode the roller coaster of fall-and-redemption all their careers, could attest to its value, and each was, in his own way, a master of its giddy heights and harrowing depths. Indeed, their tarrings and their laurels are impossible to separate.</p>
<p>But the phenomenon seems to go beyond particular personalities, and touches upon one of the deepest moral and emotional foundations of American life. In his classic 1968 book&#160;Redeemer Nation, the Berkeley scholar Ernest Tuveson identified one of the most enduring strains in American life as a belief in the nation’s divinely ordained redemptive role in the world, a belief for which he found seeds in America’s origins, and which flowered in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly with regard to the nation’s external relations and foreign policy. Yet Tuveson’s insights can surely be turned inward as well, since the externally aimed logic of redemption is just as applicable, if not more so, to individuals as well as nations. In fact, as the external has become less plausible, the internal has taken on greater and greater importance.</p>
<p>The algebra of fall-and-redemption, always a part of American culture, seems to have become an ever more integral part of the psychological drama of American politics. Leaders are more likely to be embraced fully and heartily when they have first been shown to stumble badly, to be flawed and human and vulnerable, and then allowed to rise again, scarred to be sure, but also contrite and humbled and seasoned. William Dean Howells famously observed that “what the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending”; the same is true in the theater of public life.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>The requirement that politicians be flawed bears some resemblance to the equally imperative rule that presidents demonstrate something we call “a sense of humor.” The historian Daniel Wickberg has written a brilliant study (The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America) showing how the very idea of a sense of humor is modern, and reflects a softening and socializing of the individualistic ideal. For politicians today, having a sense of humor clearly means demonstrating the willingness and ability to mock or make light of themselves and allow their spouses to complain in public about their foibles. It is a strange requirement. Why should we want to elect as president a man who wants to convince us that he does not take himself too seriously? That his self-abasement is almost certain to be, well, somewhat confected, indeed, entirely phony, seems not to matter. A sense of humor is taken seriously, and to lack it, as a “wooden” Al Gore Jr. was said to lack it in the 2000 election, can be fatal.</p>
<p>The democratic leader is supposed to be “the uncommon common man.” But to be anointed as such, one must first provide a believable demonstration of one’s all-too-commonness, of the common human need to be redeemed of&#160;something. The story is told that when Elliot Richardson, the quintessential Boston Brahmin and the man with the perfect resumé, perfect breeding, and perfect appearance, ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 1984, he was mocked by William “Billy” Bulger, then president of the Massachusetts State Senate and a quintessential Irish pol, who held up a fake newspaper with a headline reading “Vote Elliot, He’s Better Than You!” It was a brilliant stroke. Needless to say, Richardson lost. He didn’t even survive the Republican primary.</p>
<p>Some of this posturing is, of course, traceable to one of the fundamental requirements of democratic politics—the need to affirm equality in all ways at all times, and find ways to discreetly conceal the many and inevitable divergences from that ideal. Politicians are often accused of hypocrisy in such matters, but the charge is self-serving; the rest of us are guiltier than they are, precisely because we insist that they dissemble to us. On the face of the matter, would it not make sense to entrust the nuclear football to someone who is demonstrably better than oneself? Yes, but it would be a fatal mistake for that better someone to betray even a hint of awareness of his superiority. Much smarter to divert attention from himself by attacking the privileged status of an opponent, as Bulger did. One can at least hope that such cunning has its essential political uses, and that the most cunning politicians will be, if not the best, at least not the worst.</p>
<p>It would not be cynical to say that many Americans felt comfortable voting for Bill Clinton eight years after Richardson’s defeat precisely because they felt confident he was&#160;not&#160;better than them. But there was, and is, something more in play in Clinton’s case than the dynamics of democratic egalitarianism. Even after the disgraces of Monicagate and impeachment, and the pardons and disquieting scandals attending Clinton’s departure from the White House, and dozens of other embarrassments, his stock remains high. It is not only that he is a quintessential democratic figure. He also has a near-endless native capacity for evoking and receiving the public’s redemptive generosity. People tend to forgive him his faults, even if they smile and snicker as they do it.</p>
<p>Few others can get away with this on such a monumental scale, and sometimes a politician’s bid for redemption is a bit more than the market will bear. Consider the case of philandering former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who in 2009 was impeached, censured, and nearly removed from office in disgrace, who had a very public split from his wife, Jenny, and now, logically enough, is running for the U.S. House of Representatives. “I’m a sinner and I’m a flawed man but I think God can use flawed men or women, and I hope that the voters in this case will choose to use a flawed man,” he told ABC radio affiliate WTMA in an interview. It is patently a play for redemption. Sanford is refusing otherwise to talk about his personal life, and yet his flawedness seems to be his principal asset. This gambit makes the logic of redemption seem a bit too pat, as if it could be reduced to a calculated form of leading with one’s jaw; but there is no doubt that redemption-through-reelection is what is on Sanford’s mind. And who knows? He just might get it.</p>
<p>Similarly, redemption clearly has been on the mind of ex-president Jimmy Carter for the past 33 years. Carter has never gotten over the stern rebuke administered by voters in 1980, and the harsh judgment of many observers that his was a failed administration. In his case, a craving for redemption has animated an energetic, sometimes admirable, but often clumsy and self-seeking post-presidential career. In group photographs of president-elect Barack Obama and his four living predecessors at the White House, it was noticeable that Carter stood apart from the others, seemingly weighed down by a lingering sense of failure. One might think that his Christian beliefs would make him more at peace about how he is regarded in this world, given the priority his faith accords to the next one. But very few of us, and least of all the kind of man who wants to be president, can be genuinely indifferent to how we are regarded by others, and by history. And Carter is a proud man, in all the best and worst senses of that word. Redemption in the here and now, in the eyes of others, would be too sweet a vindication for him not to seek it; but it will likely elude him, because of the conspicuous pride that has motivated his quest for it. Who would be exalted must first be humbled.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>What would American political culture look like without its pervasive moral dramas of sin and redemption, sometimes expressed in forms lofty and noble, but at other times resembling nothing so much as the smarminess and vulgarity of soap opera? One thing can be said for certain: We are not only intensely fascinated by these episodes of political theater, but fully in the grip of them, as far more than mere onlookers. For an allegedly secular society, the United States seems to be curiously in thrall to ideas, gestures, emotional patterns, nervous tics, and deep premises that belong to the supposedly banished world of religion. These habits of heart and mind are evident everywhere we look, and they possess a compulsive and unquestioned power in contemporary American life. It is as if the disappearance of religion’s metaphysical dimension has occasioned a tightening hold of certain of its moral dimensions, particularly so far as these relate to guilt and absolution.</p>
<p>Consider the range of manifestations: The feeding frenzies over malfeasances by public officials, real or imagined, eventuating in obligatory rituals of public confession and abasement before the altar of Oprah Winfrey or some other secular priest or priestess invested with the power to give or withhold absolution. The obsession with our environmental sins, both as an overconsuming society and as individuals leaving carbon footprints, giving rise to such phenomena as “carbon offsets,” schemes that have been decried by skeptics as little more than “green indulgences,” transparent sops to voracious (and credulous) consciences. The almost bottomless reservoirs of racial guilt and recrimination, most recently illustrated by the embarrassingly abject apology proffered by James Wagner, the president of Emory University, for the sin of mentioning in an essay the formulation of the three-fifths rule in the U.S. Constitution as an example of political compromise, instead of condemning the rule with thundering, absolute, and final moral certainty, as so many on his faculty demanded he do, no doubt in the spirit of academic freedom. The similar and related tendency to shout down all unwelcome speech as being a form of bigotry and therefore morally unacceptable: anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, un-American, and so on. On many college campuses, the inhibiting fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way to the wrong person has all but rendered vigorous debate impossible. Whatever else one might say of these manifestations, they do not reflect a culture in which easygoing relativism, tolerance, skepticism, and laissez-faire permissiveness reign. It is instead a culture clenched taut with every imaginable form of moral anxiety, seemingly convinced despite its own secular professions that we inhabit a universe that has an inherent and unforgiving moral structure.</p>
<p>Hence, the yearning for redemption is not likely to go away, since the need for a certification of one’s blamelessness is so strong. And it must be said that, despite all the pathologies I have named, there are many reasons why we should not want it to go away, even if we could somehow miraculously banish it. For we all have serious faults, often grievous ones, and the yearning for redemption is the rightful call of our consciences and the proper object of our hopes, the very thing for which hope is forever hoping, especially in dark or troubled times. Howells’s conjecture that Americans want “a tragedy with a happy ending” is another way of saying not only that we want things to turn out happily, but that we want them to turn out in a way that redeems all our suffering in the end—we want our world to prove to be purposeful and orderly, the kind of world in which nothing is wasted and the animating virtue of hope is not futile. The pathologies stem, in part, from the fact that we want redemption more than ever, applied to a wider range of things.</p>
<p>Howells’s dictum echoes the core Christian meaning of redemption as Saint Paul understood it, that there is a way of taking what was bad, even what was meant for bad, and turning it for good. (The classic exposition can be found in chapter 8 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.) It was not for nothing that the New England Puritans spoke of their “plantation” as a New Zion, a utopian restoration of a godly commonwealth, whose ultimate aim was to provide an example for the redemption of the world.</p>
<p>But redemption is not merely a restoration of a&#160;status quo ante. More fundamentally, it is a form of alchemy, a making of something fine and noble and new out of what once was ordinary, commonplace, even debased, and severely confined by its limitations. Such transformative alchemy has long been at work in the American experience, and is indeed at the very heart of it. After all, America, and more specifically the United States, began life thinking of itself as a kind of second chance or new beginning for the world. Americans still retain much of this belief, and their feelings of guilt over American failures and malfeasances are the flip side of that continuing belief in America’s redemptive responsibility to the rest of the world. It’s a more ambitious guilt, actually, one that reflects expectations that are less and less susceptible of being easily met.</p>
<p>Such guilty feelings are often sources of social and political division. But Americans remain as one in ardently resisting the idea that the conditions of our birth should place automatic limits on who we are, or what we can become. Our natal identity itself, while always viewed as something to be affirmed, is not to be regarded as final, but instead as something to be redeemed and transformed. That is why Americans have always valued education as a ladder of personal and social mobility. And it is also why America has always been such a magnet for immigrants—men and women who were, and are, eager to cast aside the heavy lumber of their Old World in order to have the opportunity to make a new beginning for themselves.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>So the myth of redemption—myth not in the sense of a falsehood, but in the sense of an overarching story about the larger meanings of our lives that we cannot otherwise know—is as powerful as ever as an organizing and regulative force in American culture. It surely played a role in the 2008 election of Barack Obama. He made “hope” and “change” the mantras of his campaign because he grasped some deep need in the American people to which no other political figure on the scene had spoken. It was a need for&#160;their&#160;redemption.</p>
<p>In 2008, rather than the&#160;subject&#160;in need of redemption, Obama promised to be the&#160;agent&#160;of national redemption, a restorer of national innocence in matters of race, foreign relations, and environmental policy, among other areas. In a June 2008 speech celebrating the Minnesota primary victory that guaranteed him the Democratic nomination, a speech given in, yes, the city of Saint Paul, he referred to his nomination as a “defining moment for our nation,” declaring that he was “absolutely certain that generations from now . . . we will be able to look back and tell our children” that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” the moment when we “restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.” With such grandly redemptive rhetoric in play, small wonder that the 2008 campaign sometimes took on the atmosphere of a national psychodrama.</p>
<p>Small wonder, too, that the result would soon be disappointment. There was never the slightest possibility that Obama, or any other mortal politician, could deliver the things his more impassioned voters sought from him. However the second-term Obama evolves, things will never again be as they were in 2008. Democratic regulars will support him, Republicans will oppose him, but the redemptive myth has gone into hibernation, and the true believers have nearly all gone home.</p>
<p>One should not draw the wrong lesson from this. The desire for redemption, even if it sleeps from time to time, is real, powerful, and insistent. It will not sleep forever, just as it is unlikely to be satisfied by any conceivable political expedient or program or person. One could be forgiven for thinking that it should therefore be ignored, even disdained, as the kind of irrational human weakness to which practical people should give no quarter. Yet the politician who ignores it, who thinks that politics in America can ever be strictly a matter of sinks and sewers, of calm and passionless administration (or self-interested distribution of party booty), of calculated instrumental reasoning about the management of practical objectives either by accredited experts or cunning pols, is going to lose eventually.</p>
<p>Even if he is better than we are.</p>
<p>Wilfred M. McClay is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | Still the Redeemer Nation | false | https://eppc.org/publications/still-the-redeemer-nation/ | 1right-center
| 3,062 | This past February as the mammoth snowstorm dubbed 8220Winter Storm Nemo8221 bore down on the northeastern United States all eyes turned to the elected officials in the region Many of them had done a poor job of handling the effects of such storms in the past with unhappy political consequences and even after the expensive and highly publicized relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 many New York and New Jersey households remained in severe distress New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was laboring under an especially large cloud of distrust thanks to his fumbling performance during the blizzard of December 2010 when snow removal was ineffective ambulances and fire trucks got stuck in the uncleared streets and there was a backlog of 1400 emergency calls So a lot was at stake this time As Nemo approached the local CBS affiliate proclaimed 8220For Bloomberg Getting Response to This Storm Right Would Be Redemption8221 Ah yesamp160redemption Meaning deliverance from sin atonement expiation absolution regeneration the debt forgiven release from stigmatization the ransom paid the captive set free8212a new beginning a fresh start a transformation a liberation from guilt a new lease on life even if not an entirely clean slate It may take more than a snowstorm to penetrate the awareness of the famously selfrighteous Bloomberg the scourge of smokers and soda drinkers and trans fat consumers and other enemies of humanity It might not yet have occurred to him that he too stood in need of redemption But most of us understand the need for it both for ourselves and others Politicians as cynosures of the national psyche may need it rather more than most or at least the convincing appearance of it particularly when it is dispensed by the likes of CBS News Figures as different as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton two men who rode the roller coaster of fallandredemption all their careers could attest to its value and each was in his own way a master of its giddy heights and harrowing depths Indeed their tarrings and their laurels are impossible to separate But the phenomenon seems to go beyond particular personalities and touches upon one of the deepest moral and emotional foundations of American life In his classic 1968 bookamp160Redeemer Nation the Berkeley scholar Ernest Tuveson identified one of the most enduring strains in American life as a belief in the nation8217s divinely ordained redemptive role in the world a belief for which he found seeds in America8217s origins and which flowered in the 19th and 20th centuries particularly with regard to the nation8217s external relations and foreign policy Yet Tuveson8217s insights can surely be turned inward as well since the externally aimed logic of redemption is just as applicable if not more so to individuals as well as nations In fact as the external has become less plausible the internal has taken on greater and greater importance The algebra of fallandredemption always a part of American culture seems to have become an ever more integral part of the psychological drama of American politics Leaders are more likely to be embraced fully and heartily when they have first been shown to stumble badly to be flawed and human and vulnerable and then allowed to rise again scarred to be sure but also contrite and humbled and seasoned William Dean Howells famously observed that 8220what the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending8221 the same is true in the theater of public life amp160 The requirement that politicians be flawed bears some resemblance to the equally imperative rule that presidents demonstrate something we call 8220a sense of humor8221 The historian Daniel Wickberg has written a brilliant study The Senses of Humor Self and Laughter in Modern America showing how the very idea of a sense of humor is modern and reflects a softening and socializing of the individualistic ideal For politicians today having a sense of humor clearly means demonstrating the willingness and ability to mock or make light of themselves and allow their spouses to complain in public about their foibles It is a strange requirement Why should we want to elect as president a man who wants to convince us that he does not take himself too seriously That his selfabasement is almost certain to be well somewhat confected indeed entirely phony seems not to matter A sense of humor is taken seriously and to lack it as a 8220wooden8221 Al Gore Jr was said to lack it in the 2000 election can be fatal The democratic leader is supposed to be 8220the uncommon common man8221 But to be anointed as such one must first provide a believable demonstration of one8217s alltoocommonness of the common human need to be redeemed ofamp160something The story is told that when Elliot Richardson the quintessential Boston Brahmin and the man with the perfect resum233 perfect breeding and perfect appearance ran for the US Senate in Massachusetts in 1984 he was mocked by William 8220Billy8221 Bulger then president of the Massachusetts State Senate and a quintessential Irish pol who held up a fake newspaper with a headline reading 8220Vote Elliot He8217s Better Than You8221 It was a brilliant stroke Needless to say Richardson lost He didn8217t even survive the Republican primary Some of this posturing is of course traceable to one of the fundamental requirements of democratic politics8212the need to affirm equality in all ways at all times and find ways to discreetly conceal the many and inevitable divergences from that ideal Politicians are often accused of hypocrisy in such matters but the charge is selfserving the rest of us are guiltier than they are precisely because we insist that they dissemble to us On the face of the matter would it not make sense to entrust the nuclear football to someone who is demonstrably better than oneself Yes but it would be a fatal mistake for that better someone to betray even a hint of awareness of his superiority Much smarter to divert attention from himself by attacking the privileged status of an opponent as Bulger did One can at least hope that such cunning has its essential political uses and that the most cunning politicians will be if not the best at least not the worst It would not be cynical to say that many Americans felt comfortable voting for Bill Clinton eight years after Richardson8217s defeat precisely because they felt confident he wasamp160notamp160better than them But there was and is something more in play in Clinton8217s case than the dynamics of democratic egalitarianism Even after the disgraces of Monicagate and impeachment and the pardons and disquieting scandals attending Clinton8217s departure from the White House and dozens of other embarrassments his stock remains high It is not only that he is a quintessential democratic figure He also has a nearendless native capacity for evoking and receiving the public8217s redemptive generosity People tend to forgive him his faults even if they smile and snicker as they do it Few others can get away with this on such a monumental scale and sometimes a politician8217s bid for redemption is a bit more than the market will bear Consider the case of philandering former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who in 2009 was impeached censured and nearly removed from office in disgrace who had a very public split from his wife Jenny and now logically enough is running for the US House of Representatives 8220I8217m a sinner and I8217m a flawed man but I think God can use flawed men or women and I hope that the voters in this case will choose to use a flawed man8221 he told ABC radio affiliate WTMA in an interview It is patently a play for redemption Sanford is refusing otherwise to talk about his personal life and yet his flawedness seems to be his principal asset This gambit makes the logic of redemption seem a bit too pat as if it could be reduced to a calculated form of leading with one8217s jaw but there is no doubt that redemptionthroughreelection is what is on Sanford8217s mind And who knows He just might get it Similarly redemption clearly has been on the mind of expresident Jimmy Carter for the past 33 years Carter has never gotten over the stern rebuke administered by voters in 1980 and the harsh judgment of many observers that his was a failed administration In his case a craving for redemption has animated an energetic sometimes admirable but often clumsy and selfseeking postpresidential career In group photographs of presidentelect Barack Obama and his four living predecessors at the White House it was noticeable that Carter stood apart from the others seemingly weighed down by a lingering sense of failure One might think that his Christian beliefs would make him more at peace about how he is regarded in this world given the priority his faith accords to the next one But very few of us and least of all the kind of man who wants to be president can be genuinely indifferent to how we are regarded by others and by history And Carter is a proud man in all the best and worst senses of that word Redemption in the here and now in the eyes of others would be too sweet a vindication for him not to seek it but it will likely elude him because of the conspicuous pride that has motivated his quest for it Who would be exalted must first be humbled amp160 What would American political culture look like without its pervasive moral dramas of sin and redemption sometimes expressed in forms lofty and noble but at other times resembling nothing so much as the smarminess and vulgarity of soap opera One thing can be said for certain We are not only intensely fascinated by these episodes of political theater but fully in the grip of them as far more than mere onlookers For an allegedly secular society the United States seems to be curiously in thrall to ideas gestures emotional patterns nervous tics and deep premises that belong to the supposedly banished world of religion These habits of heart and mind are evident everywhere we look and they possess a compulsive and unquestioned power in contemporary American life It is as if the disappearance of religion8217s metaphysical dimension has occasioned a tightening hold of certain of its moral dimensions particularly so far as these relate to guilt and absolution Consider the range of manifestations The feeding frenzies over malfeasances by public officials real or imagined eventuating in obligatory rituals of public confession and abasement before the altar of Oprah Winfrey or some other secular priest or priestess invested with the power to give or withhold absolution The obsession with our environmental sins both as an overconsuming society and as individuals leaving carbon footprints giving rise to such phenomena as 8220carbon offsets8221 schemes that have been decried by skeptics as little more than 8220green indulgences8221 transparent sops to voracious and credulous consciences The almost bottomless reservoirs of racial guilt and recrimination most recently illustrated by the embarrassingly abject apology proffered by James Wagner the president of Emory University for the sin of mentioning in an essay the formulation of the threefifths rule in the US Constitution as an example of political compromise instead of condemning the rule with thundering absolute and final moral certainty as so many on his faculty demanded he do no doubt in the spirit of academic freedom The similar and related tendency to shout down all unwelcome speech as being a form of bigotry and therefore morally unacceptable antiSemitic racist sexist homophobic unAmerican and so on On many college campuses the inhibiting fear of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way to the wrong person has all but rendered vigorous debate impossible Whatever else one might say of these manifestations they do not reflect a culture in which easygoing relativism tolerance skepticism and laissezfaire permissiveness reign It is instead a culture clenched taut with every imaginable form of moral anxiety seemingly convinced despite its own secular professions that we inhabit a universe that has an inherent and unforgiving moral structure Hence the yearning for redemption is not likely to go away since the need for a certification of one8217s blamelessness is so strong And it must be said that despite all the pathologies I have named there are many reasons why we should not want it to go away even if we could somehow miraculously banish it For we all have serious faults often grievous ones and the yearning for redemption is the rightful call of our consciences and the proper object of our hopes the very thing for which hope is forever hoping especially in dark or troubled times Howells8217s conjecture that Americans want 8220a tragedy with a happy ending8221 is another way of saying not only that we want things to turn out happily but that we want them to turn out in a way that redeems all our suffering in the end8212we want our world to prove to be purposeful and orderly the kind of world in which nothing is wasted and the animating virtue of hope is not futile The pathologies stem in part from the fact that we want redemption more than ever applied to a wider range of things Howells8217s dictum echoes the core Christian meaning of redemption as Saint Paul understood it that there is a way of taking what was bad even what was meant for bad and turning it for good The classic exposition can be found in chapter 8 of Paul8217s Epistle to the Romans It was not for nothing that the New England Puritans spoke of their 8220plantation8221 as a New Zion a utopian restoration of a godly commonwealth whose ultimate aim was to provide an example for the redemption of the world But redemption is not merely a restoration of aamp160status quo ante More fundamentally it is a form of alchemy a making of something fine and noble and new out of what once was ordinary commonplace even debased and severely confined by its limitations Such transformative alchemy has long been at work in the American experience and is indeed at the very heart of it After all America and more specifically the United States began life thinking of itself as a kind of second chance or new beginning for the world Americans still retain much of this belief and their feelings of guilt over American failures and malfeasances are the flip side of that continuing belief in America8217s redemptive responsibility to the rest of the world It8217s a more ambitious guilt actually one that reflects expectations that are less and less susceptible of being easily met Such guilty feelings are often sources of social and political division But Americans remain as one in ardently resisting the idea that the conditions of our birth should place automatic limits on who we are or what we can become Our natal identity itself while always viewed as something to be affirmed is not to be regarded as final but instead as something to be redeemed and transformed That is why Americans have always valued education as a ladder of personal and social mobility And it is also why America has always been such a magnet for immigrants8212men and women who were and are eager to cast aside the heavy lumber of their Old World in order to have the opportunity to make a new beginning for themselves amp160 So the myth of redemption8212myth not in the sense of a falsehood but in the sense of an overarching story about the larger meanings of our lives that we cannot otherwise know8212is as powerful as ever as an organizing and regulative force in American culture It surely played a role in the 2008 election of Barack Obama He made 8220hope8221 and 8220change8221 the mantras of his campaign because he grasped some deep need in the American people to which no other political figure on the scene had spoken It was a need foramp160theiramp160redemption In 2008 rather than theamp160subjectamp160in need of redemption Obama promised to be theamp160agentamp160of national redemption a restorer of national innocence in matters of race foreign relations and environmental policy among other areas In a June 2008 speech celebrating the Minnesota primary victory that guaranteed him the Democratic nomination a speech given in yes the city of Saint Paul he referred to his nomination as a 8220defining moment for our nation8221 declaring that he was 8220absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children8221 that 8220this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal8221 the moment when we 8220restored our image as the last best hope on Earth8221 With such grandly redemptive rhetoric in play small wonder that the 2008 campaign sometimes took on the atmosphere of a national psychodrama Small wonder too that the result would soon be disappointment There was never the slightest possibility that Obama or any other mortal politician could deliver the things his more impassioned voters sought from him However the secondterm Obama evolves things will never again be as they were in 2008 Democratic regulars will support him Republicans will oppose him but the redemptive myth has gone into hibernation and the true believers have nearly all gone home One should not draw the wrong lesson from this The desire for redemption even if it sleeps from time to time is real powerful and insistent It will not sleep forever just as it is unlikely to be satisfied by any conceivable political expedient or program or person One could be forgiven for thinking that it should therefore be ignored even disdained as the kind of irrational human weakness to which practical people should give no quarter Yet the politician who ignores it who thinks that politics in America can ever be strictly a matter of sinks and sewers of calm and passionless administration or selfinterested distribution of party booty of calculated instrumental reasoning about the management of practical objectives either by accredited experts or cunning pols is going to lose eventually Even if he is better than we are Wilfred M McClay is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center | This/DET past/ADJ February/PROPN as/SCONJ the/DET mammoth/ADJ snowstorm/NOUN dubbed/VERB 8220Winter/NUM Storm/PROPN Nemo8221/PROPN bore/VERB down/ADP on/ADP the/DET northeastern/ADJ United/PROPN States/PROPN all/DET eyes/NOUN turned/VERB to/ADP the/DET elected/VERB officials/NOUN in/ADP the/DET region/NOUN Many/ADJ of/ADP them/PRON had/AUX done/VERB a/DET poor/ADJ job/NOUN of/ADP handling/VERB the/DET effects/NOUN of/ADP such/ADJ storms/NOUN in/ADP the/DET past/NOUN with/ADP unhappy/ADJ political/ADJ consequences/NOUN and/CCONJ even/ADV after/ADP the/DET expensive/ADJ and/CCONJ highly/ADV publicized/VERB relief/NOUN efforts/NOUN in/ADP the/DET wake/NOUN of/ADP Hurricane/PROPN Sandy/PROPN in/ADP October/PROPN 2012/NUM many/ADJ New/PROPN 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deliverance/NOUN from/ADP sin/NOUN atonement/PROPN expiation/NOUN absolution/NOUN regeneration/NOUN the/DET debt/NOUN forgiven/VERB release/NOUN from/ADP stigmatization/NOUN the/DET ransom/NOUN paid/VERB the/DET captive/ADJ set/NOUN free8212a/PROPN new/ADJ beginning/VERB a/DET fresh/ADJ start/NOUN a/DET transformation/NOUN a/DET liberation/NOUN from/ADP guilt/NOUN a/DET new/ADJ lease/NOUN on/ADP life/NOUN even/ADV if/SCONJ not/PART an/DET entirely/ADV clean/ADJ slate/NOUN It/PRON may/AUX take/VERB more/ADJ than/ADP a/DET snowstorm/NOUN to/PART penetrate/VERB the/DET awareness/NOUN of/ADP the/DET famously/ADV selfrighteous/ADJ Bloomberg/PROPN the/DET scourge/NOUN of/ADP smokers/NOUN and/CCONJ soda/NOUN drinkers/NOUN and/CCONJ trans/NOUN fat/ADJ consumers/NOUN and/CCONJ other/ADJ enemies/NOUN of/ADP humanity/NOUN It/PRON might/AUX not/PART yet/ADV have/AUX occurred/VERB to/ADP him/PRON that/SCONJ he/PRON too/ADV stood/VERB in/ADP need/NOUN of/ADP redemption/NOUN But/CCONJ most/ADJ of/ADP 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<p>I live a few blocks from the World Trade Center. In New York, we are still mourning the loss of so many after the attacks on our city. We want to arrest and punish the terrorists, eliminate the terrorist network and prevent future attacks. But the government’s declared war on terrorism, and many of the anti-terrorism measures, include a curtailment of freedom and constitutional rights that have many of us very worried.</p>
<p>I wrote the above paragraph and much of the article that follows toward the end of October. At that time, the repressive machinery then being put into effect was already terrifying. Since that time the situation has gotten unimaginably worse; rights that we thought embedded in the constitution and protected by international law are in serious jeopardy or have already been eliminated. It is no exaggeration to say we are Moving Toward a Police State. In this atmosphere, we should take nothing for granted. We will not be protected, nor will the courts, the congress, or the many liberals who are gleefully jumping on the bandwagon of repression guarantee our rights. We have no choice but too make our voices be heard; it is time to stand and be counted on the side of justice and against the antediluvian forces that have much of our country in a stranglehold.</p>
<p>The domestic consequences of the war on terrorism include massive arrests and interrogation of immigrants, the possible use of torture to obtain information, the creation of a special new cabinet office of Homeland Security and the passage of legislation granting intelligence and law enforcement agencies much broader powers to intrude into the private lives of Americans. Recent new initiatives — the wiretapping of attorney-client conversations and military commissions to try suspected terrorists — undermine core constitutional protections and are reminiscent of inquisitorial practices.</p>
<p>Although it is not discussed in this article, the war on terrorism also means pervasive government and media censorship of information, the silencing of dissent, and widespread ethnic and religious profiling of Muslims, Arabs and Asian people. It means creating a climate of fear where one suspects one’s neighbors and people are afraid to speak out.</p>
<p>The claimed necessity for this war at home is problematic. The legislation and other governmental actions are premised on the belief that the intelligence agencies failed to stop the September 11th attack because they lacked the spying capability to find and arrest the conspirators. Yet, neither the government nor the agencies have demonstrated that this is the reason.</p>
<p>This war at home gives Americans a false sense of security, allowing us to believe that tighter borders, vastly empowered intelligence agencies, and increased surveillance will stop terrorism. The United States is not yet a police state. However, even a police state could not stop terrorists intent on doing us harm. In addition, the fantasy of Fortress America keeps us from examining the root causes of terrorism, and the consequences of decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Unless some of the grievances against the United States are studied and addressed, terrorism will continue.</p>
<p>MILITARY COMMISSIONS: THE PERUVIAN OPTION</p>
<p>On November 13, President Bush signed an executive order establishing military commissions or tribunals to try suspected terrorists. Under this order non-citizens, whether from the United States or elsewhere, accused of aiding international terrorism, at the discretion of the President, can be tried before one of these commissions. These are not court-martials, which provide far more protections. The divergence from constitutional protections the executive order allows are breathtaking. Attorney General Ashcroft has explicitly stated that terrorists do not deserve constitutional protections. These are “courts” of conviction and not of justice.</p>
<p>The Secretary of Defense will appoint the judges, most likely military officers, who will decide both questions of law and fact. Unlike federal judges who are appointed for life, these officers will have little independence and every reason to decide in favor of the prosecution. Normal rules of evidence, which provide some assurance of reliability, will not apply. Hearsay and even evidence obtained from torture will apparently be admissible. This is particularly frightening in light of the intimations from U.S. officials that torture of suspects may be an option. Rules of evidence help insure the innocent are spared, but also that law enforcement authorities adhere to what we thought were evolving standards of a civilized society.</p>
<p>Unanimity among the judges is not required even to impose the death penalty. Suspects will not have free choice of attorneys. The only appeal from a conviction will be to the President or the Secretary of Defense. Incredibly, the entire process, including execution, can be conducted in secret and the trials can be held anywhere the Secretary of Defense decides. A trial might occur on an aircraft carrier and the body of the executed “buried” at sea. The President is literally getting away with murder.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, a number of prestigious law professors (e.g. Lawrence Tribe and Ruth Wedgwood) have accepted and even argued in favor of these tribunals. The primary claim is that it might be necessary to disclose classified information in order to obtain convictions. This is a pretext. There are procedures for handling classified information in federal courts as was done in the trial of those convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It certainly does not provide a reason for sending suspects into a “justice” system akin to that which the US condemned in Peru. The 1993 trials also demonstrate that these trials can be held in federal courts.</p>
<p>Trials before military commissions will not be trusted in either the Muslim world or elsewhere. Nor should they. They will be viewed as what they are — “kangaroo courts.” How much better to demonstrate to the world that the guilty have been apprehended and fairly convicted. A better solution would be for the US to go to the U.N. and have the UN establish a special court for the trials. Judges from different legal systems including that of the US, Muslim and civil law countries could constitute such a court.</p>
<p>WIRETAPPING ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATIONS</p>
<p>At the heart of the effective assistance of counsel is the right of a criminal defendant to a lawyer with whom he or she can communicate candidly and freely without fear that the government is overhearing confidential communications. This right is fundamental to the adversary system of justice in the Untied States. When the government overhears these conversations, a defendant’s right to a defense is compromised.</p>
<p>Now, with the stroke of pen, Attorney General Ashcroft, has eliminated the attorney-client privilege and will wiretap privileged communications when he thinks there is “reasonable suspicion to believe” that an “inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further facilitate act of violence or terrorism.” He says that approximately one hundred such suspects and their attorneys may be subject to the order. He claims the legal authority to do so without court order; in other words without the approval and finding by a neutral magistrate that attorney-client communications are facilitating criminal conduct. This is utter lawlessness by our country’s top law enforcement officer and is flatly unconstitutional. This wiretapping of attorney-client communications has already begun.</p>
<p>THE NEW LEGAL REGIME</p>
<p>The government has established a tripartite plan in its efforts to eradicate terrorism in the United States. President Bush has created a new cabinet-level Homeland Security Office; the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating thousands of individuals and groups and making hundreds of arrests; and Congress is enacting new laws that will grant the FBI and other intelligence agencies vast new powers to wiretap and spy on people in the United States.</p>
<p>THE OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY</p>
<p>On September 20th President Bush announced the creation of the Homeland Security Office, charged with gathering intelligence, coordinating anti-terrorism efforts and taking precautions to prevent and respond to terrorism. It is not yet known how this office will function, but it will most likely try to centralize the powers of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies — a difficult, if not impossible, job — among some 40 bickering agencies. Those concerned with its establishment are worried that it will become a super spy agency and, as its very name implies, that the military will play a role in domestic law enforcement.</p>
<p>FBI INVESTIGATIONS AND ARRESTS</p>
<p>The FBI has always done more than chase criminals; like the Central Intelligence Agency it has long considered itself the protector of US ideology. Those who have opposed government policies — whether civil rights workers, anti-Vietnam war protesters, opponents of the covert Reagan-era wars or cultural dissidents — have repeatedly been surveyed and had their activities disrupted by the FBI.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack, Attorney General John Ashcroft focused on non-citizens, whether permanent residents, students, temporary workers or tourists. Normally, an alien can only be held for 48 hours prior to the filing of charges. Ashcroft’s new regulation allowed arrested aliens to be held without any charges for a “reasonable time,” presumably months or longer. (See below for new legislation regarding detention of immigrants.)</p>
<p>The FBI began massive detentions and investigations of individuals suspected of terrorist connections, almost all of them non-citizens of Middle Eastern descent; over 1,100 have been arrested. Many were held for days without access to lawyers or knowledge of the charges against them; many are still in detention. Few, if any, have been proven to have a connection with the September 11 attacks and remain in jail despite having been cleared. In some cases, people were arrested merely for being from a country like Pakistan and having expired student visas. Stories of mistreatment of such detainees are not uncommon.</p>
<p>Apparently, some of those arrested are not willing to talk to the FBI, although they have been offered shorter jail sentences, jobs, money and new identities. Astonishingly, the FBI and the Department of Justice are discussing methods to force them to talk, which include “using drugs or pressure tactics such as those employed by the Israeli interrogators.” The accurate term to describe these tactics is torture. Our government wants to torture people to make them talk. There is resistance to this even from law enforcement officials. One former FBI Chief of Counter-Terrorism, said in an October New York Newsday article, “Torture goes against every grain in my body. Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them.”</p>
<p>As torture is illegal in the United States and under international law, US officials risk lawsuits by such practices. For this reason, they have suggested having another country do their dirty work; they want to extradite the suspects to allied countries where security services threaten family members and use torture. It would be difficult to imagine a more ominous signal of the repressive period we are facing. The FBI is also currently investigating groups it claims are linked to terrorism — among them pacifist groups such as the US chapter of Women in Black, which holds vigils to protest violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The FBI has threatened to force members of Women in Black to either talk about their group or go to jail. As one of the group’s members said, “If the FBI cannot or will not distinguish between groups who collude in hatred and terrorism, and peace activists who struggle in the full light of day against all forms of terrorism we are in serious trouble.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the FBI does not make that distinction. We are facing not only the roundup of thousands on flimsy suspicions, but also an all-out investigation of dissent in the United States.</p>
<p>THE NEW ANTI-TERRORIST LEGISLATION</p>
<p>Congress has passed and President Bush has signed sweeping new anti-terrorist legislation, the USA Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), aimed at both aliens and citizens. The legislation met more opposition than one might expect in these difficult times. A National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom of over 120 groups ranging from the right to the left opposed the worst aspects of the proposed new law. They succeeded in making minor modifications, but the most troubling provisions remain, and are described below:</p>
<p>Rights of Aliens</p>
<p>Prior to the legislation, anti-terrorist laws passed in the wake of the 1996 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma had already given the government wide powers to arrest, detain and deport aliens based upon secret evidence — evidence that neither the alien nor his attorney could view or refute. The current proposed legislation makes it even worse for aliens.</p>
<p>First, the law would permit “mandatory detention” of aliens certified by the attorney general as “suspected terrorists.” These could include aliens involved in barroom brawls or those who have provided only humanitarian assistance to organizations disfavored by the United States. Once certified in this way, an alien could be imprisoned indefinitely with no real opportunity for court challenge. Until now, such “preventive detention” was believed to be flatly unconstitutional.</p>
<p>Second, current law permits deportation of aliens who support terrorist activity; the proposed law would make aliens deportable for almost any association with a “terrorist organization.” Although this change seems to have a certain surface plausibility, it represents a dangerous erosion of Americans’ constitutionally protected rights of association. “Terrorist organization” is a broad and open-ended term that could include liberation groups such as the Irish Republican Army, the African National Congress, or civic groups that have ever engaged in any violent activity, such as Greenpeace. An alien who gives only medical or humanitarian aid to similar groups, or simply supports their political message in a material way could be jailed indefinitely.</p>
<p>More Powers to the FBI and CIA</p>
<p>A key element in the new law is the wide expansion of wiretapping. In the United States wiretapping is permitted, but generally only when there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and a judge signs a special wiretapping order that contains limited time periods, the numbers of the telephones wiretapped and the type of conversations that can be overheard.</p>
<p>In 1978, an exception was made to these strict requirements, permitting wiretapping to be carried out to gather intelligence information about foreign governments and foreign terrorist organizations. A secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was established that could approve such wiretaps without requiring the government to show evidence of criminal conduct. In doing so the constitutional protections necessary when investigating crimes could be bypassed. The secret court is little more than a rubber stamp for wiretapping requests by the spy agencies. It has authorized over 13,000 wiretaps in its 22-year existence, approximately a thousand last year, and has apparently never denied a request.</p>
<p>Under the new law, the same secret court will have the power to authorize wiretaps and secret searches of homes in criminal cases — not just to gather foreign intelligence. The FBI will be able to wiretap individuals and organizations without meeting the stringent requirements of the Constitution. The law will authorize the secret court to permit roving wiretaps of any phones, computers or cell phones that might possibly be used by a suspect. Widespread reading of e-mail will be allowed, even before the recipient opens it. Thousands of conversations will be listened to or read that have nothing to do with the suspect or any crime.</p>
<p>The new legislation is filled with many other expansions of investigative and prosecutorial power, including wider use of undercover agents to infiltrate organizations, longer jail sentences and lifetime supervision for some who have served their sentences, more crimes that can receive the death penalty and longer statutes of limitations for prosecuting crimes. Another provision of the new bill makes it a crime for a person to fail to notify the FBI if he or she has “reasonable grounds to believe” that someone is about to commit a terrorist offense. The language of this provision is so vague that anyone, however innocent, with any connection to anyone suspected of being a terrorist can be prosecuted. We will all need to become spies to protect ourselves and the subjects of our spying, at least for now, will be those from the Mid East.</p>
<p>The New Crime of Domestic Terrorism</p>
<p>The act creates a number of new crimes. One of the most threatening to dissent and those who oppose government policies is the crime of “domestic terrorism.” It is loosely defined as acts that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law and “appear to be intended” to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “influence the policy of a government by intimidation of coercion.” Under this definition, a protest demonstration that blocked a street and prevented an ambulance from getting by could be deemed domestic terrorism. Likewise, the demonstrations in Seattle against the WTO could fit within the definition. This was an unnecessary addition to the criminal code; there are already plenty of laws making such civil disobedience criminal without labeling such time honored protest as terrorist and imposing severe prison sentences.</p>
<p>Overall, the new legislation represents one of the most sweeping assaults on liberties in the last 50 years. It is unlikely to make us more secure; it is certain to make us less free.</p>
<p>It is common for governments to reach for draconian law enforcement solutions in times of war or national crisis. It has happened often in the United States and elsewhere. We should learn from historical example: times of hysteria, of war, and of instability are not the times to rush to enact new laws that curtail our freedoms and grant more authority to the government and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies.</p>
<p>The US government has conceptualized the war against terrorism as a permanent war, a war without boundaries. Terrorism is frightening to all of us, but it’s equally chilling to think that in the name of antiterrorism our government is willing to suspend constitutional freedoms permanently as well.</p>
<p>Michael Ratner is an international human rights lawyer and vice-president of the <a href="http://www.humanrightsnow.org/main4.htm" type="external">Center for Constitutional Rights</a>. He has brought numerous suits against the illegal use of military force by the United States Government and specializes in opposing government spying. Mr. Ratner teaches International Human Rights Litigation at Columbia Law School, and is the author of <a href="" type="internal">The Pinochet Papers</a>, <a href="" type="internal">International Human Rights Litigation in US Courts</a>, and <a href="" type="internal">Che Guevara and the FBI</a>.</p> | Moving Toward a Police State | true | https://counterpunch.org/2001/11/20/moving-toward-a-police-state/ | 2001-11-20 | 4left
| 3,062 | I live a few blocks from the World Trade Center In New York we are still mourning the loss of so many after the attacks on our city We want to arrest and punish the terrorists eliminate the terrorist network and prevent future attacks But the government8217s declared war on terrorism and many of the antiterrorism measures include a curtailment of freedom and constitutional rights that have many of us very worried I wrote the above paragraph and much of the article that follows toward the end of October At that time the repressive machinery then being put into effect was already terrifying Since that time the situation has gotten unimaginably worse rights that we thought embedded in the constitution and protected by international law are in serious jeopardy or have already been eliminated It is no exaggeration to say we are Moving Toward a Police State In this atmosphere we should take nothing for granted We will not be protected nor will the courts the congress or the many liberals who are gleefully jumping on the bandwagon of repression guarantee our rights We have no choice but too make our voices be heard it is time to stand and be counted on the side of justice and against the antediluvian forces that have much of our country in a stranglehold The domestic consequences of the war on terrorism include massive arrests and interrogation of immigrants the possible use of torture to obtain information the creation of a special new cabinet office of Homeland Security and the passage of legislation granting intelligence and law enforcement agencies much broader powers to intrude into the private lives of Americans Recent new initiatives 8212 the wiretapping of attorneyclient conversations and military commissions to try suspected terrorists 8212 undermine core constitutional protections and are reminiscent of inquisitorial practices Although it is not discussed in this article the war on terrorism also means pervasive government and media censorship of information the silencing of dissent and widespread ethnic and religious profiling of Muslims Arabs and Asian people It means creating a climate of fear where one suspects one8217s neighbors and people are afraid to speak out The claimed necessity for this war at home is problematic The legislation and other governmental actions are premised on the belief that the intelligence agencies failed to stop the September 11th attack because they lacked the spying capability to find and arrest the conspirators Yet neither the government nor the agencies have demonstrated that this is the reason This war at home gives Americans a false sense of security allowing us to believe that tighter borders vastly empowered intelligence agencies and increased surveillance will stop terrorism The United States is not yet a police state However even a police state could not stop terrorists intent on doing us harm In addition the fantasy of Fortress America keeps us from examining the root causes of terrorism and the consequences of decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East Afghanistan and elsewhere Unless some of the grievances against the United States are studied and addressed terrorism will continue MILITARY COMMISSIONS THE PERUVIAN OPTION On November 13 President Bush signed an executive order establishing military commissions or tribunals to try suspected terrorists Under this order noncitizens whether from the United States or elsewhere accused of aiding international terrorism at the discretion of the President can be tried before one of these commissions These are not courtmartials which provide far more protections The divergence from constitutional protections the executive order allows are breathtaking Attorney General Ashcroft has explicitly stated that terrorists do not deserve constitutional protections These are 8220courts8221 of conviction and not of justice The Secretary of Defense will appoint the judges most likely military officers who will decide both questions of law and fact Unlike federal judges who are appointed for life these officers will have little independence and every reason to decide in favor of the prosecution Normal rules of evidence which provide some assurance of reliability will not apply Hearsay and even evidence obtained from torture will apparently be admissible This is particularly frightening in light of the intimations from US officials that torture of suspects may be an option Rules of evidence help insure the innocent are spared but also that law enforcement authorities adhere to what we thought were evolving standards of a civilized society Unanimity among the judges is not required even to impose the death penalty Suspects will not have free choice of attorneys The only appeal from a conviction will be to the President or the Secretary of Defense Incredibly the entire process including execution can be conducted in secret and the trials can be held anywhere the Secretary of Defense decides A trial might occur on an aircraft carrier and the body of the executed 8220buried8221 at sea The President is literally getting away with murder Surprisingly a number of prestigious law professors eg Lawrence Tribe and Ruth Wedgwood have accepted and even argued in favor of these tribunals The primary claim is that it might be necessary to disclose classified information in order to obtain convictions This is a pretext There are procedures for handling classified information in federal courts as was done in the trial of those convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center It certainly does not provide a reason for sending suspects into a 8220justice8221 system akin to that which the US condemned in Peru The 1993 trials also demonstrate that these trials can be held in federal courts Trials before military commissions will not be trusted in either the Muslim world or elsewhere Nor should they They will be viewed as what they are 8212 8220kangaroo courts8221 How much better to demonstrate to the world that the guilty have been apprehended and fairly convicted A better solution would be for the US to go to the UN and have the UN establish a special court for the trials Judges from different legal systems including that of the US Muslim and civil law countries could constitute such a court WIRETAPPING ATTORNEYCLIENT COMMUNICATIONS At the heart of the effective assistance of counsel is the right of a criminal defendant to a lawyer with whom he or she can communicate candidly and freely without fear that the government is overhearing confidential communications This right is fundamental to the adversary system of justice in the Untied States When the government overhears these conversations a defendant8217s right to a defense is compromised Now with the stroke of pen Attorney General Ashcroft has eliminated the attorneyclient privilege and will wiretap privileged communications when he thinks there is 8220reasonable suspicion to believe8221 that an 8220inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further facilitate act of violence or terrorism8221 He says that approximately one hundred such suspects and their attorneys may be subject to the order He claims the legal authority to do so without court order in other words without the approval and finding by a neutral magistrate that attorneyclient communications are facilitating criminal conduct This is utter lawlessness by our country8217s top law enforcement officer and is flatly unconstitutional This wiretapping of attorneyclient communications has already begun THE NEW LEGAL REGIME The government has established a tripartite plan in its efforts to eradicate terrorism in the United States President Bush has created a new cabinetlevel Homeland Security Office the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating thousands of individuals and groups and making hundreds of arrests and Congress is enacting new laws that will grant the FBI and other intelligence agencies vast new powers to wiretap and spy on people in the United States THE OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY On September 20th President Bush announced the creation of the Homeland Security Office charged with gathering intelligence coordinating antiterrorism efforts and taking precautions to prevent and respond to terrorism It is not yet known how this office will function but it will most likely try to centralize the powers of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies 8212 a difficult if not impossible job 8212 among some 40 bickering agencies Those concerned with its establishment are worried that it will become a super spy agency and as its very name implies that the military will play a role in domestic law enforcement FBI INVESTIGATIONS AND ARRESTS The FBI has always done more than chase criminals like the Central Intelligence Agency it has long considered itself the protector of US ideology Those who have opposed government policies 8212 whether civil rights workers antiVietnam war protesters opponents of the covert Reaganera wars or cultural dissidents 8212 have repeatedly been surveyed and had their activities disrupted by the FBI In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack Attorney General John Ashcroft focused on noncitizens whether permanent residents students temporary workers or tourists Normally an alien can only be held for 48 hours prior to the filing of charges Ashcroft8217s new regulation allowed arrested aliens to be held without any charges for a 8220reasonable time8221 presumably months or longer See below for new legislation regarding detention of immigrants The FBI began massive detentions and investigations of individuals suspected of terrorist connections almost all of them noncitizens of Middle Eastern descent over 1100 have been arrested Many were held for days without access to lawyers or knowledge of the charges against them many are still in detention Few if any have been proven to have a connection with the September 11 attacks and remain in jail despite having been cleared In some cases people were arrested merely for being from a country like Pakistan and having expired student visas Stories of mistreatment of such detainees are not uncommon Apparently some of those arrested are not willing to talk to the FBI although they have been offered shorter jail sentences jobs money and new identities Astonishingly the FBI and the Department of Justice are discussing methods to force them to talk which include 8220using drugs or pressure tactics such as those employed by the Israeli interrogators8221 The accurate term to describe these tactics is torture Our government wants to torture people to make them talk There is resistance to this even from law enforcement officials One former FBI Chief of CounterTerrorism said in an October New York Newsday article 8220Torture goes against every grain in my body Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them8221 As torture is illegal in the United States and under international law US officials risk lawsuits by such practices For this reason they have suggested having another country do their dirty work they want to extradite the suspects to allied countries where security services threaten family members and use torture It would be difficult to imagine a more ominous signal of the repressive period we are facing The FBI is also currently investigating groups it claims are linked to terrorism 8212 among them pacifist groups such as the US chapter of Women in Black which holds vigils to protest violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories The FBI has threatened to force members of Women in Black to either talk about their group or go to jail As one of the group8217s members said 8220If the FBI cannot or will not distinguish between groups who collude in hatred and terrorism and peace activists who struggle in the full light of day against all forms of terrorism we are in serious trouble8221 Unfortunately the FBI does not make that distinction We are facing not only the roundup of thousands on flimsy suspicions but also an allout investigation of dissent in the United States THE NEW ANTITERRORIST LEGISLATION Congress has passed and President Bush has signed sweeping new antiterrorist legislation the USA Patriot Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism aimed at both aliens and citizens The legislation met more opposition than one might expect in these difficult times A National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom of over 120 groups ranging from the right to the left opposed the worst aspects of the proposed new law They succeeded in making minor modifications but the most troubling provisions remain and are described below Rights of Aliens Prior to the legislation antiterrorist laws passed in the wake of the 1996 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma had already given the government wide powers to arrest detain and deport aliens based upon secret evidence 8212 evidence that neither the alien nor his attorney could view or refute The current proposed legislation makes it even worse for aliens First the law would permit 8220mandatory detention8221 of aliens certified by the attorney general as 8220suspected terrorists8221 These could include aliens involved in barroom brawls or those who have provided only humanitarian assistance to organizations disfavored by the United States Once certified in this way an alien could be imprisoned indefinitely with no real opportunity for court challenge Until now such 8220preventive detention8221 was believed to be flatly unconstitutional Second current law permits deportation of aliens who support terrorist activity the proposed law would make aliens deportable for almost any association with a 8220terrorist organization8221 Although this change seems to have a certain surface plausibility it represents a dangerous erosion of Americans8217 constitutionally protected rights of association 8220Terrorist organization8221 is a broad and openended term that could include liberation groups such as the Irish Republican Army the African National Congress or civic groups that have ever engaged in any violent activity such as Greenpeace An alien who gives only medical or humanitarian aid to similar groups or simply supports their political message in a material way could be jailed indefinitely More Powers to the FBI and CIA A key element in the new law is the wide expansion of wiretapping In the United States wiretapping is permitted but generally only when there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and a judge signs a special wiretapping order that contains limited time periods the numbers of the telephones wiretapped and the type of conversations that can be overheard In 1978 an exception was made to these strict requirements permitting wiretapping to be carried out to gather intelligence information about foreign governments and foreign terrorist organizations A secret court the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established that could approve such wiretaps without requiring the government to show evidence of criminal conduct In doing so the constitutional protections necessary when investigating crimes could be bypassed The secret court is little more than a rubber stamp for wiretapping requests by the spy agencies It has authorized over 13000 wiretaps in its 22year existence approximately a thousand last year and has apparently never denied a request Under the new law the same secret court will have the power to authorize wiretaps and secret searches of homes in criminal cases 8212 not just to gather foreign intelligence The FBI will be able to wiretap individuals and organizations without meeting the stringent requirements of the Constitution The law will authorize the secret court to permit roving wiretaps of any phones computers or cell phones that might possibly be used by a suspect Widespread reading of email will be allowed even before the recipient opens it Thousands of conversations will be listened to or read that have nothing to do with the suspect or any crime The new legislation is filled with many other expansions of investigative and prosecutorial power including wider use of undercover agents to infiltrate organizations longer jail sentences and lifetime supervision for some who have served their sentences more crimes that can receive the death penalty and longer statutes of limitations for prosecuting crimes Another provision of the new bill makes it a crime for a person to fail to notify the FBI if he or she has 8220reasonable grounds to believe8221 that someone is about to commit a terrorist offense The language of this provision is so vague that anyone however innocent with any connection to anyone suspected of being a terrorist can be prosecuted We will all need to become spies to protect ourselves and the subjects of our spying at least for now will be those from the Mid East The New Crime of Domestic Terrorism The act creates a number of new crimes One of the most threatening to dissent and those who oppose government policies is the crime of 8220domestic terrorism8221 It is loosely defined as acts that are dangerous to human life violate criminal law and 8220appear to be intended8221 to intimidate or coerce a civilian population8221 or 8220influence the policy of a government by intimidation of coercion8221 Under this definition a protest demonstration that blocked a street and prevented an ambulance from getting by could be deemed domestic terrorism Likewise the demonstrations in Seattle against the WTO could fit within the definition This was an unnecessary addition to the criminal code there are already plenty of laws making such civil disobedience criminal without labeling such time honored protest as terrorist and imposing severe prison sentences Overall the new legislation represents one of the most sweeping assaults on liberties in the last 50 years It is unlikely to make us more secure it is certain to make us less free It is common for governments to reach for draconian law enforcement solutions in times of war or national crisis It has happened often in the United States and elsewhere We should learn from historical example times of hysteria of war and of instability are not the times to rush to enact new laws that curtail our freedoms and grant more authority to the government and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies The US government has conceptualized the war against terrorism as a permanent war a war without boundaries Terrorism is frightening to all of us but it8217s equally chilling to think that in the name of antiterrorism our government is willing to suspend constitutional freedoms permanently as well Michael Ratner is an international human rights lawyer and vicepresident of the Center for Constitutional Rights He has brought numerous suits against the illegal use of military force by the United States Government and specializes in opposing government spying Mr Ratner teaches International Human Rights Litigation at Columbia Law School and is the author of The Pinochet Papers International Human Rights Litigation in US Courts and Che Guevara and the FBI | I/PRON live/VERB a/DET few/ADJ blocks/NOUN from/ADP the/DET World/PROPN Trade/PROPN Center/PROPN In/ADP New/PROPN York/PROPN we/PRON are/AUX still/ADV mourning/VERB the/DET loss/NOUN of/ADP so/ADV many/ADJ after/ADP the/DET attacks/NOUN on/ADP our/PRON city/NOUN We/PRON want/VERB to/PART arrest/VERB and/CCONJ punish/VERB the/DET terrorists/NOUN eliminate/VERB the/DET terrorist/ADJ network/NOUN and/CCONJ prevent/VERB future/ADJ attacks/NOUN But/CCONJ the/DET government8217s/PROPN declared/VERB war/NOUN on/ADP terrorism/NOUN and/CCONJ many/ADJ of/ADP the/DET antiterrorism/NOUN measures/NOUN include/VERB a/DET curtailment/NOUN of/ADP freedom/NOUN and/CCONJ constitutional/ADJ rights/NOUN that/PRON have/VERB 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<p>Among the most powerful lobbies in Washington that have nothing directly to do with the pecuniary interests of the fraction of the one percent who keep the rest of us down are the National Rifle Association (NRA) and, of course, the Israel lobby. &#160;The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is its largest and best-known component, but there are many other organizations associated with it.</p>
<p>Lately, both lobbies have wielded unprecedented power, despite widespread but tepid popular disapproval.</p>
<p>By now, neither lobby has to say much or throw large sums of money around; they get their way, and then some, through intimidation.&#160; Mainstream politicians are so used to it that they do their bidding as if out of habit.</p>
<p>So far along has this process gone that neither lobby seems able to overplay its hand.&#160; In any reasonable world, the outrage du jour – there are always plenty to choose from — would be their undoing.&#160; But it never is.</p>
<p>After the most recent gun massacre – the one in Aurora, Colorado – the first words out of the Obama administration, even as the president went to Colorado (a swing state) to emote Bill Clinton style with the families of the victims, was that he had no intention of taking on “second amendment rights.”&#160; His apologists in the media were disarmingly honest: in an election year, there’s no percentage in it.</p>
<p>A few Democrats in Congress, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Illinois Governor Pat Quinn do support milquetoast restrictions on assault rifles and other military weapons and there is some interest in regulating on-line sales of massive quantities of ammunition. &#160;&#160;But, Quinn’s case apart, calls for edging closer to sanity emanate out of locales where being reasonable about guns comes cheap, and therefore where NRA intimidation doesn’t work.</p>
<p>Then there was the nauseating spectacle of Romney in Jerusalem – sending mixed signals about how eager he is to implement what most American and Israeli military professionals and the intelligence communities of both countries agree, along with nearly everyone else, is one of the worst and most dangerous ideas out there – waging a war of aggression against Iran.&#160;&#160; For Romney, the options seemed to be, as Stephen Colbert might put it – “eager” or “extremely eager.”</p>
<p>But a war is what the Israel lobby wants and, with an election pending (where words count for more than deeds), that trumps the near certain prospect of disaster for the United States (and Israel too) should America or Israel or both actually go to war.&#160; It also renders irrelevant the fact that wars of aggression are war crimes. &#160;With Mormon-hating Christian Zionists to win over, and the money of obscenely rich Jewish Zionists to tap, Romney’s lame venture in Middle Eastern diplomacy almost makes sense.</p>
<p>And so, for the time being these lobbies flourish. &#160;But nothing last forever, and there is reason to think that both may finally have reached their apogee.&#160; The conditions for their possibility, the Israel lobby’s especially, are fading fast.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>In the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama got into trouble when he told donors in California that in an era of social dislocation “folks [always “folks”!] in rural areas cling to their guns and their religion.”&#160; When this was leaked to the press, he was accused of “elitism.”</p>
<p>The real crime, though, was that his indiscretion abetted political entrepreneurs in their (largely successful) efforts to concoct yet another incarnation of that perennial oxymoronic confection, right-wing populism.</p>
<p>It must be conceded, though, that the charge was not without merit; Obama can be condescending towards&#160; “folks” whose views are retrograde — provided they are not also pillars of the corporate system or “savvy businessmen,” Obama’s term of praise for Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.</p>
<p>In any case, it is a mistake to think that the social base of the gun lobby is exclusively rural or that its constituents are economically insecure. &#160;There are plenty of capitalists of the Dick Cheney type on board, and not all of them are from Texas.</p>
<p>Still, what Obama said and what he implied does explain a great deal about the gun lobby’s power.&#160; &#160;There was a time when the NRA was comparatively harmless.&#160; In addition to lobbying in Washington and state capitols, it did good work promoting gun safety and conserving animal populations (for hunters to kill).&#160;&#160; Though it still presents itself much as it always has, education and conservation are hardly its main concerns now.</p>
<p>In line with its current political complexion, the NRA has become an ally of the armaments industry, and therefore arguably an adjunct to the military-industrial complex.&#160; But the organization really isn’t about military boosterism. &#160;For the most part, it’s not even about hunting or guns either, except symbolically or in passing. &#160;It’s about identity.</p>
<p>In a period like ours, when class-conscious politics has gone missing outside ruling class circles, political passions have come to center on imputed or contrived identities, not interests.&#160; &#160;In the United States, this has long been the pivot of the Democratic-Republican divide.&#160; On issues of class power and the distribution of the economic surplus, the themes of traditional political conflict, there is hardly a sliver of light between the two, semi-established parties.</p>
<p>Because concerns about identity loom so large, culture wars flare up from time to time, and never really subside.&#160; That’s what the NRA has been fighting in recent years – not with guns exactly, but over their place in American life.&#160; In the gun lobby’s view, that place is or should be everywhere – or, more exactly, everywhere as far as government regulation is concerned.</p>
<p>The lobby’s official view is not that the good life is a gun filled life (though that is doubtless what many NRA leaders believe), but that, thanks to God or the Constitution or both, individuals have rights to <a href="" type="internal" />own and bear arms and to do with them what they want, so long as they don’t use them to harm others in ways that the law does not allow.&#160; “Guns don’t kill people,” the saying goes, “people kill people”; but even if it were otherwise, it wouldn’t matter because gun rights are fundamental and infrangible.</p>
<p>The right to bear arms, virtually without regulation, is supposedly proclaimed in the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.&#160; A careful and honest reader would be hard put to find it in the language of that text, but there it is, the NRA contends; and with a majority of the Supreme Court in agreement, clearer minds are powerless to gainsay them.</p>
<p>The rationalizations right-wing jurists proffer are of little interest in their own right, except as examples of specious reasoning.&#160; What matters more is what they reveal about our political life.&#160; They show that we are citizens only in theory; in practice, we are whatever we see ourselves as, and the more central some issue is to our self-conceptions, the more steadfastly we cling to our view.</p>
<p>In contrast to the situation the Israel lobby confronts, the self-conceptions to which the gun lobby appeal have little to do with in-group solidarities based on real or imagined commonalities.&#160; However, they have a great deal to do with out-group hostility – directed at the kinds of people who think that only benighted losers stick to their religion and their guns.</p>
<p>It is to stick it back to them that the “folks” Obama had in mind do in fact cling to their religion and their guns, even though most of them understand, at some level, that it is foolish to flood communities, especially the ones they inhabit, with assault rifles and endless rounds of ammunition.</p>
<p>It is the same with polling data on views about, say, evolution or the existence of angels.&#160; It is not that people are imbeciles or even that they are ignorant.&#160; It is that they project imbecility and ignorance to gain the recognition they seek.&#160;&#160; To that end, they must think of themselves as different from, and opposed to, people who know better.</p>
<p>This operation works, to the extent it does, because we human beings are capable of massive self-deception and because we have a high level of tolerance for inconsistency and outright incoherence.</p>
<p>And so people who are able to negotiate their way through life competently and who take advantage of technological advances based on the science they implicitly reject are able, at the same time, to believe that, in six glorious days some four thousand years ago, God created the world and all that dwells therein pretty much as it now is.</p>
<p>It is very unlikely that the conditions that make this level of disingenuousness possible will soon change. &#160;But there is no reason why the gun lobby should be able to capitalize on it indefinitely.</p>
<p>Ironically, the NRA’s success could be its undoing.&#160; By seeing to it that serious gun control is off the political agenda, they have done their share to neutralize the usefulness of the issue for mobilizing “populist” support.&#160; And by helping to make gun violence rampant and spectacular, they have done more than their share to prepare the way for the inevitable backlash.</p>
<p>To the extent that the NRA is perceived to be too far out of line with public opinion and too militant in its opposition to an enemy that has already effectively surrendered, and insofar as its role in promoting murder and mayhem is increasingly well understood, its days of ruling the roost may be numbered.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>The Israel lobby is about identity politics too, but the issues are not the same.</p>
<p>In Israel itself, saner Zionists warn against the so-called demographic bomb.&#160; With Arab birthrates high and Jewish birthrates low, especially among secular Jews of European origin, and with many Israelis emigrating, time is not on the side of the status quo.</p>
<p>The Israel lobby, or rather its Jewish component, faces a demographic bomb too.&#160; The problem, now widely acknowledged, is that many, perhaps most, American Jews, especially younger ones, don’t care all that much about Israel and are, in fact, for the best of reasons, embarrassed by its bellicosity and racism.</p>
<p>The self-appointed leaders who comprise the Israel lobby are therefore increasingly out of line with the people they claim to represent.&#160; AIPAC is bad enough.&#160; The amply funded newcomer to its right, the Republican Jewish Coalition, is even worse.</p>
<p>At the time of the 1967 Six Day War, it was still possible to conjure up fears of impending annihilation among Jews suffering from survivors’ guilt in the wake of the Nazi Judeocide.&#160; It is mainly from the ranks of those who took a sharp Zionist turn at that time that today’s “leaders” come.</p>
<p>With the passage of time, the bases for their fears have become even more transparently unrealistic than they were in 1967.&#160; But success has spurred those self-styled leaders on and hardened their views.&#160; This at the same time that assimilation, social acceptance, intermarriage and the virtual disappearance of anti-Semitism have proceeded apace.</p>
<p>Zionism’s&#160;raison d’être&#160;was that Jews could never really assimilate into “gentile” society, an idea that Nazis and other European anti-Semites shared.&#160; Zionism’s founders were Jewish nationalists, of course, but their conviction that “the Jewish nation” must have a state of its own came in reaction to forebodings about the fate of European Jews.</p>
<p>The attachment to Palestine came later, and the connection to Judaism came later still.&#160; Indeed, the first Zionists were militantly secular.&#160; However, once they settled upon the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, they had to forge a national identity for the peoples who would settle there, and there was no way to do that without helping themselves to whatever they could retrieve from the Jewish religion and its traditions.</p>
<p>Still, before 1948 – arguably even before 1967 – Judaism and Zionism were, at best, joined together in an unhappy marriage.&#160; Zionists needed Judaism because they had no other basis for forging a Jewish identity.&#160; Judaism needed Zionism too.</p>
<p>This is because outside benighted, and largely self-segregated, orthodox (or “ultra-orthodox”) Jewish communities, Judaism has long been a dead letter.&#160; Were it not for the potlatch-like social rituals of Bar (and, in recent decades, Bat) Mitzvahs and a lingering deference to the “High Holy Days,” American temples and synagogues – like those in other “diaspora” countries — would be empty year round.</p>
<p>Of course, the pendulum is always in motion, and so there has lately been a slight uptick in religious observance. &#160;But, even though most religious Jews nowadays are at peace with Zionism, there are not, and never will be, enough practicing Jews who live outside self-imposed ghettoes and who engage with the modern world to replenish the lobby’s base.&#160; It is burdensome to follow Halakhic (Jewish legal) prescriptions, especially when one must also deal with the exigencies of modern life.</p>
<p>And so, while Zionists need Judaism, Judaism really cannot be there for them.&#160; Zionists can highjack the religion, as they largely have, and use its institutions to draw Jews into the Zionist fold.&#160; But Zionism itself must look elsewhere for sustenance.</p>
<p>This is what explains their obsession with the Nazi Judeocide of seven decades ago. &#160;Zionists call it a “Holocaust” – everyone now does — suggesting that it somehow falls outside the scope of ordinary historical understanding, that it is a moment in sacred history that is unique unto itself and inexplicable in naturalistic terms.</p>
<p>In league with “gentile” co-thinkers, they construct monuments and museums to drive the point home. But here too there are diminishing returns and, even more than is the case with the gun lobby, time is not on their side.</p>
<p>Ironically, post-9/11 “homeland security” has expedited the declining utility of the Holocaust as a substitute for the Jewish religion in the quest for Jewish identity.&#160; Not long ago, evocations of Germany’s Nazi past and allusions to the authoritarian streak in German culture were part of the political vernacular in the United States and other countries.</p>
<p>But now that (contemporary) Germany has become a paragon of decency and lawfulness in comparison with Bush’s and Obama’s America, that is largely done.&#160; This is why, for scaring people into line, the Holocaust doesn’t work as well as it used to.&#160; It is far from useless still.&#160; But the edge is gone.</p>
<p>Holocaust mongering was, and still is, useful for both the Israeli and American states.&#160; It helps give Israel moral capital that Israeli governments then use to make life in the occupied territories so miserable that Palestinians will finally “self-deport” (the word Mitt Romney used in discussing undocumented workers in the United States). &#160;&#160;And depicting the Holocaust as an evil greater than which none can be conceived makes America’s many dark moments seem pale in comparison.</p>
<p>But the Holocaust is already seventy years old, and the clock never stops running.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>Still, for the foreseeable future, Israel itself is, for all practical purposes, immune from charges of overreaching; our media see to that.&#160; But the Israel lobby is another story. Much like the gun lobby, it is in danger of going too far.</p>
<p>That all is not right with it began to dawn on public opinion when it became widely known, during the primary season last spring, that a Las Vegas financier of the Israeli far right and of the settler movement, Sheldon Adelson, almost bought the Republican nomination for Newt Gingrich.</p>
<p>Adelson especially liked how willing Gingrich was to say that there really is no Palestinian people (shades of Golda Meir), that “Judea and Samaria” rightfully belong to the Jewish people, that Iran is a clear and present danger that ought to be dealt with militarily and, of course, that the United States should move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.</p>
<p>Had he had a better candidate to work with or at least a less compromised one, Adelson might well have had his way.&#160; Instead, all he succeeded in doing was making a spectacle of himself.</p>
<p>Now he is at it again, this time for Mitt Romney.&#160; And so, with great fanfare, he brought a gaggle of right-wing plutocrats – among them, NY Jets owner Woody Johnson and hedge fund manager Paul Singer – to the Promised Land to meet up with egregiously rich expatriate Jewish Americans who, like Adelson, worry that President Obama is not subservient enough to AIPAC’s dictates or friendly enough with Benjamin Netanyahu.&#160; The idea was to raise millions of dollars for the Romney campaign.</p>
<p>Even mainstream media pundits were taken aback by this display.&#160; It was like when Charlton Heston promoted “second amendment rights” in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine massacre.</p>
<p>But at least Heston was (or had been) Moses. &#160;Adelson is not even a pale imitation of Bugsy Segal, much less of Ze’ev Jabotinsky or Yitzhak Shamir. &#160;The man is filthy rich and that makes up for a lot. &#160;But, in the final analysis, he is a nebbish, a walking caricature really, who doesn’t even have enough sense to stay as far out of the spotlight as he can.</p>
<p>Which raises a question that before this electoral cycle would have seemed quaintly archaic and that, in view of the extent of Jewish integration into American society, should never need to be asked anymore: is Sheldon Adelson – and more generally the kind of Jewish “leadership” he exemplifies — good for the Jews?</p>
<p>The question answers itself.</p>
<p>* * *</p>
<p>And so it is that two of our most nefarious lobbies might soon be undone by their own success.&#160; No one can say how many more massacres it will take before the gun lobby gets its just deserts, though it is hard to see how public opinion can take much more of the insanity it promotes.&#160; And, thanks to its Christian-evangelical component, it may take a while too for the Israel lobby to implode. &#160;But time is on the side of those who would be done with them both.</p>
<p>One would think that Zionists would have enough self-respect not to make common cause with “folks” who see in Israel a means for hastening the End Time and, along with it, the conversion or eternal damnation of recalcitrant Jews.&#160; But then Zionists seldom object when it comes to sacrificing personal integrity for the greater cause.</p>
<p>The only sure thing is that if Adelson and his co-thinkers get their war with Iran, AIPAC’s grip on American politics will dissipate faster than a lucky streak in a misbegotten casino in Macao.</p> | Twilight of the Lobbies | true | https://counterpunch.org/2012/08/03/twilight-of-the-lobbies/ | 2012-08-03 | 4left
| 3,062 | Among the most powerful lobbies in Washington that have nothing directly to do with the pecuniary interests of the fraction of the one percent who keep the rest of us down are the National Rifle Association NRA and of course the Israel lobby amp160The American Israel Public Affairs Committee AIPAC is its largest and bestknown component but there are many other organizations associated with it Lately both lobbies have wielded unprecedented power despite widespread but tepid popular disapproval By now neither lobby has to say much or throw large sums of money around they get their way and then some through intimidationamp160 Mainstream politicians are so used to it that they do their bidding as if out of habit So far along has this process gone that neither lobby seems able to overplay its handamp160 In any reasonable world the outrage du jour 8211 there are always plenty to choose from 8212 would be their undoingamp160 But it never is After the most recent gun massacre 8211 the one in Aurora Colorado 8211 the first words out of the Obama administration even as the president went to Colorado a swing state to emote Bill Clinton style with the families of the victims was that he had no intention of taking on 8220second amendment rights8221amp160 His apologists in the media were disarmingly honest in an election year there8217s no percentage in it A few Democrats in Congress New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Illinois Governor Pat Quinn do support milquetoast restrictions on assault rifles and other military weapons and there is some interest in regulating online sales of massive quantities of ammunition amp160amp160But Quinn8217s case apart calls for edging closer to sanity emanate out of locales where being reasonable about guns comes cheap and therefore where NRA intimidation doesn8217t work Then there was the nauseating spectacle of Romney in Jerusalem 8211 sending mixed signals about how eager he is to implement what most American and Israeli military professionals and the intelligence communities of both countries agree along with nearly everyone else is one of the worst and most dangerous ideas out there 8211 waging a war of aggression against Iranamp160amp160 For Romney the options seemed to be as Stephen Colbert might put it 8211 8220eager8221 or 8220extremely eager8221 But a war is what the Israel lobby wants and with an election pending where words count for more than deeds that trumps the near certain prospect of disaster for the United States and Israel too should America or Israel or both actually go to waramp160 It also renders irrelevant the fact that wars of aggression are war crimes amp160With Mormonhating Christian Zionists to win over and the money of obscenely rich Jewish Zionists to tap Romney8217s lame venture in Middle Eastern diplomacy almost makes sense And so for the time being these lobbies flourish amp160But nothing last forever and there is reason to think that both may finally have reached their apogeeamp160 The conditions for their possibility the Israel lobby8217s especially are fading fast In the 2008 campaign Barack Obama got into trouble when he told donors in California that in an era of social dislocation 8220folks always 8220folks8221 in rural areas cling to their guns and their religion8221amp160 When this was leaked to the press he was accused of 8220elitism8221 The real crime though was that his indiscretion abetted political entrepreneurs in their largely successful efforts to concoct yet another incarnation of that perennial oxymoronic confection rightwing populism It must be conceded though that the charge was not without merit Obama can be condescending towardsamp160 8220folks8221 whose views are retrograde 8212 provided they are not also pillars of the corporate system or 8220savvy businessmen8221 Obama8217s term of praise for Lloyd Blankfein CEO of Goldman Sachs In any case it is a mistake to think that the social base of the gun lobby is exclusively rural or that its constituents are economically insecure amp160There are plenty of capitalists of the Dick Cheney type on board and not all of them are from Texas Still what Obama said and what he implied does explain a great deal about the gun lobby8217s poweramp160 amp160There was a time when the NRA was comparatively harmlessamp160 In addition to lobbying in Washington and state capitols it did good work promoting gun safety and conserving animal populations for hunters to killamp160amp160 Though it still presents itself much as it always has education and conservation are hardly its main concerns now In line with its current political complexion the NRA has become an ally of the armaments industry and therefore arguably an adjunct to the militaryindustrial complexamp160 But the organization really isn8217t about military boosterism amp160For the most part it8217s not even about hunting or guns either except symbolically or in passing amp160It8217s about identity In a period like ours when classconscious politics has gone missing outside ruling class circles political passions have come to center on imputed or contrived identities not interestsamp160 amp160In the United States this has long been the pivot of the DemocraticRepublican divideamp160 On issues of class power and the distribution of the economic surplus the themes of traditional political conflict there is hardly a sliver of light between the two semiestablished parties Because concerns about identity loom so large culture wars flare up from time to time and never really subsideamp160 That8217s what the NRA has been fighting in recent years 8211 not with guns exactly but over their place in American lifeamp160 In the gun lobby8217s view that place is or should be everywhere 8211 or more exactly everywhere as far as government regulation is concerned The lobby8217s official view is not that the good life is a gun filled life though that is doubtless what many NRA leaders believe but that thanks to God or the Constitution or both individuals have rights to own and bear arms and to do with them what they want so long as they don8217t use them to harm others in ways that the law does not allowamp160 8220Guns don8217t kill people8221 the saying goes 8220people kill people8221 but even if it were otherwise it wouldn8217t matter because gun rights are fundamental and infrangible The right to bear arms virtually without regulation is supposedly proclaimed in the second amendment to the US Constitutionamp160 A careful and honest reader would be hard put to find it in the language of that text but there it is the NRA contends and with a majority of the Supreme Court in agreement clearer minds are powerless to gainsay them The rationalizations rightwing jurists proffer are of little interest in their own right except as examples of specious reasoningamp160 What matters more is what they reveal about our political lifeamp160 They show that we are citizens only in theory in practice we are whatever we see ourselves as and the more central some issue is to our selfconceptions the more steadfastly we cling to our view In contrast to the situation the Israel lobby confronts the selfconceptions to which the gun lobby appeal have little to do with ingroup solidarities based on real or imagined commonalitiesamp160 However they have a great deal to do with outgroup hostility 8211 directed at the kinds of people who think that only benighted losers stick to their religion and their guns It is to stick it back to them that the 8220folks8221 Obama had in mind do in fact cling to their religion and their guns even though most of them understand at some level that it is foolish to flood communities especially the ones they inhabit with assault rifles and endless rounds of ammunition It is the same with polling data on views about say evolution or the existence of angelsamp160 It is not that people are imbeciles or even that they are ignorantamp160 It is that they project imbecility and ignorance to gain the recognition they seekamp160amp160 To that end they must think of themselves as different from and opposed to people who know better This operation works to the extent it does because we human beings are capable of massive selfdeception and because we have a high level of tolerance for inconsistency and outright incoherence And so people who are able to negotiate their way through life competently and who take advantage of technological advances based on the science they implicitly reject are able at the same time to believe that in six glorious days some four thousand years ago God created the world and all that dwells therein pretty much as it now is It is very unlikely that the conditions that make this level of disingenuousness possible will soon change amp160But there is no reason why the gun lobby should be able to capitalize on it indefinitely Ironically the NRA8217s success could be its undoingamp160 By seeing to it that serious gun control is off the political agenda they have done their share to neutralize the usefulness of the issue for mobilizing 8220populist8221 supportamp160 And by helping to make gun violence rampant and spectacular they have done more than their share to prepare the way for the inevitable backlash To the extent that the NRA is perceived to be too far out of line with public opinion and too militant in its opposition to an enemy that has already effectively surrendered and insofar as its role in promoting murder and mayhem is increasingly well understood its days of ruling the roost may be numbered The Israel lobby is about identity politics too but the issues are not the same In Israel itself saner Zionists warn against the socalled demographic bombamp160 With Arab birthrates high and Jewish birthrates low especially among secular Jews of European origin and with many Israelis emigrating time is not on the side of the status quo The Israel lobby or rather its Jewish component faces a demographic bomb tooamp160 The problem now widely acknowledged is that many perhaps most American Jews especially younger ones don8217t care all that much about Israel and are in fact for the best of reasons embarrassed by its bellicosity and racism The selfappointed leaders who comprise the Israel lobby are therefore increasingly out of line with the people they claim to representamp160 AIPAC is bad enoughamp160 The amply funded newcomer to its right the Republican Jewish Coalition is even worse At the time of the 1967 Six Day War it was still possible to conjure up fears of impending annihilation among Jews suffering from survivors8217 guilt in the wake of the Nazi Judeocideamp160 It is mainly from the ranks of those who took a sharp Zionist turn at that time that today8217s 8220leaders8221 come With the passage of time the bases for their fears have become even more transparently unrealistic than they were in 1967amp160 But success has spurred those selfstyled leaders on and hardened their viewsamp160 This at the same time that assimilation social acceptance intermarriage and the virtual disappearance of antiSemitism have proceeded apace Zionism8217samp160raison d8217234treamp160was that Jews could never really assimilate into 8220gentile8221 society an idea that Nazis and other European antiSemites sharedamp160 Zionism8217s founders were Jewish nationalists of course but their conviction that 8220the Jewish nation8221 must have a state of its own came in reaction to forebodings about the fate of European Jews The attachment to Palestine came later and the connection to Judaism came later stillamp160 Indeed the first Zionists were militantly secularamp160 However once they settled upon the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine they had to forge a national identity for the peoples who would settle there and there was no way to do that without helping themselves to whatever they could retrieve from the Jewish religion and its traditions Still before 1948 8211 arguably even before 1967 8211 Judaism and Zionism were at best joined together in an unhappy marriageamp160 Zionists needed Judaism because they had no other basis for forging a Jewish identityamp160 Judaism needed Zionism too This is because outside benighted and largely selfsegregated orthodox or 8220ultraorthodox8221 Jewish communities Judaism has long been a dead letteramp160 Were it not for the potlatchlike social rituals of Bar and in recent decades Bat Mitzvahs and a lingering deference to the 8220High Holy Days8221 American temples and synagogues 8211 like those in other 8220diaspora8221 countries 8212 would be empty year round Of course the pendulum is always in motion and so there has lately been a slight uptick in religious observance amp160But even though most religious Jews nowadays are at peace with Zionism there are not and never will be enough practicing Jews who live outside selfimposed ghettoes and who engage with the modern world to replenish the lobby8217s baseamp160 It is burdensome to follow Halakhic Jewish legal prescriptions especially when one must also deal with the exigencies of modern life And so while Zionists need Judaism Judaism really cannot be there for themamp160 Zionists can highjack the religion as they largely have and use its institutions to draw Jews into the Zionist foldamp160 But Zionism itself must look elsewhere for sustenance This is what explains their obsession with the Nazi Judeocide of seven decades ago amp160Zionists call it a 8220Holocaust8221 8211 everyone now does 8212 suggesting that it somehow falls outside the scope of ordinary historical understanding that it is a moment in sacred history that is unique unto itself and inexplicable in naturalistic terms In league with 8220gentile8221 cothinkers they construct monuments and museums to drive the point home But here too there are diminishing returns and even more than is the case with the gun lobby time is not on their side Ironically post911 8220homeland security8221 has expedited the declining utility of the Holocaust as a substitute for the Jewish religion in the quest for Jewish identityamp160 Not long ago evocations of Germany8217s Nazi past and allusions to the authoritarian streak in German culture were part of the political vernacular in the United States and other countries But now that contemporary Germany has become a paragon of decency and lawfulness in comparison with Bush8217s and Obama8217s America that is largely doneamp160 This is why for scaring people into line the Holocaust doesn8217t work as well as it used toamp160 It is far from useless stillamp160 But the edge is gone Holocaust mongering was and still is useful for both the Israeli and American statesamp160 It helps give Israel moral capital that Israeli governments then use to make life in the occupied territories so miserable that Palestinians will finally 8220selfdeport8221 the word Mitt Romney used in discussing undocumented workers in the United States amp160amp160And depicting the Holocaust as an evil greater than which none can be conceived makes America8217s many dark moments seem pale in comparison But the Holocaust is already seventy years old and the clock never stops running Still for the foreseeable future Israel itself is for all practical purposes immune from charges of overreaching our media see to thatamp160 But the Israel lobby is another story Much like the gun lobby it is in danger of going too far That all is not right with it began to dawn on public opinion when it became widely known during the primary season last spring that a Las Vegas financier of the Israeli far right and of the settler movement Sheldon Adelson almost bought the Republican nomination for Newt Gingrich Adelson especially liked how willing Gingrich was to say that there really is no Palestinian people shades of Golda Meir that 8220Judea and Samaria8221 rightfully belong to the Jewish people that Iran is a clear and present danger that ought to be dealt with militarily and of course that the United States should move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem Had he had a better candidate to work with or at least a less compromised one Adelson might well have had his wayamp160 Instead all he succeeded in doing was making a spectacle of himself Now he is at it again this time for Mitt Romneyamp160 And so with great fanfare he brought a gaggle of rightwing plutocrats 8211 among them NY Jets owner Woody Johnson and hedge fund manager Paul Singer 8211 to the Promised Land to meet up with egregiously rich expatriate Jewish Americans who like Adelson worry that President Obama is not subservient enough to AIPAC8217s dictates or friendly enough with Benjamin Netanyahuamp160 The idea was to raise millions of dollars for the Romney campaign Even mainstream media pundits were taken aback by this displayamp160 It was like when Charlton Heston promoted 8220second amendment rights8221 in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine massacre But at least Heston was or had been Moses amp160Adelson is not even a pale imitation of Bugsy Segal much less of Ze8217ev Jabotinsky or Yitzhak Shamir amp160The man is filthy rich and that makes up for a lot amp160But in the final analysis he is a nebbish a walking caricature really who doesn8217t even have enough sense to stay as far out of the spotlight as he can Which raises a question that before this electoral cycle would have seemed quaintly archaic and that in view of the extent of Jewish integration into American society should never need to be asked anymore is Sheldon Adelson 8211 and more generally the kind of Jewish 8220leadership8221 he exemplifies 8212 good for the Jews The question answers itself And so it is that two of our most nefarious lobbies might soon be undone by their own successamp160 No one can say how many more massacres it will take before the gun lobby gets its just deserts though it is hard to see how public opinion can take much more of the insanity it promotesamp160 And thanks to its Christianevangelical component it may take a while too for the Israel lobby to implode amp160But time is on the side of those who would be done with them both One would think that Zionists would have enough selfrespect not to make common cause with 8220folks8221 who see in Israel a means for hastening the End Time and along with it the conversion or eternal damnation of recalcitrant Jewsamp160 But then Zionists seldom object when it comes to sacrificing personal integrity for the greater cause The only sure thing is that if Adelson and his cothinkers get their war with Iran AIPAC8217s grip on American politics will dissipate faster than a lucky streak in a misbegotten casino in Macao | Among/ADP the/DET most/ADV powerful/ADJ lobbies/NOUN in/ADP Washington/PROPN that/PRON have/VERB nothing/PRON directly/ADV to/PART do/VERB with/ADP the/DET pecuniary/ADJ interests/NOUN of/ADP the/DET fraction/NOUN of/ADP the/DET one/NUM percent/NOUN who/PRON keep/VERB the/DET rest/NOUN of/ADP us/PRON down/ADV are/AUX the/DET National/PROPN Rifle/PROPN Association/PROPN NRA/PROPN and/CCONJ of/ADP course/NOUN the/DET Israel/PROPN lobby/NOUN amp160The/DET American/PROPN Israel/PROPN Public/PROPN Affairs/PROPN Committee/PROPN AIPAC/PROPN is/AUX its/PRON largest/ADJ and/CCONJ bestknown/ADJ component/NOUN but/CCONJ there/PRON are/VERB many/ADJ other/ADJ organizations/NOUN associated/VERB with/ADP it/PRON Lately/ADV both/DET lobbies/NOUN have/AUX wielded/VERB unprecedented/ADJ power/NOUN despite/SCONJ widespread/ADJ but/CCONJ tepid/ADJ popular/ADJ disapproval/NOUN By/ADP now/ADV neither/DET lobby/NOUN has/VERB to/PART say/VERB much/ADJ or/CCONJ throw/VERB large/ADJ sums/NOUN of/ADP money/NOUN around/ADP they/PRON get/VERB their/PRON way/NOUN and/CCONJ then/ADV some/PRON through/ADP intimidationamp160/NUM Mainstream/ADJ politicians/NOUN are/AUX so/ADV used/ADJ to/ADP it/PRON that/SCONJ they/PRON do/VERB their/PRON bidding/NOUN as/ADP if/SCONJ out/ADP of/ADP habit/NOUN So/ADV far/ADV along/ADV has/AUX this/DET process/NOUN gone/VERB that/SCONJ neither/DET lobby/NOUN seems/VERB able/ADJ to/PART overplay/VERB its/PRON handamp160/NOUN In/ADP any/DET reasonable/ADJ world/NOUN the/DET outrage/NOUN du/PROPN jour/PROPN 8211/NUM there/PRON are/VERB always/ADV plenty/ADJ to/PART choose/VERB from/ADP 8212/NUM would/AUX be/AUX their/PRON undoingamp160/NOUN But/CCONJ it/PRON never/ADV is/AUX After/ADP the/DET most/ADV recent/ADJ gun/NOUN massacre/NOUN 8211/NUM the/DET one/NOUN in/ADP Aurora/PROPN Colorado/PROPN 8211/NUM the/DET first/ADJ words/NOUN out/ADP of/ADP the/DET Obama/PROPN administration/NOUN even/ADV as/SCONJ the/DET president/NOUN went/VERB to/ADP Colorado/PROPN a/DET swing/NOUN state/NOUN to/PART emote/VERB Bill/PROPN Clinton/PROPN style/NOUN with/ADP the/DET families/NOUN of/ADP the/DET victims/NOUN was/AUX that/SCONJ he/PRON had/VERB no/DET intention/NOUN of/ADP taking/VERB on/ADP 8220second/NUM amendment/NOUN rights8221amp160/NOUN His/PRON apologists/NOUN in/ADP the/DET media/NOUN were/AUX disarmingly/ADV honest/ADJ in/ADP an/DET election/NOUN year/NOUN there8217s/PROPN no/DET percentage/NOUN in/ADP it/PRON A/DET few/ADJ Democrats/PROPN in/ADP Congress/PROPN New/PROPN York/PROPN City/PROPN Mayor/PROPN Michael/PROPN Bloomberg/PROPN and/CCONJ Illinois/PROPN Governor/PROPN Pat/PROPN Quinn/PROPN do/AUX support/VERB milquetoast/NOUN restrictions/NOUN on/ADP assault/NOUN rifles/NOUN and/CCONJ other/ADJ military/ADJ weapons/NOUN and/CCONJ there/PRON is/VERB some/DET interest/NOUN in/ADP regulating/VERB online/ADJ sales/NOUN of/ADP massive/ADJ quantities/NOUN of/ADP ammunition/NOUN amp160amp160But/CCONJ Quinn8217s/PROPN case/NOUN apart/ADV calls/VERB for/ADP edging/VERB closer/ADV to/ADP sanity/NOUN emanate/VERB out/ADP of/ADP locales/NOUN where/SCONJ being/AUX reasonable/ADJ about/ADP guns/NOUN comes/VERB cheap/ADJ and/CCONJ therefore/ADV where/SCONJ NRA/PROPN intimidation/NOUN doesn8217/NOUN t/NOUN work/NOUN Then/ADV there/PRON was/VERB the/DET nauseating/NOUN spectacle/NOUN of/ADP Romney/PROPN in/ADP Jerusalem/PROPN 8211/NUM sending/VERB mixed/ADJ signals/NOUN about/ADP how/SCONJ eager/ADJ he/PRON is/AUX to/PART implement/VERB what/PRON most/ADV American/ADJ and/CCONJ Israeli/ADJ military/ADJ professionals/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET intelligence/NOUN communities/NOUN of/ADP both/DET countries/NOUN agree/VERB along/ADP with/ADP nearly/ADV everyone/PRON else/ADV is/AUX one/NUM of/ADP the/DET worst/ADJ and/CCONJ most/ADV dangerous/ADJ ideas/NOUN out/ADV there/ADV 8211/NUM waging/VERB a/DET war/NOUN of/ADP aggression/NOUN against/ADP Iranamp160amp160/NOUN For/ADP Romney/PROPN the/DET options/NOUN seemed/VERB to/PART be/AUX as/SCONJ Stephen/PROPN Colbert/PROPN might/AUX put/VERB it/PRON 8211/NUM 8220eager8221/NUM or/CCONJ 8220extremely/NUM eager8221/NOUN But/CCONJ a/DET war/NOUN is/AUX what/PRON the/DET Israel/PROPN lobby/NOUN wants/VERB and/CCONJ with/ADP an/DET election/NOUN pending/VERB where/SCONJ words/NOUN count/VERB for/ADP more/ADJ than/ADP deeds/NOUN that/PRON trumps/VERB the/DET near/ADP certain/ADJ prospect/NOUN of/ADP disaster/NOUN for/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN and/CCONJ Israel/PROPN too/ADV should/AUX America/PROPN or/CCONJ Israel/PROPN or/CCONJ both/PRON actually/ADV go/VERB to/PART waramp160/PROPN It/PRON also/ADV renders/VERB irrelevant/ADJ the/DET fact/NOUN that/SCONJ wars/NOUN of/ADP aggression/NOUN are/AUX war/NOUN crimes/NOUN amp160With/ADP Mormonhating/PROPN Christian/PROPN Zionists/PROPN to/PART win/VERB over/ADP and/CCONJ the/DET money/NOUN of/ADP obscenely/ADV rich/ADJ Jewish/ADJ Zionists/PROPN to/PART tap/VERB Romney8217s/PROPN lame/ADJ venture/NOUN in/ADP Middle/ADJ Eastern/PROPN diplomacy/NOUN almost/ADV makes/VERB sense/NOUN And/CCONJ so/ADV for/ADP the/DET time/NOUN being/AUX these/DET lobbies/NOUN flourish/VERB amp160But/CCONJ nothing/PRON last/ADJ forever/ADV and/CCONJ there/PRON is/VERB reason/NOUN to/PART think/VERB that/SCONJ both/PRON may/AUX finally/ADV have/AUX reached/VERB their/PRON apogeeamp160/NOUN The/DET conditions/NOUN for/ADP their/PRON possibility/NOUN the/DET Israel/PROPN lobby8217s/PROPN especially/ADV are/AUX fading/VERB fast/ADV In/ADP the/DET 2008/NUM campaign/NOUN Barack/PROPN Obama/PROPN got/VERB into/ADP trouble/NOUN when/SCONJ he/PRON told/VERB donors/NOUN in/ADP California/PROPN that/SCONJ in/ADP an/DET era/NOUN of/ADP social/ADJ dislocation/NOUN 8220folks/NOUN always/ADV 8220folks8221/NOUN in/ADP rural/ADJ areas/NOUN cling/VERB to/ADP their/PRON guns/NOUN and/CCONJ their/PRON religion8221amp160/NOUN When/SCONJ this/PRON was/AUX leaked/VERB to/ADP the/DET press/NOUN he/PRON was/AUX accused/VERB of/ADP 8220elitism8221/NUM The/DET real/ADJ crime/NOUN though/ADV was/AUX that/SCONJ his/PRON indiscretion/NOUN abetted/VERB political/ADJ entrepreneurs/NOUN in/ADP their/PRON largely/ADV successful/ADJ efforts/NOUN to/PART concoct/VERB yet/ADV another/DET incarnation/NOUN of/ADP that/DET perennial/ADJ oxymoronic/ADJ confection/NOUN rightwing/VERB populism/NOUN It/PRON must/AUX be/AUX conceded/VERB though/ADV that/SCONJ the/DET charge/NOUN was/AUX not/PART without/ADP merit/NOUN Obama/PROPN can/AUX be/AUX condescending/VERB towardsamp160/NUM 8220folks8221/NUM whose/DET views/NOUN are/AUX retrograde/NOUN 8212/NUM provided/VERB they/PRON are/AUX not/PART also/ADV pillars/NOUN of/ADP the/DET corporate/ADJ system/NOUN or/CCONJ 8220savvy/ADJ businessmen8221/PROPN Obama8217s/NOUN term/NOUN of/ADP praise/NOUN for/ADP Lloyd/PROPN Blankfein/PROPN CEO/PROPN of/ADP Goldman/PROPN Sachs/PROPN In/ADP any/DET case/NOUN it/PRON is/AUX a/DET mistake/NOUN to/PART think/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET social/ADJ base/NOUN of/ADP the/DET gun/NOUN lobby/NOUN is/AUX exclusively/ADV rural/ADJ or/CCONJ that/SCONJ its/PRON constituents/NOUN are/AUX economically/ADV insecure/ADJ amp160There/ADV are/AUX plenty/NOUN of/ADP capitalists/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Dick/PROPN Cheney/PROPN type/NOUN on/ADP board/NOUN and/CCONJ not/PART all/PRON of/ADP them/PRON are/AUX from/ADP Texas/PROPN Still/ADV what/PRON Obama/PROPN said/VERB and/CCONJ what/PRON he/PRON implied/VERB does/AUX explain/VERB a/DET great/ADJ deal/NOUN about/ADP the/DET gun/NOUN lobby8217s/PROPN poweramp160/PROPN amp160There/ADV was/AUX a/DET time/NOUN when/SCONJ the/DET NRA/PROPN was/AUX comparatively/ADV harmlessamp160/PUNCT In/ADP addition/NOUN to/ADP lobbying/VERB in/ADP Washington/PROPN and/CCONJ state/NOUN capitols/NOUN it/PRON did/VERB good/ADJ work/NOUN promoting/VERB gun/NOUN safety/NOUN and/CCONJ conserving/VERB animal/NOUN populations/NOUN for/ADP hunters/NOUN to/PART killamp160amp160/VERB Though/SCONJ it/PRON still/ADV presents/VERB itself/PRON much/ADV as/SCONJ it/PRON always/ADV has/VERB education/NOUN and/CCONJ conservation/NOUN are/AUX hardly/ADV its/PRON main/ADJ concerns/NOUN now/ADV In/ADP line/NOUN with/ADP its/PRON current/ADJ political/ADJ complexion/NOUN the/DET NRA/PROPN has/AUX become/VERB an/DET ally/NOUN of/ADP the/DET armaments/NOUN industry/NOUN and/CCONJ therefore/ADV arguably/ADV an/DET adjunct/ADJ to/ADP the/DET militaryindustrial/PROPN complexamp160/PROPN But/CCONJ the/DET organization/NOUN really/ADV isn8217/VERB t/PROPN about/ADP military/ADJ boosterism/NOUN amp160For/ADP the/DET most/ADJ part/NOUN it8217s/PROPN not/PART even/ADV about/ADP hunting/NOUN or/CCONJ guns/NOUN either/CCONJ except/SCONJ symbolically/ADV or/CCONJ in/ADP passing/VERB amp160It8217s/NOUN about/ADP identity/NOUN In/ADP a/DET period/NOUN like/ADP ours/NOUN when/SCONJ classconscious/ADJ politics/NOUN has/AUX gone/VERB missing/VERB outside/ADP ruling/VERB class/NOUN circles/NOUN political/ADJ passions/NOUN have/AUX come/VERB to/PART center/VERB on/ADP imputed/VERB or/CCONJ contrived/VERB identities/NOUN not/PART interestsamp160/VERB amp160In/PROPN the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN this/PRON has/AUX long/ADV been/AUX the/DET pivot/NOUN of/ADP the/DET DemocraticRepublican/PROPN divideamp160/PROPN On/ADP issues/NOUN of/ADP class/NOUN power/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET distribution/NOUN of/ADP the/DET economic/ADJ surplus/NOUN the/DET themes/NOUN of/ADP traditional/ADJ political/ADJ conflict/NOUN there/PRON is/VERB hardly/ADV a/DET sliver/NOUN of/ADP light/NOUN between/ADP the/DET two/NUM semiestablished/VERB parties/NOUN Because/SCONJ concerns/NOUN about/ADP identity/NOUN loom/NOUN so/ADV large/ADJ culture/NOUN wars/NOUN flare/VERB up/ADP from/ADP time/NOUN to/ADP time/NOUN and/CCONJ never/ADV really/ADV subsideamp160/VERB That8217s/PROPN what/PRON the/DET NRA/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX fighting/VERB in/ADP recent/ADJ years/NOUN 8211/NUM not/PART with/ADP guns/NOUN exactly/ADV but/CCONJ over/ADP their/PRON place/NOUN in/ADP American/PROPN lifeamp160/NOUN In/ADP the/DET gun/NOUN lobby8217s/PROPN view/NOUN that/PRON place/NOUN is/AUX or/CCONJ should/AUX be/AUX everywhere/ADV 8211/NUM or/CCONJ more/ADV exactly/ADV everywhere/ADV as/ADV far/ADV as/SCONJ government/NOUN regulation/NOUN is/AUX concerned/VERB The/DET lobby8217s/PROPN official/ADJ view/NOUN is/AUX not/PART that/SCONJ the/DET good/ADJ life/NOUN is/AUX a/DET gun/NOUN filled/VERB life/NOUN though/SCONJ that/PRON is/AUX doubtless/ADJ what/PRON many/ADJ NRA/PROPN leaders/NOUN believe/VERB but/CCONJ that/SCONJ thanks/NOUN to/ADP God/PROPN or/CCONJ the/DET Constitution/PROPN or/CCONJ both/DET individuals/NOUN have/VERB rights/NOUN to/PART own/VERB and/CCONJ bear/VERB arms/NOUN and/CCONJ to/PART do/VERB with/ADP them/PRON what/PRON they/PRON want/VERB so/ADV long/ADV as/SCONJ they/PRON don8217/VERB t/NOUN use/VERB them/PRON to/PART harm/VERB others/NOUN in/ADP ways/NOUN that/PRON the/DET law/NOUN does/AUX not/PART allowamp160/PROPN 8220Guns/NOUN don8217/VERB t/PROPN kill/VERB people8221/NOUN the/DET saying/NOUN goes/VERB 8220people/NOUN kill/VERB people8221/NOUN but/CCONJ even/ADV if/SCONJ it/PRON were/AUX otherwise/ADV it/PRON wouldn8217/PROPN t/NOUN matter/NOUN because/SCONJ gun/NOUN rights/NOUN are/AUX fundamental/ADJ and/CCONJ infrangible/ADJ The/DET right/NOUN to/PART bear/VERB arms/NOUN virtually/ADV without/ADP regulation/NOUN is/AUX supposedly/ADV proclaimed/VERB in/ADP the/DET second/ADJ amendment/NOUN to/ADP the/DET US/PROPN Constitutionamp160/NOUN A/DET careful/ADJ and/CCONJ honest/ADJ reader/NOUN would/AUX be/AUX hard/ADV put/VERB to/PART find/VERB it/PRON in/ADP the/DET language/NOUN of/ADP that/DET text/NOUN but/CCONJ there/ADV it/PRON is/AUX the/DET NRA/PROPN contends/VERB and/CCONJ with/ADP a/DET majority/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Supreme/PROPN Court/PROPN in/ADP agreement/NOUN clearer/ADJ minds/NOUN are/AUX powerless/ADJ to/PART gainsay/VERB them/PRON The/DET rationalizations/NOUN rightwing/VERB jurists/NOUN proffer/VERB are/AUX of/ADP little/ADJ interest/NOUN in/ADP their/PRON own/ADJ right/NOUN except/SCONJ as/ADP examples/NOUN of/ADP specious/ADJ reasoningamp160/NUM What/PRON matters/VERB more/ADV is/AUX what/PRON they/PRON reveal/VERB about/ADP our/PRON political/ADJ lifeamp160/NOUN They/PRON show/VERB that/SCONJ we/PRON are/AUX citizens/NOUN only/ADV in/ADP theory/NOUN in/ADP practice/NOUN we/PRON are/AUX whatever/PRON we/PRON see/VERB ourselves/PRON as/ADP and/CCONJ the/DET more/ADV central/ADJ some/DET issue/NOUN is/AUX to/ADP our/PRON selfconceptions/NOUN the/PRON more/ADV steadfastly/ADV we/PRON cling/VERB to/ADP our/PRON view/NOUN In/ADP contrast/NOUN to/ADP the/DET situation/NOUN the/DET Israel/PROPN lobby/NOUN confronts/VERB the/DET selfconceptions/NOUN to/PART which/PRON the/DET gun/NOUN lobby/NOUN appeal/NOUN have/VERB little/ADJ to/PART do/VERB with/ADP ingroup/NOUN solidarities/NOUN based/VERB on/ADP real/ADJ or/CCONJ imagined/VERB commonalitiesamp160/PROPN However/ADV they/PRON have/VERB a/DET great/ADJ deal/NOUN to/PART do/VERB with/ADP outgroup/NOUN hostility/NOUN 8211/NUM directed/VERB at/ADP the/DET kinds/NOUN of/ADP people/NOUN who/PRON think/VERB that/SCONJ only/ADV benighted/VERB losers/NOUN stick/VERB to/ADP their/PRON religion/NOUN and/CCONJ their/PRON 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<p>Photo by Alex Wright | <a href="" type="internal">CC by 2.0</a></p>
<p>Ken Burns “Vietnam War” documentary seems to emphasize the anti-war movement harassing returning veterans by name calling or spitting—an accusation I never heard of until the mid-1990s.</p>
<p>In 1965 across the country at colleges students were holding anti-war teach-ins, poetry&#160; readings, and small anti-war demonstrations. I had been in the anti-war movement starting in May 21-23, 1965, when the newly formed Vietnam Day Committee (called VDC) held the teach-in for 36-hours on the men’s playing field at UC Berkeley. I and a female friend listened for hours to the speakers in the hot afternoon as 30,000 people showed up. The State Department, who was invited to send a speaker, declined so an empty chair stood on stage with a sign saying, “Reserved for the State Department.” We listened to the baby doctor Benjamin Spock; veteran socialist leader Norman Thomas; novelist Norman Mailer; independent journalist I.F. Stone and folksinger Phil Ochs sang songs.</p>
<p>After a break for dinner, we walked onto the steps leading up to the Student Union where a young man who was handing out leaflets barked, “Sit-in against the war in San Francisco. Sit-in against the war in San Francisco.” He asked us both, “Why don’t you come to the sit-in?”</p>
<p>“I was already arrested once,” I said. “FSM (Free Speech Movement sit-in).”</p>
<p>“Terrific,” he said.</p>
<p>“I was found guilty. That’s not terrific,” I said, taking one of his leaflets.</p>
<p>Forty students sat on all the stuffed green, blue or maroon couches and chairs in the first floor lounge around the TV set on the north end. We found a place to sit on the floor.&#160; The documentary had still another parade of facts about Vietnam, but then the announcer said that the U.S. had ordered premier Diem murdered. It seemed unbelievable. Murdered! How could they arrange for a man to be killed? Hire an assassin? Pay him money? How could they be so cold-blooded?</p>
<p>The next semester on October 15, 1965, at Vietnam Day Committee’s teach-in on campus we heard that the U.S. was now bombing North and South Vietnam as well as increasing U.S. soldiers fighting there.&#160;&#160; I joined the first large anti-war march of 10,000 to march to the Oakland Army Induction Center. We marched and chanted anti-war slogans in the middle of the street down Telegraph Avenue toward Ashby Avenue, going right until we reached the intersection of Ashby and Shattuck where we milled in the center of this big intersection.&#160; We were supposed to march down Shattuck Avenue into Oakland but a line of 400 fierce Oakland cops blocked us, refusing to let us enter Oakland. A hastily convened sub-committee met to decide what to do. In the middle of the crowd I saw my roommate Rita’s date, the Army Veteran, walk over to me. He was a tall, husky man in his mid-twenties.</p>
<p>“Look at the rooftops behind the Oakland cops,” he said pointing to the rooftops. I saw Oakland cops with shotguns pointing at us. “And over there,” he said pointing to more rooftops a little south where I saw more Oakland cops pointed their shotguns down at us.&#160; I felt terrified.</p>
<p>“Follow me,” he suggested, so I followed him out of the packed crowd onto the northeast corner where we both looked at the crowd. We were the only two people standing on that corner.</p>
<p>“I learned a lot in basic training,” he continued. “You always need an escape route. If the line of cops move forward and we were in the middle of the crowd, people might panic and we might be crushed. Right here we have an escape route. Follow me,” he said, motioning. He led me one block north to a side street where nobody was. “Now you can safely walk home on an escape route.”</p>
<p>“Thanks,” I said, and then I walked home to my apartment. From them on whenever I was in a large crowd I looked for my escape route.&#160; In the news&#160; that evening I learned later the VDC leadership didn’t not to go into Oakland that afternoon but led the students back to the Berkeley Civic Center park where they&#160; scheduled a 2nd march for the next day while 100 people slept overnight in the park. There they were tear gassed—another first.</p>
<p>The next day I wasn’t there when four thousand anti-war marchers reached the Oakland line a 2nd time, being again stopped by a line of cops.&#160; Poet Allen Ginsberg at the front of the march started chanting “Hare Krisna” to calm everyone down.&#160; Suddenly Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang members appeared and attacked the protestors, ripping up banners and shouting, “Go back to Russia you fucking communists!” The police stopped the Angels.</p>
<p>In August VDC organized students to walk on the railroad tracks to stop the troop trains from going through Berkeley. Later we heard the army never sent any more troop trains through Berkeley.</p>
<p>Anti-war marches continued on November 20 when VDC had a 3rd march. The day before the Hells Angels in a press conference said that though they think the march despicable, they won’t protest it. About 8000 protestors were able to peacefully march to DeFremery Pak in Oakland.&#160; November 27 about 20,000 anti-war protestors rallied at the White House. Many famous people sponsored the march:&#160; &#160;novelists Saul Bellow and James Hersey; playwright Arthur Miller; artist Alexander Calder; actors Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Tony Randall; Dr. Albert Sabin (developer of the oral polio vaccine).</p>
<p>The next summer of 1966 VDC headquarters was bombed in Berkeley. &#160;I was in Los Angeles where I grew up and went to the anti-war march at Century City on July 9th with my friend. We joined the three hundred marching around in a circle across the street from the fifteen-story chrome and steel hotel where governors from all fifty states were meeting. A line of cops stood in front of the hotel glaring hostilely at us.&#160; Century City was traffic lanes with zooming cars, towering glass-and-steel office buildings, and streets vacant of people. The picketers were students from UCLA, from Santa Monica Community College., from Westside CORE, and from University High School, the high school near the ULCA where professors sent their kids.&#160; The high school kids were the most raucous, pushing the line faster, starting a new chant, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?”</p>
<p>The high school kids knew they were cannon fodder, the next to go to Vietnam. They reminded me of my younger brother, who would soon turn eighteen years old and start junior college in September.&#160; I felt a sedate Old Lady of Twenty compared to the rowdy sixteen-year-olds who kept shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?” Our demonstration was a smash so that a group of us decided to name ourselves the July 9th committee and keep the group together planning more anti-war events that summer. We mostly made t-shirts with anti-war slogans.</p>
<p>August 6th Hiroshima Day I waited for the anti-war march to begin to stop the war in Vietnam and also to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima with the forty high school and college students at the downtown plaza in Olvera Street by the band shell. A few of us wore the red “Get out of Vietnam” t-shirt our silk-screen subcommittee had made.&#160; We complained about the middle-aged for banning our cheer–“Hey, hey, LBJ,/ how many kids have you killed today?”</p>
<p>“They’re a bunch of scared liberals,” a boy said.</p>
<p>“Let’s chant, ‘Get out of Vietnam’ in Spanish?” &#160;“Afuera de Vietnam,” the boy said.</p>
<p>“That’s great idea,” the girl said.“Yeah.”</p>
<p>“Good idea.”</p>
<p>“Chant it.”</p>
<p>“We’ll yell it.”</p>
<p>We then shouted in Spanish, “Afuera de Vietnam. Afuera de Vietnam” as we started out of the plaza. We were part of a crowd of 300 people marching the downtown sidewalks through a largely Latino crowd busy doing Saturday shopping..</p>
<p>“Afuera de Vietnam, afuera de Vietnam,” our group screamed. The Latino men at the street corner turned to stare at us as we shouted, “afuera de Vietnam” marching by the City Hall, which looked like a concrete white phallus thrusting up into the sky.</p>
<p>“Afuera de Vietnam. Afuera de Vietnam,” we yelled all the way to the steps of City Hall.</p>
<p>I proudly wore a black arm band, walking up and down through the crowd on the City Hall lawn handing around a coffee can to collect money for the Peace Action Council. The glaring sun cooked us. About ten of us were moving through the crowd with our coffee cans. The teenagers threw in quarters, the adults half dollars and dollar bills in my can. From the top steps of City Hall respectable Westside liberals gave boring speeches to a crowd that was baking in the August sun. I thought the Los Angeles anti-war movement could kill you with boredom and decorum except for my small group of rowdies.</p>
<p>Back in Berkeley the spring of 1967 I heard Martin Luther King speaks out against the war in January. I took a short break from my studies March 25 to join the national anti-war protests. I and 100,000 others peacefully marched miles from downtown San Francisco to Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park where we filled up the stadium. We listened to many speakers including Julian Bond, Eldridge Cleaver, Coretta Scott King (King was leading an anti-war march that day in Chicago), and listened to Judy Collins and San Francisco bands. In the spring the Vietnam War had only gotten bigger with more U.S. troops and more U.S. bombings.</p>
<p>Just before I started the summer session, my mother told me she and my 78-year old grandmother were going to their first anti-war march June 23 in Century City in Los Angeles where President Johnson was having a $500/plate funding raising dinner at the hotel. My mom and grandmother joined the thousands in the march—mothers with children as Another Mother for Peace was organizing in Los Angeles; the disabled; senior citizens–marching from Cheviot Hills Park to the hotel. The baby doctor Benjamin Spock was at the head of the march. The anti-war movement had spread beyond small pacifist circles and college campuses to mothers, senior citizens, and intellectuals like poet Lowell, and writers at the New York Review of Books who in New York were coming out against the war. Four Vietnam veterans started Vietnam Veterans against the war that June.</p>
<p>1,300 helmeted LAPD officers carryings guns and nightsticks attacked the head of the crowd. The people were boxed in with nowhere to run to:&#160; the police guarded the hotel to the west; a police blockade was on the north; thousands of marchers pushed in from the south; and a steep embankment was on the east. My mother later told me my grandmother was nearly knocked down in the terrified crowd. My grandmother had survived but I was very upset about my grandmother being attacked.</p>
<p>In October the Berkeley Stop-the-Draft movement had a week of protests in Oakland. On Monday the moderates had a peaceful sit-in on the steps of the Oakland Induction Center. The anti-war moderates, who had wanted the peaceful sit-in, had been arguing with the radicals, who want to move into the streets. Before Monday the moderates had won. The group that sat down included Joan Baez and her mother when the cops started clubbing all the seated people who ducked and ran.&#160; After the moderates were clubbed, the radicals won out, the group deciding take over the street.</p>
<p>All the young men I knew including my brother were searching for ways to get out of the draft. I caught the bus into downtown Oakland, getting off at the downtown shopping district, and started walking through the crowds of shoppers and office folk–mostly middle aged ladies or younger women in dresses, heels and stockings or men in suits or shirts and trousers. I was wearing my demonstration clothes:&#160; jeans, a green t-shirt, a blue jean jacket, and tennis shoes.</p>
<p>Near the Induction Center, shoppers and office workers were replaced by a crowd of 5,000 protesters. Some young men wore motorcycle helmets or construction hard hats, and a few even held shields. I saw two medics with white arm bands. Medical students came to demonstrations to patch up the clubbed, the gassed, and the bruised. Huge Oakland cops with their nightsticks by their side and their guns in their holsters stood between the crowd and the building. More hundreds of big, beefy cops stood in a line down one side street leading up to the Induction Center.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the Oakland cops between the protesters and the Induction Center started pushing the crowd back away from the building. Another group of Oakland cops came up from the side street, marching in between the crowd. The cops cut the 5,000 into about four groups of about 1,000 apiece, moving each group away from the building. My group retreated down half a block in the middle of the street. No cars could get through. A hundred cops stationed themselves, clubs up, in front of the crowd.</p>
<p>The militants stopped and milled in the middle of the street. With their clubs up, the police started to push the protesters back once again. My group started to run, retreating down the middle of the street another half block until we were milling in the middle of the intersection. The cops stationed themselves in front of the street they had just come down, still holding their clubs high. A second and third line of cops came up, completely blocking off both cross streets, looking angry and menacing.</p>
<p>My group had only one exit, running down the street behind them. Good god, I thought, please don’t bring up a fourth line of cops to beat the hell out of us.&#160; As if the crowd shared my fear, the mass of people started running down the middle of the one open street. Hundreds of cops marched with clubs up pushing the crowd who ran away again down the middle of the street.</p>
<p>The cops, clubs up, pushed us back a second block from the Induction Center and then pushed us back a third block. On the sidewalk a medic treated a young man whose head was bleeding. Behind us, we saw a horde of black motorcycle cops driving toward us leading a bus full of draftees. The motorcycles cut a line in the middle of the protestors, leaving room for the bus to drive through.</p>
<p>We in the street hollered at the scared boys’ faces peering out of the windows, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” “Get out of Vietnam.” “No draft, no war.”</p>
<p>The draftees in the buses looked at us as if we were from Mars. They looked at us with bewildered faces as the bus roared on through the crowd in the street.</p>
<p>“Stop the war. Stop the war,” more people yelled at the draftees.</p>
<p>The man beside me said, “We kept the buses from coming in for fifteen minutes.”</p>
<p>Fifteen minutes. Big deal, I thought, as I sat on the bus driving over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco.&#160; That night I dreamed of lines of Oakland cops on three sides of me with a fourth line of cops coming up from behind. Circled and trapped. The cops started clubbing people around me.</p>
<p>In June my graduation was looming. I told my parents I wasn’t going to the regular graduation ceremonies and not to come. Instead I went with my friend Evelyn to the Vietnam Commencement Counter-Graduation. We edged our way through the crowd packed into Sproul Plaza. Five thousand had crammed into every inch of Sproul Plaza from the doors of Sproul Hall across to the Student Union and the Terrace.</p>
<p>We squeezed our way through the packed crowd to the Student Union steps, climbed up a few steps and sat down. A girl was inching her way through the crowd handing out leaflets. I took one, and read a long list of the names of young men I knew who had pledged not to be drafted.</p>
<p>I saw my community in Sproul Plaza. Two hundred male faculty in suits and ties and three women faculty stood on the top of the steps facing the crowd. A band crowded lower on the steps, solemnly clutching their tuba, trombones, drums, trumpets, and flutes. At the microphone a professor was giving citations out to young men for draft refusal, including one spending his time in the stockade for refusing to report for reserve duty. His friend picked it up for him and promised to deliver it to him in the stockade.</p>
<p>Yes, I thought, my magic community was here and had reached out to include the soldier in the stockade in San Francisco. Phil Ochs, our troubadour, pushed his way to the microphone with his guitar and began to sing, “It’s always the old who lead you to war/ and it’s always the young who go./ And I ain’t a marching anymore. /And I ain’t a marching anymore.”</p>
<p>Then Dan Siegal, a law student at Boalt Law School, took the mike and said, “Will all the men in the crowd who have vowed to refuse the draft stand?” Hundreds of young men from all sections of the crowd stood up to deafening applause. “Now say the pledge,” Siegal said.</p>
<p>They said in unison: “Our war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral. As long as the United States is involved in this war I will not serve in the Armed Forces.”</p>
<p>For four years we had breathed in this war daily like smelling a noxious gas. For four years the war hovered over first dates and weddings.&#160; For four years every young man I knew was terrified of being drafted for this war they detested, talked of harming themselves or going into exile. To stop the war, the young men I knew had to put their futures on the line. The crowd roared its approval.</p>
<p>Siegel said, “Now all those who support them stand up.” Evelyn and I stood up along with the rest of the crowd. From the second floor balcony of the Student Union a trumpet sounded. The band on the steps of Sproul Hall started to play–tubas, drums, flutes, and trombones–joining the trumpet to serenade the class of 1968 including the soldier in the stockade in San Francisco.</p> | The Antiwar Movement, Class of 1968 | true | https://counterpunch.org/2017/11/02/the-antiwar-movement-class-of-1968/ | 2017-11-02 | 4left
| 3,063 | Photo by Alex Wright CC by 20 Ken Burns 8220Vietnam War8221 documentary seems to emphasize the antiwar movement harassing returning veterans by name calling or spitting8212an accusation I never heard of until the mid1990s In 1965 across the country at colleges students were holding antiwar teachins poetryamp160 readings and small antiwar demonstrations I had been in the antiwar movement starting in May 2123 1965 when the newly formed Vietnam Day Committee called VDC held the teachin for 36hours on the men8217s playing field at UC Berkeley I and a female friend listened for hours to the speakers in the hot afternoon as 30000 people showed up The State Department who was invited to send a speaker declined so an empty chair stood on stage with a sign saying 8220Reserved for the State Department8221 We listened to the baby doctor Benjamin Spock veteran socialist leader Norman Thomas novelist Norman Mailer independent journalist IF Stone and folksinger Phil Ochs sang songs After a break for dinner we walked onto the steps leading up to the Student Union where a young man who was handing out leaflets barked 8220Sitin against the war in San Francisco Sitin against the war in San Francisco8221 He asked us both 8220Why don8217t you come to the sitin8221 8220I was already arrested once8221 I said 8220FSM Free Speech Movement sitin8221 8220Terrific8221 he said 8220I was found guilty That8217s not terrific8221 I said taking one of his leaflets Forty students sat on all the stuffed green blue or maroon couches and chairs in the first floor lounge around the TV set on the north end We found a place to sit on the flooramp160 The documentary had still another parade of facts about Vietnam but then the announcer said that the US had ordered premier Diem murdered It seemed unbelievable Murdered How could they arrange for a man to be killed Hire an assassin Pay him money How could they be so coldblooded The next semester on October 15 1965 at Vietnam Day Committee8217s teachin on campus we heard that the US was now bombing North and South Vietnam as well as increasing US soldiers fighting thereamp160amp160 I joined the first large antiwar march of 10000 to march to the Oakland Army Induction Center We marched and chanted antiwar slogans in the middle of the street down Telegraph Avenue toward Ashby Avenue going right until we reached the intersection of Ashby and Shattuck where we milled in the center of this big intersectionamp160 We were supposed to march down Shattuck Avenue into Oakland but a line of 400 fierce Oakland cops blocked us refusing to let us enter Oakland A hastily convened subcommittee met to decide what to do In the middle of the crowd I saw my roommate Rita8217s date the Army Veteran walk over to me He was a tall husky man in his midtwenties 8220Look at the rooftops behind the Oakland cops8221 he said pointing to the rooftops I saw Oakland cops with shotguns pointing at us 8220And over there8221 he said pointing to more rooftops a little south where I saw more Oakland cops pointed their shotguns down at usamp160 I felt terrified 8220Follow me8221 he suggested so I followed him out of the packed crowd onto the northeast corner where we both looked at the crowd We were the only two people standing on that corner 8220I learned a lot in basic training8221 he continued 8220You always need an escape route If the line of cops move forward and we were in the middle of the crowd people might panic and we might be crushed Right here we have an escape route Follow me8221 he said motioning He led me one block north to a side street where nobody was 8220Now you can safely walk home on an escape route8221 8220Thanks8221 I said and then I walked home to my apartment From them on whenever I was in a large crowd I looked for my escape routeamp160 In the newsamp160 that evening I learned later the VDC leadership didn8217t not to go into Oakland that afternoon but led the students back to the Berkeley Civic Center park where theyamp160 scheduled a 2nd march for the next day while 100 people slept overnight in the park There they were tear gassed8212another first The next day I wasn8217t there when four thousand antiwar marchers reached the Oakland line a 2nd time being again stopped by a line of copsamp160 Poet Allen Ginsberg at the front of the march started chanting 8220Hare Krisna8221 to calm everyone downamp160 Suddenly Hell8217s Angels motorcycle gang members appeared and attacked the protestors ripping up banners and shouting 8220Go back to Russia you fucking communists8221 The police stopped the Angels In August VDC organized students to walk on the railroad tracks to stop the troop trains from going through Berkeley Later we heard the army never sent any more troop trains through Berkeley Antiwar marches continued on November 20 when VDC had a 3rd march The day before the Hells Angels in a press conference said that though they think the march despicable they won8217t protest it About 8000 protestors were able to peacefully march to DeFremery Pak in Oaklandamp160 November 27 about 20000 antiwar protestors rallied at the White House Many famous people sponsored the marchamp160 amp160novelists Saul Bellow and James Hersey playwright Arthur Miller artist Alexander Calder actors Ossie Davis Ruby Dee and Tony Randall Dr Albert Sabin developer of the oral polio vaccine The next summer of 1966 VDC headquarters was bombed in Berkeley amp160I was in Los Angeles where I grew up and went to the antiwar march at Century City on July 9th with my friend We joined the three hundred marching around in a circle across the street from the fifteenstory chrome and steel hotel where governors from all fifty states were meeting A line of cops stood in front of the hotel glaring hostilely at usamp160 Century City was traffic lanes with zooming cars towering glassandsteel office buildings and streets vacant of people The picketers were students from UCLA from Santa Monica Community College from Westside CORE and from University High School the high school near the ULCA where professors sent their kidsamp160 The high school kids were the most raucous pushing the line faster starting a new chant 8216Hey hey LBJ how many boys did you kill today8221 The high school kids knew they were cannon fodder the next to go to Vietnam They reminded me of my younger brother who would soon turn eighteen years old and start junior college in Septemberamp160 I felt a sedate Old Lady of Twenty compared to the rowdy sixteenyearolds who kept shouting 8220Hey hey LBJ how many boys did you kill today8221 Our demonstration was a smash so that a group of us decided to name ourselves the July 9th committee and keep the group together planning more antiwar events that summer We mostly made tshirts with antiwar slogans August 6th Hiroshima Day I waited for the antiwar march to begin to stop the war in Vietnam and also to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima with the forty high school and college students at the downtown plaza in Olvera Street by the band shell A few of us wore the red 8220Get out of Vietnam8221 tshirt our silkscreen subcommittee had madeamp160 We complained about the middleaged for banning our cheer82118220Hey hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today8221 8220They8217re a bunch of scared liberals8221 a boy said 8220Let8217s chant 8216Get out of Vietnam8217 in Spanish8221 amp1608220Afuera de Vietnam8221 the boy said 8220That8217s great idea8221 the girl said8220Yeah8221 8220Good idea8221 8220Chant it8221 8220We8217ll yell it8221 We then shouted in Spanish 8220Afuera de Vietnam Afuera de Vietnam8221 as we started out of the plaza We were part of a crowd of 300 people marching the downtown sidewalks through a largely Latino crowd busy doing Saturday shopping 8220Afuera de Vietnam afuera de Vietnam8221 our group screamed The Latino men at the street corner turned to stare at us as we shouted 8220afuera de Vietnam8221 marching by the City Hall which looked like a concrete white phallus thrusting up into the sky 8220Afuera de Vietnam Afuera de Vietnam8221 we yelled all the way to the steps of City Hall I proudly wore a black arm band walking up and down through the crowd on the City Hall lawn handing around a coffee can to collect money for the Peace Action Council The glaring sun cooked us About ten of us were moving through the crowd with our coffee cans The teenagers threw in quarters the adults half dollars and dollar bills in my can From the top steps of City Hall respectable Westside liberals gave boring speeches to a crowd that was baking in the August sun I thought the Los Angeles antiwar movement could kill you with boredom and decorum except for my small group of rowdies Back in Berkeley the spring of 1967 I heard Martin Luther King speaks out against the war in January I took a short break from my studies March 25 to join the national antiwar protests I and 100000 others peacefully marched miles from downtown San Francisco to Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park where we filled up the stadium We listened to many speakers including Julian Bond Eldridge Cleaver Coretta Scott King King was leading an antiwar march that day in Chicago and listened to Judy Collins and San Francisco bands In the spring the Vietnam War had only gotten bigger with more US troops and more US bombings Just before I started the summer session my mother told me she and my 78year old grandmother were going to their first antiwar march June 23 in Century City in Los Angeles where President Johnson was having a 500plate funding raising dinner at the hotel My mom and grandmother joined the thousands in the march8212mothers with children as Another Mother for Peace was organizing in Los Angeles the disabled senior citizens8211marching from Cheviot Hills Park to the hotel The baby doctor Benjamin Spock was at the head of the march The antiwar movement had spread beyond small pacifist circles and college campuses to mothers senior citizens and intellectuals like poet Lowell and writers at the New York Review of Books who in New York were coming out against the war Four Vietnam veterans started Vietnam Veterans against the war that June 1300 helmeted LAPD officers carryings guns and nightsticks attacked the head of the crowd The people were boxed in with nowhere to run toamp160 the police guarded the hotel to the west a police blockade was on the north thousands of marchers pushed in from the south and a steep embankment was on the east My mother later told me my grandmother was nearly knocked down in the terrified crowd My grandmother had survived but I was very upset about my grandmother being attacked In October the Berkeley StoptheDraft movement had a week of protests in Oakland On Monday the moderates had a peaceful sitin on the steps of the Oakland Induction Center The antiwar moderates who had wanted the peaceful sitin had been arguing with the radicals who want to move into the streets Before Monday the moderates had won The group that sat down included Joan Baez and her mother when the cops started clubbing all the seated people who ducked and ranamp160 After the moderates were clubbed the radicals won out the group deciding take over the street All the young men I knew including my brother were searching for ways to get out of the draft I caught the bus into downtown Oakland getting off at the downtown shopping district and started walking through the crowds of shoppers and office folk8211mostly middle aged ladies or younger women in dresses heels and stockings or men in suits or shirts and trousers I was wearing my demonstration clothesamp160 jeans a green tshirt a blue jean jacket and tennis shoes Near the Induction Center shoppers and office workers were replaced by a crowd of 5000 protesters Some young men wore motorcycle helmets or construction hard hats and a few even held shields I saw two medics with white arm bands Medical students came to demonstrations to patch up the clubbed the gassed and the bruised Huge Oakland cops with their nightsticks by their side and their guns in their holsters stood between the crowd and the building More hundreds of big beefy cops stood in a line down one side street leading up to the Induction Center Suddenly the Oakland cops between the protesters and the Induction Center started pushing the crowd back away from the building Another group of Oakland cops came up from the side street marching in between the crowd The cops cut the 5000 into about four groups of about 1000 apiece moving each group away from the building My group retreated down half a block in the middle of the street No cars could get through A hundred cops stationed themselves clubs up in front of the crowd The militants stopped and milled in the middle of the street With their clubs up the police started to push the protesters back once again My group started to run retreating down the middle of the street another half block until we were milling in the middle of the intersection The cops stationed themselves in front of the street they had just come down still holding their clubs high A second and third line of cops came up completely blocking off both cross streets looking angry and menacing My group had only one exit running down the street behind them Good god I thought please don8217t bring up a fourth line of cops to beat the hell out of usamp160 As if the crowd shared my fear the mass of people started running down the middle of the one open street Hundreds of cops marched with clubs up pushing the crowd who ran away again down the middle of the street The cops clubs up pushed us back a second block from the Induction Center and then pushed us back a third block On the sidewalk a medic treated a young man whose head was bleeding Behind us we saw a horde of black motorcycle cops driving toward us leading a bus full of draftees The motorcycles cut a line in the middle of the protestors leaving room for the bus to drive through We in the street hollered at the scared boys8217 faces peering out of the windows 8220Hell no we won8217t go8221 8220Get out of Vietnam8221 8220No draft no war8221 The draftees in the buses looked at us as if we were from Mars They looked at us with bewildered faces as the bus roared on through the crowd in the street 8220Stop the war Stop the war8221 more people yelled at the draftees The man beside me said 8220We kept the buses from coming in for fifteen minutes8221 Fifteen minutes Big deal I thought as I sat on the bus driving over the Bay Bridge into San Franciscoamp160 That night I dreamed of lines of Oakland cops on three sides of me with a fourth line of cops coming up from behind Circled and trapped The cops started clubbing people around me In June my graduation was looming I told my parents I wasn8217t going to the regular graduation ceremonies and not to come Instead I went with my friend Evelyn to the Vietnam Commencement CounterGraduation We edged our way through the crowd packed into Sproul Plaza Five thousand had crammed into every inch of Sproul Plaza from the doors of Sproul Hall across to the Student Union and the Terrace We squeezed our way through the packed crowd to the Student Union steps climbed up a few steps and sat down A girl was inching her way through the crowd handing out leaflets I took one and read a long list of the names of young men I knew who had pledged not to be drafted I saw my community in Sproul Plaza Two hundred male faculty in suits and ties and three women faculty stood on the top of the steps facing the crowd A band crowded lower on the steps solemnly clutching their tuba trombones drums trumpets and flutes At the microphone a professor was giving citations out to young men for draft refusal including one spending his time in the stockade for refusing to report for reserve duty His friend picked it up for him and promised to deliver it to him in the stockade Yes I thought my magic community was here and had reached out to include the soldier in the stockade in San Francisco Phil Ochs our troubadour pushed his way to the microphone with his guitar and began to sing 8220It8217s always the old who lead you to war and it8217s always the young who go And I ain8217t a marching anymore And I ain8217t a marching anymore8221 Then Dan Siegal a law student at Boalt Law School took the mike and said 8220Will all the men in the crowd who have vowed to refuse the draft stand8221 Hundreds of young men from all sections of the crowd stood up to deafening applause 8220Now say the pledge8221 Siegal said They said in unison 8220Our war in Vietnam is unjust and immoral As long as the United States is involved in this war I will not serve in the Armed Forces8221 For four years we had breathed in this war daily like smelling a noxious gas For four years the war hovered over first dates and weddingsamp160 For four years every young man I knew was terrified of being drafted for this war they detested talked of harming themselves or going into exile To stop the war the young men I knew had to put their futures on the line The crowd roared its approval Siegel said 8220Now all those who support them stand up8221 Evelyn and I stood up along with the rest of the crowd From the second floor balcony of the Student Union a trumpet sounded The band on the steps of Sproul Hall started to play8211tubas drums flutes and trombones8211joining the trumpet to serenade the class of 1968 including the soldier in the stockade in San Francisco | Photo/NOUN by/ADP Alex/PROPN Wright/PROPN CC/PROPN by/ADP 20/NUM Ken/PROPN Burns/PROPN 8220Vietnam/PROPN War8221/PROPN documentary/NOUN seems/VERB to/PART emphasize/VERB the/DET antiwar/ADJ movement/NOUN harassing/VERB returning/VERB veterans/NOUN by/ADP name/NOUN calling/NOUN or/CCONJ spitting8212an/NOUN accusation/NOUN I/PRON never/ADV heard/VERB of/ADP until/SCONJ the/DET mid1990s/NOUN In/ADP 1965/NUM across/ADP the/DET country/NOUN at/ADP colleges/NOUN students/NOUN were/AUX holding/VERB antiwar/ADJ 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<p>By Patricia Leigh BrownThis report was produced by <a href="http://californiawatch.org/" type="external">California Watch</a>, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting.</p>
<p>THERMAL, Calif. — At one end of Avenue 54, a road slicing through some of the most fertile land in the United States, resides the California of the popular imagination: a place of Bermuda shorts, putting greens and picture-window champagne dinners overlooking the infinity pool.</p>
<p>But there is another Avenue 54 concealed behind tumbleweeds and dust. It is the 54 of arsenic-tainted water, frequent blackouts and raw sewage that backs up into the shower. It is a place of grim housekeeping, where the residents of the Eastern Coachella Valley’s roughly 125 illegal mobile home parks struggle to make 720 square feet of deteriorating metal and plywood a safe and habitable home.</p>
<p>Even the names of unincorporated communities here — Mecca, Oasis — evoke Biblical lands, befitting the manmade plagues that beset the region. This desert valley, about 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles, is one of the country’s richest agricultural areas, an irrigation-fed bounty of table grapes, bell peppers, seedless watermelons and most of the country’s dates. Island-paradise palms spring mirage-like from the hot, arid soil.</p>
<p />
<p>This Coachella, unvisited by hipsters who attend a yearly music festival in the valley, is one of the poorest, densest areas of the United States — especially during grape season, when an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 migrant workers pour into already crowded quarters, sleeping in fields, alongside irrigation ditches or on swatches of cardboard in the dirt parking lot of Leon’s Market in Mecca.</p>
<p>Israel and Fatima Gutierrez — the parents of Neftoli, 7, and Alexis, 5, and residents of the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park — live the nightmare daily.</p>
<p>The vinyl floors of their disintegrating trailer, which they rent, are dimpled with moisture. Plywood covers holes where windows once were, affixed with duct tape to walls in a slow state of collapse. Rats are a constant presence; sometimes, frogs make their way through the pipes. An extension cord leads from a single light bulb hanging from the bedroom ceiling to a socket with exposed wires.</p>
<p>“Sometimes, the niños shock themselves and scream,” Israel Gutierrez said.</p>
<p>In the tumbledown warrens of America’s pre-fab favelas — California’s Third World — the 20th century is a dim memory. Basic needs like potable water, safe and reliable electricity, rudimentary sanitation, and clean air can go unmet. Darryl Adams, the Coachella Valley Unified School District superintendent, who took over last year, visited some of his young charges recently in 115-degree heat. “These children were splashing around in little portable pools getting infections from unclean water,” Adams said.</p>
<p>“This is the Golden State, the great state,” he said. “I had no idea.”</p>
<p>“We are like a small country within the United States,” said Eduardo Guevara, a coordinator of Promotores Comunitarios del Desierto, one of a small but growing number of citizen groups working to improve the trailer parks.</p>
<p>In recent months, this small, isolated country has received national attention, with visits by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and activist Erin Brockovich.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, dozens of residents, including teachers and schoolchildren, were sickened by noxious odors emanating from a four-story-high mesa of hazardous waste operated by Western Environmental Inc., a Utah-based soil recycling company that leases land from the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians.</p>
<p>The devil’s palette of stenches was overwhelming, residents say, shifting from gas fumes to the smell of burnt oil to ruptured sewer pipes. The symptoms of “Toxico Mecca,” as it became known locally, included nausea, vomiting, dizziness and difficulty breathing.</p>
<p>“At first, we thought it was the Salton Sea,” said Isabel Galvez, a yard supervisor at Mecca Elementary School, referring to the scent of dead fish baked in fetid air at the valley’s northern edge. “But it was the site.”</p>
<p>The valley long has been a go-to toxic dumping ground, particularly on tribal land — a crazy quilt of jurisdictions scattered throughout the region. Among the most notable have been the Lawson Dump, on a Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians allotment, where hellish subterranean fires smoldered beneath millions of tons of burned waste (it was shut down by a federal judge in 2006). Down the road are remains of the state’s largest pile of garbage, nicknamed Mount San Diego by locals and closed by federal order in 1994.</p>
<p>At Western Environmental, the lack of state hazardous waste permits has come under public scrutiny. During a peak period in 2009-10, more than 10,000 shipments, most of it dirt contaminated with oil, gasoline and other hydrocarbons that emit fumes, were trucked to the plant along with sewage sludge, pesticides and other chemicals.</p>
<p>In May, after public outcry, Boxer, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, held a brief press conference at the school where dozens were sickened. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to stop receiving hazardous waste. In August, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control acknowledged it had failed for at least seven years to stop hazardous waste from being shipped to the plant and vowed to make improvements over how it monitors the area.‘It’s just the poor and the rich’</p>
<p>For those growing up in the Eastern Coachella Valley’s mobile home parks, though, there is precious little difference between the kind of environmental crises that bring headlines and TV cameras and the hundreds of dangers and indignities that define everyday life.</p>
<p>Yanet Villicana, now a 20-year-old college student, lives with her farm-worker parents and five younger sisters in a peach-brown metal trailer seemingly held together by will.</p>
<p>She walks the dirt streets of her childhood home, the Lawson Mobile Home Park — a squalid city of about 400 trailers on Torres-Martinez land — to take the county bus to college in Palm Springs. It’s a grueling two-hour journey one way.</p>
<p>She passes Duroville next door, the park on tribal land that became synonymous with rural slums, before arriving in Mecca. After too many stops, the scraggly mesquite and cracked pavement of unincorporated California gives way to bougainvillea-lined boulevards as the bus approaches Indian Wells, where streets are named for Bob Hope and Dinah Shore. The median household income is $134,615, among the highest in the state; in Mecca, it’s $25,873.</p>
<p>“It’s really sad when we go through the wealthy parts,” said Villicana, a psychology major who picks grapes in the fields during the summer to pay for braces and school. “It’s like the bus goes through all the poor sections first, then out of nowhere there are a bunch of huge houses and beautiful sights. It’s sad, because there’s really nothing in between. It’s just the poor and the rich.”</p>
<p>When the bus returns late at night, she is afraid to walk the park’s nameless pitch-black dirt lanes because there are no lights. Electricity charges are determined by the landlord, who reads the meters, so rent during the sweltering swamp-cooler summer can run as high as $700 a month.</p>
<p>“There’s nothing here,” Villicana said. “No community center. No parks.”</p>
<p>What is here, said Cecilia Cote, who works as a health promotora for the nonprofit Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo, are families living 15 to a trailer. Children are exposed to fleas from roaming dogs, open sewers or septic breaches, and overcrowded restrooms. Grape stakes salvaged from abandoned fields are used as kindling for warm baths and cooking.</p>
<p>Dr. Raul Ruiz, an emergency physician at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage and an associate dean at the UC Riverside School of Medicine, launched the Coachella Valley Healthcare Initiative last year. Ruiz, the son of farm workers who holds three degrees from Harvard University, considers the trailer parks “a public health nightmare.”</p>
<p>At the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park, Fatima Gutierrez sweeps rat droppings, changes the traps, bleaches the walls with a dish scrubber and climbs a ladder during rainy season to seal the roof with a plastic tarp, usually futilely.</p>
<p>Dr. Kenneth Russ, a physician in Palm Springs who has consulted with mobile home park residents, said the combination of substandard housing, air pollution, exposure to hazardous waste and poor nutrition “can be physically and emotionally traumatic, especially for children.”</p>
<p>Until recently, when the Riverside County Department of Environmental Health stepped in, the Rancho Garcia park had an open fly-infested sewage pit. Raw sewage seeped into streets and yards.</p>
<p>Leonard Garcia, whose father, Miguel, started the park as a labor camp, suggested that residents’ habits were to blame for some of the problems, including the sewage.</p>
<p>“It could be a plugged line, even in their own trailer,” he explained. “Sometimes, it’s a Pamper. Sometimes, it’s a buildup of lard. Or toys. Believe me, you don’t want to know what we’ve seen in these things.”</p>
<p>Conditions at Rancho Garcia are more acute than at many other parks. According to the state’s esoteric mobile home park laws, park owners are responsible for infrastructure and for providing a decent living environment that will protect homeowners’ investments. (Ninety-five percent of area residents own their mobile homes.) If a park closes, those living in rickety hand-me-downs that are too fragile to move are particularly vulnerable.</p>
<p>“Effectively, you lose a piece of property and your shelter,” explained Megan Beaman, an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance in Coachella.</p>
<p>Riverside County has 121 unpermitted parks and a few dozen legal ones, said Bob Lyman, regional manager for the county’s Transportation &amp; Land Management Agency. In addition, there are five major parks and more than 100 smaller ones on Torres-Martinez land, all outside the reach of county inspectors.</p>
<p>These tribal mobile home park residents have little legal recourse against punitive practices by owners, such as unlawful evictions or “the electricity being shut off if they are a day behind on rent,” said Arturo Rodriguez, directing attorney for the Coachella California Rural Legal Assistance Migrant Farmworker Project.Housing law’s unintended consequence</p>
<p>The proliferation of small unregulated parks dates back to the 1992 Farm Labor Housing Protection Act, an emergency measure that allowed growers to build parks of up to 12 units without obtaining zoning and land use permits.</p>
<p>But the bill written by Richard Polanco, a Los Angeles assemblyman, had unintended consequences. Opportunistic landlords swooped in to erect an estimated 400 unpermitted parks, still known as “polancos,” that skirted basic health and safety regulations, including the placement of wells, septic systems and safe electrical wiring.</p>
<p>The parks remained largely under the radar until the summer of 1998, when two people died in two different parks — one a teenager who was electrocuted when a fence became energized due to faulty wiring, the other a man electrocuted while working on repairs to his mobile home.</p>
<p>Riverside County code enforcers began cracking down, targeting 18 parks for closure and filing lawsuits against the owners. In response, California Rural Legal Assistance filed housing discrimination suits with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying the county had unfairly targeted Latino-owned parks. Two years after the first crackdown, HUD announced a $21 million settlement with the county to pay for community projects, low-income housing and cash payments to the farm worker families.</p>
<p>“It’s no accident these communities are suffering,” said Beaman, with California Rural Legal Assistance. “It comes with being 97 percent Latino, 50 percent undocumented and 100 percent working class. It’s a snapshot of how certain categories of people are forced to live differently based on their perceived power.”</p>
<p>Widespread panic about park closures prompted thousands of residents, including many indigenous native-speaking Purépecha people from the highlands of Michoacán in Mexico, to move their trailers onto sovereign tribal land, away from code enforcers as well as U.S. immigration agents.</p>
<p>The denouement was the housing apocalypse known as Duroville, a postcard of squalor and lawlessness in which packs of wild dogs roamed muddy alleyways and raw sewage puddled along Michael Street, Marylou Avenue and other byways named for owner Harvey Duro’s family.</p>
<p>Airborne toxins from the burning illegal Lawson dump next door — including elevated levels of dioxin, a carcinogen — finally brought Duroville to the attention of the federal government.</p>
<p>Sister Gabi Williams, 62, a self-described “gringo” nun, has become something of an Our Lady of Mobile Home Parks for her tireless efforts there. She recalls “black water on the ground, the dump with a huge hole in the middle sinking.”</p>
<p>She said of her work there, with flinty matter-of-factness: “It wasn’t a good idea to put up a child center around battery acid.”</p>
<p>After a cascade of events, the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced that the park would be shut down, displacing 4,000 to 5,000 residents. Averting what he called “a mass humanitarian crisis,” U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson ordered the park to remain open and set up a two-year receivership charged with making the park livable until alternatives could be found.</p>
<p>Today, the population of Duroville hovers around 2,000, expanding during the harvest and contracting from July to September, when half the residents migrate to the San Joaquin Valley. An 11-acre open sewage evaporation pond is still in use. Thomas J. Flynn, the federally appointed receiver, calls it “a West Nile virus incubator that’s like something out of Margaret Mead.”</p>
<p>Flynn has worked to alleviate the park’s underground economy, a haven for criminal activity, including a notorious drug-dealing intersection in which “cars would pull in as if they were pulling into a McDonald’s,” in his words. He also noted the “repair” shops with hundreds of cars, many stolen.</p>
<p>A blocks-long monolith of domestic detritus — mattresses, playpens, car seats, carpeting, masses of splintered wood — represents the remains of makeshift wooden structures attached to trailers, recently ordered removed.</p>
<p>“Fire accelerators that combined with improperly installed propane tanks were like a bomb,” Flynn said.</p>
<p>Dr. Alberto Manetta, a professor emeritus at UC Irvine and chairman of Latino Health Access, a nonprofit based in Santa Ana, runs a health clinic in Duroville. Two recent health surveys by Manetta and his team offer an illuminating portrait of the park: Ninety-five percent of residents do not have Internet access. Only 8 percent finished high school. One-third lack air conditioning. More than half have no source of hot water for bathing, with children using leftover cooking water to wash. Chronic conditions like diabetes and tobacco and alcohol addiction abound.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Manetta observes, the residents’ deepest concern is not their health. “Their biggest worry is being thrown out of the park,” he said.Citizen groups fight for improvements</p>
<p>Elisa Guevara’s first home in America was a wooden shack attached to a friend’s trailer in Duroville. She was an accounting assistant for a computer store in Mexico; on her first Monday in California, she went to work in the fields. She suffered dehydration and heat stroke but continued picking. “Once she starts something, she finishes it, no matter what,” her brother Eduardo said.</p>
<p>Frightened for her family’s safety after an arson, Guevara and her husband, daughter and parents left Duroville. They moved into their own trailer at the Los Gatos Mobile Home Park, brightening a corner of the living room with a shrine honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe.</p>
<p>“It was a dream to have a house,” Guevara said, “even if it wasn’t the best you could think of.”</p>
<p>But her optimism was short-lived: Last summer, half the park’s trailers lost electricity for a month when the overtaxed electrical box caught fire, forcing nine families to sleep outside because of the heat. They had to rely on ice coolers to store food and medicine. Before that, there was the defective plumbing system that forced families to live with their own waste.</p>
<p>The park’s co-owner, Benjamín Hernández offered a litany of blame for the park’s woes — residents who waste water and electricity, county inspectors who are demanding high fees for permits, and the poor economy devastating his family’s finances. Hernández said he invested in the park with nine siblings, but now they don’t have enough money to make improvements.</p>
<p>“We wanted to get a line of credit to do everything, but then the problems with the economy hit,” Hernández said. “We lost our jobs. People lost their homes. We were really affected by the economy. We spoke with the county. We tried to find another way to move forward. But there are too many costs, too many rules, too many requirements.”</p>
<p>Guevara remembers praying a lot, convinced that as a non-English-speaking woman with kidney problems, there was little she could do. But inspired by her daughter, she acted.</p>
<p>The result was Comité el Poder de la 62 — “The Power of the 62nd” — named for their avenue, one of a growing number of citizen groups fighting to improve their neighborhoods by taking landlords to court. A lawsuit is still pending; last year, a preliminary injunction required the owners to restore electricity and repair the sewage system.</p>
<p>In the Eastern Coachella Valley, worst-case scenarios are common events: Witness 90-year-old former Sunbird Mobile Home Park resident Lucas D. Hernandez’s water bill, which went from $14.16 to $596.26 after the park launched a new rate system. (Residents have filed a legal complaint.) And at Oasis Mobile Home Park — a misnomer if ever there was one — a discovery in 2007 by the EPA of a landlord’s abhorrent cunning: a system of hidden pipes rigged to agricultural drain lines that discharged residents’ sewage into the Salton Sea.</p>
<p>“You get into this floppy mood,” Maribel Sanchez, 27, said of St. Anthony’s Mobile Home Park, where a collapsed casing on a deteriorating well pumped sand into their water. One resident whose wife was recovering from breast surgery was forced to drive 15 miles so that she could take a clean shower.</p>
<p>“People don’t speak up,” added Sanchez, who works as a nanny in a gated community in La Quinta. “They think their voice isn’t going to be heard.”</p>
<p>The park, home to more than 600 people, has experienced years of violations, most notably dangerously high levels of naturally occurring arsenic in the water — prompting residents like Ana Sanchez, Maribel’s mother, to spend $20 a week or more on bottled drinking water.</p>
<p>Ruiz, of the Coachella Valley Healthcare Initiative, said the long-term health effects of the area’s myriad issues, from mobile home parks to hazardous waste, are far from clear.</p>
<p>“This should hit us all in our hearts and minds,” he said of the valley’s precarious teeter-totter of inequality. “A community doesn’t end at a gate.”</p> | On Edge of Paradise, Coachella Workers Live in Grim Conditions | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/on-edge-of-paradise-coachella-workers-live-in-grim-conditions/ | 2011-11-02 | 4left
| 3,063 | By Patricia Leigh BrownThis report was produced by California Watch a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting THERMAL Calif 8212 At one end of Avenue 54 a road slicing through some of the most fertile land in the United States resides the California of the popular imagination a place of Bermuda shorts putting greens and picturewindow champagne dinners overlooking the infinity pool But there is another Avenue 54 concealed behind tumbleweeds and dust It is the 54 of arsenictainted water frequent blackouts and raw sewage that backs up into the shower It is a place of grim housekeeping where the residents of the Eastern Coachella Valley8217s roughly 125 illegal mobile home parks struggle to make 720 square feet of deteriorating metal and plywood a safe and habitable home Even the names of unincorporated communities here 8212 Mecca Oasis 8212 evoke Biblical lands befitting the manmade plagues that beset the region This desert valley about 130 miles southeast of Los Angeles is one of the country8217s richest agricultural areas an irrigationfed bounty of table grapes bell peppers seedless watermelons and most of the country8217s dates Islandparadise palms spring miragelike from the hot arid soil This Coachella unvisited by hipsters who attend a yearly music festival in the valley is one of the poorest densest areas of the United States 8212 especially during grape season when an estimated 15000 to 20000 migrant workers pour into already crowded quarters sleeping in fields alongside irrigation ditches or on swatches of cardboard in the dirt parking lot of Leon8217s Market in Mecca Israel and Fatima Gutierrez 8212 the parents of Neftoli 7 and Alexis 5 and residents of the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park 8212 live the nightmare daily The vinyl floors of their disintegrating trailer which they rent are dimpled with moisture Plywood covers holes where windows once were affixed with duct tape to walls in a slow state of collapse Rats are a constant presence sometimes frogs make their way through the pipes An extension cord leads from a single light bulb hanging from the bedroom ceiling to a socket with exposed wires 8220Sometimes the ni241os shock themselves and scream8221 Israel Gutierrez said In the tumbledown warrens of America8217s prefab favelas 8212 California8217s Third World 8212 the 20th century is a dim memory Basic needs like potable water safe and reliable electricity rudimentary sanitation and clean air can go unmet Darryl Adams the Coachella Valley Unified School District superintendent who took over last year visited some of his young charges recently in 115degree heat 8220These children were splashing around in little portable pools getting infections from unclean water8221 Adams said 8220This is the Golden State the great state8221 he said 8220I had no idea8221 8220We are like a small country within the United States8221 said Eduardo Guevara a coordinator of Promotores Comunitarios del Desierto one of a small but growing number of citizen groups working to improve the trailer parks In recent months this small isolated country has received national attention with visits by US Sen Barbara Boxer and activist Erin Brockovich Earlier this year dozens of residents including teachers and schoolchildren were sickened by noxious odors emanating from a fourstoryhigh mesa of hazardous waste operated by Western Environmental Inc a Utahbased soil recycling company that leases land from the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians The devil8217s palette of stenches was overwhelming residents say shifting from gas fumes to the smell of burnt oil to ruptured sewer pipes The symptoms of 8220Toxico Mecca8221 as it became known locally included nausea vomiting dizziness and difficulty breathing 8220At first we thought it was the Salton Sea8221 said Isabel Galvez a yard supervisor at Mecca Elementary School referring to the scent of dead fish baked in fetid air at the valley8217s northern edge 8220But it was the site8221 The valley long has been a goto toxic dumping ground particularly on tribal land 8212 a crazy quilt of jurisdictions scattered throughout the region Among the most notable have been the Lawson Dump on a TorresMartinez Desert Cahuilla Indians allotment where hellish subterranean fires smoldered beneath millions of tons of burned waste it was shut down by a federal judge in 2006 Down the road are remains of the state8217s largest pile of garbage nicknamed Mount San Diego by locals and closed by federal order in 1994 At Western Environmental the lack of state hazardous waste permits has come under public scrutiny During a peak period in 200910 more than 10000 shipments most of it dirt contaminated with oil gasoline and other hydrocarbons that emit fumes were trucked to the plant along with sewage sludge pesticides and other chemicals In May after public outcry Boxer chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a brief press conference at the school where dozens were sickened Shortly thereafter the US Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to stop receiving hazardous waste In August California8217s Department of Toxic Substances Control acknowledged it had failed for at least seven years to stop hazardous waste from being shipped to the plant and vowed to make improvements over how it monitors the area8216It8217s just the poor and the rich8217 For those growing up in the Eastern Coachella Valley8217s mobile home parks though there is precious little difference between the kind of environmental crises that bring headlines and TV cameras and the hundreds of dangers and indignities that define everyday life Yanet Villicana now a 20yearold college student lives with her farmworker parents and five younger sisters in a peachbrown metal trailer seemingly held together by will She walks the dirt streets of her childhood home the Lawson Mobile Home Park 8212 a squalid city of about 400 trailers on TorresMartinez land 8212 to take the county bus to college in Palm Springs It8217s a grueling twohour journey one way She passes Duroville next door the park on tribal land that became synonymous with rural slums before arriving in Mecca After too many stops the scraggly mesquite and cracked pavement of unincorporated California gives way to bougainvillealined boulevards as the bus approaches Indian Wells where streets are named for Bob Hope and Dinah Shore The median household income is 134615 among the highest in the state in Mecca it8217s 25873 8220It8217s really sad when we go through the wealthy parts8221 said Villicana a psychology major who picks grapes in the fields during the summer to pay for braces and school 8220It8217s like the bus goes through all the poor sections first then out of nowhere there are a bunch of huge houses and beautiful sights It8217s sad because there8217s really nothing in between It8217s just the poor and the rich8221 When the bus returns late at night she is afraid to walk the park8217s nameless pitchblack dirt lanes because there are no lights Electricity charges are determined by the landlord who reads the meters so rent during the sweltering swampcooler summer can run as high as 700 a month 8220There8217s nothing here8221 Villicana said 8220No community center No parks8221 What is here said Cecilia Cote who works as a health promotora for the nonprofit Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo are families living 15 to a trailer Children are exposed to fleas from roaming dogs open sewers or septic breaches and overcrowded restrooms Grape stakes salvaged from abandoned fields are used as kindling for warm baths and cooking Dr Raul Ruiz an emergency physician at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage and an associate dean at the UC Riverside School of Medicine launched the Coachella Valley Healthcare Initiative last year Ruiz the son of farm workers who holds three degrees from Harvard University considers the trailer parks 8220a public health nightmare8221 At the Rancho Garcia Mobile Home Park Fatima Gutierrez sweeps rat droppings changes the traps bleaches the walls with a dish scrubber and climbs a ladder during rainy season to seal the roof with a plastic tarp usually futilely Dr Kenneth Russ a physician in Palm Springs who has consulted with mobile home park residents said the combination of substandard housing air pollution exposure to hazardous waste and poor nutrition 8220can be physically and emotionally traumatic especially for children8221 Until recently when the Riverside County Department of Environmental Health stepped in the Rancho Garcia park had an open flyinfested sewage pit Raw sewage seeped into streets and yards Leonard Garcia whose father Miguel started the park as a labor camp suggested that residents8217 habits were to blame for some of the problems including the sewage 8220It could be a plugged line even in their own trailer8221 he explained 8220Sometimes it8217s a Pamper Sometimes it8217s a buildup of lard Or toys Believe me you don8217t want to know what we8217ve seen in these things8221 Conditions at Rancho Garcia are more acute than at many other parks According to the state8217s esoteric mobile home park laws park owners are responsible for infrastructure and for providing a decent living environment that will protect homeowners8217 investments Ninetyfive percent of area residents own their mobile homes If a park closes those living in rickety handmedowns that are too fragile to move are particularly vulnerable 8220Effectively you lose a piece of property and your shelter8221 explained Megan Beaman an attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance in Coachella Riverside County has 121 unpermitted parks and a few dozen legal ones said Bob Lyman regional manager for the county8217s Transportation ampamp Land Management Agency In addition there are five major parks and more than 100 smaller ones on TorresMartinez land all outside the reach of county inspectors These tribal mobile home park residents have little legal recourse against punitive practices by owners such as unlawful evictions or 8220the electricity being shut off if they are a day behind on rent8221 said Arturo Rodriguez directing attorney for the Coachella California Rural Legal Assistance Migrant Farmworker ProjectHousing law8217s unintended consequence The proliferation of small unregulated parks dates back to the 1992 Farm Labor Housing Protection Act an emergency measure that allowed growers to build parks of up to 12 units without obtaining zoning and land use permits But the bill written by Richard Polanco a Los Angeles assemblyman had unintended consequences Opportunistic landlords swooped in to erect an estimated 400 unpermitted parks still known as 8220polancos8221 that skirted basic health and safety regulations including the placement of wells septic systems and safe electrical wiring The parks remained largely under the radar until the summer of 1998 when two people died in two different parks 8212 one a teenager who was electrocuted when a fence became energized due to faulty wiring the other a man electrocuted while working on repairs to his mobile home Riverside County code enforcers began cracking down targeting 18 parks for closure and filing lawsuits against the owners In response California Rural Legal Assistance filed housing discrimination suits with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development saying the county had unfairly targeted Latinoowned parks Two years after the first crackdown HUD announced a 21 million settlement with the county to pay for community projects lowincome housing and cash payments to the farm worker families 8220It8217s no accident these communities are suffering8221 said Beaman with California Rural Legal Assistance 8220It comes with being 97 percent Latino 50 percent undocumented and 100 percent working class It8217s a snapshot of how certain categories of people are forced to live differently based on their perceived power8221 Widespread panic about park closures prompted thousands of residents including many indigenous nativespeaking Pur233pecha people from the highlands of Michoac225n in Mexico to move their trailers onto sovereign tribal land away from code enforcers as well as US immigration agents The denouement was the housing apocalypse known as Duroville a postcard of squalor and lawlessness in which packs of wild dogs roamed muddy alleyways and raw sewage puddled along Michael Street Marylou Avenue and other byways named for owner Harvey Duro8217s family Airborne toxins from the burning illegal Lawson dump next door 8212 including elevated levels of dioxin a carcinogen 8212 finally brought Duroville to the attention of the federal government Sister Gabi Williams 62 a selfdescribed 8220gringo8221 nun has become something of an Our Lady of Mobile Home Parks for her tireless efforts there She recalls 8220black water on the ground the dump with a huge hole in the middle sinking8221 She said of her work there with flinty matteroffactness 8220It wasn8217t a good idea to put up a child center around battery acid8221 After a cascade of events the Bureau of Indian Affairs announced that the park would be shut down displacing 4000 to 5000 residents Averting what he called 8220a mass humanitarian crisis8221 US District Judge Stephen G Larson ordered the park to remain open and set up a twoyear receivership charged with making the park livable until alternatives could be found Today the population of Duroville hovers around 2000 expanding during the harvest and contracting from July to September when half the residents migrate to the San Joaquin Valley An 11acre open sewage evaporation pond is still in use Thomas J Flynn the federally appointed receiver calls it 8220a West Nile virus incubator that8217s like something out of Margaret Mead8221 Flynn has worked to alleviate the park8217s underground economy a haven for criminal activity including a notorious drugdealing intersection in which 8220cars would pull in as if they were pulling into a McDonald8217s8221 in his words He also noted the 8220repair8221 shops with hundreds of cars many stolen A blockslong monolith of domestic detritus 8212 mattresses playpens car seats carpeting masses of splintered wood 8212 represents the remains of makeshift wooden structures attached to trailers recently ordered removed 8220Fire accelerators that combined with improperly installed propane tanks were like a bomb8221 Flynn said Dr Alberto Manetta a professor emeritus at UC Irvine and chairman of Latino Health Access a nonprofit based in Santa Ana runs a health clinic in Duroville Two recent health surveys by Manetta and his team offer an illuminating portrait of the park Ninetyfive percent of residents do not have Internet access Only 8 percent finished high school Onethird lack air conditioning More than half have no source of hot water for bathing with children using leftover cooking water to wash Chronic conditions like diabetes and tobacco and alcohol addiction abound Nevertheless Manetta observes the residents8217 deepest concern is not their health 8220Their biggest worry is being thrown out of the park8221 he saidCitizen groups fight for improvements Elisa Guevara8217s first home in America was a wooden shack attached to a friend8217s trailer in Duroville She was an accounting assistant for a computer store in Mexico on her first Monday in California she went to work in the fields She suffered dehydration and heat stroke but continued picking 8220Once she starts something she finishes it no matter what8221 her brother Eduardo said Frightened for her family8217s safety after an arson Guevara and her husband daughter and parents left Duroville They moved into their own trailer at the Los Gatos Mobile Home Park brightening a corner of the living room with a shrine honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe 8220It was a dream to have a house8221 Guevara said 8220even if it wasn8217t the best you could think of8221 But her optimism was shortlived Last summer half the park8217s trailers lost electricity for a month when the overtaxed electrical box caught fire forcing nine families to sleep outside because of the heat They had to rely on ice coolers to store food and medicine Before that there was the defective plumbing system that forced families to live with their own waste The park8217s coowner Benjam237n Hern225ndez offered a litany of blame for the park8217s woes 8212 residents who waste water and electricity county inspectors who are demanding high fees for permits and the poor economy devastating his family8217s finances Hern225ndez said he invested in the park with nine siblings but now they don8217t have enough money to make improvements 8220We wanted to get a line of credit to do everything but then the problems with the economy hit8221 Hern225ndez said 8220We lost our jobs People lost their homes We were really affected by the economy We spoke with the county We tried to find another way to move forward But there are too many costs too many rules too many requirements8221 Guevara remembers praying a lot convinced that as a nonEnglishspeaking woman with kidney problems there was little she could do But inspired by her daughter she acted The result was Comit233 el Poder de la 62 8212 8220The Power of the 62nd8221 8212 named for their avenue one of a growing number of citizen groups fighting to improve their neighborhoods by taking landlords to court A lawsuit is still pending last year a preliminary injunction required the owners to restore electricity and repair the sewage system In the Eastern Coachella Valley worstcase scenarios are common events Witness 90yearold former Sunbird Mobile Home Park resident Lucas D Hernandez8217s water bill which went from 1416 to 59626 after the park launched a new rate system Residents have filed a legal complaint And at Oasis Mobile Home Park 8212 a misnomer if ever there was one 8212 a discovery in 2007 by the EPA of a landlord8217s abhorrent cunning a system of hidden pipes rigged to agricultural drain lines that discharged residents8217 sewage into the Salton Sea 8220You get into this floppy mood8221 Maribel Sanchez 27 said of St Anthony8217s Mobile Home Park where a collapsed casing on a deteriorating well pumped sand into their water One resident whose wife was recovering from breast surgery was forced to drive 15 miles so that she could take a clean shower 8220People don8217t speak up8221 added Sanchez who works as a nanny in a gated community in La Quinta 8220They think their voice isn8217t going to be heard8221 The park home to more than 600 people has experienced years of violations most notably dangerously high levels of naturally occurring arsenic in the water 8212 prompting residents like Ana Sanchez Maribel8217s mother to spend 20 a week or more on bottled drinking water Ruiz of the Coachella Valley Healthcare Initiative said the longterm health effects of the area8217s myriad issues from mobile home parks to hazardous waste are far from clear 8220This should hit us all in our hearts and minds8221 he said of the valley8217s precarious teetertotter of inequality 8220A community doesn8217t end at a gate8221 | By/ADP Patricia/PROPN Leigh/PROPN BrownThis/PROPN report/NOUN was/AUX produced/VERB by/ADP California/PROPN Watch/PROPN a/DET project/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Center/PROPN for/ADP Investigative/PROPN Reporting/PROPN THERMAL/PROPN Calif/PROPN 8212/NUM At/ADP one/NUM end/NOUN of/ADP Avenue/PROPN 54/NUM a/DET road/NOUN slicing/VERB through/ADP some/PRON of/ADP the/DET most/ADV fertile/ADJ land/NOUN in/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN resides/VERB the/DET California/PROPN of/ADP the/DET popular/ADJ imagination/NOUN a/DET place/NOUN of/ADP Bermuda/PROPN shorts/NOUN putting/VERB greens/NOUN and/CCONJ picturewindow/NOUN champagne/NOUN dinners/NOUN overlooking/VERB the/DET infinity/NOUN pool/NOUN But/CCONJ there/PRON is/VERB another/DET Avenue/PROPN 54/NUM concealed/VERB behind/ADP tumbleweeds/NOUN 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<p>Last week, representatives of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA) met in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the future evolution of the trade bloc, designed to promote complementarity and reciprocity amongst left-leaning regimes in the region such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Since its inception in 2004, ALBA has carried out important exchanges of goods and services; for example Venezuela has exported subsidized oil to Cuba and receives Cuban medical assistance in return. However, some wonder whether ALBA is practical or can help to foster real economic development for the region’s poor.</p>
<p>ALBA leaders however say it’s time to place such doubts aside. Last week in Cochabamba they declared their historic adoption of a common currency called the Unified System of Compensation of Reciprocal Payments or SUCRE in Spanish. Named after Antonio José de Sucre, a military general and hero of the wars of independence against Spain, the Sucre is to be gradually substituted for the U.S. dollar in terms of commercial exchange between ALBA member nations.</p>
<p>According to the new Cochabamba agreement, ALBA countries will make deposits in their respective currencies to an ALBA bank headquartered in Caracas. The Sucre will act as a payment compensation mechanism and allow ALBA nations to reconcile accounts when they carry out commercial transactions in local currency. It’s a kind of barter exchange system: if Venezuela for example buys textiles from Bolivia and owes the Andean nation a certain quantity of money, then this will be compensated in kind with other imported goods such as asphalt. The difference in cost will be reconciled by central banks located within respective ALBA countries which handle the Sucre. Payment requests meanwhile will be processed electronically between ALBA members via an ALBA bank.</p>
<p>Creation of the Sucre then will not lead to a new physical currency being issued. The Sucre will not have any intrinsic value but will have parity in relation to the U.S. dollar, the euro or Japanese yen. By early 2010, ALBA countries hope to start using the “virtual” currency, with future plans to convert it into a hard currency. Eventually, at some future yet undefined date, ALBA members hope to establish a unified regional currency which Bolivia has suggested could be named “Pacha” for the Quechua Indian word for Earth.</p>
<p>Recently, I sat down with Ethan Kaplan, a visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Center for Global Thought and Department of Economics. Kaplan, a former economic advisor to the Venezuelan National Assembly, discussed the economic and political implications of the Sucre.</p>
<p>NK: ALBA leaders say creating the Sucre is necessary so as to defray the regional effects of the world economic crisis. By substituting their trade in dollars with the new alternative currency, ALBA members hope to protect themselves from future financial downturns. How well do you think this will work?</p>
<p>EK: There’s a lot of evidence that currency unification leads to greater trade and hence there would probably be more intra-regional trade under the Sucre. The Sucre could make ALBA nations less subject to international financial crises outside of their group, but we need to remember that these countries have a lot of crises themselves. If ALBA nations make it harder for capital to leave their currency area, then they will have less to do with the broader international economy. A lot of recessions are induced by international financial crises, so if ALBA doesn’t have much to do with that international system and ALBA countries have a stable monetary system themselves, they could avoid some degree of financial crisis. However, I doubt that the Sucre will protect ALBA. Consider: ALBA is a small area economically. ALBA members will still trade heavily with the outside world. Obviously ALBA nations and the Sucre are not like the EU and the euro. Moreover, transmission of economic crises is more based upon trade in assets than trade in goods. My guess is that having a larger currency area shouldn’t dramatically change the demand for dollar-denominated, yen-denominated, or Euro-denominated assets. Capital controls would much more effectively accomplish that.</p>
<p>To be honest I’m more optimistic about the Sucre as a means of fostering economic growth and achieving better prices as opposed to protecting ALBA nations from financial crises. Consider: right now, ALBA nations have low tariffs on U.S. goods like cars which can come into their countries relatively cheaply. So, ALBA countries are not going to start their own domestic car industry. In the 1960s Brazil experimented with this somewhat and had a well functioning car industry for a while. However, they later eliminated trading protections and the industry went belly up. Since ALBA represents a decent sized group of countries which would be fostering trade amongst themselves, there would be some scope for industrial diversification and ALBA nations might produce some things that they would normally get from the United States. By adopting a new currency, ALBA nations get slightly greater leverage to slap tariffs on U.S. goods so as to protect infant industries which the left wing group of countries seeks to encourage.</p>
<p>NK: There’s a very pronounced political dimension to the Sucre: Hugo Chávez has remarked that the Sucre “will help us to overthrow the dictatorship of the dollar.” Yet, ALBA nations are rather insignificant economically at the global level. What are your thoughts?</p>
<p>EK: I think that’s correct — I don’t think the adoption of the Sucre or Pacha for that matter will have much of an economic impact on the United States. It probably will have a greater economic impact on ALBA nations by fostering import substitution and industry as opposed to pursuing a course of commodity exports. Here’s another benefit of a common currency: right now a lot of countries spend a lot of money buying dollar assets because they’re afraid of a speculative attack on their currency. One solution to this is to institute capital controls which the International Monetary Fund doesn’t particularly like. A successful currency union could make ALBA nations less subject to speculation and as a result these countries would be less concerned about their exchange rate relative to the U.S. dollar. As a result, ALBA nations would benefit as they wouldn’t have to invest so much in low-yield dollar assets. Still if speculators can force the bank of England to lose almost 100 billion pounds in one day back in 1992, my guess is that the Pacha will not be immune to speculative attack.</p>
<p>NK: ALBA was originally set up to counter the FTAA or Free Trade Area of the Americas, the corporately –friendly free trade scheme sponsored by Bill Clinton and George Bush. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez on the other hand says that the adoption of the Sucre constitutes a system of “fair trade” which will distance Latin American countries from “hegemonic capitalism,” “the neo-liberal dictatorship” and the “dictatorship of transnational companies.” The Sucre, Chávez adds, “will be much more than a currency.” According to him, the Sucre system will have four component parts: the Regional Monetary Council, the Sucre currency itself, the Central Clearing House, and a regional reserve and emergency fund. How significant a break does this represent with the go-go free trading past?</p>
<p>EK: If the Sucre agreement winds up fostering closer economic integration along the lines of the EU and not NAFTA, then the new ALBA currency could wind up resulting in more fair trade as opposed to exploitative trade. Here’s another way the Sucre could represent a plus: normally multinationals go to Venezuela or Ecuador and set up their own companies which get all kinds of tax breaks and make profits off exports. Those profits are then repatriated to the United States. If there’s a common currency however, those profits would probably stay in the local region. So, a new currency might promote fair trade as well as fair investment.</p>
<p>NK: On the face of it the idea of the Sucre is reminiscent of the euro, another regional currency which recently came into effect. Yet, the Sucre would seem to be more unique in that it has been promoted as a common ideological project amongst left-leaning nations. Is there any historic precedent for such an idea?</p>
<p>EK: I’m not aware of any currency that’s been promoted on the basis of shared ideology, certainly not any left wing ideology…</p>
<p>NK: What about the ruble?</p>
<p>EK: That’s a good point. The Soviets exported the ruble to all of their satellite areas. But for the Soviets, the ruble on its own wasn’t such a decisive factor as there was already a centrally planned government which decided what the satellite countries would produce as well as what price they would trade at. In other words, given that the Soviet Union could already decide the relative prices of all goods, an exchange rate was relatively redundant. So, in terms of ALBA countries I think the benefits of a shared currency are higher because you have different governments as opposed to Moscow calling the shots.</p>
<p>NK: Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa, himself an economist, hopes that the Sucre and the implementation of the new “virtual monetary system” could accelerate commerce between nations. Eventually, he hopes, such a system could be extended to all countries in Latin America and use of dollars would be reduced greatly. How likely is this to occur?</p>
<p>EK: I think if the Sucre, or the Pacha as the case may be, were extended to all of Latin America this would reduce the use of the dollar and this would have an impact on the United States, particularly if Mexico joined the Sucre. Let’s face it though: Mexico is going to be reluctant to do that. To be honest, we don’t even know if the countries that have currently signed up for the Sucre will continue to stay on it. What would happen if a right wing government came to power in one of the ALBA nations? If one ALBA country on the Sucre has an economic downturn and wants to pursue a monetary policy that will help to reduce unemployment, this could lead to inflation in another ALBA nation, which in turn could spark political conflict. For the time being the ALBA nations have relatively similar political ideologies and they could set up some kind of political institution to govern the currency board. But, if one of the ALBA nations became right wing I don’t know what would happen.</p>
<p>In addition to disagreements over monetary policy, there might also be conflicts over fiscal policy. One way for the government to get out of debt is by printing money to pay off the debt. This causes inflation. This is a very typical pattern in Latin America. So, if one ALBA country decides it wants to inflate its debt away and another country in the currency union doesn’t like that idea, then this could give rise to political conflict. A country finding itself in dire economic straits may need to create inflation because otherwise it would go bankrupt. Other countries within ALBA meanwhile won’t want one of their members to go bankrupt which could result in a potential currency attack on the entire region. Here’s the key point though: ALBA countries that are not experiencing economic pain may want to dictate how much debt their fellow member can hold as a percentage of GDP. If you want to join the EU, you must have a certain debt to GDP ratio. How will the ALBA nations bargain this out? These are vexing questions. Plus, if you really want to have an economic impact on the United States and the dollar you’d have to involve Brazil, Argentina and Mexico and it’s difficult to see that happening.</p>
<p>NK: Speaking of which, Chávez has invited Argentina to join in the Sucre, and over the past few years Venezuela and Argentina have cultivated an unprecedented geopolitical alliance which is based on shared ideological affinities. Do you think that if Argentina joined that there could be a ripple effect and other countries might be encouraged to join? Some might say that if Brazil, the true economic juggernaut in the region, fails to join that such a currency might lack credibility.</p>
<p>EK: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the current President of Argentina, is not super popular. She and her husband [former president Néstor Kirchner] had this idea of alternating power so they wouldn’t hit the wall on term limit restrictions. In light of recent parliamentary elections which resulted in electoral defeat for the Peronist party, it’s not clear whether the Kirchners can stay in power. If they don’t stay in power you can forget the idea of Argentina ever joining the Sucre. My guess is that even if they do, it’s an unlikely scenario for Argentina.</p>
<p>NK: Some might say that from the very outset the Sucre won’t have much clout. Bolivia exports most of its goods to other Andean nations such as Peru and Colombia which do not participate in ALBA. Nicaragua meanwhile exports most of its products not to fellow ALBA nations but to other Central American nations, the United States and Europe where the dollar and euro are paramount in commercial transactions. What are your thoughts?</p>
<p>EK: That’s true. But similarly a lot of countries in the EU don’t just trade amongst themselves but also with the UK, Switzerland and the United States. So, I don’t see that as being a huge barrier. In the case of Nicaragua it could be a little weird since the Central American nation doesn’t do that much business with other ALBA nations. So, there may not be a lot of benefits but conversely getting on the Sucre might imply little financial and political risk.</p>
<p>However, once the currency goes from being “virtual” to real and ALBA nations ditch their own currencies for the Pacha these costs may go up as I explained earlier. The bottom line is that as long as ALBA countries are not trading amongst themselves that’s Ok: if it’s a virtual currency like the Sucre they still maintain their exchange rates with the other countries. Once they swap their currencies entirely however they’re forced to have the same exchange rate as other ALBA countries. Normally, if Nicaragua had a lot of inflation it would want to devalue relative to its other trading partners in Central America. But in the new milieu, Nicaragua wouldn’t be able to do that. This could really wind up hurting its exports.</p>
<p>NK: What types of protections would you advise for the ALBA nations moving forward?</p>
<p>EK: My concern would be defending the incipient currency from speculative attacks. There’s a very easy way to prevent this: you need to implement currency controls. In other words, don’t let people take money out of the currency except for trade-related actions and do not allow any speculation. There’s no way for ALBA to move ahead with a currency union without acting on currency controls. The International Monetary Fund won’t be too happy about that but I don’t think these left wing countries care about the IMF anyway.</p>
<p>NK: The situation in Ecuador is positively ironic. Up until recently the Andean nation’s currency was called the Sucre, which it then ditched for the U.S. dollar. Now Ecuador is going back to another Sucre. How do you think life will change for Ecuador and Ecuadorans as the country moves to the Sucre as opposed to the dollar which had been embraced by the country’s economic elite?</p>
<p>EK: First of all, let’s look at some of the costs of using the U.S. dollar. When the U.S. inflates currency and prints dollars to pay off debt, that’s a tax because prices go up and the value of money goes down. Who pays that inflation tax? In part it’s the Ecuadoran people who hold dollars. Who benefits? The U.S. government as it gets to pay off its debt. So, these financial crises devalue Ecuadoran money.</p>
<p>But now the new Sucre monetary board, or eventually the Pacha board, could redistribute money between countries as opposed to having it filter back to the United States. Also, once Ecuador goes on the Pacha it’ll be easier for the Andean nation to adjust its exchange rate than it would under the dollar. As long as Ecuador sticks to the dollar, it’ll be beholden to whatever U.S. monetary policy happens to be. Once Ecuador’s in the ALBA currency union it has a voice and can have a much greater impact to shape its own finances.</p>
<p>There are other political benefits to not being on the U.S. dollar. Take for example the case of Panama. When George H.W. Bush wanted to get rid of military strongman Manuel Noriega, he banned the export of U.S. dollars to Panama which caused a recession. That leverage is still there potentially with Ecuador. George W. Bush never entertained the possibility of putting the squeeze on Ecuador as he was distracted in other parts of the world. But, under other circumstances the United States might have exerted pressure.</p>
<p>Despite all these problems, there are some benefits to having ties to the U.S. dollar. If you’re on the dollar this leads to stability in price levels which could be lost once Ecuador joins a new currency.</p>
<p>NK: One key question will be whether private sector exporters in ALBA nations will have confidence in the new Sucre for it is they who dominate international trade. What are your thoughts?</p>
<p>EK: If the private sector is forced to trade in the Sucre or not trade, then they’ll use it…</p>
<p>NK: In all of these countries like Ecuador and Venezuela, it’s precisely the right opposed to leftist governments which is controlling the exports …</p>
<p>EK: You could wind up with a strange situation in which the exporters are skittish about the new currency and either reduce exports or send their goods to non-ALBA countries like Colombia. In that case, the new currency union would not foster more intra-ALBA trade but the total opposite. If there’s greater state control over exports, as in the Venezuelan oil industry, this all becomes a moot question.</p>
<p>NK: Professor Kaplan, thank you very much.</p>
<p>EK: Thank you.</p>
<p>Ethan Kaplan is a visiting Professor at the Center for Global Thought and the Economics Department at Columbia University.</p>
<p>NIKOLAS KOZLOFF is the author of <a href="" type="internal">Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left</a> (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) Follow his blog at <a href="http://www.senorchichero.blogspot.com" type="external">senorchichero.blogspot.com</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Challenging the Dollar Dictatorship | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/10/23/challenging-the-dollar-dictatorship/ | 2009-10-23 | 4left
| 3,063 | Last week representatives of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas known by its Spanish acronym ALBA met in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the future evolution of the trade bloc designed to promote complementarity and reciprocity amongst leftleaning regimes in the region such as Cuba Venezuela Bolivia Nicaragua and Ecuador Since its inception in 2004 ALBA has carried out important exchanges of goods and services for example Venezuela has exported subsidized oil to Cuba and receives Cuban medical assistance in return However some wonder whether ALBA is practical or can help to foster real economic development for the region8217s poor ALBA leaders however say it8217s time to place such doubts aside Last week in Cochabamba they declared their historic adoption of a common currency called the Unified System of Compensation of Reciprocal Payments or SUCRE in Spanish Named after Antonio Jos233 de Sucre a military general and hero of the wars of independence against Spain the Sucre is to be gradually substituted for the US dollar in terms of commercial exchange between ALBA member nations According to the new Cochabamba agreement ALBA countries will make deposits in their respective currencies to an ALBA bank headquartered in Caracas The Sucre will act as a payment compensation mechanism and allow ALBA nations to reconcile accounts when they carry out commercial transactions in local currency It8217s a kind of barter exchange system if Venezuela for example buys textiles from Bolivia and owes the Andean nation a certain quantity of money then this will be compensated in kind with other imported goods such as asphalt The difference in cost will be reconciled by central banks located within respective ALBA countries which handle the Sucre Payment requests meanwhile will be processed electronically between ALBA members via an ALBA bank Creation of the Sucre then will not lead to a new physical currency being issued The Sucre will not have any intrinsic value but will have parity in relation to the US dollar the euro or Japanese yen By early 2010 ALBA countries hope to start using the 8220virtual8221 currency with future plans to convert it into a hard currency Eventually at some future yet undefined date ALBA members hope to establish a unified regional currency which Bolivia has suggested could be named 8220Pacha8221 for the Quechua Indian word for Earth Recently I sat down with Ethan Kaplan a visiting Professor at Columbia University8217s Center for Global Thought and Department of Economics Kaplan a former economic advisor to the Venezuelan National Assembly discussed the economic and political implications of the Sucre NK ALBA leaders say creating the Sucre is necessary so as to defray the regional effects of the world economic crisis By substituting their trade in dollars with the new alternative currency ALBA members hope to protect themselves from future financial downturns How well do you think this will work EK There8217s a lot of evidence that currency unification leads to greater trade and hence there would probably be more intraregional trade under the Sucre The Sucre could make ALBA nations less subject to international financial crises outside of their group but we need to remember that these countries have a lot of crises themselves If ALBA nations make it harder for capital to leave their currency area then they will have less to do with the broader international economy A lot of recessions are induced by international financial crises so if ALBA doesn8217t have much to do with that international system and ALBA countries have a stable monetary system themselves they could avoid some degree of financial crisis However I doubt that the Sucre will protect ALBA Consider ALBA is a small area economically ALBA members will still trade heavily with the outside world Obviously ALBA nations and the Sucre are not like the EU and the euro Moreover transmission of economic crises is more based upon trade in assets than trade in goods My guess is that having a larger currency area shouldn8217t dramatically change the demand for dollardenominated yendenominated or Eurodenominated assets Capital controls would much more effectively accomplish that To be honest I8217m more optimistic about the Sucre as a means of fostering economic growth and achieving better prices as opposed to protecting ALBA nations from financial crises Consider right now ALBA nations have low tariffs on US goods like cars which can come into their countries relatively cheaply So ALBA countries are not going to start their own domestic car industry In the 1960s Brazil experimented with this somewhat and had a well functioning car industry for a while However they later eliminated trading protections and the industry went belly up Since ALBA represents a decent sized group of countries which would be fostering trade amongst themselves there would be some scope for industrial diversification and ALBA nations might produce some things that they would normally get from the United States By adopting a new currency ALBA nations get slightly greater leverage to slap tariffs on US goods so as to protect infant industries which the left wing group of countries seeks to encourage NK There8217s a very pronounced political dimension to the Sucre Hugo Ch225vez has remarked that the Sucre 8220will help us to overthrow the dictatorship of the dollar8221 Yet ALBA nations are rather insignificant economically at the global level What are your thoughts EK I think that8217s correct 8212 I don8217t think the adoption of the Sucre or Pacha for that matter will have much of an economic impact on the United States It probably will have a greater economic impact on ALBA nations by fostering import substitution and industry as opposed to pursuing a course of commodity exports Here8217s another benefit of a common currency right now a lot of countries spend a lot of money buying dollar assets because they8217re afraid of a speculative attack on their currency One solution to this is to institute capital controls which the International Monetary Fund doesn8217t particularly like A successful currency union could make ALBA nations less subject to speculation and as a result these countries would be less concerned about their exchange rate relative to the US dollar As a result ALBA nations would benefit as they wouldn8217t have to invest so much in lowyield dollar assets Still if speculators can force the bank of England to lose almost 100 billion pounds in one day back in 1992 my guess is that the Pacha will not be immune to speculative attack NK ALBA was originally set up to counter the FTAA or Free Trade Area of the Americas the corporately 8211friendly free trade scheme sponsored by Bill Clinton and George Bush Venezuela8217s Hugo Ch225vez on the other hand says that the adoption of the Sucre constitutes a system of 8220fair trade8221 which will distance Latin American countries from 8220hegemonic capitalism8221 8220the neoliberal dictatorship8221 and the 8220dictatorship of transnational companies8221 The Sucre Ch225vez adds 8220will be much more than a currency8221 According to him the Sucre system will have four component parts the Regional Monetary Council the Sucre currency itself the Central Clearing House and a regional reserve and emergency fund How significant a break does this represent with the gogo free trading past EK If the Sucre agreement winds up fostering closer economic integration along the lines of the EU and not NAFTA then the new ALBA currency could wind up resulting in more fair trade as opposed to exploitative trade Here8217s another way the Sucre could represent a plus normally multinationals go to Venezuela or Ecuador and set up their own companies which get all kinds of tax breaks and make profits off exports Those profits are then repatriated to the United States If there8217s a common currency however those profits would probably stay in the local region So a new currency might promote fair trade as well as fair investment NK On the face of it the idea of the Sucre is reminiscent of the euro another regional currency which recently came into effect Yet the Sucre would seem to be more unique in that it has been promoted as a common ideological project amongst leftleaning nations Is there any historic precedent for such an idea EK I8217m not aware of any currency that8217s been promoted on the basis of shared ideology certainly not any left wing ideology8230 NK What about the ruble EK That8217s a good point The Soviets exported the ruble to all of their satellite areas But for the Soviets the ruble on its own wasn8217t such a decisive factor as there was already a centrally planned government which decided what the satellite countries would produce as well as what price they would trade at In other words given that the Soviet Union could already decide the relative prices of all goods an exchange rate was relatively redundant So in terms of ALBA countries I think the benefits of a shared currency are higher because you have different governments as opposed to Moscow calling the shots NK Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa himself an economist hopes that the Sucre and the implementation of the new 8220virtual monetary system8221 could accelerate commerce between nations Eventually he hopes such a system could be extended to all countries in Latin America and use of dollars would be reduced greatly How likely is this to occur EK I think if the Sucre or the Pacha as the case may be were extended to all of Latin America this would reduce the use of the dollar and this would have an impact on the United States particularly if Mexico joined the Sucre Let8217s face it though Mexico is going to be reluctant to do that To be honest we don8217t even know if the countries that have currently signed up for the Sucre will continue to stay on it What would happen if a right wing government came to power in one of the ALBA nations If one ALBA country on the Sucre has an economic downturn and wants to pursue a monetary policy that will help to reduce unemployment this could lead to inflation in another ALBA nation which in turn could spark political conflict For the time being the ALBA nations have relatively similar political ideologies and they could set up some kind of political institution to govern the currency board But if one of the ALBA nations became right wing I don8217t know what would happen In addition to disagreements over monetary policy there might also be conflicts over fiscal policy One way for the government to get out of debt is by printing money to pay off the debt This causes inflation This is a very typical pattern in Latin America So if one ALBA country decides it wants to inflate its debt away and another country in the currency union doesn8217t like that idea then this could give rise to political conflict A country finding itself in dire economic straits may need to create inflation because otherwise it would go bankrupt Other countries within ALBA meanwhile won8217t want one of their members to go bankrupt which could result in a potential currency attack on the entire region Here8217s the key point though ALBA countries that are not experiencing economic pain may want to dictate how much debt their fellow member can hold as a percentage of GDP If you want to join the EU you must have a certain debt to GDP ratio How will the ALBA nations bargain this out These are vexing questions Plus if you really want to have an economic impact on the United States and the dollar you8217d have to involve Brazil Argentina and Mexico and it8217s difficult to see that happening NK Speaking of which Ch225vez has invited Argentina to join in the Sucre and over the past few years Venezuela and Argentina have cultivated an unprecedented geopolitical alliance which is based on shared ideological affinities Do you think that if Argentina joined that there could be a ripple effect and other countries might be encouraged to join Some might say that if Brazil the true economic juggernaut in the region fails to join that such a currency might lack credibility EK Cristina Fern225ndez de Kirchner the current President of Argentina is not super popular She and her husband former president N233stor Kirchner had this idea of alternating power so they wouldn8217t hit the wall on term limit restrictions In light of recent parliamentary elections which resulted in electoral defeat for the Peronist party it8217s not clear whether the Kirchners can stay in power If they don8217t stay in power you can forget the idea of Argentina ever joining the Sucre My guess is that even if they do it8217s an unlikely scenario for Argentina NK Some might say that from the very outset the Sucre won8217t have much clout Bolivia exports most of its goods to other Andean nations such as Peru and Colombia which do not participate in ALBA Nicaragua meanwhile exports most of its products not to fellow ALBA nations but to other Central American nations the United States and Europe where the dollar and euro are paramount in commercial transactions What are your thoughts EK That8217s true But similarly a lot of countries in the EU don8217t just trade amongst themselves but also with the UK Switzerland and the United States So I don8217t see that as being a huge barrier In the case of Nicaragua it could be a little weird since the Central American nation doesn8217t do that much business with other ALBA nations So there may not be a lot of benefits but conversely getting on the Sucre might imply little financial and political risk However once the currency goes from being 8220virtual8221 to real and ALBA nations ditch their own currencies for the Pacha these costs may go up as I explained earlier The bottom line is that as long as ALBA countries are not trading amongst themselves that8217s Ok if it8217s a virtual currency like the Sucre they still maintain their exchange rates with the other countries Once they swap their currencies entirely however they8217re forced to have the same exchange rate as other ALBA countries Normally if Nicaragua had a lot of inflation it would want to devalue relative to its other trading partners in Central America But in the new milieu Nicaragua wouldn8217t be able to do that This could really wind up hurting its exports NK What types of protections would you advise for the ALBA nations moving forward EK My concern would be defending the incipient currency from speculative attacks There8217s a very easy way to prevent this you need to implement currency controls In other words don8217t let people take money out of the currency except for traderelated actions and do not allow any speculation There8217s no way for ALBA to move ahead with a currency union without acting on currency controls The International Monetary Fund won8217t be too happy about that but I don8217t think these left wing countries care about the IMF anyway NK The situation in Ecuador is positively ironic Up until recently the Andean nation8217s currency was called the Sucre which it then ditched for the US dollar Now Ecuador is going back to another Sucre How do you think life will change for Ecuador and Ecuadorans as the country moves to the Sucre as opposed to the dollar which had been embraced by the country8217s economic elite EK First of all let8217s look at some of the costs of using the US dollar When the US inflates currency and prints dollars to pay off debt that8217s a tax because prices go up and the value of money goes down Who pays that inflation tax In part it8217s the Ecuadoran people who hold dollars Who benefits The US government as it gets to pay off its debt So these financial crises devalue Ecuadoran money But now the new Sucre monetary board or eventually the Pacha board could redistribute money between countries as opposed to having it filter back to the United States Also once Ecuador goes on the Pacha it8217ll be easier for the Andean nation to adjust its exchange rate than it would under the dollar As long as Ecuador sticks to the dollar it8217ll be beholden to whatever US monetary policy happens to be Once Ecuador8217s in the ALBA currency union it has a voice and can have a much greater impact to shape its own finances There are other political benefits to not being on the US dollar Take for example the case of Panama When George HW Bush wanted to get rid of military strongman Manuel Noriega he banned the export of US dollars to Panama which caused a recession That leverage is still there potentially with Ecuador George W Bush never entertained the possibility of putting the squeeze on Ecuador as he was distracted in other parts of the world But under other circumstances the United States might have exerted pressure Despite all these problems there are some benefits to having ties to the US dollar If you8217re on the dollar this leads to stability in price levels which could be lost once Ecuador joins a new currency NK One key question will be whether private sector exporters in ALBA nations will have confidence in the new Sucre for it is they who dominate international trade What are your thoughts EK If the private sector is forced to trade in the Sucre or not trade then they8217ll use it8230 NK In all of these countries like Ecuador and Venezuela it8217s precisely the right opposed to leftist governments which is controlling the exports 8230 EK You could wind up with a strange situation in which the exporters are skittish about the new currency and either reduce exports or send their goods to nonALBA countries like Colombia In that case the new currency union would not foster more intraALBA trade but the total opposite If there8217s greater state control over exports as in the Venezuelan oil industry this all becomes a moot question NK Professor Kaplan thank you very much EK Thank you Ethan Kaplan is a visiting Professor at the Center for Global 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<p>The oldest human remains so far discovered in California belong to the Elem Pomo Nation, who have lived on the eastern and southern shores of the Clear Lake basin for at least 10,000 years, also inhabiting much of the peninsula between eastern and southern arms of the lake. For a minimum of 5,000 of those years, the Elem’s way of life has centered on an island, roughly 56 acres in surface area, located just off the north shore of the lake’s eastern arm. The island has been the home of five documented Elem village sites, as well as dance houses, cremation pits, human burial sites — in short, the major hallmarks of the people’s religious, cultural, and political life.</p>
<p>In spite of nearly 200-year history of Euro-American encroachment into the Pomo nation’s ancestral territory, no development has ever taken place on the island. It has been called “arguably the lushest place in Lake County.” Located a mere 60 yards offshore the Elem’s current 50-acre reservation, just outside the sleepy Lake County town of Clearlake Oaks, it is one of the last pristine sacred places to Native Americans in California.</p>
<p>Without it, the Elem Pomo would cease to be who they are as a people.</p>
<p>In 2004, a wealthy Bay Area electronics mogul named John Nady assumed paper title to the island, proposing to build a vacation home along with various supporting structures. Nady says these buildings will be constructed “sustainably,” by which he means an array of solar panels and other accouterments of “green technology.” He asserts that his private property rights ought to trump the Elem’s ability to use the island. Since gaining his paper title, he has even refused to allow the Elem access to the island for ceremonies and other traditional purposes.</p>
<p>Nady’s fanatical devotion to the American system of private property relations is understandable, given the way in which it has worked to his material benefit.</p>
<p>He founded his company, Nady Systems, Inc., based in that well-known sustainable community of Emeryville, in 1972. The company manufactures audio equipment, including wireless microphones that have long had a dominant share in the American music market. As of 1987, 73 out of the top 100 touring musicians ranked by Billboard magazine were using Nady Wireless. The company’s market share of this product category is likely every bit as commanding today. Its patriarch doubtless wields tens of millions of dollars in wealth.</p>
<p>Yet, there are a number of major problems with Nady’s proposal to construct his dream home on Rattlesnake Island, one of which is that even under the strictest definition of AngloAmerican property law, he is not the land’s rightful owner. Rather, as Elem traditionalists have consistently maintained throughout the decades, they never gave up title to the land. In 2005, their position received a boost when former Clearlake resident Liam Griffin completed a 104-page dissertation at the University of New Mexico law school establishing beyond any reasonable doubt the Elem’s rightful ownership.</p>
<p>“Rattlesnake Island was stolen, plain and simple,” Griffin says. “I know that today’s sentiment is typically ‘Well, we can’t undo the past,’ and that’s what the perpetrators were counting on when they represented that the island was not occupied.”</p>
<p>Griffin is referring to the initial 1877 patent on the island signed by then-California Governor Irwin, which ostensibly furnished title to the land to a pair of wealthy Bay Area entrepreneurs. The island’s new paper owners claimed, in spite of all available evidence, that the land was uninhabited. It would be many years before an “Indian” could legally testify in a US court, let alone bring forth a complaint. Thus, the Elem had no legal recourse in California court for challenging this judicial fleecing. Behind this fig leaf of legal propriety, a false title to the land has changed hands among a series of wealthy Anglo Americans for the past 134 years.</p>
<p>That’s the title now in the possession of Nady.</p>
<p>But Governor Irwin’s grant failed entirely to mention the rights of the Native people who lived on the island. Rather, it based its authority on three acts of Congress, none of which actually gave the authority for such a land patent. The Indian Non-Intercourse Act, signed into federal law in 1834, proclaims that aboriginal land title can be extinguished only by an act of Congress. Thus, title to the land still rightfully belongs to the Elem.</p>
<p>“Spurred by the first real threat of development in the 160 years since the arrival of white men,” Griffin’s dissertation reads, “there is an effort now underway, led by the Elem, to clarify their aboriginal rights to the island, with the hope of preserving the island on behalf of all people. Research conducted for this article reveals that the Elem have probably always had a valid claim based on the principle of aboriginal rights, but so far have failed, or been denied the standing, to properly assert it.”</p>
<p>In the years since the initial Euro-American encroachment into their land, Rattlesnake Island has come to signify not only the Elem’s ancient culture, but also something relatively new: the Elem’s steadfast refusal to relinquish that culture, in spite of intense pressure. Remarkably, the Elem continued to use the island for ceremonial and other traditional purposes up to the present day, even when they have had to violate California’s laws to do so.</p>
<p>In the early 1970s, for example, a contingent of Elem traditionalists and supporters occupied Rattlesnake Island to block construction of a subdivision by Boise Cascade Corporation, which today stands as the United States’ 13th largest pulp and paper company, and which owned more than 126,000 acres in real estate holdings in 13 states at the time. Their occupation took place in close proximity to a similar occupation of Alcatraz Island, mounted by a coalition of native people in 1969. Before long, Boise Cascade negotiated with the Elem.</p>
<p>“We’ve been here all this time, and we’ve never lost our culture,” says the Elem’s traditional cultural leader and primary historian, Jim Browneagle. “That’s what I’m more proud of than anything.”</p>
<p>Brown’s pride is particularly understandable considering that the process by which the Elem and other California Indian nations were dispossessed of their land was characterized by gut-wrenching, almost entirely one-sided white-on-native violence. While some of the many incidents of savage Anglo-American slaughter of American Indian nations are far better known, such as those that occurred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 and Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864, the bloodbaths that took place in Lake County — as with those that occurred in Mendocino County were neither less brutal nor less historically significant.</p>
<p>One of the largest such massacres took place in 1843, when a Spanish military expedition under the command of Salvador Vallejo burned approximately 200 Pomo villagers alive inside their traditional roundhouse on Kamdot Island in Clear Lake, located on Koi Pomo territory. The natives’ crime was that they refused to submit to slavery at Salvador Vallejo’s 66,000-acre rancho, a parcel that spanned much of Sonoma, Napa, and Lake counties.</p>
<p>From May 15-17, 1850, the US Army carried out what is today known as the Bloody Island massacre. After a group of Pomo men retaliated for years of murder and rape by settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone (the town of Kelseyville is named after the former), the US Army responded by slaughtering roughly 60 Pomos near Kelsey’s ranch, followed by the arbitrary slaughter of 75 Pomo far away from where the incident took place, along the Russian River.</p>
<p>BrownEagle, 58, is an engaging, energetic man who comes from a long line of spiritual and cultural leaders. His father, Jim Brown II, was the recognized spiritual and cultural leader of the Elem prior to him. His mother, Elvina Brown, was a native of the Big Valley Pomo who also became a recognized Elem cultural leader. He inherited the role of Rattlesnake Island’s most dedicated defender from his uncle, Dewey Barnes, Sr., the acknowledged spokesperson of the early-70s occupation.</p>
<p>Browneagle’s ability to marshal information pertaining not only to his own people’s history, but also various related strands of US history, global geopolitics, and current events is reminiscent of a university history professor. Yet, as Browneagle likes to say, he has been forced to exist in two worlds. He estimates that he devotes roughly half his time to leading and participating in traditional ceremonies and other cultural activities. For the vast majority of his adult life, he has also been a tribal administrator. Along with his wife, Gail, a Yokayo Pomo from the Ukiah Valley, he hosts a weekly public affairs program on KPFZ Radio out of Lakeport entitled “Tribal Voices.”</p>
<p>“I really feel so great about this,” BrownEagle says while brandishing Griffin’s report. “I feel in my heart that if I walk onto that land right now, it’s going to go into court, and I have my case already set up.”</p>
<p>Throughout most of his adulthood, BrownEagle has regularly given presentations on Elem culture in local schools and in other settings. He says his father would talk about the importance of not judging people by any visual criteria, but rather by “hearing each person’s spirit. Then, you really know who they are.”</p>
<p>Choking up as he recalls his late father’s counsel, he adds, “Wow, growing up, that was great for me.” The philosophy has led to a number of important collaborations with supportive non-native people.</p>
<p>For his part, Liam Griffin first became interested in helping protect Rattlesnake Island after he met Browneagle in the 1980s. The two men lost touch for years. But the experience of meeting BrownEagle, as well as having attended school with a number of Pomo people, stuck with him until he made it to college.</p>
<p>Another persistent ally of the Elem has been archeologist John Parker, who lives in the sleepy Lake County town of Lucerne and received his undergraduate degree at Sonoma State. In the early 70s, not long after he first enrolled at the Santa Rosa campus, Parker says, he decided that because his archeological interest was to study “how people live, rather than how they die,” he decided to go door-to-door at the Elem Pomo Colony to ask for their advice on what he should study.</p>
<p>“The first door I knock on, it turns out it was the spiritual leader of the tribe, Jim Brown II,” he recalls. Brown politely listened as Parker explained his intentions but said little, and the two parted ways. By 1978, however, Parker had developed enough of a trusted relationship with cultural leaders of the tribe that they invited him to lead an archeological study of Rattlesnake Island: the first and only time they have done so.</p>
<p>Parker has continued to work closely with the Elem ever since. In 2008, he submitted a proposal have Rattlesnake Island listed in the National Historic Register of Historic Places, the US government’s official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation. As a result, the Island has been deemed eligible for the register, though it has not yet been fully approved for the list.</p>
<p>If it is, then any development that occurs there would have to meet more rigorous criteria than is normally required. Remarkably, John Nady’s attorney, a man by the name of Frederick Schrag, wrote a roughly 50-page rebuttal of Parker’s application — a move that had to cost Nady a small fortune, such is his wealth of his one-trick pony as he attempts to ram the project through.</p>
<p>Throughout the process of attempting to ram through his building proposal, John Nady has demonstrated a continual disregard even for basic regulations. In 2004, the Lake County Community Development Department (CDD) erroneously granted him a permit to built a septic system despite his not having conducted an archeological inspection, which the California Environmental Quality Act mandates take place in potentially archaeologically significant areas. The County quickly revoked Nady’s permit. A few months later, Nady began excavation work on the septic system anyway. The Board of Supervisors called a special session with Nady to ask him to stop the work. He told them “No.” The Supervisors were forced to initiate legal proceedings a few days later, with County Counsel sending him a Cease and Desist order.</p>
<p>Investigations by the Elem and their allies have revealed that Nady has conducted at least 7,960 feet of scraping, grading, and trenching work on the island without bothering to obtain any permits, including 1,328 feet of roads, 4,316 feet of foot paths, 1,826 feet of water pipe trenches, 498 feet of power line trenches. Nady openly admitted at a public hearing that that he “cleaned stuff off the island,” much of this “stuff” being historically significant artifacts of the Elem’s habitation of the island in the period since the 1800s. Elem Tribal members have complained numerous times to the County Community Development Department, which has so far declined to follow up on the matter. Nady has repeatedly threatened to sue them.</p>
<p>Most recently, Nady has appealed the County Planning Commision’s unanimous decision that he must submit an Environmental Impact Review to the Board of Supervisors. At their August 16th meeting, the Lake County Supes deliberated on Nady’s appeal. After hearing four hours of testimony, they postponed their decision until September 6th. in their chambers in Lakeport, in a session that begins at 1:30.</p>
<p>Thus far, Nady has retained and fired four different archeological consultants, because they all indicated that the resources on Rattlesnake Island were very significant. At the August 16th Supervisors meeting, his latest archeologist revealed that Nady has categorically refused to allow cultural artifacts to be removed from the island so that they can be scientifically evaluated, as required under CEQA.</p>
<p>Yet, Nady again stated at a separate hearing that he had “cleaned stuff off the island” which also consisted of historically significant artifacts. Nady’s caretaker later confirmed that he was the one who was given the task of “removing the trash.”</p>
<p>Summing up one of Nady’s basic positions, Brown says, “All they [the Pomos] want to do is put a casino on an island, and all I want to do is put my summer home on there.” But the idea that the Elem will put a casino there is extremely far-fetched. In the 1990s, their tribal chairman was recalled explicitly because he supported building a casino there.</p>
<p>At the August 17th Lake County Supervisors meeting, a large contingent of native people from various tribes turned out in support of the Elem’s struggle. One of them was Wounded Knee DeOcampo, a traditional leader of the Coast Miwok people, who recently helped conduct a 104-day occupation of a Miwok burial ground called Glen Cove, which was slated to be developed into a parking lot by the Vallejo Parks and Recreation District. After 99 days of the occupation, the Vallejo City Council unanimously voted to grant the Corina Band of Wintun Indians and the Yocha Dehe tribe a Cultural Easement that allows them the legal right to oversee and protect their sacred grounds. It was the culmination of a struggle that DeCampo says lasted more than a dozen years.</p>
<p>Many of those who took part in the successful struggle at Glen Cove, he says, are ready to take part in a similar action at Rattlesnake Island should the Lake County Supervisors approve Nady’s proposal. “I’ve known Jim Brown for many years, and he has a very strong spirit,” DeCampo says. “I will support the Elem to protect Rattlesnake Island because desecration of sacred sites has to come to a stop.”</p>
<p>Another unyielding defender of sacred sites who attended the hearing was Morning Star Gali of the Pit River Nation of northeastern California.&#160; At the time I spoke to her, Gali was in Arizona supporting blockades organized to stop development of a ski resort in the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, a mountain range considered sacred to 13 different American Indian tribes.&#160; Gali is a former Flagstaff resident. Among her other activities to support self-determination for native people, Gali is one of the hosts of the weekly KPFA radio program “Bay Native Circle,” where she had Jim Browneagle’s son, Eagle Brown, as a guest this past week to discuss the Rattlesnake Island struggle. She says she is also working with others to help develop a web site promoting defense of Rattlesnake Island.</p>
<p>This is far from the first time that Nady has trampled on native people’s spirituality as part of a development he proposed. His production plant in Emeryville is built atop a portion of one of the most sacred sites of the Ohlone people of the San Francisco Bay and Central Coast regions, the Emeryville Shell Mounds.</p>
<p>Also at the August 17 Lake County Supervisors meeting, Jim Browneagle was given a unique opportunity to present an extensive PowerPoint concerning the Elem’s aboriginal rights on Rattlesnake Island. This authoritative presentation was based on Liam Griffin’s dissertation, condensed now into 12 pages with slides. Immediately at issue in the hearing was whether Nady should be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act. The fact that issues concerning aboriginal title were raised at the Supervisors meeting marked a breakthrough for the Elem.</p>
<p>Ultimately, if the Elem are to gain paper title of the island that is rightfully theirs, it will likely require an act of Congress. Last year, BrownEagle, Griffin, and other Elem representatives met with Congressman Mike Thompson to try to convince him to sponsor legislation bringing the federal government in to perform eminent domain on Nady’s paper title, thus granting Rattlesnake Island back to the Elem. The “grape-obsessed” Thompson, as the New York Times recently put it, wavered at the possibility that such a course might lead to a casino being constructed “in Wine Country.” However, he also indicated he might be inclined to support such legislation if the Lake County Supervisors first approve of it.</p>
<p>“Application of the federal power of eminent domain is the most practical and equitable solution, and the time to do so is now, before this ancient sacred homeland and sacred tribal landscape is destroyed and lost forever,” BrownEagle’s distilled verison of Griffin’s dissertation reads. “We are requesting tribal and public support to prevent the outright destruction of Elem’s 6,000 year old homeland village on Rattlesnake Island.”</p>
<p>Will Parrish can be reached at&#160; <a href="mailto:wparrish@riseup.net" type="external">wparrish@riseup.net</a></p>
<p>This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which will feature ongoing coverage of this issue. &#160;</p> | The Struggle For Rattlesnake Island | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/08/26/the-struggle-for-rattlesnake-island/ | 2011-08-26 | 4left
| 3,064 | The oldest human remains so far discovered in California belong to the Elem Pomo Nation who have lived on the eastern and southern shores of the Clear Lake basin for at least 10000 years also inhabiting much of the peninsula between eastern and southern arms of the lake For a minimum of 5000 of those years the Elem8217s way of life has centered on an island roughly 56 acres in surface area located just off the north shore of the lake8217s eastern arm The island has been the home of five documented Elem village sites as well as dance houses cremation pits human burial sites 8212 in short the major hallmarks of the people8217s religious cultural and political life In spite of nearly 200year history of EuroAmerican encroachment into the Pomo nation8217s ancestral territory no development has ever taken place on the island It has been called 8220arguably the lushest place in Lake County8221 Located a mere 60 yards offshore the Elem8217s current 50acre reservation just outside the sleepy Lake County town of Clearlake Oaks it is one of the last pristine sacred places to Native Americans in California Without it the Elem Pomo would cease to be who they are as a people In 2004 a wealthy Bay Area electronics mogul named John Nady assumed paper title to the island proposing to build a vacation home along with various supporting structures Nady says these buildings will be constructed 8220sustainably8221 by which he means an array of solar panels and other accouterments of 8220green technology8221 He asserts that his private property rights ought to trump the Elem8217s ability to use the island Since gaining his paper title he has even refused to allow the Elem access to the island for ceremonies and other traditional purposes Nady8217s fanatical devotion to the American system of private property relations is understandable given the way in which it has worked to his material benefit He founded his company Nady Systems Inc based in that wellknown sustainable community of Emeryville in 1972 The company manufactures audio equipment including wireless microphones that have long had a dominant share in the American music market As of 1987 73 out of the top 100 touring musicians ranked by Billboard magazine were using Nady Wireless The company8217s market share of this product category is likely every bit as commanding today Its patriarch doubtless wields tens of millions of dollars in wealth Yet there are a number of major problems with Nady8217s proposal to construct his dream home on Rattlesnake Island one of which is that even under the strictest definition of AngloAmerican property law he is not the land8217s rightful owner Rather as Elem traditionalists have consistently maintained throughout the decades they never gave up title to the land In 2005 their position received a boost when former Clearlake resident Liam Griffin completed a 104page dissertation at the University of New Mexico law school establishing beyond any reasonable doubt the Elem8217s rightful ownership 8220Rattlesnake Island was stolen plain and simple8221 Griffin says 8220I know that today8217s sentiment is typically 8216Well we can8217t undo the past8217 and that8217s what the perpetrators were counting on when they represented that the island was not occupied8221 Griffin is referring to the initial 1877 patent on the island signed by thenCalifornia Governor Irwin which ostensibly furnished title to the land to a pair of wealthy Bay Area entrepreneurs The island8217s new paper owners claimed in spite of all available evidence that the land was uninhabited It would be many years before an 8220Indian8221 could legally testify in a US court let alone bring forth a complaint Thus the Elem had no legal recourse in California court for challenging this judicial fleecing Behind this fig leaf of legal propriety a false title to the land has changed hands among a series of wealthy Anglo Americans for the past 134 years That8217s the title now in the possession of Nady But Governor Irwin8217s grant failed entirely to mention the rights of the Native people who lived on the island Rather it based its authority on three acts of Congress none of which actually gave the authority for such a land patent The Indian NonIntercourse Act signed into federal law in 1834 proclaims that aboriginal land title can be extinguished only by an act of Congress Thus title to the land still rightfully belongs to the Elem 8220Spurred by the first real threat of development in the 160 years since the arrival of white men8221 Griffin8217s dissertation reads 8220there is an effort now underway led by the Elem to clarify their aboriginal rights to the island with the hope of preserving the island on behalf of all people Research conducted for this article reveals that the Elem have probably always had a valid claim based on the principle of aboriginal rights but so far have failed or been denied the standing to properly assert it8221 In the years since the initial EuroAmerican encroachment into their land Rattlesnake Island has come to signify not only the Elem8217s ancient culture but also something relatively new the Elem8217s steadfast refusal to relinquish that culture in spite of intense pressure Remarkably the Elem continued to use the island for ceremonial and other traditional purposes up to the present day even when they have had to violate California8217s laws to do so In the early 1970s for example a contingent of Elem traditionalists and supporters occupied Rattlesnake Island to block construction of a subdivision by Boise Cascade Corporation which today stands as the United States8217 13th largest pulp and paper company and which owned more than 126000 acres in real estate holdings in 13 states at the time Their occupation took place in close proximity to a similar occupation of Alcatraz Island mounted by a coalition of native people in 1969 Before long Boise Cascade negotiated with the Elem 8220We8217ve been here all this time and we8217ve never lost our culture8221 says the Elem8217s traditional cultural leader and primary historian Jim Browneagle 8220That8217s what I8217m more proud of than anything8221 Brown8217s pride is particularly understandable considering that the process by which the Elem and other California Indian nations were dispossessed of their land was characterized by gutwrenching almost entirely onesided whiteonnative violence While some of the many incidents of savage AngloAmerican slaughter of American Indian nations are far better known such as those that occurred at Wounded Knee South Dakota in 1890 and Sand Creek Colorado in 1864 the bloodbaths that took place in Lake County 8212 as with those that occurred in Mendocino County were neither less brutal nor less historically significant One of the largest such massacres took place in 1843 when a Spanish military expedition under the command of Salvador Vallejo burned approximately 200 Pomo villagers alive inside their traditional roundhouse on Kamdot Island in Clear Lake located on Koi Pomo territory The natives8217 crime was that they refused to submit to slavery at Salvador Vallejo8217s 66000acre rancho a parcel that spanned much of Sonoma Napa and Lake counties From May 1517 1850 the US Army carried out what is today known as the Bloody Island massacre After a group of Pomo men retaliated for years of murder and rape by settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone the town of Kelseyville is named after the former the US Army responded by slaughtering roughly 60 Pomos near Kelsey8217s ranch followed by the arbitrary slaughter of 75 Pomo far away from where the incident took place along the Russian River BrownEagle 58 is an engaging energetic man who comes from a long line of spiritual and cultural leaders His father Jim Brown II was the recognized spiritual and cultural leader of the Elem prior to him His mother Elvina Brown was a native of the Big Valley Pomo who also became a recognized Elem cultural leader He inherited the role of Rattlesnake Island8217s most dedicated defender from his uncle Dewey Barnes Sr the acknowledged spokesperson of the early70s occupation Browneagle8217s ability to marshal information pertaining not only to his own people8217s history but also various related strands of US history global geopolitics and current events is reminiscent of a university history professor Yet as Browneagle likes to say he has been forced to exist in two worlds He estimates that he devotes roughly half his time to leading and participating in traditional ceremonies and other cultural activities For the vast majority of his adult life he has also been a tribal administrator Along with his wife Gail a Yokayo Pomo from the Ukiah Valley he hosts a weekly public affairs program on KPFZ Radio out of Lakeport entitled 8220Tribal Voices8221 8220I really feel so great about this8221 BrownEagle says while brandishing Griffin8217s report 8220I feel in my heart that if I walk onto that land right now it8217s going to go into court and I have my case already set up8221 Throughout most of his adulthood BrownEagle has regularly given presentations on Elem culture in local schools and in other settings He says his father would talk about the importance of not judging people by any visual criteria but rather by 8220hearing each person8217s spirit Then you really know who they are8221 Choking up as he recalls his late father8217s counsel he adds 8220Wow growing up that was great for me8221 The philosophy has led to a number of important collaborations with supportive nonnative people For his part Liam Griffin first became interested in helping protect Rattlesnake Island after he met Browneagle in the 1980s The two men lost touch for years But the experience of meeting BrownEagle as well as having attended school with a number of Pomo people stuck with him until he made it to college Another persistent ally of the Elem has been archeologist John Parker who lives in the sleepy Lake County town of Lucerne and received his undergraduate degree at Sonoma State In the early 70s not long after he first enrolled at the Santa Rosa campus Parker says he decided that because his archeological interest was to study 8220how people live rather than how they die8221 he decided to go doortodoor at the Elem Pomo Colony to ask for their advice on what he should study 8220The first door I knock on it turns out it was the spiritual leader of the tribe Jim Brown II8221 he recalls Brown politely listened as Parker explained his intentions but said little and the two parted ways By 1978 however Parker had developed enough of a trusted relationship with cultural leaders of the tribe that they invited him to lead an archeological study of Rattlesnake Island the first and only time they have done so Parker has continued to work closely with the Elem ever since In 2008 he submitted a proposal have Rattlesnake Island listed in the National Historic Register of Historic Places the US government8217s official list of districts sites buildings structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation As a result the Island has been deemed eligible for the register though it has not yet been fully approved for the list If it is then any development that occurs there would have to meet more rigorous criteria than is normally required Remarkably John Nady8217s attorney a man by the name of Frederick Schrag wrote a roughly 50page rebuttal of Parker8217s application 8212 a move that had to cost Nady a small fortune such is his wealth of his onetrick pony as he attempts to ram the project through Throughout the process of attempting to ram through his building proposal John Nady has demonstrated a continual disregard even for basic regulations In 2004 the Lake County Community Development Department CDD erroneously granted him a permit to built a septic system despite his not having conducted an archeological inspection which the California Environmental Quality Act mandates take place in potentially archaeologically significant areas The County quickly revoked Nady8217s permit A few months later Nady began excavation work on the septic system anyway The Board of Supervisors called a special session with Nady to ask him to stop the work He told them 8220No8221 The Supervisors were forced to initiate legal proceedings a few days later with County Counsel sending him a Cease and Desist order Investigations by the Elem and their allies have revealed that Nady has conducted at least 7960 feet of scraping grading and trenching work on the island without bothering to obtain any permits including 1328 feet of roads 4316 feet of foot paths 1826 feet of water pipe trenches 498 feet of power line trenches Nady openly admitted at a public hearing that that he 8220cleaned stuff off the island8221 much of this 8220stuff8221 being historically significant artifacts of the Elem8217s habitation of the island in the period since the 1800s Elem Tribal members have complained numerous times to the County Community Development Department which has so far declined to follow up on the matter Nady has repeatedly threatened to sue them Most recently Nady has appealed the County Planning Commision8217s unanimous decision that he must submit an Environmental Impact Review to the Board of Supervisors At their August 16th meeting the Lake County Supes deliberated on Nady8217s appeal After hearing four hours of testimony they postponed their decision until September 6th in their chambers in Lakeport in a session that begins at 130 Thus far Nady has retained and fired four different archeological consultants because they all indicated that the resources on Rattlesnake Island were very significant At the August 16th Supervisors meeting his latest archeologist revealed that Nady has categorically refused to allow cultural artifacts to be removed from the island so that they can be scientifically evaluated as required under CEQA Yet Nady again stated at a separate hearing that he had 8220cleaned stuff off the island8221 which also consisted of historically significant artifacts Nady8217s caretaker later confirmed that he was the one who was given the task of 8220removing the trash8221 Summing up one of Nady8217s basic positions Brown says 8220All they the Pomos want to do is put a casino on an island and all I want to do is put my summer home on there8221 But the idea that the Elem will put a casino there is extremely farfetched In the 1990s their tribal chairman was recalled explicitly because he supported building a casino there At the August 17th Lake County Supervisors meeting a large contingent of native people from various tribes turned out in support of the Elem8217s struggle One of them was Wounded Knee DeOcampo a traditional leader of the Coast Miwok people who recently helped conduct a 104day occupation of a Miwok burial ground called Glen Cove which was slated to be developed into a parking lot by the Vallejo Parks and Recreation District After 99 days of the occupation the Vallejo City Council unanimously voted to grant the Corina Band of Wintun Indians and the Yocha Dehe tribe a Cultural Easement that allows them the legal right to oversee and protect their sacred grounds It was the culmination of a struggle that DeCampo says lasted more than a dozen years Many of those who took part in the successful struggle at Glen Cove he says are ready to take part in a similar action at Rattlesnake Island should the Lake County Supervisors approve Nady8217s proposal 8220I8217ve known Jim Brown for many years and he has a very strong spirit8221 DeCampo says 8220I will support the Elem to protect Rattlesnake Island because desecration of sacred sites has to come to a stop8221 Another unyielding defender of sacred sites who attended the hearing was Morning Star Gali of the Pit River Nation of northeastern Californiaamp160 At the time I spoke to her Gali was in Arizona supporting blockades organized to stop development of a ski resort in the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff a mountain range considered sacred to 13 different American Indian tribesamp160 Gali is a former Flagstaff resident Among her other activities to support selfdetermination for native people Gali is one of the hosts of the weekly KPFA radio program 8220Bay Native Circle8221 where she had Jim Browneagle8217s son Eagle Brown as a guest this past week to discuss the Rattlesnake Island struggle She says she is also working with others to help develop a web site promoting defense of Rattlesnake Island This is far from the first time that Nady has trampled on native people8217s spirituality as part of a development he proposed His production plant in Emeryville is built atop a portion of one of the most sacred sites of the Ohlone people of the San Francisco Bay and Central Coast regions the Emeryville Shell Mounds Also at the August 17 Lake County Supervisors meeting Jim Browneagle was given a unique opportunity to present an extensive PowerPoint concerning the Elem8217s aboriginal rights on Rattlesnake Island This authoritative presentation was based on Liam Griffin8217s dissertation condensed now into 12 pages with slides Immediately at issue in the hearing was whether Nady should be exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act The fact that issues concerning aboriginal title were raised at the Supervisors meeting marked a breakthrough for the Elem Ultimately if the Elem are to gain paper title of the island that is rightfully theirs it will likely require an act of Congress Last year BrownEagle Griffin and other Elem representatives met with Congressman Mike Thompson to try to convince him to sponsor legislation bringing the federal government in to perform eminent domain on Nady8217s paper title thus granting Rattlesnake Island back to the Elem The 8220grapeobsessed8221 Thompson as the New York Times recently put it wavered at the possibility that such a course might lead to a casino being constructed 8220in Wine Country8221 However he also indicated he might be inclined to support such legislation if the Lake County Supervisors first approve of it 8220Application of the federal power of eminent domain is the most practical and equitable solution and the time to do so is now before this ancient sacred homeland and sacred tribal landscape is destroyed and lost forever8221 BrownEagle8217s distilled verison of Griffin8217s dissertation reads 8220We are requesting tribal and public support to prevent the outright destruction of Elem8217s 6000 year old homeland village on Rattlesnake Island8221 Will Parrish can be reached atamp160 wparrishriseupnet This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser which will feature ongoing coverage of this issue amp160 | The/DET oldest/ADJ human/ADJ remains/AUX so/ADV far/ADV discovered/VERB in/ADP California/PROPN belong/VERB to/ADP the/DET Elem/PROPN Pomo/PROPN Nation/PROPN who/PRON have/AUX lived/VERB on/ADP the/DET 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<p>Piles of words have been written about disaster capitalism. This brand of capitalism involves two kinds of assaults on communities: severe budget cuts and extensive privatization, both imposed during periods of psycho-social shock resulting from an economic crash, war, or a “natural disaster.” In 2005 Hurricane Katrina became a case study to trace these twin prongs of disaster capitalism as one of the world’s great cities and a stretch of the Gulf Coast were decimated by a post-hurricane flurry of budget cuts and privatization.</p>
<p>However, there’s a third leg of the violent imposition of neoliberalism in the wake of disaster that has been subject to much less scrutiny. This aspect has been as effective as privatization in opportunistically transferring huge sums of wealth into the hands of a few corporations and the rich. It has also laid much of the groundwork for further budget cutting in the wake of catastrophe. What is it?</p>
<p>Two words: tax policy. Disaster tax policy.</p>
<p>In December of 2005 Congress responded to Hurricane Katrina by passing an unprecedented economic recovery package in the form of a tellingly named bill, the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 (or “GO-Zone”). For those familiar with corporate globalization-speak, an “opportunity zone” is a synonym for “enterprise zone,” and also closely related to the various other “zones” of special exploitation carved out by states for the benefit of capital. In these sorts of zones the normal rules of state regulation (to protect the environment, workers, etc.) are suspended, creating a laissez faire atmosphere. The GO-Zone essentially amended sections of the Internal Revenue Code, sections that normally apply to corporations and financial entities operating in a region of opportunity that included the southern counties of Mississippi and Alabama, and southern parishes of Louisiana.</p>
<p>The GO-Zone, the central economic policy response to Hurricane Katrina, was quite simply a massive tax break for corporations and the wealthy. It has resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from the federal government and public sector to mostly large transnational corporations and investment banks, but also to the top 5 per cent of wealth holders in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Because this raid on the federal budget was designed to occur through somewhat arcane tax expenditures its effect of upwardly redistributing wealth and reducing federal revenues have been subtle and difficult to discern. Its absence of positive economic impacts for the hardest hit communities are conspicuous, however.</p>
<p>As a policy the GO-Zone has its origins in another recent disaster, 9-11. A virtually identical package of tax breaks for corporate wealth was written into a section of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 shortly after blocks of New York City were reduced to rubble on September 11, 2001. Buried not too deeply in this bill was the provision for creating a “New York Liberty Zone.”</p>
<p>This uber-patriotic idea (conveniently designed to aid already fabulously wealthy real estate and financial companies owning real estate and operating in lower Manhattan) was thought up right in between the two most important Bush-era tax laws, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003. All three of these bills reduced corporate taxes and taxes on personal wealth to nearly record levels, and set the federal government on its path to where it is today – massive deficit spending and a budget crisis due to shrinking revenues.</p>
<p>One of the Republican Party’s key players in drafting all of this pro-corporate tax legislation was a relatively unassuming and little known House member from Louisiana’s 4th District, Jim McCrery.</p>
<p>McCrery’s Congressional career began in 1988 and lasted just over two decades. In that time he became one of the Congress’s most knowledgeable members with respect to tax issues, and therefore a key contributor to the Bush administration’s rollback of progressive taxes. McCrery co-sponsored the Bush tax cut bills and helped work out some of their finer points as a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee.</p>
<p>In December of 2005 McCrery introduced the GO-Zone act to Congress and shepherded it through the House, Senate, and to the President’s desk in a swift sixteen days with strong bi-partisan support. On the floor of the House McCrery implored, “I cannot overemphasize the importance of putting into law as quickly as possible incentives to give businesses, individuals, people with capital to invest, the urge to go to these devastated areas and invest that capital.” His colleagues on both sides of the isle concurred that government’s role should be to lavish the wealthy and powerful with lucrative tax incentives. During the perfunctory floor debate no Democrat or Republican asked why similarly targeted economic assistance was not being proposed for workers, small businesses, and others who lacked “capital to invest.”</p>
<p>At the center of the GO-Zone are two key provisions that require a corporation or individual already be wealthy and powerful to take advantage of. The first is a $14.9 billion in bonding authority given to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. These “GO-Zone bonds” allow private financial institutions to lend billions to private companies to build all manner of private, for-profit industrial and commercial projects, with profits on these bonds subject to zero federal tax. The Congressional Research Service notes that this provision alone will reduce federal revenues by at least $1 billion over the eleven-year span of the program.</p>
<p>The second key provision was establishment of a bonus depreciation allowance which let businesses drastically reduce their tax burdens by claiming a deduction related to the expected wear-and-tear and therefore decline in the value of property and capital invested in after the storm. Depreciation is a standard tax deduction used by businesses, but the “bonus” aspect allowed for larger immediate deductions. The GO-Zone included billions more in other tax credits, tax exemptions, tax write offs, and tax loopholes to be claimed by corporations and other owners of large real estate and capital holdings, all predicated on the notion that the best disaster recovery policy is aimed at helping those who already have the most.</p>
<p>After more than five years the GO-Zone has proven a resounding failure with respect to economic recovery along the Gulf Coast. Although local chamber of commerce boosters have pointed to a lower unemployment rate than the national average, the reality is that the region’s economy has shrunk, especially in locales like New Orleans and coastal parishes where the GO-Zone’s promised benefits never materialized and never will. New Orleans and many of the hardest hit Louisiana parishes and counties in Mississippi and Alabama have seen little to no benefit from the promised infusions of cash via corporate investments in their backyards. This has meant relatively poor levels of job creation, few if any local construction contracts or subcontracts, few new sources of local tax revenues, actual reductions in housing stocks, and closures of unfunded public schools, public housing, public libraries, and other public goods. Because disaster tax policies are expressly written to benefit large wealth holders, these policies have no positive impact for working families. The majority who possess no vast real estate holdings and who own none of the corporate capital are at the mercy of the wealthy few to make decisions about the future. Democratic control over economic development is made impossible.</p>
<p>The hard truth is that most communities inside the GO-Zone’s boundaries were never meant to reap benefits from these tax incentives. The intended benefactors from the very beginning were large corporations, the big financial companies that loan to them, and the elite law firms that serve both.</p>
<p>The Gulf Opportunity Zone Act was written by and for corporate capital. Representative McCrery sponsored the bill to respond to his most important constituents: major corporations and financial institutions with stakes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. These parties were not interested in rebuilding the region’s economy to benefit disaster stricken communities. They were keen on obtaining huge tax breaks and cheap bond money to expand the already harmful economy of extraction: refineries, pipelines, and chemical plants.</p>
<p>This opportunistic imposition of disaster tax policy was a fitting capstone to McCrery’s Congressional career which was characterized by a nearly perfect record of supporting regressive taxation and budget cutting. McCrery began his professional life as a lawyer in the small city of Leesville, Louisiana. After a stint as an assistant attorney for the city of Shreveport, in 1981 he joined the staff of Rep. Charles Roemer, III. McCrery’s boss would eventually become a tax-hating, budget slashing Governor of Louisiana, one who also ushered in gambling via floating casinos and the now ubiquitous video poker machines placed in seemingly every bayou bar and truck stop. McCrery inherited Roemer’s Congressional seat in 1988.</p>
<p>In the interim, however, McCrery spent four years working as a lawyer for the Georgia Pacific Corporation, one of the largest timber, pulp, and chemicals companies in the world with operations in Louisiana and nearby Arkansas. Perhaps it was during his four years at Georgia Pacific that McCrery’s pro-corporate ideology was finally and fully cemented, or maybe it was earlier. Whenever it was, freshman McCrery entered the Congress ready to rewrite the tax code in favor of further concentrating wealth to the benefit of companies like G-P.</p>
<p>Candidate McCrery’s elections were bankrolled by the usual powerhouse corporations that spend heavily on Republicans and Democrats alike, many of them big insurance, healthcare, and financial concerns. Oil and chemical companies with operations in Louisiana were also among the Congressman’s biggest sources of campaign cash. He received virtually nothing from unions, environmental funds, women’s organizations, and African American owned businesses.</p>
<p>McCrery’s former employer Georgia Pacific was one of his top donors throughout his career. Between 1998 and 2004 Georgia Pacific gave McCrery more than $21,000. After Georgia Pacific was bought out by Koch Industries in 2005 (just around the same time Hurricane Katrina struck) Koch continued to donate to McCrery, giving him $10,000 in 2006. Another major funder of McCrery was Harrah’s Entertainment. The Casino giant with two hotels, two casinos, and a horse-racing track in his district, gave McCrery $17,500 between 2002 and 2006. These corporations were largely investing in McCrery for his deft knowledge of tax policy, and his effectiveness in crafting tax legislation redistribute wealth from the public sector to private. These were shrewd investments.</p>
<p>To build support for this neoliberal economic agenda, Rep. McCrery created a very successful political action committee in 1996, the Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism (CPC). In addition to spending tens of thousands of dollars on ritzy fund raising events at various California wine country attractions like the Lodge at Sonoma, and Benziger Winery, McCrery’s CPC doled out $5000 and $10,000 contributions to Republican candidates who would help pass extremely corporate friendly laws. A list of the CPC’s biggest cash cows correlates almost perfectly with high scorers on the Americans for Tax Reform scorecard (Grover Norquist’s austerity-obsessed organization). McCrery himself routinely scored above the 95th percentile. Some of the CPC’s favored candidates have become stars of the Tea Party.</p>
<p>Having helped stack the House with Republican allies, when Hurricane Katrina hit it was almost a foregone conclusion that the economic policy response would center on tax cuts. Democrats voted with equal enthusiasm for the GO-Zone Act though, their own party’s leadership having been been infected by the same neoliberal policy doctrines during the Clinton years.</p>
<p>Most aspects of the GO-Zone Act were set to expire at the end of 2010, but late last year the Congress extended many provisions, including the tax-exempt bond program which had failed to dole out its entire lending cap. Nevertheless, after a half-decade of implementation the GO-Zone’s record speaks loud and clear. The primary beneficiaries of GO-Zone bonds have been the large oil and chemical companies. Areas that have seen the largest GO-Zone bond investments are uniformly outside of the hardest hit parishes and counties. Any economic stimulus and jobs created therefore have been at a distance from the most crippled areas. A mere ten mega-projects financed with GO-Zone bonds involving expansion of oil refineries, chemical plants, pipelines, and petroleum tanks have consumed more than half of all the program’s funds in Louisiana. (In the upcoming May/June issue of Dollars and Sense magazine, <a href="http://www.dollarsandsense.org/" type="external">http://www.dollarsandsense.org/</a>, I will present a more complete picture of the GO-Zone’s failure as a disaster reconstruction policy in Louisiana.)</p>
<p>One of the biggest GO-Zone bond recipients in Louisiana will be McCrery’s former employer and major campaign donor, Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific. The Atlanta based company is expected to receive $250 million to expand a pulp and paper plant in East Baton Rouge Parish. It’s an exemplary disaster tax policy-enabled project; the plant will be built in a Parish that experienced relatively little damage from Katrina; it reinforces and further enriches the heavily polluting industries that already dominate Louisiana’s chemical corridor; it will generate huge profits for Koch Industries; and it’s all being done in the name of disaster reconstruction.</p>
<p>When McCrery retired from the House in 2008 he wasted no time stepping through the revolving door and into a job with the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel. It was a perfect fit for the ex-Congressman. Started in 2007 Capitol Counsel was described by The Hill’s Alexander Bolton as a lobbying firm focused on helping shape tax policy for its clients. According to Bolton:</p>
<p>“Two of the most experienced Democratic tax lobbyists in Washington have joined forces with a team of Democratic fundraisers and operatives to form what likely will emerge as one of Washington’s premier boutique lobbying shops. The firm, Capitol Counsel LLC, will focus almost exclusively on two of the most powerful committees in Congress: the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance panels.”</p>
<p>When McCrery joined Capitol Counsel he was leaving the Congress as the highly influential ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. Reaching back into this Committee, and the Senate’s tax policy panel, McCrery has worked to reduce taxes for companies like General Electric, provide tax breaks for oil firms like Bass Enterprises Production, and tax credits for manufacturers like Parsons&amp; &#160;Whittemore.</p>
<p>For example, in 2010 McCrery lobbied his former House colleagues and the Senate for passage of a bill that would have amended the Internal Revenue Code to allow a credit against income tax for corporations using energy derived from biomass to power domestic paper, pulp and paperboard factories. Parsons&amp; &#160;Whittemore, McCrery’s client, would have profited nicely if the bill had passed, but it did not. Coincidentally, earlier in 2010 McCrery’s former employer Georgia Pacific reached an agreement to purchase several Alabama pulp and paper mills from Parsons &amp; Whittemore.</p>
<p>Another example of McCrery’s continuing influence over tax policy involves Harrah’s Casino. Having been one of his biggest fundraisers while a Congressman, Harrah’s is now a client. McCrery spent the Summer of 2010 lobbying on Harrah’s behalf to amend portions of the tax code to allow the company to expand into Internet gaming and reduce the company’s tax burden. While the GO-Zone specifically barred casinos from utilizing its tax provisions, Harrah’s nevertheless profited from Hurricane Katrina in its own way by successfully pressuring Mississippi politicians to finally allow casinos such as its Grand Casino Biloxi to be built on dry land.</p>
<p>Before McCrery exited the House for his substantially more lucrative lobbying gig the Congress attempted to implement disaster tax policies after several other storms. Most notable was the introduction of the Midwestern Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 by Senator Charles Grassley (with Senator Barack Obama co-sponsoring). This bill would have duplicated the GO-Zone’s two key provisions with tax-exempt bond financing and bonus depreciation deductions made available to businesses within the geographic region flooded by the storms of that year.</p>
<p>The bill never became law. The Heartland Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 was passed instead. The “Heartland” bill included many tax benefits for individuals and some for businesses, but these two key disaster tax policies were nixed. Nevertheless, the concept of using tax deductions as the central policy tool to rebuild after disasters remains popular in Congress, due in part to the continuing influence of corporations and large wealth holders through lobby shops like Capitol Counsel.</p>
<p>Ironically a senior lawyer at the elite New Orleans law firm of Adams &amp; Reese who helped write portions of the GO-Zone Act, and whose clients have included big companies that have utilized tax-free GO-Zone bonds, sums up the harmful corporate bias inherent in disaster tax policy:</p>
<p>“the single greatest deficiency in the [GO-Zone] Act is the lack of sufficient assistance for small businesses. Smaller businesses typically do not need bonus depreciation because it is only beneficial if you have or expect substantial federal tax liability.”</p>
<p>In other words, bonus depreciation was explicitly designed to help only very large corporations, particularly those like oil and chemical companies —think Exxon or Georgia Pacific— who routinely reinvest in machinery and their physical plants. This lawyer continued:</p>
<p>“Without allowing the GO Zone bonds to be bank qualified, banks cannot generally justify the purchase of tax-exempt bonds for small borrowers.”</p>
<p>Bank qualification was only one of the many reasons why tax-exempt GO-Zone bonds went un-utilized by 99 per cent of businesses, mostly medium and small firms, in the disaster-stricken region. Again, it was an opportunistic policy that only large corporations and large financial companies could possibly gain from.</p>
<p>Thus, more than five years after Katrina, the Gulf Opportunity Zone has become a zone of spotty recovery, with some communities still suffering from economic damages that will never be repaired by policies that were never designed to do so, and other areas seeing huge investments by polluting industries, wealth all the while being concentrated in the hands of a few. Ultimately this episode is about much more than one member of Congress, or one set of industries that gamed the tax code after a natural disaster; it’s about the ascendancy of an ideology among government leadership, on both side of the aisle. The problem is that those who adhere to disaster tax policy not only believe the best response to calamity is to further enrich and empower the wealthy few: they also lack the ability to imagine that government could respond any differently, that it could directly empower and enrich the people, from the bottom up.</p>
<p>DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:darwin@riseup.net" type="external">darwin@riseup.net</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Rigging the Tax Code to Profit From Disasters | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/04/05/rigging-the-tax-code-to-profit-from-disasters/ | 2011-04-05 | 4left
| 3,064 | Piles of words have been written about disaster capitalism This brand of capitalism involves two kinds of assaults on communities severe budget cuts and extensive privatization both imposed during periods of psychosocial shock resulting from an economic crash war or a 8220natural disaster8221 In 2005 Hurricane Katrina became a case study to trace these twin prongs of disaster capitalism as one of the world8217s great cities and a stretch of the Gulf Coast were decimated by a posthurricane flurry of budget cuts and privatization However there8217s a third leg of the violent imposition of neoliberalism in the wake of disaster that has been subject to much less scrutiny This aspect has been as effective as privatization in opportunistically transferring huge sums of wealth into the hands of a few corporations and the rich It has also laid much of the groundwork for further budget cutting in the wake of catastrophe What is it Two words tax policy Disaster tax policy In December of 2005 Congress responded to Hurricane Katrina by passing an unprecedented economic recovery package in the form of a tellingly named bill the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005 or 8220GOZone8221 For those familiar with corporate globalizationspeak an 8220opportunity zone8221 is a synonym for 8220enterprise zone8221 and also closely related to the various other 8220zones8221 of special exploitation carved out by states for the benefit of capital In these sorts of zones the normal rules of state regulation to protect the environment workers etc are suspended creating a laissez faire atmosphere The GOZone essentially amended sections of the Internal Revenue Code sections that normally apply to corporations and financial entities operating in a region of opportunity that included the southern counties of Mississippi and Alabama and southern parishes of Louisiana The GOZone the central economic policy response to Hurricane Katrina was quite simply a massive tax break for corporations and the wealthy It has resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from the federal government and public sector to mostly large transnational corporations and investment banks but also to the top 5 per cent of wealth holders in Louisiana Mississippi and Alabama Because this raid on the federal budget was designed to occur through somewhat arcane tax expenditures its effect of upwardly redistributing wealth and reducing federal revenues have been subtle and difficult to discern Its absence of positive economic impacts for the hardest hit communities are conspicuous however As a policy the GOZone has its origins in another recent disaster 911 A virtually identical package of tax breaks for corporate wealth was written into a section of the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 shortly after blocks of New York City were reduced to rubble on September 11 2001 Buried not too deeply in this bill was the provision for creating a 8220New York Liberty Zone8221 This uberpatriotic idea conveniently designed to aid already fabulously wealthy real estate and financial companies owning real estate and operating in lower Manhattan was thought up right in between the two most important Bushera tax laws the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 All three of these bills reduced corporate taxes and taxes on personal wealth to nearly record levels and set the federal government on its path to where it is today 8211 massive deficit spending and a budget crisis due to shrinking revenues One of the Republican Party8217s key players in drafting all of this procorporate tax legislation was a relatively unassuming and little known House member from Louisiana8217s 4th District Jim McCrery McCrery8217s Congressional career began in 1988 and lasted just over two decades In that time he became one of the Congress8217s most knowledgeable members with respect to tax issues and therefore a key contributor to the Bush administration8217s rollback of progressive taxes McCrery cosponsored the Bush tax cut bills and helped work out some of their finer points as a powerful member of the Ways and Means Committee In December of 2005 McCrery introduced the GOZone act to Congress and shepherded it through the House Senate and to the President8217s desk in a swift sixteen days with strong bipartisan support On the floor of the House McCrery implored 8220I cannot overemphasize the importance of putting into law as quickly as possible incentives to give businesses individuals people with capital to invest the urge to go to these devastated areas and invest that capital8221 His colleagues on both sides of the isle concurred that government8217s role should be to lavish the wealthy and powerful with lucrative tax incentives During the perfunctory floor debate no Democrat or Republican asked why similarly targeted economic assistance was not being proposed for workers small businesses and others who lacked 8220capital to invest8221 At the center of the GOZone are two key provisions that require a corporation or individual already be wealthy and powerful to take advantage of The first is a 149 billion in bonding authority given to Louisiana Mississippi and Alabama These 8220GOZone bonds8221 allow private financial institutions to lend billions to private companies to build all manner of private forprofit industrial and commercial projects with profits on these bonds subject to zero federal tax The Congressional Research Service notes that this provision alone will reduce federal revenues by at least 1 billion over the elevenyear span of the program The second key provision was establishment of a bonus depreciation allowance which let businesses drastically reduce their tax burdens by claiming a deduction related to the expected wearandtear and therefore decline in the value of property and capital invested in after the storm Depreciation is a standard tax deduction used by businesses but the 8220bonus8221 aspect allowed for larger immediate deductions The GOZone included billions more in other tax credits tax exemptions tax write offs and tax loopholes to be claimed by corporations and other owners of large real estate and capital holdings all predicated on the notion that the best disaster recovery policy is aimed at helping those who already have the most After more than five years the GOZone has proven a resounding failure with respect to economic recovery along the Gulf Coast Although local chamber of commerce boosters have pointed to a lower unemployment rate than the national average the reality is that the region8217s economy has shrunk especially in locales like New Orleans and coastal parishes where the GOZone8217s promised benefits never materialized and never will New Orleans and many of the hardest hit Louisiana parishes and counties in Mississippi and Alabama have seen little to no benefit from the promised infusions of cash via corporate investments in their backyards This has meant relatively poor levels of job creation few if any local construction contracts or subcontracts few new sources of local tax revenues actual reductions in housing stocks and closures of unfunded public schools public housing public libraries and other public goods Because disaster tax policies are expressly written to benefit large wealth holders these policies have no positive impact for working families The majority who possess no vast real estate holdings and who own none of the corporate capital are at the mercy of the wealthy few to make decisions about the future Democratic control over economic development is made impossible The hard truth is that most communities inside the GOZone8217s boundaries were never meant to reap benefits from these tax incentives The intended benefactors from the very beginning were large corporations the big financial companies that loan to them and the elite law firms that serve both The Gulf Opportunity Zone Act was written by and for corporate capital Representative McCrery sponsored the bill to respond to his most important constituents major corporations and financial institutions with stakes in Louisiana Mississippi and Alabama These parties were not interested in rebuilding the region8217s economy to benefit disaster stricken communities They were keen on obtaining huge tax breaks and cheap bond money to expand the already harmful economy of extraction refineries pipelines and chemical plants This opportunistic imposition of disaster tax policy was a fitting capstone to McCrery8217s Congressional career which was characterized by a nearly perfect record of supporting regressive taxation and budget cutting McCrery began his professional life as a lawyer in the small city of Leesville Louisiana After a stint as an assistant attorney for the city of Shreveport in 1981 he joined the staff of Rep Charles Roemer III McCrery8217s boss would eventually become a taxhating budget slashing Governor of Louisiana one who also ushered in gambling via floating casinos and the now ubiquitous video poker machines placed in seemingly every bayou bar and truck stop McCrery inherited Roemer8217s Congressional seat in 1988 In the interim however McCrery spent four years working as a lawyer for the Georgia Pacific Corporation one of the largest timber pulp and chemicals companies in the world with operations in Louisiana and nearby Arkansas Perhaps it was during his four years at Georgia Pacific that McCrery8217s procorporate ideology was finally and fully cemented or maybe it was earlier Whenever it was freshman McCrery entered the Congress ready to rewrite the tax code in favor of further concentrating wealth to the benefit of companies like GP Candidate McCrery8217s elections were bankrolled by the usual powerhouse corporations that spend heavily on Republicans and Democrats alike many of them big insurance healthcare and financial concerns Oil and chemical companies with operations in Louisiana were also among the Congressman8217s biggest sources of campaign cash He received virtually nothing from unions environmental funds women8217s organizations and African American owned businesses McCrery8217s former employer Georgia Pacific was one of his top donors throughout his career Between 1998 and 2004 Georgia Pacific gave McCrery more than 21000 After Georgia Pacific was bought out by Koch Industries in 2005 just around the same time Hurricane Katrina struck Koch continued to donate to McCrery giving him 10000 in 2006 Another major funder of McCrery was Harrah8217s Entertainment The Casino giant with two hotels two casinos and a horseracing track in his district gave McCrery 17500 between 2002 and 2006 These corporations were largely investing in McCrery for his deft knowledge of tax policy and his effectiveness in crafting tax legislation redistribute wealth from the public sector to private These were shrewd investments To build support for this neoliberal economic agenda Rep McCrery created a very successful political action committee in 1996 the Committee for the Preservation of Capitalism CPC In addition to spending tens of thousands of dollars on ritzy fund raising events at various California wine country attractions like the Lodge at Sonoma and Benziger Winery McCrery8217s CPC doled out 5000 and 10000 contributions to Republican candidates who would help pass extremely corporate friendly laws A list of the CPC8217s biggest cash cows correlates almost perfectly with high scorers on the Americans for Tax Reform scorecard Grover Norquist8217s austerityobsessed organization McCrery himself routinely scored above the 95th percentile Some of the CPC8217s favored candidates have become stars of the Tea Party Having helped stack the House with Republican allies when Hurricane Katrina hit it was almost a foregone conclusion that the economic policy response would center on tax cuts Democrats voted with equal enthusiasm for the GOZone Act though their own party8217s leadership having been been infected by the same neoliberal policy doctrines during the Clinton years Most aspects of the GOZone Act were set to expire at the end of 2010 but late last year the Congress extended many provisions including the taxexempt bond program which had failed to dole out its entire lending cap Nevertheless after a halfdecade of implementation the GOZone8217s record speaks loud and clear The primary beneficiaries of GOZone bonds have been the large oil and chemical companies Areas that have seen the largest GOZone bond investments are uniformly outside of the hardest hit parishes and counties Any economic stimulus and jobs created therefore have been at a distance from the most crippled areas A mere ten megaprojects financed with GOZone bonds involving expansion of oil refineries chemical plants pipelines and petroleum tanks have consumed more than half of all the program8217s funds in Louisiana In the upcoming MayJune issue of Dollars and Sense magazine httpwwwdollarsandsenseorg I will present a more complete picture of the GOZone8217s failure as a disaster reconstruction policy in Louisiana One of the biggest GOZone bond recipients in Louisiana will be McCrery8217s former employer and major campaign donor Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific The Atlanta based company is expected to receive 250 million to expand a pulp and paper plant in East Baton Rouge Parish It8217s an exemplary disaster tax policyenabled project the plant will be built in a Parish that experienced relatively little damage from Katrina it reinforces and further enriches the heavily polluting industries that already dominate Louisiana8217s chemical corridor it will generate huge profits for Koch Industries and it8217s all being done in the name of disaster reconstruction When McCrery retired from the House in 2008 he wasted no time stepping through the revolving door and into a job with the lobbying firm Capitol Counsel It was a perfect fit for the exCongressman Started in 2007 Capitol Counsel was described by The Hill8217s Alexander Bolton as a lobbying firm focused on helping shape tax policy for its clients According to Bolton 8220Two of the most experienced Democratic tax lobbyists in Washington have joined forces with a team of Democratic fundraisers and operatives to form what likely will emerge as one of Washington8217s premier boutique lobbying shops The firm Capitol Counsel LLC will focus almost exclusively on two of the most powerful committees in Congress the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance panels8221 When McCrery joined Capitol Counsel he was leaving the Congress as the highly influential ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee Reaching back into this Committee and the Senate8217s tax policy panel McCrery has worked to reduce taxes for companies like General Electric provide tax breaks for oil firms like Bass Enterprises Production and tax credits for manufacturers like Parsonsampamp amp160Whittemore For example in 2010 McCrery lobbied his former House colleagues and the Senate for passage of a bill that would have amended the Internal Revenue Code to allow a credit against income tax for corporations using energy derived from biomass to power domestic paper pulp and paperboard factories Parsonsampamp amp160Whittemore McCrery8217s client would have profited nicely if the bill had passed but it did not Coincidentally earlier in 2010 McCrery8217s former employer Georgia Pacific reached an agreement to purchase several Alabama pulp and paper mills from Parsons ampamp Whittemore Another example of McCrery8217s continuing influence over tax policy involves Harrah8217s Casino Having been one of his biggest fundraisers while a Congressman Harrah8217s is now a client McCrery spent the Summer of 2010 lobbying on Harrah8217s behalf to amend portions of the tax code to allow the company to expand into Internet gaming and reduce the company8217s tax burden While the GOZone specifically barred casinos from utilizing its tax provisions Harrah8217s nevertheless profited from Hurricane Katrina in its own way by successfully pressuring Mississippi politicians to finally allow casinos such as its Grand Casino Biloxi to be built on dry land Before McCrery exited the House for his substantially more lucrative lobbying gig the Congress attempted to implement disaster tax policies after several other storms Most notable was the introduction of the Midwestern Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 by Senator Charles Grassley with Senator Barack Obama cosponsoring This bill would have duplicated the GOZone8217s two key provisions with taxexempt bond financing and bonus depreciation deductions made available to businesses within the geographic region flooded by the storms of that year The bill never became law The Heartland Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2008 was passed instead The 8220Heartland8221 bill included many tax benefits for individuals and some for businesses but these two key disaster tax policies were nixed Nevertheless the concept of using tax deductions as the central policy tool to rebuild after disasters remains popular in Congress due in part to the continuing influence of corporations and large wealth holders through lobby shops like Capitol Counsel Ironically a senior lawyer at the elite New Orleans law firm of Adams ampamp Reese who helped write portions of the GOZone Act and whose clients have included big companies that have utilized taxfree GOZone bonds sums up the harmful corporate bias inherent in disaster tax policy 8220the single greatest deficiency in the GOZone Act is the lack of sufficient assistance for small businesses Smaller businesses typically do not need bonus depreciation because it is only beneficial if you have or expect substantial federal tax liability8221 In other words bonus depreciation was explicitly designed to help only very large corporations particularly those like oil and chemical companies 8212think Exxon or Georgia Pacific8212 who routinely reinvest in machinery and their physical plants This lawyer continued 8220Without allowing the GO Zone bonds to be bank qualified banks cannot generally justify the purchase of taxexempt bonds for small borrowers8221 Bank qualification was only one of the many reasons why taxexempt GOZone bonds went unutilized by 99 per cent of businesses mostly medium and small firms in the disasterstricken region Again it was an opportunistic policy that only large corporations and large financial companies could possibly gain from Thus more than five years after Katrina the Gulf Opportunity Zone has become a zone of spotty recovery with some communities still suffering from economic damages that will never be repaired by policies that were never designed to do so and other areas seeing huge investments by polluting industries wealth all the while being concentrated in the hands of a few Ultimately this episode is about much more than one member of Congress or one set of industries that gamed the tax code after a natural disaster it8217s about the ascendancy of an ideology among government leadership on both side of the aisle The problem is that those who adhere to disaster tax policy not only believe the best response to calamity is to further enrich and empower the wealthy few they also lack the ability to imagine that government could respond any differently that it could directly empower and enrich the people from the bottom up DARWIN BONDGRAHAM is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans Albuquerque and Navarro CA He can be reached at darwinriseupnet amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 | Piles/NOUN of/ADP words/NOUN have/AUX been/AUX written/VERB about/ADP disaster/NOUN capitalism/NOUN This/DET brand/NOUN of/ADP capitalism/NOUN involves/VERB two/NUM kinds/NOUN of/ADP assaults/NOUN on/ADP communities/NOUN severe/ADJ budget/NOUN cuts/NOUN and/CCONJ extensive/ADJ privatization/NOUN both/PRON imposed/VERB during/ADP periods/NOUN 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<p>In another resounding demonstration of the importance of legally constituted checks and balances on executive power in the United States, the Associated Press, after filing a request to the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act, has secured 58 transcripts from the latest round of annual Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo, convened to assess whether the detainees still pose a threat to the US, or if they are still presumed to have ongoing “intelligence value.”</p>
<p>This is just the latest in a series of important actions undertaken by the AP with regard to Guantánamo. Previously, the agency secured the right to reproduce 60 habeas petitions, and obtained the 517 Summaries of Evidence for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) held at Guantánamo. Used to assess whether the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” these documents were analyzed by Mark and Joshua Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School to produce a ground-breaking report in February 2006, which demonstrated that, according to the government’s own allegations, only 8 percent of the detainees were accused of having any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and 86 percent were not captured by US forces, but by their Pakistan and Afghan allies, at a time when the Americans were making bounty payments, equivalent to an average worker’s lifetime salary, for the delivery of al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.</p>
<p>Subsequent revelations have done little to suggest that even these lowly figures are reliable, and the recent testimony of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who was involved in compiling the “evidence” for the Tribunals, has been particularly damaging to the government’s case. Abraham declared that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and frequently consisted of intelligence “of a generalized nature – often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and concluded that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”</p>
<p>In spring 2006, the AP secured its greatest victory, after taking the government to court over its refusal to reveal the names and nationalities of the Guantánamo detainees, as well as 8,000 pages of transcripts from their CSRTs and the first round of ARBs. A treasure trove of information (though not necessarily in the way that Donald Rumsfeld had in mind when he declared, in December 2001, that the first prisoners captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan “should be a treasure trove” of intelligence leads), these documents not only revealed – for the first time in four years, scandalously – who was actually held in Guantánamo, but also provided, through the transcripts, the first opportunity for the detainees to tell their stories to the world.</p>
<p>Although the tribunals and review boards were – and are – as monstrously illegal as the rest of the Guantánamo regime, with lawyers excluded from the hearings and decisions based largely on secret evidence obtained through torture, coercion and bribery, the information contained in the transcripts was so compelling that, when cross-referenced with the detainees’ names and arranged chronologically, it provided the basis for my forthcoming book The Guantánamo Files, which unveils the story of Guantánamo and the majority of its detainees for the first time.</p>
<p>The latest documents secured by the AP have just been released to the public by the Department of Defense, and it would, I think, be fair to say that they are the second most important set of documents relating to Guantánamo that have been released by the Pentagon (following the spring 2006 documents described above). As well as containing the 58 transcripts from the Second Round of the ARBs, the documents also include, for the first time, the ”evidence” – in the form of the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence so heavily criticized by Stephen Abraham – for all the Tribunals with the names of the detainees included (they were previously redacted), as well as all the Unclassified Summaries for both rounds of the ARBs. Also included are transcripts of the habeas corpus petitions of 179 detainees, and the whole set of documents is indexed so thoroughly that it appears, implausibly, to have been compiled as a testament to the importance of Freedom of Information legislation, with the aim of facilitating a greater understanding of Guantánamo and its detainees than has previously been possible.</p>
<p>These documents will provide lawyers, human rights activists and researchers with an invaluable base from which to gain at least a glimpse into the lives of the many dozens of detainees without legal representation, who have never taken part in any tribunals or review boards and whose stories were hitherto completely unknown. More crucially, perhaps, they will also enable critics of the regime to follow the ways in which additional allegations – produced under dubious circumstances in countless interrogations both at Guantánamo and in secret prisons – have mounted up against the detainees during the long years of their illegal imprisonment.</p>
<p>The only disappointment is that the documents relating to the decisions made by the review boards about whether to release detainees, or to continue to hold them, are so heavily redacted as to be all but useless, but even on this point other documents – the “Indexes to Transfer and Release Decisions” – provide invaluable, and previously concealed information about who has been released, and, more crucially, about the many dozens of detainees – at least 70, according to my first analysis – who have been cleared for release through the ARBs but are still held at Guantánamo because the US government cannot reach a satisfactory agreement with their home governments (as in the cases of the Yemenis), or is unwilling to return them to regimes where, ironically, after years of lawless and brutal detention in US custody, they face the prospect of torture or other ill-treatment. While information about who has been cleared is made available to individual detainees’ lawyers, the value of these documents is that they enable this information to be extended to those particularly vulnerable individuals without legal representation.</p>
<p>Of particular interest, for now, are the transcripts of the ARBs, especially as the AP trailed the release of the documents with a series of press releases over the weekend, picking out a few stories that contain important information. Chief amongst these is the transcript of the review board hearing of Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of several men presumed to be the intended “20th hijacker” on 9/11. Al-Qahtani’s story has been widely reported, particularly in 2005 when Time obtained a day-to-day transcript of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” to which he was subjected over a 50-day period from November 2002 to January 2003, when he was, amongst other things, interrogated and kept awake for 20 hours a day on most days, stripped naked, sexually humiliated, and forced to bark like a dog.</p>
<p>Although al-Qahtani’s lawyer reported in March 2006 that he had recanted his confession, the transcript of his ARB hearing is the first time that he has denied the 9/11 allegations in person, telling his review board, “this is the first statement I am making of my own free will and without coercion or under the threat of torture,” and stating, “I am a businessman, a peaceful man. I have no connection to terrorism, violence or fighters.” Refuting allegations that he admitted traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, that he attended a training camp, and that met Osama bin Laden and agreed to participate in a “martyr mission” for al-Qaeda, al-Qahtani said that the statements were not true and that he had only admitted to them while he was being “tortured” at Guantánamo, and included his allegations of torture in a statement that was read out to the board.</p>
<p>In other press releases over the weekend, Andrew O. Selsky and Ben Fox of the AP focused on the story of Ayman Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor caught up in the failed Tora Bora campaign, in November and December 2001, when the US military allowed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and numerous other senior figures in al-Qaeda and the Taliban to escape across the unguarded Pakistani border. Explaining that he was not a terrorist but had been caught up with al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountains, Batarfi said that he met Osama bin Laden in the mountains, to explain to him that the defense of Tora Bora was a lost cause, because “Most of all the total guns in the Tora Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 people.” He noted, however, that bin Laden “did not prepare himself for Tora Bora and to be frank he didn’t care about anyone but himself. He came for a day to visit the area and we talked to him and we wanted to leave this area. He said he didn’t know where to go himself and the second day he escaped and was gone.” Abandoned in the mountains, Batarfi said that he struggled to tend to the wounded and dying, who were overwhelmed by American air power. “I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties,” he explained. “I did a hand amputation by a knife and I did a finger amputation with scissors, and if someone was injured badly I was just operating on the table.”</p>
<p>Batarfi’s story is not widely known, although I was able to cover it in depth in my book because he has taken part in previous tribunals and review boards. As a result, I was more interested in uncovering the stories of other detainees whose voices had, until these documents were released, not been heard at all despite having spent over five and half years in US custody. Although these men are not strictly “ghost” prisoners – because their names and nationalities were released under duress last year, as opposed to the thousands of unknown, unrepresented and unreported prisoners held in Afghanistan, Iraq and other undisclosed locations – there is still something deeply disturbing about the fact that, after all this time, in which they have been held without charge or trial, in conditions of almost total isolation that would be difficult for even the most hardened of convicted criminals on the US mainland to endure, the voices of these men are being heard for the first time.</p>
<p>They include Hani al-Khalif, a former Saudi soldier, who served with US soldiers during the first Gulf War, who maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan in the winter of 2000 to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and explained, “The Taliban government is the right side to belong to because the other side has come out of the Taliban which is wrong,” and another Saudi – who didn’t wish to be identified – who said that he “wanted to participate in jihad for religious purposes to help people in need of food distribution,” because this would “strengthen his relationship with God,” and described how he had made the decision “because of emotion, because I saw a picture of a little baby that had dirty clothes and her hair was not combed or cut.” He insisted that “his goal was to help for two months and then return home,” but said that on arrival in Afghanistan he was tricked into attending the al-Farouq camp (a camp for Arab recruits that was affiliated with al-Qaeda), where he was dismayed to discover that it was “a terrorist training camp with political motivations, not religious goals.”</p>
<p>Also included is the testimony of Hisham Sliti, a Tunisian client of the London-based legal charity Reprieve, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, reported Sliti’s story in his book&#160;Bad Men: Guantánamo and the Secret Prisons, in which he portrayed an affable former drug addict, imprisoned for many years in prisons in Italy and Belgium, who reminisced at length about the quality of the European prisons compared to Guantánamo. “In Italy the prison was wide open for six hours a day,” he explained. “You could have anything in your room – I had a little fornello, a gas cooker. Can you imagine the Americans allowing that? Here, we call a plastic spoon a ‘Camp Delta Kalashnikov,’ as the soldiers think we’re going to attack them with it.” In the first hearing that Sliti deigned to attend, he lived up to Stafford Smith’s character sketch, explaining at length his various exploits in Europe, and telling the board that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.”</p>
<p>Another first-time testimony is that of Ravil Mingazov, the last of eight Russians in Guantánamo, who, it turns out, was actually born in Tajikistan. A former soldier in the Russian army, Mingazov explained that, although he had been honored for excellent service early in his career, he subsequently converted to Islam and fell out of favor with the KGB to such an extent that he deserted the army, left his wife and family, and fled to Afghanistan with the help of members of the Taliban-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Refuting allegations that he trained at al-Farouq, he said that he had made up these stories while imprisoned at the US airbase in Bagram, and added that he had in fact fled from the IMU, traveling to Pakistan, where he stayed at a center run by the missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi in Lahore. He explained that he was captured, with 16 other Guantánamo detainees, after moving to a guest house used by university students in Faisalabad, which was, unfortunately, owned – or otherwise connected to – the “high-value” al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah.</p>
<p>Sadly – given its undiluted focus on anti-American militancy – the only other first-time story, that of the Saudi Abdul Rahman al-Zahri, was the only one of the previously unheard voices picked up by the AP, which reported that he “proudly proclaimed himself a holy warrior and ‘an enemy of the United States.’” As the AP described it, al-Zahri “praised the Sept. 11 attacks and other terrorist strikes and said they were retaliation “for your criminal acts and your military invasion [of] the Islamic countries.” While this was a fair précis of his story – although it did not mention that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, stating instead that he would have been “honored” to have been chosen as a member – it was, as I have indicated above, unrepresentative of the majority of the stories reported in the transcripts.</p>
<p>On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Zahri’s “confession” will no doubt assure some Americans that the Bush administration’s unprecedentedly lawless and brutal conduct over the last six years is justified, but I believe that what the majority of the documents reveal – both through some of the examples cited above, and through the many stories of wronged men betrayed by rivals or through false intelligence that are scattered throughout the transcripts – is exactly the opposite. From my particular perspective, as someone who has studied the stories of the detainees in depth for the last 18 months, the most heart-rending aspect of the transcripts is the confusion and despair shown by detainees who, year after year in their review boards, and often more frequently in their interrogations, have painstakingly repeated their stories ad nauseam, refuting wild and unsubstantiated allegations, and at a loss to understand why they, in particular, have been singled out for inclusion in a never-ending cycle of total isolation and evidence-free crimes. To give just one example, the Afghan Mohammed Zahir, a 54-year old teacher who had fled to Iran during the time of the Taliban, has been telling his captors, since he was seized in 2003, that he had returned to Afghanistan to serve the new government of Hamid Karzai by teaching in a secular school, but received threatening night letters from the Taliban, who betrayed him to the Americans. “You captured me because I am an Afghan or a Muslim,” he told his review board, “but I haven’t done anything. I was teaching the children under the tree.”</p>
<p>In conclusion, then, the release of these documents – which was perhaps contrived by the Pentagon to coincide with 9/11, in the hope that they would be conveniently brushed under the carpet – does not vindicate the government’s post-9/11 policy, when, as CIA director Cofer Black so memorably described it, “the gloves came off,” but hints rather at the true legacy of 9/11: torture, “disappearances” and a regime of secret prisons that should be anathema to those living in a country – the United States – that was founded on the rule of law, and that should only be able to regard itself unflinchingly as a beacon of civilized values if it returns to these foundations, insisting that those in charge of the country return to the rule of law that they have flouted so outrageously, with such damaging consequences for America’s reputation abroad, and a concomitant disregard for the rights of Americans themselves (as the hidden history of torture in the case of Jose Padilla recently showed).</p>
<p>In the reflected world in which America admires itself, the prisoners revealed in these transcripts should be charged with crimes and prosecuted in a recognized court of law, rather than being consigned to an extra-legal black hole, where men’s futures are dealt with in a paranoid and gullible atmosphere in which allegations obtained through torture, coercion or bribery are regarded as the truth, abuse is rife, and the presumption of innocence has been done away with completely. 9/11 was a crime – a monstrous crime – but it should not have provided an opportunity for the nation’s supposed defenders to embark on a counter-campaign that has ended up mocking the very values that it purported to defend.</p>
<p>ANDY WORTHINGTON is a British historian, and the author of <a href="" type="internal">‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison</a>(to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007).His website is: <a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk" type="external">www.andyworthington.co.uk</a> He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:andy@andyworthington.co.uk" type="external">andy@andyworthington.co.uk</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | The Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/09/13/the-guantnamo-transcripts-ghost-prisoners-speak-after-five-and-a-half-years-and-911-hijacker-recants-his-tortured-confession/ | 2007-09-13 | 4left
| 3,064 | In another resounding demonstration of the importance of legally constituted checks and balances on executive power in the United States the Associated Press after filing a request to the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act has secured 58 transcripts from the latest round of annual Administrative Review Boards at Guant225namo convened to assess whether the detainees still pose a threat to the US or if they are still presumed to have ongoing 8220intelligence value8221 This is just the latest in a series of important actions undertaken by the AP with regard to Guant225namo Previously the agency secured the right to reproduce 60 habeas petitions and obtained the 517 Summaries of Evidence for the Combatant Status Review Tribunals CSRTs held at Guant225namo Used to assess whether the detainees had been correctly designated as 8220enemy combatants8221 these documents were analyzed by Mark and Joshua Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School to produce a groundbreaking report in February 2006 which demonstrated that according to the government8217s own allegations only 8 percent of the detainees were accused of having any kind of affiliation with alQaeda 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies and 86 percent were not captured by US forces but by their Pakistan and Afghan allies at a time when the Americans were making bounty payments equivalent to an average worker8217s lifetime salary for the delivery of alQaeda and Taliban suspects Subsequent revelations have done little to suggest that even these lowly figures are reliable and the recent testimony of Lt Col Stephen Abraham who was involved in compiling the 8220evidence8221 for the Tribunals has been particularly damaging to the government8217s case Abraham declared that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed and frequently consisted of intelligence 8220of a generalized nature 8211 often outdated often 8216generic8217 rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals8217 status8221 and concluded that the whole system was geared towards rubberstamping the detainees8217 prior designation as 8220enemy combatants8221 In spring 2006 the AP secured its greatest victory after taking the government to court over its refusal to reveal the names and nationalities of the Guant225namo detainees as well as 8000 pages of transcripts from their CSRTs and the first round of ARBs A treasure trove of information though not necessarily in the way that Donald Rumsfeld had in mind when he declared in December 2001 that the first prisoners captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan 8220should be a treasure trove8221 of intelligence leads these documents not only revealed 8211 for the first time in four years scandalously 8211 who was actually held in Guant225namo but also provided through the transcripts the first opportunity for the detainees to tell their stories to the world Although the tribunals and review boards were 8211 and are 8211 as monstrously illegal as the rest of the Guant225namo regime with lawyers excluded from the hearings and decisions based largely on secret evidence obtained through torture coercion and bribery the information contained in the transcripts was so compelling that when crossreferenced with the detainees8217 names and arranged chronologically it provided the basis for my forthcoming book The Guant225namo Files which unveils the story of Guant225namo and the majority of its detainees for the first time The latest documents secured by the AP have just been released to the public by the Department of Defense and it would I think be fair to say that they are the second most important set of documents relating to Guant225namo that have been released by the Pentagon following the spring 2006 documents described above As well as containing the 58 transcripts from the Second Round of the ARBs the documents also include for the first time the 8221evidence8221 8211 in the form of the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence so heavily criticized by Stephen Abraham 8211 for all the Tribunals with the names of the detainees included they were previously redacted as well as all the Unclassified Summaries for both rounds of the ARBs Also included are transcripts of the habeas corpus petitions of 179 detainees and the whole set of documents is indexed so thoroughly that it appears implausibly to have been compiled as a testament to the importance of Freedom of Information legislation with the aim of facilitating a greater understanding of Guant225namo and its detainees than has previously been possible These documents will provide lawyers human rights activists and researchers with an invaluable base from which to gain at least a glimpse into the lives of the many dozens of detainees without legal representation who have never taken part in any tribunals or review boards and whose stories were hitherto completely unknown More crucially perhaps they will also enable critics of the regime to follow the ways in which additional allegations 8211 produced under dubious circumstances in countless interrogations both at Guant225namo and in secret prisons 8211 have mounted up against the detainees during the long years of their illegal imprisonment The only disappointment is that the documents relating to the decisions made by the review boards about whether to release detainees or to continue to hold them are so heavily redacted as to be all but useless but even on this point other documents 8211 the 8220Indexes to Transfer and Release Decisions8221 8211 provide invaluable and previously concealed information about who has been released and more crucially about the many dozens of detainees 8211 at least 70 according to my first analysis 8211 who have been cleared for release through the ARBs but are still held at Guant225namo because the US government cannot reach a satisfactory agreement with their home governments as in the cases of the Yemenis or is unwilling to return them to regimes where ironically after years of lawless and brutal detention in US custody they face the prospect of torture or other illtreatment While information about who has been cleared is made available to individual detainees8217 lawyers the value of these documents is that they enable this information to be extended to those particularly vulnerable individuals without legal representation Of particular interest for now are the transcripts of the ARBs especially as the AP trailed the release of the documents with a series of press releases over the weekend picking out a few stories that contain important information Chief amongst these is the transcript of the review board hearing of Mohammed alQahtani one of several men presumed to be the intended 822020th hijacker8221 on 911 AlQahtani8217s story has been widely reported particularly in 2005 when Time obtained a daytoday transcript of the 8220enhanced interrogation techniques8221 to which he was subjected over a 50day period from November 2002 to January 2003 when he was amongst other things interrogated and kept awake for 20 hours a day on most days stripped naked sexually humiliated and forced to bark like a dog Although alQahtani8217s lawyer reported in March 2006 that he had recanted his confession the transcript of his ARB hearing is the first time that he has denied the 911 allegations in person telling his review board 8220this is the first statement I am making of my own free will and without coercion or under the threat of torture8221 and stating 8220I am a businessman a peaceful man I have no connection to terrorism violence or fighters8221 Refuting allegations that he admitted traveling to Afghanistan in 2001 that he attended a training camp and that met Osama bin Laden and agreed to participate in a 8220martyr mission8221 for alQaeda alQahtani said that the statements were not true and that he had only admitted to them while he was being 8220tortured8221 at Guant225namo and included his allegations of torture in a statement that was read out to the board In other press releases over the weekend Andrew O Selsky and Ben Fox of the AP focused on the story of Ayman Batarfi a Yemeni doctor caught up in the failed Tora Bora campaign in November and December 2001 when the US military allowed Osama bin Laden Ayman alZawahiri and numerous other senior figures in alQaeda and the Taliban to escape across the unguarded Pakistani border Explaining that he was not a terrorist but had been caught up with alQaeda in the Tora Bora mountains Batarfi said that he met Osama bin Laden in the mountains to explain to him that the defense of Tora Bora was a lost cause because 8220Most of all the total guns in the Tora Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 people8221 He noted however that bin Laden 8220did not prepare himself for Tora Bora and to be frank he didn8217t care about anyone but himself He came for a day to visit the area and we talked to him and we wanted to leave this area He said he didn8217t know where to go himself and the second day he escaped and was gone8221 Abandoned in the mountains Batarfi said that he struggled to tend to the wounded and dying who were overwhelmed by American air power 8220I was out of medicine and I had a lot of casualties8221 he explained 8220I did a hand amputation by a knife and I did a finger amputation with scissors and if someone was injured badly I was just operating on the table8221 Batarfi8217s story is not widely known although I was able to cover it in depth in my book because he has taken part in previous tribunals and review boards As a result I was more interested in uncovering the stories of other detainees whose voices had until these documents were released not been heard at all despite having spent over five and half years in US custody Although these men are not strictly 8220ghost8221 prisoners 8211 because their names and nationalities were released under duress last year as opposed to the thousands of unknown unrepresented and unreported prisoners held in Afghanistan Iraq and other undisclosed locations 8211 there is still something deeply disturbing about the fact that after all this time in which they have been held without charge or trial in conditions of almost total isolation that would be difficult for even the most hardened of convicted criminals on the US mainland to endure the voices of these men are being heard for the first time They include Hani alKhalif a former Saudi soldier who served with US soldiers during the first Gulf War who maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan in the winter of 2000 to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance and explained 8220The Taliban government is the right side to belong to because the other side has come out of the Taliban which is wrong8221 and another Saudi 8211 who didn8217t wish to be identified 8211 who said that he 8220wanted to participate in jihad for religious purposes to help people in need of food distribution8221 because this would 8220strengthen his relationship with God8221 and described how he had made the decision 8220because of emotion because I saw a picture of a little baby that had dirty clothes and her hair was not combed or cut8221 He insisted that 8220his goal was to help for two months and then return home8221 but said that on arrival in Afghanistan he was tricked into attending the alFarouq camp a camp for Arab recruits that was affiliated with alQaeda where he was dismayed to discover that it was 8220a terrorist training camp with political motivations not religious goals8221 Also included is the testimony of Hisham Sliti a Tunisian client of the Londonbased legal charity Reprieve which represents dozens of Guant225namo detainees Clive Stafford Smith Reprieve8217s legal director reported Sliti8217s story in his bookamp160Bad Men Guant225namo and the Secret Prisons in which he portrayed an affable former drug addict imprisoned for many years in prisons in Italy and Belgium who reminisced at length about the quality of the European prisons compared to Guant225namo 8220In Italy the prison was wide open for six hours a day8221 he explained 8220You could have anything in your room 8211 I had a little fornello a gas cooker Can you imagine the Americans allowing that Here we call a plastic spoon a 8216Camp Delta Kalashnikov8217 as the soldiers think we8217re going to attack them with it8221 In the first hearing that Sliti deigned to attend he lived up to Stafford Smith8217s character sketch explaining at length his various exploits in Europe and telling the board that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium where the country had been portrayed as 8220a clean uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education8221 but that what he found instead was that 8220I didn8217t care for the country It was very hot dusty and the women were ugly The atmosphere and environment didn8217t agree with me8221 Another firsttime testimony is that of Ravil Mingazov the last of eight Russians in Guant225namo who it turns out was actually born in Tajikistan A former soldier in the Russian army Mingazov explained that although he had been honored for excellent service early in his career he subsequently converted to Islam and fell out of favor with the KGB to such an extent that he deserted the army left his wife and family and fled to Afghanistan with the help of members of the Talibanaffiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan Refuting allegations that he trained at alFarouq he said that he had made up these stories while imprisoned at the US airbase in Bagram and added that he had in fact fled from the IMU traveling to Pakistan where he stayed at a center run by the missionary organization JamaatalTablighi in Lahore He explained that he was captured with 16 other Guant225namo detainees after moving to a guest house used by university students in Faisalabad which was unfortunately owned 8211 or otherwise connected to 8211 the 8220highvalue8221 alQaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah Sadly 8211 given its undiluted focus on antiAmerican militancy 8211 the only other firsttime story that of the Saudi Abdul Rahman alZahri was the only one of the previously unheard voices picked up by the AP which reported that he 8220proudly proclaimed himself a holy warrior and 8216an enemy of the United States82178221 As the AP described it alZahri 8220praised the Sept 11 attacks and other terrorist strikes and said they were retaliation 8220for your criminal acts and your military invasion of the Islamic countries8221 While this was a fair pr233cis of his story 8211 although it did not mention that he was not a member of alQaeda stating instead that he would have been 8220honored8221 to have been chosen as a member 8211 it was as I have indicated above unrepresentative of the majority of the stories reported in the transcripts On the sixth anniversary of 911 alZahri8217s 8220confession8221 will no doubt assure some Americans that the Bush administration8217s unprecedentedly lawless and brutal conduct over the last six years is justified but I believe that what the majority of the documents reveal 8211 both through some of the examples cited above and through the many stories of wronged men betrayed by rivals or through false intelligence that are scattered throughout the transcripts 8211 is exactly the opposite From my particular perspective as someone who has studied the stories of the detainees in depth for the last 18 months the most heartrending aspect of the transcripts is the confusion and despair shown by detainees who year after year in their review boards and often more frequently in their interrogations have painstakingly repeated their stories ad nauseam refuting wild and unsubstantiated allegations and at a loss to understand why they in particular have been singled out for inclusion in a neverending cycle of total isolation and evidencefree crimes To give just one example the Afghan Mohammed Zahir a 54year old teacher who had fled to Iran during the time of the Taliban has been telling his captors since he was seized in 2003 that he had returned to Afghanistan to serve the new government of Hamid Karzai by teaching in a secular school but received threatening night letters from the Taliban who betrayed him to the Americans 8220You captured me because I am an Afghan or a Muslim8221 he told his review board 8220but I haven8217t done anything I was teaching the children under the tree8221 In conclusion then the release of these documents 8211 which was perhaps contrived by the Pentagon to coincide with 911 in the hope that they would be conveniently brushed under the carpet 8211 does not vindicate the government8217s post911 policy when as CIA director Cofer Black so memorably described it 8220the gloves came off8221 but hints rather at the true legacy of 911 torture 8220disappearances8221 and a regime of secret prisons that should be anathema to those living in a country 8211 the United States 8211 that was founded on the rule of law and that should only be able to regard itself unflinchingly as a beacon of civilized values if it returns to these foundations insisting that those in charge of the country return to the rule of law that they have flouted so outrageously with such damaging consequences for America8217s reputation abroad and a concomitant disregard for the rights of Americans themselves as the hidden history of torture in the case of Jose Padilla recently showed In the reflected world in which America admires itself the prisoners revealed in these transcripts should be charged with crimes and prosecuted in a recognized court of law rather than being consigned to an extralegal black hole where men8217s futures are dealt with in a paranoid and gullible atmosphere in which allegations obtained through torture coercion or bribery are regarded as the truth abuse is rife and the presumption of innocence has been done away with completely 911 was a crime 8211 a monstrous crime 8211 but it should not have provided an opportunity for the nation8217s supposed defenders to embark on a countercampaign that has ended up mocking the very values that it purported to defend ANDY WORTHINGTON is a British historian and the author of 8216The Guant225namo Files The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America8217s Illegal Prisonto be published by Pluto Press in October 2007His website is wwwandyworthingtoncouk He can be reached at andyandyworthingtoncouk amp160 amp160 amp160 | In/ADP another/DET resounding/NOUN demonstration/NOUN of/ADP the/DET importance/NOUN of/ADP legally/ADV constituted/VERB checks/NOUN and/CCONJ balances/NOUN on/ADP executive/ADJ power/NOUN in/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN the/DET Associated/PROPN Press/PROPN after/ADP filing/VERB a/DET request/NOUN to/ADP the/DET Pentagon/PROPN 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<p>The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed to “fight terror as if there were no peace and … make peace as if there were no terror.” The story of the 2003 <a href="http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cahier/proche-orient/a10414" type="external">Geneva Accord</a> is a testament to that spirit at a time when many in the region see plenty of reasons to doubt that peace is within reach. Many Israelis view the second intifada and the Palestinian Authority’s unwillingness or inability to rein it in as evidence that a Palestinian peace partner simply doesn’t exist. For Palestinians, Israeli military strikes, the economic strangulation of the territories, the construction of the security barrier, and Ariel Sharon’s plan to unilaterally disengage from the Gaza Strip are proof that Israel is not interested in a negotiated solution, and seeks to thwart the creation of a viable Palestinian state.</p>
<p>In his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/097192063X/qid=1098148860/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-5597442-1102237" type="external">The Path to Geneva</a>, Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo Accords, takes us through the years of the official peace talks — and of the parallel, and unofficial, Geneva Accord talks. Over the course of more than two years, with officials talks stalled, Beilin continued negotiations in secret with Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Yasser Abed Rabbo. They came up with what they hope will become a blueprint for a permanent settlement of the conflict once official negotiations resume.</p>
<p>Under the Geneva Accord, Israel makes greater territorial concessions than in previous proposals and cedes sovereignty over the Temple Mount, or the Haram al-Sharif, to the Palestinians. The Palestinian refugees, for the most part, give up claims of the “right of return” to Israel and receive financial compensations. The Geneva Accord remains unendorsed — indeed, dismissed — by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, but Beilin sees reason for optimism in polls showing that about 40 percent of Israelis and Palestinians in support of the agreement.</p>
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<p>Beilin, who is currently the leader of the Social-Democratic “Yahad” party, recently spoke with MotherJones.com from Israel.</p>
<p>MotherJones.com: How do the agreements in the Geneva Accord differ from the proposals rejected at Camp David?</p>
<p>Yossi Beilin: Well, first of all, this is something which has been agreed upon. So the big difference is not necessarily the details, but the mere fact that those details were agreed upon by both sides. It is very difficult to compare, because you don’t have the paper of Camp David — there was never such a paper. What you have is a debate about the different views, subjective views, of the participants, and analyses about Camp David. I believe that the ideas which evolved in Camp David, and the Clinton Plan, and then in the Taba talks in January 2001, were the basis for our negotiations.</p>
<p>In our initiative, the basis for the negotiations are the borders of ‘67. And when we deviated from these borders, there was a total compensation to the Palestinians. So if we annexed about 2 percent of the West Bank, we would hand over two percent from sovereign Israel to the new Palestinian state. In Camp David, the [Ehud] Barak idea was to hand over to the Palestinians only 91 percent of the West Bank. As for the other issues, there is a very clear division in East Jerusalem and in the Old City of Jerusalem: we are handing over the sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians. In Camp David, this was not the case. We are suggesting that we accept the five permanent venues for the Palestinian refugees which were proposed by Clinton — meaning the new Palestinian state, the current countries where the refugees live today, the areas that would be swapped by Israel to the new Palestinian state, and host or third countries that might absorb these refugees. The fifth one will be Israel, and there we’ll take into consideration, when we absorb these refugees, the average number of the refugees absorbed by other countries.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What were the difficulties and the advantages of conducting these unofficial peace talks after the official talks failed, the intifada began, and Ariel Sharon was elected the prime minister?</p>
<p>YB: Well, we knew that Sharon would not negotiate with the Palestinians because no Palestinian can accept his plan — which [envisions] some enclaves of Palestinian autonomy or partial sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. So we decided to negotiate and to suggest something that might be accepted by relatively big groups on both sides. And those who negotiated, most of them, were the previous official negotiators on both sides. So although it was a kind of a civil society initiative, in reality this initiative was suggested by veterans of the negotiations and not just by academicians, or people who were outside the political loop.</p>
<p>Now, speaking about the advantages, the main one is that it was secretly done, without any interference, so there was no pressure on us to show some advance in the negotiations when this was not the case. While in official talks, there is such a pressure, which comes mainly from the media.</p>
<p>On the other hand, since there was no deadline — in official talks you always have a kind of a deadline, even if it is artificial — it went on longer than expected. We thought it would take several months, and it took about two-and-a-half years. And since we were only unofficial negotiators, we did not have professional assistance. And we had many, many difficulties in meeting with each other as a result of the curfews and the closures and the ongoing violence. Sometimes it was even impossible to meet abroad. Most of the time, it was easier to meet abroad than either on the Palestinian side, which was [off limits to] us because of the government decision that no Israelis could go to areas under the Palestinian Authority, called Area A. And it was also difficult to get permits for the Palestinians. So these technical difficulties were very typical for something unofficial. Had it been official negotiations, nobody would have stopped us from meeting each other.</p>
<p>MJ.com: At times, you met at Israeli checkpoints.</p>
<p>YB: Yes. In most of the cases when we met in the region, we met at the checkpoints. Usually, it was in a building, in the World Bank building in Jerusalem, which is adjacent to A-ram checkpoint. But sometimes even that was impossible, so we had to meet in the checkpoint itself, where there was no building whatsoever. Once we met in a car. This made our life quite difficult and dragged the process much, much longer than expected.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Sharon and Bush have ruled out any direct dealings with Arafat. Was that a mistake?</p>
<p>YB: Yes, it is a mistake, because they don’t suggest an alternative and they don’t set conditions. I think Arafat is a very problematic counterpart, and the fact that rather than stopping the intifada at its inception, he actually rode the wave of the intifada, was the biggest mistake he made. But punishing him is childish and calling him an irrelevant leader is childish too. He is very relevant, whether we like it or not.</p>
<p>I think what had to be done was to put conditions to him, like to unify the security forces and to fight terrorism could be the way to test him again, and to see how serious he was. Saying to him, “Whatever you do, you will never ever become again a partner,” is actually sending him to extremism. That’s a big mistake. Had the Americans or Sharon been in a situation to say, OK don’t talk to Arafat, but you have a Jefferson-style president to replace him and talk to him — that could have been a reasonable offer. But we all know that, right now, there is no substitute for him. And excluding Arafat means either to take unilateral steps, like the withdrawal from Gaza, without anything in exchange. This is a very strange way to say we don’t have a partner, so we give him whatever we have without any price.</p>
<p>The other option is to do nothing, which for Israel is not a real option. It might be an American option. Bush doesn’t live here and he doesn’t have the responsibility to keep Israel Jewish and democratic, and I am not sure whether Bush is worried about the demographic problem or the border problems of Israel. But we live here and we need a solution before there is a Palestinian majority under our control. I am sure that Bush either doesn’t understand or is not worried about it, but he cannot tell us don’t negotiate with your only partner without suggesting a real substitute. And just using the “road map” as a fig leaf to say, I am still committed to the Bush vision, or to the “road map,” without doing anything in order to implement it.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What steps would you like Bush, if he wins a second term, or Kerry, if he wins, to take?</p>
<p>YB: First of all, you cannot do something like excluding our only partner without suggesting anything in exchange. I don’t expect that the Americans will do our work and I don’t think they can negotiate on our behalf. We succeeded to have peace with Jordan, and to have the Oslo agreement, and to withdraw from Lebanon without the Americans. They helped us a lot once we did it of course, financially and otherwise, but they were not involved at all in these three efforts. And when they were involved, like with the negotiations with Syria, nothing happened. So I don’t expect the Americans to impose the solution, or to suggest even a solution, or to work for us. The only thing that I want them to do is not disturb us and not put us in a situation whereby negotiations cannot take place.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Bush supports Sharon in his policy of unilateral disengagement and his security fence. You oppose them. Why?</p>
<p>YB: I think these are two different things. The barrier was imposed on Sharon. He was very much against it, he spoke against it. At a certain moment, he saw that there was a huge support in Israel for it of more than 70 percent and so he decided to build his own barrier, which resembles very much his plan. He has a plan. His plan is to put the Palestinians in some enclaves, like prisons, in order to get rid of the demographic problem without having a contiguous Palestinian state, without giving them the capital, and without solving the refugee problem — which I believe is a danger for Israel even before it is a danger to the Palestinians. So he tried to build this fence, but both the Israeli Supreme Court and the International Court could not accept his route, and he had to change this fence. And I believe that was he is doing today with the fence is something which is totally against his original idea. He is building the fence much closer to the ‘67 borders, and I believe that he is doing it against his will.</p>
<p>The question of Gaza is different. I believe that getting rid of Gaza was part of his original plan, but he could not do that at the beginning of his term because the Palestinians were still considered partners. We had just concluded our negotiations in Taba. They were quite successful. We felt that we were closer to each other than ever before. The Americans still talked with Arafat. And Sharon had to prove to the Israelis and to the Americans that the Palestinian Authority could not be a partner, only then it was possible for him to get the support for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Had he suggested it in March 2001, when he was elected, I assume that President Bush would’ve told him this is not part of any plan; don’t take unilateral decisions. This did not happen three years later when the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority was destroyed by Sharon. (And not without reason; I mean, the Palestinian Authority was involved in terrorism. And, again, Arafat himself helped him a lot with his speeches, with what he did with Karine A — this famous boat which brought ammunition and weapons from Iran to the Palestinians — all these things helped Sharon to say I don’t have a partner.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What will happen if this plan proceeds and there is still no coordination between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority?</p>
<p>YB: Nobody knows exactly, but I think unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza is very risky. We, as the Yahad party in Israel, will support it, because we cannot be against an end of the occupation, even in on only 6 percent of the territories. But we are worried about the development, because it might strengthen the extremists, weaken the Authority even more, weaken the pragmatic end of the Palestinian side, because negotiations will become redundant. If Israel is leaving the territories on its own, why should they bother with concessions to us and the Geneva-like initiatives — if they just can wait and see whether Israel is withdrawing or not?</p>
<p>MJ.com: The government has recently announced a package for the Gaza settlers. Some of them will take it, but some of them have indicated that they are not going to move. How do you see this panning out?</p>
<p>YB: We are speaking here about a very small [number], about 1,600 families. A democratic government with an army and a police force can remove these people, especially when most of them are not criminals and will not fight against the army or the police. The easiest thing is to say that at a certain date, the government of Israel will order the army to leave the Gaza Strip, and that all those Israelis who remain there will become illegal settlers. Now, I believe that if this is the case, most of them will leave Gaza on their own and will take the compensations. If a small group of extremists says we are ready to remain there even without the army, defense, and without any budget, and without schools, and without hospitals, I believe that this group will become smaller and smaller, and eventually will have to leave too. The big mistake now is to wait for a showdown, that the international media will wait for a certain date, and then people from the West Bank will go to Gaza to help their brethren, and there will be a social pressure on those families in Gaza who don’t want to remain there, to remain there in order to demonstrate solidarity with extremists. I believe that what is being done — I don’t know whether on purpose or because of stupidity — is a preparation for a huge showdown in a half a year or so. And this, in my view, is a big, big mistake. It can be dealt with in a much easier way.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Have there been any developments on the Geneva Accord that you would like to share?</p>
<p>YB: The main development is the following one: Geneva got support that was much bigger than expected — about 40 percent in the public opinion polls on both sides. But of course it could not become a reality because it was not authored by the officials, and on the Israeli side, Sharon rejected it outright. And on the Palestinian side, although the Authority was very positive towards it, it never endorsed it.</p>
<p>Now, the direct impact of Geneva was that Sharon declared his ideas about unilateral withdrawal. When he was asked in the New York Times about it — why did he suggest the unilateral withdrawal just now? — he said that it was because of Geneva. He was afraid that a Geneva-like document might be imposed on Israel, and that he had to suggest his own ideas. Now this was a very important development, but once he suggested his idea, it became the only game in town. And the idea of Geneva was deferred to a much later point in the future, and the world is now dealing with the unilateral withdrawal.</p>
<p>What we are trying to do — on the Palestinian and on the Israeli sides — is to try and see what can be done in order to make the unilateral withdrawal, which we cannot reject, a first step towards a permanent solution like Geneva. So our efforts are now invested mainly in this missing link. After the Gaza withdrawal, Sharon doesn’t intend to do anything more. We, the peace camp in Israel, will have to put pressure on Sharon to go on and to talk seriously with the Palestinians in order to find a solution not only for Gaza, but also for the West Bank. So we are preparing ourselves. In the meantime, we will try to put on the agenda, very soon, a whole plan that will tell the world what should happen in order to make Gaza a first step towards an agreement. There are many, many issues that have to be tackled so that the withdrawal from Gaza will not be a punishment for the Palestinians, but just a beginning of the negotiations.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What are the prospects for the Geneva Accord being implemented and what, besides Sharon’s plan, are the other alternatives?</p>
<p>YB: Geneva is the Bush vision, it is the Clinton Plan, it is Camp David, it is Taba. Whatever you say, it is more or less Geneva. We did not invent the wheel; we just invented the details, not the wheel itself. The wheel is there, so whoever will take the decision to go for a permanent solution with the Palestinians will find himself in something like Geneva. Whether it is possible with the current government in Israel and the current government on the Palestinian side, I am not so sure, but I don’t want to give up.</p>
<p>I think that my role, or the role of the peace camp in Israel, is to do two things. One is to put pressure on Sharon to move, and that is what we did, and quite successfully, if you take into account what he himself admitted. And the other thing is to replace him as soon as possible, according to the democratic norms and rules of Israel, in order to have another leader who understands the need for a permanent agreement.</p>
<p /> | The Road to Geneva | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2004/10/road-geneva/ | 2004-10-20 | 4left
| 3,064 | amp160 The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin vowed to 8220fight terror as if there were no peace and 8230 make peace as if there were no terror8221 The story of the 2003 Geneva Accord is a testament to that spirit at a time when many in the region see plenty of reasons to doubt that peace is within reach Many Israelis view the second intifada and the Palestinian Authority8217s unwillingness or inability to rein it in as evidence that a Palestinian peace partner simply doesn8217t exist For Palestinians Israeli military strikes the economic strangulation of the territories the construction of the security barrier and Ariel Sharon8217s plan to unilaterally disengage from the Gaza Strip are proof that Israel is not interested in a negotiated solution and seeks to thwart the creation of a viable Palestinian state In his book The Path to Geneva Yossi Beilin one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo Accords takes us through the years of the official peace talks 8212 and of the parallel and unofficial Geneva Accord talks Over the course of more than two years with officials talks stalled Beilin continued negotiations in secret with Palestinian Liberation Organization8217s Yasser Abed Rabbo They came up with what they hope will become a blueprint for a permanent settlement of the conflict once official negotiations resume Under the Geneva Accord Israel makes greater territorial concessions than in previous proposals and cedes sovereignty over the Temple Mount or the Haram alSharif to the Palestinians The Palestinian refugees for the most part give up claims of the 8220right of return8221 to Israel and receive financial compensations The Geneva Accord remains unendorsed 8212 indeed dismissed 8212 by the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority but Beilin sees reason for optimism in polls showing that about 40 percent of Israelis and Palestinians in support of the agreement amp160 Beilin who is currently the leader of the SocialDemocratic 8220Yahad8221 party recently spoke with MotherJonescom from Israel MotherJonescom How do the agreements in the Geneva Accord differ from the proposals rejected at Camp David Yossi Beilin Well first of all this is something which has been agreed upon So the big difference is not necessarily the details but the mere fact that those details were agreed upon by both sides It is very difficult to compare because you don8217t have the paper of Camp David 8212 there was never such a paper What you have is a debate about the different views subjective views of the participants and analyses about Camp David I believe that the ideas which evolved in Camp David and the Clinton Plan and then in the Taba talks in January 2001 were the basis for our negotiations In our initiative the basis for the negotiations are the borders of 821667 And when we deviated from these borders there was a total compensation to the Palestinians So if we annexed about 2 percent of the West Bank we would hand over two percent from sovereign Israel to the new Palestinian state In Camp David the Ehud Barak idea was to hand over to the Palestinians only 91 percent of the West Bank As for the other issues there is a very clear division in East Jerusalem and in the Old City of Jerusalem we are handing over the sovereignty over the Temple Mount to the Palestinians In Camp David this was not the case We are suggesting that we accept the five permanent venues for the Palestinian refugees which were proposed by Clinton 8212 meaning the new Palestinian state the current countries where the refugees live today the areas that would be swapped by Israel to the new Palestinian state and host or third countries that might absorb these refugees The fifth one will be Israel and there we8217ll take into consideration when we absorb these refugees the average number of the refugees absorbed by other countries MJcom What were the difficulties and the advantages of conducting these unofficial peace talks after the official talks failed the intifada began and Ariel Sharon was elected the prime minister YB Well we knew that Sharon would not negotiate with the Palestinians because no Palestinian can accept his plan 8212 which envisions some enclaves of Palestinian autonomy or partial sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza So we decided to negotiate and to suggest something that might be accepted by relatively big groups on both sides And those who negotiated most of them were the previous official negotiators on both sides So although it was a kind of a civil society initiative in reality this initiative was suggested by veterans of the negotiations and not just by academicians or people who were outside the political loop Now speaking about the advantages the main one is that it was secretly done without any interference so there was no pressure on us to show some advance in the negotiations when this was not the case While in official talks there is such a pressure which comes mainly from the media On the other hand since there was no deadline 8212 in official talks you always have a kind of a deadline even if it is artificial 8212 it went on longer than expected We thought it would take several months and it took about twoandahalf years And since we were only unofficial negotiators we did not have professional assistance And we had many many difficulties in meeting with each other as a result of the curfews and the closures and the ongoing violence Sometimes it was even impossible to meet abroad Most of the time it was easier to meet abroad than either on the Palestinian side which was off limits to us because of the government decision that no Israelis could go to areas under the Palestinian Authority called Area A And it was also difficult to get permits for the Palestinians So these technical difficulties were very typical for something unofficial Had it been official negotiations nobody would have stopped us from meeting each other MJcom At times you met at Israeli checkpoints YB Yes In most of the cases when we met in the region we met at the checkpoints Usually it was in a building in the World Bank building in Jerusalem which is adjacent to Aram checkpoint But sometimes even that was impossible so we had to meet in the checkpoint itself where there was no building whatsoever Once we met in a car This made our life quite difficult and dragged the process much much longer than expected MJcom Sharon and Bush have ruled out any direct dealings with Arafat Was that a mistake YB Yes it is a mistake because they don8217t suggest an alternative and they don8217t set conditions I think Arafat is a very problematic counterpart and the fact that rather than stopping the intifada at its inception he actually rode the wave of the intifada was the biggest mistake he made But punishing him is childish and calling him an irrelevant leader is childish too He is very relevant whether we like it or not I think what had to be done was to put conditions to him like to unify the security forces and to fight terrorism could be the way to test him again and to see how serious he was Saying to him 8220Whatever you do you will never ever become again a partner8221 is actually sending him to extremism That8217s a big mistake Had the Americans or Sharon been in a situation to say OK don8217t talk to Arafat but you have a Jeffersonstyle president to replace him and talk to him 8212 that could have been a reasonable offer But we all know that right now there is no substitute for him And excluding Arafat means either to take unilateral steps like the withdrawal from Gaza without anything in exchange This is a very strange way to say we don8217t have a partner so we give him whatever we have without any price The other option is to do nothing which for Israel is not a real option It might be an American option Bush doesn8217t live here and he doesn8217t have the responsibility to keep Israel Jewish and democratic and I am not sure whether Bush is worried about the demographic problem or the border problems of Israel But we live here and we need a solution before there is a Palestinian majority under our control I am sure that Bush either doesn8217t understand or is not worried about it but he cannot tell us don8217t negotiate with your only partner without suggesting a real substitute And just using the 8220road map8221 as a fig leaf to say I am still committed to the Bush vision or to the 8220road map8221 without doing anything in order to implement it MJcom What steps would you like Bush if he wins a second term or Kerry if he wins to take YB First of all you cannot do something like excluding our only partner without suggesting anything in exchange I don8217t expect that the Americans will do our work and I don8217t think they can negotiate on our behalf We succeeded to have peace with Jordan and to have the Oslo agreement and to withdraw from Lebanon without the Americans They helped us a lot once we did it of course financially and otherwise but they were not involved at all in these three efforts And when they were involved like with the negotiations with Syria nothing happened So I don8217t expect the Americans to impose the solution or to suggest even a solution or to work for us The only thing that I want them to do is not disturb us and not put us in a situation whereby negotiations cannot take place MJcom Bush supports Sharon in his policy of unilateral disengagement and his security fence You oppose them Why YB I think these are two different things The barrier was imposed on Sharon He was very much against it he spoke against it At a certain moment he saw that there was a huge support in Israel for it of more than 70 percent and so he decided to build his own barrier which resembles very much his plan He has a plan His plan is to put the Palestinians in some enclaves like prisons in order to get rid of the demographic problem without having a contiguous Palestinian state without giving them the capital and without solving the refugee problem 8212 which I believe is a danger for Israel even before it is a danger to the Palestinians So he tried to build this fence but both the Israeli Supreme Court and the International Court could not accept his route and he had to change this fence And I believe that was he is doing today with the fence is something which is totally against his original idea He is building the fence much closer to the 821667 borders and I believe that he is doing it against his will The question of Gaza is different I believe that getting rid of Gaza was part of his original plan but he could not do that at the beginning of his term because the Palestinians were still considered partners We had just concluded our negotiations in Taba They were quite successful We felt that we were closer to each other than ever before The Americans still talked with Arafat And Sharon had to prove to the Israelis and to the Americans that the Palestinian Authority could not be a partner only then it was possible for him to get the support for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza Had he suggested it in March 2001 when he was elected I assume that President Bush would8217ve told him this is not part of any plan don8217t take unilateral decisions This did not happen three years later when the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority was destroyed by Sharon And not without reason I mean the Palestinian Authority was involved in terrorism And again Arafat himself helped him a lot with his speeches with what he did with Karine A 8212 this famous boat which brought ammunition and weapons from Iran to the Palestinians 8212 all these things helped Sharon to say I don8217t have a partner MJcom What will happen if this plan proceeds and there is still no coordination between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority YB Nobody knows exactly but I think unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza is very risky We as the Yahad party in Israel will support it because we cannot be against an end of the occupation even in on only 6 percent of the territories But we are worried about the development because it might strengthen the extremists weaken the Authority even more weaken the pragmatic end of the Palestinian side because negotiations will become redundant If Israel is leaving the territories on its own why should they bother with concessions to us and the Genevalike initiatives 8212 if they just can wait and see whether Israel is withdrawing or not MJcom The government has recently announced a package for the Gaza settlers Some of them will take it but some of them have indicated that they are not going to move How do you see this panning out YB We are speaking here about a very small number about 1600 families A democratic government with an army and a police force can remove these people especially when most of them are not criminals and will not fight against the army or the police The easiest thing is to say that at a certain date the government of Israel will order the army to leave the Gaza Strip and that all those Israelis who remain there will become illegal settlers Now I believe that if this is the case most of them will leave Gaza on their own and will take the compensations If a small group of extremists says we are ready to remain there even without the army defense and without any budget and without schools and without hospitals I believe that this group will become smaller and smaller and eventually will have to leave too The big mistake now is to wait for a showdown that the international media will wait for a certain date and then people from the West Bank will go to Gaza to help their brethren and there will be a social pressure on those families in Gaza who don8217t want to remain there to remain there in order to demonstrate solidarity with extremists I believe that what is being done 8212 I don8217t know whether on purpose or because of stupidity 8212 is a preparation for a huge showdown in a half a year or so And this in my view is a big big mistake It can be dealt with in a much easier way MJcom Have there been any developments on the Geneva Accord that you would like to share YB The main development is the following one Geneva got support that was much bigger than expected 8212 about 40 percent in the public opinion polls on both sides But of course it could not become a reality because it was not authored by the officials and on the Israeli side Sharon rejected it outright And on the Palestinian side although the Authority was very positive towards it it never endorsed it Now the direct impact of Geneva was that Sharon declared his ideas about unilateral withdrawal When he was asked in the New York Times about it 8212 why did he suggest the unilateral withdrawal just now 8212 he said that it was because of Geneva He was afraid that a Genevalike document might be imposed on Israel and that he had to suggest his own ideas Now this was a very important development but once he suggested his idea it became the only game in town And the idea of Geneva was deferred to a much later point in the future and the world is now dealing with the unilateral withdrawal What we are trying to do 8212 on the Palestinian and on the Israeli sides 8212 is to try and see what can be done in order to make the unilateral withdrawal which we cannot reject a first step towards a permanent solution like Geneva So our efforts are now invested mainly in this missing link After the Gaza withdrawal Sharon doesn8217t intend to do anything more We the peace camp in Israel will have to put pressure on Sharon to go on and to talk seriously with the Palestinians in order to find a solution not only for Gaza but also for the West Bank So we are preparing ourselves In the meantime we will try to put on the agenda very soon a whole plan that will tell the world what should happen in order to make Gaza a first step towards an agreement There are many many issues that have to be tackled so that the withdrawal from Gaza will not be a punishment for the Palestinians but just a beginning of the negotiations MJcom What are the prospects for the Geneva Accord being implemented and what besides Sharon8217s plan are the other alternatives YB Geneva is the Bush vision it is the Clinton Plan it is Camp David it is Taba Whatever you say it is more or less Geneva We did not invent the wheel we just invented the details not the wheel itself The wheel is there so whoever will take the decision to go for a permanent solution with the Palestinians will find himself in something like Geneva Whether it is possible with the current government in Israel and the current government on the Palestinian side I am not so sure but I don8217t want to give up I think that my role or the role of the peace camp in Israel is to do two things One is to put pressure on Sharon to move and that is what we did and quite successfully if you take into account what he himself admitted And the other thing is to replace him as soon as possible according to the democratic norms and rules of Israel in order to have another leader who understands the need for a permanent agreement | amp160/VERB The/DET late/ADJ Israeli/ADJ Prime/PROPN Minister/PROPN Yitzhak/PROPN Rabin/PROPN vowed/VERB to/ADP 8220fight/NUM terror/NOUN as/SCONJ if/SCONJ there/PRON were/VERB no/DET peace/NOUN and/CCONJ 8230/NUM make/VERB peace/NOUN as/SCONJ if/SCONJ there/PRON were/VERB no/DET terror8221/NOUN The/DET story/NOUN of/ADP the/DET 2003/NUM Geneva/PROPN Accord/PROPN is/AUX a/DET testament/NOUN to/ADP that/DET spirit/NOUN at/ADP a/DET time/NOUN when/SCONJ many/ADJ in/ADP the/DET region/NOUN see/VERB plenty/NOUN of/ADP reasons/NOUN to/PART doubt/VERB that/SCONJ peace/NOUN is/AUX within/ADP reach/NOUN Many/ADJ Israelis/PROPN view/VERB the/DET second/ADJ intifada/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET Palestinian/ADJ Authority8217s/PROPN unwillingness/NOUN or/CCONJ inability/NOUN to/PART rein/VERB it/PRON in/ADP as/ADP evidence/NOUN that/SCONJ a/DET 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<p>President Bush recently&#160;nominated Milan D. Smith Jr. to fill a longstanding vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit, which covers nine western states, is a notorious bastion of liberal judicial lawlessness. So the White House should be looking to fill the vacancy with an outstanding jurist who is learned in questions of federal constitutional and statutory law and who is prepared to dedicate two decades or more to the arduous task of helping to transform that court.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Smith hardly fits the bill. A Los Angeles-area attorney, Smith, 64, has specialized for nearly four decades in real estate transactions–a specialty that has little bearing on the questions that occupy federal courts. In his one term as a member of a state antidiscrimination commission, he “distinguished himself” by “his time-management skills,” says one of his supporters. He recently explained his decision to step down from the commission by implying disdain for his fellow party members: “I’m a Republican, but I’m a Republican with a heart.”</p>
<p>Consider also David L. Bunning, whom President Bush nominated to a federal district judgeship in 2001. Thirty-five years old when he was nominated, Bunning had been a lawyer for only ten years. Citing his “very limited and shallow” experience with civil cases, his not “particularly challenging” criminal caseload as a federal prosecutor, his unimpressive writing, and his middling academic record, the ABA rated Bunning “not qualified” for a judgeship. Whether or not one credits the ABA rating–a minority of the committee did find Bunning “qualified”–it would be difficult to argue that Bunning was prime judgeship material. But the Senate, with a Democratic majority intent on blocking many of the president’s judicial nominees, expeditiously and unanimously confirmed Bunning.</p>
<p>Smith and Bunning might buck the odds and prove to be outstanding judges, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest there is anything exceptional about their questionable qualifications. On the contrary, unpromising judicial picks have been all too common among President Bush’s lower-court nominees. But what the low caliber of these nominees helps demonstrate is the extraordinary and regrettable influence senators exercise over federal judgeships in their home states. For the key facts driving Smith’s candidacy are that Barbara Boxer, the ultraliberal senator from California, recommended his nomination and that Smith is the brother of Oregon’s Republican senator Gordon Smith. His brother and Boxer, Milan Smith says, “are very good friends.” As for Bunning, the district judgeship that he now occupies is in Kentucky, the home state of Republican senator Jim Bunning, who, not coincidentally, is his father.</p>
<p>For all the attention given to the Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees in recent years, the greater impediment to President Bush’s ability to appoint high-quality practitioners of judicial restraint to the federal district and appellate courts comes from obscure Senate practices that enjoy widespread bipartisan support from senators. These practices exist because they serve the narrow interests of individual senators. They are, in short, perquisites of membership in the club known as the United States Senate.</p>
<p>After his remarkable successes in winning the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, President Bush must return to the less glamorous work of filling vacancies on the lower courts. This work is more difficult not only because of the large number of open seats but because of the great influence that home-state senators believe themselves entitled to exert over lower-court nominations.</p>
<p>This influence can manifest itself in two ways: first, through the Senate Judiciary Committee’s blue-slip policy, which serves primarily as a tool of senators in the party opposite the president’s; and second, through the entrenched attitude of same-party senators that they have a virtual right to designate judicial nominees in their states.</p>
<p>Let’s&#160;begin&#160;with&#160;the&#160;blue-slip policy, which is generally thought to have arisen as an informal Senate Judiciary Committee practice some 50 years ago. The “blue slip” refers to the piece of paper that the chairman of the committee sends to a senator informing him that the president has made a nomination to a position in his home state and inviting him to object or offer support. A senator who objects can express his objection on the blue slip (a “negative blue slip”).</p>
<p>The substance of the blue-slip policy, both historically and as it applies today, is murky and disputed. The policy’s contours depend primarily on four factors. First, which grounds may a senator legitimately rely on to object to a home-state nomination? May he rely simply on personal grounds, such as the fact that the nominee is the sister of his next general-election opponent? Or may he also rely on broader political or ideological differences with the nominee?</p>
<p>Second, what effect will the committee chairman afford a negative blue slip? Will it suffice to kill a nomination? Or will it merely be given the indeterminate promise of “substantial weight”? Does it matter whether the other home-state senator has also submitted a negative blue slip?</p>
<p>Third, to which judicial nominations will the blue-slip policy apply? Only to those for district judges, whose caseloads clearly relate to the home state in which the judge will sit? Or also to those for appellate judges, even though appellate judges from different states in the same circuit take part equally in the cases arising from the district courts across those various states?</p>
<p>Fourth, and oddly neglected, is whether the Senate majority (and thus the committee chairman) is of the same party as the president. If the Senate majority is of the same party as the president, then a negative blue slip by a minority senator operates to obstruct (to the extent of the effect accorded the blue slip) the presumed common will of the president and the Senate majority. By contrast, if the Senate majority is of the party opposing the president, then the obstructing effect of a negative blue slip by a majority senator is more readily justifiable as an exercise of power delegated to that senator by his colleagues in the majority.</p>
<p>How these factors interact determines how sensible any particular blue-slip policy is. If, for example, blue slips were to apply only to district-court nominees and senators were to return negative blue slips only when they had genuine personal grounds for objecting to the nominee, a committee chairman could reasonably give those negative blue slips nomination-killing effect, even where the negative blue slip came from a minority senator. After all, it should not be a difficult matter for the president to find an equally qualified nominee who does not arouse the senator’s personal opposition. Conversely, where a negative blue slip can be returned for purely ideological reasons, it would seem defensible for a committee chairman to give decisive effect to that negative blue slip when it is submitted by a member of his own party, but it would seem suicidal–or, more precisely, remarkably detrimental to the interests of his own party–to do so when it is submitted by a member of the minority party.</p>
<p>Curiously enough, there are some individuals deeply involved in the current confirmation process who believe that this absurd policy is precisely what Arlen Specter, the committee’s chairman for the past year, has adopted, both for district-court and appellate-court nominees. This belief explains why it would be helpful to Milan Smith, rather than damning, that Barbara Boxer welcomes his nomination.</p>
<p>Orrin Hatch, Specter’s predecessor as chairman, stated clearly in 2003 that he would abide by the same blue-slip policy that Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden had adopted when they each chaired the committee. Under what Hatch labeled the “Kennedy-Biden-Hatch blue-slip policy,” the return of a negative blue slip on a nomination would be given “substantial weight,” but a committee hearing and vote on the nomination would proceed. Specter has issued no such statement, and he has not yet held a hearing on any nominee with negative or unreturned blue slips.</p>
<p>When Hatch spelled out his blue-slip policy in 2003, the left attacked him for departing from the nomination-killing policy that he had supposedly applied as chairman in the late 1990s to nominees of President Clinton. What this attack ignored, of course, is that the situation in the late 1990s, when the president was of a different party from the Senate majority, was manifestly different from the situation today, when the president and the Senate majority are of the same party. Especially when it is acceptable to return a negative blue slip on ideological grounds, it is elementary common sense, not hypocrisy, for a committee chairman to distinguish between granting his own majority colleagues the power to block a nominee of a president of the opposite party, on the one hand, and granting a member of the minority the ability to block a nominee of a president who is of the same party as the committee chairman.</p>
<p>This common sense is also supported by precedent. Since the beginning of the Nixon administration 37 years ago, there have been only two brief periods in which the president and the committee chairman were both Democrats: 1977 to 1981, with President Carter and Chairman Kennedy*, and 1993 to 1994, with President Clinton and Chairman Biden (and when I was a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer). As Hatch made clear, Kennedy and Biden adopted the same policy that Hatch adopted in 2003. In particular, it was after Carter became president that Kennedy diluted the blue-slip policy that had applied to Nixon and Ford nominees, so that a negative blue slip would be accorded only “substantial weight.”</p>
<p>A feudal lord’s supposed right–the droit du seigneur–to usurp a vassal’s marital privileges with his bride on their wedding night is apocryphal. But what might be called the droit du sénateur–a senator’s asserted right to direct the president in his constitutional authority to name judges in the senator’s home state–is very real.</p>
<p>The Constitution provides that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint” federal judges. The syntax of this provision makes clear that the power to nominate lies exclusively with the president and that the constitutional role of the Senate comes into play after the president makes a nomination. As Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist 66: “It will be the office of the President to nominate, and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint. There will, of course, be no exertion of choice on the part of the Senate. They may defeat one choice of the Executive, and oblige him to make another; but they cannot themselves choose–they can only ratify or reject the choice he may have made.”</p>
<p>But the practical reality has long been very different. Senators of the same party as the president regularly claim the right to select district-court nominees in their states, and presidents, including President Bush, largely acquiesce in these claims. Presidents are free to engage in whatever prenomination consultation they find expedient, and I am certainly not contending that the role that senators have seized is unconstitutional. But, as Hamilton explained in Federalist 76, senators’ involvement in the choice of nominees multiplies the prospect that “personal considerations” will be given undue weight at the expense of qualifications. As the Bunning nomination exemplifies, senators have undermined the advantages in quality that Hamilton recognized should flow from having “sole and undivided responsibility” for nominations vested in the president.</p>
<p>Indeed, a senator selecting judicial nominees will naturally be inclined to regard the occasion as one more opportunity to dispense patronage to supporters. Presidents, of course, are hardly immune from the same temptation. But, Hamilton argues, a president will have a “livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation.” This would seem to be especially true of a president, like Bush, who has clearly stated his commitment to a jurisprudential philosophy of judicial restraint and who has staffed his ranks of nominations-vetters with excellent lawyers who share that commitment. Thus, there should be no doubt that exercise of the droit du sénateur generally operates to degrade the quality of President Bush’s district court nominees.</p>
<p>Fortunately, the degree to which senators actually exercise this perceived right varies considerably, and there are numerous district court nominees who have been of high caliber. But this right also threatens to expand, as senators aim to increase their influence on the selection of appellate court nominees whose chambers would be in their states.</p>
<p>Even senators of the party opposite the president’s have gotten in on the act. In 2001, when Democrats controlled the Senate, California senators Boxer and Dianne Feinstein set up a commission to screen candidates for district judgeships and succeeded in coercing President Bush to select his nominees from the candidates approved by the commission. Despite the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2002 and further Republican gains in 2004, the role of that commission remains unchanged, and every nominee of President Bush to a district judgeship in California has been preapproved by the commission.</p>
<p>How&#160;adverse is the Senate’s effect on the quality of judicial nominees? As it happens, the D.C. Circuit, which is immune from any home-state senator influence, provides a sort of control group against which judges from other courts of appeals can be compared. Although only three courts of appeals have fewer seats, the D.C. Circuit over the past 25 years has featured a slew of outstanding conservative jurists–most prominently Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, but also many lesser-known stars, such as (to name just a couple) Laurence Silberman and Douglas Ginsburg. No other court of appeals comes close to matching this roster.</p>
<p>It might be thought that the D.C. Circuit’s reputation for producing Supreme Court nominees makes it especially attractive to stellar candidates. But I think it more likely that the D.C. Circuit has produced so many Supreme Court nominees because the absence of home-state senator interference makes it easier for strong candidates to be nominated and confirmed. Judge Janice Rogers Brown provides a telling case in point. Brown was a California supreme court justice when President Bush nominated her to the D.C. Circuit in 2003. The White House fully understood that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to confirm her to the Ninth Circuit. Indeed, senators Boxer and Feinstein killed the earlier nomination of Carolyn Kuhl to a Ninth Circuit seat. Although Democrats put up a major fight, Brown was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit last year.</p>
<p>Consider also Brett Kavanaugh, President Bush’s currently pending–and superbly qualified–nominee to the D.C. Circuit. Kavanaugh is a native of Maryland, and a seat on the Fourth Circuit that Maryland’s Democratic senators regard as a “Maryland seat” has been vacant for more than five years. But these senators forced President Bush to abandon his original outstanding candidate for that slot (Maryland resident Peter Keisler) and would likewise have fought tooth-and-nail against Kavanaugh as a Fourth Circuit nominee. By contrast, Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the D.C. Circuit soon (though it shouldn’t be overlooked that his nomination has already been pending for more than two-and-a-half years).</p>
<p>There are, of course, other explanations for the quality of D.C. Circuit judges. In particular, every president undoubtedly pays special attention to D.C. Circuit nominations because that court, with its heavy administrative-law caseload, plays a major role in reviewing actions of the executive branch. But it seems clear that the much-reduced senatorial influence–resulting from the inapplicability of the blue-slip policy and the absence of any home-state senator pushing for his brother-in-law to be nominated–also contributes significantly to quality.</p>
<p>The ill effects of senatorial influence extend beyond reducing the quality of nominees. The clout of senators also operates perversely to ensure that, broadly speaking, weaker nominees are confirmed faster than stronger ones. Assume two nominees, one who has de facto been selected by a senator (and who therefore is more likely to have been selected because of his ties to the senator than because of his qualifications) and the other who is a genuine high-quality presidential pick. In an exercise of reciprocal back-scratching, the senator’s colleagues will likely put his pick on the faster track.</p>
<p>Indeed, Senate Democrats like to deflect criticism of their unprecedented filibusters of lower-court nominees by citing statistics showing how many of the president’s nominees have been confirmed. What these statistics obscure is that the Senate has disproportionately confirmed the nominees whom senators understand to be essentially senatorial selections. For very good reasons, not all nominees are of equal import in the eyes of the White House. Yet senatorial selections provide Democrats cover to use other procedural mechanisms–such as the anonymous “hold” or the withholding of unanimous consent–to stall or block the most important nominees.</p>
<p>Politics is politics, and I have no illusion that the successful career politicians who occupy Senate seats can be induced to abandon the self-serving practices that enhance their power and help advance their reelection. But there are some minimal steps that certain senators should take.</p>
<p>First, Chairman Specter should make clear that Barbara Boxer and company do not have the unprecedented power to veto President Bush’s judicial nominees. Specifically, he should expressly adopt the same blue-slip policy that former chairmen Kennedy, Biden, and Hatch applied when each was dealing with a president of his own party: The return of a negative blue slip, while accorded “substantial weight,” will not impede the committee from proceeding to a hearing and a vote on the nomination.</p>
<p>Second, Republican senators, while continuing to exert extraordinary influence on the selection of district-court nominees, should yield full nominating power to President Bush on appellate-court nominees. The work of a court of appeals judge has no particular connection to a single state, and there is no principled basis for a home-state senator to use the incidental fact of the presumed location of a vacancy to invoke any influence over the nomination to fill that vacancy. Republican senators should agree that any views they offer on appellate-court nominations are purely advisory.</p>
<p>Third, Specter and Majority Leader Bill Frist should press to make sure that longstanding nominees receive committee votes and final Senate action. It is, on balance, good that the David Bunnings and Milan Smiths, once nominated, proceed to confirmation. But their success should not come at the expense of nominees like Terry Boyle (nominated to the Fourth Circuit in May 2001) and Brett Kavanaugh.</p>
<p>–Edward Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog on judicial nominations.</p> | Droit du Sénateur | false | https://eppc.org/publications/droit-du-senateur/ | 1right-center
| 3,064 | President Bush recentlyamp160nominated Milan D Smith Jr to fill a longstanding vacancy on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit The Ninth Circuit which covers nine western states is a notorious bastion of liberal judicial lawlessness So the White House should be looking to fill the vacancy with an outstanding jurist who is learned in questions of federal constitutional and statutory law and who is prepared to dedicate two decades or more to the arduous task of helping to transform that court Unfortunately Smith hardly fits the bill A Los Angelesarea attorney Smith 64 has specialized for nearly four decades in real estate transactions8211a specialty that has little bearing on the questions that occupy federal courts In his one term as a member of a state antidiscrimination commission he 8220distinguished himself8221 by 8220his timemanagement skills8221 says one of his supporters He recently explained his decision to step down from the commission by implying disdain for his fellow party members 8220I8217m a Republican but I8217m a Republican with a heart8221 Consider also David L Bunning whom President Bush nominated to a federal district judgeship in 2001 Thirtyfive years old when he was nominated Bunning had been a lawyer for only ten years Citing his 8220very limited and shallow8221 experience with civil cases his not 8220particularly challenging8221 criminal caseload as a federal prosecutor his unimpressive writing and his middling academic record the ABA rated Bunning 8220not qualified8221 for a judgeship Whether or not one credits the ABA rating8211a minority of the committee did find Bunning 8220qualified82218211it would be difficult to argue that Bunning was prime judgeship material But the Senate with a Democratic majority intent on blocking many of the president8217s judicial nominees expeditiously and unanimously confirmed Bunning Smith and Bunning might buck the odds and prove to be outstanding judges and I certainly don8217t mean to suggest there is anything exceptional about their questionable qualifications On the contrary unpromising judicial picks have been all too common among President Bush8217s lowercourt nominees But what the low caliber of these nominees helps demonstrate is the extraordinary and regrettable influence senators exercise over federal judgeships in their home states For the key facts driving Smith8217s candidacy are that Barbara Boxer the ultraliberal senator from California recommended his nomination and that Smith is the brother of Oregon8217s Republican senator Gordon Smith His brother and Boxer Milan Smith says 8220are very good friends8221 As for Bunning the district judgeship that he now occupies is in Kentucky the home state of Republican senator Jim Bunning who not coincidentally is his father For all the attention given to the Democratic filibuster of judicial nominees in recent years the greater impediment to President Bush8217s ability to appoint highquality practitioners of judicial restraint to the federal district and appellate courts comes from obscure Senate practices that enjoy widespread bipartisan support from senators These practices exist because they serve the narrow interests of individual senators They are in short perquisites of membership in the club known as the United States Senate After his remarkable successes in winning the confirmations of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito President Bush must return to the less glamorous work of filling vacancies on the lower courts This work is more difficult not only because of the large number of open seats but because of the great influence that homestate senators believe themselves entitled to exert over lowercourt nominations This influence can manifest itself in two ways first through the Senate Judiciary Committee8217s blueslip policy which serves primarily as a tool of senators in the party opposite the president8217s and second through the entrenched attitude of sameparty senators that they have a virtual right to designate judicial nominees in their states Let8217samp160beginamp160withamp160theamp160blueslip policy which is generally thought to have arisen as an informal Senate Judiciary Committee practice some 50 years ago The 8220blue slip8221 refers to the piece of paper that the chairman of the committee sends to a senator informing him that the president has made a nomination to a position in his home state and inviting him to object or offer support A senator who objects can express his objection on the blue slip a 8220negative blue slip8221 The substance of the blueslip policy both historically and as it applies today is murky and disputed The policy8217s contours depend primarily on four factors First which grounds may a senator legitimately rely on to object to a homestate nomination May he rely simply on personal grounds such as the fact that the nominee is the sister of his next generalelection opponent Or may he also rely on broader political or ideological differences with the nominee Second what effect will the committee chairman afford a negative blue slip Will it suffice to kill a nomination Or will it merely be given the indeterminate promise of 8220substantial weight8221 Does it matter whether the other homestate senator has also submitted a negative blue slip Third to which judicial nominations will the blueslip policy apply Only to those for district judges whose caseloads clearly relate to the home state in which the judge will sit Or also to those for appellate judges even though appellate judges from different states in the same circuit take part equally in the cases arising from the district courts across those various states Fourth and oddly neglected is whether the Senate majority and thus the committee chairman is of the same party as the president If the Senate majority is of the same party as the president then a negative blue slip by a minority senator operates to obstruct to the extent of the effect accorded the blue slip the presumed common will of the president and the Senate majority By contrast if the Senate majority is of the party opposing the president then the obstructing effect of a negative blue slip by a majority senator is more readily justifiable as an exercise of power delegated to that senator by his colleagues in the majority How these factors interact determines how sensible any particular blueslip policy is If for example blue slips were to apply only to districtcourt nominees and senators were to return negative blue slips only when they had genuine personal grounds for objecting to the nominee a committee chairman could reasonably give those negative blue slips nominationkilling effect even where the negative blue slip came from a minority senator After all it should not be a difficult matter for the president to find an equally qualified nominee who does not arouse the senator8217s personal opposition Conversely where a negative blue slip can be returned for purely ideological reasons it would seem defensible for a committee chairman to give decisive effect to that negative blue slip when it is submitted by a member of his own party but it would seem suicidal8211or more precisely remarkably detrimental to the interests of his own party8211to do so when it is submitted by a member of the minority party Curiously enough there are some individuals deeply involved in the current confirmation process who believe that this absurd policy is precisely what Arlen Specter the committee8217s chairman for the past year has adopted both for districtcourt and appellatecourt nominees This belief explains why it would be helpful to Milan Smith rather than damning that Barbara Boxer welcomes his nomination Orrin Hatch Specter8217s predecessor as chairman stated clearly in 2003 that he would abide by the same blueslip policy that Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden had adopted when they each chaired the committee Under what Hatch labeled the 8220KennedyBidenHatch blueslip policy8221 the return of a negative blue slip on a nomination would be given 8220substantial weight8221 but a committee hearing and vote on the nomination would proceed Specter has issued no such statement and he has not yet held a hearing on any nominee with negative or unreturned blue slips When Hatch spelled out his blueslip policy in 2003 the left attacked him for departing from the nominationkilling policy that he had supposedly applied as chairman in the late 1990s to nominees of President Clinton What this attack ignored of course is that the situation in the late 1990s when the president was of a different party from the Senate majority was manifestly different from the situation today when the president and the Senate majority are of the same party Especially when it is acceptable to return a negative blue slip on ideological grounds it is elementary common sense not hypocrisy for a committee chairman to distinguish between granting his own majority colleagues the power to block a nominee of a president of the opposite party on the one hand and granting a member of the minority the ability to block a nominee of a president who is of the same party as the committee chairman This common sense is also supported by precedent Since the beginning of the Nixon administration 37 years ago there have been only two brief periods in which the president and the committee chairman were both Democrats 1977 to 1981 with President Carter and Chairman Kennedy and 1993 to 1994 with President Clinton and Chairman Biden and when I was a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer As Hatch made clear Kennedy and Biden adopted the same policy that Hatch adopted in 2003 In particular it was after Carter became president that Kennedy diluted the blueslip policy that had applied to Nixon and Ford nominees so that a negative blue slip would be accorded only 8220substantial weight8221 A feudal lord8217s supposed right8211the droit du seigneur8211to usurp a vassal8217s marital privileges with his bride on their wedding night is apocryphal But what might be called the droit du s233nateur8211a senator8217s asserted right to direct the president in his constitutional authority to name judges in the senator8217s home state8211is very real The Constitution provides that the president 8220shall nominate and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate shall appoint8221 federal judges The syntax of this provision makes clear that the power to nominate lies exclusively with the president and that the constitutional role of the Senate comes into play after the president makes a nomination As Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist 66 8220It will be the office of the President to nominate and with the advice and consent of the Senate to appoint There will of course be no exertion of choice on the part of the Senate They may defeat one choice of the Executive and oblige him to make another but they cannot themselves choose8211they can only ratify or reject the choice he may have made8221 But the practical reality has long been very different Senators of the same party as the president regularly claim the right to select districtcourt nominees in their states and presidents including President Bush largely acquiesce in these claims Presidents are free to engage in whatever prenomination consultation they find expedient and I am certainly not contending that the role that senators have seized is unconstitutional But as Hamilton explained in Federalist 76 senators8217 involvement in the choice of nominees multiplies the prospect that 8220personal considerations8221 will be given undue weight at the expense of qualifications As the Bunning nomination exemplifies senators have undermined the advantages in quality that Hamilton recognized should flow from having 8220sole and undivided responsibility8221 for nominations vested in the president Indeed a senator selecting judicial nominees will naturally be inclined to regard the occasion as one more opportunity to dispense patronage to supporters Presidents of course are hardly immune from the same temptation But Hamilton argues a president will have a 8220livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation8221 This would seem to be especially true of a president like Bush who has clearly stated his commitment to a jurisprudential philosophy of judicial restraint and who has staffed his ranks of nominationsvetters with excellent lawyers who share that commitment Thus there should be no doubt that exercise of the droit du s233nateur generally operates to degrade the quality of President Bush8217s district court nominees Fortunately the degree to which senators actually exercise this perceived right varies considerably and there are numerous district court nominees who have been of high caliber But this right also threatens to expand as senators aim to increase their influence on the selection of appellate court nominees whose chambers would be in their states Even senators of the party opposite the president8217s have gotten in on the act In 2001 when Democrats controlled the Senate California senators Boxer and Dianne Feinstein set up a commission to screen candidates for district judgeships and succeeded in coercing President Bush to select his nominees from the candidates approved by the commission Despite the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2002 and further Republican gains in 2004 the role of that commission remains unchanged and every nominee of President Bush to a district judgeship in California has been preapproved by the commission Howamp160adverse is the Senate8217s effect on the quality of judicial nominees As it happens the DC Circuit which is immune from any homestate senator influence provides a sort of control group against which judges from other courts of appeals can be compared Although only three courts of appeals have fewer seats the DC Circuit over the past 25 years has featured a slew of outstanding conservative jurists8211most prominently Antonin Scalia Robert Bork Clarence Thomas and John Roberts but also many lesserknown stars such as to name just a couple Laurence Silberman and Douglas Ginsburg No other court of appeals comes close to matching this roster It might be thought that the DC Circuit8217s reputation for producing Supreme Court nominees makes it especially attractive to stellar candidates But I think it more likely that the DC Circuit has produced so many Supreme Court nominees because the absence of homestate senator interference makes it easier for strong candidates to be nominated and confirmed Judge Janice Rogers Brown provides a telling case in point Brown was a California supreme court justice when President Bush nominated her to the DC Circuit in 2003 The White House fully understood that it would be very difficult if not impossible to confirm her to the Ninth Circuit Indeed senators Boxer and Feinstein killed the earlier nomination of Carolyn Kuhl to a Ninth Circuit seat Although Democrats put up a major fight Brown was confirmed to the DC Circuit last year Consider also Brett Kavanaugh President Bush8217s currently pending8211and superbly qualified8211nominee to the DC Circuit Kavanaugh is a native of Maryland and a seat on the Fourth Circuit that Maryland8217s Democratic senators regard as a 8220Maryland seat8221 has been vacant for more than five years But these senators forced President Bush to abandon his original outstanding candidate for that slot Maryland resident Peter Keisler and would likewise have fought toothandnail against Kavanaugh as a Fourth Circuit nominee By contrast Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the DC Circuit soon though it shouldn8217t be overlooked that his nomination has already been pending for more than twoandahalf years There are of course other explanations for the quality of DC Circuit judges In particular every president undoubtedly pays special attention to DC Circuit nominations because that court with its heavy administrativelaw caseload plays a major role in reviewing actions of the executive branch But it seems clear that the muchreduced senatorial influence8211resulting from the inapplicability of the blueslip policy and the absence of any homestate senator pushing for his brotherinlaw to be nominated8211also contributes significantly to quality The ill effects of senatorial influence extend beyond reducing the quality of nominees The clout of senators also operates perversely to ensure that broadly speaking weaker nominees are confirmed faster than stronger ones Assume two nominees one who has de facto been selected by a senator and who therefore is more likely to have been selected because of his ties to the senator than because of his qualifications and the other who is a genuine highquality presidential pick In an exercise of reciprocal backscratching the senator8217s colleagues will likely put his pick on the faster track Indeed Senate Democrats like to deflect criticism of their unprecedented filibusters of lowercourt nominees by citing statistics showing how many of the president8217s nominees have been confirmed What these statistics obscure is that the Senate has disproportionately confirmed the nominees whom senators understand to be essentially senatorial selections For very good reasons not all nominees are of equal import in the eyes of the White House Yet senatorial selections provide Democrats cover to use other procedural mechanisms8211such as the anonymous 8220hold8221 or the withholding of unanimous consent8211to stall or block the most important nominees Politics is politics and I have no illusion that the successful career politicians who occupy Senate seats can be induced to abandon the selfserving practices that enhance their power and help advance their reelection But there are some minimal steps that certain senators should take First Chairman Specter should make clear that Barbara Boxer and company do not have the unprecedented power to veto President Bush8217s judicial nominees Specifically he should expressly adopt the same blueslip policy that former chairmen Kennedy Biden and Hatch applied when each was dealing with a president of his own party The return of a negative blue slip while accorded 8220substantial weight8221 will not impede the committee from proceeding to a hearing and a vote on the nomination Second Republican senators while continuing to exert extraordinary influence on the selection of districtcourt nominees should yield full nominating power to President Bush on appellatecourt nominees The work of a court of appeals judge has no particular connection to a single state and there is no principled basis for a homestate senator to use the incidental fact of the presumed location of a vacancy to invoke any influence over the nomination to fill that vacancy Republican senators should agree that any views they offer on appellatecourt nominations are purely advisory Third Specter and Majority Leader Bill Frist should press to make sure that longstanding nominees receive committee votes and final Senate action It is on balance good that the David Bunnings and Milan Smiths once nominated proceed to confirmation But their success should not come at the expense of nominees like Terry Boyle nominated to the Fourth Circuit in May 2001 and Brett Kavanaugh 8211Edward Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributor to National Review Online8217s Bench Memos blog on judicial nominations | President/PROPN Bush/PROPN recentlyamp160nominated/VERB Milan/PROPN D/PROPN Smith/PROPN Jr/PROPN to/PART fill/VERB a/DET longstanding/ADJ vacancy/NOUN on/ADP the/DET US/PROPN Court/PROPN of/ADP Appeals/PROPN for/ADP the/DET Ninth/PROPN Circuit/PROPN The/DET Ninth/PROPN Circuit/PROPN which/PRON covers/VERB nine/NUM western/ADJ states/NOUN is/AUX a/DET notorious/ADJ bastion/NOUN of/ADP liberal/ADJ judicial/ADJ lawlessness/NOUN So/ADV the/DET White/PROPN House/PROPN should/AUX 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<p>In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha), the social democratic, parliamentary left in India, composed of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), the Communist Party of India (CPI) and a bunch of smaller left-wing parties, suffered&#160; the severest electoral thrashing in a long time. This year, the CPM won a total of only 16 parliamentary seats. As compared to its performance in the last general elections in 2004 this is a decline of 27 seats. The CPI, on the other hand, won 4 seats in this time around, suffering a net decline of 6 parliamentary seats from its position in 2004. Does this mean that the Indian population has rejected even the mildly progressive policies that the social democratic left tried to defend at the central level? Is this a mandate for the ruling Congress party and by extension for neoliberalism, its pet project since the early 1990s?</p>
<p>The facts don’t sustain such a claim.</p>
<p>A careful analysis of the results show that this was an electoral rebuke to the social democratic left but not to social democratic policies; on the other hand, just as in 2004 when the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party’s “shinning India” slogan was decisively rejected by the populace, this is a mandate against neoliberalism and for welfare-oriented policies. To the extent that the Congress was pushed by the social democratic left to implement such policies, it can possibly be interpreted as an indirect endorsement of Congress’s late-in-the day populism.</p>
<p>The first misinterpretation that is gaining ground is the alleged existence of a “wave” in favor of the centrist Congress party which swept it to power, overcoming the ubiquitous current of anti-incumbency observed in Indian politics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Despite having won 206 parliamentary seats, the Congress merely won 28.55 per cent of the votes polled in 2009, increasing it by just about 2 per centage points from 2004. An overall share of 29 per cent of the total votes polled at the national level can hardly be interpreted as a “massive wave”; besides, this overall increase also hides substantial decreases in vote share (and seats) in several important states like Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.</p>
<p>The second misinterpretation going the rounds assumes that this general election saw the definite demise of regional parties and all federalist tendencies of the Indian populace; the people voted overwhelmingly for national parties, the argument goes, because they want stability. Whether people desire stability or not, the fact is that the populace did not reject regional parties in favor of national parties. This can be seen by looking at the share of votes going to the Congress and the BJP taken together: according to provisional figures released by the Election Commission of India, the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP in fact declined from 48.69 per cent in 2004 to 47.35 per cent in 2009.</p>
<p>Social Democratic Performance</p>
<p>How did the social democratic left parties perform in terms of the share of votes polled? At the national level, the CPM lost only marginally in terms of the share of votes polled. The decline was from 5.66 per cent in 2004 to 5.33 per cent this year; the CPI, on the other hand, gained marginally at the national level, increasing its share of votes from 1.41 to 1.43 per cent. Thus, going by these national figures, there is no evidence of any trend against their opposition, however feeble, to the neoliberal policies of the UPA-led Central government.</p>
<p>But the national level figures hide many interesting state-level variations; hence we must also look at state-level data to get a more complete picture. There is another reason why we need to supplement national level with state-level analysis: since the social democratic left is prominent only in the three states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal, the national figures are not very relevant to assessing their electoral prospects.</p>
<p>How did the social democrats perform in the different states? Three tendencies can be observed in the data. First, the social democratic left managed to increase its vote share in a few states: Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Andaman &amp; Nicobar Islands. Apart from Manipur, of course, the total vote share of the SDL in these states remains insignificant; hence, the increase in the vote share did not even remotely translate into changes in seats. Second, the social democratic left lost its share of votes polled in a large number of states: Assam, Bihar, Jammu &amp; Kashmir, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. The percentage declines in Punjab and Jharkhand were very large, though that did not affect the reckoning in terms of seats because the SDL did not have seats to start with, i.e., in 2004. On the other hand, the sharp decline in the vote share in Tripura did not translate, fortunately for the social democratic left, into any decline in seats. Third, the states where the loss of vote share wreaked havoc for the reckoning in terms of seats were Kerala and West Bengal: in Kerala, the share of votes going to the social democrats declined from 39.41 per cent in 2004 to 37.92 per cent in 2009; in West Bengal, the corresponding share declined from 50.72 per cent in 2004 to 43.3 per cent in 2009. The bulk of the decrease in&#160; national vote share was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal, the prime left bastions, whereas the increase in vote share was spread out across states where the SDL is electorally marginal.</p>
<p>So,&#160; why was the bulk of the decrease in vote share for the social democratic left concentrated in Kerala and West Bengal? The clue to an answer is provided by the fact that both states, Kerala and West Bengal, currently have social democratic governments, led by the CPM. In both states, the state governments have, over the past few years, increasingly accepted, adopted and pushed neoliberal economic policies, often in the name of development and industrialization. This led to the emergence of a seemingly paradoxical situation: the social democratic left opposed, however feebly, the continued adoption of neoliberal polices at the level of the central government, while the same set of policies were aggressively pursued in the states where they were in power. The debacle of the social democrats in the two most electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal can, therefore, be read as a forceful rejection of this doublespeak and hypocrisy. The rejection of the social democrats at the level of these two states, moreover, dovetails into the overall mandate in favor of progressive and social democratic policies, and against the neoliberal turn, at the national level. Of course there were other local factors, both in West Bengal and in Kerala, that overlaid this broad rejection of the neoliberal turn and turned the mandate decisively against them in both these states. Before we look at some of these factors, especially for West Bengal where the crash of the social democratic left was the most stunning, a comment about the so-called national “wave” in favour of the Congress is in order.</p>
<p>Social Democrats help the Congress</p>
<p>The so-called nationwide “wave” in favor of Congress, if there was one, resulted to a large extent from the slew of populist policies that it adopted over its last few years in office, pushed towards this by the social democrats. These include the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the step-up in public investment in agriculture, the debt relief program for farmers, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2006, the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Bill 2008, the setting up of the Sacchar Committee to inquire into the continued marginalization of Muslims in the country. The Congress cashed the benefits of this populist swing electorally, claiming it to be its own policies whereas, in truth, the social democratic left was largely instrumental in pushing for these policies at the central level.</p>
<p>Other similar policies pushed for by the social democrats include: opposition to financial sector reforms (pensions, insurance), opposition to outright privatization of the public sector, privatization of health care and education. These defensive actions by the social democratic left have partially limited the unbridled power of capital to exploit labor and have provided some relief to the mass of the working people in India. It is, therefore, no surprise that corporate India is exultant at the social democrats’ electoral disaster this month. The stock market in Bombay erupted immediately after the results were out. Trading had to be stopped for a while to deal with the unprecedented euphoria. As many media reports in India show, the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and other business groups have already started preparing their “wish-list” of reforms, by which they mean another round of neoliberal policy onslaughts on the common people. Naturally enough, land reforms does not figure in this wish-list of reforms.</p>
<p>The social democratic left’s ability to counter the Congress’ claim that the populist thrust was a result of a progressive shift in the party, in reality fiercely opposed by entrenched interests within the Congress, was severely limited by its actuakl, de facto record in the states where it was in power: Kerala and West Bengal. Thus, paradoxically, while it was largely responsible for creating the populist shift in the Congress party and thereby creating support in its favor, it could not transform this effort into any substantial electoral advantage for itself; and this was largely because of its doublespeak and hypocrisy, saying one thing at the central level and doing exactly the opposite at the state level. Probably nothing brings out this better than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA, which provides a guarantee of a minimum of 100 days of work to the rural poor, came into effect on February 02, 2006 in 200 of India’s poorest districts. This provision was originally brought to the fore by grassroots-level mass movements in Rajasthan and other states in India, and was later adopted and forcefully pushed by the social democrats at the central level. While the NREGA has been constantly attacked in the mainstream press as a waste of resources and a useless policy initiative, in reality it has managed to create substantial benefits for the rural proletariat and poor peasants; even though there is still a lot of room for improvement, the limited pro-people initiative represented by the NREGA has managed to improve the lives of the rural poor by putting a floor on agricultural wages and assuring some days of employment, both of which resulted in increased rural incomes.</p>
<p>West Bengal: A Closer Look</p>
<p>How did the NREGA fare in West Bengal and Kerala compared to other states? In 2006-07, the person-days of NREGA employment generated per rural household amounted&#160; 6 in West Bengal and and even more wretched 3 in Kerala, with both states figuring in the list of the 3 worst performers. Compared to this, the all-India average was 17 person-days. Chhattisgarh generated 34, Madhya Pradesh 56, Assam 70 and Rajasthan 77 person-days. A similar picture emerges for the next year too: in 2007-08, West Bengal generated 8 person-days and Kerala 6 person-days, much below the all-India average of 16 person-days. The dismal performance of the state government led the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS), a non-party, registered trade union of agricultural workers, to file a public interest litigation in the Calcutta High Court on non implementation of the 100 days work guarantee scheme in West Bengal. In sum, therefore, the two states where the social democrats were in power saw the worst implementation of the NREGA!</p>
<p>Coming back to the factors specific to West Bengal that led to this electoral disaster for the social democratic left, we must complement the story of the state government’s surrender to neoliberalism with its fatal arrogance. Failure in the implementation of the NREGA went hand-in-hand with other overt neoliberal policy moves: privatization of health care, privatization of education,&#160; full-scale assault on the public distribution system, and an aggressive state-sponsored attack on farmers in a bid to “acquire”&#160; agricultural land for a neoliberal industrialization drive. Singur and Nandigram stand as symbols, at the same time, of both this attack by the state on behalf of corporate capital and also of the fierce resistance to this brutality by the poor peasants and landless laborers. The arrogance of the state government was in repellent display during the “re-capture” of Nandigram in March 2007, a violent attack on the people opposing forcible land acquisition, and also in the manner it dealt with the case of Rizwanur Rahman. Against a backdrop of endemically dismal conditions for the Muslims in the state, the insensitivity displayed in the Rizwanur Rahman case increased the fury of the common Muslim population against the social democratic state government. Is it so difficult to see, then, why some of the districts in West Bengal where the social democrats performed wretchedly, like North and South&#160; Paraganas, Nadia, Murshidabad, Malda, Birbhum, are also ones with a&#160; relatively high proportion of Muslims?</p>
<p>At this point, we need to closely scrutinize an alternative argument that is going the social democratic rounds. This argument runs something like this: the Left Front made a great tactical mistake in severing ties with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Center on the issue of the nuclear deal with the USA; this allowed the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress (INC) to forge an alliance in West Bengal; this alliance was instrumental in consolidating the anti-Left votes and directly resulted in the electoral reverses of the social democrats in West Bengal.</p>
<p>Alas, the argument does not hold water If it were true that the social democratic debacle was fueled mainly by the consolidation of anti-Left votes (because of the Congress-TMC alliance), it would mean the following: the social democratic left’s share of votes polled would remain relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2009. This is a straightforward testable implication of the above argument. What does the evidence say on this?</p>
<p>There was a big decline in the share of votes that went to the social democratic Left Front: in 2004, the Left Front had garnered 50.72 per cent of the votes polled; in 2009, the corresponding vote share fell to 43.56 per cent. While it is difficult to accurately see how this 7 per cent statewide decline is distributed across all the parliamentary constituencies because of the 2008 delimitation of constituencies, we can nonetheless figure out the changes in vote shares in those that remained relatively unchanged by the delimitation process: Balurghat saw a marginal decline of 0.49 per cent, Raigunj a decline of 3.13 per cent, Alipurduars a decline of 4.48 per cent, Cooch Behar a decline of 6.88 per cent, Darjeeling a decline of 7.99 per cent, Birbhum a decline of 9.65 per cent and Bolpur witnessed a massive decline of 15.65 per cent. Can we, in the face of this overwhelming evidence of a massive rejection of the social democratic left, still stick to the story of the supposed consolidation of anti-Left votes as the primary reason behind the debacle?</p>
<p>The social democratic left played an important role in slowing down the juggernaut of neoliberalism in India through its intervention in the formation of the Common Minimum Program of the UPA; and this was largely possible, given the political situation five years ago, because of its sizable parliamentary presence at the central level. If nothing, the reaction of corporate India to the electoral debacle of the social democrats is proof of the partial efficacy of its past interventions. But there are at least two serious problems for a strategy that focuses on primarily on electoral politics, as the social democratic left does.</p>
<p>First, most of its interventions, even though salutary, are at best defensive actions and therefore extremely limited from any long-term left political perspective; the ruling classes set the agenda and move forward with a concrete program of neoliberal reforms and the social democrats reacts to that agenda. It tries to halt the speed of the reforms, tries to win a battle here or there. In such a scenario, the best outcome can only be a return to the status quo, not a move forward towards a socialist future. Is it difficult for the social democratic left to see the inherent and long-term limitations of its strategy?</p>
<p>This brings us to the second, and related, problem of social democratic strategy. The fact that the Communist parties, now part of what I have called the social democratic left, have lost the political offensive in the context of the class struggle in India also finds reflection in their over-emphasis on electoral politics, to the virtual exclusion of all non-electoral struggles. Over the last two decades, there is not one significant nationwide non-electoral struggle that it initiated or led; all its attention and energy has been fixed towards how to maintain its electoral position in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. More often than not, it has been willing to enter into opportunistic and unprincipled alliances to attain short-term electoral goals, little realizing that this opportunism leads to long-term political setbacks. At times it has even gone with the right-wing BJP to keep the centrist Congress out of power, quickly reversing the logic at the next moment and aligning with the Congress to defend secularism. Caught in these endless electoral antics and working within a framework whose rules have been set by the ruling classes, it has gradually distanced itself from its programmatic concerns of a people’s democratic revolution. To recover its potency and relevance, it must refashion itself by forging links with the rising tide of revolutionary mass movements in India against the neoliberal offensive and overcome its obsession with electoral politics. Of course if post-poll statements of the social democratic bigwigs in West Bengal, like Biman Bose, are anything to go by, they have decided to do exactly the opposite: justify the electoral debacle on external factors, avoid any serious rethinking and continue with elections as the primary focus of their politics.</p>
<p>DEEPANKAR BASU is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Colorado State University. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:Deepankar.Basu@colostate.edu" type="external">Deepankar.Basu@colostate.edu</a></p> | Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/05/26/was-the-indian-election-a-debacle-for-the-left-if-so-why-2/ | 2009-05-26 | 4left
| 3,065 | In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament Lok Sabha the social democratic parliamentary left in India composed of the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist CPM the Communist Party of India CPI and a bunch of smaller leftwing parties sufferedamp160 the severest electoral thrashing in a long time This year the CPM won a total of only 16 parliamentary seats As compared to its performance in the last general elections in 2004 this is a decline of 27 seats The CPI on the other hand won 4 seats in this time around suffering a net decline of 6 parliamentary seats from its position in 2004 Does this mean that the Indian population has rejected even the mildly progressive policies that the social democratic left tried to defend at the central level Is this a mandate for the ruling Congress party and by extension for neoliberalism its pet project since the early 1990s The facts don8217t sustain such a claim A careful analysis of the results show that this was an electoral rebuke to the social democratic left but not to social democratic policies on the other hand just as in 2004 when the rightwing Bhartiya Janata Party8217s 8220shinning India8221 slogan was decisively rejected by the populace this is a mandate against neoliberalism and for welfareoriented policies To the extent that the Congress was pushed by the social democratic left to implement such policies it can possibly be interpreted as an indirect endorsement of Congress8217s lateinthe day populism The first misinterpretation that is gaining ground is the alleged existence of a 8220wave8221 in favor of the centrist Congress party which swept it to power overcoming the ubiquitous current of antiincumbency observed in Indian politics Nothing could be farther from the truth Despite having won 206 parliamentary seats the Congress merely won 2855 per cent of the votes polled in 2009 increasing it by just about 2 per centage points from 2004 An overall share of 29 per cent of the total votes polled at the national level can hardly be interpreted as a 8220massive wave8221 besides this overall increase also hides substantial decreases in vote share and seats in several important states like Orissa Jharkhand Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh The second misinterpretation going the rounds assumes that this general election saw the definite demise of regional parties and all federalist tendencies of the Indian populace the people voted overwhelmingly for national parties the argument goes because they want stability Whether people desire stability or not the fact is that the populace did not reject regional parties in favor of national parties This can be seen by looking at the share of votes going to the Congress and the BJP taken together according to provisional figures released by the Election Commission of India the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP in fact declined from 4869 per cent in 2004 to 4735 per cent in 2009 Social Democratic Performance How did the social democratic left parties perform in terms of the share of votes polled At the national level the CPM lost only marginally in terms of the share of votes polled The decline was from 566 per cent in 2004 to 533 per cent this year the CPI on the other hand gained marginally at the national level increasing its share of votes from 141 to 143 per cent Thus going by these national figures there is no evidence of any trend against their opposition however feeble to the neoliberal policies of the UPAled Central government But the national level figures hide many interesting statelevel variations hence we must also look at statelevel data to get a more complete picture There is another reason why we need to supplement national level with statelevel analysis since the social democratic left is prominent only in the three states of Kerala Tripura and West Bengal the national figures are not very relevant to assessing their electoral prospects How did the social democrats perform in the different states Three tendencies can be observed in the data First the social democratic left managed to increase its vote share in a few states Andhra Pradesh Goa Gujarat Madhya Pradesh Manipur Rajasthan Uttar Pradesh Chhattisgarh Uttaranchal and Andaman ampamp Nicobar Islands Apart from Manipur of course the total vote share of the SDL in these states remains insignificant hence the increase in the vote share did not even remotely translate into changes in seats Second the social democratic left lost its share of votes polled in a large number of states Assam Bihar Jammu ampamp Kashmir Kerala Maharashtra Punjab Tamil Nadu Tripura West Bengal and Jharkhand The percentage declines in Punjab and Jharkhand were very large though that did not affect the reckoning in terms of seats because the SDL did not have seats to start with ie in 2004 On the other hand the sharp decline in the vote share in Tripura did not translate fortunately for the social democratic left into any decline in seats Third the states where the loss of vote share wreaked havoc for the reckoning in terms of seats were Kerala and West Bengal in Kerala the share of votes going to the social democrats declined from 3941 per cent in 2004 to 3792 per cent in 2009 in West Bengal the corresponding share declined from 5072 per cent in 2004 to 433 per cent in 2009 The bulk of the decrease inamp160 national vote share was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal the prime left bastions whereas the increase in vote share was spread out across states where the SDL is electorally marginal Soamp160 why was the bulk of the decrease in vote share for the social democratic left concentrated in Kerala and West Bengal The clue to an answer is provided by the fact that both states Kerala and West Bengal currently have social democratic governments led by the CPM In both states the state governments have over the past few years increasingly accepted adopted and pushed neoliberal economic policies often in the name of development and industrialization This led to the emergence of a seemingly paradoxical situation the social democratic left opposed however feebly the continued adoption of neoliberal polices at the level of the central government while the same set of policies were aggressively pursued in the states where they were in power The debacle of the social democrats in the two most electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal can therefore be read as a forceful rejection of this doublespeak and hypocrisy The rejection of the social democrats at the level of these two states moreover dovetails into the overall mandate in favor of progressive and social democratic policies and against the neoliberal turn at the national level Of course there were other local factors both in West Bengal and in Kerala that overlaid this broad rejection of the neoliberal turn and turned the mandate decisively against them in both these states Before we look at some of these factors especially for West Bengal where the crash of the social democratic left was the most stunning a comment about the socalled national 8220wave8221 in favour of the Congress is in order Social Democrats help the Congress The socalled nationwide 8220wave8221 in favor of Congress if there was one resulted to a large extent from the slew of populist policies that it adopted over its last few years in office pushed towards this by the social democrats These include the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA the stepup in public investment in agriculture the debt relief program for farmers the Right to Information Act 2005 the Central Educational Institutions Reservation in Admission Act 2006 the Unorganized Workers8217 Social Security Bill 2008 the setting up of the Sacchar Committee to inquire into the continued marginalization of Muslims in the country The Congress cashed the benefits of this populist swing electorally claiming it to be its own policies whereas in truth the social democratic left was largely instrumental in pushing for these policies at the central level Other similar policies pushed for by the social democrats include opposition to financial sector reforms pensions insurance opposition to outright privatization of the public sector privatization of health care and education These defensive actions by the social democratic left have partially limited the unbridled power of capital to exploit labor and have provided some relief to the mass of the working people in India It is therefore no surprise that corporate India is exultant at the social democrats8217 electoral disaster this month The stock market in Bombay erupted immediately after the results were out Trading had to be stopped for a while to deal with the unprecedented euphoria As many media reports in India show the Confederation of Indian Industries CII the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry FICCI and other business groups have already started preparing their 8220wishlist8221 of reforms by which they mean another round of neoliberal policy onslaughts on the common people Naturally enough land reforms does not figure in this wishlist of reforms The social democratic left8217s ability to counter the Congress8217 claim that the populist thrust was a result of a progressive shift in the party in reality fiercely opposed by entrenched interests within the Congress was severely limited by its actuakl de facto record in the states where it was in power Kerala and West Bengal Thus paradoxically while it was largely responsible for creating the populist shift in the Congress party and thereby creating support in its favor it could not transform this effort into any substantial electoral advantage for itself and this was largely because of its doublespeak and hypocrisy saying one thing at the central level and doing exactly the opposite at the state level Probably nothing brings out this better than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA The NREGA which provides a guarantee of a minimum of 100 days of work to the rural poor came into effect on February 02 2006 in 200 of India8217s poorest districts This provision was originally brought to the fore by grassrootslevel mass movements in Rajasthan and other states in India and was later adopted and forcefully pushed by the social democrats at the central level While the NREGA has been constantly attacked in the mainstream press as a waste of resources and a useless policy initiative in reality it has managed to create substantial benefits for the rural proletariat and poor peasants even though there is still a lot of room for improvement the limited propeople initiative represented by the NREGA has managed to improve the lives of the rural poor by putting a floor on agricultural wages and assuring some days of employment both of which resulted in increased rural incomes West Bengal A Closer Look How did the NREGA fare in West Bengal and Kerala compared to other states In 200607 the persondays of NREGA employment generated per rural household amountedamp160 6 in West Bengal and and even more wretched 3 in Kerala with both states figuring in the list of the 3 worst performers Compared to this the allIndia average was 17 persondays Chhattisgarh generated 34 Madhya Pradesh 56 Assam 70 and Rajasthan 77 persondays A similar picture emerges for the next year too in 200708 West Bengal generated 8 persondays and Kerala 6 persondays much below the allIndia average of 16 persondays The dismal performance of the state government led the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity PBKMS a nonparty registered trade union of agricultural workers to file a public interest litigation in the Calcutta High Court on non implementation of the 100 days work guarantee scheme in West Bengal In sum therefore the two states where the social democrats were in power saw the worst implementation of the NREGA Coming back to the factors specific to West Bengal that led to this electoral disaster for the social democratic left we must complement the story of the state government8217s surrender to neoliberalism with its fatal arrogance Failure in the implementation of the NREGA went handinhand with other overt neoliberal policy moves privatization of health care privatization of educationamp160 fullscale assault on the public distribution system and an aggressive statesponsored attack on farmers in a bid to 8220acquire8221amp160 agricultural land for a neoliberal industrialization drive Singur and Nandigram stand as symbols at the same time of both this attack by the state on behalf of corporate capital and also of the fierce resistance to this brutality by the poor peasants and landless laborers The arrogance of the state government was in repellent display during the 8220recapture8221 of Nandigram in March 2007 a violent attack on the people opposing forcible land acquisition and also in the manner it dealt with the case of Rizwanur Rahman Against a backdrop of endemically dismal conditions for the Muslims in the state the insensitivity displayed in the Rizwanur Rahman case increased the fury of the common Muslim population against the social democratic state government Is it so difficult to see then why some of the districts in West Bengal where the social democrats performed wretchedly like North and Southamp160 Paraganas Nadia Murshidabad Malda Birbhum are also ones with aamp160 relatively high proportion of Muslims At this point we need to closely scrutinize an alternative argument that is going the social democratic rounds This argument runs something like this the Left Front made a great tactical mistake in severing ties with the Congressled United Progressive Alliance UPA at the Center on the issue of the nuclear deal with the USA this allowed the Trinamool Congress TMC and the Congress INC to forge an alliance in West Bengal this alliance was instrumental in consolidating the antiLeft votes and directly resulted in the electoral reverses of the social democrats in West Bengal Alas the argument does not hold water If it were true that the social democratic debacle was fueled mainly by the consolidation of antiLeft votes because of the CongressTMC alliance it would mean the following the social democratic left8217s share of votes polled would remain relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2009 This is a straightforward testable implication of the above argument What does the evidence say on this There was a big decline in the share of votes that went to the social democratic Left Front in 2004 the Left Front had garnered 5072 per cent of the votes polled in 2009 the corresponding vote share fell to 4356 per cent While it is difficult to accurately see how this 7 per cent statewide decline is distributed across all the parliamentary constituencies because of the 2008 delimitation of constituencies we can nonetheless figure out the changes in vote shares in those that remained relatively unchanged by the delimitation process Balurghat saw a marginal decline of 049 per cent Raigunj a decline of 313 per cent Alipurduars a decline of 448 per cent Cooch Behar a decline of 688 per cent Darjeeling a decline of 799 per cent Birbhum a decline of 965 per cent and Bolpur witnessed a massive decline of 1565 per cent Can we in the face of this overwhelming evidence of a massive rejection of the social democratic left still stick to the story of the supposed consolidation of antiLeft votes as the primary reason behind the debacle The social democratic left played an important role in slowing down the juggernaut of neoliberalism in India through its intervention in the formation of the Common Minimum Program of the UPA and this was largely possible given the political situation five years ago because of its sizable parliamentary presence at the central level If nothing the reaction of corporate India to the electoral debacle of the social democrats is proof of the partial efficacy of its past interventions But there are at least two serious problems for a strategy that focuses on primarily on electoral politics as the social democratic left does First most of its interventions even though salutary are at best defensive actions and therefore extremely limited from any longterm left political perspective the ruling classes set the agenda and move forward with a concrete program of neoliberal reforms and the social democrats reacts to that agenda It tries to halt the speed of the reforms tries to win a battle here or there In such a scenario the best outcome can only be a return to the status quo not a move forward towards a socialist future Is it difficult for the social democratic left to see the inherent and longterm limitations of its strategy This brings us to the second and related problem of social democratic strategy The fact that the Communist parties now part of what I have called the social democratic left have lost the political offensive in the context of the class struggle in India also finds reflection in their overemphasis on electoral politics to the virtual exclusion of all nonelectoral struggles Over the last two decades there is not one significant nationwide nonelectoral struggle that it initiated or led all its attention and energy has been fixed towards how to maintain its electoral position in West Bengal Kerala and Tripura More often than not it has been willing to enter into opportunistic and unprincipled alliances to attain shortterm electoral goals little realizing that this opportunism leads to longterm political setbacks At times it has even gone with the rightwing BJP to keep the centrist Congress out of power quickly reversing the logic at the next moment and aligning with the Congress to defend secularism Caught in these endless electoral antics and working within a framework whose rules have been set by the ruling classes it has gradually distanced itself from its programmatic concerns of a people8217s democratic revolution To recover its potency and relevance it must refashion itself by forging links with the rising tide of revolutionary mass movements in India against the neoliberal offensive and overcome its obsession with electoral politics Of course if postpoll statements of the social democratic bigwigs in West Bengal like Biman Bose are anything to go by they have decided to do exactly the opposite justify the electoral debacle on external factors avoid any serious rethinking and continue with elections as the primary focus of their politics DEEPANKAR BASU is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Colorado State University He can be reached at DeepankarBasucolostateedu | In/ADP the/DET recently/ADV concluded/VERB 2009/NUM general/ADJ elections/NOUN to/ADP the/DET lower/ADJ house/NOUN of/ADP the/DET parliament/NOUN Lok/PROPN Sabha/PROPN the/DET social/ADJ democratic/ADJ parliamentary/ADJ left/NOUN in/ADP India/PROPN composed/VERB of/ADP the/DET Communist/PROPN Party/PROPN of/ADP 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<p>One morning last year, Calvin R. Mitchell Sr. went to a local dollar discount store to buy a fan and beat the July heat in his small, stuffy Uptown studio apartment. On his way back home, two police officers stopped him.</p>
<p>One asked, “‘You got a receipt for this fan?'” Mitchell recalled. Before he could get it out of his pocket, he said, one of the cops handcuffed him. Mitchell was taken to the police station at 5400 N. Lincoln Ave. and held for 13 hours without being charged. “I don’t steal. I’ve worked all my life,” said Mitchell, a 51-year-old grandfather and retired employee of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds’s Office. The dollar store owner later confirmed that Mitchell had paid for his purchase.</p>
<p>Ten days after the incident, Mitchell, then a regular participant in neighborhood community policing meetings, filed complaints with the Chicago Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, which is staffed by police officers, and the Office of Professional Standards, the civilian body that investigates excessive force by officers.</p>
<p>Sixteen months later, the case still hasn’t been resolved.</p>
<p>Mitchell is wary of how civilian complaints are dealt with by the department, which includes 13,705 officers. “They’re going to interview me and investigate me—they’re not concerned about what happened to me,” he said.</p>
<p>Like Mitchell, many citizens are suspicious of the excessive force investigations that seem to be understood by only those involved with their inner workings. Officials confirmed that OPS scrutinizes both the victim and the officer accused, and its methods are dictated in large part by the police officers’ union. Through an analysis of OPS investigations, the Reporter found that the officers accused in the cases were provided lawyers before they responded to charges against them in writing, while in nearly every case victims were questioned without lawyers. Investigations often lasted more than 100 days and were closed or suspended when witnesses could not be found or witnesses’ testimonies conflicted.</p>
<p>Through this process, 6 percent of excessive force complaints were upheld in a five-year period—a number many citizens find too low. As a result, some people with complaints against officers bypass the agency altogether, and file civil suits, costing taxpayers $20 million in settlements as of Aug. 31 of this year, up from $5.5 million in 1998. City officials and aldermen have not responded to the rising numbers despite the city’s shrinking budget.</p>
<p>Between 1998 and 2002-the most recent year for which information is available-citizens made 13,703 charges against officers. OPS found evidence to support 847 of them. During the same period, the city resolved 935 civil cases alleging excessive force by Chicago police officers that will cost the city $61.2 million. The Chicago Reporter researched 489 of the suits, identifying 767 individual officers by their badge numbers. Of those, 109 were found in more than one suit-those cases alone cost the city $3.7 million.</p>
<p>“We’ve got to do something-we can’t put our head in the sand and pretend that everything is all right if we’re paying $15, $20, $25 million a year on these brutality cases,” said Howard Brookins, alderman of the South Side’s 21st Ward.</p>
<p>Brookins, an attorney who has represented victims in suits against the city for at least 12 years, last year introduced a “police accountability ordinance” in the city council. The measure, which has failed to attract support from most other aldermen, would require the police department to identify and discipline those who have been charged with excessive force more than once. That’s what OPS is supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t because it isn’t independent, Brookins said.</p>
<p>Tisa Morris, the office’s chief administrator, rejected the charge. “I follow an oath, and we have ethics,” she said. “We’re independent.”</p>
<p>OPS reports directly to the superintendent, who, when he upholds charges, imposes penalties. When penalties are greater than 30 days, or when officers appeal penalties, the Chicago Police Board, a nine-member civilian body, reviews and rules on the cases, and meets monthly to hear public comments. Police board members and the OPS chief administrator are appointed by the superintendent.</p>
<p>When OPS complaints are upheld, the discipline imposed on officers is insufficient, many victims and their families feel.</p>
<p>Last month, the Chicago Sun Times reported that an officer who fatally shot a citizen after a struggle at the 95th Street train station received a 30-day suspension. Police officials would not to confirm or provide any specifics about the case.</p>
<p>“That is a slap in the face,” said David Bates, a coordinator for the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. Bates was on Death Row for 11 years, but, in 1994, his murder conviction was overturned after evidence revealed he had been tortured into confessing by former police Cmdr. Jon Burge.</p>
<p>Citizens who mistrust OPS, or file complaints but are frustrated with the lack of results, seek out lawyers to file suits.</p>
<p>“They do not come to us first,” said Jon Loevy, a civil rights lawyer whose firm has handled hundreds of excessive force cases. But Patrick Rocks, first assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago’s Department of Law, said the number or cost of civil suits the city settles has nothing to do with the performance of OPS. The city has many reasons to settle, he said, including how much the case will cost if it goes to trial. “These kinds of lawsuits can be very expensive to litigate,” he said.</p>
<p>And others suspect less noble intentions by the plaintiffs.</p>
<p>“Many Civil Rights Lawyers/Firms make a living out of suing municipalities for no other reason than they have deep pockets,” Mark Donahue, president of Chicago’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, wrote in an email. “The distrust created in the community is also a basis for the sharks to enjoin on the feeding frenzies that they at times create.”</p>
<p>But R. Eugene Pincham, a retired Illinois Appellate Justice, disagreed. People file civil suits because OPS “doesn’t work. It never did,” he said. For eight years, Pincham heard Appellate Review cases alleging brutality by Chicago police. “Their investigations are biased,” he said. “They distort the facts, distort the questions and distort the answers.”</p>
<p />
<p>In the past year, Mitchell talked to his ward committeeman and local judges, but they couldn’t help. He said Cook County State’s Attorney Richard A. Devine advised him to file a lawsuit. But that won’t be easy for him. Mitchell asked for help with the suit at several free law clinics, but they were either not interested or didn’t call back. One told him there was a year’s wait, and private lawyers “want a lot of money I don’t have,” he said. Still, a suit is “all I can do—or I can forget. Those are my only options,” Mitchell said. But it’s not about the money, he said. “I’m not trying to attack one person; I’m trying to attack the issues. Something’s wrong with the way things are.”</p>
<p>OPS was once the response to such concerns.</p>
<p>Internal Affairs handled cases of police abuse until 1974, when former U.S. Representative Ralph Metcalfe, Chicago’s bar associations and activists banded together to threaten the Chicago Police Department with a lawsuit in response to what they said was its inadequate, closed-door investigations of excessive force by officers.</p>
<p>In response, then-Supt. James Rochford created OPS. Yet today—as the office completes its 30th year—citizens continue to question its impartiality and credibility, in part because of what they see as OPS’ secretive nature.</p>
<p>Civilians correctly assume OPS investigates officers who are charged with misconduct. But many do not realize that, to protect officers against retribution, it also examines the people who make the charges. Many alleged victims don’t understand the process or what the police board does, Carney said.</p>
<p>The process goes something like this: Citizens have to provide their names when they file complaints, by phone or letter, or by speaking with any officer. The most recent data available show that the agency receives an average of more than 900 complaints a year. In 2002, the last year for which the information has been published, the number of complaints hit 1,447, their highest point in the past decade.</p>
<p>Morris reviews the complaints and then assigns them to investigators, who, when they are hired, must have bachelor’s degrees and detective experience, or the equivalent. The City of Chicago’s 2004 budget for the police department shows that OPS has 12 investigative supervisors, 61 investigators and six staffers who do data entry. The agency has a $5.8 million budget in 2004. Morris declined to discuss the more detailed aspects of investigations.</p>
<p>But the Reporter inspected all 72 investigations of excessive force complaints involving off-duty officers from September 1999 to May 2001. Though OPS investigations are confidential, the 72 case files were provided to the Reporter by Loevy, who received them from the city through a 2002 civil suit. His client, George Garcia, alleged that he was hit and kicked in late November 2001 in an unprovoked attack by an off-duty Chicago police officer, resulting in a broken nose, cracked lip and injured hip. Garcia filed an OPS complaint before going to Loevy, but about six months later he still hadn’t heard anything from the office, Loevy said. Garcia later settled with the city for $600,000.</p>
<p>The Reporter’s analysis found that victims were questioned in person without lawyers present while officers responded to charges in writing after lawyers had been provided. Donahue said his union negotiated the provision into the officers’ contract with the city in order to protect their rights.</p>
<p>“The criminals have due process guarantees and so should we,” he said.</p>
<p>The files show that, soon after complaints are filed about incidents involving off-duty officers—including barfights, arguments over parking spaces and car accidents—OPS investigators talk to people in the area to find witnesses, photograph victims at hospitals, and conduct formal interviews, which are transcribed for the files.</p>
<p>Officers were interviewed by investigators an average of 76 days after the investigations were opened. The investigations took an average of 125 days to complete. In addition, in all of the 72 cases, at least two witnesses had to corroborate the alleged victim’s claim for it to be found credible. If an investigator couldn’t find witnesses or witnesses didn’t respond to letters, cases were closed or suspended.</p>
<p>Morris disputed the findings. “Credible” testimony from one witness can be enough to uphold a case, she said. In incidents where the only people present were the alleged victim and the officer, “a number of different variables –¦ specific to each case” determine if the charges are upheld.</p>
<p>Several different OPS workers review each investigation, Morris said. A complaint is classified as “sustained” if there was enough evidence to prove the claim; “insufficient” if there wasn’t; “unfounded” if the claim was found untrue; or “exonerated” if the victim’s allegations are proven true, but the officer’s actions are deemed justified.</p>
<p>If the charge is sustained, OPS makes a recommendation for a penalty based on “the specific rules” violated, Morris said. The superintendent then decides on a punishment.</p>
<p>An officer can appeal this decision to the police board only if the superintendent, upon the recommendations, imposes a suspension of more than five days, said Mark Iris, the board’s acting interim executive director.</p>
<p>But any penalty of more than 30 days is sent to the board for a hearing automatically. “The police board only deals with cases sent to it,” Iris said, though many people try to ask about ongoing OPS investigations in board meetings.</p>
<p>Once cases are sent to the police board, an attorney hired by the city conducts a videotaped hearing that includes the superintendent’s general counsel and lawyers for the police officers.</p>
<p>The hearing videotape and other case information is then forwarded to police board members, said Carney, who has been the board chairman for the eight years and was just appointed for another five.</p>
<p>The members meet behind closed doors once a month for an hour-and-a-half to review cases and make decisions. The board announces those decisions in its monthly public meeting, without specifying the names of the officers involved. Once it’s done so, the superintendent can lessen, but not increase, the penalties, Carney said.</p>
<p>With OPS deciding in favor of officers almost every time, many victims of excessive force turn to the courts for relief. While Loevy’s investigations show that complaints were sustained against 23 of the 74 off-duty officers, nine of the 74 officers were also charged in civil suits, costing the city $209,000.</p>
<p>The suits also show that, in the span of five years, 17 officers were charged in at least three different civil suits, costing the city nearly $1.6 million.</p>
<p>“That directly shows that OPS, the city of Chicago and Mayor [Richard M.] Daley turn a blind eye to police brutality,” said Bates, of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. “The city should be more careful with its money.”</p>
<p>But there are explanations Bates isn’t considering, according to Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the city’s Law Department.</p>
<p>“I think that there are some officers in certain roles in the police department who have more contact with the public and are more likely to be named in these lawsuits,” Hoyle said. “It’s also important to remember that police officers are allowed to use force in arresting people.”</p>
<p>Morris, the OPS chief administrator, said that, once it has been determined an officer should be disciplined, investigators review both commendations and excessive force complaints—sustained or not—over a five-year period to help determine the officer’s penalty. The department’s contract with the police union mandates that officers’ OPS files are destroyed and their records wiped clean every five years.</p>
<p>“There’s no procedure to globally look at misconduct,” said William Hooks, a criminal defense attorney and former president of the Cook County Bar Association. “Individually, each [complaint] becomes unfounded, and the practice continues.”</p>
<p>The lack of results leads to a mistrust of OPS, Loevy said. “We have a lot of clients who tried to resolve it in the internal discipline level and basically got told, ‘Screw you,'” Loevy said. “So people who have been wronged get frustrated and don’t let it go. They go seek out lawyers.”</p>
<p>Hooks instructs his clients not to file OPS complaints at all, because the information the office collects from victims is later turned over to city lawyers in order to defend officers in civil suits.</p>
<p>“You’re giving up your story and they’re not giving up anything,” he said.</p>
<p>Rocks, the city attorney, countered that discouraging victims from filing complaints with OPS actually prevents officials from stemming problem behavior.</p>
<p>“If someone doesn’t file a complaint, it hinders the police department’s ability to discipline officers who have violated rules,” he said.</p>
<p>Others who file civil suits don’t cooperate with OPS because they may be facing criminal charges themselves, making them hesitant to cooperate, Rocks said.</p>
<p>And the high number and cost of civil suits, along with the number of officers cited in them, may simply be due to greed, wrote Donahue of the FOP. “They are performing an injustice to the Police, the City and all Chicagoans.”</p>
<p>Hooks said it’s not that easy. Most settlements aren’t lucrative: The median payment is $10,000, according to the Reporter’s analysis. Not many victims of excessive force have enough money to hire a lawyer, Hooks said. And, when they do, “the city is very good at getting the cases dismissed.”</p>
<p>From 1992 to 2003, the City of Chicago resolved 54 percent of excessive force lawsuits brought against officers without paying out.</p>
<p>While the city continues to pay millions for police abuse civil suits, few officials are willing to do anything about it. Last year, after meeting with community groups, members of the ACLU and the Justice Coalition, a community activist group, Alderman Brookins introduced the ordinance requiring that the police department identify and provide additional training to officers who had accumulated repeated civilian complaints.</p>
<p>Those are the same requirements that courts across the country are imposing, said Brookins, whose father was a police officer.</p>
<p>He said he approached other aldermen, but only 20th Ward Alderman Arenda Troutman signed on. The council referred the ordinance to the Police and Fire Committee, chaired by Alderman Isaac S. Carothers of the West Side’s 29th Ward. It’s been there ever since.</p>
<p>City code gives the committee “jurisdiction over all matters relating to the Police Department and the Fire Department.” Its 14 members have the authority to request documents, ask “probing questions” and craft legislation on police policy.</p>
<p>Brookins’ ordinance would increase documentation and reporting of excessive force incidents. It specifies that OPS “accept and investigate anonymous complaints,” interview both citizens and police “in the same amount of detail,” and, when only the victim and officer were present during an incident, show “no presumption in favor of the statement of the police officer.”</p>
<p>“This is something that the citizens have been complaining about, and they’re tired of seeing millions of dollars go to these victims. –¦ I think those things can possibly be avoided,” Brookins said. By law, any city expense of more than $100,000, including settlements and judgments for civil suits alleging excessive force, require approval from aldermen, he noted. “They continue to pay out for these lawsuits for officers who, quite frankly, are named in OPS reports or lawsuits on numerous occasions.” The payouts cause a “large hole” in the city’s budget, Brookins said</p>
<p>Brookins said he asked Carothers a few months ago to call the ordinance before the police and fire committee. Carothers told him that it would happen “soon,” but it still hasn’t, he said.</p>
<p>Carothers did not return repeated phone calls requesting a response. But over the summer, he told the Reporter he is hesitant to support laws that affect the police.</p>
<p>“The supervisor people in the police department need to see if we need to bring these people in for additional training, do we need to use some sort of discipline, or should those people be off the force all together,” Carothers said. But “once you put something in an ordinance, now you have to change a law, and you can’t change it so easy as changing a policy.” He added: “Of the 13,000 [officers] we’ve got, those are some bad apples, and we need to weed them out, and I’m confident that the superintendent will do that.”</p>
<p>Brandi M. Green, Dana Keith, Mica Powers and LaTricia Taylor helped research this story.</p> | Accounting for Police | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/accounting-police/ | 2007-09-26 | 3left-center
| 3,065 | One morning last year Calvin R Mitchell Sr went to a local dollar discount store to buy a fan and beat the July heat in his small stuffy Uptown studio apartment On his way back home two police officers stopped him One asked 82208216You got a receipt for this fan8221 Mitchell recalled Before he could get it out of his pocket he said one of the cops handcuffed him Mitchell was taken to the police station at 5400 N Lincoln Ave and held for 13 hours without being charged 8220I don8217t steal I8217ve worked all my life8221 said Mitchell a 51yearold grandfather and retired employee of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds8217s Office The dollar store owner later confirmed that Mitchell had paid for his purchase Ten days after the incident Mitchell then a regular participant in neighborhood community policing meetings filed complaints with the Chicago Police Department8217s Internal Affairs Division which is staffed by police officers and the Office of Professional Standards the civilian body that investigates excessive force by officers Sixteen months later the case still hasn8217t been resolved Mitchell is wary of how civilian complaints are dealt with by the department which includes 13705 officers 8220They8217re going to interview me and investigate me8212they8217re not concerned about what happened to me8221 he said Like Mitchell many citizens are suspicious of the excessive force investigations that seem to be understood by only those involved with their inner workings Officials confirmed that OPS scrutinizes both the victim and the officer accused and its methods are dictated in large part by the police officers8217 union Through an analysis of OPS investigations the Reporter found that the officers accused in the cases were provided lawyers before they responded to charges against them in writing while in nearly every case victims were questioned without lawyers Investigations often lasted more than 100 days and were closed or suspended when witnesses could not be found or witnesses8217 testimonies conflicted Through this process 6 percent of excessive force complaints were upheld in a fiveyear period8212a number many citizens find too low As a result some people with complaints against officers bypass the agency altogether and file civil suits costing taxpayers 20 million in settlements as of Aug 31 of this year up from 55 million in 1998 City officials and aldermen have not responded to the rising numbers despite the city8217s shrinking budget Between 1998 and 2002the most recent year for which information is availablecitizens made 13703 charges against officers OPS found evidence to support 847 of them During the same period the city resolved 935 civil cases alleging excessive force by Chicago police officers that will cost the city 612 million The Chicago Reporter researched 489 of the suits identifying 767 individual officers by their badge numbers Of those 109 were found in more than one suitthose cases alone cost the city 37 million 8220We8217ve got to do somethingwe can8217t put our head in the sand and pretend that everything is all right if we8217re paying 15 20 25 million a year on these brutality cases8221 said Howard Brookins alderman of the South Side8217s 21st Ward Brookins an attorney who has represented victims in suits against the city for at least 12 years last year introduced a 8220police accountability ordinance8221 in the city council The measure which has failed to attract support from most other aldermen would require the police department to identify and discipline those who have been charged with excessive force more than once That8217s what OPS is supposed to be doing but it doesn8217t because it isn8217t independent Brookins said Tisa Morris the office8217s chief administrator rejected the charge 8220I follow an oath and we have ethics8221 she said 8220We8217re independent8221 OPS reports directly to the superintendent who when he upholds charges imposes penalties When penalties are greater than 30 days or when officers appeal penalties the Chicago Police Board a ninemember civilian body reviews and rules on the cases and meets monthly to hear public comments Police board members and the OPS chief administrator are appointed by the superintendent When OPS complaints are upheld the discipline imposed on officers is insufficient many victims and their families feel Last month the Chicago Sun Times reported that an officer who fatally shot a citizen after a struggle at the 95th Street train station received a 30day suspension Police officials would not to confirm or provide any specifics about the case 8220That is a slap in the face8221 said David Bates a coordinator for the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights Bates was on Death Row for 11 years but in 1994 his murder conviction was overturned after evidence revealed he had been tortured into confessing by former police Cmdr Jon Burge Citizens who mistrust OPS or file complaints but are frustrated with the lack of results seek out lawyers to file suits 8220They do not come to us first8221 said Jon Loevy a civil rights lawyer whose firm has handled hundreds of excessive force cases But Patrick Rocks first assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago8217s Department of Law said the number or cost of civil suits the city settles has nothing to do with the performance of OPS The city has many reasons to settle he said including how much the case will cost if it goes to trial 8220These kinds of lawsuits can be very expensive to litigate8221 he said And others suspect less noble intentions by the plaintiffs 8220Many Civil Rights LawyersFirms make a living out of suing municipalities for no other reason than they have deep pockets8221 Mark Donahue president of Chicago8217s police union the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 wrote in an email 8220The distrust created in the community is also a basis for the sharks to enjoin on the feeding frenzies that they at times create8221 But R Eugene Pincham a retired Illinois Appellate Justice disagreed People file civil suits because OPS 8220doesn8217t work It never did8221 he said For eight years Pincham heard Appellate Review cases alleging brutality by Chicago police 8220Their investigations are biased8221 he said 8220They distort the facts distort the questions and distort the answers8221 In the past year Mitchell talked to his ward committeeman and local judges but they couldn8217t help He said Cook County State8217s Attorney Richard A Devine advised him to file a lawsuit But that won8217t be easy for him Mitchell asked for help with the suit at several free law clinics but they were either not interested or didn8217t call back One told him there was a year8217s wait and private lawyers 8220want a lot of money I don8217t have8221 he said Still a suit is 8220all I can do8212or I can forget Those are my only options8221 Mitchell said But it8217s not about the money he said 8220I8217m not trying to attack one person I8217m trying to attack the issues Something8217s wrong with the way things are8221 OPS was once the response to such concerns Internal Affairs handled cases of police abuse until 1974 when former US Representative Ralph Metcalfe Chicago8217s bar associations and activists banded together to threaten the Chicago Police Department with a lawsuit in response to what they said was its inadequate closeddoor investigations of excessive force by officers In response thenSupt James Rochford created OPS Yet today8212as the office completes its 30th year8212citizens continue to question its impartiality and credibility in part because of what they see as OPS8217 secretive nature Civilians correctly assume OPS investigates officers who are charged with misconduct But many do not realize that to protect officers against retribution it also examines the people who make the charges Many alleged victims don8217t understand the process or what the police board does Carney said The process goes something like this Citizens have to provide their names when they file complaints by phone or letter or by speaking with any officer The most recent data available show that the agency receives an average of more than 900 complaints a year In 2002 the last year for which the information has been published the number of complaints hit 1447 their highest point in the past decade Morris reviews the complaints and then assigns them to investigators who when they are hired must have bachelor8217s degrees and detective experience or the equivalent The City of Chicago8217s 2004 budget for the police department shows that OPS has 12 investigative supervisors 61 investigators and six staffers who do data entry The agency has a 58 million budget in 2004 Morris declined to discuss the more detailed aspects of investigations But the Reporter inspected all 72 investigations of excessive force complaints involving offduty officers from September 1999 to May 2001 Though OPS investigations are confidential the 72 case files were provided to the Reporter by Loevy who received them from the city through a 2002 civil suit His client George Garcia alleged that he was hit and kicked in late November 2001 in an unprovoked attack by an offduty Chicago police officer resulting in a broken nose cracked lip and injured hip Garcia filed an OPS complaint before going to Loevy but about six months later he still hadn8217t heard anything from the office Loevy said Garcia later settled with the city for 600000 The Reporter8217s analysis found that victims were questioned in person without lawyers present while officers responded to charges in writing after lawyers had been provided Donahue said his union negotiated the provision into the officers8217 contract with the city in order to protect their rights 8220The criminals have due process guarantees and so should we8221 he said The files show that soon after complaints are filed about incidents involving offduty officers8212including barfights arguments over parking spaces and car accidents8212OPS investigators talk to people in the area to find witnesses photograph victims at hospitals and conduct formal interviews which are transcribed for the files Officers were interviewed by investigators an average of 76 days after the investigations were opened The investigations took an average of 125 days to complete In addition in all of the 72 cases at least two witnesses had to corroborate the alleged victim8217s claim for it to be found credible If an investigator couldn8217t find witnesses or witnesses didn8217t respond to letters cases were closed or suspended Morris disputed the findings 8220Credible8221 testimony from one witness can be enough to uphold a case she said In incidents where the only people present were the alleged victim and the officer 8220a number of different variables 8211166 specific to each case8221 determine if the charges are upheld Several different OPS workers review each investigation Morris said A complaint is classified as 8220sustained8221 if there was enough evidence to prove the claim 8220insufficient8221 if there wasn8217t 8220unfounded8221 if the claim was found untrue or 8220exonerated8221 if the victim8217s allegations are proven true but the officer8217s actions are deemed justified If the charge is sustained OPS makes a recommendation for a penalty based on 8220the specific rules8221 violated Morris said The superintendent then decides on a punishment An officer can appeal this decision to the police board only if the superintendent upon the recommendations imposes a suspension of more than five days said Mark Iris the board8217s acting interim executive director But any penalty of more than 30 days is sent to the board for a hearing automatically 8220The police board only deals with cases sent to it8221 Iris said though many people try to ask about ongoing OPS investigations in board meetings Once cases are sent to the police board an attorney hired by the city conducts a videotaped hearing that includes the superintendent8217s general counsel and lawyers for the police officers The hearing videotape and other case information is then forwarded to police board members said Carney who has been the board chairman for the eight years and was just appointed for another five The members meet behind closed doors once a month for an hourandahalf to review cases and make decisions The board announces those decisions in its monthly public meeting without specifying the names of the officers involved Once it8217s done so the superintendent can lessen but not increase the penalties Carney said With OPS deciding in favor of officers almost every time many victims of excessive force turn to the courts for relief While Loevy8217s investigations show that complaints were sustained against 23 of the 74 offduty officers nine of the 74 officers were also charged in civil suits costing the city 209000 The suits also show that in the span of five years 17 officers were charged in at least three different civil suits costing the city nearly 16 million 8220That directly shows that OPS the city of Chicago and Mayor Richard M Daley turn a blind eye to police brutality8221 said Bates of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights 8220The city should be more careful with its money8221 But there are explanations Bates isn8217t considering according to Jennifer Hoyle spokeswoman for the city8217s Law Department 8220I think that there are some officers in certain roles in the police department who have more contact with the public and are more likely to be named in these lawsuits8221 Hoyle said 8220It8217s also important to remember that police officers are allowed to use force in arresting people8221 Morris the OPS chief administrator said that once it has been determined an officer should be disciplined investigators review both commendations and excessive force complaints8212sustained or not8212over a fiveyear period to help determine the officer8217s penalty The department8217s contract with the police union mandates that officers8217 OPS files are destroyed and their records wiped clean every five years 8220There8217s no procedure to globally look at misconduct8221 said William Hooks a criminal defense attorney and former president of the Cook County Bar Association 8220Individually each complaint becomes unfounded and the practice continues8221 The lack of results leads to a mistrust of OPS Loevy said 8220We have a lot of clients who tried to resolve it in the internal discipline level and basically got told 8216Screw you8221 Loevy said 8220So people who have been wronged get frustrated and don8217t let it go They go seek out lawyers8221 Hooks instructs his clients not to file OPS complaints at all because the information the office collects from victims is later turned over to city lawyers in order to defend officers in civil suits 8220You8217re giving up your story and they8217re not giving up anything8221 he said Rocks the city attorney countered that discouraging victims from filing complaints with OPS actually prevents officials from stemming problem behavior 8220If someone doesn8217t file a complaint it hinders the police department8217s ability to discipline officers who have violated rules8221 he said Others who file civil suits don8217t cooperate with OPS because they may be facing criminal charges themselves making them hesitant to cooperate Rocks said And the high number and cost of civil suits along with the number of officers cited in them may simply be due to greed wrote Donahue of the FOP 8220They are performing an injustice to the Police the City and all Chicagoans8221 Hooks said it8217s not that easy Most settlements aren8217t lucrative The median payment is 10000 according to the Reporter8217s analysis Not many victims of excessive force have enough money to hire a lawyer Hooks said And when they do 8220the city is very good at getting the cases dismissed8221 From 1992 to 2003 the City of Chicago resolved 54 percent of excessive force lawsuits brought against officers without paying out While the city continues to pay millions for police abuse civil suits few officials are willing to do anything about it Last year after meeting with community groups members of the ACLU and the Justice Coalition a community activist group Alderman Brookins introduced the ordinance requiring that the police department identify and provide additional training to officers who had accumulated repeated civilian complaints Those are the same requirements that courts across the country are imposing said Brookins whose father was a police officer He said he approached other aldermen but only 20th Ward Alderman Arenda Troutman signed on The council referred the ordinance to the Police and Fire Committee chaired by Alderman Isaac S Carothers of the West Side8217s 29th Ward It8217s been there ever since City code gives the committee 8220jurisdiction over all matters relating to the Police Department and the Fire Department8221 Its 14 members have the authority to request documents ask 8220probing questions8221 and craft legislation on police policy Brookins8217 ordinance would increase documentation and reporting of excessive force incidents It specifies that OPS 8220accept and investigate anonymous complaints8221 interview both citizens and police 8220in the same amount of detail8221 and when only the victim and officer were present during an incident show 8220no presumption in favor of the statement of the police officer8221 8220This is something that the citizens have been complaining about and they8217re tired of seeing millions of dollars go to these victims 8211166 I think those things can possibly be avoided8221 Brookins said By law any city expense of more than 100000 including settlements and judgments for civil suits alleging excessive force require approval from aldermen he noted 8220They continue to pay out for these lawsuits for officers who quite frankly are named in OPS reports or lawsuits on numerous occasions8221 The payouts cause a 8220large hole8221 in the city8217s budget Brookins said Brookins said he asked Carothers a few months ago to call the ordinance before the police and fire committee Carothers told him that it would happen 8220soon8221 but it still hasn8217t he said Carothers did not return repeated phone calls requesting a response But over the summer he told the Reporter he is hesitant to support laws that affect the police 8220The supervisor people in the police department need to see if we need to bring these people in for additional training do we need to use some sort of discipline or should those people be off the force all together8221 Carothers said But 8220once you put something in an ordinance now you have to change a law and you can8217t change it so easy as changing a policy8221 He added 8220Of the 13000 officers we8217ve got those are some bad apples and we need to weed them out and I8217m confident that the superintendent will do that8221 Brandi M Green Dana Keith Mica Powers and LaTricia Taylor helped research this story | One/NUM morning/NOUN last/ADJ year/NOUN Calvin/PROPN R/PROPN Mitchell/PROPN Sr/PROPN went/VERB to/ADP a/DET local/ADJ dollar/NOUN discount/NOUN store/NOUN to/PART buy/VERB a/DET fan/NOUN and/CCONJ beat/VERB the/DET July/PROPN heat/NOUN in/ADP his/PRON small/ADJ stuffy/ADJ Uptown/PROPN studio/NOUN apartment/NOUN On/ADP his/PRON way/NOUN back/ADV home/ADV two/NUM police/NOUN officers/NOUN stopped/VERB him/PRON One/PRON asked/VERB 82208216You/NUM got/VERB a/DET receipt/NOUN for/SCONJ this/DET fan8221/NOUN Mitchell/PROPN recalled/VERB Before/SCONJ he/PRON could/AUX get/VERB it/PRON out/ADP of/ADP his/PRON pocket/NOUN he/PRON said/VERB one/NUM of/ADP the/DET cops/NOUN handcuffed/VERB him/PRON Mitchell/PROPN was/AUX taken/VERB to/ADP the/DET police/NOUN station/NOUN at/ADP 5400/NUM N/PROPN Lincoln/PROPN Ave/PROPN and/CCONJ held/VERB for/ADP 13/NUM hours/NOUN 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<p>In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha), the social democratic, parliamentary left in India, composed of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), the Communist Party of India (CPI) and a bunch of smaller left-wing parties, suffered&#160; the severest electoral thrashing in a long time. This year, the CPM won a total of only 16 parliamentary seats. As compared to its performance in the last general elections in 2004 this is a decline of 27 seats. The CPI, on the other hand, won 4 seats in this time around, suffering a net decline of 6 parliamentary seats from its position in 2004. Does this mean that the Indian population has rejected even the mildly progressive policies that the social democratic left tried to defend at the central level? Is this a mandate for the ruling Congress party and by extension for neoliberalism, its pet project since the early 1990s?</p>
<p>The facts don’t sustain such a claim.</p>
<p>A careful analysis of the results show that this was an electoral rebuke to the social democratic left but not to social democratic policies; on the other hand, just as in 2004 when the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party’s “shinning India” slogan was decisively rejected by the populace, this is a mandate against neoliberalism and for welfare-oriented policies. To the extent that the Congress was pushed by the social democratic left to implement such policies, it can possibly be interpreted as an indirect endorsement of Congress’s late-in-the day populism.</p>
<p>The first misinterpretation that is gaining ground is the alleged existence of a “wave” in favor of the centrist Congress party which swept it to power, overcoming the ubiquitous current of anti-incumbency observed in Indian politics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Despite having won 206 parliamentary seats, the Congress merely won 28.55 per cent of the votes polled in 2009, increasing it by just about 2 per centage points from 2004. An overall share of 29 per cent of the total votes polled at the national level can hardly be interpreted as a “massive wave”; besides, this overall increase also hides substantial decreases in vote share (and seats) in several important states like Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh.</p>
<p>The second misinterpretation going the rounds assumes that this general election saw the definite demise of regional parties and all federalist tendencies of the Indian populace; the people voted overwhelmingly for national parties, the argument goes, because they want stability. Whether people desire stability or not, the fact is that the populace did not reject regional parties in favor of national parties. This can be seen by looking at the share of votes going to the Congress and the BJP taken together: according to provisional figures released by the Election Commission of India, the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP in fact declined from 48.69 per cent in 2004 to 47.35 per cent in 2009.</p>
<p>Social Democratic Performance</p>
<p>How did the social democratic left parties perform in terms of the share of votes polled? At the national level, the CPM lost only marginally in terms of the share of votes polled. The decline was from 5.66 per cent in 2004 to 5.33 per cent this year; the CPI, on the other hand, gained marginally at the national level, increasing its share of votes from 1.41 to 1.43 per cent. Thus, going by these national figures, there is no evidence of any trend against their opposition, however feeble, to the neoliberal policies of the UPA-led Central government.</p>
<p>But the national level figures hide many interesting state-level variations; hence we must also look at state-level data to get a more complete picture. There is another reason why we need to supplement national level with state-level analysis: since the social democratic left is prominent only in the three states of Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal, the national figures are not very relevant to assessing their electoral prospects.</p>
<p>How did the social democrats perform in the different states? Three tendencies can be observed in the data. First, the social democratic left managed to increase its vote share in a few states: Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Andaman &amp; Nicobar Islands. Apart from Manipur, of course, the total vote share of the SDL in these states remains insignificant; hence, the increase in the vote share did not even remotely translate into changes in seats. Second, the social democratic left lost its share of votes polled in a large number of states: Assam, Bihar, Jammu &amp; Kashmir, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. The percentage declines in Punjab and Jharkhand were very large, though that did not affect the reckoning in terms of seats because the SDL did not have seats to start with, i.e., in 2004. On the other hand, the sharp decline in the vote share in Tripura did not translate, fortunately for the social democratic left, into any decline in seats. Third, the states where the loss of vote share wreaked havoc for the reckoning in terms of seats were Kerala and West Bengal: in Kerala, the share of votes going to the social democrats declined from 39.41 per cent in 2004 to 37.92 per cent in 2009; in West Bengal, the corresponding share declined from 50.72 per cent in 2004 to 43.3 per cent in 2009. The bulk of the decrease in&#160; national vote share was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal, the prime left bastions, whereas the increase in vote share was spread out across states where the SDL is electorally marginal.</p>
<p>So,&#160; why was the bulk of the decrease in vote share for the social democratic left concentrated in Kerala and West Bengal? The clue to an answer is provided by the fact that both states, Kerala and West Bengal, currently have social democratic governments, led by the CPM. In both states, the state governments have, over the past few years, increasingly accepted, adopted and pushed neoliberal economic policies, often in the name of development and industrialization. This led to the emergence of a seemingly paradoxical situation: the social democratic left opposed, however feebly, the continued adoption of neoliberal polices at the level of the central government, while the same set of policies were aggressively pursued in the states where they were in power. The debacle of the social democrats in the two most electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal can, therefore, be read as a forceful rejection of this doublespeak and hypocrisy. The rejection of the social democrats at the level of these two states, moreover, dovetails into the overall mandate in favor of progressive and social democratic policies, and against the neoliberal turn, at the national level. Of course there were other local factors, both in West Bengal and in Kerala, that overlaid this broad rejection of the neoliberal turn and turned the mandate decisively against them in both these states. Before we look at some of these factors, especially for West Bengal where the crash of the social democratic left was the most stunning, a comment about the so-called national “wave” in favour of the Congress is in order.</p>
<p>Social Democrats help the Congress</p>
<p>The so-called nationwide “wave” in favor of Congress, if there was one, resulted to a large extent from the slew of populist policies that it adopted over its last few years in office, pushed towards this by the social democrats. These include the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the step-up in public investment in agriculture, the debt relief program for farmers, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2006, the Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Bill 2008, the setting up of the Sacchar Committee to inquire into the continued marginalization of Muslims in the country. The Congress cashed the benefits of this populist swing electorally, claiming it to be its own policies whereas, in truth, the social democratic left was largely instrumental in pushing for these policies at the central level.</p>
<p>Other similar policies pushed for by the social democrats include: opposition to financial sector reforms (pensions, insurance), opposition to outright privatization of the public sector, privatization of health care and education. These defensive actions by the social democratic left have partially limited the unbridled power of capital to exploit labor and have provided some relief to the mass of the working people in India. It is, therefore, no surprise that corporate India is exultant at the social democrats’ electoral disaster this month. The stock market in Bombay erupted immediately after the results were out. Trading had to be stopped for a while to deal with the unprecedented euphoria. As many media reports in India show, the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and other business groups have already started preparing their “wish-list” of reforms, by which they mean another round of neoliberal policy onslaughts on the common people. Naturally enough, land reforms does not figure in this wish-list of reforms.</p>
<p>The social democratic left’s ability to counter the Congress’ claim that the populist thrust was a result of a progressive shift in the party, in reality fiercely opposed by entrenched interests within the Congress, was severely limited by its actuakl, de facto record in the states where it was in power: Kerala and West Bengal. Thus, paradoxically, while it was largely responsible for creating the populist shift in the Congress party and thereby creating support in its favor, it could not transform this effort into any substantial electoral advantage for itself; and this was largely because of its doublespeak and hypocrisy, saying one thing at the central level and doing exactly the opposite at the state level. Probably nothing brings out this better than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The NREGA, which provides a guarantee of a minimum of 100 days of work to the rural poor, came into effect on February 02, 2006 in 200 of India’s poorest districts. This provision was originally brought to the fore by grassroots-level mass movements in Rajasthan and other states in India, and was later adopted and forcefully pushed by the social democrats at the central level. While the NREGA has been constantly attacked in the mainstream press as a waste of resources and a useless policy initiative, in reality it has managed to create substantial benefits for the rural proletariat and poor peasants; even though there is still a lot of room for improvement, the limited pro-people initiative represented by the NREGA has managed to improve the lives of the rural poor by putting a floor on agricultural wages and assuring some days of employment, both of which resulted in increased rural incomes.</p>
<p>West Bengal: A Closer Look</p>
<p>How did the NREGA fare in West Bengal and Kerala compared to other states? In 2006-07, the person-days of NREGA employment generated per rural household amounted&#160; 6 in West Bengal and and even more wretched 3 in Kerala, with both states figuring in the list of the 3 worst performers. Compared to this, the all-India average was 17 person-days. Chhattisgarh generated 34, Madhya Pradesh 56, Assam 70 and Rajasthan 77 person-days. A similar picture emerges for the next year too: in 2007-08, West Bengal generated 8 person-days and Kerala 6 person-days, much below the all-India average of 16 person-days. The dismal performance of the state government led the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS), a non-party, registered trade union of agricultural workers, to file a public interest litigation in the Calcutta High Court on non implementation of the 100 days work guarantee scheme in West Bengal. In sum, therefore, the two states where the social democrats were in power saw the worst implementation of the NREGA!</p>
<p>Coming back to the factors specific to West Bengal that led to this electoral disaster for the social democratic left, we must complement the story of the state government’s surrender to neoliberalism with its fatal arrogance. Failure in the implementation of the NREGA went hand-in-hand with other overt neoliberal policy moves: privatization of health care, privatization of education,&#160; full-scale assault on the public distribution system, and an aggressive state-sponsored attack on farmers in a bid to “acquire”&#160; agricultural land for a neoliberal industrialization drive. Singur and Nandigram stand as symbols, at the same time, of both this attack by the state on behalf of corporate capital and also of the fierce resistance to this brutality by the poor peasants and landless laborers. The arrogance of the state government was in repellent display during the “re-capture” of Nandigram in March 2007, a violent attack on the people opposing forcible land acquisition, and also in the manner it dealt with the case of Rizwanur Rahman. Against a backdrop of endemically dismal conditions for the Muslims in the state, the insensitivity displayed in the Rizwanur Rahman case increased the fury of the common Muslim population against the social democratic state government. Is it so difficult to see, then, why some of the districts in West Bengal where the social democrats performed wretchedly, like North and South&#160; Paraganas, Nadia, Murshidabad, Malda, Birbhum, are also ones with a&#160; relatively high proportion of Muslims?</p>
<p>At this point, we need to closely scrutinize an alternative argument that is going the social democratic rounds. This argument runs something like this: the Left Front made a great tactical mistake in severing ties with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Center on the issue of the nuclear deal with the USA; this allowed the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress (INC) to forge an alliance in West Bengal; this alliance was instrumental in consolidating the anti-Left votes and directly resulted in the electoral reverses of the social democrats in West Bengal.</p>
<p>Alas, the argument does not hold water If it were true that the social democratic debacle was fueled mainly by the consolidation of anti-Left votes (because of the Congress-TMC alliance), it would mean the following: the social democratic left’s share of votes polled would remain relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2009. This is a straightforward testable implication of the above argument. What does the evidence say on this?</p>
<p>There was a big decline in the share of votes that went to the social democratic Left Front: in 2004, the Left Front had garnered 50.72 per cent of the votes polled; in 2009, the corresponding vote share fell to 43.56 per cent. While it is difficult to accurately see how this 7 per cent statewide decline is distributed across all the parliamentary constituencies because of the 2008 delimitation of constituencies, we can nonetheless figure out the changes in vote shares in those that remained relatively unchanged by the delimitation process: Balurghat saw a marginal decline of 0.49 per cent, Raigunj a decline of 3.13 per cent, Alipurduars a decline of 4.48 per cent, Cooch Behar a decline of 6.88 per cent, Darjeeling a decline of 7.99 per cent, Birbhum a decline of 9.65 per cent and Bolpur witnessed a massive decline of 15.65 per cent. Can we, in the face of this overwhelming evidence of a massive rejection of the social democratic left, still stick to the story of the supposed consolidation of anti-Left votes as the primary reason behind the debacle?</p>
<p>The social democratic left played an important role in slowing down the juggernaut of neoliberalism in India through its intervention in the formation of the Common Minimum Program of the UPA; and this was largely possible, given the political situation five years ago, because of its sizable parliamentary presence at the central level. If nothing, the reaction of corporate India to the electoral debacle of the social democrats is proof of the partial efficacy of its past interventions. But there are at least two serious problems for a strategy that focuses on primarily on electoral politics, as the social democratic left does.</p>
<p>First, most of its interventions, even though salutary, are at best defensive actions and therefore extremely limited from any long-term left political perspective; the ruling classes set the agenda and move forward with a concrete program of neoliberal reforms and the social democrats reacts to that agenda. It tries to halt the speed of the reforms, tries to win a battle here or there. In such a scenario, the best outcome can only be a return to the status quo, not a move forward towards a socialist future. Is it difficult for the social democratic left to see the inherent and long-term limitations of its strategy?</p>
<p>This brings us to the second, and related, problem of social democratic strategy. The fact that the Communist parties, now part of what I have called the social democratic left, have lost the political offensive in the context of the class struggle in India also finds reflection in their over-emphasis on electoral politics, to the virtual exclusion of all non-electoral struggles. Over the last two decades, there is not one significant nationwide non-electoral struggle that it initiated or led; all its attention and energy has been fixed towards how to maintain its electoral position in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. More often than not, it has been willing to enter into opportunistic and unprincipled alliances to attain short-term electoral goals, little realizing that this opportunism leads to long-term political setbacks. At times it has even gone with the right-wing BJP to keep the centrist Congress out of power, quickly reversing the logic at the next moment and aligning with the Congress to defend secularism. Caught in these endless electoral antics and working within a framework whose rules have been set by the ruling classes, it has gradually distanced itself from its programmatic concerns of a people’s democratic revolution. To recover its potency and relevance, it must refashion itself by forging links with the rising tide of revolutionary mass movements in India against the neoliberal offensive and overcome its obsession with electoral politics. Of course if post-poll statements of the social democratic bigwigs in West Bengal, like Biman Bose, are anything to go by, they have decided to do exactly the opposite: justify the electoral debacle on external factors, avoid any serious rethinking and continue with elections as the primary focus of their politics.</p>
<p>DEEPANKAR BASU is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Colorado State University. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:Deepankar.Basu@colostate.edu" type="external">Deepankar.Basu@colostate.edu</a></p> | Was the Indian Election a Debacle for the Left? If So, Why? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/05/26/was-the-indian-election-a-debacle-for-the-left-if-so-why/ | 2009-05-26 | 4left
| 3,065 | In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament Lok Sabha the social democratic parliamentary left in India composed of the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist CPM the Communist Party of India CPI and a bunch of smaller leftwing parties sufferedamp160 the severest electoral thrashing in a long time This year the CPM won a total of only 16 parliamentary seats As compared to its performance in the last general elections in 2004 this is a decline of 27 seats The CPI on the other hand won 4 seats in this time around suffering a net decline of 6 parliamentary seats from its position in 2004 Does this mean that the Indian population has rejected even the mildly progressive policies that the social democratic left tried to defend at the central level Is this a mandate for the ruling Congress party and by extension for neoliberalism its pet project since the early 1990s The facts don8217t sustain such a claim A careful analysis of the results show that this was an electoral rebuke to the social democratic left but not to social democratic policies on the other hand just as in 2004 when the rightwing Bhartiya Janata Party8217s 8220shinning India8221 slogan was decisively rejected by the populace this is a mandate against neoliberalism and for welfareoriented policies To the extent that the Congress was pushed by the social democratic left to implement such policies it can possibly be interpreted as an indirect endorsement of Congress8217s lateinthe day populism The first misinterpretation that is gaining ground is the alleged existence of a 8220wave8221 in favor of the centrist Congress party which swept it to power overcoming the ubiquitous current of antiincumbency observed in Indian politics Nothing could be farther from the truth Despite having won 206 parliamentary seats the Congress merely won 2855 per cent of the votes polled in 2009 increasing it by just about 2 per centage points from 2004 An overall share of 29 per cent of the total votes polled at the national level can hardly be interpreted as a 8220massive wave8221 besides this overall increase also hides substantial decreases in vote share and seats in several important states like Orissa Jharkhand Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh The second misinterpretation going the rounds assumes that this general election saw the definite demise of regional parties and all federalist tendencies of the Indian populace the people voted overwhelmingly for national parties the argument goes because they want stability Whether people desire stability or not the fact is that the populace did not reject regional parties in favor of national parties This can be seen by looking at the share of votes going to the Congress and the BJP taken together according to provisional figures released by the Election Commission of India the combined vote share of the Congress and BJP in fact declined from 4869 per cent in 2004 to 4735 per cent in 2009 Social Democratic Performance How did the social democratic left parties perform in terms of the share of votes polled At the national level the CPM lost only marginally in terms of the share of votes polled The decline was from 566 per cent in 2004 to 533 per cent this year the CPI on the other hand gained marginally at the national level increasing its share of votes from 141 to 143 per cent Thus going by these national figures there is no evidence of any trend against their opposition however feeble to the neoliberal policies of the UPAled Central government But the national level figures hide many interesting statelevel variations hence we must also look at statelevel data to get a more complete picture There is another reason why we need to supplement national level with statelevel analysis since the social democratic left is prominent only in the three states of Kerala Tripura and West Bengal the national figures are not very relevant to assessing their electoral prospects How did the social democrats perform in the different states Three tendencies can be observed in the data First the social democratic left managed to increase its vote share in a few states Andhra Pradesh Goa Gujarat Madhya Pradesh Manipur Rajasthan Uttar Pradesh Chhattisgarh Uttaranchal and Andaman ampamp Nicobar Islands Apart from Manipur of course the total vote share of the SDL in these states remains insignificant hence the increase in the vote share did not even remotely translate into changes in seats Second the social democratic left lost its share of votes polled in a large number of states Assam Bihar Jammu ampamp Kashmir Kerala Maharashtra Punjab Tamil Nadu Tripura West Bengal and Jharkhand The percentage declines in Punjab and Jharkhand were very large though that did not affect the reckoning in terms of seats because the SDL did not have seats to start with ie in 2004 On the other hand the sharp decline in the vote share in Tripura did not translate fortunately for the social democratic left into any decline in seats Third the states where the loss of vote share wreaked havoc for the reckoning in terms of seats were Kerala and West Bengal in Kerala the share of votes going to the social democrats declined from 3941 per cent in 2004 to 3792 per cent in 2009 in West Bengal the corresponding share declined from 5072 per cent in 2004 to 433 per cent in 2009 The bulk of the decrease inamp160 national vote share was concentrated in the electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal the prime left bastions whereas the increase in vote share was spread out across states where the SDL is electorally marginal Soamp160 why was the bulk of the decrease in vote share for the social democratic left concentrated in Kerala and West Bengal The clue to an answer is provided by the fact that both states Kerala and West Bengal currently have social democratic governments led by the CPM In both states the state governments have over the past few years increasingly accepted adopted and pushed neoliberal economic policies often in the name of development and industrialization This led to the emergence of a seemingly paradoxical situation the social democratic left opposed however feebly the continued adoption of neoliberal polices at the level of the central government while the same set of policies were aggressively pursued in the states where they were in power The debacle of the social democrats in the two most electorally important states of Kerala and West Bengal can therefore be read as a forceful rejection of this doublespeak and hypocrisy The rejection of the social democrats at the level of these two states moreover dovetails into the overall mandate in favor of progressive and social democratic policies and against the neoliberal turn at the national level Of course there were other local factors both in West Bengal and in Kerala that overlaid this broad rejection of the neoliberal turn and turned the mandate decisively against them in both these states Before we look at some of these factors especially for West Bengal where the crash of the social democratic left was the most stunning a comment about the socalled national 8220wave8221 in favour of the Congress is in order Social Democrats help the Congress The socalled nationwide 8220wave8221 in favor of Congress if there was one resulted to a large extent from the slew of populist policies that it adopted over its last few years in office pushed towards this by the social democrats These include the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA the stepup in public investment in agriculture the debt relief program for farmers the Right to Information Act 2005 the Central Educational Institutions Reservation in Admission Act 2006 the Unorganized Workers8217 Social Security Bill 2008 the setting up of the Sacchar Committee to inquire into the continued marginalization of Muslims in the country The Congress cashed the benefits of this populist swing electorally claiming it to be its own policies whereas in truth the social democratic left was largely instrumental in pushing for these policies at the central level Other similar policies pushed for by the social democrats include opposition to financial sector reforms pensions insurance opposition to outright privatization of the public sector privatization of health care and education These defensive actions by the social democratic left have partially limited the unbridled power of capital to exploit labor and have provided some relief to the mass of the working people in India It is therefore no surprise that corporate India is exultant at the social democrats8217 electoral disaster this month The stock market in Bombay erupted immediately after the results were out Trading had to be stopped for a while to deal with the unprecedented euphoria As many media reports in India show the Confederation of Indian Industries CII the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry FICCI and other business groups have already started preparing their 8220wishlist8221 of reforms by which they mean another round of neoliberal policy onslaughts on the common people Naturally enough land reforms does not figure in this wishlist of reforms The social democratic left8217s ability to counter the Congress8217 claim that the populist thrust was a result of a progressive shift in the party in reality fiercely opposed by entrenched interests within the Congress was severely limited by its actuakl de facto record in the states where it was in power Kerala and West Bengal Thus paradoxically while it was largely responsible for creating the populist shift in the Congress party and thereby creating support in its favor it could not transform this effort into any substantial electoral advantage for itself and this was largely because of its doublespeak and hypocrisy saying one thing at the central level and doing exactly the opposite at the state level Probably nothing brings out this better than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act NREGA The NREGA which provides a guarantee of a minimum of 100 days of work to the rural poor came into effect on February 02 2006 in 200 of India8217s poorest districts This provision was originally brought to the fore by grassrootslevel mass movements in Rajasthan and other states in India and was later adopted and forcefully pushed by the social democrats at the central level While the NREGA has been constantly attacked in the mainstream press as a waste of resources and a useless policy initiative in reality it has managed to create substantial benefits for the rural proletariat and poor peasants even though there is still a lot of room for improvement the limited propeople initiative represented by the NREGA has managed to improve the lives of the rural poor by putting a floor on agricultural wages and assuring some days of employment both of which resulted in increased rural incomes West Bengal A Closer Look How did the NREGA fare in West Bengal and Kerala compared to other states In 200607 the persondays of NREGA employment generated per rural household amountedamp160 6 in West Bengal and and even more wretched 3 in Kerala with both states figuring in the list of the 3 worst performers Compared to this the allIndia average was 17 persondays Chhattisgarh generated 34 Madhya Pradesh 56 Assam 70 and Rajasthan 77 persondays A similar picture emerges for the next year too in 200708 West Bengal generated 8 persondays and Kerala 6 persondays much below the allIndia average of 16 persondays The dismal performance of the state government led the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity PBKMS a nonparty registered trade union of agricultural workers to file a public interest litigation in the Calcutta High Court on non implementation of the 100 days work guarantee scheme in West Bengal In sum therefore the two states where the social democrats were in power saw the worst implementation of the NREGA Coming back to the factors specific to West Bengal that led to this electoral disaster for the social democratic left we must complement the story of the state government8217s surrender to neoliberalism with its fatal arrogance Failure in the implementation of the NREGA went handinhand with other overt neoliberal policy moves privatization of health care privatization of educationamp160 fullscale assault on the public distribution system and an aggressive statesponsored attack on farmers in a bid to 8220acquire8221amp160 agricultural land for a neoliberal industrialization drive Singur and Nandigram stand as symbols at the same time of both this attack by the state on behalf of corporate capital and also of the fierce resistance to this brutality by the poor peasants and landless laborers The arrogance of the state government was in repellent display during the 8220recapture8221 of Nandigram in March 2007 a violent attack on the people opposing forcible land acquisition and also in the manner it dealt with the case of Rizwanur Rahman Against a backdrop of endemically dismal conditions for the Muslims in the state the insensitivity displayed in the Rizwanur Rahman case increased the fury of the common Muslim population against the social democratic state government Is it so difficult to see then why some of the districts in West Bengal where the social democrats performed wretchedly like North and Southamp160 Paraganas Nadia Murshidabad Malda Birbhum are also ones with aamp160 relatively high proportion of Muslims At this point we need to closely scrutinize an alternative argument that is going the social democratic rounds This argument runs something like this the Left Front made a great tactical mistake in severing ties with the Congressled United Progressive Alliance UPA at the Center on the issue of the nuclear deal with the USA this allowed the Trinamool Congress TMC and the Congress INC to forge an alliance in West Bengal this alliance was instrumental in consolidating the antiLeft votes and directly resulted in the electoral reverses of the social democrats in West Bengal Alas the argument does not hold water If it were true that the social democratic debacle was fueled mainly by the consolidation of antiLeft votes because of the CongressTMC alliance it would mean the following the social democratic left8217s share of votes polled would remain relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2009 This is a straightforward testable implication of the above argument What does the evidence say on this There was a big decline in the share of votes that went to the social democratic Left Front in 2004 the Left Front had garnered 5072 per cent of the votes polled in 2009 the corresponding vote share fell to 4356 per cent While it is difficult to accurately see how this 7 per cent statewide decline is distributed across all the parliamentary constituencies because of the 2008 delimitation of constituencies we can nonetheless figure out the changes in vote shares in those that remained relatively unchanged by the delimitation process Balurghat saw a marginal decline of 049 per cent Raigunj a decline of 313 per cent Alipurduars a decline of 448 per cent Cooch Behar a decline of 688 per cent Darjeeling a decline of 799 per cent Birbhum a decline of 965 per cent and Bolpur witnessed a massive decline of 1565 per cent Can we in the face of this overwhelming evidence of a massive rejection of the social democratic left still stick to the story of the supposed consolidation of antiLeft votes as the primary reason behind the debacle The social democratic left played an important role in slowing down the juggernaut of neoliberalism in India through its intervention in the formation of the Common Minimum Program of the UPA and this was largely possible given the political situation five years ago because of its sizable parliamentary presence at the central level If nothing the reaction of corporate India to the electoral debacle of the social democrats is proof of the partial efficacy of its past interventions But there are at least two serious problems for a strategy that focuses on primarily on electoral politics as the social democratic left does First most of its interventions even though salutary are at best defensive actions and therefore extremely limited from any longterm left political perspective the ruling classes set the agenda and move forward with a concrete program of neoliberal reforms and the social democrats reacts to that agenda It tries to halt the speed of the reforms tries to win a battle here or there In such a scenario the best outcome can only be a return to the status quo not a move forward towards a socialist future Is it difficult for the social democratic left to see the inherent and longterm limitations of its strategy This brings us to the second and related problem of social democratic strategy The fact that the Communist parties now part of what I have called the social democratic left have lost the political offensive in the context of the class struggle in India also finds reflection in their overemphasis on electoral politics to the virtual exclusion of all nonelectoral struggles Over the last two decades there is not one significant nationwide nonelectoral struggle that it initiated or led all its attention and energy has been fixed towards how to maintain its electoral position in West Bengal Kerala and Tripura More often than not it has been willing to enter into opportunistic and unprincipled alliances to attain shortterm electoral goals little realizing that this opportunism leads to longterm political setbacks At times it has even gone with the rightwing BJP to keep the centrist Congress out of power quickly reversing the logic at the next moment and aligning with the Congress to defend secularism Caught in these endless electoral antics and working within a framework whose rules have been set by the ruling classes it has gradually distanced itself from its programmatic concerns of a people8217s democratic revolution To recover its potency and relevance it must refashion itself by forging links with the rising tide of revolutionary mass movements in India against the neoliberal offensive and overcome its obsession with electoral politics Of course if postpoll statements of the social democratic bigwigs in West Bengal like Biman Bose are anything to go by they have decided to do exactly the opposite justify the electoral debacle on external factors avoid any serious rethinking and continue with elections as the primary focus of their politics DEEPANKAR BASU is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Colorado State University He can be reached at DeepankarBasucolostateedu | In/ADP the/DET recently/ADV concluded/VERB 2009/NUM general/ADJ elections/NOUN to/ADP the/DET lower/ADJ house/NOUN of/ADP the/DET parliament/NOUN Lok/PROPN Sabha/PROPN the/DET social/ADJ democratic/ADJ parliamentary/ADJ left/NOUN in/ADP India/PROPN composed/VERB of/ADP the/DET Communist/PROPN Party/PROPN of/ADP 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West/PROPN Bengal/PROPN like/ADP Biman/PROPN Bose/PROPN are/AUX anything/PRON to/PART go/VERB by/ADP they/PRON have/AUX decided/VERB to/PART do/VERB exactly/ADV the/DET opposite/ADJ justify/VERB the/DET electoral/ADJ debacle/NOUN on/ADP external/ADJ factors/NOUN avoid/VERB any/DET serious/ADJ rethinking/NOUN and/CCONJ continue/VERB with/ADP elections/NOUN as/ADP the/DET primary/ADJ focus/NOUN of/ADP their/PRON politics/NOUN DEEPANKAR/PROPN BASU/PROPN is/AUX Assistant/PROPN Professor/PROPN of/ADP Economics/PROPN at/ADP the/DET Colorado/PROPN State/PROPN University/PROPN He/PRON can/AUX be/AUX reached/VERB at/ADP DeepankarBasucolostateedu/PROPN |
<p />
<p>RUSH: I have to tell you, I sometimes have to dial myself back. You know, I’m aware of everything — it’s my job — I keep up to speed, and I have a blessed memory. The brain chemistry I have is such that my memory is wonderful. And sometimes it’s helpful, and other times it ends up being frustrating, such as this whole situation with Bill O’Reilly and Fox News.</p>
<p>Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wondered why not a single left-wing media figure is ever the target of advertiser boycotts? Have you ever noticed that, and, if you haven’t, please take notice of it, and then ask yourself, why? What in the world could explain the one-sidedness of this? How is it that a woman who is now out there berating Bill O’Reilly as a subhuman dryball happily once dated Anthony Weiner and is currently on CNN giving commentary about this and many other things?</p>
<p>Now, this is a subject I have become, out of necessity, an expert in. And it’s also a subject that is very delicate to discuss, because it probably would behoove me to not share everything I know about this. I’m already a big enough target. I’m already more famous than most people should ever hope to be, and, as such, that has a direct effect on the size of the target that is on me. And you always do what you can to reduce the size of the target while not reducing your presence.</p>
<p>But, if you’re interested in this, if you’re fascinated by it — this is not a defense or anything of the sort of Bill O’Reilly. This is all about the modern American nature of politics and how things happen, why they happen, how they get done, and so forth. If I wanted to defend O’Reilly, I could. But it’s not about that. Frankly, what surprises me is — and this is where I’m approaching the quicksand, ladies and gentlemen. What surprises me is that there has been so little learned about how to deal with this.</p>
<p>Let me share with you as an illustration what I’m talking about. I have no idea what this is. Somebody sent me this today. It’s an email that contains a link to something called the Transom Happy Hour. Now, I think this is a part of the Federalist website, but don’t nail me to that. I don’t really know. Whoever this blogger is is weighing in on O’Reilly. And the blogger makes the point, doesn’t care about O’Reilly, never watched O’Reilly, didn’t like what O’Reilly wrote about Reagan, but… And of course that’s obligatory. You have to distance yourself from the target who’s being destroyed here. You can’t ever get close to defending a target unless they come after you. So you have to say, “I don’t care one way or the other, Bill O’Reilly, Bill O’Shmiley, Ted Baxter doesn’t matter to me.”</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" />Then you get to this paragraph. “The upshot is it worked. The one-two punch of New York media calling up every agency, advertising agency, corporate advertiser, keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on and those who fled, worked. As a publisher of a center-right Web magazine, this is disturbing. It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure.”</p>
<p>When did this guy — when was he born? It didn’t even happen to him and he’s just now noticing how this works? “The one-two punch of New York media calling up every agency and corporate advertiser, keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on –” i.e., with O’Reilly “– and those who fled, worked. As the publisher of a center-right magazine, this is disturbing. It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message as an organization that you can essentially be blackmailed into getting rid of –” no kidding!</p>
<p>Whoever this is has just awakened to a reality that’s been around for decades here, and it’s a one-way street. It never happens to people on the left. “Similar corporate pressure could easily bankrupt any for-profit, right-of-center publication which is one reason so many are gravitating instead to the security of nonprofit and not commercial, not selling advertising.” The big mistake — I’m getting very, very close to the quicksand. Do you mind if I go there? The mistake being made here is that corporate America is not where this starts.</p>
<p>This blogger believes it sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message, da-da-da-da-da, lists of advertisers who stayed on and those who fled. This does not start with the advertisers. They are the victims of the entire process themselves. They just happen to be the first people that get hit.</p>
<p>The way this works is this. The New York Times runs a story, and the story talks about how valuable O’Reilly is to Fox News and how much money O’Reilly is generating, and this irritates everybody that reads the New York Times. They don’t want to see this. They don’t want to see how successful O’Reilly is. They don’t want to see how big Fox is ’cause they hate it. They hate Fox, they hate O’Reilly, they don’t want to see any of this. And the New York Times pounds ’em with how much money O’Reilly is making, how much money he’s generating for Fox, how powerful Fox is, and they see as they read this.</p>
<p>And then the New York Times lowers the boom and points out that O’Reilly is a serial whatever and has paid off $13 million to other women to shut up. There has to be an outlet for the anger. Then what happens is where the real story begins. And it is not that advertisers are reading the New York Times and going, “Oh, my God, I can’t have my product there,” and they call their agency and say, “You get us out of there.” That is not how it happened. That is what they want you to think happens, but that’s not how it happens.</p>
<p>The advertisers are not taking the initiative here. The advertisers are themselves being inundated with what they think is tens of thousands of complaint emails and tweets from people they believe represent tens of thousands of legitimately angry citizens. When in truth it is a bunch of bots, Facebook bots and Twitter bots that may have been generated by no more than 10 people, made to look like tens of thousands. And that’s all she wrote.</p>
<p>When the advertisers are swarmed with that, if Fox, O’Reilly, if the salespeople are not prepared, if they don’t know what’s going on, and if they can’t hit these advertisers and explain what’s happening to them and tell ’em to ignore it, that it’s all part of an organized campaign and that these tweets do not represent real people.</p>
<p>Because, you know, liberals, sponsors of O’Reilly have been have you noticed many of them sponsor the Clinton Foundation? Many of them… There’s a serial all edged rapist. I mean, you talk about sexual abuse? Bill Clinton’s wife ran the bimbo eruptions units when he was in the White House to seek and find the women who might accuse Bill Clinton of sexual abuse (and other things) and destroy them. And advertisers never leave the Clintons, and donors never leave the Clintons. Why is that?</p>
<p>Because donors and advertisers never receive massive numbers of complaint emails from all of these Twitter and Facebook bots. It’s a one-way street, and… I don’t mean to sound arrogant or condescending about this. But I’m literally shocked that so few people literally know what happens here because they’re not prepared to deal with it. O’Reilly could have survived this. Weeeeeell, let… I say that with guarded… There are other factors involved here that you don’t know about that might have made it impossible for O’Reilly to survive.</p>
<p>And I’m sorry to sound mysterious about that, but it’s corporate intrigue. It all gets combined, nevertheless, and the result is what you see on TV today. It’s nothing but a giant, full-fledged, manufactured smear — and don’t forget where it started. It started in the New York Times. “No, Rush! No, Rush! It started with O’Reilly.” It did? Well, that stuff’s been going on (allegedly) for years. How come he’s not gone ten years ago? It started with the New York Times, and then the other players pick up the ball when it’s their turn to pick it up and run with it and do what they do.</p>
<p>And this is what happens. O’Reilly is not the first, and he will not be the last. But it still boils down to one thing: The left cannot beat Fox News in the arena of cable news. The media, the left cannot beat Fox News. The only option they have is to destroy it. Because they can’t outcompete it as is evidenced by ratings day in and day out since 1996, when Fox debuted. The standard operating procedure for the left is not to level the playing field but to close it. It’s to deny participation on the playing field, not level it. No tolerance. No fairness.</p>
<p>Their objective is to destroy the opposition because they can’t beat the opposition in the arena of competition where both entities are battling — and that would be, in this case, cable news. And it’s a story here that has repeated itself. I’ve been doing this over 25 years, and I’ve seen this I don’t know how many times. As I say again, it’s not trying to be know-it-all-ish or any of that. But it really doesn’t surprise me that as long as that has been going on there doesn’t seem to be — other than in certain places (ahem) — a viable strategy to deal with it.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH:&#160; Okay.&#160; Back to the phones.&#160; Bill in Atlanta.&#160; Welcome, sir.&#160; Great to have you on the program today.&#160; How are you?</p>
<p>CALLER:&#160; Thank you so much, Rush.&#160; When you were talking earlier about Bill O’Reilly — and I was hoping you would address this issue — and I’m the same age as you.&#160; The first one of these cases I can remember is Anita Bryant in the 70’s, who was the spokesman for Florida orange juice, and they destroyed her career for coming out against gay rights.&#160; And this was at a time when the vast majority of public support was on her side, but it didn’t matter.</p>
<p>RUSH:&#160; Right.</p>
<p>CALLER:&#160; So it just shows to me how a small very vocal group can wield outsized influence, as you were talking —</p>
<p>RUSH:&#160; Well, look, that is a point.&#160; But in examining this — and this a fascinating aspect of it to me, and I’ve delved into it, I’ve had to, why does it work?&#160; And I know the answer to that.&#160; The small number of people are able to make themselves look, regardless of the era, like they are the vast majority, when they’re not.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: So I checked the email during the break, and somebody asked me a question. I’m glad I found this, by the way. I mean, you would not believe how many thousands of emails we get here just during the program. I’m glad I found this. Somebody remembered the opening segment of the program and talking about this fiasco with O’Reilly and Fox News, that I pointed out it all started not with O’Reilly and whatever he’s alleged to have done. This all started in the New York Times.</p>
<p>And somebody said, “What’s the big deal about that?” Well, now, it’s kind of obvious to me, but if it isn’t, then I’m happy to explain it. There are two aspects of it. The fact that it starts in the New… Why did the New York Times do the story? Out of the blue, they want to do a story on O’Reilly or Fox with whatever number of payouts to women over…? Where’d this come from? Nothing just comes out of the ether, folks. They’re not sitting there at the New York Times waiting for ideas to pop into their heads and then one second some reporter says, “You know what?</p>
<p>“I think I’m going to do a story on what a sexual harasser Bill O’Reilly is.” That’s not how it happens. This is… The reason that it starts in the New York Times is important is because the second aspect is that corporate intrigue that I mentioned that is also behind this, and it’s… (sigh) I don’t work there, so I guess it’s not any quicksand, but there is a battle for power going on there between sons of Rupert Murdoch and Rupert — and they are not conservatives, my friends.</p>
<p>In fact, they are… What’s the generation before Millennials? Is that what they…? X? Their friends are all liberal. Their wives. One of their wives works for the Clinton Global Initiative. One of the wives, when this New York Times story hit, says, “You can’t keep the man on the air! You just can’t. This is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to watch. It’s embarrassing to Dad’s company! You can’t do this.” And the fact that the story ran in the New York Times was of such profound shock, sadness, and embarrassment, that they felt they had to do something.</p>
<p>That’s why the fact that it started on the New York Times is crucial. There are two reasons for it being important. The fact that it starts the Times not just appearing out of nothing, out of the ether. Okay, so you, here’s the timeline. Story, New York Times. How long did it take before you started hearing about massive advertiser defections? Just a day, right? You think that was natural? No, this was a campaign, folks. That’s why some of this is so frustrating to me, that even after all this time, these campaigns are not immediately spotted for what they are.</p>
<p>And therefore, people are not able to deal with ’em.</p>
<p>And this one should have been expected, given what’s gone on the last two years there. They should have ready for this. But you see, the bottom line is they were. Fox is not… It’s not gonna be the way it is for long. There’s a massive… Well, I don’t want to say “massive,” but there’s a shakeup coming, and it’s generational. It’s generational and political. It’s just like anything else: Nothing ever is constantly the same. There’s change everywhere. But it’s been amazingly easy. I mean, to sit from a distance and watch this, it’s amazing how easy it appears, at least to me, that this massive and rapid transformation is occurring.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Leanne, as we head back to the phones, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Welcome to the EIB Network. How are you?</p>
<p>CALLER: Well, thank you, Rush. It’s an honor and I want to thank you for helping me about 15 years ago understand the difference between liberal and conservative and understand that I was conservative and why.</p>
<p>RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Really do.</p>
<p>CALLER: But about O’Reilly. I’ve been almost bleeding from the eyes ever since all this junk started. The snowflake journalists, they’re supposed to be strong women that can sit on TV and hold their own with anybody and argue back and forth. And certain ones, I think Shannon Bream, Martha MacCallum, Jenna Lee, others, I just love them to death. And I think they’re strong enough to handle themselves. These little snowflakes who get boob jobs — excuse me — and hair extensions and —</p>
<p>RUSH: Here it comes.</p>
<p>CALLER: — false eyelashes and seven-inch heels —</p>
<p>RUSH: Here it comes.</p>
<p>CALLER: — and Spandex dresses and cutaway leather like they’re going to a nightclub. And then when somebody takes the bait, it’s, oh, they get all teary and run to a lawyer. Get over it. I mean, it’s maddening. I used to work someplace where a man had a little gathering of women and they would tell off-color jokes. And the first time that happened —</p>
<p>RUSH: Oh, you cannot do that, no, no.</p>
<p>CALLER: No. You know what I did?</p>
<p>RUSH: Even if she’s wearing Spandex, hair extensions, and seven-inch heels, you can’t tell the joke.</p>
<p>CALLER: Well, where I worked this guy would do that, and I said, “Oh, that’s not for mixed company,” and just walked away. And from then on he said, “Oh, I don’t think Leanne’s gonna like this one,” and I’d know to leave. But if he had followed me to my desk and kept saying, “Hey, listen, this is good,” then, you know, I might have a reason to go to H.R. or something. But I can handle myself. And I think MacCallum and any of these women could say in a nice but firm, clear way, “Take a hike. I don’t appreciate that.” But they get all teary, “I need a safe space. I’m a strong journalist, but he said something that made me just feel so bad.” I mean, it’s disgusting to me.</p>
<p>RUSH: Well, here’s the thing, Leanne, you have not, obviously — I’m going to engage here in a bit of speculation — my guess is, because of your experience, as I am deducing from listening to you, and your age, you probably have not come under the influence or spell of the modern era of feminism. My guess would be that even when you have encountered it you’ve rejected it.</p>
<p>And yet you’d be amazed at the number of women today who are the product, particularly if they are college graduates. They’ve taken women’s studies course. They’ve been conditioned to think of men this way. They have been taught what to do if this kind of behavior they sense has been aimed at them. It’s just different eras. You come from an era where a guy gets fresh with you and you slap him or you insult him and you send him away with his tail between his legs.</p>
<p>There’s a different era of how that’s dealt with these days, particularly in business. I’m glad you called. I really appreciate your perspective on this. I have to take a break, though, now. I’m thinking of seven-inch heels, Spandex here.</p> | Ask Yourself Why Left-Wing Media Personalities Are Never the Target of Advertiser Boycotts | true | https://rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/04/20/ask-yourself-why-left-wing-media-personalities-are-never-the-target-of-advertiser-boycotts/ | 2017-04-20 | 0right
| 3,065 | RUSH I have to tell you I sometimes have to dial myself back You know I8217m aware of everything 8212 it8217s my job 8212 I keep up to speed and I have a blessed memory The brain chemistry I have is such that my memory is wonderful And sometimes it8217s helpful and other times it ends up being frustrating such as this whole situation with Bill O8217Reilly and Fox News Let me ask you a question Have you ever wondered why not a single leftwing media figure is ever the target of advertiser boycotts Have you ever noticed that and if you haven8217t please take notice of it and then ask yourself why What in the world could explain the onesidedness of this How is it that a woman who is now out there berating Bill O8217Reilly as a subhuman dryball happily once dated Anthony Weiner and is currently on CNN giving commentary about this and many other things Now this is a subject I have become out of necessity an expert in And it8217s also a subject that is very delicate to discuss because it probably would behoove me to not share everything I know about this I8217m already a big enough target I8217m already more famous than most people should ever hope to be and as such that has a direct effect on the size of the target that is on me And you always do what you can to reduce the size of the target while not reducing your presence But if you8217re interested in this if you8217re fascinated by it 8212 this is not a defense or anything of the sort of Bill O8217Reilly This is all about the modern American nature of politics and how things happen why they happen how they get done and so forth If I wanted to defend O8217Reilly I could But it8217s not about that Frankly what surprises me is 8212 and this is where I8217m approaching the quicksand ladies and gentlemen What surprises me is that there has been so little learned about how to deal with this Let me share with you as an illustration what I8217m talking about I have no idea what this is Somebody sent me this today It8217s an email that contains a link to something called the Transom Happy Hour Now I think this is a part of the Federalist website but don8217t nail me to that I don8217t really know Whoever this blogger is is weighing in on O8217Reilly And the blogger makes the point doesn8217t care about O8217Reilly never watched O8217Reilly didn8217t like what O8217Reilly wrote about Reagan but8230 And of course that8217s obligatory You have to distance yourself from the target who8217s being destroyed here You can8217t ever get close to defending a target unless they come after you So you have to say 8220I don8217t care one way or the other Bill O8217Reilly Bill O8217Shmiley Ted Baxter doesn8217t matter to me8221 Then you get to this paragraph 8220The upshot is it worked The onetwo punch of New York media calling up every agency advertising agency corporate advertiser keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on and those who fled worked As a publisher of a centerright Web magazine this is disturbing It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure8221 When did this guy 8212 when was he born It didn8217t even happen to him and he8217s just now noticing how this works 8220The onetwo punch of New York media calling up every agency and corporate advertiser keeping lists of advertisers who stayed on 82118221 ie with O8217Reilly 82208211 and those who fled worked As the publisher of a centerright magazine this is disturbing It sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message as an organization that you can essentially be blackmailed into getting rid of 82118221 no kidding Whoever this is has just awakened to a reality that8217s been around for decades here and it8217s a oneway street It never happens to people on the left 8220Similar corporate pressure could easily bankrupt any forprofit rightofcenter publication which is one reason so many are gravitating instead to the security of nonprofit and not commercial not selling advertising8221 The big mistake 8212 I8217m getting very very close to the quicksand Do you mind if I go there The mistake being made here is that corporate America is not where this starts This blogger believes it sets a very bad precedent about the power of advertiser pressure and sends a message dadadadada lists of advertisers who stayed on and those who fled This does not start with the advertisers They are the victims of the entire process themselves They just happen to be the first people that get hit The way this works is this The New York Times runs a story and the story talks about how valuable O8217Reilly is to Fox News and how much money O8217Reilly is generating and this irritates everybody that reads the New York Times They don8217t want to see this They don8217t want to see how successful O8217Reilly is They don8217t want to see how big Fox is 8217cause they hate it They hate Fox they hate O8217Reilly they don8217t want to see any of this And the New York Times pounds 8217em with how much money O8217Reilly is making how much money he8217s generating for Fox how powerful Fox is and they see as they read this And then the New York Times lowers the boom and points out that O8217Reilly is a serial whatever and has paid off 13 million to other women to shut up There has to be an outlet for the anger Then what happens is where the real story begins And it is not that advertisers are reading the New York Times and going 8220Oh my God I can8217t have my product there8221 and they call their agency and say 8220You get us out of there8221 That is not how it happened That is what they want you to think happens but that8217s not how it happens The advertisers are not taking the initiative here The advertisers are themselves being inundated with what they think is tens of thousands of complaint emails and tweets from people they believe represent tens of thousands of legitimately angry citizens When in truth it is a bunch of bots Facebook bots and Twitter bots that may have been generated by no more than 10 people made to look like tens of thousands And that8217s all she wrote When the advertisers are swarmed with that if Fox O8217Reilly if the salespeople are not prepared if they don8217t know what8217s going on and if they can8217t hit these advertisers and explain what8217s happening to them and tell 8217em to ignore it that it8217s all part of an organized campaign and that these tweets do not represent real people Because you know liberals sponsors of O8217Reilly have been have you noticed many of them sponsor the Clinton Foundation Many of them8230 There8217s a serial all edged rapist I mean you talk about sexual abuse Bill Clinton8217s wife ran the bimbo eruptions units when he was in the White House to seek and find the women who might accuse Bill Clinton of sexual abuse and other things and destroy them And advertisers never leave the Clintons and donors never leave the Clintons Why is that Because donors and advertisers never receive massive numbers of complaint emails from all of these Twitter and Facebook bots It8217s a oneway street and8230 I don8217t mean to sound arrogant or condescending about this But I8217m literally shocked that so few people literally know what happens here because they8217re not prepared to deal with it O8217Reilly could have survived this Weeeeeell let8230 I say that with guarded8230 There are other factors involved here that you don8217t know about that might have made it impossible for O8217Reilly to survive And I8217m sorry to sound mysterious about that but it8217s corporate intrigue It all gets combined nevertheless and the result is what you see on TV today It8217s nothing but a giant fullfledged manufactured smear 8212 and don8217t forget where it started It started in the New York Times 8220No Rush No Rush It started with O8217Reilly8221 It did Well that stuff8217s been going on allegedly for years How come he8217s not gone ten years ago It started with the New York Times and then the other players pick up the ball when it8217s their turn to pick it up and run with it and do what they do And this is what happens O8217Reilly is not the first and he will not be the last But it still boils down to one thing The left cannot beat Fox News in the arena of cable news The media the left cannot beat Fox News The only option they have is to destroy it Because they can8217t outcompete it as is evidenced by ratings day in and day out since 1996 when Fox debuted The standard operating procedure for the left is not to level the playing field but to close it It8217s to deny participation on the playing field not level it No tolerance No fairness Their objective is to destroy the opposition because they can8217t beat the opposition in the arena of competition where both entities are battling 8212 and that would be in this case cable news And it8217s a story here that has repeated itself I8217ve been doing this over 25 years and I8217ve seen this I don8217t know how many times As I say again it8217s not trying to be knowitallish or any of that But it really doesn8217t surprise me that as long as that has been going on there doesn8217t seem to be 8212 other than in certain places ahem 8212 a viable strategy to deal with it BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSHamp160 Okayamp160 Back to the phonesamp160 Bill in Atlantaamp160 Welcome siramp160 Great to have you on the program todayamp160 How are you CALLERamp160 Thank you so much Rushamp160 When you were talking earlier about Bill O8217Reilly 8212 and I was hoping you would address this issue 8212 and I8217m the same age as youamp160 The first one of these cases I can remember is Anita Bryant in the 708217s who was the spokesman for Florida orange juice and they destroyed her career for coming out against gay rightsamp160 And this was at a time when the vast majority of public support was on her side but it didn8217t matter RUSHamp160 Right CALLERamp160 So it just shows to me how a small very vocal group can wield outsized influence as you were talking 8212 RUSHamp160 Well look that is a pointamp160 But in examining this 8212 and this a fascinating aspect of it to me and I8217ve delved into it I8217ve had to why does it workamp160 And I know the answer to thatamp160 The small number of people are able to make themselves look regardless of the era like they are the vast majority when they8217re not BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH So I checked the email during the break and somebody asked me a question I8217m glad I found this by the way I mean you would not believe how many thousands of emails we get here just during the program I8217m glad I found this Somebody remembered the opening segment of the program and talking about this fiasco with O8217Reilly and Fox News that I pointed out it all started not with O8217Reilly and whatever he8217s alleged to have done This all started in the New York Times And somebody said 8220What8217s the big deal about that8221 Well now it8217s kind of obvious to me but if it isn8217t then I8217m happy to explain it There are two aspects of it The fact that it starts in the New8230 Why did the New York Times do the story Out of the blue they want to do a story on O8217Reilly or Fox with whatever number of payouts to women over8230 Where8217d this come from Nothing just comes out of the ether folks They8217re not sitting there at the New York Times waiting for ideas to pop into their heads and then one second some reporter says 8220You know what 8220I think I8217m going to do a story on what a sexual harasser Bill O8217Reilly is8221 That8217s not how it happens This is8230 The reason that it starts in the New York Times is important is because the second aspect is that corporate intrigue that I mentioned that is also behind this and it8217s8230 sigh I don8217t work there so I guess it8217s not any quicksand but there is a battle for power going on there between sons of Rupert Murdoch and Rupert 8212 and they are not conservatives my friends In fact they are8230 What8217s the generation before Millennials Is that what they8230 X Their friends are all liberal Their wives One of their wives works for the Clinton Global Initiative One of the wives when this New York Times story hit says 8220You can8217t keep the man on the air You just can8217t This is embarrassing It8217s embarrassing to watch It8217s embarrassing to Dad8217s company You can8217t do this8221 And the fact that the story ran in the New York Times was of such profound shock sadness and embarrassment that they felt they had to do something That8217s why the fact that it started on the New York Times is crucial There are two reasons for it being important The fact that it starts the Times not just appearing out of nothing out of the ether Okay so you here8217s the timeline Story New York Times How long did it take before you started hearing about massive advertiser defections Just a day right You think that was natural No this was a campaign folks That8217s why some of this is so frustrating to me that even after all this time these campaigns are not immediately spotted for what they are And therefore people are not able to deal with 8217em And this one should have been expected given what8217s gone on the last two years there They should have ready for this But you see the bottom line is they were Fox is not8230 It8217s not gonna be the way it is for long There8217s a massive8230 Well I don8217t want to say 8220massive8221 but there8217s a shakeup coming and it8217s generational It8217s generational and political It8217s just like anything else Nothing ever is constantly the same There8217s change everywhere But it8217s been amazingly easy I mean to sit from a distance and watch this it8217s amazing how easy it appears at least to me that this massive and rapid transformation is occurring BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH Leanne as we head back to the phones Chattanooga Tennessee Welcome to the EIB Network How are you CALLER Well thank you Rush It8217s an honor and I want to thank you for helping me about 15 years ago understand the difference between liberal and conservative and understand that I was conservative and why RUSH Thank you very much I appreciate that Really do CALLER But about O8217Reilly I8217ve been almost bleeding from the eyes ever since all this junk started The snowflake journalists they8217re supposed to be strong women that can sit on TV and hold their own with anybody and argue back and forth And certain ones I think Shannon Bream Martha MacCallum Jenna Lee others I just love them to death And I think they8217re strong enough to handle themselves These little snowflakes who get boob jobs 8212 excuse me 8212 and hair extensions and 8212 RUSH Here it comes CALLER 8212 false eyelashes and seveninch heels 8212 RUSH Here it comes CALLER 8212 and Spandex dresses and cutaway leather like they8217re going to a nightclub And then when somebody takes the bait it8217s oh they get all teary and run to a lawyer Get over it I mean it8217s maddening I used to work someplace where a man had a little gathering of women and they would tell offcolor jokes And the first time that happened 8212 RUSH Oh you cannot do that no no CALLER No You know what I did RUSH Even if she8217s wearing Spandex hair extensions and seveninch heels you can8217t tell the joke CALLER Well where I worked this guy would do that and I said 8220Oh that8217s not for mixed company8221 and just walked away And from then on he said 8220Oh I don8217t think Leanne8217s gonna like this one8221 and I8217d know to leave But if he had followed me to my desk and kept saying 8220Hey listen this is good8221 then you know I might have a reason to go to HR or something But I can handle myself And I think MacCallum and any of these women could say in a nice but firm clear way 8220Take a hike I don8217t appreciate that8221 But they get all teary 8220I need a safe space I8217m a strong journalist but he said something that made me just feel so bad8221 I mean it8217s disgusting to me RUSH Well here8217s the thing Leanne you have not obviously 8212 I8217m going to engage here in a bit of speculation 8212 my guess is because of your experience as I am deducing from listening to you and your age you probably have not come under the influence or spell of the modern era of feminism My guess would be that even when you have encountered it you8217ve rejected it And yet you8217d be amazed at the number of women today who are the product particularly if they are college graduates They8217ve taken women8217s studies course They8217ve been conditioned to think of men this way They have been taught what to do if this kind of behavior they sense has been aimed at them It8217s just different eras You come from an era where a guy gets fresh with you and you slap him or you insult him and you send him away with his tail between his legs There8217s a different era of how that8217s dealt with these days particularly in business I8217m glad you called I really appreciate your perspective on this I have to take a break though now I8217m thinking of seveninch heels Spandex here | RUSH/ADJ I/PRON have/VERB to/PART tell/VERB you/PRON I/PRON sometimes/ADV have/VERB to/PART dial/VERB myself/PRON back/ADP You/PRON know/VERB I8217/NOUN m/VERB aware/ADJ of/ADP everything/PRON 8212/NUM it8217s/PROPN my/PRON job/NOUN 8212/NUM I/PRON keep/VERB up/ADP to/ADP speed/NOUN and/CCONJ I/PRON have/VERB a/DET blessed/ADJ memory/NOUN The/DET brain/NOUN chemistry/NOUN I/PRON have/VERB is/AUX such/ADJ that/SCONJ my/PRON memory/NOUN is/AUX wonderful/ADJ And/CCONJ sometimes/ADV it8217s/PROPN helpful/ADJ and/CCONJ other/ADJ times/NOUN it/PRON ends/VERB up/ADP being/AUX frustrating/ADJ such/ADJ as/ADP this/DET whole/ADJ situation/NOUN with/ADP Bill/PROPN O8217Reilly/ADV and/CCONJ Fox/PROPN News/PROPN Let/VERB me/PRON ask/VERB you/PRON a/DET question/NOUN Have/AUX you/PRON ever/ADV wondered/VERB why/SCONJ not/PART a/DET single/ADJ leftwing/VERB media/NOUN 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<p>When news came that Paul Sweezy had died we turned to ROBERT POLLIN, once a student of Sweeezy’s, for input on Sweezy’s economic contributions. Pollin is professor of economics at U Mass, Amherst, at the Political Economy Research Institute, which he and his colleagues have made into a power house of research, most notably into the living wage campaigns across the US, most recently in New Mexico and Louisiana, which Pollin pioneered. A few months ago we reviewed here <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859846734/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity</a>, Pollin’s superb book on the US economy in the Clinton and early Bush years. Pollin swiftly responded with the extremely enlightening reflections below. AC.</p>
<p>Dear Alex,</p>
<p>Here are some thoughts on Paul Sweezy.</p>
<p>First, on his major intellectual and political contributions:</p>
<p>There is no doubt that Paul was the leading Marxian economist in the United States, and probably the world, during his lifetime. Certainly he was the most widely recognized and respected. In my view, he made four major intellectual/political contributions.</p>
<p>1. His book, Theory of Capitalist Development (first published, I believe in 1942), was an extraordinarily cogent explanation of the economics of Karl Marx, in particular the main themes of Capital. Paul went through all the basic issues, starting with the labor theory of value, and getting all the way to the falling rate of profit. However, this was not merely a work of exegesis-of collecting and assembling quotes. Paul presented a clear and fair treatment of Marx, but he also developed some ideas of his own. Perhaps most important, Paul was critical of the falling rate of profit explanation of economic crisis in Marx-and that criticism was all the more powerful because Paul presented Marx’s arguments in such a clear way. But Paul went further than criticism: he also developed the underconsumptionist strains in Marx’s writings, which were not as well developed in Capital as the falling rate of profit arguments. No doubt, Sweezy was strongly influenced by the pull of JM Keynes in developing the underconsumptionist arguments in Marx. Keynes said the macroeconomic problem of capitalism was effective demand-and that was the cause of the 1930s depression. Sweezy saw this point coming out of Marx, and well before Keynes. [By the way, Keynes himself acknowledged Marx, along with some obscure people, like Silvio Gessel, as predating him with an underconsumptionist perspective]. I will come back to this Marx/Keynes connection in Sweezy. But the main thing on Theory of Capitalist Development is that it was a classic, incredibly clear, exposition of Marxian economics. It remains today the first place I would send a student who wants to get the basics of Marx in a serious, but still totally accessible way.</p>
<p>2. The next big book was, of course, Monopoly Capital, written with Paul Baran, though Baran died before they finished the manuscript. This book tried, and succeeded in many ways, to bring Marxism alive for its time. It was not another exposition of Marxian economics per se, and it did not use Capital in an orthodox way. It was trying to capture the spirit of Marxism in an era of giant corporations and big government capitalism. It focused on the U.S., deliberately, in the way Marx focused on England in Capital-as the most important and advanced capitalist economy. It was also written with the 1930s depression and 1940s war-induced amazing recovery as the background. Thus, Sweezy and Baran hypothized about a “tendency of surplus to rise” rather than the profit rate to fall. Surplus would rise because big corporations had monopolistic pricing power, and so they could extract surplus both from non-monopolistic elements of the U.S. economy, and from less developed countries, which at the time included everyone. The fundamental problem to the internal logic of this system was then, what they termed “surplus absorption”-who was going to buy the things that the corporations could produce? This is how they linked up the issue of big government and imperialism with the functioning of the monopolistic capitalist model. They said military spending was necessary to buy up the surplus product; and thus we needed the cold war, and imperialism, to prevent the economy from again lapsing into depression. Here again you see the links with Keynesianism, and with the obviously powerful experience of coming out of the depression: the only thing that brought us out of the depression being, obviously, massive deficit spending to pay for the war. And here is where the idea of military Keynesianism becomes very clear.</p>
<p>I would add though that the idea of military Keynesianism was first articulated clearly by Kalecki in his great short paper “The Political Aspects of Full Employment”. Paul acknowledged his debt to Kalecki many times. He also said that Monopoly Capital was heavily influenced by Josef Steindl’s book, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism. In any case, Paul was indeed trying to synthesize Marxism with aspects of Keynesianism, as well as the theory of monopoly. This latter connection also made lots of sense, since Paul himself, in an earlier incarnation, had made a major contribution to the theory of monopoly pricing, a topic to which I’ll return below.</p>
<p>3. The third major intellectual and political contribution by Paul was, of course, his creating Monthly Review, and serving as its co-editor for 50 years. I mentioned this contribution third, but I don’t mean to place it third. It is probably first in terms of overall influence and as a measure of Paul’s lifelong dedication to the left. However, it is also true that Monthly Review would not have had anything close to the stature it enjoyed had Paul not also been the author of Theory of Capitalist Development and Monopoly Capital. Monthly Review was hugely important, in my view, in sustaining a serious Marxian left that was talking about real things, and not wandering into either cult-like Marxology or over academic trivia. It was also important in maintaining a focus on political economy as central to Marxism, just as Karl himself meant it to be. Monthly Review did also spawn something like what Paul and Harry liked to call “The Monthly Review school.” I would say the most important stream of that school of thought was its perspective on imperialism and underdevelopment. It was connected to what became known as the “dependency school”-the view that the third world was underdeveloped because of the system of dependency that was created by imperialism. The Monthly Review version of this approach was more infused with a Marxist spirit, but it was basically in this strain of thought. Certainly Andre Gunder Frank and Harry Magdoff was major thinkers here, as well as Paul himself.</p>
<p>But the main thing with Monthly Review wasn’t so much the specific things that were in it, but rather that it existed and it kept going, all through the dark McCarthy period. It then was a touchstone for the left as the 1960s burst out. This leads me to what I think was a fourth major contribution by Paul, starting really in the 1970s.</p>
<p>4. This fourth contribution was the work Paul was doing with Harry Magdoff, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s and 1980s, of documenting the emerging form of capitalism that has now become ascendant-the increasing role of finance in the operations of capitalism. This has been termed “financialization”, and I think it’s fair to say that Paul and Harry were the first people on the left to notice this and call attention. They did so with their typical cogency, command of the basics, and capacity to see the broader implications for a Marxist understanding of reality. I myself was heavily influenced by this work when I was a graduate student. Indeed, I got my idea for my dissertation after I read a Review of the Month by them called “Debt and the Business Cycle.” They were writing such things when, at the same time, the New School itself didn’t even have a field in financial economics-since most of the people thought this was for the bourgeoisie to figure out on their own.</p>
<p>5. I mentioned Paul’s earlier work on monopoly and want to come back to that. Before Paul was involved in Marxian economics, he was a superstar graduate student and junior faculty member at Harvard. He was the protégé of Joseph Schumpeter, who was conservative but brilliant and open-minded. Anyway, in this early phase of Paul’s career, he developed an explanation for how oligopolistic firms set their prices-he called it a “kinked demand curve.” The kink in the kinked demand curve refers to the capacity of oligopolists to push up prices beyond what a normal smooth demand relationship would suggest because of their pricing power. This was an important contribution in the literature on microeconomics and industrial organization, and I believe Paul wrote it as a graduate student. In any case, this theory was in all the textbooks. There is even a story that someone told me about an orthodox economist, obviously totally oblivious to anything about the left, who said something like the following: “Remember that guy Paul Sweezy? He was this brilliant young economist who came up with the kinked demand curve theory. Too bad he died so young.”</p>
<p>Some other Sweezy stories:</p>
<p>The connection with Schumpeter is very interesting. Schumpeter clearly admired Sweezy greatly. And remember, at the time, with the exception of Keynes, Schumpeter was probably the most prestigious economist in the world. Schumpeter wrote this massive history of thought book, which went far beyond what anyone else had attempted, at least in terms of length, called History of Economic Analysis. The number of references to Paul Sweezy in the index of that book are quite substantial. I would guess Sweezy was in the top 10-15 in terms of references-and that’s pretty good when you are talking about the whole history of economic analysis, including everyone. And this was before Sweezy had done Monopoly Capital.</p>
<p>There is more to the Sweezy/Schumpeter connection in my view, though I don’t think anyone else had ever thought about this. Schumpeter wrote this wonderfully provocative book called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. He was really reaching to be provocative since he started one section with the book asking the question: “Can Capitalism Survive?” And he answered no-this coming from probably the leading intellectual defender of capitalism in the world at the time, with the possible exception Hayek. But there’s more. Schumpeter then goes on to ask: “Can socialism succeed?” And to this, his answer is an equally shocking, “Yes, I think it can.”</p>
<p>Now Schumpeter goes on to explain what he really means when he gives these answers. And in both cases, I think he was heavily influenced by his relationship with Paul. Can Capitalism survive? He said no because he said capitalism breeds intellectual freedom, people with critical minds. And it was only inevitable that this spirit would breed powerful minds who would turn their guns on the deficiencies of capitalism itself. No doubt, he had Sweezy in mind here-since here was Sweezy, the smartest young economist at Harvard, from a ruling class family, becoming a Marxist before Schumpeter’s own eyes. Then on the question of socialism. Schumpeter says it will succeed, in that it will be workable, though it will be cumbersome and bureaucratic, if more egalitarian than capitalism. And how will it even work at that level? Because the brilliant thinkers who have grown dissatisfied with the crassness and injustices of capitalism will also rise to the top in a socialist society, and make it function decently well. And again, who else could he have had in mind here but Paul, his student and protégé? Anyway, I once asked Paul about this theory of mine. He didn’t dismiss it, but of course, he was too modest to claim it was entirely true. He told me, “well there were lots of people around then and Schumpeter was just picking up the spirit of the time.” Yes, true, but no doubt, Sweezy embodied that spirit for Schumpeter more fully and powerfully than anyone else.</p>
<p>On his Harvard career-again I think before he became a Marxist, Paul and some other graduate students put together a small book called, I think “A Program for American Democracy.” It was a clear exposition of how to implement a Keynesian demand stimulus program for the fighting the depression. My understanding was that it had some significant influence at the time it came out-Kindleberger, for example, cites it in his history of the Depression.</p>
<p>Let me finally give a few personal thoughts. I may be the only person in the world who can make this claim: outside of high school, the first book I ever read in economics was Monopoly Capital, and the first teacher of economics I ever had was Paul Sweezy. In my first semester at the New School, spring of 1975, I took Paul’s course titled “Reading and Using Capital.” As you can imagine, I was totally pumped to be taking a course on Marx’s Capital from the person universally acknowledged as the leading Marxist economist in the world at the time. When I met with the student advisor my first day there, I told him I felt like I would be taking a course on the Civil War taught by Abraham Lincoln.</p>
<p>Anyway, the advisor-Ron Blackwell, who is now a leading official of the AFL-CIO-told me that “Paul Sweezy isn’t really a Marxist but a Keynesian.” I didn’t know enough to have any idea what Ron meant by that. I have subsequently come to understand the comment. In fact, there is a lot of Keynes in Sweezy-as I mentioned before, with respect to both Theory of Capitalist Development and Monopoly Capital. This was a powerful synthesis he was attempting, while still retaining the basic spirit and commitments of Marxism.</p>
<p>There was a fever pitch at the New School when the course began. On the first day, probably 400 people or so showed up, and you couldn’t get into the room. The next class, you had to show your proof of enrollment to get into the class, as another 400 showed up. However, things calmed down very quickly once we really got into things. Paul was an amazingly clear and committed teacher. But he definitely wasn’t into any kind of theatre of teaching or histrionics. So the course rapidly thinned down to 30-40 people who really wanted to hear Paul expound on Marx.</p>
<p>Among the students-though he didn’t come every time-was Daniel Ellsberg. I noticed this person one day just sitting there in class, taking notes on the lecture, like everyone else. This of course was at the very height of Ellsberg’s fame. I said to another student something like, “Isn’t that weird. That guy over there looks exactly like Daniel Ellsberg.” Ellsberg heard me say that, and just walked over to me, stuck out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dan Ellsberg.” Then we started talking about the class. He said he didn’t agree with Sweezy or Marx, because the Marxian tradition doesn’t give enough weight to spiritual and religious impulses in understanding human behavior, or something to that effect. Anyway, it was a very interesting discussion. Ellsberg was perfectly happy to mix it up with the students, and try to learn from the great Sweezy.</p>
<p>At the time, the first English translation of the Grundrisse had just been published. Paul was extremely upset about the way it had turned out, and mentioned it to us repeatedly. As I recall, it all hinged on a mistranslation of the word from German, “Realization” I really don’t remember the problem exactly, but on reflection it all definitely had to do with Paul’s focus on the issue of underconsumption, or “realization failure” in understanding Marx’s theory of economic crisis. Apparently Paul thought all this got garbled in the English translation of the Grundrisse, where it had been very clear in the original. This was a regular theme in the class, and became a joke among the students-here goes Sweezy again on “realization”</p>
<p>Another more trivial thing about Paul then that we students joked about was the way he dressed. He had these two loud short-sleeved shirts-one I think was orange and the other one was blue. He seemed to wear these shirts on alternating days-as though he knew which loud shirt to wear according to the day of the week. We would say, “it’s a good thing he has on his blue shirt today. Otherwise, we might be going over the material from last week’s class.” The general point is this: Paul was completely unadorned, completely without pretension, and paid not the slightest bit of attention to how he dressed.</p>
<p>Which brings up another point. Paul was legendarily handsome in his younger years, and apparently the attraction for women remained powerful. Some evidence: Paul Samuelson himself wrote about it, in an article in Newsweek called, I believe, “When Gods Strode The Earth.” Samueulson was writing about a debate at Harvard between Schumpeter and Sweezy in the midst of the Depression, when Samuelson was a student there. In the article, as I recall, Sweezy, not Schumpeter, was “the God”-he was so smart, so rich, so handsome, and so Marxist. He apparently made mincemeat of the great Schumpeter, debating the most burning issue of the time. More evidence: In the mid 1980s I was at a small weekend retreat sponsored by MR. I happened to be talking to woman professor at the conference, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly (used to be at Johns Hopkins, not sure if she’s still there). Anyway, I noticed that she broke off our conversation and became transfixed for almost a full minute. She then turned back to me and said, “Look at Sweezy. He is so beautiful.” And this is when Paul was in his mid seventies.</p>
<p>So, you asked for thoughts of all kinds and you’ve got them. Paul was an amazingly great man. I could also give you some criticisms, both of his work and his politics. But at the moment these would seem totally trivial and petty.</p>
<p>ROBERT POLLIN is professor of economic and founding co-director of the <a href="http://www.umass.edu/peri/" type="external">Political Economy Research Institute</a> at the University of Massachuesetts-Amherst. He is also the author of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859846734/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity</a>. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:pollin@counterpunch.org" type="external">pollin@counterpunch.org</a>.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | "He was an Amazingly Great Man" | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/03/06/quot-he-was-an-amazingly-great-man-quot/ | 2004-03-06 | 4left
| 3,065 | When news came that Paul Sweezy had died we turned to ROBERT POLLIN once a student of Sweeezy8217s for input on Sweezy8217s economic contributions Pollin is professor of economics at U Mass Amherst at the Political Economy Research Institute which he and his colleagues have made into a power house of research most notably into the living wage campaigns across the US most recently in New Mexico and Louisiana which Pollin pioneered A few months ago we reviewed here Contours of Descent US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity Pollin8217s superb book on the US economy in the Clinton and early Bush years Pollin swiftly responded with the extremely enlightening reflections below AC Dear Alex Here are some thoughts on Paul Sweezy First on his major intellectual and political contributions There is no doubt that Paul was the leading Marxian economist in the United States and probably the world during his lifetime Certainly he was the most widely recognized and respected In my view he made four major intellectualpolitical contributions 1 His book Theory of Capitalist Development first published I believe in 1942 was an extraordinarily cogent explanation of the economics of Karl Marx in particular the main themes of Capital Paul went through all the basic issues starting with the labor theory of value and getting all the way to the falling rate of profit However this was not merely a work of exegesisof collecting and assembling quotes Paul presented a clear and fair treatment of Marx but he also developed some ideas of his own Perhaps most important Paul was critical of the falling rate of profit explanation of economic crisis in Marxand that criticism was all the more powerful because Paul presented Marx8217s arguments in such a clear way But Paul went further than criticism he also developed the underconsumptionist strains in Marx8217s writings which were not as well developed in Capital as the falling rate of profit arguments No doubt Sweezy was strongly influenced by the pull of JM Keynes in developing the underconsumptionist arguments in Marx Keynes said the macroeconomic problem of capitalism was effective demandand that was the cause of the 1930s depression Sweezy saw this point coming out of Marx and well before Keynes By the way Keynes himself acknowledged Marx along with some obscure people like Silvio Gessel as predating him with an underconsumptionist perspective I will come back to this MarxKeynes connection in Sweezy But the main thing on Theory of Capitalist Development is that it was a classic incredibly clear exposition of Marxian economics It remains today the first place I would send a student who wants to get the basics of Marx in a serious but still totally accessible way 2 The next big book was of course Monopoly Capital written with Paul Baran though Baran died before they finished the manuscript This book tried and succeeded in many ways to bring Marxism alive for its time It was not another exposition of Marxian economics per se and it did not use Capital in an orthodox way It was trying to capture the spirit of Marxism in an era of giant corporations and big government capitalism It focused on the US deliberately in the way Marx focused on England in Capitalas the most important and advanced capitalist economy It was also written with the 1930s depression and 1940s warinduced amazing recovery as the background Thus Sweezy and Baran hypothized about a 8220tendency of surplus to rise8221 rather than the profit rate to fall Surplus would rise because big corporations had monopolistic pricing power and so they could extract surplus both from nonmonopolistic elements of the US economy and from less developed countries which at the time included everyone The fundamental problem to the internal logic of this system was then what they termed 8220surplus absorption8221who was going to buy the things that the corporations could produce This is how they linked up the issue of big government and imperialism with the functioning of the monopolistic capitalist model They said military spending was necessary to buy up the surplus product and thus we needed the cold war and imperialism to prevent the economy from again lapsing into depression Here again you see the links with Keynesianism and with the obviously powerful experience of coming out of the depression the only thing that brought us out of the depression being obviously massive deficit spending to pay for the war And here is where the idea of military Keynesianism becomes very clear I would add though that the idea of military Keynesianism was first articulated clearly by Kalecki in his great short paper 8220The Political Aspects of Full Employment8221 Paul acknowledged his debt to Kalecki many times He also said that Monopoly Capital was heavily influenced by Josef Steindl8217s book Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism In any case Paul was indeed trying to synthesize Marxism with aspects of Keynesianism as well as the theory of monopoly This latter connection also made lots of sense since Paul himself in an earlier incarnation had made a major contribution to the theory of monopoly pricing a topic to which I8217ll return below 3 The third major intellectual and political contribution by Paul was of course his creating Monthly Review and serving as its coeditor for 50 years I mentioned this contribution third but I don8217t mean to place it third It is probably first in terms of overall influence and as a measure of Paul8217s lifelong dedication to the left However it is also true that Monthly Review would not have had anything close to the stature it enjoyed had Paul not also been the author of Theory of Capitalist Development and Monopoly Capital Monthly Review was hugely important in my view in sustaining a serious Marxian left that was talking about real things and not wandering into either cultlike Marxology or over academic trivia It was also important in maintaining a focus on political economy as central to Marxism just as Karl himself meant it to be Monthly Review did also spawn something like what Paul and Harry liked to call 8220The Monthly Review school8221 I would say the most important stream of that school of thought was its perspective on imperialism and underdevelopment It was connected to what became known as the 8220dependency school8221the view that the third world was underdeveloped because of the system of dependency that was created by imperialism The Monthly Review version of this approach was more infused with a Marxist spirit but it was basically in this strain of thought Certainly Andre Gunder Frank and Harry Magdoff was major thinkers here as well as Paul himself But the main thing with Monthly Review wasn8217t so much the specific things that were in it but rather that it existed and it kept going all through the dark McCarthy period It then was a touchstone for the left as the 1960s burst out This leads me to what I think was a fourth major contribution by Paul starting really in the 1970s 4 This fourth contribution was the work Paul was doing with Harry Magdoff beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s and 1980s of documenting the emerging form of capitalism that has now become ascendantthe increasing role of finance in the operations of capitalism This has been termed 8220financialization8221 and I think it8217s fair to say that Paul and Harry were the first people on the left to notice this and call attention They did so with their typical cogency command of the basics and capacity to see the broader implications for a Marxist understanding of reality I myself was heavily influenced by this work when I was a graduate student Indeed I got my idea for my dissertation after I read a Review of the Month by them called 8220Debt and the Business Cycle8221 They were writing such things when at the same time the New School itself didn8217t even have a field in financial economicssince most of the people thought this was for the bourgeoisie to figure out on their own 5 I mentioned Paul8217s earlier work on monopoly and want to come back to that Before Paul was involved in Marxian economics he was a superstar graduate student and junior faculty member at Harvard He was the prot233g233 of Joseph Schumpeter who was conservative but brilliant and openminded Anyway in this early phase of Paul8217s career he developed an explanation for how oligopolistic firms set their priceshe called it a 8220kinked demand curve8221 The kink in the kinked demand curve refers to the capacity of oligopolists to push up prices beyond what a normal smooth demand relationship would suggest because of their pricing power This was an important contribution in the literature on microeconomics and industrial organization and I believe Paul wrote it as a graduate student In any case this theory was in all the textbooks There is even a story that someone told me about an orthodox economist obviously totally oblivious to anything about the left who said something like the following 8220Remember that guy Paul Sweezy He was this brilliant young economist who came up with the kinked demand curve theory Too bad he died so young8221 Some other Sweezy stories The connection with Schumpeter is very interesting Schumpeter clearly admired Sweezy greatly And remember at the time with the exception of Keynes Schumpeter was probably the most prestigious economist in the world Schumpeter wrote this massive history of thought book which went far beyond what anyone else had attempted at least in terms of length called History of Economic Analysis The number of references to Paul Sweezy in the index of that book are quite substantial I would guess Sweezy was in the top 1015 in terms of referencesand that8217s pretty good when you are talking about the whole history of economic analysis including everyone And this was before Sweezy had done Monopoly Capital There is more to the SweezySchumpeter connection in my view though I don8217t think anyone else had ever thought about this Schumpeter wrote this wonderfully provocative book called Capitalism Socialism and Democracy He was really reaching to be provocative since he started one section with the book asking the question 8220Can Capitalism Survive8221 And he answered nothis coming from probably the leading intellectual defender of capitalism in the world at the time with the possible exception Hayek But there8217s more Schumpeter then goes on to ask 8220Can socialism succeed8221 And to this his answer is an equally shocking 8220Yes I think it can8221 Now Schumpeter goes on to explain what he really means when he gives these answers And in both cases I think he was heavily influenced by his relationship with Paul Can Capitalism survive He said no because he said capitalism breeds intellectual freedom people with critical minds And it was only inevitable that this spirit would breed powerful minds who would turn their guns on the deficiencies of capitalism itself No doubt he had Sweezy in mind heresince here was Sweezy the smartest young economist at Harvard from a ruling class family becoming a Marxist before Schumpeter8217s own eyes Then on the question of socialism Schumpeter says it will succeed in that it will be workable though it will be cumbersome and bureaucratic if more egalitarian than capitalism And how will it even work at that level Because the brilliant thinkers who have grown dissatisfied with the crassness and injustices of capitalism will also rise to the top in a socialist society and make it function decently well And again who else could he have had in mind here but Paul his student and prot233g233 Anyway I once asked Paul about this theory of mine He didn8217t dismiss it but of course he was too modest to claim it was entirely true He told me 8220well there were lots of people around then and Schumpeter was just picking up the spirit of the time8221 Yes true but no doubt Sweezy embodied that spirit for Schumpeter more fully and powerfully than anyone else On his Harvard careeragain I think before he became a Marxist Paul and some other graduate students put together a small book called I think 8220A Program for American Democracy8221 It was a clear exposition of how to implement a Keynesian demand stimulus program for the fighting the depression My understanding was that it had some significant influence at the time it came outKindleberger for example cites it in his history of the Depression Let me finally give a few personal thoughts I may be the only person in the world who can make this claim outside of high school the first book I ever read in economics was Monopoly Capital and the first teacher of economics I ever had was Paul Sweezy In my first semester at the New School spring of 1975 I took Paul8217s course titled 8220Reading and Using Capital8221 As you can imagine I was totally pumped to be taking a course on Marx8217s Capital from the person universally acknowledged as the leading Marxist economist in the world at the time When I met with the student advisor my first day there I told him I felt like I would be taking a course on the Civil War taught by Abraham Lincoln Anyway the advisorRon Blackwell who is now a leading official of the AFLCIOtold me that 8220Paul Sweezy isn8217t really a Marxist but a Keynesian8221 I didn8217t know enough to have any idea what Ron meant by that I have subsequently come to understand the comment In fact there is a lot of Keynes in Sweezyas I mentioned before with respect to both Theory of Capitalist Development and Monopoly Capital This was a powerful synthesis he was attempting while still retaining the basic spirit and commitments of Marxism There was a fever pitch at the New School when the course began On the first day probably 400 people or so showed up and you couldn8217t get into the room The next class you had to show your proof of enrollment to get into the class as another 400 showed up However things calmed down very quickly once we really got into things Paul was an amazingly clear and committed teacher But he definitely wasn8217t into any kind of theatre of teaching or histrionics So the course rapidly thinned down to 3040 people who really wanted to hear Paul expound on Marx Among the studentsthough he didn8217t come every timewas Daniel Ellsberg I noticed this person one day just sitting there in class taking notes on the lecture like everyone else This of course was at the very height of Ellsberg8217s fame I said to another student something like 8220Isn8217t that weird That guy over there looks exactly like Daniel Ellsberg8221 Ellsberg heard me say that and just walked over to me stuck out his hand and said 8220Hi Dan Ellsberg8221 Then we started talking about the class He said he didn8217t agree with Sweezy or Marx because the Marxian tradition doesn8217t give enough weight to spiritual and religious impulses in understanding human behavior or something to that effect Anyway it was a very interesting discussion Ellsberg was perfectly happy to mix it up with the students and try to learn from the great Sweezy At the time the first English translation of the Grundrisse had just been published Paul was extremely upset about the way it had turned out and mentioned it to us repeatedly As I recall it all hinged on a mistranslation of the word from German 8220Realization8221 I really don8217t remember the problem exactly but on reflection it all definitely had to do with Paul8217s focus on the issue of underconsumption or 8220realization failure8221 in understanding Marx8217s theory of economic crisis Apparently Paul thought all this got garbled in the English translation of the Grundrisse where it had been very clear in the original This was a regular theme in the class and became a joke among the studentshere goes Sweezy again on 8220realization8221 Another more trivial thing about Paul then that we students joked about was the way he dressed He had these two loud shortsleeved shirtsone I think was orange and the other one was blue He seemed to wear these shirts on alternating daysas though he knew which loud shirt to wear according to the day of the week We would say 8220it8217s a good thing he has on his blue shirt today Otherwise we might be going over the material from last week8217s class8221 The general point is this Paul was completely unadorned completely without pretension and paid not the slightest bit of attention to how he dressed Which brings up another point Paul was legendarily handsome in his younger years and apparently the attraction for women remained powerful Some evidence Paul Samuelson himself wrote about it in an article in Newsweek called I believe 8220When Gods Strode The Earth8221 Samueulson was writing about a debate at Harvard between Schumpeter and Sweezy in the midst of the Depression when Samuelson was a student there In the article as I recall Sweezy not Schumpeter was 8220the God8221he was so smart so rich so handsome and so Marxist He apparently made mincemeat of the great Schumpeter debating the most burning issue of the time More evidence In the mid 1980s I was at a small weekend retreat sponsored by MR I happened to be talking to woman professor at the conference Patricia FernandezKelly used to be at Johns Hopkins not sure if she8217s still there Anyway I noticed that she broke off our conversation and became transfixed for almost a full minute She then turned back to me and said 8220Look at Sweezy He is so beautiful8221 And this is when Paul was in his mid seventies So you asked for thoughts of all kinds and you8217ve got them Paul was an amazingly great man I could also give you some criticisms both of his work and his politics But at the moment these would seem totally trivial and petty ROBERT POLLIN is professor of economic and founding codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of MassachuesettsAmherst He is also the author of the Contours of Descent US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity He can be reached at pollincounterpunchorg amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 | When/SCONJ news/NOUN came/VERB that/SCONJ Paul/PROPN Sweezy/PROPN had/AUX died/VERB we/PRON turned/VERB to/ADP ROBERT/PROPN POLLIN/PROPN once/ADV a/DET student/NOUN of/ADP Sweeezy8217s/PROPN for/ADP input/NOUN on/ADP Sweezy8217s/ADJ economic/ADJ contributions/NOUN Pollin/PROPN is/AUX professor/NOUN of/ADP economics/NOUN at/ADP U/PROPN Mass/PROPN Amherst/PROPN at/ADP the/DET Political/PROPN Economy/PROPN Research/PROPN Institute/PROPN which/PRON he/PRON and/CCONJ his/PRON colleagues/NOUN have/AUX made/VERB into/ADP a/DET power/NOUN house/NOUN of/ADP research/NOUN most/ADV notably/ADV into/ADP the/DET living/VERB wage/NOUN campaigns/NOUN across/ADP the/DET US/PROPN most/ADV recently/ADV in/ADP New/PROPN Mexico/PROPN and/CCONJ Louisiana/PROPN which/PRON Pollin/PROPN pioneered/VERB A/DET few/ADJ 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<p>The Al Qaeda attacks of September 11 prompted a flood of questions as to why the U.S. intelligence community had failed to see them coming; and Sen. Bob Graham wanted some answers. The Florida Democrat, then chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, joined 36 other House and Senate members to form the 2002 congressional joint inquiry into where the intelligence agencies went wrong.</p>
<p>In his recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400063523/qid=1101331056/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/103-3232010-8089453" type="external">Intelligence Matters</a>, Graham provides an inside account of what this inquiry found. Graham details examples of the agencies failing to connect the dots or adapt to the new threats represented by global terrorism. He shares his experiences researching intelligence failures and offers some recommendations for preventing future ones. And he takes the Bush administration to task for disengaging from the war against Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq, a decision Graham voted against and memorably criticized on the Senate floor.</p>
<p>“Ultimately, I would reach the conclusion that September 11 was the culmination of a long trail of American intelligence failures both at home and abroad,” Graham writes in his introduction, “an almost bewildering array of mistakes, missteps, and missed opportunities caused by warring governmental cultures, bureaucratic incompetence and neglect, lack of imagination, and perhaps, most tragic of all, a failure of leadership at the highest levels of government.”</p>
<p>Graham, a former governor of Florida, chose not to seek re-election to the Senate this year, after 18 years’ service (10 of them on the intelligence committee). He recently spoke by phone with MotherJones.com.</p>
<p>MotherJones.com: In the book, you detail a dozen instances where U.S. intelligence could have unraveled the 9/11 plot and prevented the attacks, but failed to. What trends did you see in those failures?</p>
<p>Bob Graham: It wasn’t just a matter of collecting intelligence; it was using intelligence in a creative and coordinated way. There were at least 12 instances where, had our agencies — particularly the CIA and the FBI — acted with more assertiveness, the tragedy of 9/11 would likely have been avoided. One of the reasons that I think we failed in those instances had to do with the way in which we were organized, that there is more a feeling of competitiveness than collaboration in many of the activities of our intelligence agencies. The second was the human side. Our intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, are a product of the Cold War. We understand Russian language and culture, and intelligence played a significant role in our Cold War victory. Our new adversaries, however, speak languages that we hardly understand and come from cultures where we’re even more ignorant. We need to have a massive infusion of new people with the skills necessary to operate on threats from the Middle East and Central Asia. We also need to reorganize the intelligence agencies in a way that will better respond to the new threats we’re facing.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What can the agencies do to bring in those people, both in the short and long term?</p>
<p>BG: In the longer run, one idea I’m personally going to be working on is to establish for the intelligence agencies an equivalent to the Reserve Officers Training Corps for the military. That is, to identify students while they’re undergraduates, encourage them through student financial aid to add to their curriculum some courses that will be beneficial to their service as an intelligence officer, particularly the languages of the Middle East and Central Asia. And then the student would make a commitment to service for a certain period of time in exchange for the financial assistance provided while they were undergraduates.</p>
<p>In terms of a shorter-term thing, the United States is the most diverse nation on earth, and we have significant numbers of people from almost every ethnic and cultural background. There are, for instance, approximately seven million Americans whose heritage is from the Arab Middle East. It has been very difficult to date to get people with that heritage cleared to serve in the intelligence services; there is almost a profiling that has kept them out. I think we need to develop new ways of evaluating the patriotism and credibility of Arab Americans so that we can take advantage of people who are more likely to have a knowledge of the languages and an understanding of the cultures of our principal threat areas today.</p>
<p>MJ.com: During the joint inquiry, you found many instances where “The Wall” between agencies prevented essential intelligence sharing. What reforms could help solve that problem?</p>
<p>BG: Some steps have been taken in that regard to eliminate, for instance, limitations on intelligence agencies and law-enforcement agencies cooperating with each other. And some of those 12 missed opportunities revolved around those walls that prevented sharing. I also think that the structure that’s being considered in the Congress today, which would have a strong director of national intelligence who could lay out standards for enhanced cooperation and enforce those standards — as well as a series of intelligence setters which focus on specific threats such as terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — would be a structure that would reduce the chances of a repetition of the intelligence community’s behavior prior to 9/11.</p>
<p>MJ.com: How cooperative were President Bush and his administration with your inquiry?</p>
<p>BG: They started out with a lot of representations of how helpful they would be, in the same way that they did to the citizens’ 9/11 Commission that followed us. But when you actually started to dig close to sensitive information — the most sensitive being the role of the Saudis — they began to erect barriers.</p>
<p>MJ.com: When did you first realize that the administration was shifting its focus away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and toward Iraq instead?</p>
<p>BG: In February 2002. The U.S. Central Command, which has military responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia, is based in Tampa, Fla. I’ve had a practice of going there during military operations to get a briefing. On that particular day, the subject was the war in Afghanistan. At the conclusion of a fairly upbeat briefing, Gen. Tommy Franks — who was the commander of Central Command and subsequently the commander of the war in Iraq — took me into his office and said, “We’re no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan; we’re engaged in a manhunt.” He went on to say that some of the military personnel and equipment which had been most important in the early successes in Afghanistan were being relocated to get ready for a war in Iraq. He then went on to describe how he thought the war on terrorism should be conducted: staying in Afghanistan until we crushed Al Qaeda there, then moving to other areas, such as Somalia and Kenya, where there were large numbers of Al Qaeda cells. He was also suspicious of the intelligence that was coming out of Iraq, and said that the Europeans knew more about weapons of mass destruction there than we did. That was my first recognition that we were about to abandon the war on terror against the enemy that had just killed 3,000 Americans, in order to shift our attention to a bad, evil person — but a bad, evil person who had never killed any Americans other than in combat.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Do you see the way intelligence was handled before the Iraq war as strictly an intelligence failure or as a consequence of political pressure from the administration?</p>
<p>BG: I would say it was the willingness of the intelligence agencies to be co-opted for political reasons. As early as the spring of 2002, the White House had called CIA representatives down to begin preparing what would be a public document to make the case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, weapons that could be used on an immediate basis and therefore required pre-emptive action to eliminate. When we got into the hearings on that issue in the August/September period of 2002, we were aware that what the intelligence community was telling us privately was not the same as what they were telling the American people publicly; that conditions and limitations that were being given in a closed session were eliminated in the public documents. Comments on Saddam Hussein’s actual willingness to use weapons of mass destruction — assuming he had them — were much more restricted in private briefings than what the administration was releasing to the American people. That was one of the reasons I voted against the authorization to go to war when it came before the Senate in early October of 2002.</p>
<p>MJ.com: How can the government shift focus back to Al Qaeda and terrorism?</p>
<p>BG: Well, that’s a very good question to which there is no good answer. We’ve gotten ourselves so bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq that we’ve allowed our principal enemies to regroup, to recruit thousands of new terrorists, to diversify into a much more flexible and nimble organization. Al Qaeda today is a different Al Qaeda than it was three or four years ago, and has become a more serious opponent for the United States. On the other hand, I don’t think we can just pack our bags and walk away from Iraq. The strategy of trying to train enough Iraqis, and train them adequately with necessary equipment, is probably the only strategy that has a chance for us to make any kind of an early — and I would define “early” as anytime within the next five years — exit from Iraq.</p>
<p>MJ.com: In addition to Al Qaeda, where else should intelligence and anti-terrorism efforts focus?</p>
<p>BG: The other major international terrorist groups, starting with Hezbollah and going on to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and others. Those are groups that have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans; until 9/11, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other international terrorist group. They are well-organized. They’ve had a history of conducting successful operations. We’ve done virtually nothing to them. For instance, in the book I describe a meeting with the president of Syria, which is the home for Hezbollah and Hamas, urging that he take action to expel those groups from his country. He was very defensive about that and our government has been unwilling to face him down and basically say, “It’s intolerable for you to be providing a sanctuary for these murderous terrorist groups. And if you aren’t willing to evict them, then with the international community, we will be forced to do so.”</p>
<p>MJ.com: What actions can the United States take against nations that, like Syria, continue to harbor these groups?</p>
<p>BG: It may involve sanctions, and in fact the Congress has now passed legislation authorizing the president to use economic sanctions against Syria, an authorization that the president has been very tepid in utilizing. But Syria’s a country that understands its position in the world, which is that of a declining power. And I believe strong U.S. diplomatic demands, backed up by other major international forces which recognize the power and potential of terrorist activities against them that Hezbollah and Hamas represent, we could force change in Syrian policy without having to resort to military activity. But we’ve never tried to have the iron fist in the velvet glove.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Earlier you mentioned the need for better human intelligence. How can the agencies improve in that respect?</p>
<p>BG: I asked that same question of an official of the British equivalent of the CIA, and he had a three-word answer: “penetrate, penetrate, penetrate.” We fell into the habit, during the Cold War, of learning what we needed to know about the Soviet Union from satellites and other distant collection platforms. You can’t do that against Osama bin Laden or the leadership of Hezbollah. They don’t use conventional communication systems, and taking a picture of their caves or tents won’t tell you very much about what their plans are. You’ve got to get a human being close enough to the inner circle who can begin to put together what the intentions and capabilities of those terrorists are. That’s why improving our human intelligence, which is the place where you would carry out an operation of penetration, is so important.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What other systemic changes would improve the intelligence agencies?</p>
<p>BG: Today, the person who is allegedly in charge of our overall strategic intelligence activities is also the director of the CIA. The history is, they spend so much time running the day-to-day activities of the CIA — and there are a lot of problems that require that kind of day-to-day attention — that nobody has been looking at the big picture. For instance, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was not a single American actually on the ground in Iraq whose job it was to verify these statements that exiles and foreign nations were giving us as to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capability and the likelihood that he would use those weapons. We can’t afford another massive failure like that. So I think having a person who sits at the top of all the intelligence agencies and has the responsibility, among others, of looking at the big picture — what are the principal threats today? What are the principal threats likely to be 10 or 20 years from now that we need to start preparing to understand and to meet?</p>
<p>The second thing is I think the intelligence community has become too incestuous, that it just listens to itself. We need to open up to other sources of information, including open-source information. There is speculation in Cairo that had somebody been reading Egyptian newspapers and magazines, they could have put together the fact that there was a plot underway inside the United States by Al Qaeda. We didn’t have that capability, and we paid a high price for it.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Couldn’t an intelligence czar still be susceptible to political pressure?</p>
<p>BG: In a democracy, you can never give an insurance policy that improper things won’t happen. I think the best way to avoid that is transparency. The more eyes that are on an activity, the less likely that activity is to be manipulated for purposes other than the national interest. In this bill that is pending, we rewrite the method by which materials can be classified, that is, withheld from the public. Today, it’s 100 percent a presidential decision. If the president wants to deny the American people knowledge as to what the Saudis did to support the terrorists, that’s the president’s prerogative. And if the American people accept that, as they did on Nov. 2, 2004, that pattern will continue. This legislation would give some means of requiring the president to at least explain why he is withholding information from the American people.</p>
<p>MJ.com: During the joint inquiry, you served as co-chair with Porter Goss. What did you think of his appointment as head of the CIA?</p>
<p>BG: I strongly supported his appointment. I thought that Porter not only had personal characteristics of leadership and dedication, but also had the personal background, having served for 10 years as a clandestine officer in the CIA and then, for the last 16 years in Congress, being one of the primary overseers and monitors of the intelligence community. I know there have been some concerns expressed about the first few weeks of Porter’s tenure, including the fact that he brought some people into the CIA with whom he had worked in the past. I find that to be perfectly normal; when a person accepts a major executive responsibility, it’s standard for them to bring people that they have confidence in, who understand their style of leadership, to assist in carrying out the mission. Porter’s also been questioned about some of the changes that were made. Frankly, there are a lot of changes needed in the CIA. I don’t know the individuals who have departed the agency since Porter took over, but I have enough confidence in Porter to believe that he found reason to make changes.</p>
<p>MJ.com: What do you expect will happen with the intelligence reform legislation in the weeks ahead?</p>
<p>BG: I would say there’s a 30 percent chance that before the end of this Congress, which is early January, a reorganization of the intelligence community will have been enacted. The two people who will make the most difference are President George Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon has been the principal adversary of intelligence reform. Not just today, but over the last 10 or 20 years. The reason is, the Defense Department manages about 80 percent of the intelligence budget, and it’s very reluctant to give up that control. And almost any of these reform recommendations will have the effect of reducing the Defense Department’s control over the intelligence budgets. There are other reasons given as to why the Defense Department should continue with as much influence as it has today but, in my judgment, the only one that really is relevant is the unwillingness of the Defense Department to give up control. It’s going to take President Bush calling Secretary Rumsfeld into the Oval Office and laying down the law.</p>
<p>MJ.com: Looking at the 9/11 Commission report that was completed after your inquiry, how did the findings of the two compare?</p>
<p>BG: In the main, it was very consistent. The basic intelligence failures that we found, and the recommendations to correct those failures, were largely adopted in the 9/11 report. The 9/11 Commission had a somewhat broader jurisdiction than we did; they were also looking at things like the FAA and other non-intelligence agencies. In the matter of findings, the biggest disagreement we had with the 9/11 Commission was on the role of Saudi Arabia. We found that there was compelling evidence that the Saudis played an active role in assisting two of the terrorists in Southern California, including being the means of substantial funding for those two terrorists. And this question of whether their support was limited to those two, or may have extended to others of the 17 terrorists, is still an unsolved mystery because the FBI did such an inept job of conducting that investigation. Whether we got it right or the 9/11’s softer evaluation of the role of the Saudis was right, we won’t know until after the administration makes available more information to the American people.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p /> | Intelligence Matters | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/intelligence-matters/ | 2004-11-23 | 4left
| 3,066 | The Al Qaeda attacks of September 11 prompted a flood of questions as to why the US intelligence community had failed to see them coming and Sen Bob Graham wanted some answers The Florida Democrat then chairman of the Senate intelligence committee joined 36 other House and Senate members to form the 2002 congressional joint inquiry into where the intelligence agencies went wrong In his recent book Intelligence Matters Graham provides an inside account of what this inquiry found Graham details examples of the agencies failing to connect the dots or adapt to the new threats represented by global terrorism He shares his experiences researching intelligence failures and offers some recommendations for preventing future ones And he takes the Bush administration to task for disengaging from the war against Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq a decision Graham voted against and memorably criticized on the Senate floor 8220Ultimately I would reach the conclusion that September 11 was the culmination of a long trail of American intelligence failures both at home and abroad8221 Graham writes in his introduction 8220an almost bewildering array of mistakes missteps and missed opportunities caused by warring governmental cultures bureaucratic incompetence and neglect lack of imagination and perhaps most tragic of all a failure of leadership at the highest levels of government8221 Graham a former governor of Florida chose not to seek reelection to the Senate this year after 18 years8217 service 10 of them on the intelligence committee He recently spoke by phone with MotherJonescom MotherJonescom In the book you detail a dozen instances where US intelligence could have unraveled the 911 plot and prevented the attacks but failed to What trends did you see in those failures Bob Graham It wasn8217t just a matter of collecting intelligence it was using intelligence in a creative and coordinated way There were at least 12 instances where had our agencies 8212 particularly the CIA and the FBI 8212 acted with more assertiveness the tragedy of 911 would likely have been avoided One of the reasons that I think we failed in those instances had to do with the way in which we were organized that there is more a feeling of competitiveness than collaboration in many of the activities of our intelligence agencies The second was the human side Our intelligence agencies particularly the CIA are a product of the Cold War We understand Russian language and culture and intelligence played a significant role in our Cold War victory Our new adversaries however speak languages that we hardly understand and come from cultures where we8217re even more ignorant We need to have a massive infusion of new people with the skills necessary to operate on threats from the Middle East and Central Asia We also need to reorganize the intelligence agencies in a way that will better respond to the new threats we8217re facing MJcom What can the agencies do to bring in those people both in the short and long term BG In the longer run one idea I8217m personally going to be working on is to establish for the intelligence agencies an equivalent to the Reserve Officers Training Corps for the military That is to identify students while they8217re undergraduates encourage them through student financial aid to add to their curriculum some courses that will be beneficial to their service as an intelligence officer particularly the languages of the Middle East and Central Asia And then the student would make a commitment to service for a certain period of time in exchange for the financial assistance provided while they were undergraduates In terms of a shorterterm thing the United States is the most diverse nation on earth and we have significant numbers of people from almost every ethnic and cultural background There are for instance approximately seven million Americans whose heritage is from the Arab Middle East It has been very difficult to date to get people with that heritage cleared to serve in the intelligence services there is almost a profiling that has kept them out I think we need to develop new ways of evaluating the patriotism and credibility of Arab Americans so that we can take advantage of people who are more likely to have a knowledge of the languages and an understanding of the cultures of our principal threat areas today MJcom During the joint inquiry you found many instances where 8220The Wall8221 between agencies prevented essential intelligence sharing What reforms could help solve that problem BG Some steps have been taken in that regard to eliminate for instance limitations on intelligence agencies and lawenforcement agencies cooperating with each other And some of those 12 missed opportunities revolved around those walls that prevented sharing I also think that the structure that8217s being considered in the Congress today which would have a strong director of national intelligence who could lay out standards for enhanced cooperation and enforce those standards 8212 as well as a series of intelligence setters which focus on specific threats such as terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction 8212 would be a structure that would reduce the chances of a repetition of the intelligence community8217s behavior prior to 911 MJcom How cooperative were President Bush and his administration with your inquiry BG They started out with a lot of representations of how helpful they would be in the same way that they did to the citizens8217 911 Commission that followed us But when you actually started to dig close to sensitive information 8212 the most sensitive being the role of the Saudis 8212 they began to erect barriers MJcom When did you first realize that the administration was shifting its focus away from Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and toward Iraq instead BG In February 2002 The US Central Command which has military responsibility for the Middle East and Central Asia is based in Tampa Fla I8217ve had a practice of going there during military operations to get a briefing On that particular day the subject was the war in Afghanistan At the conclusion of a fairly upbeat briefing Gen Tommy Franks 8212 who was the commander of Central Command and subsequently the commander of the war in Iraq 8212 took me into his office and said 8220We8217re no longer fighting a war in Afghanistan we8217re engaged in a manhunt8221 He went on to say that some of the military personnel and equipment which had been most important in the early successes in Afghanistan were being relocated to get ready for a war in Iraq He then went on to describe how he thought the war on terrorism should be conducted staying in Afghanistan until we crushed Al Qaeda there then moving to other areas such as Somalia and Kenya where there were large numbers of Al Qaeda cells He was also suspicious of the intelligence that was coming out of Iraq and said that the Europeans knew more about weapons of mass destruction there than we did That was my first recognition that we were about to abandon the war on terror against the enemy that had just killed 3000 Americans in order to shift our attention to a bad evil person 8212 but a bad evil person who had never killed any Americans other than in combat MJcom Do you see the way intelligence was handled before the Iraq war as strictly an intelligence failure or as a consequence of political pressure from the administration BG I would say it was the willingness of the intelligence agencies to be coopted for political reasons As early as the spring of 2002 the White House had called CIA representatives down to begin preparing what would be a public document to make the case that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq weapons that could be used on an immediate basis and therefore required preemptive action to eliminate When we got into the hearings on that issue in the AugustSeptember period of 2002 we were aware that what the intelligence community was telling us privately was not the same as what they were telling the American people publicly that conditions and limitations that were being given in a closed session were eliminated in the public documents Comments on Saddam Hussein8217s actual willingness to use weapons of mass destruction 8212 assuming he had them 8212 were much more restricted in private briefings than what the administration was releasing to the American people That was one of the reasons I voted against the authorization to go to war when it came before the Senate in early October of 2002 MJcom How can the government shift focus back to Al Qaeda and terrorism BG Well that8217s a very good question to which there is no good answer We8217ve gotten ourselves so bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq that we8217ve allowed our principal enemies to regroup to recruit thousands of new terrorists to diversify into a much more flexible and nimble organization Al Qaeda today is a different Al Qaeda than it was three or four years ago and has become a more serious opponent for the United States On the other hand I don8217t think we can just pack our bags and walk away from Iraq The strategy of trying to train enough Iraqis and train them adequately with necessary equipment is probably the only strategy that has a chance for us to make any kind of an early 8212 and I would define 8220early8221 as anytime within the next five years 8212 exit from Iraq MJcom In addition to Al Qaeda where else should intelligence and antiterrorism efforts focus BG The other major international terrorist groups starting with Hezbollah and going on to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and others Those are groups that have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans until 911 Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other international terrorist group They are wellorganized They8217ve had a history of conducting successful operations We8217ve done virtually nothing to them For instance in the book I describe a meeting with the president of Syria which is the home for Hezbollah and Hamas urging that he take action to expel those groups from his country He was very defensive about that and our government has been unwilling to face him down and basically say 8220It8217s intolerable for you to be providing a sanctuary for these murderous terrorist groups And if you aren8217t willing to evict them then with the international community we will be forced to do so8221 MJcom What actions can the United States take against nations that like Syria continue to harbor these groups BG It may involve sanctions and in fact the Congress has now passed legislation authorizing the president to use economic sanctions against Syria an authorization that the president has been very tepid in utilizing But Syria8217s a country that understands its position in the world which is that of a declining power And I believe strong US diplomatic demands backed up by other major international forces which recognize the power and potential of terrorist activities against them that Hezbollah and Hamas represent we could force change in Syrian policy without having to resort to military activity But we8217ve never tried to have the iron fist in the velvet glove MJcom Earlier you mentioned the need for better human intelligence How can the agencies improve in that respect BG I asked that same question of an official of the British equivalent of the CIA and he had a threeword answer 8220penetrate penetrate penetrate8221 We fell into the habit during the Cold War of learning what we needed to know about the Soviet Union from satellites and other distant collection platforms You can8217t do that against Osama bin Laden or the leadership of Hezbollah They don8217t use conventional communication systems and taking a picture of their caves or tents won8217t tell you very much about what their plans are You8217ve got to get a human being close enough to the inner circle who can begin to put together what the intentions and capabilities of those terrorists are That8217s why improving our human intelligence which is the place where you would carry out an operation of penetration is so important MJcom What other systemic changes would improve the intelligence agencies BG Today the person who is allegedly in charge of our overall strategic intelligence activities is also the director of the CIA The history is they spend so much time running the daytoday activities of the CIA 8212 and there are a lot of problems that require that kind of daytoday attention 8212 that nobody has been looking at the big picture For instance in the runup to the war in Iraq there was not a single American actually on the ground in Iraq whose job it was to verify these statements that exiles and foreign nations were giving us as to Saddam Hussein8217s weapons of mass destruction capability and the likelihood that he would use those weapons We can8217t afford another massive failure like that So I think having a person who sits at the top of all the intelligence agencies and has the responsibility among others of looking at the big picture 8212 what are the principal threats today What are the principal threats likely to be 10 or 20 years from now that we need to start preparing to understand and to meet The second thing is I think the intelligence community has become too incestuous that it just listens to itself We need to open up to other sources of information including opensource information There is speculation in Cairo that had somebody been reading Egyptian newspapers and magazines they could have put together the fact that there was a plot underway inside the United States by Al Qaeda We didn8217t have that capability and we paid a high price for it MJcom Couldn8217t an intelligence czar still be susceptible to political pressure BG In a democracy you can never give an insurance policy that improper things won8217t happen I think the best way to avoid that is transparency The more eyes that are on an activity the less likely that activity is to be manipulated for purposes other than the national interest In this bill that is pending we rewrite the method by which materials can be classified that is withheld from the public Today it8217s 100 percent a presidential decision If the president wants to deny the American people knowledge as to what the Saudis did to support the terrorists that8217s the president8217s prerogative And if the American people accept that as they did on Nov 2 2004 that pattern will continue This legislation would give some means of requiring the president to at least explain why he is withholding information from the American people MJcom During the joint inquiry you served as cochair with Porter Goss What did you think of his appointment as head of the CIA BG I strongly supported his appointment I thought that Porter not only had personal characteristics of leadership and dedication but also had the personal background having served for 10 years as a clandestine officer in the CIA and then for the last 16 years in Congress being one of the primary overseers and monitors of the intelligence community I know there have been some concerns expressed about the first few weeks of Porter8217s tenure including the fact that he brought some people into the CIA with whom he had worked in the past I find that to be perfectly normal when a person accepts a major executive responsibility it8217s standard for them to bring people that they have confidence in who understand their style of leadership to assist in carrying out the mission Porter8217s also been questioned about some of the changes that were made Frankly there are a lot of changes needed in the CIA I don8217t know the individuals who have departed the agency since Porter took over but I have enough confidence in Porter to believe that he found reason to make changes MJcom What do you expect will happen with the intelligence reform legislation in the weeks ahead BG I would say there8217s a 30 percent chance that before the end of this Congress which is early January a reorganization of the intelligence community will have been enacted The two people who will make the most difference are President George Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld The Pentagon has been the principal adversary of intelligence reform Not just today but over the last 10 or 20 years The reason is the Defense Department manages about 80 percent of the intelligence budget and it8217s very reluctant to give up that control And almost any of these reform recommendations will have the effect of reducing the Defense Department8217s control over the intelligence budgets There are other reasons given as to why the Defense Department should continue with as much influence as it has today but in my judgment the only one that really is relevant is the unwillingness of the Defense Department to give up control It8217s going to take President Bush calling Secretary Rumsfeld into the Oval Office and laying down the law MJcom Looking at the 911 Commission report that was completed after your inquiry how did the findings of the two compare BG In the main it was very consistent The basic intelligence failures that we found and the recommendations to correct those failures were largely adopted in the 911 report The 911 Commission had a somewhat broader jurisdiction than we did they were also looking at things like the FAA and other nonintelligence agencies In the matter of findings the biggest disagreement we had with the 911 Commission was on the role of Saudi Arabia We found that there was compelling evidence that the Saudis played an active role in assisting two of the terrorists in Southern California including being the means of substantial funding for those two terrorists And this question of whether their support was limited to those two or may have extended to others of the 17 terrorists is still an unsolved mystery because the FBI did such an inept job of 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<p>HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT — The students of the Academy of Engineering &amp; Green Technologies at Hartford High School are already giving serious thought to the kinds of careers they want to prepare for — not just four or six years down the road, but decades into the future.</p>
<p>Shyesha Washington has had several internship experiences, in offices, churches, and schools. She said she most enjoyed assisting a kindergarten teacher with special needs students.</p>
<p>“This one kid loved to climb up the teacher and he tried to climb up me and he’s already up to here on me,” she said, motioning to her waist and chuckling. “And it wasn’t really working!”</p>
<p>When asked if she thought about teaching in the future, she said she had it all worked out.</p>
<p>“After I take off from my business career, I’ll go back to teaching. That’s the plan.”</p>
<p>When you walk into Hartford High School, you immediately see school resource officers chatting by the entrance and posters reminding you how many absences are too many. Chronic absenteeism is a problem for Hartford schools, one that the district is trying to work on through <a href="http://www.hartfordschools.org/family-resources/welcome-center/78-pages/649-attendancematters" type="external">awareness campaigns</a>. The large high school building divides into three schools, a Nursing Academy, The Academy of Engineering &amp; Green Technologies, and the Law and Government Academy. By having these different areas of focus, the high school provides a magnet-like appeal.</p>
<p>But students like Washington are up against the odds — and for a reason that may initially seem unconnected to their future professional success. Hartford High School is not desegregated. Only 6 percent of students who attend the school are white or Asian.</p>
<p>None of Hartford’s neighborhood schools are fully desegregated, according to compliance standards set by the Sheff v. O’Neill court case, which stipulates that at least 25 percent of a school’s population should be white and Asian, although one school comes very close. The lawsuit began in 1989, when 18 students brought a case against the state of Connecticut for failing to provide them with their right to an education and equal protection under the law, arguing that public schools with mostly black and Hispanic populations receive less funding. In 1996, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the state’s current desegregation plan was initiated.</p>
<p>Under that plan, there has been a serious expansion of magnet schools in Hartford and the creation of the “open choice” program, which allows students to attend schools outside district boundaries. Magnet schools are specifically intended to spur desegregation in schools by attracting white suburban families to attend schools in the city.</p>
<p>But there are still thousands of Hartford students unable to attend high-quality schools. In order to get selected for a magnet school, parents must go through the lottery process. Only about half of Hartford students get selected. The other half of them have to attend neighborhood schools that vary in quality, but that are mostly segregated.</p>
<p>One school, the James H. Naylor School, is almost fully integrated at 23 percent, but the majority of neighborhood schools are under 10 percent. Those schools have received the same amount of funding from the state for the past five years — funding that neighborhood school principals say doesn’t cut it for the needs of their students.</p>
<p>“You’re destined to live a life of poverty unless you’re the extraordinary one or the lucky&#160;one.”</p>
<p>Typically, schools that are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic often have fewer resources and attract less experienced teachers, putting students of color at a disadvantage. Students in segregated schools tend to make smaller gains in reading, according to a 2014 <a href="http://fpg.unc.edu/node/7225" type="external">study</a> conducted by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. This isolation of minority students is only one piece among other social and economic barriers children of color face, but the goal is that desegregation of schools could help bridge the <a href="http://www.epi.org/publication/the-racial-achievement-gap-segregated-schools-and-segregated-neighborhoods-a-constitutional-insult/" type="external">racial achievement gap</a>.</p>
<p>“It’s not just that math scores are low. It’s a life sentence to poverty,” said Bruce Douglas, executive director for CREC. “Because if a child doesn’t get that good quality education in preschool and those first five years of education, you’re destined to live a life of poverty unless you’re the extraordinary one or the lucky one.”</p>
<p>Advocates for a higher quality, desegregated school system say that the state has dragged their feet since the lawsuit began and could do more to expand “high quality seats” for Hartford children.</p>
<p>“The challenge right now is the failure of the state of fully implement the Sheff ruling. There are still about 55 percent of Hartford kids who are still in in a position of separate and unequal schools,” said Phil Tegeler, executive director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. “The schools are much better than they were at the time of the ruling, but they are still high-poverty, racially isolated schools that don’t have the resources to meet the needs of students.”</p>
<p>Tegeler said both economic and racial integration have been key to implementing the Sheff ruling.</p>
<p>“The Hartford kids in the magnets don’t look that much different from the Hartford kids in the regular schools and that’s an important part of the process. The general goal goal is to have 50 percent urban and 50 percent suburban kids and that has generally gotten us both the economic and racial integration we’re looking for.”</p>
<p>The problem is that not enough students are able to attend those high-quality schools, and some neighborhood schools are in serious need of repair, Douglas said. Douglas visited the Clark School as part of CREC’s turnaround program for the school that wold have lasted three to five years, to increase achievement. He found that it was uninhabitable.</p>
<p>“We went into the school and the school was in such disrepair,” Douglas said. “There was mildew, no toilet paper dispensers, not the absence of toilet paper, but no dispensers, OK? The sinks in the bathroom did not work, you could not see outside of any of the windows in the school, and had it been an apartment house, it would have been condemned and this is 20 years after the court case.”</p>
<p>“Had it been an apartment house, it would have been condemned.”</p>
<p>Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which are hazardous chemicals, were <a href="http://www.courant.com/community/hartford/hc-hartford-school-board-pcbs-0121-20150120-story.html" type="external">found</a> at the school. Around 500 students were distributed across three schools in Hartford and the turnaround effort never happened, due to a cut in funding, the Hartford Courant <a href="http://www.courant.com/community/hartford/hc-hartford-clark-school-crec-0807-20150806-story.html" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>“it could be a lack of willingness. I call it institutional racism,” Douglas said. “In Connecticut, we’re just not appalled by the condition in which our disenfranchised children live. We’re just not appalled. To the people in the state, it’s just the natural order of things. They don’t even see it.”</p>
<p>Hartford magnet schools still generally report lower academic performance than suburban schools. But neighborhood schools’ performance is generally worse. At The Academy of Engineering &amp; Green Technologies, only 18.6 percent of students meet or exceed English Language Arts standards in 11th grade. Fewer than 5 percent of students meet or exceed standards in 11th grade math at The Academy of Engineering &amp; Green Technologies. In fact, all of the neighborhood schools in Hartford with enough data to report score below 5 percent in meeting math standards.</p>
<p>Principal Michael Maziarz admits the school has a long way to go in raising its math and reading scores. He hopes that an improvement in school climate, a willingness to adapt classroom instruction to fit students’ needs, more cultural competency training, and hands-on workforce experience will be a recipe for success.</p>
<p>“I have kids that are easily getting into college and I have kids coming into high school reading at a fourth-grade level. You have to give them the option and say I know you have this intelligence in you and it’s on us then to provide the options, to provide multiple means of expression,” Maziarz said.</p>
<p>A big focus for Maziarz is making sure that students feel a sense of ownership of the school. Although the students have uniforms, every year, seniors make T-shirts specifically for their class and wear them to school to celebrate their last year. According to one teacher, Maziarz is also very involved with students on a personal level — he gives out his cell phone number.</p>
<p>“I say to our teachers all the time, it’s not enough to like our kids. Our kids need to be loved and they need to feel that, and once they feel that and they feel safe, it’s amazing what our kids are capable of doing,” Maziarz said.</p>
<p>Walking the halls of the school, it’s clear that Maziarz isn’t the type of authority figure whom students avoid. Students either simply smiled and said “Hey” as they passed him, or approached him to ask questions about classes.</p>
<p>Part of what has worked well for teachers is having students lay out what kind of classroom environment they need in order to be successful. That often lets teachers know things about a student’s personal life, like what a student’s family environment is like.</p>
<p>“Kids say this is the environment I work best in and that helped teachers, because I didn’t know this was going on at home or that this was your cultural background or that this was what you’re feeling and if I don’t have that open conversation we’re never going to break down those barriers,” he said.</p>
<p>Regular cultural competency training is also very important to the effort to build a safe environment for students at the school. The principals at the neighborhood schools I visited — The Academy of Engineering &amp; Green Technologies, James H. Naylor School, and Parkville Community School — were all focused on making sure cultural competency training was an important part of professional development, as an ongoing part of their training as teachers.</p>
<p>The principals were also dedicated to differentiated instruction for students who have unique educational needs, whether they’re English Language Learners, they have a learning disability, or they struggle with schoolwork for any reason. Parkville Community School has a room full of bins identifying instruction materials for different grade levels that teachers can pick from at any time to match students’ needs. Teachers at James H. Naylor were learning to accept that some students should present what they know through their verbal skills while others are more likely to express what they know through an essay.</p>
<p>“If the written form is not their forte, we’re going to target that skill and develop that skill but we’re not going to shut down the other one,” said Guillaume Gendre, principal of the James H. Naylor School. “There’s more noise in the classroom, but guess what? There’s more learning too.”</p>
<p>Despite these principals’ efforts to make neighborhood schools as desirable as magnet schools, they still have challenges. Most of them are unable to hire more teachers and struggling to prepare for major changes in student population from year to year, depending on how many children are accepted into magnet schools in Hartford.</p>
<p>For example, Gendre has only has two and a half teachers assigned to help all of the school’s English language learner students. He also needs more teachers in general, because parents will complain that 31 third-grade students are being taught a single teacher — but he can’t easily hire them.</p>
<p>Parkville Community School Principal Dirk Olmstead also needs more more tutors for the school’s after-school program. The school once had a Boys and Girls Club — but the organization lost its grant, and the school would have had to pay $10,000 a month to receive the same service. After different efforts to provide an after-school program failed, Olmstead decided to hire retired teachers to tutor students. Unlike some magnet schools, such as Classical Magnet School, which offers after-school enrichment programs, the school has only a couple after-school activities, such as chorus and student council. Parkville Community School only has 8 percent white and Asian or “reduced isolation” students.</p>
<p>Things are harder for smaller neighborhood schools, Olmstead said.</p>
<p>“What is frustrating for smaller schools is that every kid walks in with a dollar sign on his forehead and for these smaller schools, they have a hard time offering support because they don’t have the money,” Olmstead said. “For us, we’re at 538, and if you’re over 300 kids, you can have those different services, but if you’re under that, you have to receive some help from other people. We’re self-sufficient where we can make strategic choices.”</p>
<p>James H. Naylor and Parkville Community School are either above or near the Hartford average of 24.1 percent of students meeting and exceeding ELA standards in third grade. Parkville is making progress on math and reading, with 66 percent of students who took the Northwest Evaluation Association Measure of Academic Progress test making 100 percent growth from fall 2014 to spring 2015 in math and 67 percent of students making said progress on English Language Arts. However, all but one Hartford school, including magnets and neighborhood schools, had scores above the state average of 53 percent. Magnet schools dominated the list of schools scoring higher and neighborhood schools dominated the lower scores.The numbers were similar for fourth grade ELA standards.</p>
<p>When looking at surrounding towns, only 14.2 percent of Hartford students met or exceeded math standards, compared to 54.7 percent of West Hartford students, 67 percent of Glastonbury students, and 63.9 percent of Farmington students, though it did outperform New Haven, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. Its scores for ELA standards painted a similar picture.</p>
<p>Education advocates say that funding issues are getting in the way of a quality education for not just Hartford students, but Connecticut students in general.</p>
<p>“One of the dilemmas that Connecticut has that creates this inequitable funding and ‘More money, please” dilemma is 169 towns in the size of a state where half of it is a ranch in Oklahoma, so you’ve got 169 towns that are vying for some kind of equity and some of those towns are extraordinary wealthy,” Douglas said. “Some of them are the wealthiest towns in the United States, and then right next to them you have some of the poorest cities in the United States.”</p>
<p>The perception that neighborhood schools, open choice suburban schools, and magnet schools have different resources and quality of education persists. A October 2014 report that was conducted during a transition between superintendents asked whether all students have access to high quality facilities, whether a child attends a magnet, a choice school or a neighborhood school. Only 18.5 percent of magnet school employees agreed or strongly agreed. The percentage of neighborhood school employees who agreed was even lower, at 10 percent. There were high rates of disagreement among both parents and school employees that quality of education was the same regardless of school.</p>
<p>Douglas said he would like to see the state and city acknowledge that the root of the education issue is a broader economic problem that needs to be addressed through revitalization efforts that would bring a more racially and economically diverse population into the city to spend money and send their children to Hartford schools. He said that a short-term, emergency plan would be to send more Hartford children to the suburbs while revitalizing the city and desegregating the region rather than attempting to desegregate schools one by one.</p>
<p>“On any given day in West Hartford, the restaurants are open and people are in the streets. Three miles down in Hartford, it’s dark and nobody is in the streets,” Douglas said.</p>
<p>Tegeler, who has worked on creating fair housing policies in Connecticut, said that there are three major things the state needs to do to ensure the city itself becomes desegregated.</p>
<p>“Three miles down in Hartford, it’s dark and nobody is in the streets.”</p>
<p>“It would be easy to help low-income families with children move out to low poverty, high-performing school districts, sort of like the Open Choice Program for housing, by empowering families to move to school districts so they’re actually living in the district where their kids are going to school. Connecticut has a pretty weak housing mobility program,” Tegeler explained.</p>
<p>Teleger said the state’s low-income tax housing program is very segregated and is in need of reform if it is going to provide better access for low-income families to move into areas with better school districts. He said the state also needs to crack down on exclusionary zoning.</p>
<p>“We have appeals process here in Connecticut that lets developers appeal denial of affordable housing, but its not as strong as it coud be and the state has to take back some of the powers given to municipalities for zoning and land use and require certain affordable housing targets for suburbs,” Tegeler said.</p>
<p>Colin Gordon, an expert on discriminatory housing policies and a history professor at the University of Iowa, says that although most people don’t think current zoning policies are explicitly or even intentionally racist, that’s the origin.</p>
<p>“If you chop up a metropolitan area, as is the case in St. Louis, into little municipal fragments and then you let each one of them decide the rules for local development such as lot size, house size, etc… you can’t help but in meticulous and damaging and dysfunctional ways sort your local population by income,” he said. “Thirty and 40 years ago that was much more explicitly seen as a sort of racial project when municipalities were starting to zone&#160;… Engineers trying to solve a problem would say, ‘Well, you know we no longer have access to explicit forms of restriction, but if you say every lot has to be 30,000 feet and every house needs to be this big, you’ll keep them out.’”</p>
<p>Jeron Campbell, data and accountability officer at the Hartford Open Choice Program, said he hopes that the city will naturally integrate — but it will take a long time to do so.</p>
<p>“It’s funny because you used to have policies and laws that supported separatism, but we don’t have laws to force people to come together. Somehow that’s the wrong thing to do,” Campbell said. “It seems like it’s going to take a long time for this country to really heal. You just look at so many different things that go on that are legal and in every major area, you find huge race-related issues, access to quality health care, access to quality housing, access to quality education, insurance rates, hiring rates, wealth opportunities, and attainment, the largest single factor continues to be race.”</p> | Segregation Is Alive And Well In The Public School System, And These Students Are Dealing With It | true | http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/11/09/3719394/public-schools-integration/ | 2015-11-09 | 4left
| 3,066 | HARTFORD CONNECTICUT820282128202The students of the Academy of Engineering ampamp Green Technologies at Hartford High School are already giving serious thought to the kinds of careers they want to prepare for820282128202not just four or six years down the road but decades into the future Shyesha Washington has had several internship experiences in offices churches and schools She said she most enjoyed assisting a kindergarten teacher with special needs students 8220This one kid loved to climb up the teacher and he tried to climb up me and he8217s already up to here on me8221 she said motioning to her waist and chuckling 8220And it wasn8217t really working8221 When asked if she thought about teaching in the future she said she had it all worked out 8220After I take off from my business career I8217ll go back to teaching That8217s the plan8221 When you walk into Hartford High School you immediately see school resource officers chatting by the entrance and posters reminding you how many absences are too many Chronic absenteeism is a problem for Hartford schools one that the district is trying to work on through awareness campaigns The large high school building divides into three schools a Nursing Academy The Academy of Engineering ampamp Green Technologies and the Law and Government Academy By having these different areas of focus the high school provides a magnetlike appeal But students like Washington are up against the odds820282128202and for a reason that may initially seem unconnected to their future professional success Hartford High School is not desegregated Only 6 percent of students who attend the school are white or Asian None of Hartford8217s neighborhood schools are fully desegregated according to compliance standards set by the Sheff v O8217Neill court case which stipulates that at least 25 percent of a school8217s population should be white and Asian although one school comes very close The lawsuit began in 1989 when 18 students brought a case against the state of Connecticut for failing to provide them with their right to an education and equal protection under the law arguing that public schools with mostly black and Hispanic populations receive less funding In 1996 the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs but it wasn8217t until 2008 that the state8217s current desegregation plan was initiated Under that plan there has been a serious expansion of magnet schools in Hartford and the creation of the 8220open choice8221 program which allows students to attend schools outside district boundaries Magnet schools are specifically intended to spur desegregation in schools by attracting white suburban families to attend schools in the city But there are still thousands of Hartford students unable to attend highquality schools In order to get selected for a magnet school parents must go through the lottery process Only about half of Hartford students get selected The other half of them have to attend neighborhood schools that vary in quality but that are mostly segregated One school the James H Naylor School is almost fully integrated at 23 percent but the majority of neighborhood schools are under 10 percent Those schools have received the same amount of funding from the state for the past five years820282128202funding that neighborhood school principals say doesn8217t cut it for the needs of their students 8220You8217re destined to live a life of poverty unless you8217re the extraordinary one or the luckyamp160one8221 Typically schools that are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic often have fewer resources and attract less experienced teachers putting students of color at a disadvantage Students in segregated schools tend to make smaller gains in reading according to a 2014 study conducted by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute This isolation of minority students is only one piece among other social and economic barriers children of color face but the goal is that desegregation of schools could help bridge the racial achievement gap 8220It8217s not just that math scores are low It8217s a life sentence to poverty8221 said Bruce Douglas executive director for CREC 8220Because if a child doesn8217t get that good quality education in preschool and those first five years of education you8217re destined to live a life of poverty unless you8217re the extraordinary one or the lucky one8221 Advocates for a higher quality desegregated school system say that the state has dragged their feet since the lawsuit began and could do more to expand 8220high quality seats8221 for Hartford children 8220The challenge right now is the failure of the state of fully implement the Sheff ruling There are still about 55 percent of Hartford kids who are still in in a position of separate and unequal schools8221 said Phil Tegeler executive director of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council 8220The schools are much better than they were at the time of the ruling but they are still highpoverty racially isolated schools that don8217t have the resources to meet the needs of students8221 Tegeler said both economic and racial integration have been key to implementing the Sheff ruling 8220The Hartford kids in the magnets don8217t look that much different from the Hartford kids in the regular schools and that8217s an important part of the process The general goal goal is to have 50 percent urban and 50 percent suburban kids and that has generally gotten us both the economic and racial integration we8217re looking for8221 The problem is that not enough students are able to attend those highquality schools and some neighborhood schools are in serious need of repair Douglas said Douglas visited the Clark School as part of CREC8217s turnaround program for the school that wold have lasted three to five years to increase achievement He found that it was uninhabitable 8220We went into the school and the school was in such disrepair8221 Douglas said 8220There was mildew no toilet paper dispensers not the absence of toilet paper but no dispensers OK The sinks in the bathroom did not work you could not see outside of any of the windows in the school and had it been an apartment house it would have been condemned and this is 20 years after the court case8221 8220Had it been an apartment house it would have been condemned8221 Polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs which are hazardous chemicals were found at the school Around 500 students were distributed across three schools in Hartford and the turnaround effort never happened due to a cut in funding the Hartford Courant reported 8220it could be a lack of willingness I call it institutional racism8221 Douglas said 8220In Connecticut we8217re just not appalled by the condition in which our disenfranchised children live We8217re just not appalled To the people in the state it8217s just the natural order of things They don8217t even see it8221 Hartford magnet schools still generally report lower academic performance than suburban schools But neighborhood schools8217 performance is generally worse At The Academy of Engineering ampamp Green Technologies only 186 percent of students meet or exceed English Language Arts standards in 11th grade Fewer than 5 percent of students meet or exceed standards in 11th grade math at The Academy of Engineering ampamp Green Technologies In fact all of the neighborhood schools in Hartford with enough data to report score below 5 percent in meeting math standards Principal Michael Maziarz admits the school has a long way to go in raising its math and reading scores He hopes that an improvement in school climate a willingness to adapt classroom instruction to fit students8217 needs more cultural competency training and handson workforce experience will be a recipe for success 8220I have kids that are easily getting into college and I have kids coming into high school reading at a fourthgrade level You have to give them the option and say I know you have this intelligence in you and it8217s on us then to provide the options to provide multiple means of expression8221 Maziarz said A big focus for Maziarz is making sure that students feel a sense of ownership of the school Although the students have uniforms every year seniors make Tshirts specifically for their class and wear them to school to celebrate their last year According to one teacher Maziarz is also very involved with students on a personal level820282128202he gives out his cell phone number 8220I say to our teachers all the time it8217s not enough to like our kids Our kids need to be loved and they need to feel that and once they feel that and they feel safe it8217s amazing what our kids are capable of doing8221 Maziarz said Walking the halls of the school it8217s clear that Maziarz isn8217t the type of authority figure whom students avoid Students either simply smiled and said 8220Hey8221 as they passed him or approached him to ask questions about classes Part of what has worked well for teachers is having students lay out what kind of classroom environment they need in order to be successful That often lets teachers know things about a student8217s personal life like what a student8217s family environment is like 8220Kids say this is the environment I work best in and that helped teachers because I didn8217t know this was going on at home or that this was your cultural background or that this was what you8217re feeling and if I don8217t have that open conversation we8217re never going to break down those barriers8221 he said Regular cultural competency training is also very important to the effort to build a safe environment for students at the school The principals at the neighborhood schools I visited820282128202The Academy of Engineering ampamp Green Technologies James H Naylor School and Parkville Community School820282128202were all focused on making sure cultural competency training was an important part of professional development as an ongoing part of their training as teachers The principals were also dedicated to differentiated instruction for students who have unique educational needs whether they8217re English Language Learners they have a learning disability or they struggle with schoolwork for any reason Parkville Community School has a room full of bins identifying instruction materials for different grade levels that teachers can pick from at any time to match students8217 needs Teachers at James H Naylor were learning to accept that some students should present what they know through their verbal skills while others are more likely to express what they know through an essay 8220If the written form is not their forte we8217re going to target that skill and develop that skill but we8217re not going to shut down the other one8221 said Guillaume Gendre principal of the James H Naylor School 8220There8217s more noise in the classroom but guess what There8217s more learning too8221 Despite these principals8217 efforts to make neighborhood schools as desirable as magnet schools they still have challenges Most of them are unable to hire more teachers and struggling to prepare for major changes in student population from year to year depending on how many children are accepted into magnet schools in Hartford For example Gendre has only has two and a half teachers assigned to help all of the school8217s English language learner students He also needs more teachers in general because parents will complain that 31 thirdgrade students are being taught a single teacher820282128202but he can8217t easily hire them Parkville Community School Principal Dirk Olmstead also needs more more tutors for the school8217s afterschool program The school once had a Boys and Girls Club820282128202but the organization lost its grant and the school would have had to pay 10000 a month to receive the same service After different efforts to provide an afterschool program failed Olmstead decided to hire retired teachers to tutor students Unlike some magnet schools such as Classical Magnet School which offers afterschool enrichment programs the school has only a couple afterschool activities such as chorus and student council Parkville Community School only has 8 percent white and Asian or 8220reduced isolation8221 students Things are harder for smaller neighborhood schools Olmstead said 8220What is frustrating for smaller schools is that every kid walks in with a dollar sign on his forehead and for these smaller schools they have a hard time offering support because they don8217t have the money8221 Olmstead said 8220For us we8217re at 538 and if you8217re over 300 kids you can have those different services but if you8217re under that you have to receive some help from other people We8217re selfsufficient where we can make strategic choices8221 James H Naylor and Parkville Community School are either above or near the Hartford average of 241 percent of students meeting and exceeding ELA standards in third grade Parkville is making progress on math and reading with 66 percent of students who took the Northwest Evaluation Association Measure of Academic Progress test making 100 percent growth from fall 2014 to spring 2015 in math and 67 percent of students making said progress on English Language Arts However all but one Hartford school including magnets and neighborhood schools had scores above the state average of 53 percent Magnet schools dominated the list of schools scoring higher and neighborhood schools dominated the lower scoresThe numbers were similar for fourth grade ELA standards When looking at surrounding towns only 142 percent of Hartford students met or exceeded math standards compared to 547 percent of West Hartford students 67 percent of Glastonbury students and 639 percent of Farmington students though it did outperform New Haven Bridgeport and Waterbury Its scores for ELA standards painted a similar picture Education advocates say that funding issues are getting in the way of a quality education for not just Hartford students but Connecticut students in general 8220One of the dilemmas that Connecticut has that creates this inequitable funding and 8216More money please8221 dilemma is 169 towns in the size of a state where half of it is a ranch in Oklahoma so you8217ve got 169 towns that are vying for some kind of equity and some of those towns are extraordinary wealthy8221 Douglas said 8220Some of them are the wealthiest towns in the United States and then right next to them you have some of the poorest cities in the United States8221 The perception that neighborhood schools open choice suburban schools and magnet schools have different resources and quality of education persists A October 2014 report that was conducted during a transition between superintendents asked whether all students have access to high quality facilities whether a child attends a magnet a choice school or a neighborhood school Only 185 percent of magnet school employees agreed or strongly agreed The percentage of neighborhood school employees who agreed was even lower at 10 percent There were high rates of disagreement among both parents and school employees that quality of education was the same regardless of school Douglas said he would like to see the state and city acknowledge that the root of the education issue is a broader economic problem that needs to be addressed through revitalization efforts that would bring a more racially and economically diverse population into the city to spend money and send their children to Hartford schools He said that a shortterm emergency plan would be to send more Hartford children to the suburbs while revitalizing the city and desegregating the region rather than attempting to desegregate schools one by one 8220On any given day in West Hartford the restaurants are open and people are in the streets Three miles down in Hartford it8217s dark and nobody is in the streets8221 Douglas said Tegeler who has worked on creating fair housing policies in Connecticut said that there are three major things the state needs to do to ensure the city itself becomes desegregated 8220Three miles down in Hartford it8217s dark and nobody is in the streets8221 8220It would be easy to help lowincome families with children move out to low poverty highperforming school districts sort of like the Open Choice Program for housing by empowering families to move to school districts so they8217re actually living in the district where their kids are going to school Connecticut has a pretty weak housing mobility program8221 Tegeler explained Teleger said the state8217s lowincome tax housing program is very segregated and is in need of reform if it is going to provide better access for lowincome families to move into areas with better school districts He said the state also needs to crack down on exclusionary zoning 8220We have appeals process here in Connecticut that lets developers appeal denial of affordable housing but its not as strong as it coud be and the state has to take back some of the powers given to municipalities for zoning and land use and require certain affordable housing targets for suburbs8221 Tegeler said Colin Gordon an expert on discriminatory housing policies and a history professor at the University of Iowa says that although most people don8217t think current zoning policies are explicitly or even intentionally racist that8217s the origin 8220If you chop up a metropolitan area as is the case in St Louis into little municipal fragments and then you let each one of them decide the rules for local development such as lot size house size etc8230 you can8217t help but in meticulous and damaging and dysfunctional ways sort your local population by income8221 he said 8220Thirty and 40 years ago that was much more explicitly seen as a sort of racial project when municipalities were starting to zoneamp1608230 Engineers trying to solve a problem would say 8216Well you know we no longer have access to explicit forms of restriction but if you say every lot has to be 30000 feet and every house needs to be this big you8217ll keep them out82178221 Jeron Campbell data and accountability officer at the Hartford Open Choice Program said he hopes that the city will naturally integrate820282128202but it will take a long time to do so 8220It8217s funny because you used to have policies and laws that supported separatism but we don8217t have laws to force people to come together Somehow that8217s the wrong thing to do8221 Campbell said 8220It seems like it8217s going to take a long time for this country to really heal You just look at so many different things that go on that are legal and in every major area you find huge racerelated issues access to quality health care access to quality housing access to quality education insurance rates hiring rates wealth opportunities and attainment the largest single factor continues to be race8221 | HARTFORD/PROPN 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<p>Mexico City.</p>
<p>When we last left leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), recently robbed of the Mexican presidency by the usual fraud, he was eyeball to eyeball in the great Zocalo plaza of Mexico City where his supporters had been camped out since the July 2 election, with Vicente Fox, the former President of Coca Cola Mexico and the outgoing president of this very polarized republic staring down his throat.</p>
<p>At the core of their discord was who would declaim the time-honored “Grito” of Independence this past September 15, the eve of the 196th anniversary of the beginning of Mexico’s war to free itself from the Spanish Crown and the maximum patriotic moment in this nation’s year. By imperial fiat, the Grito is the property of the sitting president who installed on a balcony of the National Palace makes a big show of the rebel yell uttered by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the defrocked priest of Dolores Hidalgo in Fox’s home state of Guanajuato, who on September 16, 1810 (the time of day is disputed) had clanged the church bells to summon the black and brown underclass of the region to rise up against the “Gachupin” (Spanish but literally “spur-rider”) owned hacienda of Dolores. “Viva Mexico!” the excommunicated priest and father of many children, harangued the seething crowd, declaring the nation’s independence from the Crown, “let’s go string up some Gachupines.”</p>
<p>Later, Hidalgo, who was driven by his commitment to end slavery in what the Spanish Empire called New Spain, would lead an unarmed army of 100,000 people on Mexico City, was routed by the Spur-riders, fled north and was eventually captured, put before a firing squad, then beheaded.</p>
<p>To AMLO, a student of history, whose people had been occupying this Tienanmen-sized plaza for seven weeks, Hidalgo’s yell was far more appropriate to his rebel congregation than to a Fox who has often seemed more of a viceroy of a colonized land than the democratically-elected president of a questionably democratic republic. Seven weeks before, AMLO let it be known that his people were not abandoning the Zocalo for Vicente Fox’s Grito. The drumbeat of confrontation had been thrumming ever since.</p>
<p>Morning after morning, Fox’s press secretary Ruben Aguilar had insisted that the President would fulfill his obligations to protocol and pronounce the Grito from the usual balcony. The Presidential balcony was prepared, presidential bunting draped over the grillwork, the traditional bell which Fox would ring to proclaim independence hung, and the dimensions of the overhang measured for the installation of bullet-proof glass panels.</p>
<p>Thousands of members of the elite presidential military unit the Estado Mayor, and the militarized police (PFP) were snuck into the block-long National Palace through the back door backed up by light tanks, water canons, and portable metal barriers the Fox government had deployed to surround congress in the president’s foiled-by-AMLO attempt to deliver his State of the Union address this past September 1.</p>
<p>On Wednesday morning, about 60 hours before the Fox was to perch on the presidential balcony, the barriers, manned by the PFP robocops, were installed in front of the National Palace about 50 yards from the tent in which Lopez Obrador slept each night. Bands of AMLO’s supporters immediately set up camp in the no-man’s land between and there was light scrimmaging ­ a bottle or two tossed ­ all the morning. One persistent rumor had an assassination team emerging from the two subway stop exits immediately to the left and right of AMLO’s tent. By now, word was flying that the PFP would soon try to clear the Zocalo to sanitize it in advance of Fox’s Grito.</p>
<p>Lopez Obrador’s troops are sworn to non-violent resistance and in a maneuver worthy of Martin Luther King, AMLO’s encampments out on the Paseo De Reforma avenue broke down their tents and re-installed them on all the access corners to the great square to thwart federal police attack. By midnight Wednesday-Thursday, Fox and AMLO remained nose to nose and an eyeball apart.</p>
<p>I sprang out of bed around 4:30 Thursday morning. A siren wailed incessantly down a nearby street. The flopflop of the helicopter hovering over the old quarter was unmistakable. What sounded like the rumbling of many heavy trucks ­ military transports ­ bottomed the mix. I turned to the radio for early morning reports of troop movement.</p>
<p>But when dawn broke, the streets were not under siege. The morning vendors set up shop on the sidewalks and the encampments began to hum. Some sort of rapprochements was in the wind.</p>
<p>By mid-morning Thursday, the Senate, meeting in its own palace a few blocks west, stepped into the fray and tried to separate the combatants. Led by Fox’s own party ­ in fact by his former Interior Secretary and personal favorite as successor Santiago Creel ­ voted unanimously to “exhort” the Fox to go do his Grito someplace else in order to avoid confrontation and bring shame upon the office of the Presidency. One strategy advanced by Lopez Obrador’s supporters, if indeed they managed to stay in the Zocalo for Fox’s performance, was to turn their backs on the President, drop their pantalones, and mass moon the leader.</p>
<p>By Siesta time (4 PM), Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal summoned reporters to inform the nation that President Fox had blinked ­ he would deliver his Grito from Padre Hidalgo’s hometown in far-off Dolores, deep in Fox country.</p>
<p>Two weeks after AMLO’s congressional delegation prevented Vicente Fox from presenting his final Informe to the nation, the growing civil resistance had sent him packing to another palace, cracked comedienne Jesusa Rodriguez, the mc of AMLO’s nightly “informative assemblies”, “the Palacio of Hierro”, a high end department store, so that first lady Martita could get in a little shopping.</p>
<p>The fiesta began immediately. By Thursday nightfall, the walls of the Zocalo were blazing million-volt replicas of Hidalgo, his bell, the Mexican eagle, the national colors, as platoons of Independence Day junk vendors moved in hawking their plastic “coronetas” and pestilent “espuma”, a foul foam with which kids blast each other ­ and everyone else in the vicinity ­ at these annual celebrations of Mexican schlock.</p>
<p>The Zocalo floor, now stripped of tents after 49 days of civil resistance in preparation for AMLO’s Grito and the National Democratic Convention (CND) to be convened the next day, was filled with joyous knots of supporters, many with their CND delegate badges hanging proudly around their necks. Grinning, big-bellied farmers from Sinaloa mowed down the roasted ears of the new corn, the elotes ­ the first fruit of the season – offered by the Indian women who had set up their grills all over the square. Soon, after the Convention, the men from Sinaloa would be heading home for the first time since AMLO had called them to the Zocalo in July.</p>
<p>At his Friday morning press conference, Ruben Aguilar lied that his boss was just being “prudent” in eschewing the bout with AMLO in the Zocalo. Intelligence reports, he sneered brightly, had revealed that there were “violent groups” inside AMLO’s umbrella who were sworn “to kill civilians” if Fox had gone to the plaza.</p>
<p>Lopez Obrador’s last informative assemblies (this “Cronista” attended all 49 of them) were about as close to nostalgia as the straight-ahead AMLO ever gets. These had been historic days, he marveled. His people had lived under a hard rain, hardball-sized hail, and a deluge of racist abuse from the right wing PAN and its odious candidate Felipe Calderon who had been awarded the cooked election.</p>
<p>But flowers had bloomed from the peoples’ outrage. There were two weddings in the camps in the last days and a christening in the Chiapas tent over which Don Samuel Ruiz, the sainted bishop emeritus of San Cristobal presided. I would bet that nine months from now a lot of little “Andrea Manuelas” and “Andres Manuels” are going to be christened too.</p>
<p>Art had flourished in the tents. Poets and Ska bands and Nueva Trova singers crowded the stages and a group of 30 Jarocha musicians from Veracruz and the Huasteca strolled the seven-mile skein of the camps each night, their fiddles flying. Every evening for weeks, an old geezer like me had set up his easel by the side of the stage from which AMLO spoke and painted this mural-sized canvas of a huge fist wrapped in the Mexican colors emerging from the crowd which he drew as if the people were kernels of corn.</p>
<p>Each night, AMLO would remind the faithful that they were making history out here and that one day down the years they would tell their children and grandchildren about having been in the camps and they would be considered heroes of the republic in their own homes. This movement that had begun under the banner of “The Poor First!” and which had been germinating for years as the Fox government came down hard on Lopez Obrador with everything it had, had metastasized into a full-scale civic insurrection in the weeks since the election had been stolen July 2, peaceful civil resistance that rattled the nation’s rotting institutions, most prominently the judiciary and the electoral authority. Now Lopez Obrador was calling for a plebiscite to call a constitutional convention that would write a new Mexican magna carta, the re-founding of the republic. This was what the National Democratic Convention was all about – that and ratifying AMLO as the legitimate president of Mexico.</p>
<p>Night after night I had gone to the assemblies, chewing the revolutionary fat. I felt privileged to be there, a tall, bearded white guy in a kaffia and a beret in a sea of brown faces. After the last assembly, everyone in my part of the crowd turned and shook their neighbor’s hand like they do at the end of the Mass.</p>
<p>“La Noche Mexicana” (The Mexican Night) bookends the Grito. It’s the night when Mexicans put on those floppy, silly sombreros and Speedy Gonzalez serapes and serenade the moon. It is supreme, unabashed kitsch but this year the bash in the Zocalo had a distinct feel. In between the strands of ranchero singers who followed one another on the big screen above the stage, there was this steady roar of “Obrador! Obrador!” – or else the gracious chant that had captured the throat here in the last days of the assemblies and encampments: “it is an honor to be with Lopez Obrador.”</p>
<p>Andres Manuel was keeping a low profile. In fact, he had ceded the Grito to trusted colleague and successor as Mayor of Mexico City, Alejandro Encinas in tandem with new senator Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, lead mother of the Mothers of the Disappeared whose own son had been taken by the government during the guerrilla wars of the 1970s.</p>
<p>The roly-poly, one-time Communist mayor and the bird-like 76 year-old Ibarra shouted the Grito and rang them bells and there were many “Vivas!” and beneath them all, there was always this rumble. Obrador! Obrador! About 20 minutes of dazzling fireworks followed, fingers ol light dripping down on the throng with snappy booms and after each burst, there it was again. Obrador! Obrador!</p>
<p>AMLO had appeared briefly on stage for the ritual and then ducked down into the sealed-off subway and left the party to spend a first night with his sons in their small apartment down near the university and to prepare for the National Democratic Convention the next day. As the Zocalo emptied out into the darkened side streets of my beloved barrio, each became a tunnel of sound. Obrador! Obrador!</p>
<p>Unwilling to alienate the Generals and Admirals AMLO knows he will need down the line to refound the republic, Lopez Obrador urged celebrants and supporters to abandon the Zocalo before dawn on Saturday so that the Mexican military might display its might in a Soviet-style pageant of hand-me-down tanks and other menacing vehicles, goose-stepping troops, lightly salted with historical regiments like the ersatz “Zapapuaxlas”, the Indians who drove off the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1864. All of a sudden, the Paseo de Reforma, traffic-less and smog-free for seven weeks of encampments, was clotted with military vehicles poisoning the Mexico City air. It was back to business as usual.</p>
<p>Even before the final convoy had rolled out of the Zocalo, AMLO’s supporters had rushed in, seized the flagpole, and flashed signs that Fox was a traitor to democracy and Calderon a Usurper.</p>
<p>The National Democratic Convention was billed as the next stage in the civil resistance that is rolling across Mexico. Actually, the CND was less of a Convention than it was a stand-up march. In the weeks after July 2, when public ardor was at its zenith, AMLO had orchestrated successive 1.2 million and 2.1 million (police estimates) marches, the largest political demonstrations in the nation’s history, and he needed to top a million on September 16. He came close ­ a million delegates had signed up but the commitment of many was tested by high holiday bus fares and the first corn coming in out in the countryside and perhaps only half that number actually showed up. Nonetheless, the Zocalo and the surrounding streets of the Centro were wall to wall with delegates ­ but the numbers did not spill out of the old quarter into the city as in the gargantuan assemblies of July 16 and 30.</p>
<p>As is mandatory at such peoples’ conclaves, the CND did not commence at the appointed hour. An hour went by and breathing room on the Zocalo grew scarce and the masses restless. Slightly after 4 PM, the skies broke open and a cold, drenching deluge cascaded down upon AMLO’s people. The plastic cape venders spread out through the crowd but plastic didn’t get it. My umbrella, battered after 49 days of downpour at the informative assemblies, drooped at the corners and when Martin Miranda, an old guy, huddled under it big drops kept sloshing off the busted spokes and splattering his nose. Martin laughed and shouted about how it rains and it rains and the people do not move (“llueve y llueve y el pueblo no se mueve!”) As usual, AMLO’s people stood firm in the midst of the biblical weather, thundering back at Tlaloc, the rain god, whose bloody sacrificial mound is being refurbished on one corner of the Zocalo.</p>
<p>Many years before, in August 1994, the Zapatistas’ had invited 6000 members of civil society into the bowels of the Lacandon jungle for a National Democratic Convention and then as now, Chaac, the Mayan incarnation of Tlaloc, had let us have it with a monumental “tormenton” that enveloped the mostly-urban conventioneers in a sea of Jurassic mud.</p>
<p>The Convention itself was more cut and dried than the weather when it finally kicked in around 6 PM, the delay being chalked up to AMLO who was putting the final touches on his acceptance speech. Much like the Zapatistas’ historic 1994 CND, the convention givers set the agenda. There had been intense pre-discussions of the salient proposals that AMLO had proposed ­ the naming of Lopez Obrador as the legitimate president of Mexico, the refusal to be governed by the usurper Calderon, and the preparation for a new constriction, inside AMLO’s orbit – the camps and the city he had governed for six years and a few strongholds on the periphery. But overwhelmingly, his people came prepared to vote the whole enchilada up without much discussion.</p>
<p>Unity was the buzzword and dissonance pretty much limited to should AMLO be inaugurated on November 20th, the anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican revolution in 1910 or on December 1st when Calderon the Usurper was scheduled to be imposed by congress. When Lopez Obrador asked for hands an intense shouting march broke out. “20!” yelled half the masses, “Diciembre!” screamed the other half ­ in the end November 20 prevailed because on December 1 AMLO had other plans to prevent the investiture of Felipe Calderon,</p>
<p>A blue-ribbon commission was selected to investigate the writing of a plebiscite that would be the basis of the calling of a constitutional convention that would re-write Mexico’s magna carta and lead to the refounding of the republic ­ Lopez Obrador was dead serious about this history. The basis for agreement was “Effective Suffrage! No to the Imposition!” the renovation of Mexico’s rotting institutions, an end to the appalling poverty in which 70 million Mexicans barely subsist, and the defense of the nation’s strategic reserves, petroleum, and electricity generation from the neo-liberal scourge.</p>
<p>The Convention came at a critical moment in this on-going battle to save Mexico’s soul. Now AMLO’s people were being dispersed back to where they came from. Could these enormously focused energies be sustained back home? The key was “chamba” (work), something for AMLO’s people to do to make his crusade felt every day out there in the country. A day to defend Mexico’s oil industry from privatization was set for September 27. A whole week in October was dedicated to blasting corruption. AMLO’s inauguration in November would come 10 days before Armageddon, December 1, Calderon’s coronation. In the meantime, the legitimate President of Mexico by popular acclaim, whose government would be based in the capital but would be an “itinerant” one as AMLO wends his way from state to state and municipality to municipality, to revisit the country that he is certain that he won last July 2.</p>
<p>AMLO’s acceptance speech rang with defiance, filled with hypnotically cadenced repetitive stanzas of what needed to change in Mexico ­ it was not unlike one of Marcos’s serial list poems ­ but by that time I was listening to it on the one radio station that ever covers these things, drying out and finishing up packing. Early the next morning, I would fly to Seattle and Sasha and I would begin our lives together finally. For this writer, much as for AMLO, a new stage of struggle was about to unfold.</p>
<p>This is JOHN ROSS’s final electoral chronicle. The Blindman and his blushing bride Sasha Crow (they met human shielding in Baghdad) will be honeymooning for the next few weeks in Turkey and Greece. Ross’s ZAPATISTAS! Making Another World Possible ­ Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2006 will be published in October and the author will be traveling the Left Coast through December. These dispatches will continue at ten-day intervals.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | The Final Chapter in Mexico (for Now) | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/09/20/the-final-chapter-in-mexico-for-now/ | 2006-09-20 | 4left
| 3,067 | Mexico City When we last left leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador AMLO recently robbed of the Mexican presidency by the usual fraud he was eyeball to eyeball in the great Zocalo plaza of Mexico City where his supporters had been camped out since the July 2 election with Vicente Fox the former President of Coca Cola Mexico and the outgoing president of this very polarized republic staring down his throat At the core of their discord was who would declaim the timehonored 8220Grito8221 of Independence this past September 15 the eve of the 196th anniversary of the beginning of Mexico8217s war to free itself from the Spanish Crown and the maximum patriotic moment in this nation8217s year By imperial fiat the Grito is the property of the sitting president who installed on a balcony of the National Palace makes a big show of the rebel yell uttered by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla the defrocked priest of Dolores Hidalgo in Fox8217s home state of Guanajuato who on September 16 1810 the time of day is disputed had clanged the church bells to summon the black and brown underclass of the region to rise up against the 8220Gachupin8221 Spanish but literally 8220spurrider8221 owned hacienda of Dolores 8220Viva Mexico8221 the excommunicated priest and father of many children harangued the seething crowd declaring the nation8217s independence from the Crown 8220let8217s go string up some Gachupines8221 Later Hidalgo who was driven by his commitment to end slavery in what the Spanish Empire called New Spain would lead an unarmed army of 100000 people on Mexico City was routed by the Spurriders fled north and was eventually captured put before a firing squad then beheaded To AMLO a student of history whose people had been occupying this Tienanmensized plaza for seven weeks Hidalgo8217s yell was far more appropriate to his rebel congregation than to a Fox who has often seemed more of a viceroy of a colonized land than the democraticallyelected president of a questionably democratic republic Seven weeks before AMLO let it be known that his people were not abandoning the Zocalo for Vicente Fox8217s Grito The drumbeat of confrontation had been thrumming ever since Morning after morning Fox8217s press secretary Ruben Aguilar had insisted that the President would fulfill his obligations to protocol and pronounce the Grito from the usual balcony The Presidential balcony was prepared presidential bunting draped over the grillwork the traditional bell which Fox would ring to proclaim independence hung and the dimensions of the overhang measured for the installation of bulletproof glass panels Thousands of members of the elite presidential military unit the Estado Mayor and the militarized police PFP were snuck into the blocklong National Palace through the back door backed up by light tanks water canons and portable metal barriers the Fox government had deployed to surround congress in the president8217s foiledbyAMLO attempt to deliver his State of the Union address this past September 1 On Wednesday morning about 60 hours before the Fox was to perch on the presidential balcony the barriers manned by the PFP robocops were installed in front of the National Palace about 50 yards from the tent in which Lopez Obrador slept each night Bands of AMLO8217s supporters immediately set up camp in the noman8217s land between and there was light scrimmaging 173 a bottle or two tossed 173 all the morning One persistent rumor had an assassination team emerging from the two subway stop exits immediately to the left and right of AMLO8217s tent By now word was flying that the PFP would soon try to clear the Zocalo to sanitize it in advance of Fox8217s Grito Lopez Obrador8217s troops are sworn to nonviolent resistance and in a maneuver worthy of Martin Luther King AMLO8217s encampments out on the Paseo De Reforma avenue broke down their tents and reinstalled them on all the access corners to the great square to thwart federal police attack By midnight WednesdayThursday Fox and AMLO remained nose to nose and an eyeball apart I sprang out of bed around 430 Thursday morning A siren wailed incessantly down a nearby street The flopflop of the helicopter hovering over the old quarter was unmistakable What sounded like the rumbling of many heavy trucks 173 military transports 173 bottomed the mix I turned to the radio for early morning reports of troop movement But when dawn broke the streets were not under siege The morning vendors set up shop on the sidewalks and the encampments began to hum Some sort of rapprochements was in the wind By midmorning Thursday the Senate meeting in its own palace a few blocks west stepped into the fray and tried to separate the combatants Led by Fox8217s own party 173 in fact by his former Interior Secretary and personal favorite as successor Santiago Creel 173 voted unanimously to 8220exhort8221 the Fox to go do his Grito someplace else in order to avoid confrontation and bring shame upon the office of the Presidency One strategy advanced by Lopez Obrador8217s supporters if indeed they managed to stay in the Zocalo for Fox8217s performance was to turn their backs on the President drop their pantalones and mass moon the leader By Siesta time 4 PM Interior Secretary Carlos Abascal summoned reporters to inform the nation that President Fox had blinked 173 he would deliver his Grito from Padre Hidalgo8217s hometown in faroff Dolores deep in Fox country Two weeks after AMLO8217s congressional delegation prevented Vicente Fox from presenting his final Informe to the nation the growing civil resistance had sent him packing to another palace cracked comedienne Jesusa Rodriguez the mc of AMLO8217s nightly 8220informative assemblies8221 8220the Palacio of Hierro8221 a high end department store so that first lady Martita could get in a little shopping The fiesta began immediately By Thursday nightfall the walls of the Zocalo were blazing millionvolt replicas of Hidalgo his bell the Mexican eagle the national colors as platoons of Independence Day junk vendors moved in hawking their plastic 8220coronetas8221 and pestilent 8220espuma8221 a foul foam with which kids blast each other 173 and everyone else in the vicinity 173 at these annual celebrations of Mexican schlock The Zocalo floor now stripped of tents after 49 days of civil resistance in preparation for AMLO8217s Grito and the National Democratic Convention CND to be convened the next day was filled with joyous knots of supporters many with their CND delegate badges hanging proudly around their necks Grinning bigbellied farmers from Sinaloa mowed down the roasted ears of the new corn the elotes 173 the first fruit of the season 8211 offered by the Indian women who had set up their grills all over the square Soon after the Convention the men from Sinaloa would be heading home for the first time since AMLO had called them to the Zocalo in July At his Friday morning press conference Ruben Aguilar lied that his boss was just being 8220prudent8221 in eschewing the bout with AMLO in the Zocalo Intelligence reports he sneered brightly had revealed that there were 8220violent groups8221 inside AMLO8217s umbrella who were sworn 8220to kill civilians8221 if Fox had gone to the plaza Lopez Obrador8217s last informative assemblies this 8220Cronista8221 attended all 49 of them were about as close to nostalgia as the straightahead AMLO ever gets These had been historic days he marveled His people had lived under a hard rain hardballsized hail and a deluge of racist abuse from the right wing PAN and its odious candidate Felipe Calderon who had been awarded the cooked election But flowers had bloomed from the peoples8217 outrage There were two weddings in the camps in the last days and a christening in the Chiapas tent over which Don Samuel Ruiz the sainted bishop emeritus of San Cristobal presided I would bet that nine months from now a lot of little 8220Andrea Manuelas8221 and 8220Andres Manuels8221 are going to be christened too Art had flourished in the tents Poets and Ska bands and Nueva Trova singers crowded the stages and a group of 30 Jarocha musicians from Veracruz and the Huasteca strolled the sevenmile skein of the camps each night their fiddles flying Every evening for weeks an old geezer like me had set up his easel by the side of the stage from which AMLO spoke and painted this muralsized canvas of a huge fist wrapped in the Mexican colors emerging from the crowd which he drew as if the people were kernels of corn Each night AMLO would remind the faithful that they were making history out here and that one day down the years they would tell their children and grandchildren about having been in the camps and they would be considered heroes of the republic in their own homes This movement that had begun under the banner of 8220The Poor First8221 and which had been germinating for years as the Fox government came down hard on Lopez Obrador with everything it had had metastasized into a fullscale civic insurrection in the weeks since the election had been stolen July 2 peaceful civil resistance that rattled the nation8217s rotting institutions most prominently the judiciary and the electoral authority Now Lopez Obrador was calling for a plebiscite to call a constitutional convention that would write a new Mexican magna carta the refounding of the republic This was what the National Democratic Convention was all about 8211 that and ratifying AMLO as the legitimate president of Mexico Night after night I had gone to the assemblies chewing the revolutionary fat I felt privileged to be there a tall bearded white guy in a kaffia and a beret in a sea of brown faces After the last assembly everyone in my part of the crowd turned and shook their neighbor8217s hand like they do at the end of the Mass 8220La Noche Mexicana8221 The Mexican Night bookends the Grito It8217s the night when Mexicans put on those floppy silly sombreros and Speedy Gonzalez serapes and serenade the moon It is supreme unabashed kitsch but this year the bash in the Zocalo had a distinct feel In between the strands of ranchero singers who followed one another on the big screen above the stage there was this steady roar of 8220Obrador Obrador8221 8211 or else the gracious chant that had captured the throat here in the last days of the assemblies and encampments 8220it is an honor to be with Lopez Obrador8221 Andres Manuel was keeping a low profile In fact he had ceded the Grito to trusted colleague and successor as Mayor of Mexico City Alejandro Encinas in tandem with new senator Rosario Ibarra de Piedra lead mother of the Mothers of the Disappeared whose own son had been taken by the government during the guerrilla wars of the 1970s The rolypoly onetime Communist mayor and the birdlike 76 yearold Ibarra shouted the Grito and rang them bells and there were many 8220Vivas8221 and beneath them all there was always this rumble Obrador Obrador About 20 minutes of dazzling fireworks followed fingers ol light dripping down on the throng with snappy booms and after each burst there it was again Obrador Obrador AMLO had appeared briefly on stage for the ritual and then ducked down into the sealedoff subway and left the party to spend a first night with his sons in their small apartment down near the university and to prepare for the National Democratic Convention the next day As the Zocalo emptied out into the darkened side streets of my beloved barrio each became a tunnel of sound Obrador Obrador Unwilling to alienate the Generals and Admirals AMLO knows he will need down the line to refound the republic Lopez Obrador urged celebrants and supporters to abandon the Zocalo before dawn on Saturday so that the Mexican military might display its might in a Sovietstyle pageant of handmedown tanks and other menacing vehicles goosestepping troops lightly salted with historical regiments like the ersatz 8220Zapapuaxlas8221 the Indians who drove off the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1864 All of a sudden the Paseo de Reforma trafficless and smogfree for seven weeks of encampments was clotted with military vehicles poisoning the Mexico City air It was back to business as usual Even before the final convoy had rolled out of the Zocalo AMLO8217s supporters had rushed in seized the flagpole and flashed signs that Fox was a traitor to democracy and Calderon a Usurper The National Democratic Convention was billed as the next stage in the civil resistance that is rolling across Mexico Actually the CND was less of a Convention than it was a standup march In the weeks after July 2 when public ardor was at its zenith AMLO had orchestrated successive 12 million and 21 million police estimates marches the largest political demonstrations in the nation8217s history and he needed to top a million on September 16 He came close 173 a million delegates had signed up but the commitment of many was tested by high holiday bus fares and the first corn coming in out in the countryside and perhaps only half that number actually showed up Nonetheless the Zocalo and the surrounding streets of the Centro were wall to wall with delegates 173 but the numbers did not spill out of the old quarter into the city as in the gargantuan assemblies of July 16 and 30 As is mandatory at such peoples8217 conclaves the CND did not commence at the appointed hour An hour went by and breathing room on the Zocalo grew scarce and the masses restless Slightly after 4 PM the skies broke open and a cold drenching deluge cascaded down upon AMLO8217s people The plastic cape venders spread out through the crowd but plastic didn8217t get it My umbrella battered after 49 days of downpour at the informative assemblies drooped at the corners and when Martin Miranda an old guy huddled under it big drops kept sloshing off the busted spokes and splattering his nose Martin laughed and shouted about how it rains and it rains and the people do not move 8220llueve y llueve y el pueblo no se mueve8221 As usual AMLO8217s people stood firm in the midst of the biblical weather thundering back at Tlaloc the rain god whose bloody sacrificial mound is being refurbished on one corner of the Zocalo Many years before in August 1994 the Zapatistas8217 had invited 6000 members of civil society into the bowels of the Lacandon jungle for a National Democratic Convention and then as now Chaac the Mayan incarnation of Tlaloc had let us have it with a monumental 8220tormenton8221 that enveloped the mostlyurban conventioneers in a sea of Jurassic mud The Convention itself was more cut and dried than the weather when it finally kicked in around 6 PM the delay being chalked up to AMLO who was putting the final touches on his acceptance speech Much like the Zapatistas8217 historic 1994 CND the convention givers set the agenda There had been intense prediscussions of the salient proposals that AMLO had proposed 173 the naming of Lopez Obrador as the legitimate president of Mexico the refusal to be governed by the usurper Calderon and the preparation for a new constriction inside AMLO8217s orbit 8211 the camps and the city he had governed for six years and a few strongholds on the periphery But overwhelmingly his people came prepared to vote the whole enchilada up without much discussion Unity was the buzzword and dissonance pretty much limited to should AMLO be inaugurated on November 20th the anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican revolution in 1910 or on December 1st when Calderon the Usurper was scheduled to be imposed by congress When Lopez Obrador asked for hands an intense shouting march broke out 8220208221 yelled half the masses 8220Diciembre8221 screamed the other half 173 in the end November 20 prevailed because on December 1 AMLO had other plans to prevent the investiture of Felipe Calderon A blueribbon commission was selected to investigate the writing of a plebiscite that would be the basis of the calling of a constitutional convention that would rewrite Mexico8217s magna carta and lead to the refounding of the republic 173 Lopez Obrador was dead serious about this history The basis for agreement was 8220Effective Suffrage No to the Imposition8221 the renovation of Mexico8217s rotting institutions an end to the appalling poverty in which 70 million Mexicans barely subsist and the defense of the nation8217s strategic reserves petroleum and electricity generation from the neoliberal scourge The Convention came at a critical moment in this ongoing battle to save Mexico8217s soul Now AMLO8217s people were being dispersed back to where they came from Could these enormously focused energies be sustained back home The key was 8220chamba8221 work something for AMLO8217s people to do to make his crusade felt every day out there in the country A day to defend Mexico8217s oil industry from privatization was set for September 27 A whole week in October was dedicated to blasting corruption AMLO8217s inauguration in November would come 10 days before Armageddon December 1 Calderon8217s coronation In the meantime the legitimate President of Mexico by popular acclaim whose government would be based in the capital but would be an 8220itinerant8221 one as AMLO wends his way from state to state and municipality to municipality to revisit the country that he is certain that he won last July 2 AMLO8217s acceptance speech rang with defiance filled with hypnotically cadenced repetitive stanzas of what needed to change in Mexico 173 it was not unlike one of Marcos8217s serial list poems 173 but by that time I was listening to it on the one radio station that ever covers these things drying out and finishing up packing Early the next morning I would fly to Seattle and Sasha and I would begin our lives together finally For this writer much as for AMLO a new stage of struggle was about to unfold This is JOHN ROSS8217s final electoral chronicle The Blindman and his blushing bride Sasha Crow they met human shielding in Baghdad will be honeymooning for the next few weeks in Turkey and Greece Ross8217s ZAPATISTAS Making Another World Possible 173 Chronicles of Resistance 20002006 will be published in October and the author will be traveling the Left Coast through December These dispatches will continue at tenday intervals amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 | Mexico/PROPN City/PROPN When/SCONJ we/PRON last/VERB left/VERB leftist/ADJ Andres/PROPN Manuel/PROPN Lopez/PROPN Obrador/PROPN AMLO/PROPN recently/ADV robbed/VERB of/ADP the/DET Mexican/ADJ presidency/NOUN by/ADP the/DET usual/ADJ fraud/NOUN he/PRON was/AUX eyeball/NOUN to/ADP eyeball/NOUN in/ADP the/DET great/ADJ Zocalo/PROPN plaza/NOUN of/ADP Mexico/PROPN City/PROPN where/SCONJ his/PRON supporters/NOUN had/AUX been/AUX camped/VERB out/ADP since/SCONJ the/DET July/PROPN 2/NUM election/NOUN with/ADP Vicente/PROPN Fox/PROPN the/DET former/ADJ President/PROPN of/ADP Coca/PROPN Cola/PROPN Mexico/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET outgoing/ADJ president/NOUN of/ADP this/DET very/ADV 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Hidalgo/PROPN in/ADP Fox8217s/PROPN home/NOUN state/NOUN of/ADP Guanajuato/PROPN who/PRON on/ADP September/PROPN 16/NUM 1810/NUM the/DET time/NOUN of/ADP day/NOUN is/AUX disputed/VERB had/AUX clanged/VERB the/DET church/NOUN bells/NOUN to/PART summon/VERB the/DET black/ADJ and/CCONJ brown/ADJ underclass/NOUN of/ADP the/DET region/NOUN to/PART rise/VERB up/ADP against/ADP the/DET 8220Gachupin8221/NOUN Spanish/ADJ but/CCONJ literally/ADV 8220spurrider8221/NUM owned/VERB hacienda/NOUN of/ADP Dolores/PROPN 8220Viva/NUM Mexico8221/PROPN the/DET excommunicated/ADJ priest/NOUN and/CCONJ father/NOUN of/ADP many/ADJ children/NOUN harangued/VERB the/DET seething/VERB crowd/NOUN declaring/VERB the/DET nation8217s/ADJ independence/NOUN from/ADP the/DET Crown/PROPN 8220let8217s/PROPN go/VERB string/VERB up/ADP some/DET Gachupines8221/PROPN Later/ADV Hidalgo/PROPN who/PRON was/AUX driven/VERB by/ADP his/PRON commitment/NOUN to/PART end/VERB slavery/NOUN in/ADP what/PRON the/DET Spanish/PROPN Empire/PROPN called/VERB New/PROPN Spain/PROPN would/AUX lead/VERB an/DET unarmed/ADJ army/NOUN of/ADP 100000/NUM people/NOUN on/ADP Mexico/PROPN City/PROPN was/AUX routed/VERB by/ADP the/DET Spurriders/PROPN fled/VERB north/NOUN and/CCONJ was/AUX eventually/ADV captured/VERB put/VERB before/ADP a/DET firing/NOUN squad/NOUN then/ADV beheaded/VERB To/PART AMLO/VERB a/DET student/NOUN of/ADP history/NOUN whose/DET people/NOUN had/AUX been/AUX occupying/VERB this/DET Tienanmensized/VERB plaza/NOUN for/ADP seven/NUM weeks/NOUN Hidalgo8217s/PROPN yell/VERB was/AUX far/ADV more/ADV appropriate/ADJ to/ADP his/PRON rebel/NOUN congregation/NOUN than/ADP to/ADP a/DET Fox/PROPN who/PRON has/AUX often/ADV seemed/VERB more/ADJ of/ADP a/DET viceroy/NOUN of/ADP a/DET colonized/ADJ land/NOUN than/ADP the/DET democraticallyelected/VERB president/NOUN of/ADP a/DET questionably/ADV democratic/ADJ republic/NOUN Seven/NUM weeks/NOUN before/ADP AMLO/NOUN let/VERB it/PRON be/AUX known/VERB that/SCONJ his/PRON people/NOUN were/AUX not/PART abandoning/VERB the/DET Zocalo/PROPN for/ADP Vicente/PROPN Fox8217s/PROPN Grito/PROPN The/DET drumbeat/NOUN of/ADP confrontation/NOUN had/AUX been/AUX thrumming/VERB ever/ADV since/SCONJ Morning/PROPN after/ADP morning/NOUN Fox8217s/PROPN press/NOUN secretary/PROPN Ruben/PROPN Aguilar/PROPN had/AUX insisted/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET President/PROPN would/AUX fulfill/VERB his/PRON obligations/NOUN to/PART protocol/NOUN and/CCONJ pronounce/VERB the/DET Grito/PROPN from/ADP the/DET usual/ADJ balcony/NOUN The/DET Presidential/ADJ balcony/NOUN was/AUX prepared/ADJ presidential/ADJ bunting/NOUN draped/VERB over/ADP the/DET grillwork/NOUN the/DET traditional/ADJ bell/NOUN which/PRON Fox/PROPN would/AUX ring/VERB to/PART proclaim/VERB independence/NOUN hung/VERB and/CCONJ the/DET dimensions/NOUN of/ADP the/DET overhang/NOUN measured/VERB for/ADP the/DET installation/NOUN of/ADP bulletproof/ADJ glass/NOUN panels/NOUN Thousands/NOUN of/ADP members/NOUN of/ADP the/DET elite/ADJ presidential/ADJ military/ADJ unit/NOUN the/DET Estado/PROPN Mayor/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET militarized/ADJ police/NOUN PFP/PROPN were/AUX snuck/VERB into/ADP the/DET blocklong/NOUN National/PROPN Palace/PROPN through/ADP the/DET back/ADJ door/NOUN backed/VERB up/ADP by/ADP light/ADJ tanks/NOUN water/NOUN canons/NOUN and/CCONJ portable/ADJ metal/NOUN barriers/NOUN the/DET Fox/PROPN government/NOUN had/AUX deployed/VERB to/PART surround/VERB congress/PROPN in/ADP the/DET president8217s/NOUN foiledbyAMLO/NOUN attempt/NOUN to/PART deliver/VERB his/PRON State/PROPN of/ADP the/DET Union/PROPN address/NOUN this/DET past/ADJ September/PROPN 1/NUM On/ADP Wednesday/PROPN morning/NOUN about/ADV 60/NUM hours/NOUN before/SCONJ the/DET Fox/PROPN was/AUX to/PART perch/VERB on/ADP the/DET presidential/ADJ balcony/NOUN the/DET barriers/NOUN manned/VERB by/ADP the/DET PFP/PROPN robocops/NOUN were/AUX installed/VERB in/ADP front/NOUN of/ADP the/DET National/PROPN Palace/PROPN about/ADV 50/NUM yards/NOUN from/ADP the/DET tent/NOUN in/ADP which/PRON Lopez/PROPN Obrador/PROPN slept/VERB each/DET night/NOUN Bands/NOUN of/ADP AMLO8217s/PROPN supporters/NOUN immediately/ADV set/VERB up/ADP camp/NOUN in/ADP the/DET noman8217s/PROPN land/NOUN between/ADP and/CCONJ there/PRON was/VERB light/NOUN scrimmaging/VERB 173/NUM a/DET bottle/NOUN or/CCONJ two/NUM tossed/VERB 173/NUM all/DET the/DET morning/NOUN One/NUM persistent/ADJ rumor/NOUN had/VERB an/DET assassination/NOUN team/NOUN emerging/VERB from/ADP the/DET two/NUM subway/NOUN stop/NOUN exits/VERB immediately/ADV to/ADP the/DET left/ADJ and/CCONJ right/NOUN of/ADP AMLO8217s/PROPN tent/NOUN By/ADP now/ADV word/NOUN was/AUX flying/VERB that/SCONJ the/DET PFP/PROPN would/AUX soon/ADV try/VERB to/PART clear/VERB the/DET Zocalo/PROPN to/PART sanitize/VERB it/PRON in/ADP advance/NOUN of/ADP Fox8217s/PROPN Grito/PROPN Lopez/PROPN Obrador8217s/NOUN troops/NOUN are/AUX sworn/VERB to/ADP nonviolent/ADJ resistance/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP a/DET maneuver/NOUN worthy/ADJ of/ADP Martin/PROPN Luther/PROPN King/PROPN AMLO8217s/NOUN encampments/VERB out/ADP on/ADP the/DET Paseo/PROPN De/PROPN Reforma/PROPN avenue/NOUN broke/VERB down/ADP their/PRON tents/NOUN and/CCONJ reinstalled/VERB them/PRON on/ADP all/DET the/DET access/NOUN corners/NOUN to/ADP the/DET great/ADJ square/NOUN to/PART thwart/VERB federal/ADJ police/NOUN attack/NOUN By/ADP midnight/NOUN WednesdayThursday/PROPN Fox/PROPN and/CCONJ AMLO/PROPN remained/VERB nose/NOUN to/ADP nose/NOUN and/CCONJ an/DET eyeball/NOUN apart/ADV I/PRON sprang/VERB out/ADP of/ADP bed/NOUN around/ADP 430/NUM Thursday/PROPN morning/NOUN A/DET siren/NOUN wailed/VERB incessantly/ADV down/ADP a/DET nearby/ADJ street/NOUN The/DET flopflop/NOUN of/ADP the/DET helicopter/NOUN hovering/VERB over/ADP the/DET old/ADJ quarter/NOUN was/AUX unmistakable/ADJ What/PRON sounded/VERB like/ADP the/DET rumbling/NOUN of/ADP many/ADJ heavy/ADJ trucks/NOUN 173/NUM military/NOUN transports/VERB 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Mexico8217s/PROPN soul/NOUN Now/ADV AMLO8217s/PROPN people/NOUN were/AUX being/AUX dispersed/VERB back/ADV to/ADP where/SCONJ they/PRON came/VERB from/ADP Could/AUX these/DET enormously/ADV focused/VERB energies/NOUN be/AUX sustained/VERB back/ADV home/ADV The/DET key/NOUN was/AUX 8220chamba8221/NUM work/NOUN something/PRON for/SCONJ AMLO8217s/PROPN people/NOUN to/PART do/VERB to/PART make/VERB his/PRON crusade/NOUN felt/VERB every/DET day/NOUN out/ADV there/ADV in/ADP the/DET country/NOUN A/DET day/NOUN to/PART defend/VERB Mexico8217s/ADJ oil/NOUN industry/NOUN from/ADP privatization/NOUN was/AUX set/VERB for/ADP September/PROPN 27/NUM A/DET whole/ADJ week/NOUN in/ADP October/PROPN was/AUX dedicated/VERB to/ADP blasting/VERB corruption/NOUN AMLO8217s/PROPN inauguration/NOUN in/ADP November/PROPN would/AUX come/VERB 10/NUM days/NOUN before/ADP Armageddon/PROPN December/PROPN 1/NUM Calderon8217s/ADJ coronation/NOUN In/ADP the/DET meantime/NOUN the/DET legitimate/ADJ President/PROPN of/ADP Mexico/PROPN by/ADP popular/ADJ acclaim/NOUN whose/DET government/NOUN would/AUX be/AUX based/VERB in/ADP the/DET capital/NOUN but/CCONJ would/AUX be/AUX an/DET 8220itinerant8221/ADJ one/NUM as/SCONJ AMLO/NOUN wends/VERB his/PRON way/NOUN from/ADP state/NOUN to/ADP state/NOUN and/CCONJ municipality/NOUN to/ADP municipality/NOUN to/PART revisit/VERB the/DET country/NOUN that/SCONJ he/PRON is/AUX certain/ADJ that/SCONJ he/PRON won/VERB last/ADJ July/PROPN 2/NUM AMLO8217s/ADJ acceptance/NOUN speech/NOUN rang/VERB with/ADP defiance/NOUN filled/VERB with/ADP hypnotically/ADV cadenced/VERB repetitive/ADJ stanzas/NOUN of/ADP what/PRON needed/VERB to/PART change/VERB in/ADP Mexico/PROPN 173/NUM it/PRON was/AUX not/PART unlike/ADP one/NUM of/ADP Marcos8217s/ADJ serial/ADJ list/NOUN poems/VERB 173/NUM but/CCONJ by/ADP that/DET time/NOUN I/PRON was/AUX listening/VERB to/ADP it/PRON on/ADP the/DET one/NUM radio/NOUN station/NOUN that/PRON ever/ADV covers/VERB these/DET things/NOUN drying/VERB out/ADP and/CCONJ finishing/VERB up/ADP packing/VERB Early/ADV the/DET next/ADJ morning/NOUN I/PRON would/AUX fly/VERB to/ADP Seattle/PROPN and/CCONJ Sasha/PROPN and/CCONJ I/PRON would/AUX begin/VERB our/PRON lives/NOUN together/ADV finally/ADV For/ADP this/DET writer/NOUN much/ADV as/ADP for/ADP AMLO/NOUN a/DET new/ADJ stage/NOUN of/ADP struggle/NOUN was/AUX about/ADJ to/PART unfold/VERB This/PRON is/AUX JOHN/PROPN ROSS8217s/PROPN final/ADJ electoral/ADJ chronicle/NOUN The/DET Blindman/PROPN and/CCONJ his/PRON blushing/NOUN bride/NOUN Sasha/PROPN Crow/PROPN they/PRON met/VERB human/ADJ shielding/NOUN in/ADP Baghdad/PROPN will/AUX be/AUX honeymooning/VERB for/ADP the/DET next/ADJ few/ADJ weeks/NOUN in/ADP Turkey/PROPN and/CCONJ Greece/PROPN Ross8217s/PROPN ZAPATISTAS/PROPN Making/VERB Another/DET World/PROPN Possible/PROPN 173/NUM Chronicles/NOUN of/ADP Resistance/PROPN 20002006/NUM will/AUX be/AUX published/VERB in/ADP October/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET author/NOUN will/AUX be/AUX traveling/VERB the/DET Left/PROPN Coast/PROPN through/ADP December/PROPN These/DET dispatches/NOUN will/AUX continue/VERB at/ADP tenday/NOUN intervals/NOUN amp160/PROPN amp160/PROPN amp160/PROPN amp160/PROPN |
<p>This article first appeared on <a href="//truthout.org" type="external">TruthOut</a>.</p>
<p>For decades now, Noam Chomsky has been widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive (linguist, philosopher, social and political critic) and the leading US dissident since the Vietnam War. Chomsky has published over 100 books and thousands of articles and essays, and is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees by some of the world's greatest academic institutions. His latest book, Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013, has just been published by Haymarket Books. On the occasion of the release of his last book, Chomsky gave an exclusive and wide-ranging interview to C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout, parts of which will also appear in The Sunday Eleftherotypia, a major national Greek newspaper.</p>
<p>C.J. Polychroniou: In a nationally televised address on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States, Obama announced to the American people and the rest of the world that the United States is going back to war in Iraq, this time against the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Is Iraq an unfinished business of the US invasion of 2003, or is the situation there merely the inevitable outcome of the strategic agenda of the Empire of Chaos?</p>
<p>Noam Chomsky: "Inevitable" is a strong word, but the appearance of ISIS and the general spread of radical jihadism is a fairly natural outgrowth of Washington wielding its sledgehammer at the fragile society of Iraq, which was barely hanging together after a decade of US-UK sanctions so onerous that the respected international diplomats who administered them via the UN both resigned in protest, charging that they were "genocidal."</p>
<p>One of the most respected mainstream US Middle East analysts, former CIA operative Graham Fuller, recently wrote that "I think the United States is one of the key creators of [ISIS]. The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."</p>
<p>He is correct, I think. The situation is a disaster for the US, but is a natural result of its invasion. One of the grim consequences of US-UK aggression was to inflame sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq to shreds, and have spread over the whole region, with awful consequences.</p>
<p>ISIS seems to represent a new jihadist movement, with greater inherent tendencies toward barbarity in the pursuit of its mission to re-establish an Islamic caliphate, yet apparently more able to recruit young radical Muslims from the heart of Europe, and even as far as Australia, than al-Qaeda itself. In your view, why has religious fanaticism become the driving force behind so many Muslim movements around the world?</p>
<p>Like Britain before it, the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism, which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control. When secular options are crushed, religious extremism often fills the vacuum. Furthermore, the primary US ally over the years, Saudi Arabia, is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state, which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist Wahabi/Salafi doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways, and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups, along with Gulf Emirates - all US allies.</p>
<p>It's worth noting that religious fanaticism is spreading in the West as well, as democracy erodes. The US is a striking example. There are not many countries in the world where the large majority of the population believes that God's hand guides evolution, and almost half of these think that the world was created a few thousand years ago. And as the Republican Party has become so extreme in serving wealth and corporate power that it cannot appeal to the public on its actual policies, it has been compelled to rely on these sectors as a voting base, giving them substantial influence on policy.</p>
<p>The US committed major war crimes in Iraq, but the acts of violence committed these day against civilians in the country, particularly against children and people from various ethnic and religious communities, is also simply appalling. Given that Iraq exhibited its longest stretch of political stability under Saddam Hussein, what didactic lessons should one draw from today's extremely messy situation in that part of the world?</p>
<p>The most elementary lesson is that it is wise to adhere to civilized norms and international law. The criminal violence of rogue states like the US and UK is not guaranteed to have catastrophic consequences, but we can hardly claim to be surprised when it does.</p>
<p>US attacks against ISIS's bases in Syria without the approval and collaboration of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad would constitute a violation of international law, claimed Damascus, Moscow and Tehran before the start of bombing. However, isn't it the case that the destruction of ISIS's forces in Syria would further strengthen the Syrian regime? Or is it that the Assad regime is afraid it will be next in line?</p>
<p>The Assad regime has been rather quiet. It has not, for example, appealed to the Security Council to act to terminate the attack, which is, undoubtedly, in violation of the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law (and if anyone cares, part of the "Supreme law of the land" in the US, under the Constitution). Assad's murderous regime doubtless can see what the rest of the world does: the US attack on ISIS weakens its main enemy.</p>
<p>In addition to some Western nations, Arab states have also offered military support to US attacks against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Is this a case of one form of Islamic fundamentalism (Saudi Arabia, for example) exhibiting fear for another form of Islamic fundamentalism (ISIS)?</p>
<p>As the New York Times accurately reported, the support is "tepid." The regimes surely fear ISIS, but it apparently continues to draw financial support from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and its ideological roots, as I mentioned, are in Saudi radical Islamic extremism, which has not abated.</p>
<p>Life in Gaza has returned to normalcy after Hamas and Israel agreed to a cease-fire. For how long?</p>
<p>I would hesitate to use the term "normalcy." The latest onslaught was even more vicious than its predecessors, and its impact is horrendous. The Egyptian military dictatorship, which is bitterly anti-Hamas, is also adding to the tragedy.</p>
<p>What will happen next? There has been a regular pattern since the first such agreement was reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005. It called for "a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people, continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods, and the transit of people, reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, [and the] re-opening of the airport in Gaza" that Israeli bombing had demolished.</p>
<p>Later agreements have been variants on the same themes, the current one as well. Each time, Israel has disregarded the agreements while Hamas has lived up to them (as Israel concedes) until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response, which gives Israel another opportunity to "mow the lawn," in its elegant phrase. The interim periods of "quiet" (meaning one-way quiet) allow Israel to carry forward its policies of taking over whatever it values in the West Bank, leaving Palestinians in dismembered cantons. All, of course, with crucial US support: military, economic, diplomatic and ideological, in framing the issues in accord with Israel's basic perspective.</p>
<p>That, indeed, was the purpose of Israel's "disengagement" from Gaza in 2005 - while remaining the occupying power, as recognized by the world (apart from Israel), even the US. The purpose was outlined candidly by the architect and chief negotiator of the "disengagement," Prime Minister Sharon's close associate, Dov Weissglass. He informed the press that "The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."</p>
<p>That pattern has been reiterated over and over, and it seems that it is being re-enacted today. However, some knowledgeable Israeli commentators have suggested that Israel might finally relax its torture of Gaza. Its illegal takeover of much of the West Bank (including Greater Jerusalem) has proceeded so far that Israeli authorities might anticipate that it is irreversible. And they now have a cooperative ally in the brutal military dictatorship in Egypt. Furthermore, the rise of ISIS and the general shattering of the region have improved the tacit alliance with the Saudi dictatorship and possibly others. Conceivably, Israel might depart from its extreme rejectionism, though for now, the signs do not look auspicious.</p>
<p>The latest Israeli carnage in Gaza stirred public sentiment around the world increasingly against the state of Israel. To what extent is the unconditional support rendered by the US toward Israel the outplay of domestic political factors, and under what conditions do you see a shift in Washington's policy toward Tel Aviv?</p>
<p>There are very powerful domestic factors. One illustration was given right in the midst of the latest Israeli assault. At one point, Israeli weapons seemed to be running low, and the US kindly supplied Israel with more advanced weapons, which enabled it to carry the onslaught further. These weapons were taken from the stocks that the US pre-positions in Israel, for eventual use by US forces, one of many indications of the very close military connections that go back many years. Intelligence interactions are even better established. Israel is also a favored location for US investors, not just in its advanced military economy. There is a huge voting bloc of evangelical Christians that is fanatically pro-Israel. There is also an effective Israel lobby, which is often pushing an open door - and which quickly backs down when it confronts US power, not surprisingly.</p>
<p>There are, however, shifts in popular sentiments, particularly among younger people, including the Jewish community. I experience that personally, as do others. Not long ago I literally had to have police protection when I spoke on these topics on college campuses, even my own university. That has greatly changed. By now Palestine solidarity is a major commitment on many campuses. Over time, these changes could combine with some other factors to lead to a change of US policy. It's happened before. But it will take hard, serious, dedicated work.</p>
<p>What are the aims and the objectives of US policy in Ukraine, other than stirring up trouble and then letting other forces do the dirty work?</p>
<p>Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, the US began seeking to extend its dominance, including NATO membership, over the regions released from Russian control - in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev, whose protests were dismissed. Ukraine is surely the next ripe fruit that the US hopes to pluck from the tree.</p>
<p>Doesn't Russia have a legitimate concern over Ukraine's potential alliance with NATO?</p>
<p>"The US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis."</p>
<p>A very legitimate concern, over the expansion of NATO generally. This is so obvious that it is even the topic of the lead article in the current issue of the major establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. He observes that the US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis.</p>
<p>Looking at the current situation in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Ukraine, the China Sea and even in parts of Europe, Zbigniew Brzezinski's recent comment on MSNBC that "We are facing a kind of dynamically spreading chaos in parts of the world" seems rather apropos. How much of this development is related to the decline of a global hegemon and to the balance of power that existed in the era of the Cold War?</p>
<p>US power reached its peak in 1945 and has been rather steadily declining ever since. There have been many changes in recent years. One is the rise of China as a major power. Another is Latin America's breaking free of imperial control (for the last century, US control) for the first time in 500 years. Related to these developments is the rise of the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, based in China and including India, Pakistan, the Central Asian states, and others.</p>
<p>But the US remains the dominant global power, by a large measure.</p>
<p>Last month marked the 69th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, yet nuclear disarmament remains a chimera. In a recent article of yours, you underscored the point that we are merely lucky to have avoided a nuclear war so far. Do you think, then, that it's a matter of time before nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorist groups?</p>
<p>"Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups: state terrorists."</p>
<p>Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups: state terrorists, the US primary among them. It's conceivable that weapons of mass destruction might also fall into the hands of "retail terrorists," greatly enhancing the enormous dangers to survival.</p>
<p>Since the late 1970s, most advanced economies have returned to predatory capitalism. As a result, income and wealth inequality have reached spectacular heights, poverty is becoming entrenched, unemployment is skyrocketing and standards of living are declining. In addition, "really existing capitalism" is causing mass environmental damage and destruction which, along with the population explosion, is leading us to an unmitigated global disaster. Can civilization survive really existing capitalism?</p>
<p>First, let me say that what I have in mind by the term "really existing capitalism" is what really exists and what is called "capitalism." The United States is the most important case, for obvious reasons. The term "capitalism" is vague enough to cover many possibilities. It is commonly used to refer to the US economic system, which receives substantial state intervention, ranging from creative innovation to the "too-big-to-fail" government insurance policy for banks, and which is highly monopolized, further limiting market reliance.</p>
<p>It's worth bearing in mind the scale of the departures of "really existing capitalism" from official "free-market capitalism." To mention only a few examples, in the past 20 years, the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, carrying forward the oligopolistic character of the US economy. This directly undermines markets, avoiding price wars through efforts at often-meaningless product differentiation through massive advertising, which is itself dedicated to undermining markets in the official sense, based on informed consumers making rational choices. Computers and the internet, along with other basic components of the IT revolution, were largely in the state sector (R&amp;D, subsidy, procurement, and other devices) for decades before they were handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to commercial markets and profit. The government insurance policy, which provides big banks with enormous advantages, has been roughly estimated by economists and the business press to be perhaps on the order of as much as $80 billion a year. However, a recent study by the International Monetary Fund indicates - to quote the business press - that perhaps "the largest US banks aren't really profitable at all," adding that "the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from US taxpayers." This is more evidence to support the judgment of Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times, that "an out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid."</p>
<p>In a way, all of this explains the economic devastation produced by contemporary capitalism that you underscore in your question above. Really existing capitalism — RECD for short (pronounced "wrecked") — is radically incompatible with democracy. It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it. Could functioning democracy make a difference? Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative, but I think there's some reason to think so. Really existing capitalism is a human creation, and can be changed or replaced.</p>
<p>Your latest book, Masters of Mankind, which came out in September by Haymarket Books, is a collection of essays written between 1969 and 2013. The world has changed a great deal during this period, so my question is this: Has your understanding of the world changed over time, and, if so, what have been the most catalytic events in altering your perspective about politics?</p>
<p>My understanding of the world has changed over time as I've learned a lot more about the past and ongoing events regularly add new critical materials.&#160;I can't really identify single events or people.&#160;It's cumulative, a constant process of re-thinking in the light of new information and more consideration of what I hadn't properly understood. However, hierarchical and arbitrary power remains at the core of politics in our world and the source of all evils.</p>
<p>In a recent exchange we had, I expressed my pessimism about the future of our species. You replied by saying "I share your conviction, but keep remembering the line I've occasionally quoted from the Analects, defining the 'exemplary person' — presumably the master himself: 'the one who keeps trying, though he knows there is no hope.'" Is the situation as dire as that?</p>
<p>We cannot know for sure. What we do know, however, is that if we succumb to despair we will help ensure that the worst will happen. And if we grasp the hopes that exist and work to make the best use of them, there might be a better world.</p>
<p>Not much of a choice.</p>
<p>C.J. Polychroniou is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout's Public Intellectual Project. He is the author of several books, and his articles have appeared in a variety of publications.</p> | Chomsky: U.S. Spawned a Fundamentalist Frankenstein in the Mideast | true | http://alternet.org/books/chomsky-us-spawned-fundamentalist-frankenstein-mideast | 2014-10-06 | 4left
| 3,067 | This article first appeared on TruthOut For decades now Noam Chomsky has been widely regarded as the most important intellectual alive linguist philosopher social and political critic and the leading US dissident since the Vietnam War Chomsky has published over 100 books and thousands of articles and essays and is the recipient of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees by some of the worlds greatest academic institutions His latest book Masters of Mankind Essays and Lectures 19692013 has just been published by Haymarket Books On the occasion of the release of his last book Chomsky gave an exclusive and wideranging interview to CJ Polychroniou for Truthout parts of which will also appear in The Sunday Eleftherotypia a major national Greek newspaper CJ Polychroniou In a nationally televised address on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States Obama announced to the American people and the rest of the world that the United States is going back to war in Iraq this time against the selfproclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS Is Iraq an unfinished business of the US invasion of 2003 or is the situation there merely the inevitable outcome of the strategic agenda of the Empire of Chaos Noam Chomsky Inevitable is a strong word but the appearance of ISIS and the general spread of radical jihadism is a fairly natural outgrowth of Washington wielding its sledgehammer at the fragile society of Iraq which was barely hanging together after a decade of USUK sanctions so onerous that the respected international diplomats who administered them via the UN both resigned in protest charging that they were genocidal One of the most respected mainstream US Middle East analysts former CIA operative Graham Fuller recently wrote that I think the United States is one of the key creators of ISIS The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS He is correct I think The situation is a disaster for the US but is a natural result of its invasion One of the grim consequences of USUK aggression was to inflame sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq to shreds and have spread over the whole region with awful consequences ISIS seems to represent a new jihadist movement with greater inherent tendencies toward barbarity in the pursuit of its mission to reestablish an Islamic caliphate yet apparently more able to recruit young radical Muslims from the heart of Europe and even as far as Australia than alQaeda itself In your view why has religious fanaticism become the driving force behind so many Muslim movements around the world Like Britain before it the US has tended to support radical Islam and to oppose secular nationalism which both imperial states have regarded as more threatening to their goals of domination and control When secular options are crushed religious extremism often fills the vacuum Furthermore the primary US ally over the years Saudi Arabia is the most radical Islamist state in the world and also a missionary state which uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist WahabiSalafi doctrines by establishing schools mosques and in other ways and has also been the primary source for the funding of radical Islamist groups along with Gulf Emirates all US allies Its worth noting that religious fanaticism is spreading in the West as well as democracy erodes The US is a striking example There are not many countries in the world where the large majority of the population believes that Gods hand guides evolution and almost half of these think that the world was created a few thousand years ago And as the Republican Party has become so extreme in serving wealth and corporate power that it cannot appeal to the public on its actual policies it has been compelled to rely on these sectors as a voting base giving them substantial influence on policy The US committed major war crimes in Iraq but the acts of violence committed these day against civilians in the country particularly against children and people from various ethnic and religious communities is also simply appalling Given that Iraq exhibited its longest stretch of political stability under Saddam Hussein what didactic lessons should one draw from todays extremely messy situation in that part of the world The most elementary lesson is that it is wise to adhere to civilized norms and international law The criminal violence of rogue states like the US and UK is not guaranteed to have catastrophic consequences but we can hardly claim to be surprised when it does US attacks against ISISs bases in Syria without the approval and collaboration of the Syrian regime of Bashar alAssad would constitute a violation of international law claimed Damascus Moscow and Tehran before the start of bombing However isnt it the case that the destruction of ISISs forces in Syria would further strengthen the Syrian regime Or is it that the Assad regime is afraid it will be next in line The Assad regime has been rather quiet It has not for example appealed to the Security Council to act to terminate the attack which is undoubtedly in violation of the UN Charter the foundation of modern international law and if anyone cares part of the Supreme law of the land in the US under the Constitution Assads murderous regime doubtless can see what the rest of the world does the US attack on ISIS weakens its main enemy In addition to some Western nations Arab states have also offered military support to US attacks against ISIS in Iraq and Syria Is this a case of one form of Islamic fundamentalism Saudi Arabia for example exhibiting fear for another form of Islamic fundamentalism ISIS As the New York Times accurately reported the support is tepid The regimes surely fear ISIS but it apparently continues to draw financial support from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and its ideological roots as I mentioned are in Saudi radical Islamic extremism which has not abated Life in Gaza has returned to normalcy after Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire For how long I would hesitate to use the term normalcy The latest onslaught was even more vicious than its predecessors and its impact is horrendous The Egyptian military dictatorship which is bitterly antiHamas is also adding to the tragedy What will happen next There has been a regular pattern since the first such agreement was reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005 It called for a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the importexport of goods and the transit of people reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza the building of a seaport in Gaza and the reopening of the airport in Gaza that Israeli bombing had demolished Later agreements have been variants on the same themes the current one as well Each time Israel has disregarded the agreements while Hamas has lived up to them as Israel concedes until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response which gives Israel another opportunity to mow the lawn in its elegant phrase The interim periods of quiet meaning oneway quiet allow Israel to carry forward its policies of taking over whatever it values in the West Bank leaving Palestinians in dismembered cantons All of course with crucial US support military economic diplomatic and ideological in framing the issues in accord with Israels basic perspective That indeed was the purpose of Israels disengagement from Gaza in 2005 while remaining the occupying power as recognized by the world apart from Israel even the US The purpose was outlined candidly by the architect and chief negotiator of the disengagement Prime Minister Sharons close associate Dov Weissglass He informed the press that The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion on the refugees the borders and Jerusalem Effectively this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails has been removed indefinitely from our agenda And all this with authority and permission All with a US presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress That pattern has been reiterated over and over and it seems that it is being reenacted today However some knowledgeable Israeli commentators have suggested that Israel might finally relax its torture of Gaza Its illegal takeover of much of the West Bank including Greater Jerusalem has proceeded so far that Israeli authorities might anticipate that it is irreversible And they now have a cooperative ally in the brutal military dictatorship in Egypt Furthermore the rise of ISIS and the general shattering of the region have improved the tacit alliance with the Saudi dictatorship and possibly others Conceivably Israel might depart from its extreme rejectionism though for now the signs do not look auspicious The latest Israeli carnage in Gaza stirred public sentiment around the world increasingly against the state of Israel To what extent is the unconditional support rendered by the US toward Israel the outplay of domestic political factors and under what conditions do you see a shift in Washingtons policy toward Tel Aviv There are very powerful domestic factors One illustration was given right in the midst of the latest Israeli assault At one point Israeli weapons seemed to be running low and the US kindly supplied Israel with more advanced weapons which enabled it to carry the onslaught further These weapons were taken from the stocks that the US prepositions in Israel for eventual use by US forces one of many indications of the very close military connections that go back many years Intelligence interactions are even better established Israel is also a favored location for US investors not just in its advanced military economy There is a huge voting bloc of evangelical Christians that is fanatically proIsrael There is also an effective Israel lobby which is often pushing an open door and which quickly backs down when it confronts US power not surprisingly There are however shifts in popular sentiments particularly among younger people including the Jewish community I experience that personally as do others Not long ago I literally had to have police protection when I spoke on these topics on college campuses even my own university That has greatly changed By now Palestine solidarity is a major commitment on many campuses Over time these changes could combine with some other factors to lead to a change of US policy Its happened before But it will take hard serious dedicated work What are the aims and the objectives of US policy in Ukraine other than stirring up trouble and then letting other forces do the dirty work Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the USSR the US began seeking to extend its dominance including NATO membership over the regions released from Russian control in violation of verbal promises to Gorbachev whose protests were dismissed Ukraine is surely the next ripe fruit that the US hopes to pluck from the tree Doesnt Russia have a legitimate concern over Ukraines potential alliance with NATO The US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis A very legitimate concern over the expansion of NATO generally This is so obvious that it is even the topic of the lead article in the current issue of the major establishment journal Foreign Affairs by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer He observes that the US is at the root of the current Ukraine crisis Looking at the current situation in Iraq Syria Libya Nigeria Ukraine the China Sea and even in parts of Europe Zbigniew Brzezinskis recent comment on MSNBC that We are facing a kind of dynamically spreading chaos in parts of the world seems rather apropos How much of this development is related to the decline of a global hegemon and to the balance of power that existed in the era of the Cold War US power reached its peak in 1945 and has been rather steadily declining ever since There have been many changes in recent years One is the rise of China as a major power Another is Latin Americas breaking free of imperial control for the last century US control for the first time in 500 years Related to these developments is the rise of the BRICS bloc Brazil Russia India China South Africa and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization based in China and including India Pakistan the Central Asian states and others But the US remains the dominant global power by a large measure Last month marked the 69th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan yet nuclear disarmament remains a chimera In a recent article of yours you underscored the point that we are merely lucky to have avoided a nuclear war so far Do you think then that its a matter of time before nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorist groups Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups state terrorists Nuclear weapons are already in the hands of terrorist groups state terrorists the US primary among them Its conceivable that weapons of mass destruction might also fall into the hands of retail terrorists greatly enhancing the enormous dangers to survival Since the late 1970s most advanced economies have returned to predatory capitalism As a result income and wealth inequality have reached spectacular heights poverty is becoming entrenched unemployment is skyrocketing and standards of living are declining In addition really existing capitalism is causing mass environmental damage and destruction which along with the population explosion is leading us to an unmitigated global disaster Can civilization survive really existing capitalism First let me say that what I have in mind by the term really existing capitalism is what really exists and what is called capitalism The United States is the most important case for obvious reasons The term capitalism is vague enough to cover many possibilities It is commonly used to refer to the US economic system which receives substantial state intervention ranging from creative innovation to the toobigtofail government insurance policy for banks and which is highly monopolized further limiting market reliance Its worth bearing in mind the scale of the departures of really existing capitalism from official freemarket capitalism To mention only a few examples in the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply carrying forward the oligopolistic character of the US economy This directly undermines markets avoiding price wars through efforts at oftenmeaningless product differentiation through massive advertising which is itself dedicated to undermining markets in the official sense based on informed consumers making rational choices Computers and the internet along with other basic components of the IT revolution were largely in the state sector RampampD subsidy procurement and other devices for decades before they were handed over to private enterprise for adaptation to commercial markets and profit The government insurance policy which provides big banks with enormous advantages has been roughly estimated by economists and the business press to be perhaps on the order of as much as 80 billion a year However a recent study by the International Monetary Fund indicates to quote the business press that perhaps the largest US banks arent really profitable at all adding that the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from US taxpayers This is more evidence to support the judgment of Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times that an outofcontrol financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid In a way all of this explains the economic devastation produced by contemporary capitalism that you underscore in your question above Really existing capitalism 8212 RECD for short pronounced wrecked 8212 is radically incompatible with democracy It seems to me unlikely that civilization can survive really existing capitalism and the sharply attenuated democracy that goes along with it Could functioning democracy make a difference Consideration of nonexistent systems can only be speculative but I think theres some reason to think so Really existing capitalism is a human creation and can be changed or replaced Your latest book Masters of Mankind which came out in September by Haymarket Books is a collection of essays written between 1969 and 2013 The world has changed a great deal during this period so my question is this Has your understanding of the world changed over time and if so what have been the most catalytic events in altering your perspective about politics My understanding of the world has changed over time as Ive learned a lot more about the past and ongoing events regularly add new critical materialsamp160I cant really identify single events or peopleamp160Its cumulative a constant process of rethinking in the light of new information and more consideration of what I hadnt properly understood However hierarchical and arbitrary power remains at the core of politics in our world and the source of all evils In a recent exchange we had I expressed my pessimism about the future of our species You replied by saying I share your conviction but keep remembering the line Ive occasionally quoted from the Analects defining the exemplary person 8212 presumably the master himself the one who keeps trying though he knows there is no hope Is the situation as dire as that We cannot know for sure What we do know however is that if we succumb to despair we will help ensure that the worst will happen And if we grasp the hopes that exist and work to make the best use of them there might be a better world Not much of a choice CJ Polychroniou is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthouts Public Intellectual Project He is the author of several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of publications | This/DET article/NOUN first/ADV appeared/VERB on/ADP TruthOut/PROPN For/ADP decades/NOUN now/ADV Noam/PROPN Chomsky/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX widely/ADV regarded/VERB as/ADP the/DET most/ADV important/ADJ intellectual/ADJ alive/ADJ linguist/ADJ philosopher/NOUN social/ADJ and/CCONJ political/ADJ critic/NOUN and/CCONJ the/DET leading/VERB US/PROPN dissident/NOUN since/SCONJ the/DET Vietnam/PROPN War/PROPN Chomsky/PROPN has/AUX published/VERB over/ADP 100/NUM books/NOUN and/CCONJ thousands/NOUN of/ADP articles/NOUN and/CCONJ essays/NOUN 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<p>Photo by Don Relyea | <a href="" type="internal">CC BY 2.0</a></p>
<p>Like it or not, in the 2018 midterms, the only way to defeat Republicans – and defy Donald Trump (or Mike Pence) — will be to vote for Democrats.</p>
<p>I don’t like it, and I don’t think anybody else should either.&#160; The Democratic Party is part of the problem.&#160; It would have to change beyond recognition to become even a small part of the solution.</p>
<p>But, at least in the short run, voting for a Democrat is the only way to ward off a pernicious, clear, present, and extremely grave danger.</p>
<p>The problem is not that there aren’t many Americans willing and eager to change the world radically for the better; there are plenty.&#160; It is that our debilitating duopoly party system holds sway over us.&#160; The idea that whatever is not Republican must be Democratic might as well be imprinted in our minds.</p>
<p>Those two parties have worked hard over many years to make this the case, and they are at it still.&#160; Corporate media do yeoman service in their behalf.</p>
<p>This is why a large segment of the anti-Trump “resistance,” perhaps the most anodyne political force ever to use that word, is, for all intents and purposes, a Democratic Party project, and why much of the rest either is or is about to be coopted into the Democratic fold.</p>
<p>Good or bad (or very bad), this is inevitable. &#160;Democratic victories in 2018 are not quite as inevitable because Democrats have a knack for losing with winning hands.&#160; But this time around, even more than in 2016, they would have to outdo themselves not to take control of both the Senate and the House.</p>
<p>Insofar as Democratic victories weaken the Republican Party, diminishing its hold over national and state institutions, then bring them on.&#160; A pox on them, though, insofar as they help build the Democratic Party in anything like its present form.</p>
<p>On a scale of one to ten, where one is as bad as it has ever been in American politics since the “segregation forever” days and ten is as good as it ever got, Republicans today are somewhere in the minus three to five range.&#160; Trump himself is incommensurable because he is too much all over the place; but all the places he goes are bad.</p>
<p>By that measure, Democrats get a two or three.&#160; That would be Democrats of the Clinton, Schumer, Pelosi type.&#160; Democrats of the Sanders, Warren variety are better than that, at least on domestic matters, and the jury is out on the new people who are reportedly preparing to run for office as Democrats in 2018. &#160;Some of them may even have a radical bone or two in their bodies; or one can at least hope.</p>
<p>The worst thing about Democrats is their eagerness to prepare the way in public opinion for stumbling into World War III. &#160;To be sure, their warmongering is only the most glaring reason to find them appalling.&#160; Their newly found love for the pillars of the national security state – especially the FBI and CIA – is another.&#160; And, of course, there are all the many ways that they and the GOP are of one mind in supporting a neoliberal world order with America calling the shots.</p>
<p>In short, they are bad news – in ways that drag down everyone in their fold.</p>
<p>But our duopoly party system has colonized American political culture so thoroughly that it has become almost unthinkable for opponents of Republicans not to be supporters of Democrats.&#160; And even when they are not – when, for example, they vote for the Greens – the thought that a vote for anybody but a Democrat is a vote for a Republican is inevitably on the mind; pathetically, in many circumstances, this is at least arguably the case.</p>
<p>Because the stakes are so high in 2018, and the alternatives so weak, few and far between, the duopoly’s hold over oppositional politics this time around is likely to be more than usually difficult to exorcise.&#160; There is no choice but to deal with it and, if need be, to acquiesce.</p>
<p>It should go without saying that the case against lesser evil voting is sound, and that it makes excellent sense, logically and (in most imaginable circumstances) politically, to oppose Republicans without supporting Democrats.&#160; Lesser evil voting elects evils; worse still, it promotes a race to the bottom.</p>
<p>But with an adolescent boy in an old man’s body controlling the nuclear arsenal and locked into a sick co-dependent relationship with a Republic Party comprised of loathsome troglodytes dead set on undoing most of the advances of the past hundred years, otherwise sound positions must sometimes be overridden.&#160; To fight back against Trump and all things Trumpian, one must do what one must do; the urgency could hardly be greater.</p>
<p>But then it is important to keep a clear head – by not disregarding the dangers inherent in using the only means available, in the short term, for holding the Trumpian menace at bay.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Despite all the brouhaha that corporate media present as gospel truth, it is still far from clear precisely what, if anything, “Russiagate” amounts to; only the hypocrisy inherent in the (always vague) charges is certain.</p>
<p>At least since the end of Word War II, the United States has been the most flagrant meddler in the affairs of other countries of all time.</p>
<p>When the Soviet Union was intact and strong, there wasn’t much American intelligence services could accomplish there, though not for lack of trying.&#160; Then Soviet “satellites,” in Eastern Europe bore the brunt – along with Cuba, of course, and everywhere else there was a whiff of Soviet influence.</p>
<p>China and countries in Asia and Africa that were, even in minor ways, in its ambit received similar attention.&#160; But, back in the day, American planners saw the Soviet Union as the greater threat.&#160; That was therefore where America meddled more.</p>
<p>When the Soviet Union imploded and split apart, former Soviet Republics became Target Number One – largely because American planners made incorporating them into the empire a top priority.</p>
<p>The Russian federation itself was, at first, less of a priority because it didn’t have to be.&#160; With its economy in tatters thanks to the brutal way that its regression to capitalism was engineered (partly with American help), and with a government headed by a drunkard, Boris Yeltsin, and run by and for oligarchs and kleptocrats, there wasn’t much for the CIA to do.</p>
<p>The Clintons loved it and so did the neocons.&#160; They would like nothing more than to make America great again by knocking Russia back down to where it was in the Bill Clinton days.</p>
<p>But, of course, American meddling is and never has been confined just to parts of the world on the other side of “the Iron Curtain” and in what used to be called the Third World.&#160;&#160; The United States is a serial meddler – in every country on earth that might not otherwise do what the empire’s stewards want.</p>
<p>And yet the political class and its media flunkies are shocked, shocked that Russia would be so uppity as to meddle too – in American elections, no less.&#160; Again, the meddling they are supposed to have done is of an unspecified nature and without any apparent consequence. But so what!&#160; This cannot stand!</p>
<p>Words fail to describe the extent of the hypocrisy, the sheer chutzpah of it all.</p>
<p>To be fair, though, culpability on this account is not confined to the Democratic Party.&#160;&#160;&#160; Republicans are as bad or worse; or rather they were before Democrats found Russiagate a useful cudgel to use against Trump and therefore against them.</p>
<p>Self-righteous hypocrisy about the moral and political rectitude of “the city on the hill” is a bipartisan affliction — more American than apple pie.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>However, zeal in reviving Cold War animosities – and therefore in making our world more dangerous than it need be – is not.&#160; As a Cold War party, Democrats are worse.&#160; Or, rather, they have been ever since the summer of 2016, when the Clinton campaign decided that it would be a good idea to go neocon.&#160; Since then, the idea has taken on a life of its own, and spilled out into wider circles at home and abroad.</p>
<p>The idea at first was not exactly to lay the groundwork for not blaming themselves should Clinton lose to Trump; no one, including Trump and the people around him, thought that was more than a theoretical possibility.</p>
<p>But Team Hillary was concerned that only second wave feminists and Democratic Party hacks were enthusiastic about the prospect of a Hillary (or Hillary and Bill) Restoration.</p>
<p>The contrast with the enthusiasm Bernie Sanders had stirred up was palpable.&#160; This, along with the fact that, even without leaked emails, everybody who cared knew that the game had been rigged against him, made Clinton and her people worry that Sanders enthusiasts and other potential Democratic voters would stay home on Election Day.</p>
<p>The more preposterous the alternative was, the greater the probability of that.&#160; Nobody, not even the Republicans Trump defeated to become that party’s nominee, was more preposterous than the Donald.</p>
<p>Low enthusiasm for Clinton wouldn’t put Trump in the White House – that was unthinkable – but a little insurance couldn’t hurt.</p>
<p>And so they did, as best they could, what Democrats did back in the Harry Truman days and for many years thereafter.&#160; They could hardly redbait the Russians outright; the Russian government, under Vladimir Putin, is no redder than they, which is about as un-red as can be (in the old, not the corporate media, sense.)</p>
<p>It turns out, though, that redbaiters no longer need reds to redbait; the original Cold Warriors had done their job well so well that, even now that anti-Communism is an historical anachronism, its spirit survives, as much a tenet of the American civil religion as ever.</p>
<p>This, like so much else, is part of the patrimony of both mainstream political parties.&#160; But with the GOP under Trump’s thumb, and with Trump pushing a Russia-friendly line, it fell to the Democrats to get out in front.</p>
<p>Someday, perhaps quite soon, Trump’s reasons for being less bellicose than Clinton will become clearer.&#160; Most likely, financial shenanigans of a criminal kind are involved. &#160;&#160;For now, though, we can only be grateful that the positions he campaigned on and that his administration has so far taken are less extreme.</p>
<p>When Democrats took it upon themselves to play an up-dated version of the anti-Communist card, they caught a break.&#160; Russia, under Putin, was acting in ways that they and their propagandist could easily, if not quite fairly, demonize.</p>
<p>Ever since the Soviet Union expired and Chinese Communism took off down “the capitalist road,” history has been repeating itself – not as tragedy or farce, as Marx (following Hegel) said great historical events often do, but as a bizarre combination of the two.</p>
<p>After the Bolshevik Revolution and during the course of the civil war that ensued, capitalist powers, including the United States, constructed a military equivalent of a quarantine barrier, the infamous cordon sanitaire, around revolutionary Russia.&#160; Nearly a century later, the United States and its allies set about doing it again.</p>
<p>Ronald Regan promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move an inch further east.&#160; It did, of course – relentlessly.&#160; &#160;By the time Hillary Clinton was about to move back into the White House, NATO had moved about as far to the east as it could.</p>
<p>Ukraine, however, was not yet in the US-EU fold &#160;– to the dismay of the liberal imperialists whom Clinton had empowered when she was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, and whom Obama continued to support during his second term.</p>
<p>Many Ukrainians, especially in the mainly Ukrainian (not Russian) speaking western parts of the country, didn’t much like it either.&#160; Some of them were comparatively benign nationalists; many were fascists or quasi-fascists.</p>
<p>Their attempts at staging yet one more “color revolution,” aided and abetted by Western, especially American, meddling, set off a militant resistance movement in the eastern, Russian speaking parts of the country; in the Crimea, above all.&#160; This finally forced Russia’s hand, giving Cold War revivalists in both parties an opportunity to let loose.</p>
<p>It was Democrats who made the most of the opportunity; with Trump in the White House, they had the most to gain.&#160; Thus they and their media flunkies set about stirring up old animosities that had never quite faded away even during the Bill Clinton salad days in the nineties when they no longer served any purpose.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Civics lessons in American secondary schools have gone the way of the dinosaurs, but, back in the day, when they were commonplace, they conveyed a certain view of what democratic governance is supposed to be like.&#160; What was taught in them aligned well with the expectations of America’s founders — and, more generally, with the thinking of the Enlightened political philosophers from whom those founders drew inspiration.</p>
<p>The general idea was that laws are, or ought to be, made and executed by public servants dedicated to doing what is best for the whole community, not just for themselves or for particular sub-communities, partial associations, or interest groups.&#160; Sophisticated versions of this line of thought survive to this day in the work of leading twentieth and twenty-first century political philosophers.</p>
<p>The real world of liberal democracy, ours especially, deviates profoundly from the civics lesson ideal.&#160; Electoral campaigns are not about figuring out what is best for the whole community; they are about selling candidates to voters in the mindless way that advertisers sell bars of soap.</p>
<p>This takes money, lots of it.&#160; The love of which is said to be the root of all evil.&#160; Perhaps it is.&#160; It is certainly the root of all Republican and (big-D) Democratic efforts to undermine (small-d) democracy.</p>
<p>Everybody knows this; indeed, it has always been this way to some extent.&#160; Neither Democrats nor Republicans object.</p>
<p>Therefore both parties court donors assiduously.&#160; Indeed, it is the main thing they do.</p>
<p>This is one reason why our political life is so morally and intellectually degraded.&#160; It is also a reason why economic inequalities spill over from the economic sphere into the real world of purportedly democratic institutions.</p>
<p>Even with formal equality of citizenship, gross inequalities of political influence make a mockery of the civics lesson story; and with increasing inequality, the deviation from the ideal is rapidly becoming even more extreme and salient.</p>
<p>Our profoundly irrational capitalist economic system in its current phase is largely to blame for this, along with the virulent “rent seeking” that economic and political inequalities encourage.&#160; Rent-seekers derive income not by adding to real productive capacities, but by using political influence to manipulate the social and economic environments in which economic activities occur.</p>
<p>And so we have entered into a period of grave economic and political turbulence. &#160;It is impossible to say how it will end.</p>
<p>The duopoly parties nevertheless toddle on unbothered.&#160;&#160; They could care less, more generally, about deviations from (small-d) democratic ideals – except insofar as they advantage or disadvantage one or the other party.</p>
<p>Voter suppression disadvantages Democrats.&#160; Therefore, they oppose it — in the milquetoast ways for which they are famous. &#160;They could oppose it more, but taking their own side is not in their nature.</p>
<p>It hardly bothers either party that the system is run by and for the hyper-rich, and both parties like – indeed, thrive on — a media system that dumbs voters down and marginalizes political views that fall outside the ambit of one or the other duopoly party.</p>
<p>But foreign meddling, Democrats insist, is beyond the pale.&#160; Democrats cannot abide foreigners, Russians no less, involving themselves in American elections.</p>
<p>Even if the Russians are guilty as charged and Vladimir Putin is as evil as Rachel Maddow thinks, the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and practically every other American capitalist who wants something from the American government harms American “democracy” more.</p>
<p>Those “malefactors of great wealth,” as Teddy Roosevelt called their counterparts a century ago, generally get their way.&#160; The contrast with the alleged Russian meddlers is extreme; they don’t seem to have accomplished much of anything all.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Democrats insist: the very idea of Russian meddling offends all we hold sacred.&#160; Therefore, praise the lord and pass the ammunition.</p>
<p>However, for them, as for their rivals in the other duopoly party, the meddling, direct or indirect, of countries that benefit the donor class is seldom even a problem.&#160; Their meddling, when on the up and up, which it often may be, is called “lobbying.” But even when it is not, prudent Democrats and Republicans look the other way.</p>
<p>Some of the most noxious regimes in the world are past masters at bending the American government to its will, regardless of the wishes of the American people; Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies are among the most extreme examples.</p>
<p>And then there is Israel, which no one in either duopoly party ever dares fault.&#160; Its meddling in American political affairs puts even American meddling in the affairs of other countries to shame.</p>
<p>Democrats and Republicans are fine with that.&#160; No matter that the government of Israel effectively owns Congress, or even that, by both conviction and marriage, it has the Trump family is in its thrall.</p>
<p>“A foolish consistency,” Emerson wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”&#160; Foolish inconsistencies are generally more insidious and damaging. &#160;&#160;The less odious duopoly party thrives on them, just as it has thrived lately on reviving the Cold War. &#160;Shame on it!</p>
<p>But unless circumstances change fundamentally in unforeseeable and extremely unlikely ways between now and November, there will be compelling reasons to vote for Democrats – or rather to vote against Republicans by voting for Democrats — in the coming midterm elections.</p>
<p>Even so, if anything of more lasting value than relief from some of the direst consequences of Trump’s election is to come from voting for Democrats in November, the time to start organizing against the party of the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and others like them will not be after the election is over, when the old regime is riding high as it surely will be if there is a Democratic “wave.” &#160;The time for that is now.</p> | Remember, Democrats are Awful Too | true | https://counterpunch.org/2018/01/19/remember-democrats-are-awful-too/ | 2018-01-19 | 4left
| 3,067 | Photo by Don Relyea CC BY 20 Like it or not in the 2018 midterms the only way to defeat Republicans 8211 and defy Donald Trump or Mike Pence 8212 will be to vote for Democrats I don8217t like it and I don8217t think anybody else should eitheramp160 The Democratic Party is part of the problemamp160 It would have to change beyond recognition to become even a small part of the solution But at least in the short run voting for a Democrat is the only way to ward off a pernicious clear present and extremely grave danger The problem is not that there aren8217t many Americans willing and eager to change the world radically for the better there are plentyamp160 It is that our debilitating duopoly party system holds sway over usamp160 The idea that whatever is not Republican must be Democratic might as well be imprinted in our minds Those two parties have worked hard over many years to make this the case and they are at it stillamp160 Corporate media do yeoman service in their behalf This is why a large segment of the antiTrump 8220resistance8221 perhaps the most anodyne political force ever to use that word is for all intents and purposes a Democratic Party project and why much of the rest either is or is about to be coopted into the Democratic fold Good or bad or very bad this is inevitable amp160Democratic victories in 2018 are not quite as inevitable because Democrats have a knack for losing with winning handsamp160 But this time around even more than in 2016 they would have to outdo themselves not to take control of both the Senate and the House Insofar as Democratic victories weaken the Republican Party diminishing its hold over national and state institutions then bring them onamp160 A pox on them though insofar as they help build the Democratic Party in anything like its present form On a scale of one to ten where one is as bad as it has ever been in American politics since the 8220segregation forever8221 days and ten is as good as it ever got Republicans today are somewhere in the minus three to five rangeamp160 Trump himself is incommensurable because he is too much all over the place but all the places he goes are bad By that measure Democrats get a two or threeamp160 That would be Democrats of the Clinton Schumer Pelosi typeamp160 Democrats of the Sanders Warren variety are better than that at least on domestic matters and the jury is out on the new people who are reportedly preparing to run for office as Democrats in 2018 amp160Some of them may even have a radical bone or two in their bodies or one can at least hope The worst thing about Democrats is their eagerness to prepare the way in public opinion for stumbling into World War III amp160To be sure their warmongering is only the most glaring reason to find them appallingamp160 Their newly found love for the pillars of the national security state 8211 especially the FBI and CIA 8211 is anotheramp160 And of course there are all the many ways that they and the GOP are of one mind in supporting a neoliberal world order with America calling the shots In short they are bad news 8211 in ways that drag down everyone in their fold But our duopoly party system has colonized American political culture so thoroughly that it has become almost unthinkable for opponents of Republicans not to be supporters of Democratsamp160 And even when they are not 8211 when for example they vote for the Greens 8211 the thought that a vote for anybody but a Democrat is a vote for a Republican is inevitably on the mind pathetically in many circumstances this is at least arguably the case Because the stakes are so high in 2018 and the alternatives so weak few and far between the duopoly8217s hold over oppositional politics this time around is likely to be more than usually difficult to exorciseamp160 There is no choice but to deal with it and if need be to acquiesce It should go without saying that the case against lesser evil voting is sound and that it makes excellent sense logically and in most imaginable circumstances politically to oppose Republicans without supporting Democratsamp160 Lesser evil voting elects evils worse still it promotes a race to the bottom But with an adolescent boy in an old man8217s body controlling the nuclear arsenal and locked into a sick codependent relationship with a Republic Party comprised of loathsome troglodytes dead set on undoing most of the advances of the past hundred years otherwise sound positions must sometimes be overriddenamp160 To fight back against Trump and all things Trumpian one must do what one must do the urgency could hardly be greater But then it is important to keep a clear head 8211 by not disregarding the dangers inherent in using the only means available in the short term for holding the Trumpian menace at bay Despite all the brouhaha that corporate media present as gospel truth it is still far from clear precisely what if anything 8220Russiagate8221 amounts to only the hypocrisy inherent in the always vague charges is certain At least since the end of Word War II the United States has been the most flagrant meddler in the affairs of other countries of all time When the Soviet Union was intact and strong there wasn8217t much American intelligence services could accomplish there though not for lack of tryingamp160 Then Soviet 8220satellites8221 in Eastern Europe bore the brunt 8211 along with Cuba of course and everywhere else there was a whiff of Soviet influence China and countries in Asia and Africa that were even in minor ways in its ambit received similar attentionamp160 But back in the day American planners saw the Soviet Union as the greater threatamp160 That was therefore where America meddled more When the Soviet Union imploded and split apart former Soviet Republics became Target Number One 8211 largely because American planners made incorporating them into the empire a top priority The Russian federation itself was at first less of a priority because it didn8217t have to beamp160 With its economy in tatters thanks to the brutal way that its regression to capitalism was engineered partly with American help and with a government headed by a drunkard Boris Yeltsin and run by and for oligarchs and kleptocrats there wasn8217t much for the CIA to do The Clintons loved it and so did the neoconsamp160 They would like nothing more than to make America great again by knocking Russia back down to where it was in the Bill Clinton days But of course American meddling is and never has been confined just to parts of the world on the other side of 8220the Iron Curtain8221 and in what used to be called the Third Worldamp160amp160 The United States is a serial meddler 8211 in every country on earth that might not otherwise do what the empire8217s stewards want And yet the political class and its media flunkies are shocked shocked that Russia would be so uppity as to meddle too 8211 in American elections no lessamp160 Again the meddling they are supposed to have done is of an unspecified nature and without any apparent consequence But so whatamp160 This cannot stand Words fail to describe the extent of the hypocrisy the sheer chutzpah of it all To be fair though culpability on this account is not confined to the Democratic Partyamp160amp160amp160 Republicans are as bad or worse or rather they were before Democrats found Russiagate a useful cudgel to use against Trump and therefore against them Selfrighteous hypocrisy about the moral and political rectitude of 8220the city on the hill8221 is a bipartisan affliction 8212 more American than apple pie However zeal in reviving Cold War animosities 8211 and therefore in making our world more dangerous than it need be 8211 is notamp160 As a Cold War party Democrats are worseamp160 Or rather they have been ever since the summer of 2016 when the Clinton campaign decided that it would be a good idea to go neoconamp160 Since then the idea has taken on a life of its own and spilled out into wider circles at home and abroad The idea at first was not exactly to lay the groundwork for not blaming themselves should Clinton lose to Trump no one including Trump and the people around him thought that was more than a theoretical possibility But Team Hillary was concerned that only second wave feminists and Democratic Party hacks were enthusiastic about the prospect of a Hillary or Hillary and Bill Restoration The contrast with the enthusiasm Bernie Sanders had stirred up was palpableamp160 This along with the fact that even without leaked emails everybody who cared knew that the game had been rigged against him made Clinton and her people worry that Sanders enthusiasts and other potential Democratic voters would stay home on Election Day The more preposterous the alternative was the greater the probability of thatamp160 Nobody not even the Republicans Trump defeated to become that party8217s nominee was more preposterous than the Donald Low enthusiasm for Clinton wouldn8217t put Trump in the White House 8211 that was unthinkable 8211 but a little insurance couldn8217t hurt And so they did as best they could what Democrats did back in the Harry Truman days and for many years thereafteramp160 They could hardly redbait the Russians outright the Russian government under Vladimir Putin is no redder than they which is about as unred as can be in the old not the corporate media sense It turns out though that redbaiters no longer need reds to redbait the original Cold Warriors had done their job well so well that even now that antiCommunism is an historical anachronism its spirit survives as much a tenet of the American civil religion as ever This like so much else is part of the patrimony of both mainstream political partiesamp160 But with the GOP under Trump8217s thumb and with Trump pushing a Russiafriendly line it fell to the Democrats to get out in front Someday perhaps quite soon Trump8217s reasons for being less bellicose than Clinton will become cleareramp160 Most likely financial shenanigans of a criminal kind are involved amp160amp160For now though we can only be grateful that the positions he campaigned on and that his administration has so far taken are less extreme When Democrats took it upon themselves to play an updated version of the antiCommunist card they caught a breakamp160 Russia under Putin was acting in ways that they and their propagandist could easily if not quite fairly demonize Ever since the Soviet Union expired and Chinese Communism took off down 8220the capitalist road8221 history has been repeating itself 8211 not as tragedy or farce as Marx following Hegel said great historical events often do but as a bizarre combination of the two After the Bolshevik Revolution and during the course of the civil war that ensued capitalist powers including the United States constructed a military equivalent of a quarantine barrier the infamous cordon sanitaire around revolutionary Russiaamp160 Nearly a century later the United States and its allies set about doing it again Ronald Regan promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move an inch further eastamp160 It did of course 8211 relentlesslyamp160 amp160By the time Hillary Clinton was about to move back into the White House NATO had moved about as far to the east as it could Ukraine however was not yet in the USEU fold amp1608211 to the dismay of the liberal imperialists whom Clinton had empowered when she was Barack Obama8217s Secretary of State and whom Obama continued to support during his second term Many Ukrainians especially in the mainly Ukrainian not Russian speaking western parts of the country didn8217t much like it eitheramp160 Some of them were comparatively benign nationalists many were fascists or quasifascists Their attempts at staging yet one more 8220color revolution8221 aided and abetted by Western especially American meddling set off a militant resistance movement in the eastern Russian speaking parts of the country in the Crimea above allamp160 This finally forced Russia8217s hand giving Cold War revivalists in both parties an opportunity to let loose It was Democrats who made the most of the opportunity with Trump in the White House they had the most to gainamp160 Thus they and their media flunkies set about stirring up old animosities that had never quite faded away even during the Bill Clinton salad days in the nineties when they no longer served any purpose Civics lessons in American secondary schools have gone the way of the dinosaurs but back in the day when they were commonplace they conveyed a certain view of what democratic governance is supposed to be likeamp160 What was taught in them aligned well with the expectations of America8217s founders 8212 and more generally with the thinking of the Enlightened political philosophers from whom those founders drew inspiration The general idea was that laws are or ought to be made and executed by public servants dedicated to doing what is best for the whole community not just for themselves or for particular subcommunities partial associations or interest groupsamp160 Sophisticated versions of this line of thought survive to this day in the work of leading twentieth and twentyfirst century political philosophers The real world of liberal democracy ours especially deviates profoundly from the civics lesson idealamp160 Electoral campaigns are not about figuring out what is best for the whole community they are about selling candidates to voters in the mindless way that advertisers sell bars of soap This takes money lots of itamp160 The love of which is said to be the root of all evilamp160 Perhaps it isamp160 It is certainly the root of all Republican and bigD Democratic efforts to undermine smalld democracy Everybody knows this indeed it has always been this way to some extentamp160 Neither Democrats nor Republicans object Therefore both parties court donors assiduouslyamp160 Indeed it is the main thing they do This is one reason why our political life is so morally and intellectually degradedamp160 It is also a reason why economic inequalities spill over from the economic sphere into the real world of purportedly democratic institutions Even with formal equality of citizenship gross inequalities of political influence make a mockery of the civics lesson story and with increasing inequality the deviation from the ideal is rapidly becoming even more extreme and salient Our profoundly irrational capitalist economic system in its current phase is largely to blame for this along with the virulent 8220rent seeking8221 that economic and political inequalities encourageamp160 Rentseekers derive income not by adding to real productive capacities but by using political influence to manipulate the social and economic environments in which economic activities occur And so we have entered into a period of grave economic and political turbulence amp160It is impossible to say how it will end The duopoly parties nevertheless toddle on unbotheredamp160amp160 They could care less more generally about deviations from smalld democratic ideals 8211 except insofar as they advantage or disadvantage one or the other party Voter suppression disadvantages Democratsamp160 Therefore they oppose it 8212 in the milquetoast ways for which they are famous amp160They could oppose it more but taking their own side is not in their nature It hardly bothers either party that the system is run by and for the hyperrich and both parties like 8211 indeed thrive on 8212 a media system that dumbs voters down and marginalizes political views that fall outside the ambit of one or the other duopoly party But foreign meddling Democrats insist is beyond the paleamp160 Democrats cannot abide foreigners Russians no less involving themselves in American elections Even if the Russians are guilty as charged and Vladimir Putin is as evil as Rachel Maddow thinks the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson and practically every other American capitalist who wants something from the American government harms American 8220democracy8221 more Those 8220malefactors of great wealth8221 as Teddy Roosevelt called their counterparts a century ago generally get their wayamp160 The contrast with the alleged Russian meddlers is extreme they don8217t seem to have accomplished much of anything all Nevertheless Democrats insist the very idea of Russian meddling offends all we hold sacredamp160 Therefore praise the lord and pass the ammunition However for them as for their rivals in the other duopoly party the meddling direct or indirect of countries that benefit the donor class is seldom even a problemamp160 Their meddling when on the up and up which it often may be is called 8220lobbying8221 But even when it is not prudent Democrats and Republicans look the other way Some of the most noxious regimes in the world are past masters at bending the American government to its will regardless of the wishes of the American people Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies are among the most extreme examples And then there is Israel which no one in either duopoly party ever dares faultamp160 Its meddling in American political affairs puts even American meddling in the affairs of other countries to shame Democrats and Republicans are fine with thatamp160 No matter that the government of Israel effectively owns Congress or even that by both conviction and marriage it has the Trump family is in its thrall 8220A foolish consistency8221 Emerson wrote 8220is the hobgoblin of little minds8221amp160 Foolish inconsistencies are generally more insidious and damaging amp160amp160The less odious duopoly party thrives on them just as it has thrived lately on reviving the Cold War amp160Shame on it But unless circumstances change fundamentally in unforeseeable and extremely unlikely ways between now and November there will be compelling reasons to vote for Democrats 8211 or rather to vote against Republicans by voting for Democrats 8212 in the coming midterm elections Even so if anything of more lasting value than relief from some of the direst consequences of Trump8217s election is to come from voting for Democrats in November the time to start organizing against the party of the Clintons Chuck Schumer Nancy Pelosi and others like them will not be after the election is over when the old regime is riding high as it surely will be if there is a Democratic 8220wave8221 amp160The time for that is now | Photo/NOUN by/ADP Don/PROPN Relyea/PROPN CC/PROPN BY/PROPN 20/NUM Like/ADP it/PRON or/CCONJ not/PART in/ADP the/DET 2018/NUM midterms/VERB the/DET only/ADJ way/NOUN to/PART defeat/VERB Republicans/PROPN 8211/NUM and/CCONJ defy/ADJ Donald/PROPN Trump/PROPN or/CCONJ Mike/PROPN Pence/PROPN 8212/NUM will/AUX be/AUX to/PART vote/VERB for/ADP Democrats/PROPN I/PRON don8217/VERB t/NOUN like/ADP it/PRON and/CCONJ I/PRON don8217/VERB t/PROPN think/VERB anybody/PRON else/ADV should/AUX eitheramp160/PROPN The/DET Democratic/PROPN Party/PROPN 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<p>Marshall Auerback is a Fellow at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. He has some 28 years experience in the investment management business, serving as a global portfolio strategist. Mr Auerback graduated magna cum laude in English &amp; Philosophy from Queen’s University in 1981 and received a law degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University in 1983. He has contributed several articles to CounterPunch.</p>
<p>MIKE WHITNEY: In a recent article on New Deal 2.0, you offered an practical solution to growing unemployment:&#160; Make government the "Employer of Last Resort". How would this work and who would be included? What effect would this have on the economy?</p>
<p>Marshall Auerback: What I am advocating would create something close to a full employment: a universal job guarantee available through the thick and thin of the business cycle. The federal government would ensure a job offer to anyone ready and willing to work, at the established program compensation level (including wages and a healthy benefits package). To keep it simple, the program wage could be set at the current federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) to minimize wage disruption, and then adjusted periodically as that is raised. The key is to get it entrenched as a permanent feature of government.</p>
<p>It would not be introducing another element of intrusive bureaucracy into our economy, but simply better utilizing the existing stock of unemployed…Social spending on the unemployed prevents aggregate demand from collapsing into a depression-like state, but little is done to enhance future growth and demand, which can be done by providing them with employment, greater education and higher skill levels.&#160; &#160;The usual benefits would be provided, including vacation and sick leave, and contributions to Social Security. Although Hyman Minsky called this a "Government as Employer of Last Resort" idea, the phrase might be too emotive for some (many in this country have a visceral hatred of government), so let’s call it Job Guarantee (JG) program or an Employment Guarantee Act.</p>
<p>The original New Deal programs included large-scale infrastructure projects with direction coming from Washington. A permanent and universal JG program should be decentralized, with projects created and administered locally — where the workers are, and for the benefit of their communities.</p>
<p>This brings us to the fundamental principle of the Job Guarantee program: it is a complement that provides jobs to those who would otherwise be jobless and it provides public services and infrastructure that otherwise would not be supplied. JG workers will be gaining useful work experience and training, making them more appealing to other employers. When firms hire, they will recruit from the JG program, offering a slightly higher wage.</p>
<p>MIKE WHITNEY: Every day I get e mails from people who are worried that the US is sliding towards Zimbabwe-type hyperinflation. Since the financial crisis began, the money supply has exploded and the Fed’s balance sheet has widened to over $2.2 trillion. What effect will this have on the dollar and the US economy? Should we be concerned about Bernanke’s quantitative easing (QE) program?</p>
<p>Marshall Auerback: The only circumstances in which I could envisage a Weimar or Zimbabwe scenario is if we had complete political dysfunction and a corresponding loss of taxing authority, a la Zimbabwe (or the Confederacy during the Civil War).&#160; If the tax system breaks down, the government’s fiat money can indeed become worthless – which is manifested as hyperinflation.&#160; The government in that situation can print ever increasing quantities of money, but find little for sale, even as resources sit idle.&#160; This does not require full employment or high capacity utilization. In fact, quite the opposite because once the value of money collapses in the manner I described above, it becomes virtually impossible to undertake ‘money now for money later’ transactions, and the economy degenerates into barter, or the private sector contracts with alternative money with a relatively more stable value.&#160; The point is that that the hyperinflation is not caused by the "printing of money" per se.&#160; Rather, running the printing presses at full speed captures only the effect, not the cause of the problem.&#160; It is usually the breakdown of the tax system, indeed the political system as a whole, that creates the hyperinflation.</p>
<p>That is still an outlier in the US in my opinion, although watching our current government in action, I do not discount it as a possibility.&#160;</p>
<p>Quantitative easing is a crock. Let me quote our Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke:&#160; "Under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation."&#160; But the government also has to know which buttons to press. QE and lower interest rates are not the buttons for that job.&#160; The button is the budget deficit, and they seem categorically against pressing it due to deficit myths.</p>
<p>Proponents of quantitative easing claim it adds liquidity to a system where lending by commercial banks is seemingly frozen because of a lack of reserves in the banking system overall. It is commonly claimed that it involves “printing money” to ease a “cash-starved” system. That is an unfortunate and misleading representation.</p>
<p>The mainstream economists advocate QE once interest rates get down to zero because they see it as the only stimulatory monetary policy measure left. But their conception of the way the monetary system operates is flawed and also reflects their obsession with the use of monetary policy as a counterstabilising policy tool.</p>
<p>Modern monetary theory suggests that monetary policy will not be an effective instrument and QE in particular is a very long bow to draw if your objective is to stimulate economic activity. &#160;</p>
<p>Does quantitative easing work?</p>
<p>The mainstream belief is based on the erroneous belief that the banks need reserves before they can lend and that quantitative easing provides those reserves. That is a major misrepresentation of the way the banking system actually operates. But the mainstream position asserts (wrongly) that banks only lend if they have prior reserves.</p>
<p>This is the text-book conception of the world and parades as the money multiplier theory. It is taught – to their disadvantage – to all undergraduate students in economics. It is an exercise in deceptive brainwashing. The illusion is that a bank is an institution that accepts deposits to build up reserves and then on-lends them at a margin to make money. The conceptualization suggests that if it doesn’t have adequate reserves then it cannot lend. So the presupposition is that by adding to bank reserves, quantitative easing will help lending.</p>
<p>But bank lending is not “reserve constrained”. Banks lend to any credit worthy customer they can find and then worry about their reserve positions afterwards. If they are short of reserves (their reserve accounts have to be in positive balance each day and in some countries central banks require certain ratios to be maintained) then they borrow from each other in the interbank market or, ultimately, they will borrow from the central bank through the so-called discount window. They are reluctant to use the latter facility because it carries a penalty (higher interest cost).</p>
<p>The point is that building bank reserves will not increase the bank’s capacity to lend. Loans create deposits which generate reserves. The reason that the commercial banks are currently not lending much is because they are not convinced there are credit worthy customers on their doorstep. In the current climate the assessment of what is credit worthy has become very strict compared to the lax days as the top of the boom approached.</p>
<p>All that the central bank is doing is buying one type of financial asset (private holdings of bonds, company paper) and exchanging it for another (reserve balances at the central bank). The net financial assets in the private sector are in fact unchanged although the portfolio composition of those assets is altered (maturity substitution) which changes yields and returns.</p>
<p>In terms of changing portfolio compositions, QE increases central bank demand for “long maturity” assets held in the private sector which reduces interest rates at the longer end of the yield curve. These are traditionally thought of as the investment rates.</p>
<p>This might (but probably will not) increase aggregate demand given the cost of investment funds is likely to drop. But on the other hand, the lower rates reduce the interest-income of savers who will reduce consumption (demand) accordingly. How these opposing effects balance out is unclear. Clearly, the BOE research department has no idea of how the effects interact.</p>
<p>Overall, this uncertainty points to the problems involved in using monetary policy to stimulate (or contract) the economy. It is a blunt policy instrument with ambiguous impacts. &#160;</p>
<p>According to Bloomberg News, the Fed has committed or loaned over $11.4 trillion to stabilize the financial system.&#160; But very little has changed by way of regulation. In fact, capital requirements, securitzation, unregulated derivatives trading, and off-balance sheet operations, remain virtually the same. Aren’t we reassembling a system that we know has basic design-flaws? How do we fix this?</p>
<p>Marshall Auerback: Again, I think this misrepresents what the Fed has done. It’s been an asset shift.&#160; The Fed cannot create new net financial assets. Only the Treasury can do that.&#160; Instead, I tend to agree with Professor Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, who has argued, fairly convincingly in my view, that the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet has been widely misunderstood within the economics profession, because it has been viewed through the lens of a pre-existing debate about the monetary transmission mechanism.&#160; Those who emphasized the importance of the money supply (on nominal spending) saw the expansion as quantitative easing, and warned about eventual inflationary consequences.&#160; Those who emphasized the credit channel (as Bernanke) saw the expansion as providing credit that was temporarily unavailable in the private market.&#160; The fact that the balance sheet expanded on both sides, and in both cases with the private sector as counterparty, tells us that something else was going on.</p>
<p>Instead, Mehrling has argued that the Fed’s actions after Lehman should be understood as moving the wholesale money market onto its own balance sheet.&#160; Banks with surplus funds lent them to the Fed by holding excess reserve balances, and banks that needed funds borrowed them from the Fed through the discount window.&#160; Foreign banks that needed dollar funding got it through their own central bank, which got it from the Fed through the liquidity swap facility.&#160; Banks that were short of collateral eligible for discount borrowed directly through the new commercial paper facility.&#160; Shadow banks that could not deposit in the Fed instead bought Treasury bills, and the Treasury deposited the proceeds at the Fed.</p>
<p>And, again, because we haven’t deployed our fiscal resources to support aggregate demand, the policies have not been successful.&#160; They are simply an attempt to restore a highly destructive status quo ante.</p>
<p>Economic growth in the US depends heavily on consumer spending. But for the last decade or more, workers’ wages have been stagnant, so growth has come from debt-spending. Now all that is beginning to change.&#160; Credit is getting tighter and households–that lost $13 trillion since the&#160; financial crisis began– have been forced to cut back. Is it really possible for GDP to increase without strong wage growth? How is widening inequality reducing aggregate demand and weakening the economy?</p>
<p>Marshall Auerback: This is not a new phenomenon. There is little understanding that if households and firms try to net save (save more out of income flows than they tangibly invest) incomes collapse, and desired private net saving is thwarted. The private "excess saving" cannot exist without a budget deficit or a trade surplus. Many people make this mistake. At best, we can talk about planned private saving being in excess of planned private investment, but other than that, we are violating double entry book keeping principles.</p>
<p>And consider this: in 1998, 1999 and 2000 (increasing each year), the US government "virtuously" ran budget surpluses. These were widely lauded even though they had the effect of draining aggregate demand and forcing the private sector to rely more on debt, the very things we are now rightly decrying.&#160; But we’ve misdiagnosed the cause.&#160; The fiscal surpluses caused the private sector to become more heavily indebted than before as the fiscal drag squeezed liquidity and destroyed aggregate demand and incomes. Along with our misconceived embrace of financial deregulation, the combined result was sharply rising unemployment and a major recession.</p>
<p>I would argue that we have the model from the FDR years. But this entails an approach where we work to restore personal incomes and balance sheets before we deal with the bank balance sheets.&#160; You improve aggregate demand and incomes will rise and with that so will CREDITWORTHINESS, as well as the ability to service existing loans.&#160; This in turn enhances the banks’ balance sheets and facilitates greater provision of credit.&#160; It’s so easy, even a banker can figure it out.</p>
<p>Today, I believe that most major banks are insolvent and cannot (and should not) be saved. Too big to fail means they are to big to be saved, although I think we have to approach this from the perspective of functionality as well as the sheer size of the banks.</p>
<p>We should insist upon a market structure in which financial institutions are universally small. But smallness cannot be defined by balance-sheet assets alone. We need to manage the degree of interconnectedness and the scale of total exposures (including off-balance sheet exposures arising from derivative market participation), which gets to your point about functionality. Further, we need to ensure that no market participants are indispensable by virtue of controlling some essential market infrastructure.</p>
<p>Right now it is essential that all big banks be examined during the “holiday” to uncover claims on one another. It is highly likely that supervisors will find that several trillions of dollars of bad assets will turn out to be claims big financial institutions have on one another (that is exactly what was found when AIG was examined—which is why the government bail-out of AIG led to side payments to the big banks and shadow banks). In addition, it will be necessary to increase supervision and regulation of the financial sector. It is particularly important to put a stop to the practices that brought on the crisis.</p>
<p>As the experience of the early 1930s as well as that of the 1980s tells us, if left alone to deal with the current problems, market mechanisms will push management and owners of insolvent institutions to ramp up losses. The result can be massive deflation, massive bankruptcies, massive destructions of physical assets, and enormous unemployment will continue until the debt structure is simplified. In the process, social unrest will grow to the point that the entire socio-economic system will be threatened.</p>
<p>Debt Forgiveness</p>
<p>A more effective way to restart the economic process on the solid ground is to deal with the underlying cause of the problem: borrowers cannot meet the required payments. This implies sustaining their income and employment and, if necessary, drastically modifying their debt service burden. The whole boom of the 2000s (and more broadly the growth process that emerged at the in the early 1980s) was based on household borrowing and the continuation of negative saving trends (that is, household deficit spending). A good place to start recovery efforts, therefore, would be to change this method of economic growth. There are two key ways to do that.</p>
<p>First, a household’s main source of income is its employment, which itself is heavily tied to the state of the economy. Policy can “decouple” this link to some degree through creation of counter-cyclical government employment programs. There are plenty of non-profitable, even though crucial, economic activities that require labor (from massive infrastructure programs to social services). CCC, WPA, and other programs of the New Deal employed millions of people, creating jobs very rapidly in extremely useful projects. In its first six years, the WPA spent $11 billion, three-quarters of that on construction and conservation projects and the remainder on community service programs. During that time, WPA employed about 8 million workers. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) put approximately 2.75 million unemployed young men to work to reclaim government land and forests through irrigation, soil enrichment, pest control, tree planting, fire prevention and other conservation projects. Workers earned a dollar a day, and had to send part of their wages home to their families. Through the National Youth Administration (NYA) the government made it possible for 1.5 million high school students and 600,000 college students to continue their education by providing them with part-time jobs to meet their expenses.</p>
<p>Debt Jubilee 2010</p>
<p>However, guaranteeing access to employment will not be enough to deal with the current crisis. Indeed, following decades of growing debt, households have accumulated debt well beyond their means, and even if employment programs are put in place, they will pay on average a lower wage than what many jobless households used to earn. Given that many households could not service their debt with their previous income, providing them employment (at a wage that could be below their previous wage) will only provide some relief from their debt problem. We, therefore, need a massive modification of loans and possibility bankruptcy (which must be made simpler and less costly). Some economists, remembering that this was done in the past, have suggested a debt jubilee; credit card companies have already begun to go down this road and more could be done here. The government could provide incentives to encourage more financial companies to go down this path.</p>
<p>If borrowers can meet their payments, lenders will receive their funds and will return to profitability; in turn, some of the securitization processes will be revived. Of course, many banks are no longer used to making most of their money from interest payments, but it may be time to return toward a less trade-and-fee driven financial sector. Hold to maturity is a good starting point.</p>
<p>Marshall Auerback is a Fellow at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. He has some 28 years experience in the investment management business, serving as a global portfolio strategist. Mr Auerback graduated magna cum laude in English &amp; Philosophy from Queen’s University in 1981 and received a law degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University in 1983. He has contributed several articles to CounterPunch. He can be reached at be reached at <a href="mailto:MAuer1959@aol.com" type="external">MAuer1959@aol.com</a></p>
<p>MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state and can be reached at <a href="mailto:fergiewhitney@msn.com" type="external">fergiewhitney@msn.com</a>.</p>
<p /> | The Path to Full Employment | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/12/02/the-path-to-full-employment/ | 2009-12-02 | 4left
| 3,069 | Marshall Auerback is a Fellow at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute He has some 28 years experience in the investment management business serving as a global portfolio strategist Mr Auerback graduated magna cum laude in English ampamp Philosophy from Queen8217s University in 1981 and received a law degree from Corpus Christi College Oxford University in 1983 He has contributed several articles to CounterPunch MIKE WHITNEY In a recent article on New Deal 20 you offered an practical solution to growing unemploymentamp160 Make government the Employer of Last Resort How would this work and who would be included What effect would this have on the economy Marshall Auerback What I am advocating would create something close to a full employment a universal job guarantee available through the thick and thin of the business cycle The federal government would ensure a job offer to anyone ready and willing to work at the established program compensation level including wages and a healthy benefits package To keep it simple the program wage could be set at the current federal minimum wage 725 an hour to minimize wage disruption and then adjusted periodically as that is raised The key is to get it entrenched as a permanent feature of government It would not be introducing another element of intrusive bureaucracy into our economy but simply better utilizing the existing stock of unemployed8230Social spending on the unemployed prevents aggregate demand from collapsing into a depressionlike state but little is done to enhance future growth and demand which can be done by providing them with employment greater education and higher skill levelsamp160 amp160The usual benefits would be provided including vacation and sick leave and contributions to Social Security Although Hyman Minsky called this a Government as Employer of Last Resort idea the phrase might be too emotive for some many in this country have a visceral hatred of government so let8217s call it Job Guarantee JG program or an Employment Guarantee Act The original New Deal programs included largescale infrastructure projects with direction coming from Washington A permanent and universal JG program should be decentralized with projects created and administered locally 8212 where the workers are and for the benefit of their communities This brings us to the fundamental principle of the Job Guarantee program it is a complement that provides jobs to those who would otherwise be jobless and it provides public services and infrastructure that otherwise would not be supplied JG workers will be gaining useful work experience and training making them more appealing to other employers When firms hire they will recruit from the JG program offering a slightly higher wage MIKE WHITNEY Every day I get e mails from people who are worried that the US is sliding towards Zimbabwetype hyperinflation Since the financial crisis began the money supply has exploded and the Fed8217s balance sheet has widened to over 22 trillion What effect will this have on the dollar and the US economy Should we be concerned about Bernanke8217s quantitative easing QE program Marshall Auerback The only circumstances in which I could envisage a Weimar or Zimbabwe scenario is if we had complete political dysfunction and a corresponding loss of taxing authority a la Zimbabwe or the Confederacy during the Civil Waramp160 If the tax system breaks down the government8217s fiat money can indeed become worthless 8211 which is manifested as hyperinflationamp160 The government in that situation can print ever increasing quantities of money but find little for sale even as resources sit idleamp160 This does not require full employment or high capacity utilization In fact quite the opposite because once the value of money collapses in the manner I described above it becomes virtually impossible to undertake 8216money now for money later8217 transactions and the economy degenerates into barter or the private sector contracts with alternative money with a relatively more stable valueamp160 The point is that that the hyperinflation is not caused by the printing of money per seamp160 Rather running the printing presses at full speed captures only the effect not the cause of the problemamp160 It is usually the breakdown of the tax system indeed the political system as a whole that creates the hyperinflation That is still an outlier in the US in my opinion although watching our current government in action I do not discount it as a possibilityamp160 Quantitative easing is a crock Let me quote our Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernankeamp160 Under a papermoney system a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflationamp160 But the government also has to know which buttons to press QE and lower interest rates are not the buttons for that jobamp160 The button is the budget deficit and they seem categorically against pressing it due to deficit myths Proponents of quantitative easing claim it adds liquidity to a system where lending by commercial banks is seemingly frozen because of a lack of reserves in the banking system overall It is commonly claimed that it involves 8220printing money8221 to ease a 8220cashstarved8221 system That is an unfortunate and misleading representation The mainstream economists advocate QE once interest rates get down to zero because they see it as the only stimulatory monetary policy measure left But their conception of the way the monetary system operates is flawed and also reflects their obsession with the use of monetary policy as a counterstabilising policy tool Modern monetary theory suggests that monetary policy will not be an effective instrument and QE in particular is a very long bow to draw if your objective is to stimulate economic activity amp160 Does quantitative easing work The mainstream belief is based on the erroneous belief that the banks need reserves before they can lend and that quantitative easing provides those reserves That is a major misrepresentation of the way the banking system actually operates But the mainstream position asserts wrongly that banks only lend if they have prior reserves This is the textbook conception of the world and parades as the money multiplier theory It is taught 8211 to their disadvantage 8211 to all undergraduate students in economics It is an exercise in deceptive brainwashing The illusion is that a bank is an institution that accepts deposits to build up reserves and then onlends them at a margin to make money The conceptualization suggests that if it doesn8217t have adequate reserves then it cannot lend So the presupposition is that by adding to bank reserves quantitative easing will help lending But bank lending is not 8220reserve constrained8221 Banks lend to any credit worthy customer they can find and then worry about their reserve positions afterwards If they are short of reserves their reserve accounts have to be in positive balance each day and in some countries central banks require certain ratios to be maintained then they borrow from each other in the interbank market or ultimately they will borrow from the central bank through the socalled discount window They are reluctant to use the latter facility because it carries a penalty higher interest cost The point is that building bank reserves will not increase the bank8217s capacity to lend Loans create deposits which generate reserves The reason that the commercial banks are currently not lending much is because they are not convinced there are credit worthy customers on their doorstep In the current climate the assessment of what is credit worthy has become very strict compared to the lax days as the top of the boom approached All that the central bank is doing is buying one type of financial asset private holdings of bonds company paper and exchanging it for another reserve balances at the central bank The net financial assets in the private sector are in fact unchanged although the portfolio composition of those assets is altered maturity substitution which changes yields and returns In terms of changing portfolio compositions QE increases central bank demand for 8220long maturity8221 assets held in the private sector which reduces interest rates at the longer end of the yield curve These are traditionally thought of as the investment rates This might but probably will not increase aggregate demand given the cost of investment funds is likely to drop But on the other hand the lower rates reduce the interestincome of savers who will reduce consumption demand accordingly How these opposing effects balance out is unclear Clearly the BOE research department has no idea of how the effects interact Overall this uncertainty points to the problems involved in using monetary policy to stimulate or contract the economy It is a blunt policy instrument with ambiguous impacts amp160 According to Bloomberg News the Fed has committed or loaned over 114 trillion to stabilize the financial systemamp160 But very little has changed by way of regulation In fact capital requirements securitzation unregulated derivatives trading and offbalance sheet operations remain virtually the same Aren8217t we reassembling a system that we know has basic designflaws How do we fix this Marshall Auerback Again I think this misrepresents what the Fed has done It8217s been an asset shiftamp160 The Fed cannot create new net financial assets Only the Treasury can do thatamp160 Instead I tend to agree with Professor Perry Mehrling of Barnard College who has argued fairly convincingly in my view that the expansion of the Fed8217s balance sheet has been widely misunderstood within the economics profession because it has been viewed through the lens of a preexisting debate about the monetary transmission mechanismamp160 Those who emphasized the importance of the money supply on nominal spending saw the expansion as quantitative easing and warned about eventual inflationary consequencesamp160 Those who emphasized the credit channel as Bernanke saw the expansion as providing credit that was temporarily unavailable in the private marketamp160 The fact that the balance sheet expanded on both sides and in both cases with the private sector as counterparty tells us that something else was going on Instead Mehrling has argued that the Fed8217s actions after Lehman should be understood as moving the wholesale money market onto its own balance sheetamp160 Banks with surplus funds lent them to the Fed by holding excess reserve balances and banks that needed funds borrowed them from the Fed through the discount windowamp160 Foreign banks that needed dollar funding got it through their own central bank which got it from the Fed through the liquidity swap facilityamp160 Banks that were short of collateral eligible for discount borrowed directly through the new commercial paper facilityamp160 Shadow banks that could not deposit in the Fed instead bought Treasury bills and the Treasury deposited the proceeds at the Fed And again because we haven8217t deployed our fiscal resources to support aggregate demand the policies have not been successfulamp160 They are simply an attempt to restore a highly destructive status quo ante Economic growth in the US depends heavily on consumer spending But for the last decade or more workers8217 wages have been stagnant so growth has come from debtspending Now all that is beginning to changeamp160 Credit is getting tighter and households8211that lost 13 trillion since theamp160 financial crisis began8211 have been forced to cut back Is it really possible for GDP to increase without strong wage growth How is widening inequality reducing aggregate demand and weakening the economy Marshall Auerback This is not a new phenomenon There is little understanding that if households and firms try to net save save more out of income flows than they tangibly invest incomes collapse and desired private net saving is thwarted The private excess saving cannot exist without a budget deficit or a trade surplus Many people make this mistake At best we can talk about planned private saving being in excess of planned private investment but other than that we are violating double entry book keeping principles And consider this in 1998 1999 and 2000 increasing each year the US government virtuously ran budget surpluses These were widely lauded even though they had the effect of draining aggregate demand and forcing the private sector to rely more on debt the very things we are now rightly decryingamp160 But we8217ve misdiagnosed the causeamp160 The fiscal surpluses caused the private sector to become more heavily indebted than before as the fiscal drag squeezed liquidity and destroyed aggregate demand and incomes Along with our misconceived embrace of financial deregulation the combined result was sharply rising unemployment and a major recession I would argue that we have the model from the FDR years But this entails an approach where we work to restore personal incomes and balance sheets before we deal with the bank balance sheetsamp160 You improve aggregate demand and incomes will rise and with that so will CREDITWORTHINESS as well as the ability to service existing loansamp160 This in turn enhances the banks8217 balance sheets and facilitates greater provision of creditamp160 It8217s so easy even a banker can figure it out Today I believe that most major banks are insolvent and cannot and should not be saved Too big to fail means they are to big to be saved although I think we have to approach this from the perspective of functionality as well as the sheer size of the banks We should insist upon a market structure in which financial institutions are universally small But smallness cannot be defined by balancesheet assets alone We need to manage the degree of interconnectedness and the scale of total exposures including offbalance sheet exposures arising from derivative market participation which gets to your point about functionality Further we need to ensure that no market participants are indispensable by virtue of controlling some essential market infrastructure Right now it is essential that all big banks be examined during the 8220holiday8221 to uncover claims on one another It is highly likely that supervisors will find that several trillions of dollars of bad assets will turn out to be claims big financial institutions have on one another that is exactly what was found when AIG was examined8212which is why the government bailout of AIG led to side payments to the big banks and shadow banks In addition it will be necessary to increase supervision and regulation of the financial sector It is particularly important to put a stop to the practices that brought on the crisis As the experience of the early 1930s as well as that of the 1980s tells us if left alone to deal with the current problems market mechanisms will push management and owners of insolvent institutions to ramp up losses The result can be massive deflation massive bankruptcies massive destructions of physical assets and enormous unemployment will continue until the debt structure is simplified In the process social unrest will grow to the point that the entire socioeconomic system will be threatened Debt Forgiveness A more effective way to restart the economic process on the solid ground is to deal with the underlying cause of the problem borrowers cannot meet the required payments This implies sustaining their income and employment and if necessary drastically modifying their debt service burden The whole boom of the 2000s and more broadly the growth process that emerged at the in the early 1980s was based on household borrowing and the continuation of negative saving trends that is household deficit spending A good place to start recovery efforts therefore would be to change this method of economic growth There are two key ways to do that First a household8217s main source of income is its employment which itself is heavily tied to the state of the economy Policy can 8220decouple8221 this link to some degree through creation of countercyclical government employment programs There are plenty of nonprofitable even though crucial economic activities that require labor from massive infrastructure programs to social services CCC WPA and other programs of the New Deal employed millions of people creating jobs very rapidly in extremely useful projects In its first six years the WPA spent 11 billion threequarters of that on construction and conservation projects and the remainder on community service programs During that time WPA employed about 8 million workers The Civilian Conservation Corps CCC put approximately 275 million unemployed young men to work to reclaim government land and forests through irrigation soil enrichment pest control tree planting fire prevention and other conservation projects Workers earned a dollar a day and had to send part of their wages home to their families Through the National Youth Administration NYA the government made it possible for 15 million high school students and 600000 college students to continue their education by providing them with parttime jobs to meet their expenses Debt Jubilee 2010 However guaranteeing access to employment will not be enough to deal with the current crisis Indeed following decades of growing debt households have accumulated debt well beyond their means and even if employment programs are put in place they will pay on average a lower wage than what many jobless households used to earn Given that many households could not service their debt with their previous income providing them employment at a wage that could be below their previous wage will only provide some relief from their debt problem We therefore need a massive modification of loans and possibility bankruptcy which must be made simpler and less costly Some economists remembering that this was done in the past have suggested a debt jubilee credit card companies have already begun to go down this road and more could be done here The government could provide incentives to encourage more financial companies to go down this path If borrowers can meet their payments lenders will receive their funds and will return to profitability in turn some of the securitization processes will be revived Of course many banks are no longer used to making most of their money from interest payments but it may be time to return toward a less tradeandfee driven financial sector Hold to maturity is a good starting point Marshall Auerback is a Fellow at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute He has some 28 years experience in the investment management business serving as a global portfolio strategist Mr Auerback graduated magna cum laude in English ampamp Philosophy from Queen8217s University in 1981 and received a law degree from Corpus Christi College Oxford University in 1983 He has contributed several articles to CounterPunch He can be reached at be reached at MAuer1959aolcom MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state and can be reached at fergiewhitneymsncom | Marshall/PROPN Auerback/PROPN is/AUX a/DET Fellow/NOUN at/ADP the/DET Franklin/PROPN and/CCONJ Eleanor/PROPN Roosevelt/PROPN Institute/PROPN He/PRON has/VERB some/DET 28/NUM years/NOUN experience/NOUN in/ADP the/DET investment/NOUN management/NOUN business/NOUN serving/VERB as/ADP a/DET global/ADJ portfolio/NOUN strategist/NOUN Mr/PROPN Auerback/PROPN graduated/VERB magna/PROPN cum/PROPN laude/PROPN in/ADP English/PROPN ampamp/NOUN Philosophy/NOUN from/ADP Queen8217s/PROPN University/PROPN in/ADP 1981/NUM and/CCONJ received/VERB a/DET law/NOUN degree/NOUN from/ADP Corpus/PROPN Christi/PROPN College/PROPN Oxford/PROPN University/PROPN in/ADP 1983/NUM He/PRON has/AUX contributed/VERB several/ADJ articles/NOUN to/ADP CounterPunch/PROPN MIKE/PROPN WHITNEY/PROPN In/ADP a/DET recent/ADJ article/NOUN on/ADP New/PROPN 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<p>For Mark Bowden, author of <a href="" type="internal">Hué 1968</a>, the pivotal battle of the War in Vietnam did not follow the script most Americans were used to scanning in their newspapers or visualizing on the evening news.&#160; The war Americans followed at home was like a humongous hunting expedition.&#160; U.S. forces seemed engaged in an endless chase over a lush boondocks inhabited by peasants and dotted with rice paddies or trailing the rugged forested highlands in search of the Viet Cong, a cunning and elusive enemy whose tactics were hit and run, not stand and fight.</p>
<p>When an atypical fixed battle developed, it was typically well-removed from the population centers that hugged the coastline off the South China Sea.&#160; Vietnam was, after all, a guerrilla war, or more broadly understood, a people’s war fought to reunite a nation, artificially divided into North and South by fiat of the United States in the service of geopolitical brinksmanship.&#160; Accused of fermenting the southern insurgency, North Vietnam was mercilessly bombed, but spared the carnage of a ground war.&#160; Not so the south where, by whatever foul means, the idea was “to isolate the population from the Viet Cong,” notwithstanding that, as Mark Bowden readily concedes, “in most instances they were one in the same.”&#160;&#160; The resistance was popular and widespread, and its idea was to drive the American invader out, and overthrow a despised ruling clique of Vietnamese compradors which survived only because the invader had committed hundreds of thousands of its own troops and billions of its taxpayers’ dollars to sustain it.</p>
<p>Americans were consistently assured that bit by bit the tumultuous countryside was being pacified, and the guerillas attrited, both politically and as a fighting force.&#160; In late 1967 Americans were told they were winning the war.&#160; When Tet – the Luna New Year – dawned on January 31, 1968, that illusion was irreparably shattered.&#160; The vastly superior forces of the United States and its southern catspaw, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), were caught virtually flat footed when thousands of regular troops of the People’s Army of North Vietnam seemingly materialized from thin air, and in coordination with local units of the southern resistance, launched up and down the length and breath of South Vietnam what was quickly branded the Tet Offensive. &#160;The most stunning blow for Americans, war managers and citizens alike, was an assault on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon taken right to the walls of the American Embassy.</p>
<p>For several weeks thereafter, media attention in the U.S. and throughout the world focused primarily on the shock of Saigon’s vulnerability, overplaying its significance.&#160; A thousand kilometers north, at first scarcely noticed, even by the Commander of U.S. forces, General William Westmoreland, a battle had commenced that would become the “longest and bloodiest” of the war, not waged over the – till then – familiar rural topography, but house to house, street by street, culminating in one of the most intense chapters of urban warfare in the annals of American military history.&#160; &#160;Observers today might liken it to a more recent urban free-for-all entangling American troops in Fallujah, Iraq.&#160; Or, better yet, recall a U.S. military fiasco in downtown Mogadishu that Mark Bowden had crafted into an earlier best seller.&#160; To the extent comparisons hold, the Battle of Hué was like Black Hawk Down on steroids.</p>
<p>Hué 1968 is a comprehensive account of that battle written in the page-turning style of popular narrative non-fiction.&#160; The author has assembled a cast of eyewitnesses who participated in the action, Vietnamese and Americans, and the battle unfolds in recollections mined from their interviews, and, for the departed, from other primary sources at his disposal, such as lengthy wartime correspondences.&#160; Bowden has properly set the strategic stage for his action in the context of the war’s two most relevant contemporaneous developments.&#160; There was the very fact of Tet, simultaneous attacks with varying degrees of effectiveness on virtually every population center and military base in the South.&#160; The Year of the Monkey came in like Armageddon, catching General Westmoreland, for one, completely off guard even though he later claimed he knew those crafty commies were planning something.</p>
<p>To draw attention away from their true intentions, the North Vietnamese had executed a feint, keeping a remote Marine encampment under heavy bombardment at Khe Sanh near the border with Laos, and just below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).&#160; Taking the bait, and just two weeks before Tet, Westmoreland weakened his coastal enclaves by detaching troops to reinforce the beleaguered camp. &#160;The American general believed he was luring the North Vietnamese into a repeat of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which in 1954 brought French colonial control of Vietnam to an end but inadvertently opened the door to an American invasion.&#160; This time, Westmoreland fantasized, “he was determined to prevent history from repeating itself.”&#160;&#160; That battle never developed, and several months later, Khe Sanh was abandoned by the Americans.</p>
<p>Westmoreland’s obsession with Khe Sanh apparently prevented him from fully grasping that Hué, South Vietnam’s third largest city, and former Imperial capital, had fallen to the Liberation Front in less than twenty-four hours.&#160; This pattern of disbelief was moreover pervasive up and down the American chain of command.&#160; &#160;At Phu Bai, a Marine base less than fifteen miles south of Hué, the commanding general, with improbable symmetry named Forster LaHue, repeatedly ignored reports on the size of the force his counterattack would face, and insisted that, instead of thousands, their number couldn’t possibly exceed more than a few hundred.&#160; Could a force as large as the one being reported enter and occupy the entire city that quickly and virtually undetected?&#160;&#160; Through some of his most original reporting Bowden reconstructs exactly how that occurred.</p>
<p>Shifting the action in his account from one adversary to the other, Bowden begins with the attack, describing how four regiments totaling roughly four thousand uniformed NVA soldiers managed to infiltrate the border between North and South Vietnam, rendezvous with local guerrillas in a force of equal size, and ultimately bivouac on the outskirts of Hué.&#160; “It was the kind of troop movement,” comments Bowden, “that could remain secret only if the citizenry supported it, or didn’t care enough to sound the alarm.”</p>
<p>Certainly in Hué there were many Catholics who, in general, were partisans of the Saigon regime, not to mention a contingent of elite ARVN soldiers stationed there, who would have sounded the alarm if they’d been aware of any imminent threat.&#160; On another side was a strong current of anti-Americanism among the Buddhists and the student body at Vietnam’s prestigious Hué University, who two years earlier had combined and rioted against the repressive South Vietnamese government, and burned the library of the United States Information Service.&#160; But by early 1968, Hue was being little frequented by the war’s violence, and hopes were stoked that the city’s rich stock of architectural treasures, not least the palace of Vietnam’s last royal dynasty, might avoid destruction.&#160; Compared with the rest of the country, life in Hué was reasonably good, and reasonably safe.&#160; A degree of political complacency had set into what remained a functional commercial entrepot where trade and traffic on Hue’s iconic Perfume River remained brisk.</p>
<p>Even though a majority of Hué’s population of 140,000 could not be considered pillars of the revolution, an underground resistance network was well-entrenched in the city and highly motivated. &#160;And Bowden, having tracked down a small cast of survivors, gives us affecting &#160;sketches of, among others, the Village Girl who guided the troops through the darkness and pointed them toward their targets; the VC commander who stood up to the hero of Dien Bien Phu, General Vo Nguyen Giap, and revised the battle plan; the college boy who worked with his fisherman landlord to smuggle arms into the city by sampan; the Buddhist poet turned what we would call ‘information officer,’ and Bowden – who holds many conventional opinions– calls “propagandist;” but my favorite was the balsy little guy who was given the task to create a giant new flag for the victors to raise once they’d taken the city.</p>
<p>The flag detail merits a special nod to illustrate the contrast between the high tech m.o. of the Empire’s war machine, and the endless improvisation of those in the Front who used gumption, imagination and stealth to their advantage in the face of overwhelming fire power from air, land and sea.&#160; The task to create a flag to be seen, not as “an invasion or occupation, but rather as a liberation,” fell to Sargent Cao Van Sen, an old war horse who’d fought with the Viet Minh against the French, joined the northern Army, and was then ordered back to his native Hue to organize among the Viet Cong. &#160;The idea of the flag, Bowden says “was to recognize real political differences between North and South,” with a design that represented, not only the liberation forces, but also “the intelligentsia and the city’s religious factions – Buddhists and Catholics.”&#160; Hanoi’s political objective at that stage was transitional, “to establish a neutral, independent South Vietnam,” leaving reunification to future negotiations.”&#160; Sgt. Sen’s job was to line up the material, a sewing machine and a seamstress to produce a single flag, which, when completed, required two men to carry it.&#160; After being “run up the 123-foot flagpole… that stood just outside the royal palace before the Citadel’s southern wall… it was visible all over Hué” when the city’s denizens awoke January 31st on the first morning of Tet.</p>
<p>Metropolitan Hue spread over both sides of the Perfume River, and the Front’s objective was to occupy the zone on the south bank called the Triangle, and, on the north, the Citadel, an “enormous fortress that enclosed nearly two square miles… its walls twenty-six feet high and impenetrably thick,” and enclosing the neighborhoods of Hue’s most affluent residents.&#160;&#160; Primary targets, included the air strip inside the Citadel, the province headquarters, the treasury, the post office, the prison, the radio station and “the sole American base, the [Military Assistance Command, Vietnam] MACV compound.”</p>
<p>The Commander of the Front, General Dang Kinh watched from high ground to the west, anxiously awaiting the assault to begin.&#160; Finally, “throughout the city arose the sound of gunfire… scattered at first, and then as if touched off by a fuse, it rose rapidly to a din.”&#160; By the time the shooting stopped, the attacking force, having “suffered only a few casualties, had dealt Hue’s defenders a crushing surprise blow.”&#160; The only major targets not overrun were a fortified redoubt occupied by the 1st ARVN Division inside the Citadel, and the MACV compound on the opposite side of the river, both heavily under siege.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the loud cheerleading from Hanoi for Tet to unleash a “popular uprising,” it was General Kinh’s opinion, according to Bowden, that no such uprising would occur, not even in subdued and occupied Hué, given the certainty of an overpowering American counter-attack.&#160; Kinh knew his forces “could take the city, but… not hold it for long.&#160; Achievable goals… were to destroy the ARVN division, and… round up… those who represented the Saigon regime… who were marked for arrest and punishment.”</p>
<p>The subsequent executions of many of these Saigon officials is thematic in Bowden’s text, an overly eager retailing of the ex post facto justification among the war’s apologists for the American decision to rescue their allies by destroying their city.&#160; More informed observers might counter that for an American writer of Bowden’s stature to lay charges of mass murder at the Vietnamese resistance– in this instance taking blood retaliation on enemies considered legitimate military targets – demonstrates a highly hometown cast of mind, and a failure to do the math on the infinitely less selective assassination orgy of the U.S. Phoenix Program, not to mention the war’s vastly unbalanced human death toll perpetrated upon the Vietnamese population by the invader.</p>
<p>Kinh’s prediction proved correct. &#160;And much of what Bowden encapsulates in Hué 1968 is devoted to a ground level view on just how the city was retaken.&#160; &#160;Bowden fully examines first January 31st, the day Hué fell, from a variety of vantage points including civilians and combatants on both sides, then moves the battle forward in week long blocks until the Front, faced with annihilation, is forced to withdraw. &#160;&#160;Had the U.S. command acted more swiftly, the lives of many marines might have been spared, but the city faced devastation in every scenario as long as the occupiers remained.&#160;&#160; The initial counter-thrust came from the nearby Marine base at Phu Bai when General LaHue, still doubting his adversary’s vast numerical superiority, initially dispatched so few marines that, on one of few occasions during the war, the U.S. was seriously out-gunned.&#160; When a marine captain already in Hué called for air and artillery strikes to dislodge the entrenched enemy, General LaHue told him “rather strikingly that he was overreacting.“&#160; LaHue “saw no reason on earth why the more than four hundred men in the [MACV] compound, reinforced with well over three hundred U.S. marines,” assorted tanks and heavy weaponized vehicles, “should not be able to flatten anything between them and the fucking Citadel.”&#160; Bowden aptly titles this episode An Idiotic Mission.</p>
<p>Three hundred men represented one understrength marine battalion, but only a single unit, Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Division was dispatched at first to test the enemy strength.&#160; This proved a disaster, and the best account of the action on the ground I’ve found was not Bowden’s, but in <a href="" type="internal">Vietnam-Perkasie</a>, a memoir by W.D. (Bill) Ehrhart.&#160; When Alpha Company left Phu Bai just as the sun was coming up, Bill Ehrhart was given the option of staying behind.&#160; He was short, meaning only a few days remained on what had already been a harrowing thirteen month tour.&#160; But since the unit was just going to check things out, and were told they’d be back by evening, Bill threw caution to the wind.</p>
<p>Alpha Company, moving to relieve the assault on the MACV compound passed a gas station on the city outskirts, and then, Ehrhart writes, “all hell broke loose… The shock of the ambush caught the whole column completely by surprise… We knew the compound lay straight up the road… seven blocks ahead… We fought our way up the [first] block.&#160; And the one after that.&#160; All day long we inched up the street.&#160; Casualties were appalling.&#160;&#160; Wounded and dead Marines lay everywhere.”&#160; Ehrhart, wounded in action, was in the thick of it the whole time.&#160; His memoir is a compelling, heart wrenching read.</p>
<p>From there Bowden covers the fighting chapter and verse.&#160; And if battle action is your genre, it’s a read that’s hair raising enough to fix your attention. &#160;The killing went on for 26 days, and by the end, 80% of the city lay in rubble.&#160; Bowden devotes a last chapter to Hue’s human toll.&#160; “Two-hundred and fifty American marines and soldiers were killed, and 1,554 wounded… The Front’s losses are estimated at between 2,400 and 5000…. A conservative guess at those executed would be two thousand… [which] brings us to a combined civilian death toll of about eight thousand… not an exact figure, but to the degree it’s off, it’s off by being too low.”</p>
<p>That the civilian death toll was enormous, cannot be doubted, and is by most accounts I’ve read over the years attributed to the terrible pounding the city took from naval off-shore guns, and from American and ARVN air power and artillery intent on expelling the Front whatever the human cost.&#160; As for “those executed,” it appears as if Bowden may have that figure “off” by a factor of ten.&#160; Writing in The New York Times in October 1972, Richard Barnet, a former State Department official and co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, quotes what the Hue Police Chief told a correspondent of The Times of London in March 1968 just days after the battle.&#160; The Chief, “Doan Cong Lap estimated the total number of executions at 200.“&#160; Moreover, “the local Catholic priest reported that none of his clergy or parishioners were harmed by the N.L.F. [National Liberation Front],” who had been given instructions to be on their best behavior. &#160;Even if these two eyewitnesses under-counted the reprisal deaths, it’s still unlikely that Bowden’s figure holds water, given his reliance on official U.S. sources.</p>
<p>Richard Barnet took up this topic at a time when voices in the Nixon administration were claiming that mass executions at Hué were proof there would be a bloodbath if the U.S. withdrew and the communists came to power.&#160;&#160; When questioned on this in Hanoi, Premier Pham Van Dong retorted, “There is nothing in recent Vietnamese history to suggest that a government bent on killing hundreds of thousands of people in South Vietnam can keep peace.”&#160; In any case the bloodbath was us.&#160; As Barnet dryly quipped, “In the Orwellian age, the daily saturation bombings of Indochina are defended as missions of mercy.”</p>
<p>Mark Bowden seems to bend over backwards throughout this voluminous and valuable book to provide a two-sided perspective on a particularly tragic moment in the Vietnam War.&#160; But there’s something distastefully familiar in his throwaway rhetoric of the Cold War bias that got us into Vietnam in the first place.&#160; Bowden demonstrates how truth is betrayed by the words he chooses, for example, that “antiwar activists in the States romanticized Ho Chi Minh, and his cause, emphasizing his nationalist character…&#160; [but] Hanoi was Communist, authoritarian to the core… ruthless and doctrinaire.”&#160; Yet even this phobic reflex to honor the thought police in the mainstream where he prospers doesn’t cause Bowden to ignore that it was the Stalinists who hoped to come to power though the ballot box and the Americans who made war to prevent that.</p>
<p>By consensus in the school of conventional wisdom the Tet Offensive of 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War, after which the American war aim was not to win, but how to get out.&#160; Mark Bowden makes an excellent case that the fulcrum of that turning point was the Battle of Hue.&#160; But what if there was no turning point? &#160;In Vietnam the protracted war to expel a powerful foreign invader had its roots in millennia past; the American invasion was just another bump in the road.</p>
<p>This article originally appeared in CounterPunch magazine.</p> | Hué Back When: the Bloodbath in Vietnam Was Us | true | https://counterpunch.org/2018/01/29/hue-back-when-the-bloodbath-in-vietnam-was-us/ | 2018-01-29 | 4left
| 3,069 | For Mark Bowden author of Hu233 1968 the pivotal battle of the War in Vietnam did not follow the script most Americans were used to scanning in their newspapers or visualizing on the evening newsamp160 The war Americans followed at home was like a humongous hunting expeditionamp160 US forces seemed engaged in an endless chase over a lush boondocks inhabited by peasants and dotted with rice paddies or trailing the rugged forested highlands in search of the Viet Cong a cunning and elusive enemy whose tactics were hit and run not stand and fight When an atypical fixed battle developed it was typically wellremoved from the population centers that hugged the coastline off the South China Seaamp160 Vietnam was after all a guerrilla war or more broadly understood a people8217s war fought to reunite a nation artificially divided into North and South by fiat of the United States in the service of geopolitical brinksmanshipamp160 Accused of fermenting the southern insurgency North Vietnam was mercilessly bombed but spared the carnage of a ground waramp160 Not so the south where by whatever foul means the idea was 8220to isolate the population from the Viet Cong8221 notwithstanding that as Mark Bowden readily concedes 8220in most instances they were one in the same8221amp160amp160 The resistance was popular and widespread and its idea was to drive the American invader out and overthrow a despised ruling clique of Vietnamese compradors which survived only because the invader had committed hundreds of thousands of its own troops and billions of its taxpayers8217 dollars to sustain it Americans were consistently assured that bit by bit the tumultuous countryside was being pacified and the guerillas attrited both politically and as a fighting forceamp160 In late 1967 Americans were told they were winning the waramp160 When Tet 8211 the Luna New Year 8211 dawned on January 31 1968 that illusion was irreparably shatteredamp160 The vastly superior forces of the United States and its southern catspaw the Army of the Republic of Vietnam ARVN were caught virtually flat footed when thousands of regular troops of the People8217s Army of North Vietnam seemingly materialized from thin air and in coordination with local units of the southern resistance launched up and down the length and breath of South Vietnam what was quickly branded the Tet Offensive amp160The most stunning blow for Americans war managers and citizens alike was an assault on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon taken right to the walls of the American Embassy For several weeks thereafter media attention in the US and throughout the world focused primarily on the shock of Saigon8217s vulnerability overplaying its significanceamp160 A thousand kilometers north at first scarcely noticed even by the Commander of US forces General William Westmoreland a battle had commenced that would become the 8220longest and bloodiest8221 of the war not waged over the 8211 till then 8211 familiar rural topography but house to house street by street culminating in one of the most intense chapters of urban warfare in the annals of American military historyamp160 amp160Observers today might liken it to a more recent urban freeforall entangling American troops in Fallujah Iraqamp160 Or better yet recall a US military fiasco in downtown Mogadishu that Mark Bowden had crafted into an earlier best selleramp160 To the extent comparisons hold the Battle of Hu233 was like Black Hawk Down on steroids Hu233 1968 is a comprehensive account of that battle written in the pageturning style of popular narrative nonfictionamp160 The author has assembled a cast of eyewitnesses who participated in the action Vietnamese and Americans and the battle unfolds in recollections mined from their interviews and for the departed from other primary sources at his disposal such as lengthy wartime correspondencesamp160 Bowden has properly set the strategic stage for his action in the context of the war8217s two most relevant contemporaneous developmentsamp160 There was the very fact of Tet simultaneous attacks with varying degrees of effectiveness on virtually every population center and military base in the Southamp160 The Year of the Monkey came in like Armageddon catching General Westmoreland for one completely off guard even though he later claimed he knew those crafty commies were planning something To draw attention away from their true intentions the North Vietnamese had executed a feint keeping a remote Marine encampment under heavy bombardment at Khe Sanh near the border with Laos and just below the Demilitarized Zone DMZamp160 Taking the bait and just two weeks before Tet Westmoreland weakened his coastal enclaves by detaching troops to reinforce the beleaguered camp amp160The American general believed he was luring the North Vietnamese into a repeat of the battle of Dien Bien Phu which in 1954 brought French colonial control of Vietnam to an end but inadvertently opened the door to an American invasionamp160 This time Westmoreland fantasized 8220he was determined to prevent history from repeating itself8221amp160amp160 That battle never developed and several months later Khe Sanh was abandoned by the Americans Westmoreland8217s obsession with Khe Sanh apparently prevented him from fully grasping that Hu233 South Vietnam8217s third largest city and former Imperial capital had fallen to the Liberation Front in less than twentyfour hoursamp160 This pattern of disbelief was moreover pervasive up and down the American chain of commandamp160 amp160At Phu Bai a Marine base less than fifteen miles south of Hu233 the commanding general with improbable symmetry named Forster LaHue repeatedly ignored reports on the size of the force his counterattack would face and insisted that instead of thousands their number couldn8217t possibly exceed more than a few hundredamp160 Could a force as large as the one being reported enter and occupy the entire city that quickly and virtually undetectedamp160amp160 Through some of his most original reporting Bowden reconstructs exactly how that occurred Shifting the action in his account from one adversary to the other Bowden begins with the attack describing how four regiments totaling roughly four thousand uniformed NVA soldiers managed to infiltrate the border between North and South Vietnam rendezvous with local guerrillas in a force of equal size and ultimately bivouac on the outskirts of Hu233amp160 8220It was the kind of troop movement8221 comments Bowden 8220that could remain secret only if the citizenry supported it or didn8217t care enough to sound the alarm8221 Certainly in Hu233 there were many Catholics who in general were partisans of the Saigon regime not to mention a contingent of elite ARVN soldiers stationed there who would have sounded the alarm if they8217d been aware of any imminent threatamp160 On another side was a strong current of antiAmericanism among the Buddhists and the student body at Vietnam8217s prestigious Hu233 University who two years earlier had combined and rioted against the repressive South Vietnamese government and burned the library of the United States Information Serviceamp160 But by early 1968 Hue was being little frequented by the war8217s violence and hopes were stoked that the city8217s rich stock of architectural treasures not least the palace of Vietnam8217s last royal dynasty might avoid destructionamp160 Compared with the rest of the country life in Hu233 was reasonably good and reasonably safeamp160 A degree of political complacency had set into what remained a functional commercial entrepot where trade and traffic on Hue8217s iconic Perfume River remained brisk Even though a majority of Hu2338217s population of 140000 could not be considered pillars of the revolution an underground resistance network was wellentrenched in the city and highly motivated amp160And Bowden having tracked down a small cast of survivors gives us affecting amp160sketches of among others the Village Girl who guided the troops through the darkness and pointed them toward their targets the VC commander who stood up to the hero of Dien Bien Phu General Vo Nguyen Giap and revised the battle plan the college boy who worked with his fisherman landlord to smuggle arms into the city by sampan the Buddhist poet turned what we would call 8216information officer8217 and Bowden 8211 who holds many conventional opinions8211 calls 8220propagandist8221 but my favorite was the balsy little guy who was given the task to create a giant new flag for the victors to raise once they8217d taken the city The flag detail merits a special nod to illustrate the contrast between the high tech mo of the Empire8217s war machine and the endless improvisation of those in the Front who used gumption imagination and stealth to their advantage in the face of overwhelming fire power from air land and seaamp160 The task to create a flag to be seen not as 8220an invasion or occupation but rather as a liberation8221 fell to Sargent Cao Van Sen an old war horse who8217d fought with the Viet Minh against the French joined the northern Army and was then ordered back to his native Hue to organize among the Viet Cong amp160The idea of the flag Bowden says 8220was to recognize real political differences between North and South8221 with a design that represented not only the liberation forces but also 8220the intelligentsia and the city8217s religious factions 8211 Buddhists and Catholics8221amp160 Hanoi8217s political objective at that stage was transitional 8220to establish a neutral independent South Vietnam8221 leaving reunification to future negotiations8221amp160 Sgt Sen8217s job was to line up the material a sewing machine and a seamstress to produce a single flag which when completed required two men to carry itamp160 After being 8220run up the 123foot flagpole8230 that stood just outside the royal palace before the Citadel8217s southern wall8230 it was visible all over Hu2338221 when the city8217s denizens awoke January 31st on the first morning of Tet Metropolitan Hue spread over both sides of the Perfume River and the Front8217s objective was to occupy the zone on the south bank called the Triangle and on the north the Citadel an 8220enormous fortress that enclosed nearly two square miles8230 its walls twentysix feet high and impenetrably thick8221 and enclosing the neighborhoods of Hue8217s most affluent residentsamp160amp160 Primary targets included the air strip inside the Citadel the province headquarters the treasury the post office the prison the radio station and 8220the sole American base the Military Assistance Command Vietnam MACV compound8221 The Commander of the Front General Dang Kinh watched from high ground to the west anxiously awaiting the assault to beginamp160 Finally 8220throughout the city arose the sound of gunfire8230 scattered at first and then as if touched off by a fuse it rose rapidly to a din8221amp160 By the time the shooting stopped the attacking force having 8220suffered only a few casualties had dealt Hue8217s defenders a crushing surprise blow8221amp160 The only major targets not overrun were a fortified redoubt occupied by the 1st ARVN Division inside the Citadel and the MACV compound on the opposite side of the river both heavily under siege Notwithstanding the loud cheerleading from Hanoi for Tet to unleash a 8220popular uprising8221 it was General Kinh8217s opinion according to Bowden that no such uprising would occur not even in subdued and occupied Hu233 given the certainty of an overpowering American counterattackamp160 Kinh knew his forces 8220could take the city but8230 not hold it for longamp160 Achievable goals8230 were to destroy the ARVN division and8230 round up8230 those who represented the Saigon regime8230 who were marked for arrest and punishment8221 The subsequent executions of many of these Saigon officials is thematic in Bowden8217s text an overly eager retailing of the ex post facto justification among the war8217s apologists for the American decision to rescue their allies by destroying their cityamp160 More informed observers might counter that for an American writer of Bowden8217s stature to lay charges of mass murder at the Vietnamese resistance8211 in this instance taking blood retaliation on enemies considered legitimate military targets 8211 demonstrates a highly hometown cast of mind and a failure to do the math on the infinitely less selective assassination orgy of the US Phoenix Program not to mention the war8217s vastly unbalanced human death toll perpetrated upon the Vietnamese population by the invader Kinh8217s prediction proved correct amp160And much of what Bowden encapsulates in Hu233 1968 is devoted to a ground level view on just how the city was retakenamp160 amp160Bowden fully examines first January 31st the day Hu233 fell from a variety of vantage points including civilians and combatants on both sides then moves the battle forward in week long blocks until the Front faced with annihilation is forced to withdraw amp160amp160Had the US command acted more swiftly the lives of many marines might have been spared but the city faced devastation in every scenario as long as the occupiers remainedamp160amp160 The initial counterthrust came from the nearby Marine base at Phu Bai when General LaHue still doubting his adversary8217s vast numerical superiority initially dispatched so few marines that on one of few occasions during the war the US was seriously outgunnedamp160 When a marine captain already in Hu233 called for air and artillery strikes to dislodge the entrenched enemy General LaHue told him 8220rather strikingly that he was overreacting8220amp160 LaHue 8220saw no reason on earth why the more than four hundred men in the MACV compound reinforced with well over three hundred US marines8221 assorted tanks and heavy weaponized vehicles 8220should not be able to flatten anything between them and the fucking Citadel8221amp160 Bowden aptly titles this episode An Idiotic Mission Three hundred men represented one understrength marine battalion but only a single unit Alpha Company of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Marine Division was dispatched at first to test the enemy strengthamp160 This proved a disaster and the best account of the action on the ground I8217ve found was not Bowden8217s but in VietnamPerkasie a memoir by WD Bill Ehrhartamp160 When Alpha Company left Phu Bai just as the sun was coming up Bill Ehrhart was given the option of staying behindamp160 He was short meaning only a few days remained on what had already been a harrowing thirteen month touramp160 But since the unit was just going to check things out and were told they8217d be back by evening Bill threw caution to the wind Alpha Company moving to relieve the assault on the MACV compound passed a gas station on the city outskirts and then Ehrhart writes 8220all hell broke loose8230 The shock of the ambush caught the whole column completely by surprise8230 We knew the compound lay straight up the road8230 seven blocks ahead8230 We fought our way up the first blockamp160 And the one after thatamp160 All day long we inched up the streetamp160 Casualties were appallingamp160amp160 Wounded and dead Marines lay everywhere8221amp160 Ehrhart wounded in action was in the thick of it the whole timeamp160 His memoir is a compelling heart wrenching read From there Bowden covers the fighting chapter and verseamp160 And if battle action is your genre it8217s a read that8217s hair raising enough to fix your attention amp160The killing went on for 26 days and by the end 80 of the city lay in rubbleamp160 Bowden devotes a last chapter to Hue8217s human tollamp160 8220Twohundred and fifty American marines and soldiers were killed and 1554 wounded8230 The Front8217s losses are estimated at between 2400 and 50008230 A conservative guess at those executed would be two thousand8230 which brings us to a combined civilian death toll of about eight thousand8230 not an exact figure but to the degree it8217s off it8217s off by being too low8221 That the civilian death toll was enormous cannot be doubted and is by most accounts I8217ve read over the years attributed to the terrible pounding the city took from naval offshore guns and from American and ARVN air power and artillery intent on expelling the Front whatever the human costamp160 As for 8220those executed8221 it appears as if Bowden may have that figure 8220off8221 by a factor of tenamp160 Writing in The New York Times in October 1972 Richard Barnet a former State Department official and cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies quotes what the Hue Police Chief told a correspondent of The Times of London in March 1968 just days after the battleamp160 The Chief 8220Doan Cong Lap estimated the total number of executions at 2008220amp160 Moreover 8220the local Catholic priest reported that none of his clergy or parishioners were harmed by the NLF National Liberation Front8221 who had been given instructions to be on their best behavior amp160Even if these two eyewitnesses undercounted the reprisal deaths it8217s still unlikely that Bowden8217s figure holds water given his reliance on official US sources Richard Barnet took up this topic at a time when voices in the Nixon administration were claiming that mass executions at Hu233 were proof there would be a bloodbath if the US withdrew and the communists came to poweramp160amp160 When questioned on this in Hanoi Premier Pham Van Dong retorted 8220There is nothing in recent Vietnamese history to suggest that a government bent on killing hundreds of thousands of people in South Vietnam can keep peace8221amp160 In any case the bloodbath was usamp160 As Barnet dryly quipped 8220In the Orwellian age the daily saturation bombings of Indochina are defended as missions of mercy8221 Mark Bowden seems to bend over backwards throughout this voluminous and valuable book to provide a twosided perspective on a particularly tragic moment in the Vietnam Waramp160 But there8217s something distastefully familiar in his throwaway rhetoric of the Cold War bias that got us into Vietnam in the first placeamp160 Bowden demonstrates how truth is betrayed by the words he chooses for example that 8220antiwar activists in the States romanticized Ho Chi Minh and his cause emphasizing his nationalist character8230amp160 but Hanoi was Communist authoritarian to the core8230 ruthless and doctrinaire8221amp160 Yet even this phobic reflex to honor the thought police in the mainstream where he prospers doesn8217t cause Bowden to ignore that it was the Stalinists who hoped to come to power though the ballot box and the Americans who made war to prevent that By consensus in the school of conventional wisdom the Tet Offensive of 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War after which the American war aim was not to win but how to get outamp160 Mark Bowden makes an excellent case that the fulcrum of that turning point was the Battle of Hueamp160 But what if there was no turning point amp160In Vietnam the protracted war to expel a powerful foreign invader had its roots in millennia past the American invasion was just another bump in the road This article originally appeared in CounterPunch magazine | For/ADP Mark/PROPN Bowden/PROPN author/NOUN of/ADP Hu233/PROPN 1968/NUM the/DET pivotal/ADJ battle/NOUN of/ADP the/DET War/PROPN in/ADP Vietnam/PROPN did/AUX not/PART follow/VERB the/DET script/NOUN most/ADJ Americans/PROPN were/AUX used/VERB to/ADP scanning/VERB in/ADP their/PRON newspapers/NOUN or/CCONJ visualizing/VERB on/ADP the/DET evening/NOUN newsamp160/NOUN The/DET war/NOUN Americans/PROPN followed/VERB at/ADP home/NOUN was/AUX like/ADP a/DET humongous/ADJ hunting/NOUN expeditionamp160/PUNCT US/PROPN forces/NOUN seemed/VERB engaged/ADJ in/ADP an/DET endless/ADJ chase/NOUN over/ADP a/DET lush/ADJ boondocks/NOUN inhabited/VERB by/ADP peasants/NOUN and/CCONJ dotted/VERB with/ADP rice/NOUN paddies/NOUN or/CCONJ trailing/VERB the/DET rugged/ADJ forested/ADJ highlands/NOUN in/ADP search/NOUN of/ADP the/DET Viet/PROPN Cong/PROPN a/DET cunning/ADJ and/CCONJ elusive/ADJ enemy/NOUN whose/DET tactics/NOUN were/AUX hit/VERB and/CCONJ run/AUX not/PART stand/VERB and/CCONJ fight/VERB When/SCONJ an/DET atypical/ADJ fixed/VERB battle/NOUN developed/VERB it/PRON was/AUX typically/ADV wellremoved/VERB from/ADP the/DET population/NOUN centers/NOUN that/PRON hugged/VERB the/DET coastline/NOUN off/ADP the/DET South/PROPN China/PROPN Seaamp160/NOUN Vietnam/PROPN was/AUX after/ADV all/DET a/DET guerrilla/NOUN war/NOUN or/CCONJ more/ADV broadly/ADV understood/VERB a/DET people8217s/PROPN war/NOUN fought/VERB to/PART reunite/VERB a/DET nation/NOUN artificially/ADV divided/VERB into/ADP North/PROPN and/CCONJ South/PROPN by/ADP fiat/NOUN of/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN in/ADP the/DET service/NOUN of/ADP geopolitical/ADJ brinksmanshipamp160/NOUN Accused/VERB of/ADP fermenting/VERB the/DET southern/ADJ insurgency/NOUN North/PROPN Vietnam/PROPN was/AUX mercilessly/ADV bombed/VERB but/CCONJ spared/VERB the/DET carnage/NOUN of/ADP a/DET ground/NOUN waramp160/PUNCT Not/PART so/ADV the/DET south/NOUN where/SCONJ by/ADP whatever/DET foul/NOUN means/VERB the/DET idea/NOUN was/AUX 8220to/PROPN isolate/VERB the/DET population/NOUN from/ADP the/DET Viet/PROPN Cong8221/PROPN notwithstanding/ADP that/PRON as/SCONJ Mark/PROPN Bowden/PROPN readily/ADV concedes/VERB 8220/NUM in/ADP most/ADJ instances/NOUN they/PRON were/AUX one/NUM in/ADP the/DET same8221amp160amp160/NOUN The/DET resistance/NOUN was/AUX popular/ADJ and/CCONJ widespread/ADJ and/CCONJ its/PRON idea/NOUN was/AUX to/PART drive/VERB the/DET American/ADJ invader/NOUN out/ADP and/CCONJ overthrow/VERB a/DET despised/VERB ruling/VERB clique/NOUN of/ADP Vietnamese/ADJ compradors/NOUN which/PRON survived/VERB only/ADV because/SCONJ the/DET invader/NOUN had/AUX committed/VERB hundreds/NOUN of/ADP thousands/NOUN of/ADP its/PRON own/ADJ troops/NOUN and/CCONJ billions/NOUN of/ADP its/PRON taxpayers8217/PROPN dollars/NOUN to/PART sustain/VERB it/PRON Americans/PROPN were/AUX consistently/ADV assured/VERB that/DET bit/NOUN by/ADP bit/NOUN the/DET tumultuous/ADJ countryside/NOUN was/AUX being/AUX pacified/VERB and/CCONJ the/DET guerillas/NOUN attrited/VERB both/PRON politically/ADV and/CCONJ as/ADP a/DET fighting/NOUN forceamp160/PUNCT In/ADP late/ADJ 1967/NUM Americans/PROPN were/AUX told/VERB they/PRON were/AUX winning/VERB the/DET waramp160/PROPN When/SCONJ Tet/PROPN 8211/NUM the/DET Luna/PROPN New/PROPN Year/PROPN 8211/NUM dawned/VERB on/ADP January/PROPN 31/NUM 1968/NUM that/DET illusion/NOUN was/AUX irreparably/ADV shatteredamp160/VERB The/DET vastly/ADV superior/ADJ forces/NOUN of/ADP the/DET United/PROPN States/PROPN and/CCONJ its/PRON southern/ADJ catspaw/PROPN the/DET Army/PROPN of/ADP the/DET Republic/PROPN of/ADP Vietnam/PROPN ARVN/PROPN were/AUX caught/VERB virtually/ADV flat/ADJ footed/VERB when/SCONJ thousands/NOUN of/ADP regular/ADJ troops/NOUN of/ADP the/DET People8217s/PROPN Army/PROPN of/ADP North/PROPN Vietnam/PROPN seemingly/ADV materialized/VERB from/ADP thin/ADJ air/NOUN and/CCONJ in/ADP coordination/NOUN with/ADP local/ADJ units/NOUN of/ADP the/DET southern/ADJ resistance/NOUN launched/VERB up/ADP and/CCONJ down/ADP the/DET length/NOUN and/CCONJ breath/NOUN of/ADP South/PROPN Vietnam/PROPN what/PRON was/AUX quickly/ADV branded/VERB the/DET Tet/PROPN Offensive/PROPN amp160The/ADP most/ADV stunning/ADJ blow/NOUN for/ADP Americans/PROPN war/NOUN managers/NOUN and/CCONJ citizens/NOUN alike/ADV was/AUX an/DET assault/NOUN on/ADP the/DET South/ADJ Vietnamese/ADJ capital/NOUN of/ADP Saigon/PROPN taken/VERB right/ADV to/ADP the/DET walls/NOUN of/ADP the/DET American/PROPN Embassy/PROPN For/ADP several/ADJ weeks/NOUN thereafter/ADV media/NOUN attention/NOUN in/ADP the/DET US/PROPN and/CCONJ throughout/ADP the/DET world/NOUN focused/VERB primarily/ADV on/ADP the/DET shock/NOUN of/ADP Saigon8217s/PROPN vulnerability/NOUN overplaying/VERB its/PRON significanceamp160/NUM A/PRON thousand/NUM kilometers/NOUN north/ADV at/ADP first/ADV scarcely/ADV noticed/VERB even/ADV by/ADP the/DET Commander/PROPN of/ADP US/PROPN forces/NOUN General/PROPN William/PROPN Westmoreland/PROPN a/DET battle/NOUN had/AUX commenced/VERB that/PRON would/AUX become/VERB the/DET 8220longest/NOUN and/CCONJ bloodiest8221/NOUN of/ADP the/DET war/NOUN not/PART waged/VERB over/ADP the/DET 8211/NUM till/SCONJ then/ADV 8211/NUM familiar/ADJ rural/ADJ topography/NOUN but/CCONJ house/NOUN to/ADP house/PROPN street/PROPN by/ADP street/NOUN culminating/VERB in/ADP one/NUM of/ADP the/DET most/ADV intense/ADJ chapters/NOUN of/ADP urban/ADJ warfare/NOUN in/ADP the/DET annals/NOUN of/ADP American/ADJ military/NOUN historyamp160/PROPN amp160Observers/NOUN today/NOUN might/AUX liken/VERB it/PRON to/ADP a/DET more/ADV recent/ADJ urban/ADJ freeforall/NOUN entangling/VERB American/ADJ troops/NOUN in/ADP Fallujah/PROPN Iraqamp160/PUNCT Or/CCONJ better/ADV yet/ADV recall/VERB a/DET US/PROPN military/ADJ fiasco/NOUN in/ADP downtown/NOUN Mogadishu/PROPN that/PRON Mark/PROPN Bowden/PROPN had/AUX crafted/VERB into/ADP an/DET earlier/ADV best/ADJ selleramp160/NUM To/ADP the/DET extent/NOUN comparisons/NOUN hold/VERB the/DET Battle/PROPN of/ADP Hu233/PROPN was/AUX like/ADP Black/PROPN Hawk/PROPN Down/ADP on/ADP steroids/PROPN Hu233/PROPN 1968/NUM is/AUX a/DET comprehensive/ADJ account/NOUN of/ADP that/DET battle/NOUN written/VERB in/ADP the/DET pageturning/ADJ style/NOUN of/ADP popular/ADJ narrative/NOUN nonfictionamp160/NOUN The/DET author/NOUN has/AUX assembled/VERB a/DET cast/NOUN of/ADP eyewitnesses/NOUN who/PRON participated/VERB in/ADP the/DET action/NOUN Vietnamese/PROPN and/CCONJ Americans/PROPN and/CCONJ the/DET battle/NOUN unfolds/VERB in/ADP recollections/NOUN mined/VERB from/ADP their/PRON interviews/NOUN and/CCONJ for/ADP the/DET departed/VERB from/ADP other/ADJ primary/ADJ sources/NOUN at/ADP his/PRON disposal/NOUN such/ADJ as/ADP lengthy/ADJ wartime/NOUN correspondencesamp160/PROPN Bowden/PROPN has/AUX properly/ADV set/VERB the/DET strategic/ADJ stage/NOUN for/ADP his/PRON action/NOUN in/ADP the/DET context/NOUN of/ADP the/DET war8217s/NOUN two/NUM most/ADV relevant/ADJ contemporaneous/ADJ developmentsamp160/PROPN There/PRON was/VERB the/DET very/ADJ fact/NOUN of/ADP Tet/PROPN simultaneous/ADJ attacks/NOUN with/ADP varying/VERB degrees/NOUN of/ADP effectiveness/NOUN on/ADP virtually/ADV every/PRON population/NOUN center/NOUN and/CCONJ military/ADJ base/NOUN in/ADP the/DET Southamp160/NOUN The/DET Year/PROPN of/ADP the/DET Monkey/PROPN came/VERB in/ADP like/ADP Armageddon/PROPN catching/VERB General/PROPN Westmoreland/PROPN for/ADP one/NUM completely/ADV off/ADP guard/NOUN even/ADV though/SCONJ he/PRON later/ADV claimed/VERB he/PRON knew/VERB those/DET crafty/ADJ commies/NOUN were/AUX planning/VERB something/PRON To/PART draw/VERB attention/NOUN away/ADV from/ADP their/PRON true/ADJ intentions/NOUN the/DET North/PROPN Vietnamese/PROPN had/AUX executed/VERB a/DET feint/NOUN keeping/VERB a/DET remote/ADJ Marine/PROPN encampment/NOUN under/ADP heavy/ADJ bombardment/NOUN at/ADP Khe/PROPN Sanh/PROPN near/ADP the/DET border/NOUN with/ADP Laos/PROPN and/CCONJ just/ADV below/ADP the/DET Demilitarized/PROPN Zone/PROPN DMZamp160/PROPN Taking/VERB the/DET bait/NOUN and/CCONJ just/ADV two/NUM weeks/NOUN before/SCONJ Tet/PROPN Westmoreland/PROPN weakened/VERB his/PRON coastal/ADJ enclaves/NOUN by/ADP detaching/VERB troops/NOUN to/PART reinforce/VERB the/DET beleaguered/ADJ camp/NOUN amp160The/PRON American/ADJ general/NOUN believed/VERB he/PRON was/AUX luring/VERB the/DET North/PROPN Vietnamese/PROPN into/ADP a/DET repeat/NOUN of/ADP the/DET battle/NOUN of/ADP Dien/PROPN Bien/PROPN Phu/PROPN which/PRON in/ADP 1954/NUM brought/VERB French/ADJ colonial/ADJ control/NOUN of/ADP Vietnam/PROPN to/ADP an/DET end/NOUN but/CCONJ inadvertently/ADV opened/VERB the/DET door/NOUN to/ADP an/DET American/PROPN invasionamp160/PROPN This/DET time/NOUN Westmoreland/PROPN fantasized/ADJ 8220he/NOUN was/AUX determined/ADJ to/PART prevent/VERB history/NOUN from/ADP repeating/VERB itself8221amp160amp160/PROPN That/DET battle/NOUN never/ADV developed/VERB and/CCONJ several/ADJ months/NOUN later/ADV Khe/PROPN Sanh/PROPN was/AUX abandoned/VERB by/ADP the/DET Americans/PROPN Westmoreland8217s/VERB obsession/NOUN with/ADP Khe/PROPN Sanh/PROPN apparently/ADV prevented/VERB him/PRON from/ADP fully/ADV grasping/VERB that/SCONJ Hu233/PROPN South/PROPN Vietnam8217s/PROPN third/ADV largest/ADJ city/NOUN and/CCONJ former/ADJ Imperial/ADJ capital/NOUN had/AUX fallen/VERB to/ADP the/DET Liberation/PROPN Front/PROPN in/ADP less/ADJ than/ADP twentyfour/NOUN hoursamp160/NUM This/DET pattern/NOUN of/ADP disbelief/NOUN was/AUX moreover/ADV pervasive/ADJ up/ADP and/CCONJ down/ADP the/DET American/ADJ chain/NOUN of/ADP commandamp160/PROPN amp160At/PROPN Phu/PROPN Bai/PROPN a/DET Marine/PROPN base/NOUN less/ADJ than/ADP fifteen/NUM miles/NOUN south/ADV of/ADP Hu233/PROPN the/DET commanding/VERB general/NOUN with/ADP improbable/ADJ symmetry/NOUN named/VERB Forster/PROPN LaHue/PROPN repeatedly/ADV ignored/VERB reports/NOUN on/ADP the/DET size/NOUN of/ADP the/DET force/NOUN his/PRON counterattack/NOUN would/AUX face/VERB and/CCONJ insisted/VERB that/SCONJ instead/ADV of/ADP thousands/NOUN their/PRON number/NOUN couldn8217/NOUN t/NOUN possibly/ADV exceed/VERB more/ADJ than/ADP a/DET few/ADJ hundredamp160/PROPN Could/AUX a/DET force/NOUN as/ADV large/ADJ as/SCONJ the/DET one/NOUN being/AUX reported/VERB enter/VERB and/CCONJ occupy/VERB the/DET entire/ADJ city/NOUN that/PRON quickly/ADV and/CCONJ virtually/ADV undetectedamp160amp160/NUM Through/ADP some/PRON of/ADP his/PRON most/ADV original/ADJ reporting/VERB Bowden/PROPN reconstructs/NOUN exactly/ADV how/SCONJ that/PRON occurred/VERB 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<p />
<p>RUSH: Now, over the years, my friends, I have spent some time trying to explain to this audience of people here who liberals are and what they believe and why they believe it. And in one of the specific efforts that I have made, I have made repeated attempts to explain to you why the American left does not appear to love America. Instead, they have deep feelings of anger about America. You’ve heard me say it once; you’ve heard me say it a gazillion times. They do not believe in American exceptionalism. They don’t believe in American Greatness. They believe America was founded in an unjust, unfair — and in some cases illegal — manner.</p>
<p>They think there’s nothing worthy of celebrating about the United States. It’s imperfect, and it can be perfected but only if they are responsible for it. They do not believe that we are a legitimate superpower. They believe that our superpower status is the result of theft, that we have behaved as an imperial people and we have conquered the world. And we have gone everywhere we’ve gone and stolen what we wanted, and we brought it back, and that’s why we’re so economically successful, and that’s why we are so rich and wealthy compared to the other nations of the world, because we have stolen what we have.</p>
<p>We have not legitimately produced it, and therefore our country is illegitimate. And I’ve had people say, “Rush, don’t you think that’s a little excessive? Don’t you think that’s a little…?” No! It’s not excessive at all. I’ve even gone further in explaining why the left is for complete, total, open borders. They believe poverty around the world is the fault of the United States. If we had not gone to Central America and had the CIA murdering leaders and installing our own people — if we’d not gone to the Middle East, if we’d not gone to Europe, and if we’d not plundered these places — the rest of the world wouldn’t want to come here.</p>
<p>But because we have stolen world’s riches, and because we have plundered the rest of the world, they have no choice but than to come here. And, as such, we should let them in. If somebody wants to come to our country to improve their life — and especially if their life is in bad shape because of us in the first place — why, we should let them. And I’ve had people say, “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an exaggeration? Don’t you think you’re going a little bit overboard on that? I mean, you want people to believe what you’re saying, but that sounds so odd that it…”</p>
<p>Well, it may sound odd. What it is is unconventional. What these are is truths that very few people will utter or say, for whatever reasons. But I come to you today with a little bit of evidence, as I always do. I always have evidence, facts, news, whatever, to back up my claims. I was just rummaging around doing show prep last night, and I came across a headline: “Martin Sheen Blames U.S. for Ruining Central America, Causing Immigration.” I said, “Well, looky here! (chuckles) Exactly what I’ve been saying! Exactly! Thank you, Emilio!” His name is Emilio Estevez, right? (interruption)</p>
<p>Is he Emilio or is one of his kids Emilio? (interruption) He’s Emilio? (interruption) Okay, Martin Sheen. This is the guy… I remember when this program first started in 1988, August 1st 1980. About a month later, Martin Sheen was the mayor of Malibu or something, and he wanted to import a bunch of homeless people into Malibu because of the way they were being mistreated. This was the guy that the banded together with the now-famous Mitch Snyder, the homeless advocate. Who would want to “advocate” for homelessness?</p>
<p />
<p>These are the people that thought a shopping cart was a legitimate home. Anyway, this guy got together with Mitch Snyder, who lived in Washington, and they would go to Washington on cold nights and they would kick the homeless off their sleeping grates and sleep on them themselves to show solidarity with the homeless. So what I wanted to do is I wanted… It may not have been my first month, but it was within the first year. I wanted to charter a bus and put a bunch of homeless people, round ’em up here in Los Angeles, and drive them to Malibu because this is what Martin Sheen said he wanted to do.</p>
<p>I was discouraged from doing this by my syndication partners because of potential litigation. If any of the homeless on my chartered bus had gotten injured, I would be liable. They ran in there and said, “Don’t do this. You can talk about doing it, but don’t actually charter a bus and put the homeless on it. You don’t know who’s gonna end up on the bus.” So I didn’t do it. I mean, it was made… Johnny Carson did a week’s worth of stuff on this. That’s who this guy is, Martin Sheen, okay?</p>
<p>“Appearing as a guest on Monday’s Tavis Smiley show on PBS, liberal actor Martin Sheen claimed that the United States is to blame for causing so many immigrants to leave Central American countries and travel to the U.S. as he complained about past interventions in some of those countries. [He] concluded that ‘we’re looking at what we have wrought.'” My friends, I do not make this up. I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body, not just the back of my hand. I know them. I know what they think. I know what they’re going to think before they realize it. I know what they’re gonna do.</p>
<p>Sheen’s “comments came during a discussion after host Smiley brought up President Donald Trump’s recent decision to end the DACA program that benefits young illegal immigrants. After Sheen commented that it is important to ‘defend these young people,’ the PBS host suggested that there is ‘hatred’ for illegal immigrants as he followed up: ‘Take me back — I want to juxtapose or have you juxtapose for me, Martin, the hatred that you had to endure when you started out as an actor all those years ago. And that name — Ramon Estevez…”</p>
<p>Oh, it’s Ramon!</p>
<p>He’s Ramon Estevez.</p>
<p>“And that name — Ramon Estevez — didn’t serve you so well.” He changed the name to “Sheen” because he liked Bishop Sheen. (interruption) Yeah, one of his sons is Emilio. Is that Charlie or the other one? (interruption) The other one. I’m having a mental block. Anyway, they are the Estevez family. They’re the ones that changed their named, not me. Tavis Smiley is brought it up here: “the same kind of hatred that you see this week — that you’ve seen this week that’s been, you know, applied against the very same people.” So there’s hatred out there, folks, all because Trump wants to rescind an unconstitutional presidential executive action, the DACA deal.</p>
<p>By the way… Well, I’ll have to get into this in a moment, but, you know, I’ve been suggesting… I put forth, “Okay, nobody wants to round up these kids and kick ’em out of country. Nobody wants to round ’em up and deport them.” Although most of them aren’t “kids” anymore. Some of them still are. I saw something that 30% of the 800,000 that Obama granted entry have engaged in some kind of criminal activity, some of it misdemeanor, some felony. The point is they’re not kids anymore.</p>
<p>But the American people are not gonna sit by just watch kids rounded up and sent back home. So I said, “Why don’t you get something for it? If you’re going to go ahead and legalize this, get funding for the wall! Get something. You’re The Art of the Deal. Get something! You like Chuck and Nancy, now; you’re doing lots of deals with Chuck…” By the way, there’s more deals coming up with Chuck and Nancy. Do you know this? Tax reform. Trump may do tax reform with Chuck and Nancy. Pshew! Got it right here. It’s in the audio sound bite number two. Coming up. Don’t go anywhere.</p>
<p>So he’s not gonna get anything.</p>
<p>It doesn’t appear that he’s going to demand funding for the wall in either whatever he plans to do with DACA or this deal he did with Chuck and Nancy on the debt ceiling and some of the other items that were in that deal. Anyway, back to this: Martin “Sheen recounted what his life was like when he was younger and trying to get into acting, Smiley followed up with another question about immigration: ‘If we are a nation of immigrants, what has happened that’s caused this to happen? What is it about the story that we’re writing at this moment that’s caused us to turn on immigrants if we are a nation of immigrants?'”</p>
<p>Now, you see here the trick for these people is to never draw distinction between legal and illegal immigration. They just treat all immigration as legal. And why? Well, because we deserve it! We deserve so much. We deserve to find out the way the rest of the world lives because we caused it. We’re responsible for the pain and suffering for because we have plundered and we have stolen and we’ve steamrollered over these smaller countries and smaller people, and it’s no wonder they hate us.</p>
<p>They’re justified. It’s no wonder they want to come here and get back what we stole from them. Here Martin Sheen is essentially admitting all this. So I just wanted to bring your attention to this. You say, “Martin Sheen’s not an elected Democrat! He doesn’t speak for them.” He does. They all think the same way, folks. They’re automatons. That’s the point about them. You have to believe the same things or you’re thrown out. You have to say the same things or they will shut you up. It’s what we were talking about yesterday when it comes to groupthink and consensus.</p>
<p>And here’s something I just wanted to mention. That’s it. That’s the sum total. I just wanted to give you evidence. Some people said, “You’re going a little overboard in the way you’re describing this.” No, this is what they think. That is how in their minds they moralize the legitimacy of allowing immigrants to break the law and come here, because they deserves to be exempted because we’ve basically made them poor. And then they run around and this is part and parcel of their never ending attacks on the founding and the decency of the country.</p>
<p>“An author and journalist came under fire on social media Monday, after she tweeted a reply to an anti-looting warning from Miami police by saying: ‘The carceral [sic] state… is inseparable from white supremacy.'” What she means is that police officers are arresting looters. Where I live, the only people allowed on the island in south Florida are residents and EMS people right now. I think they’re calling that Phase 2. Phase 3 is when employees (people that own businesses but don’t live there) can return. We couldn’t do the EIB Network program there today because the staff he doesn’t live there would not be allowed on the island.</p>
<p>The reason for this — and it’s not just Palm Beach, it’s all over south Florida — is to keep looters out. It’s the biggest problem they’ve got, ’cause every criminal mind knows that there are a lot of homes unoccupied, that a lot of homes that didn’t suffer a lot of damage are unoccupied, that people got the hell out. So they are just sitting-duck targets. So the police are doing everything they can the criminal element out — and, for the most part, they’re doing a the job. But when they find looters either of public property or private property, small business, they’re arresting them, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/09/11/prestigious-author-compares-arrests-looters-to-white-supremacy.html" type="external">and this author is calling that “white supremacy”</a>!</p>
<p>You see, even criminals in a time of disaster have a right to what they see in the store even if they can’t afford it. In fact, even more if they can’t afford it because that’s unfair and that’s unjust, and that’s another reason why America is a bad place. So these people are just trying to survive and to arrest them is nothing more than white supremacy. You have to look up “carceral.” It means having to do with prison. It’s part of the root word of “incarceration.”</p>
<p>“The Miami Police Department took to Twitter on Sunday, as Hurricane Irma…” Which, by the way, was not as strong as predicted. Which, by the way, only did one-third the amount of damage that was predicted. Which, by the way, is still bad. But which, by the way, is not what was predicted. (I will get in trouble for pointing this out.) Anyway, “The Miami Police Department took to Twitter on Sunday, as Hurricane Irma battered the state.</p>
<p>“‘Thinking about looting? Ask these guys how that turned out. #stayindoors,’ the post read, sharing a photo of people inside a jail cell. Though Sarah Jaffe’s tweet on Monday garnered 1,500 likes, it sparked more than 100 comments — many of which were critical and accused her of being racist.” She’s the law enforcement official and that’s when this author came out and said. (impression) This is absolutely… This is racist, this is white supremacy. It’s white supremacy to enforce the law. “According to one of her several online biographers, Ms. Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture.</p>
<p>“Her work has appeared in The Nation, in Salon, The Week, American Prospect, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and many other publications.” So she has a wide distribution network. “‘They have prisons, crime, and private property in Nigeria too,’ one user wrote. ‘And Egypt. And India. Nothing to do with white supremacy. Poverty/inequality.'” A responder wrote that, not her. “Jaffe is the author of the book Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.” Anyway, the point is this is occasion she’s not alone in thinking this, that it is white supremacy.</p>
<p>It fits their narrative of the day that enforcing the law is white supremacy, ’cause who founded the nation? A bunch of white guys! Who founded the nation and wrote the laws? A bunch of white guys! What were they? They were racist pigs (in their way of thinking), and so it just… The Democrat Party wonders why it can’t win elections, and it’s only gonna get worse, the more they keep this up. Because they are not in any way, shape, manner, or form representative of even half, not even half of the way people in this country think.</p>
<p>BREAK TRANSCRIPT</p>
<p>RUSH: Here we have the audio. Grab audio sound bite number 21. Back to this Martin Sheen. I want you to hear this. He was on the Tavis Smiley show Friday on PBS. And the question: “What is it about the story that we’re writing at this moment, Mr. Sheen, that caused us to turn on immigrants if we’re a nation of immigrants?”</p>
<p>SHEEN: There is not a nation between Mexico and Panama that has not been affected by the United States either military, economically, uh, or outright colonialized.</p>
<p>SMILEY: Mmm-hmm! Mmm-hmm!</p>
<p>RUSH: See?</p>
<p>SHEEN: You know, all of Central America. Most of these people are coming from these countries… The — the war in El Salvador, for example, so many hundreds of thousands of Salvadorians fled that war. We were supporting this very conservative, right-wing basically —</p>
<p>SMILEY: Mmm-hmm!</p>
<p>SHEEN: — military dictatorship all those years until, eh, it was finally peace accord was achieved. The same thing Nicaragua. And we invaded that country how many times in the last century and this century, controlled their governments, controlled their economy. So all of the immigrants that are in the country from those countries and whose children (sputters) came with them as tiny ones —</p>
<p>SMILEY: Mmm-hmm!</p>
<p>SHEEN: — and some that have been born here, probably would not be here in such numbers if it hadn’t been for our involvement in their countries in this hemisphere!</p>
<p>RUSH: See? I mean, folks, I do not make this stuff up. They are coming because we’ve made them poor. They are coming because we’ve stolen from them. We’ve dominated ’em economically, politically, socially. We’ve given them no choice but than to come here where they’re essentially looking for what we stole from them so they can take it back. It’s kind of like the same thinking behind, “How did the rich get rich? They stole it from the poor.” That’s what they say Reagan’s trickle-down economics was.</p>
<p>“Well, the rich get rich on the backs of poor.” I’ve never understood the math of that: How does anybody get rich taking from the poor? But people fall for it. Now, in this case, why is there poverty in the world? Why is there poverty in Central America? By the way, we didn’t invade Nicaragua! The Soviet Union was attempting to establish another Cuba there. That’s what the Sandinista and the Contra thing was about during the Reagan years. We were trying to prevent a Soviet client state, another one in our hemisphere, in Nicaragua.</p>
<p>Daniel Ortega was their henchman. We didn’t invade anything! They, the Soviets, invaded our hemisphere and we were simply defending ourselves. But the reason that there is poverty in the world, folks, is because of the unequal distribution of capitalism. But people like Martin Sheen thinks that there’s not enough communism, that capitalism is to blame, ’cause capitalism’s unfair. Capitalism is where America is, is what America is, and look at America! America is the richest place in the world.</p>
<p>He doesn’t see that, well, maybe if we had a more equal distribution of capitalism, people in Central America wouldn’t need to come here because their countries would be economically growing and sufficient and so forth. They don’t see it that way at all. They see us as the enemy, see us as the culprit, and this defines the American left today and certainly the American leftist radicals, and it’s one of the many reasons that the Democrat Party is gonna continue to lose elections.</p> | Evidence: The Left Hates America | true | https://rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/09/12/evidence-the-left-hates-america/ | 2017-09-12 | 0right
| 3,069 | RUSH Now over the years my friends I have spent some time trying to explain to this audience of people here who liberals are and what they believe and why they believe it And in one of the specific efforts that I have made I have made repeated attempts to explain to you why the American left does not appear to love America Instead they have deep feelings of anger about America You8217ve heard me say it once you8217ve heard me say it a gazillion times They do not believe in American exceptionalism They don8217t believe in American Greatness They believe America was founded in an unjust unfair 8212 and in some cases illegal 8212 manner They think there8217s nothing worthy of celebrating about the United States It8217s imperfect and it can be perfected but only if they are responsible for it They do not believe that we are a legitimate superpower They believe that our superpower status is the result of theft that we have behaved as an imperial people and we have conquered the world And we have gone everywhere we8217ve gone and stolen what we wanted and we brought it back and that8217s why we8217re so economically successful and that8217s why we are so rich and wealthy compared to the other nations of the world because we have stolen what we have We have not legitimately produced it and therefore our country is illegitimate And I8217ve had people say 8220Rush don8217t you think that8217s a little excessive Don8217t you think that8217s a little82308221 No It8217s not excessive at all I8217ve even gone further in explaining why the left is for complete total open borders They believe poverty around the world is the fault of the United States If we had not gone to Central America and had the CIA murdering leaders and installing our own people 8212 if we8217d not gone to the Middle East if we8217d not gone to Europe and if we8217d not plundered these places 8212 the rest of the world wouldn8217t want to come here But because we have stolen world8217s riches and because we have plundered the rest of the world they have no choice but than to come here And as such we should let them in If somebody wants to come to our country to improve their life 8212 and especially if their life is in bad shape because of us in the first place 8212 why we should let them And I8217ve had people say 8220Don8217t you think that8217s a bit of an exaggeration Don8217t you think you8217re going a little bit overboard on that I mean you want people to believe what you8217re saying but that sounds so odd that it82308221 Well it may sound odd What it is is unconventional What these are is truths that very few people will utter or say for whatever reasons But I come to you today with a little bit of evidence as I always do I always have evidence facts news whatever to back up my claims I was just rummaging around doing show prep last night and I came across a headline 8220Martin Sheen Blames US for Ruining Central America Causing Immigration8221 I said 8220Well looky here chuckles Exactly what I8217ve been saying Exactly Thank you Emilio8221 His name is Emilio Estevez right interruption Is he Emilio or is one of his kids Emilio interruption He8217s Emilio interruption Okay Martin Sheen This is the guy8230 I remember when this program first started in 1988 August 1st 1980 About a month later Martin Sheen was the mayor of Malibu or something and he wanted to import a bunch of homeless people into Malibu because of the way they were being mistreated This was the guy that the banded together with the nowfamous Mitch Snyder the homeless advocate Who would want to 8220advocate8221 for homelessness These are the people that thought a shopping cart was a legitimate home Anyway this guy got together with Mitch Snyder who lived in Washington and they would go to Washington on cold nights and they would kick the homeless off their sleeping grates and sleep on them themselves to show solidarity with the homeless So what I wanted to do is I wanted8230 It may not have been my first month but it was within the first year I wanted to charter a bus and put a bunch of homeless people round 8217em up here in Los Angeles and drive them to Malibu because this is what Martin Sheen said he wanted to do I was discouraged from doing this by my syndication partners because of potential litigation If any of the homeless on my chartered bus had gotten injured I would be liable They ran in there and said 8220Don8217t do this You can talk about doing it but don8217t actually charter a bus and put the homeless on it You don8217t know who8217s gonna end up on the bus8221 So I didn8217t do it I mean it was made8230 Johnny Carson did a week8217s worth of stuff on this That8217s who this guy is Martin Sheen okay 8220Appearing as a guest on Monday8217s Tavis Smiley show on PBS liberal actor Martin Sheen claimed that the United States is to blame for causing so many immigrants to leave Central American countries and travel to the US as he complained about past interventions in some of those countries He concluded that 8216we8217re looking at what we have wrought8221 My friends I do not make this up I know these people like every square inch of my glorious naked body not just the back of my hand I know them I know what they think I know what they8217re going to think before they realize it I know what they8217re gonna do Sheen8217s 8220comments came during a discussion after host Smiley brought up President Donald Trump8217s recent decision to end the DACA program that benefits young illegal immigrants After Sheen commented that it is important to 8216defend these young people8217 the PBS host suggested that there is 8216hatred8217 for illegal immigrants as he followed up 8216Take me back 8212 I want to juxtapose or have you juxtapose for me Martin the hatred that you had to endure when you started out as an actor all those years ago And that name 8212 Ramon Estevez82308221 Oh it8217s Ramon He8217s Ramon Estevez 8220And that name 8212 Ramon Estevez 8212 didn8217t serve you so well8221 He changed the name to 8220Sheen8221 because he liked Bishop Sheen interruption Yeah one of his sons is Emilio Is that Charlie or the other one interruption The other one I8217m having a mental block Anyway they are the Estevez family They8217re the ones that changed their named not me Tavis Smiley is brought it up here 8220the same kind of hatred that you see this week 8212 that you8217ve seen this week that8217s been you know applied against the very same people8221 So there8217s hatred out there folks all because Trump wants to rescind an unconstitutional presidential executive action the DACA deal By the way8230 Well I8217ll have to get into this in a moment but you know I8217ve been suggesting8230 I put forth 8220Okay nobody wants to round up these kids and kick 8217em out of country Nobody wants to round 8217em up and deport them8221 Although most of them aren8217t 8220kids8221 anymore Some of them still are I saw something that 30 of the 800000 that Obama granted entry have engaged in some kind of criminal activity some of it misdemeanor some felony The point is they8217re not kids anymore But the American people are not gonna sit by just watch kids rounded up and sent back home So I said 8220Why don8217t you get something for it If you8217re going to go ahead and legalize this get funding for the wall Get something You8217re The Art of the Deal Get something You like Chuck and Nancy now you8217re doing lots of deals with Chuck82308221 By the way there8217s more deals coming up with Chuck and Nancy Do you know this Tax reform Trump may do tax reform with Chuck and Nancy Pshew Got it right here It8217s in the audio sound bite number two Coming up Don8217t go anywhere So he8217s not gonna get anything It doesn8217t appear that he8217s going to demand funding for the wall in either whatever he plans to do with DACA or this deal he did with Chuck and Nancy on the debt ceiling and some of the other items that were in that deal Anyway back to this Martin 8220Sheen recounted what his life was like when he was younger and trying to get into acting Smiley followed up with another question about immigration 8216If we are a nation of immigrants what has happened that8217s caused this to happen What is it about the story that we8217re writing at this moment that8217s caused us to turn on immigrants if we are a nation of immigrants8221 Now you see here the trick for these people is to never draw distinction between legal and illegal immigration They just treat all immigration as legal And why Well because we deserve it We deserve so much We deserve to find out the way the rest of the world lives because we caused it We8217re responsible for the pain and suffering for because we have plundered and we have stolen and we8217ve steamrollered over these smaller countries and smaller people and it8217s no wonder they hate us They8217re justified It8217s no wonder they want to come here and get back what we stole from them Here Martin Sheen is essentially admitting all this So I just wanted to bring your attention to this You say 8220Martin Sheen8217s not an elected Democrat He doesn8217t speak for them8221 He does They all think the same way folks They8217re automatons That8217s the point about them You have to believe the same things or you8217re thrown out You have to say the same things or they will shut you up It8217s what we were talking about yesterday when it comes to groupthink and consensus And here8217s something I just wanted to mention That8217s it That8217s the sum total I just wanted to give you evidence Some people said 8220You8217re going a little overboard in the way you8217re describing this8221 No this is what they think That is how in their minds they moralize the legitimacy of allowing immigrants to break the law and come here because they deserves to be exempted because we8217ve basically made them poor And then they run around and this is part and parcel of their never ending attacks on the founding and the decency of the country 8220An author and journalist came under fire on social media Monday after she tweeted a reply to an antilooting warning from Miami police by saying 8216The carceral sic state8230 is inseparable from white supremacy8221 What she means is that police officers are arresting looters Where I live the only people allowed on the island in south Florida are residents and EMS people right now I think they8217re calling that Phase 2 Phase 3 is when employees people that own businesses but don8217t live there can return We couldn8217t do the EIB Network program there today because the staff he doesn8217t live there would not be allowed on the island The reason for this 8212 and it8217s not just Palm Beach it8217s all over south Florida 8212 is to keep looters out It8217s the biggest problem they8217ve got 8217cause every criminal mind knows that there are a lot of homes unoccupied that a lot of homes that didn8217t suffer a lot of damage are unoccupied that people got the hell out So they are just sittingduck targets So the police are doing everything they can the criminal element out 8212 and for the most part they8217re doing a the job But when they find looters either of public property or private property small business they8217re arresting them and this author is calling that 8220white supremacy8221 You see even criminals in a time of disaster have a right to what they see in the store even if they can8217t afford it In fact even more if they can8217t afford it because that8217s unfair and that8217s unjust and that8217s another reason why America is a bad place So these people are just trying to survive and to arrest them is nothing more than white supremacy You have to look up 8220carceral8221 It means having to do with prison It8217s part of the root word of 8220incarceration8221 8220The Miami Police Department took to Twitter on Sunday as Hurricane Irma82308221 Which by the way was not as strong as predicted Which by the way only did onethird the amount of damage that was predicted Which by the way is still bad But which by the way is not what was predicted I will get in trouble for pointing this out Anyway 8220The Miami Police Department took to Twitter on Sunday as Hurricane Irma battered the state 82208216Thinking about looting Ask these guys how that turned out stayindoors8217 the post read sharing a photo of people inside a jail cell Though Sarah Jaffe8217s tweet on Monday garnered 1500 likes it sparked more than 100 comments 8212 many of which were critical and accused her of being racist8221 She8217s the law enforcement official and that8217s when this author came out and said impression This is absolutely8230 This is racist this is white supremacy It8217s white supremacy to enforce the law 8220According to one of her several online biographers Ms Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist covering labor economic justice social movements politics gender and pop culture 8220Her work has appeared in The Nation in Salon The Week American Prospect the Washington Post The Atlantic and many other publications8221 So she has a wide distribution network 82208216They have prisons crime and private property in Nigeria too8217 one user wrote 8216And Egypt And India Nothing to do with white supremacy Povertyinequality8221 A responder wrote that not her 8220Jaffe is the author of the book Necessary Trouble Americans in Revolt8221 Anyway the point is this is occasion she8217s not alone in thinking this that it is white supremacy It fits their narrative of the day that enforcing the law is white supremacy 8217cause who founded the nation A bunch of white guys Who founded the nation and wrote the laws A bunch of white guys What were they They were racist pigs in their way of thinking and so it just8230 The Democrat Party wonders why it can8217t win elections and it8217s only gonna get worse the more they keep this up Because they are not in any way shape manner or form representative of even half not even half of the way people in this country think BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH Here we have the audio Grab audio sound bite number 21 Back to this Martin Sheen I want you to hear this He was on the Tavis Smiley show Friday on PBS And the question 8220What is it about the story that we8217re writing at this moment Mr Sheen that caused us to turn on immigrants if we8217re a nation of immigrants8221 SHEEN There is not a nation between Mexico and Panama that has not been affected by the United States either military economically uh or outright colonialized SMILEY Mmmhmm Mmmhmm RUSH See SHEEN You know all of Central America Most of these people are coming from these countries8230 The 8212 the war in El Salvador for example so many hundreds of thousands of Salvadorians fled that war We were supporting this very conservative rightwing basically 8212 SMILEY Mmmhmm SHEEN 8212 military dictatorship all those years until eh it was finally peace accord was achieved The same thing Nicaragua And we invaded that country how many times in the last century and this century controlled their governments controlled their economy So all of the immigrants that are in the country from those countries and whose children sputters came with them as tiny ones 8212 SMILEY Mmmhmm SHEEN 8212 and some that have been born here probably would not be here in such numbers if it hadn8217t been for our involvement in their countries in this hemisphere RUSH See I mean folks I do not make this stuff up They are coming because we8217ve made them poor They are coming because we8217ve stolen from them We8217ve dominated 8217em economically politically socially We8217ve given them no choice but than to come here where they8217re essentially looking for what we stole from them so they can take it back It8217s kind of like the same thinking behind 8220How did the rich get rich They stole it from the poor8221 That8217s what they say Reagan8217s trickledown economics was 8220Well the rich get rich on the backs of poor8221 I8217ve never understood the math of that How does anybody get rich taking from the poor But people fall for it Now in this case why is there poverty in the world Why is there poverty in Central America By the way we didn8217t invade Nicaragua The Soviet Union was attempting to establish another Cuba there That8217s what the Sandinista and the Contra thing was about during the Reagan years We were trying to prevent a Soviet client state another one in our hemisphere in Nicaragua Daniel Ortega was their henchman We didn8217t invade anything They the Soviets invaded our hemisphere and we were simply defending ourselves But the reason that there is poverty in the world folks is because of the unequal distribution of capitalism But people like Martin Sheen thinks that there8217s not enough communism that capitalism is to blame 8217cause capitalism8217s unfair Capitalism is where America is is what America is and look at America America is the richest place in the world He doesn8217t see that well maybe if we had a more equal distribution of capitalism people in Central America wouldn8217t need to come here because their countries would be economically growing and sufficient and so forth They don8217t see it that way at all They see us as the enemy see us as the culprit and this defines the American left today and certainly the American leftist radicals and it8217s one of the many reasons that the Democrat Party is gonna continue to lose elections | RUSH/VERB Now/ADV over/ADP the/DET years/NOUN my/PRON friends/NOUN I/PRON have/AUX spent/VERB some/DET time/NOUN trying/VERB to/PART explain/VERB to/ADP this/DET audience/NOUN of/ADP people/NOUN here/ADV who/PRON liberals/NOUN are/AUX and/CCONJ what/PRON they/PRON believe/VERB and/CCONJ why/SCONJ they/PRON believe/VERB it/PRON And/CCONJ in/ADP one/NUM of/ADP the/DET specific/ADJ efforts/NOUN that/PRON I/PRON have/AUX made/VERB I/PRON have/AUX 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<p>Bob Love, a retired Chicago Bulls star, stands chuckling on stage at Brentano Math and Science Academy in Logan Square, a chain of plastic links stretched across his exceptional armspan. A 3rd-grade boy calmly holds up one end; a 2nd-grade girl strains on tiptoes to hold up the other.</p>
<p>“We’re going to measure Mr. Love’s armspan and height,” lab teacher Raquel Gonzalez announces to an auditorium packed with primary students. “I need everybody to count with me.” Gonzalez points to each link while the kids count aloud. A gasp goes up at the total. “Sixty! Whoa!” Love’s height turns out to be nearly as impressive—a whopping 59 links.</p>
<p>Love’s visit to Brentano is the grand finale to a schoolwide science project aimed at learning a scientific concept: the human body is mathematically proportioned. During the project, students also learned about the scientific process as they predicted outcomes of their experiment, accurately measured a partner’s arm-span and height and communicated findings with a graph.</p>
<p>Just a few years ago, math and science at Brentano was “no fun” at all, according to Principal Reynes Reyes. Teachers lectured, students answered textbook questions. But after Brentano brought in the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science (TAMS), a local non-profit agency, teachers began replacing lectures with hands-on activities. With TAMS, teachers got in-depth courses, coaching in the classroom and time to collaborate—the kind of professional development that experts advocate to improve teaching nationwide.</p>
<p>TAMS cost Brentano substantial time and money, $25,000 in training and another $25,000 in materials. The payoff, says Reyes, has been no less impressive: better-skilled teachers, more enthusiastic students and substantial gains in scores on standardized math and science tests.</p>
<p>Nationally, there is growing recognition that professional development is an essential element of school improvement. Since the early 1980s, the country has sunk millions of dollars into creating higher standards for all students, tests to measure student learning and new classroom technology, “but no money on assuring our teachers have the skills to use them,” according to Terry Dozier, the Secretary’s Special Advisor on Teaching at the U.S. Department of Education.</p>
<p>“People are beginning to realize that if we don’t focus on teachers’ knowledge and skills, all those other improvements are going to buy us very little,” she says.</p>
<p>Locally, the story is much the same. To break the inertia that gripped Chicago’s public schools, the 1988 Reform Act shifted power from central office to local school councils. Some schools leapt to improve teacher training, but most grappled instead with more obvious needs such as organizing council meetings or improving school safety. Now, observers note a sharpened focus on staff development, spurred either by national attention to the issue, new foundation dollars or the threat of probation—depending on whom you ask.</p>
<p>The need for better staff development appears acute. A 1992 survey conducted by the independent Consortium on Chicago School Research found that a third of elementary school principals believe that half or fewer of the teachers at their own schools have a good grasp of language arts instruction, which includes reading and writing. Even more principals cited teacher deficiencies in math, social studies and science.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a 1997 Consortium survey of teachers suggests that while they spend a great deal of time on professional development, it doesn’t amount to much. For one, many schools seem to be sampling from a smorgasbord of programs, with no coherent plan and too little time devoted to any one topic.</p>
<p>“I think all of us have been in schools where it’s clear that the staff are working very hard, but their efforts aren’t adding up to real change or improvement,” says Consortium Study Director BetsAnn Smith.</p>
<p>Among experts, a clear consensus has emerged on what it takes to build a skilled faculty. First, professional development should be part of a long-term, schoolwide plan focused on specific goals for improving student achievement. Second, teachers need sustained learning in both content knowledge and teaching strategies. Third, as teachers hone their skills, they need both coaching in the classroom and time to discuss instruction with their peers.</p>
<p>Teachers and experts alike denounce what traditionally has passed for staff development—districtwide inservice days where teachers sit for hours listening to experts lecture on topics chosen by district bureaucrats.</p>
<p>“If you wanted to evaluate the quality of staff development nationwide, you would find it was one of the most poorly done activities,” says Margaret Harrigan, a former Chicago principal, district superintendent and human resources director who is now on the faculty at the DePaul University School of Education. “Somebody decides [that teachers] need to be fixed, and so they arrange for a fix. And it isn’t meaningful.”</p>
<p>Staff development tends to be most meaningful when organized with teacher input by schools themselves, with districts playing a guiding and supporting role, experts say.</p>
<p>In Chicago, reform helped shift professional development efforts to the school level. Prior to 1988, subdistricts controlled staff development money. While some distributed those funds directly to schools, most subjected teachers to workshops of the traditional sort.</p>
<p>The 1997 Consortium survey found that teachers now receive most staff development through their schools rather than from courses organized by central office, universities or the Chicago Teachers Union. Most teachers surveyed gave high marks to their staff development experiences; however, a third said they did not address the needs of their students. Harrigan believes many principals still fail to seek teacher input.</p>
<p>The professional development that teachers pursue on their own also may fail to address their students’ needs. As a rule, school districts give pay increases for coursework beyond a bachelor’s degree but set few restrictions on the kinds of courses that qualify. In Chicago, only courses in medicine, law and religion are off-limits; virtually anything else may count toward so-called lane credit. An 8th-grade science teacher, for instance, could move up a pay lane with graduate courses in fine arts or business—provided they were offered through an accredited institution.</p>
<p>Classroom teachers earn degrees in counseling and administration far more often than they do in English, history, math or science, according to Harrigan. “Very few teachers take courses in the subject areas in which they are teaching,” she says.</p>
<p>About half of Chicago’s some 27,000 teachers have earned raises based on additional study. This school year, those lane credits will cost at least $47 million in salaries alone, according to a CATALYST analysis of School Board data.</p>
<p>Even when teachers do take courses related to classroom teaching, they may not receive the necessary support at their schools to adopt new practices. For example, one 1st-grade teacher at a South Side school earned a master’s degree that focused on “cooperative learning,” a teaching strategy that can boost student achievement. Back in the classroom, she couldn’t figure out how to keep kids from copying each other’s work, and there was no one around to help her. Now, her students again sit in rows and work alone.</p>
<p>No one is suggesting that teachers should stop doing graduate work, says Barry Bull, a researcher at the Indiana Education Policy Center at Indiana University at Bloomington. “But that kind of individual improvement doesn’t add up to school improvement,” he says. “It’s simply too fragmented.”</p>
<p>Instead, professional development choices should be tailored to priorities for raising student achievement at a particular school. A school team should then draw up a long-term plan for what teachers need to learn in order to move students ahead.</p>
<p>Pursuing professional development as a team also can boost teachers’ camaraderie and commitment to reaching common goals, Bull believes. The team approach makes it easier for teachers to help each other, too. With long-term planning, teachers can be assured sufficient time for mastering new strategies. And a focused plan keeps a school from taking on too many improvements at once.</p>
<p>Typically, school reforms are driven by fads rather than long-term plans, and schools hop from program to program in search of a quick fix for low achievement. As a result, teachers may grow cynical and reluctant to try new ideas.</p>
<p>“Teachers have been trained very well to hold their noses, close their eyes, shut their doors and wait until ‘this too has passed,'” says Judith Rényi, executive director of the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education at the National Education Association. “If teachers are going to go to the trouble of learning something new, they have to know it’s going to stay around.”</p>
<p>TAMS Executive Director Lourdes Monteagudo has found that schools making the best gains with the program are the ones that concentrated all their efforts on it. “The worst schools are the ones that have 20 things going on, and they can’t focus on any of them,” she notes.</p>
<p>At Brentano, focusing on TAMS meant dropping lots of smaller math programs that a number of universities were piloting at the school. “With so many programs running simultaneously, it was hard to measure which programs were helping students’ achievement and which weren’t,” notes Principal Reyes.</p>
<p>Selecting a single professional development program for math and science put everyone on the same page, he says. “It made it easier for teachers to collaborate, it made it easier for me to supervise the programs, and it made it easier for the students–[giving them] more continuity from grade to grade.”</p>
<p>A 1995 Consortium survey found half of Chicago’s elementary teachers felt that programs at their schools were at least somewhat uncoordinated; 43 percent reported so many programs they couldn’t keep track of them. Almost half said programs tend to come and go.</p>
<p>Typically, professional development programs are judged by “the happiness quotient,” or how well teachers enjoyed them. Experts say a school instead should use hard data such as standardized test scores, attendance rates and samples of student work. If professional development is not leading to increased student learning, a school needs to determine why and revise its long-term plan accordingly.</p>
<p>Some professional development programs do produce better results than others. Many educators have found that general teaching strategies, such as how to reach children with different “learning styles,” tend to be less effective than those that address a specific content area at a specific grade level. In addition, most teachers need more study in content areas, experts say.</p>
<p>To win certification in Illinois, elementary teachers are required to take only six semester hours of math and 12 of science; they often choose the watered-down courses aimed at education majors. In the primary area of reading, only two semester hours are required.</p>
<p>Through TAMS, Brentano teachers took 60 hours of courses that covered scientific concepts such as ecosystems, adaptation, mass and weight. Sixth-grade teacher Marianne Shimkus says she’s now able to teach some of these concepts in greater depth. “It makes us more confident,” she says of the TAMS training. “One thing about students—they know if you don’t know. And nobody can put you on the spot like an 11-year-old.”</p>
<p>TAMS instructors also covered the nitty-gritty details of instruction, such as how to ensure that each student masters a particular skill. For example, the first time 2nd-graders measure objects in the science lab, they generally come up with the wrong numbers. Before TAMS, says lab teacher Raquel Gonzalez, “I would have said, ‘That’s not how you do it.’ I would have done it myself and left it at that.” Now she has her students repeat the experiment and coaches each pair.</p>
<p>Gonzalez says her undergraduate education classes tended to overlook the practical details. For instance, she learned to design science units that would “wow” her students but not how to teach them to a class of 30. “I have units from school that are just sitting there because I don’t know how to get them together,” she says.</p>
<p>Undergraduate education courses have long been criticized as more theoretical than practical. In response, many Chicago colleges of education have upgraded their programs to include more classroom skills and more hours of student teaching. But even a solid undergraduate program doesn’t eliminate the need for ongoing teacher learning, experts say.</p>
<p>As with most undergraduate programs, there isn’t enough time in initial teacher education to cover all that a professional needs to know, let alone ensure that they can expertly apply what they learn in any given environment. Further, research continues to produce new knowledge about teaching and learning. “What’s competence today won’t be competence five years from now,” says Dennis Sparks, executive director of the National Staff Development Council.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for schools, researchers are not of one mind in many areas; their disagreements are especially intense in the area of early reading instruction. Some experts argue in favor of packaged programs that produce replicable results in many schools and classrooms; others encourage teachers to innovate in response to individual children’s needs.</p>
<p>Harvey “Smokey” Daniels of National-Louis University favors innovation. The goal of professional development, he says, is to produce “a powerful, unique, idiosyncratic professional.” Through the university’s Center for City Schools, teachers try out strategies they can incorporate into their own classroom programs. For example, teachers participate in literature circles, or small-group discussions of a book selected for independent reading.</p>
<p>Daniels finds that the vast majority of teachers are capable of designing learning activities tailored to the needs and interests of their students. Packaged programs should be the refuge only of “the least competent and least committed,” he says.</p>
<p>Advocates of packaged programs argue that teachers cannot possibly craft instructional materials and teaching strategies with the same attention to detail as can a team of researchers. “When would they have time to teach?” asks Marsha Berger, deputy director of the Educational Issues Department at the American Federation of Teachers. She notes that Direct Instruction and Success for All, two elementary school reading programs AFT supports, have been tested and refined for more than a decade.</p>
<p>Professional development centered on learning “the tried and true” leaves teachers more time to collaborate on materials for enriching the core program and to discuss individual students, she says.</p>
<p>Schools that opt for packaged programs can move more quickly, according to an ongoing study by RAND Corp., a research organization based in Santa Monica, Calif. RAND is studying implementation of seven school reform designs sponsored by New American Schools, a non-profit group based in Arlington, Va.</p>
<p>Schools can successfully implement packaged programs within a year, RAND found; other programs “unfold at a slower rate,” says RAND’s Susan Bodilly. “Teachers need more time, not only to learn new ideas but to come up with practices.” The study hasn’t yet determined which reform models lead to the greatest gains in student achievement.</p>
<p>Regardless of what approach a school chooses, teachers need support. Research has shown that teachers are much more likely to pursue new teaching strategies when they have shared planning time and classroom coaching. Without these two supports, one study found, fewer than 10 percent of teachers put strategies learned in professional development into classroom use.</p>
<p>By and large, Chicago teachers lack the support they need to improve instruction. The 1995 Consortium survey found only 55 percent of Chicago teachers work with colleagues to design instruction. The 1997 survey found 68 percent of teachers get meaningful feedback from a colleague less than once a month; 25 percent reported they had never visited a colleague’s classroom.</p>
<p>Brentano teachers rarely spent time collaborating until TAMS helped the school rearrange its schedule. Now teachers at each grade level have a common prep period once a week while their students go to gym or other “specials.” Planning together helps ensure that everyone covers all the skills and concepts for their grade level; it also has improved relations among teachers. “Everyone gets along a little better,” says 6th-grade teacher Marianne Shimkus. “There’s more sharing of ideas.”</p>
<p>A TAMS consultant also has spent time in each teacher’s classroom, first modeling lessons, then co-teaching, and now observing and providing feedback. Coaching is an expensive support—roughly 25 percent of the program’s cost—but a crucial one.</p>
<p>“You can take teachers and give them all the workshops you want,” says Gonzalez. “But if you don’t come back to the school and help them out with it, and show them how to do it, it’s not going to work,” she insists. At her previous elementary school, professional development programs often went by the wayside. “Some won’t try [new techniques] because they’re afraid. Some want to go with the old way because that’s what they feel comfortable with.”</p>
<p>Coaching “makes a world of difference,” says Gonzalez. “She shows them, ‘Hey, this is simple,’ and models it, so then they’re not afraid anymore.”</p>
<p>To be successful, even the best-designed staff development program needs fertile soil. In the Consortium’s view, the key element is trust among the adults who work in a school.</p>
<p>The 1995 Consortium study found that trust correlated with a school’s test score gains more strongly than did any other factor, including a school’s poverty level, parents’ education or how low test scores were at the beginning of reform.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, the study found that distrust undermined professional development efforts. Teachers who reported low levels of trust were far less likely to learn new teaching methods or to seek constructive criticism from colleagues, the study found.</p>
<p>Schools with a history of low student achievement, ineffective leadership and failed reforms tend to have the lowest levels of trust, says Consortium Director Anthony Bryk. But he adds that some low-achieving schools that have developed high levels of trust.</p>
<p>What usually makes the difference, he says, is a new principal with a new vision who makes the effort to “counsel out” low-performing teachers and attract motivated ones.</p>
<p>Building a professional community, like any significant change, takes time and perseverance; there are no short-term solutions, says Bryk. “To really build social trust, people have to [join] together around work they feel is important and eventually achieve some success at.”</p>
<p>* Excludes counselors, coordinators and other non-classroom teachers.</p>
<p>Source: Various Chicago school officials</p>
<p>Chicago teacher salaries</p>
<p>Average, 96-97: $45,508</p>
<p>Base salary ranges, 42-week year:</p>
<p>Bachelor’s degree $30,600-$48,000 12,268 teachers</p>
<p>Master’s degree $32,700-$50,200 5,898 teachers</p>
<p>Master’s plus 15 semester hours $33,700-$51,200 2,107 teachers</p>
<p>Master’s plus 30 semester hours $34,800-$52,300 1,650 teachers</p>
<p>Master’s plus 45 semester hours $35,900-$53,300 3,612 teachers</p>
<p>Doctorate (Ph.D. or Ed.D.) $36,900-$54,400 285 teachers</p>
<p>Note: Within each so-called lane, salaries depend on the number of years a teacher has worked. Teachers with at least 12 years of experience get the maximum in each lane.</p>
<p>Source: Chicago Public Schools</p> | Growing a faculty | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/growing-faculty-0/ | 2005-09-14 | 3left-center
| 3,070 | Bob Love a retired Chicago Bulls star stands chuckling on stage at Brentano Math and Science Academy in Logan Square a chain of plastic links stretched across his exceptional armspan A 3rdgrade boy calmly holds up one end a 2ndgrade girl strains on tiptoes to hold up the other 8220We8217re going to measure Mr Love8217s armspan and height8221 lab teacher Raquel Gonzalez announces to an auditorium packed with primary students 8220I need everybody to count with me8221 Gonzalez points to each link while the kids count aloud A gasp goes up at the total 8220Sixty Whoa8221 Love8217s height turns out to be nearly as impressive8212a whopping 59 links Love8217s visit to Brentano is the grand finale to a schoolwide science project aimed at learning a scientific concept the human body is mathematically proportioned During the project students also learned about the scientific process as they predicted outcomes of their experiment accurately measured a partner8217s armspan and height and communicated findings with a graph Just a few years ago math and science at Brentano was 8220no fun8221 at all according to Principal Reynes Reyes Teachers lectured students answered textbook questions But after Brentano brought in the Teachers Academy for Mathematics and Science TAMS a local nonprofit agency teachers began replacing lectures with handson activities With TAMS teachers got indepth courses coaching in the classroom and time to collaborate8212the kind of professional development that experts advocate to improve teaching nationwide TAMS cost Brentano substantial time and money 25000 in training and another 25000 in materials The payoff says Reyes has been no less impressive betterskilled teachers more enthusiastic students and substantial gains in scores on standardized math and science tests Nationally there is growing recognition that professional development is an essential element of school improvement Since the early 1980s the country has sunk millions of dollars into creating higher standards for all students tests to measure student learning and new classroom technology 8220but no money on assuring our teachers have the skills to use them8221 according to Terry Dozier the Secretary8217s Special Advisor on Teaching at the US Department of Education 8220People are beginning to realize that if we don8217t focus on teachers8217 knowledge and skills all those other improvements are going to buy us very little8221 she says Locally the story is much the same To break the inertia that gripped Chicago8217s public schools the 1988 Reform Act shifted power from central office to local school councils Some schools leapt to improve teacher training but most grappled instead with more obvious needs such as organizing council meetings or improving school safety Now observers note a sharpened focus on staff development spurred either by national attention to the issue new foundation dollars or the threat of probation8212depending on whom you ask The need for better staff development appears acute A 1992 survey conducted by the independent Consortium on Chicago School Research found that a third of elementary school principals believe that half or fewer of the teachers at their own schools have a good grasp of language arts instruction which includes reading and writing Even more principals cited teacher deficiencies in math social studies and science Meanwhile a 1997 Consortium survey of teachers suggests that while they spend a great deal of time on professional development it doesn8217t amount to much For one many schools seem to be sampling from a smorgasbord of programs with no coherent plan and too little time devoted to any one topic 8220I think all of us have been in schools where it8217s clear that the staff are working very hard but their efforts aren8217t adding up to real change or improvement8221 says Consortium Study Director BetsAnn Smith Among experts a clear consensus has emerged on what it takes to build a skilled faculty First professional development should be part of a longterm schoolwide plan focused on specific goals for improving student achievement Second teachers need sustained learning in both content knowledge and teaching strategies Third as teachers hone their skills they need both coaching in the classroom and time to discuss instruction with their peers Teachers and experts alike denounce what traditionally has passed for staff development8212districtwide inservice days where teachers sit for hours listening to experts lecture on topics chosen by district bureaucrats 8220If you wanted to evaluate the quality of staff development nationwide you would find it was one of the most poorly done activities8221 says Margaret Harrigan a former Chicago principal district superintendent and human resources director who is now on the faculty at the DePaul University School of Education 8220Somebody decides that teachers need to be fixed and so they arrange for a fix And it isn8217t meaningful8221 Staff development tends to be most meaningful when organized with teacher input by schools themselves with districts playing a guiding and supporting role experts say In Chicago reform helped shift professional development efforts to the school level Prior to 1988 subdistricts controlled staff development money While some distributed those funds directly to schools most subjected teachers to workshops of the traditional sort The 1997 Consortium survey found that teachers now receive most staff development through their schools rather than from courses organized by central office universities or the Chicago Teachers Union Most teachers surveyed gave high marks to their staff development experiences however a third said they did not address the needs of their students Harrigan believes many principals still fail to seek teacher input The professional development that teachers pursue on their own also may fail to address their students8217 needs As a rule school districts give pay increases for coursework beyond a bachelor8217s degree but set few restrictions on the kinds of courses that qualify In Chicago only courses in medicine law and religion are offlimits virtually anything else may count toward socalled lane credit An 8thgrade science teacher for instance could move up a pay lane with graduate courses in fine arts or business8212provided they were offered through an accredited institution Classroom teachers earn degrees in counseling and administration far more often than they do in English history math or science according to Harrigan 8220Very few teachers take courses in the subject areas in which they are teaching8221 she says About half of Chicago8217s some 27000 teachers have earned raises based on additional study This school year those lane credits will cost at least 47 million in salaries alone according to a CATALYST analysis of School Board data Even when teachers do take courses related to classroom teaching they may not receive the necessary support at their schools to adopt new practices For example one 1stgrade teacher at a South Side school earned a master8217s degree that focused on 8220cooperative learning8221 a teaching strategy that can boost student achievement Back in the classroom she couldn8217t figure out how to keep kids from copying each other8217s work and there was no one around to help her Now her students again sit in rows and work alone No one is suggesting that teachers should stop doing graduate work says Barry Bull a researcher at the Indiana Education Policy Center at Indiana University at Bloomington 8220But that kind of individual improvement doesn8217t add up to school improvement8221 he says 8220It8217s simply too fragmented8221 Instead professional development choices should be tailored to priorities for raising student achievement at a particular school A school team should then draw up a longterm plan for what teachers need to learn in order to move students ahead Pursuing professional development as a team also can boost teachers8217 camaraderie and commitment to reaching common goals Bull believes The team approach makes it easier for teachers to help each other too With longterm planning teachers can be assured sufficient time for mastering new strategies And a focused plan keeps a school from taking on too many improvements at once Typically school reforms are driven by fads rather than longterm plans and schools hop from program to program in search of a quick fix for low achievement As a result teachers may grow cynical and reluctant to try new ideas 8220Teachers have been trained very well to hold their noses close their eyes shut their doors and wait until 8216this too has passed8221 says Judith R233nyi executive director of the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education at the National Education Association 8220If teachers are going to go to the trouble of learning something new they have to know it8217s going to stay around8221 TAMS Executive Director Lourdes Monteagudo has found that schools making the best gains with the program are the ones that concentrated all their efforts on it 8220The worst schools are the ones that have 20 things going on and they can8217t focus on any of them8221 she notes At Brentano focusing on TAMS meant dropping lots of smaller math programs that a number of universities were piloting at the school 8220With so many programs running simultaneously it was hard to measure which programs were helping students8217 achievement and which weren8217t8221 notes Principal Reyes Selecting a single professional development program for math and science put everyone on the same page he says 8220It made it easier for teachers to collaborate it made it easier for me to supervise the programs and it made it easier for the students8211giving them more continuity from grade to grade8221 A 1995 Consortium survey found half of Chicago8217s elementary teachers felt that programs at their schools were at least somewhat uncoordinated 43 percent reported so many programs they couldn8217t keep track of them Almost half said programs tend to come and go Typically professional development programs are judged by 8220the happiness quotient8221 or how well teachers enjoyed them Experts say a school instead should use hard data such as standardized test scores attendance rates and samples of student work If professional development is not leading to increased student learning a school needs to determine why and revise its longterm plan accordingly Some professional development programs do produce better results than others Many educators have found that general teaching strategies such as how to reach children with different 8220learning styles8221 tend to be less effective than those that address a specific content area at a specific grade level In addition most teachers need more study in content areas experts say To win certification in Illinois elementary teachers are required to take only six semester hours of math and 12 of science they often choose the watereddown courses aimed at education majors In the primary area of reading only two semester hours are required Through TAMS Brentano teachers took 60 hours of courses that covered scientific concepts such as ecosystems adaptation mass and weight Sixthgrade teacher Marianne Shimkus says she8217s now able to teach some of these concepts in greater depth 8220It makes us more confident8221 she says of the TAMS training 8220One thing about students8212they know if you don8217t know And nobody can put you on the spot like an 11yearold8221 TAMS instructors also covered the nittygritty details of instruction such as how to ensure that each student masters a particular skill For example the first time 2ndgraders measure objects in the science lab they generally come up with the wrong numbers Before TAMS says lab teacher Raquel Gonzalez 8220I would have said 8216That8217s not how you do it8217 I would have done it myself and left it at that8221 Now she has her students repeat the experiment and coaches each pair Gonzalez says her undergraduate education classes tended to overlook the practical details For instance she learned to design science units that would 8220wow8221 her students but not how to teach them to a class of 30 8220I have units from school that are just sitting there because I don8217t know how to get them together8221 she says Undergraduate education courses have long been criticized as more theoretical than practical In response many Chicago colleges of education have upgraded their programs to include more classroom skills and more hours of student teaching But even a solid undergraduate program doesn8217t eliminate the need for ongoing teacher learning experts say As with most undergraduate programs there isn8217t enough time in initial teacher education to cover all that a professional needs to know let alone ensure that they can expertly apply what they learn in any given environment Further research continues to produce new knowledge about teaching and learning 8220What8217s competence today won8217t be competence five years from now8221 says Dennis Sparks executive director of the National Staff Development Council Unfortunately for schools researchers are not of one mind in many areas their disagreements are especially intense in the area of early reading instruction Some experts argue in favor of packaged programs that produce replicable results in many schools and classrooms others encourage teachers to innovate in response to individual children8217s needs Harvey 8220Smokey8221 Daniels of NationalLouis University favors innovation The goal of professional development he says is to produce 8220a powerful unique idiosyncratic professional8221 Through the university8217s Center for City Schools teachers try out strategies they can incorporate into their own classroom programs For example teachers participate in literature circles or smallgroup discussions of a book selected for independent reading Daniels finds that the vast majority of teachers are capable of designing learning activities tailored to the needs and interests of their students Packaged programs should be the refuge only of 8220the least competent and least committed8221 he says Advocates of packaged programs argue that teachers cannot possibly craft instructional materials and teaching strategies with the same attention to detail as can a team of researchers 8220When would they have time to teach8221 asks Marsha Berger deputy director of the Educational Issues Department at the American Federation of Teachers She notes that Direct Instruction and Success for All two elementary school reading programs AFT supports have been tested and refined for more than a decade Professional development centered on learning 8220the tried and true8221 leaves teachers more time to collaborate on materials for enriching the core program and to discuss individual students she says Schools that opt for packaged programs can move more quickly according to an ongoing study by RAND Corp a research organization based in Santa Monica Calif RAND is studying implementation of seven school reform designs sponsored by New American Schools a nonprofit group based in Arlington Va Schools can successfully implement packaged programs within a year RAND found other programs 8220unfold at a slower rate8221 says RAND8217s Susan Bodilly 8220Teachers need more time not only to learn new ideas but to come up with practices8221 The study hasn8217t yet determined which reform models lead to the greatest gains in student achievement Regardless of what approach a school chooses teachers need support Research has shown that teachers are much more likely to pursue new teaching strategies when they have shared planning time and classroom coaching Without these two supports one study found fewer than 10 percent of teachers put strategies learned in professional development into classroom use By and large Chicago teachers lack the support they need to improve instruction The 1995 Consortium survey found only 55 percent of Chicago teachers work with colleagues to design instruction The 1997 survey found 68 percent of teachers get meaningful feedback from a colleague less than once a month 25 percent reported they had never visited a colleague8217s classroom Brentano teachers rarely spent time collaborating until TAMS helped the school rearrange its schedule Now teachers at each grade level have a common prep period once a week while their students go to gym or other 8220specials8221 Planning together helps ensure that everyone covers all the skills and concepts for their grade level it also has improved relations among teachers 8220Everyone gets along a little better8221 says 6thgrade teacher Marianne Shimkus 8220There8217s more sharing of ideas8221 A TAMS consultant also has spent time in each teacher8217s classroom first modeling lessons then coteaching and now observing and providing feedback Coaching is an expensive support8212roughly 25 percent of the program8217s cost8212but a crucial one 8220You can take teachers and give them all the workshops you want8221 says Gonzalez 8220But if you don8217t come back to the school and help them out with it and show them how to do it it8217s not going to work8221 she insists At her previous elementary school professional development programs often went by the wayside 8220Some won8217t try new techniques because they8217re afraid Some want to go with the old way because that8217s what they feel comfortable with8221 Coaching 8220makes a world of difference8221 says Gonzalez 8220She shows them 8216Hey this is simple8217 and models it so then they8217re not afraid anymore8221 To be successful even the bestdesigned staff development program needs fertile soil In the Consortium8217s view the key element is trust among the adults who work in a school The 1995 Consortium study found that trust correlated with a school8217s test score gains more strongly than did any other factor including a school8217s poverty level parents8217 education or how low test scores were at the beginning of reform Not surprisingly the study found that distrust undermined professional development efforts Teachers who reported low levels of trust were far less likely to learn new teaching methods or to seek constructive criticism from colleagues the study found Schools with a history of low student achievement ineffective leadership and failed reforms tend to have the lowest levels of trust says Consortium Director Anthony Bryk But he adds that some lowachieving schools that have developed high levels of trust What usually makes the difference he says is a new principal with a new vision who makes the effort to 8220counsel out8221 lowperforming teachers and attract motivated ones Building a professional community like any significant change takes time and perseverance there are no shortterm solutions says Bryk 8220To really build social trust people have to join together around work they feel is important and eventually achieve some success at8221 Excludes counselors coordinators and other nonclassroom teachers Source Various Chicago school officials Chicago teacher salaries Average 9697 45508 Base salary ranges 42week year Bachelor8217s degree 3060048000 12268 teachers Master8217s degree 3270050200 5898 teachers Master8217s plus 15 semester hours 3370051200 2107 teachers Master8217s plus 30 semester hours 3480052300 1650 teachers Master8217s plus 45 semester hours 3590053300 3612 teachers Doctorate PhD or EdD 3690054400 285 teachers Note Within each socalled lane salaries depend on the number of years a teacher has worked Teachers with at least 12 years of experience get the maximum in each lane Source Chicago Public Schools | Bob/PROPN Love/PROPN a/DET retired/VERB Chicago/PROPN Bulls/PROPN star/NOUN stands/VERB chuckling/VERB on/ADP stage/NOUN at/ADP Brentano/PROPN Math/PROPN and/CCONJ Science/PROPN Academy/PROPN in/ADP Logan/PROPN Square/PROPN a/DET chain/NOUN of/ADP plastic/ADJ links/NOUN stretched/VERB across/ADP his/PRON exceptional/ADJ armspan/NOUN A/DET 3rdgrade/NUM boy/NOUN calmly/ADV holds/VERB up/ADP one/NUM end/NOUN a/DET 2ndgrade/NUM girl/NOUN strains/VERB on/ADP tiptoes/NOUN to/PART hold/VERB up/ADP the/DET other/ADJ 8220We8217re/PROPN going/VERB to/PART measure/VERB Mr/PROPN Love8217s/PROPN armspan/PROPN and/CCONJ height8221/PROPN lab/NOUN teacher/NOUN Raquel/PROPN Gonzalez/PROPN announces/VERB to/ADP an/DET auditorium/NOUN packed/VERB with/ADP primary/ADJ students/NOUN 8220I/PROPN need/VERB everybody/PRON to/PART count/VERB with/ADP me8221/PROPN Gonzalez/PROPN points/VERB to/ADP each/DET link/NOUN while/SCONJ the/DET kids/NOUN count/VERB aloud/ADV A/DET gasp/NOUN goes/VERB up/ADP at/ADP the/DET total/ADJ 8220Sixty/NUM Whoa8221/PROPN Love8217s/PROPN height/NOUN turns/VERB out/ADP to/PART be/AUX nearly/ADV as/ADP impressive8212a/ADJ whopping/ADJ 59/NUM links/NOUN 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump’s fashion style true to her Europe roots | false | https://apnews.com/c17019d689b943a38e73cdf2886223ec | 2018-01-16 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Slovenianborn/PROPN Melania/PROPN Trump/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX unafraid/ADJ to/PART go/VERB against/ADP her/PRON husband8217s/PROPN 8220America/NUM First8221/PROPN agenda/NOUN and/CCONJ stay/VERB true/ADJ to/ADP her/PRON roots/NOUN if/SCONJ there8217s/VERB a/DET message/NOUN to/PART be/AUX taken/VERB from/ADP her/PRON bold/ADJ foreignflavored/ADJ wardrobe/NOUN 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump’s fashion style true to her Europe roots | false | https://apnews.com/c17019d689b943a38e73cdf2886223ec | 2018-01-16 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Slovenianborn/PROPN Melania/PROPN Trump/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX unafraid/ADJ to/PART go/VERB against/ADP her/PRON husband8217s/PROPN 8220America/NUM First8221/PROPN agenda/NOUN and/CCONJ stay/VERB true/ADJ to/ADP her/PRON roots/NOUN if/SCONJ there8217s/VERB a/DET message/NOUN to/PART be/AUX taken/VERB from/ADP her/PRON bold/ADJ foreignflavored/ADJ wardrobe/NOUN 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump's fashion style true to her Europe roots | false | https://apnews.com/amp/c17019d689b943a38e73cdf2886223ec | 2018-01-16 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump’s fashion style true to her Europe roots | false | https://apnews.com/c17019d689b943a38e73cdf2886223ec | 2018-01-16 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Slovenianborn/PROPN Melania/PROPN Trump/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX unafraid/ADJ to/PART go/VERB against/ADP her/PRON husband8217s/PROPN 8220America/NUM First8221/PROPN agenda/NOUN and/CCONJ stay/VERB true/ADJ to/ADP her/PRON roots/NOUN if/SCONJ there8217s/VERB a/DET message/NOUN to/PART be/AUX taken/VERB from/ADP her/PRON bold/ADJ foreignflavored/ADJ wardrobe/NOUN 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump’s style evokes Europe roots, not America First | false | https://apnews.com/1b78705f6e464d9e8601885173c55fcb | 2018-01-15 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Slovenianborn/PROPN Melania/PROPN Trump/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX unafraid/ADJ to/PART go/VERB against/ADP her/PRON husband8217s/PROPN 8220America/NUM First8221/PROPN agenda/NOUN and/CCONJ stay/VERB true/ADJ to/ADP her/PRON roots/NOUN if/SCONJ there8217s/VERB a/DET message/NOUN to/PART be/AUX taken/VERB from/ADP her/PRON bold/ADJ foreignflavored/ADJ wardrobe/NOUN 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump's style evokes Europe roots, not America First | false | https://apnews.com/amp/1b78705f6e464d9e8601885173c55fcb | 2018-01-15 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband's "America First" agenda and stay true to her roots, if there's a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady's touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump's political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He's helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>"In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?" Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It's a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump's clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house's knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama's frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not Mrs. Trump's choice, given her husband's unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world's most photographed women.</p>
<p>It's a deafening silence, especially given that it's an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an "America First" administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn't have such a rosy view of the garment's over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president's ill-fated attempt to repeal "Obamacare" was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady's wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It's an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there's a message in Mrs. Trump's fashion — it's that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she's acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn't part of the equation.</p>
<p>"She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself," Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. "Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion."</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: "She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind."</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump's looks contain a veiled reference to the event she's dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps' visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown's wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she's not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children's interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama's legacy, many of Mrs. Trump's fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor's.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama's buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump's signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn't affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: "Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don't comment on private clients. We've never had contact with her team."</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to "go to hell" when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump's most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it's perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump's fashion style true to her Europe roots | false | https://apnews.com/amp/c17019d689b943a38e73cdf2886223ec | 2018-01-16 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husbands America First agenda and stay true to her roots if theres a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first ladys touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trumps political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned Hes helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not Pierre told AP Mrs Trumps oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled Its a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trumps clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design houses knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obamas frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps its not Mrs Trumps choice given her husbands unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the worlds most photographed women Its a deafening silence especially given that its an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an America First administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didnt have such a rosy view of the garments over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the presidents illfated attempt to repeal Obamacare was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first ladys wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique Its an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If theres a message in Mrs Trumps fashion 8212 its that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste shes acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isnt part of the equation She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion Adds Pierre via email She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind Sometimes Mrs Trumps looks contain a veiled reference to the event shes dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gowns wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown shes not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting childrens interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obamas legacy many of Mrs Trumps fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessors Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obamas buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trumps signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasnt affected its communications policy The house told AP Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we dont comment on private clients Weve never had contact with her team By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to go to hell when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trumps most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry its perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K 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<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p>
<p>PARIS (AP) — Slovenian-born Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband’s “America First” agenda and stay true to her roots, if there’s a message to be taken from her bold, foreign-flavored wardrobe in 2017.</p>
<p>In her first year as first lady, Mrs. Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industry-wide backlash against her unpopular spouse.</p>
<p>The first first lady to be born in continental Europe, Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia, in the southern Balkans, just over 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Italian border. Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid-1990s, years before she got U.S. citizenship in 2006.</p>
<p>From designs by Dolce &amp; Gabbana, Del Pozo, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels, the 47-year-old first lady’s touchstones have not only been the Old World, but its most established — and expensive — design houses.</p>
<p>As the wife of a billionaire, Mrs. Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump’s political base.</p>
<p>Since becoming first lady, Mrs. Trump has chosen Herve Pierre, a French-born immigrant, as her fashion adviser. Politics be damned: He’s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve, eye-popping colors and big sunglasses, and show off her svelte, 5-foot-11 frame and thick, dark hair.</p>
<p>“In the news, we speak a lot of politics, so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else, why not?” Pierre told AP.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s old-school, dressed-to-the-nines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel, but in perceptions that the first lady, who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly, is reserved in her persona.</p>
<p>Not since Jackie Kennedy has a U.S. first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs. Trump.</p>
<p>Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for U.S. brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled.</p>
<p>It’s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama — who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers, and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, who stuck closely to U.S. fashion brands.</p>
<p>Most of Mrs. Trump’s clothes are bought off-the-rack from a retailer without the design house’s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady.</p>
<p>This is highly unusual — and contrasts with Mrs. Obama’s frequent collaborations with designers.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s not Mrs. Trump’s choice, given her husband’s unpopularity.</p>
<p>People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs. Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP, even though she is among the world’s most photographed women.</p>
<p>It’s a deafening silence, especially given that it’s an industry Mrs. Trump actually worked in.</p>
<p>Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady. (Mrs. Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel.)</p>
<p>But in an “America First” administration, Mrs. Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to blue-collar supporters.</p>
<p>While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored, floral D&amp;G silk coat Mrs. Trump wore in Sicily in May, political commentators didn’t have such a rosy view of the garment’s over-$50,000 price tag.</p>
<p>It cost, they quickly pointed out, more than the average annual U.S. household income. Mrs. Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinette-style wardrobe as the president’s ill-fated attempt to repeal “Obamacare” was being considered, an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance.</p>
<p>She was praised for getting it right when she wore $50 converse sneakers and $185 J Brand jeans (despite the $1,100 Balmain shirt) during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children.</p>
<p>Since the television age, the first lady’s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique.</p>
<p>It’s an impossible game to win.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was criticized for wearing $540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington — despite twinning them with a more affordable J.Crew cardigan.</p>
<p>Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an off-the-rack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball, after having worn it to a previous ball.</p>
<p>If there’s a message in Mrs. Trump’s fashion — it’s that she dresses to look good, in keeping with the expensive personal taste she’s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005. Political meaning isn’t part of the equation.</p>
<p>“She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, told AP. “Mrs. Trump wears what she likes, and what is appropriate for the occasion.”</p>
<p>Adds Pierre, via email: “She has and had already a very personal style in fashion, before she was first lady. As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses, I work keeping her vision in mind.”</p>
<p>Sometimes, Mrs. Trump’s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she’s dressing for.</p>
<p>She wore an iconic piece of French fashion — a red Christian Dior bar jacket — for the Trumps’ visit to Paris in July.</p>
<p>But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavy-handed.</p>
<p>In May, Mrs. Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki. The dress evoked the Arabian Desert, and its military-style epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East.</p>
<p>When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House, Mrs. Trump dressed in a maxi-dress from Italian house Pucci. The gown’s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump has a great passion for fashion, and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre, has shown she’s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures.</p>
<p>The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children’s interests.</p>
<p>When she departed the White House to visit hurricane-damaged Texas last year, her impractically high stilettos, though chic, upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash. She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas, but the damage already had been done.</p>
<p>Much like her husband, who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama’s legacy, many of Mrs. Trump’s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor’s.</p>
<p>Her high-end European clothes contrast with Mrs. Obama’s buy-American wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing high-priced garments with more popular brands.</p>
<p>Mrs. Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms — and promoted her get-fit initiatives as first lady.</p>
<p>Mrs. Trump’s signature style is the dramatic, often covered, sleeve.</p>
<p>A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs. Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves. Mrs. Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach, Florida. In another twist on that style, Mrs. Trump sometimes wears coats, such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne, draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp. It does away with the hands — and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable, but not hands-on, first lady.</p>
<p>Madrid-based fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural, pret-a-couture creations being worn by Mrs. Trump, but that hasn’t affected its communications policy.</p>
<p>The house told AP: “Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the U.S. and we don’t comment on private clients. We’ve never had contact with her team.”</p>
<p>By contrast, designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs. Obama.</p>
<p>Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs. Trump publicly — such as Ralph Lauren, Dolce &amp; Gabbana and Beirut-born Reem Acra. They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP.</p>
<p>Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to “go to hell” when he revealed himself to be among Mrs. Trump’s most passionate supporters — posting a photo of her in D&amp;G on his Instagram account to instant criticism.</p>
<p>And when Mrs. Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House, some even threatened to boycott the house.</p>
<p>For the fashion industry, it’s perhaps a case of once bitten, twice shy.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Thomas Adamson can be followed at Twitter.com/ThomasAdamson_K</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report</p> | Melania Trump’s style evokes Europe roots, not America First | false | https://apnews.com/1b78705f6e464d9e8601885173c55fcb | 2018-01-15 | 2least
| 3,070 | PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report PARIS AP 8212 Slovenianborn Melania Trump has been unafraid to go against her husband8217s 8220America First8221 agenda and stay true to her roots if there8217s a message to be taken from her bold foreignflavored wardrobe in 2017 In her first year as first lady Mrs Trump has often wrapped herself in the clothes of her home continent as several American designers publicly refused to dress her in what was a fashion industrywide backlash against her unpopular spouse The first first lady to be born in continental Europe Trump grew up in Sevnica in Slovenia in the southern Balkans just over 100 kilometers 60 miles from the Italian border Her first real taste for fashion came while living in Paris as a young model in the mid1990s years before she got US citizenship in 2006 From designs by Dolce ampamp Gabbana Del Pozo Christian Dior Emilio Pucci Givenchy and Valentino to daringly high Christian Louboutin heels the 47yearold first lady8217s touchstones have not only been the Old World but its most established 8212 and expensive 8212 design houses As the wife of a billionaire Mrs Trump can afford to spend into the five figures for a garment and seems unconcerned about how that squares with voters in President Donald Trump8217s political base Since becoming first lady Mrs Trump has chosen Herve Pierre a Frenchborn immigrant as her fashion adviser Politics be damned He8217s helped her hone looks that emphasize the sleeve eyepopping colors and big sunglasses and show off her svelte 5foot11 frame and thick dark hair 8220In the news we speak a lot of politics so if for a moment we can forget about it and enjoy something else why not8221 Pierre told AP Mrs Trump8217s oldschool dressedtothenines glamour and full fabrics evoke distance not only in how far the clothes have had to travel but in perceptions that the first lady who only moved to the White House in June and rarely speaks publicly is reserved in her persona Not since Jackie Kennedy has a US first lady had such a European aesthetic as Mrs Trump Although she wore Ralph Lauren to the inauguration and has also shown a penchant for US brands such as Michael Kors and Calvin Klein many of her most recognizable looks have been foreign designed and assembled It8217s a striking contrast with Michelle Obama 8212 who famously used her first lady wardrobe as a way of championing often young American designers and with Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton who stuck closely to US fashion brands Most of Mrs Trump8217s clothes are bought offtherack from a retailer without the design house8217s knowledge that the garment is destined for the first lady This is highly unusual 8212 and contrasts with Mrs Obama8217s frequent collaborations with designers Perhaps it8217s not Mrs Trump8217s choice given her husband8217s unpopularity People from 17 fashion brands that Mrs Trump wears declined to comment on the first lady when contacted by AP even though she is among the world8217s most photographed women It8217s a deafening silence especially given that it8217s an industry Mrs Trump actually worked in Walking the path of both foreign and highly priced glamour presents its share of risks for any first lady Mrs Kennedy was criticized for wearing Parisian stalwart Chanel But in an 8220America First8221 administration Mrs Trump is particularly vulnerable to criticism as her husband assails immigration and plays to bluecollar supporters While the fashion press gushed over a brightly colored floral DampampG silk coat Mrs Trump wore in Sicily in May political commentators didn8217t have such a rosy view of the garment8217s over50000 price tag It cost they quickly pointed out more than the average annual US household income Mrs Trump was criticized for a Marie Antoinettestyle wardrobe as the president8217s illfated attempt to repeal 8220Obamacare8221 was being considered an effort that might have stripped millions of people of their insurance She was praised for getting it right when she wore 50 converse sneakers and 185 J Brand jeans despite the 1100 Balmain shirt during a day spent digging around the White House vegetable garden with children Since the television age the first lady8217s wardrobe has invariably invited vibrant political critique It8217s an impossible game to win Mrs Obama was criticized for wearing 540 Lanvin sneakers at a food bank in Washington 8212 despite twinning them with a more affordable JCrew cardigan Rosalynn Carter was berated during the 1970s oil crisis for being too unglamorous when she wore an offtherack gown to the 1977 inaugural ball after having worn it to a previous ball If there8217s a message in Mrs Trump8217s fashion 8212 it8217s that she dresses to look good in keeping with the expensive personal taste she8217s acquired since marrying Trump in 2005 Political meaning isn8217t part of the equation 8220She does not concern herself with what others think about her fashion and always stays true to herself8221 Stephanie Grisham a spokeswoman for the first lady told AP 8220Mrs Trump wears what she likes and what is appropriate for the occasion8221 Adds Pierre via email 8220She has and had already a very personal style in fashion before she was first lady As you can see she likes suits and structured dresses I work keeping her vision in mind8221 Sometimes Mrs Trump8217s looks contain a veiled reference to the event she8217s dressing for She wore an iconic piece of French fashion 8212 a red Christian Dior bar jacket 8212 for the Trumps8217 visit to Paris in July But the references vary in degrees of subtlety and can sometimes be heavyhanded In May Mrs Trump passed up the traditional headscarf in Saudi Arabia in favor of a Ralph Lauren shirtdress in khaki The dress evoked the Arabian Desert and its militarystyle epaulettes and pockets suggested the garb of troops in the Middle East When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the White House Mrs Trump dressed in a maxidress from Italian house Pucci The gown8217s wild print and bright yellow color might well have been chosen to capture the vibrancy of the subcontinent and the hue of its flag Mrs Trump has a great passion for fashion and alongside former Carolina Herrera design chief Pierre has shown she8217s not afraid of bold style statements even if it upstages her political ventures The bright pink belted Del Pozo dress with dramatic leg of mutton sleeves that she wore for an address at the United Nations seemed to take precedence over the actual speech she gave on the importance of protecting children8217s interests When she departed the White House to visit hurricanedamaged Texas last year her impractically high stilettos though chic upstaged the trip and set off a social media backlash She changed into sensible sneakers before deplaning in Texas but the damage already had been done Much like her husband who has tried to undo much of Barack Obama8217s legacy many of Mrs Trump8217s fashion choices seem to be the polar opposite of her predecessor8217s Her highend European clothes contrast with Mrs Obama8217s buyAmerican wardrobe priority and the relatable image she honed by mixing highpriced garments with more popular brands Mrs Obama was associated with sleeveless styles that showed off her famously toned arms 8212 and promoted her getfit initiatives as first lady Mrs Trump8217s signature style is the dramatic often covered sleeve A white sheath from British designer Roksanda that Mrs Trump wore at the Republican National Convention gained attention for its striking bell sleeves Mrs Trump also garnered attention for wearing a bright red Givenchy cape dress with bold floppy sleeves as she joined the president for a trip to Palm Beach Florida In another twist on that style Mrs Trump sometimes wears coats such as a pink number in October by Swedish house Acne draped over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging limp It does away with the hands 8212 and adds to the subliminal message that her priority is to be a fashionable but not handson first lady Madridbased fashion house Del Pozo has gained unparalleled publicity for its sculptural pretacouture creations being worn by Mrs Trump but that hasn8217t affected its communications policy The house told AP 8220Melania Trump is a normal client that buys from a retailer in the US and we don8217t comment on private clients We8217ve never had contact with her team8221 By contrast designers generally were eager to talk about dressing Mrs Obama Many may have heeded lessons from the unpleasant experience of a few designers who have supported Mrs Trump publicly 8212 such as Ralph Lauren Dolce ampamp Gabbana and Beirutborn Reem Acra They all faced criticism on social media and would not comment to AP Stefano Gabbana told his online critics to 8220go to hell8221 when he revealed himself to be among Mrs Trump8217s most passionate supporters 8212 posting a photo of her in DampampG on his Instagram account to instant criticism And when Mrs Trump wore Ralph Lauren at the White House some even threatened to boycott the house For the fashion industry it8217s perhaps a case of once bitten twice shy ___ Thomas Adamson can be followed at TwittercomThomasAdamson_K ___ Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report | PARIS/PROPN AP/PROPN 8212/NUM Slovenianborn/PROPN Melania/PROPN Trump/PROPN has/AUX been/AUX unafraid/ADJ to/PART go/VERB against/ADP her/PRON husband8217s/PROPN 8220America/NUM First8221/PROPN agenda/NOUN and/CCONJ stay/VERB true/ADJ to/ADP her/PRON roots/NOUN if/SCONJ there8217s/VERB a/DET message/NOUN to/PART be/AUX taken/VERB from/ADP her/PRON bold/ADJ foreignflavored/ADJ wardrobe/NOUN 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<p>In recent days we have all witnessed two vomitous eruptions of moral nullity that would tax the powers of a Voltaire or a Vidal to do them proper justice; they quite o’er-crow the meager gifts of a hack like me. But I will sketch a few observations here nonetheless, if only to add one more small voice to those few who bear witness to the evils perpetrated by our unaccountable leaders.</p>
<p>We speak of course of Barack Obama’s Nobel speech and Tony Blair’s recent comments on the Iraq War.&#160; Let’s take the lesser figure first.</p>
<p>I.</p>
<p>Since leaving office, Tony Blair has dipped his blood-smeared snout into various corporate troughs, amassing millions, while simultaneously becoming one of the great whited sepulchres of our day, making a great show of his conversion to Catholicism, his “faith foundation,” and so on. He has even lectured at Yale Divinity School. But this holy huckster looks more haunted every day. The glaring, bulging eyes, the frantic rictus of his grin – indistinguishable from the grimace of a man in gut-clenching pain — and the ever-more strident, maniacal defense of his war crimes give compelling testimony to the hellish fires consuming his psyche.</p>
<p>Next month, Blair will go before the Chilcot Inquiry, a panel of UK Establishment worthies charged with investigating the origins of Britain’s role in the invasion of Iraq.&#160; Although the worthies have been remarkably toothless in their questioning of the great and good so far – the smell of whitewash is definitely in the air – the inquiry has at least performed the useful function of bringing the forgotten subject of Iraq back into the public eye, while collating and confirming, with sworn testimony, much of what we have learned in dribs and drabs over the years about the rank, deliberate deceit behind this murderous catastrophe. One choice bit that has emerged from the inquiry is the revelation that the centerpiece of Blair’s case for immediate war – the claim that Saddam Hussein could hit Europe with WMD-loaded missiles on just 45 minutes’ notice – came from unconfirmed, third-hand gossip passed along by an Iraqi taxi driver.</p>
<p>As Blair’s turn on the well-padded Chilcot cushion draws near, he has launched frantic efforts to keep his testimony secret while at the same time trying to undercut the rationale for the whole war origins inquiry, which has focused on the professed justification for the invasion: disarming Iraq’s (non-existent) WMD. So last week, Blair gave an interview to a friendly, timorous chat-show host in which he made the brazen admission – no, the proud boast – that he would have found a way to drive Britain into war with Iraq even if he had known for certain that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. (And of course, given the nature of the “‘intelligence” that Blair used in his pre-war WMD claims&#160; it is certain that Blair&#160; was indeed certain that Saddam had no such weapons when the invasion was launched).</p>
<p>Thus it is now Blair’s contention that there is no charge to answer concerning the origins of the war; all this WMD guff is meaningless. He would have found “other arguments” to persuade Britons to follow George W. Bush into the war that American militarists had long been planning.</p>
<p>Blair’s admission has drawn a remarkable response from another Establishment mandarin, Sir Ken Macdonald, who served for five years as Director of Public Prosecutions under Blair’s government – and now works in private practice at a major law firm…alongside Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie. The headline in The Times puts it plainly: “Intoxicated by power, Blair tricked us into war.” In his column, Macdonald writes:</p>
<p>“The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer. This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage. It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.</p>
<p>“…Mr Blair’s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power. Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mind-altering brew at home. But Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him. In this sense he was weak and, as we can see, he remains so. Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the self-regarding mantra that “hand on heart, I only did what I thought was right”. But this is a narcissist’s defence and self-belief is no answer to misjudgment: it is certainly no answer to death. “Yo, Blair”, perhaps, was his truest measure.”</p>
<p>Macdonald also gives us a sneak peek inside the workings of the elite, with observations that doubtless apply equally well across the ocean:</p>
<p>“In British public life, loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation. It’s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts, so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward. Disloyalty, on the other hand, means a terrible casting out, a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure. So which way will our heroes jump?</p>
<p>“We must hope in the right direction — for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power, stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world, that has brought our politics so low. If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction, the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt.”</p>
<p>It is almost certain that the Chilcot inquiry will produce little more than the usual blood-flecked whitewash. Certainly, Tony Blair will face no official action for his crimes; he will not even lose any of his corporate sponsors, unlike the heinous Tiger Woods, whose sexual intimacy with consenting adults is obviously far worse than the murder of more than one million innocent people. (We’ll never see Woods lecturing at Yale Divinity School now!)</p>
<p>But keep looking at Blair’s face; watch, year by year, as it brings forth the hideous fruits of the inferno within. For as one of his illustrious countrymen once put it: “Murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.”</p>
<p>II.</p>
<p>“A narcissist’s defense.” As a description of Obama’s Peace Prize speech, Macdonald’s phrase could hardly be bettered. But the intense, near-pathological self-regard in the speech was not Obama’s alone, of course; we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard, at least, he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be: the embodiment of the nation. His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism, in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace, was breathtaking in its chutzpah – but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen, and the ruling elite above all.</p>
<p>Many have already remarked on Obama’s adoption of Bush’s principle of unilateral, “pre-emptive” military action, anytime, anywhere, whenever a leader declares his nation is under threat. This approach — which Bush called “the path of action” — was roundly scorned by critics of the former regime, many of whom now scramble to praise Obama’s “nuanced” embrace of aggression. But again, let us give credit where it is due; in this aspect of the speech, Obama did in fact go beyond Bush’s more narrowly nationalist conception, saying: “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.”</p>
<p>Thus Obama would, apparently, extend the right of unilateral military action to “any head of state” that feels the necessity of defending his or her nation. But of course this is just empty verbiage, a pointless, bald-faced lie that not even Bush would have tried to get away with. Would Obama accept a unilateral, pre-emptive strike by Tehran against Israel, where top legislators and government officials routinely talk of attacking Iran? Would Obama cheer the “right” of Russia to strike unilaterally at Poland if the U.S. “missile shield” deal, now on hold, was suddenly consummated? Would Obama support a unilateral strike by India at Pakistan — or vice versa — in the still-seething cauldron of tensions on the subcontinent, where both nations legitimately feel threatened by the other? Would he support the right of Kim Jong-il to “defend his nation” by attacking South Korea the next time there is a threatening border incident there?</p>
<p>No, it is clear that only the United States — and its allies, like Israel — are to be allowed the supreme privilege of unilateral war. The line was inserted in the speech simply because it would sound good in the moment, and create a temporary emotional reaction that might carry listeners past the macabre incongruity underlying the entire event: giving a peace award to the bloodstained leader of a military machine hip-deep in the coagulate gore of two, vast, civilian-slaughtering wars.</p>
<p>Obama staked his boldest claim to American exceptionalism with a passage that he lifted, almost verbatim, from his West Point speech just a few days before, when he announced his second massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan:</p>
<p>“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.”</p>
<p>Here is chutzpah — and hubris — raised to the level of the sublime. Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred, extremism, chaos and brutal corruption around the world — and offered them as justification for the hideous, unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech: War is Peace. In this perverse inversion of values, Obama, as a warmaker, is actually a peacemaker, you see — and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who was evoked at several points in the speech.</p>
<p>And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech. And perhaps the most significant too. All the cant about America’s altruism and “enlightened self-interest” in killing millions of people (Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama’s historical survey) for the sake of all the children of the world (red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in our sight) was just par for the rhetorical course. It was nothing that had not been said many times before, including the references — so lauded by Obama’s liberal apologists — to those inadvertent “mistakes” America seems to keep making, out of a surfeit of good intentions, no doubt. But I don’t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi before. (And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, no less! Oh, that sublime brass….)</p>
<p>Although larded with usual hyper-yet-flaccid, florid-yet-false oratorical stylings that have become Obama’s trademark, his words about King and Gandhi drip with scorn and condescension. I was actually taken aback when I read these passages:</p>
<p>“I make this statement [about the moral justification for war] mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: It merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.</p>
<p>“But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”</p>
<p>The intellectual incoherence and arrogant sneering behind this supposedly laudatory passage is staggering. After claiming to be the personal embodiment of King and Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent action, Obama gives the game away with this line: “I face the world as it is.” Those two guys, they were just dreamers, they were unrealistic, they were unserious; they didn’t “face the world as it is,” they weren’t savvy and pragmatic, like me. I have to go to war because I’m a head of state “sworn to protect and defend my nation.”</p>
<p>[Here, Obama indulges in a trope that is pandemic among his apologists: the idea that he was somehow forced to become the head of a militarist state waging endless war around the world, that he has somehow woken up and found himself “the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. But of course he chose to pursue this kind of power in this kind of system — chose it, pursued it, fought like hell to win it. It’s what he wanted. Yet still this notion of Obama as a helpless victim of fate — lost in a world he never made — persists.]</p>
<p>He then goes on to give the lie to his previously stated admiration for Gandhi and King: “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” Thus, King, Gandhi and any practitioner of non-violent resistance to evil are, ultimately, naive, ineffectual — weak.</p>
<p>Notice the incoherence – or perhaps deliberate elision – at work here. Obama says he must face down “threats to the American people” — and then talks about Hitler’s armies, immediately coupling, and rhetorically equating them, with al-Qaeda’s scattered handful of hidden fugitives. Are the American people now threatened by Hitler’s armies? Are al-Qaeda’s paltry forces — less than 100 of them in Afghanistan, according to Obama’s own war-wagers — the equal of Hitler’s armies of millions of men?</p>
<p>But there is a deeper untruth beyond these cheap rhetorical tricks. For it is blatantly untrue to say that “a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.” First of all, one cannot make that statement because this approach was never tried. Therefore you cannot state categorically that it would not have worked. Doubtless it would have cost millions of lives; but as Gandhi himself pointed out, the violent resistance to Hitler’s armies also cost tens of millions of lives. But Obama’s formulation — which is a hackneyed one indeed — only deals with one view of non-violent resistance to Hitler: i.e., from the outside, resisting his armies as they poured across the borders. There is another way in which a non-violent resistance movement without any doubt could have “halted Hitler’s armies”: if it had taken root and spread throughout Germany itself, including among the armed forces and its supporting industries.</p>
<p>In the event, this did not happen. But it was not, and is not, an impossibility for humankind to pursue such an approach. Therefore it is fatuous and false to state what cannot possibly be known: whether non-violent resistance would have thwarted Nazism, and whether this would have been more or less costly than the way of violence.</p>
<p>Similarly, it is false to say that “negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” The only response to this bald statement is: How do you know? Has anybody tried it? No. Therefore you cannot call it an impossibility — and then use this supposed, untested “impossibility” as your justification for laying waste to whole nations. You may say that it would be unjust to negotiate with al-Qaeda, that those who use murderous violence to achieve their ends should simply be killed or prosecuted. (Where then would that leave the leaders of the exalted, exceptional, unilateral United States?) But of course this is precisely what Gandhi did: he sat down and negotiated with the representatives of an empire that had caused the deaths of millions of his own people. He negotiated with them in good faith, with good will, despite what they had done and were doing to his people — and despite the fact that many of his interlocutors, such as Winston Churchill, hated him with a blind, racist fury. And he was successful — although again, not without cost, both before and after the liberation. But Gandhi, and King, knew the costs of non-violence – because they were genuinely savvy, and genuinely realistic about the nature of evil.</p>
<p>In any case, aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario, the speech is a glaring example of Obama’s deep-seated (and perhaps unconscious) contempt for the path of peace, and its practitioners. It is also a manifestation of his own inferno, of his desperate need to justify — to himself and to the world — his free, deliberate choice to follow the blood-choked “path of action” as the commander-in-chief of a bloated, brutal war machine.</p>
<p>No one forced any of these decisions – or these specious, obscene justifications – on Obama or Blair. Their own narcissism — their own lust for power and their love for the system that gave them that power – has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed.</p>
<p>CHRIS FLOYD is an American writer and frequent contributer to CounterPunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at <a href="http://www.chris-floyd.com/" type="external">www.chris-floyd.com</a>.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Blair, Obama and the Narcissist’s Defense | true | https://counterpunch.org/2009/12/15/blair-obama-and-the-narcissist-s-defense/ | 2009-12-15 | 4left
| 3,071 | In recent days we have all witnessed two vomitous eruptions of moral nullity that would tax the powers of a Voltaire or a Vidal to do them proper justice they quite o8217ercrow the meager gifts of a hack like me But I will sketch a few observations here nonetheless if only to add one more small voice to those few who bear witness to the evils perpetrated by our unaccountable leaders We speak of course of Barack Obama8217s Nobel speech and Tony Blair8217s recent comments on the Iraq Waramp160 Let8217s take the lesser figure first I Since leaving office Tony Blair has dipped his bloodsmeared snout into various corporate troughs amassing millions while simultaneously becoming one of the great whited sepulchres of our day making a great show of his conversion to Catholicism his 8220faith foundation8221 and so on He has even lectured at Yale Divinity School But this holy huckster looks more haunted every day The glaring bulging eyes the frantic rictus of his grin 8211 indistinguishable from the grimace of a man in gutclenching pain 8212 and the evermore strident maniacal defense of his war crimes give compelling testimony to the hellish fires consuming his psyche Next month Blair will go before the Chilcot Inquiry a panel of UK Establishment worthies charged with investigating the origins of Britain8217s role in the invasion of Iraqamp160 Although the worthies have been remarkably toothless in their questioning of the great and good so far 8211 the smell of whitewash is definitely in the air 8211 the inquiry has at least performed the useful function of bringing the forgotten subject of Iraq back into the public eye while collating and confirming with sworn testimony much of what we have learned in dribs and drabs over the years about the rank deliberate deceit behind this murderous catastrophe One choice bit that has emerged from the inquiry is the revelation that the centerpiece of Blair8217s case for immediate war 8211 the claim that Saddam Hussein could hit Europe with WMDloaded missiles on just 45 minutes8217 notice 8211 came from unconfirmed thirdhand gossip passed along by an Iraqi taxi driver As Blair8217s turn on the wellpadded Chilcot cushion draws near he has launched frantic efforts to keep his testimony secret while at the same time trying to undercut the rationale for the whole war origins inquiry which has focused on the professed justification for the invasion disarming Iraq8217s nonexistent WMD So last week Blair gave an interview to a friendly timorous chatshow host in which he made the brazen admission 8211 no the proud boast 8211 that he would have found a way to drive Britain into war with Iraq even if he had known for certain that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction And of course given the nature of the 82208216intelligence8221 that Blair used in his prewar WMD claimsamp160 it is certain that Blairamp160 was indeed certain that Saddam had no such weapons when the invasion was launched Thus it is now Blair8217s contention that there is no charge to answer concerning the origins of the war all this WMD guff is meaningless He would have found 8220other arguments8221 to persuade Britons to follow George W Bush into the war that American militarists had long been planning Blair8217s admission has drawn a remarkable response from another Establishment mandarin Sir Ken Macdonald who served for five years as Director of Public Prosecutions under Blair8217s government 8211 and now works in private practice at a major law firm8230alongside Tony Blair8217s wife Cherie The headline in The Times puts it plainly 8220Intoxicated by power Blair tricked us into war8221 In his column Macdonald writes 8220The degree of deceit involved in our decision to go to war on Iraq becomes steadily clearer This was a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions and playing footsie on Sunday morning television does nothing to repair the damage It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn8217t want and on a basis that it8217s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible 82208230Mr Blair8217s fundamental flaw was his sycophancy towards power Perhaps this seems odd in a man who drank so much of that mindaltering brew at home But Washington turned his head and he couldn8217t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him In this sense he was weak and as we can see he remains so Since those sorry days we have frequently heard him repeating the selfregarding mantra that 8220hand on heart I only did what I thought was right8221 But this is a narcissist8217s defence and selfbelief is no answer to misjudgment it is certainly no answer to death 8220Yo Blair8221 perhaps was his truest measure8221 Macdonald also gives us a sneak peek inside the workings of the elite with observations that doubtless apply equally well across the ocean 8220In British public life loyalty and service to power can sometimes count for more to insiders than any tricky questions of wider reputation It8217s the regard you are held in by your peers that really counts so that steadfastness in the face of attack and threatened exposure brings its own rich hierarchy of honour and reward Disloyalty on the other hand means a terrible casting out a rocky and barren Roman exile that few have the courage to endure So which way will our heroes jump 8220We must hope in the right direction 8212 for it is precisely this privately arranged nature of British Establishment power stubborn beyond sympathy for years in the face of the modern world that has brought our politics so low If Chilcot fails to reveal the truth without fear in this Middle Eastern story of violence and destruction the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt8221 It is almost certain that the Chilcot inquiry will produce little more than the usual bloodflecked whitewash Certainly Tony Blair will face no official action for his crimes he will not even lose any of his corporate sponsors unlike the heinous Tiger Woods whose sexual intimacy with consenting adults is obviously far worse than the murder of more than one million innocent people We8217ll never see Woods lecturing at Yale Divinity School now But keep looking at Blair8217s face watch year by year as it brings forth the hideous fruits of the inferno within For as one of his illustrious countrymen once put it 8220Murder though it have no tongue will speak with most miraculous organ8221 II 8220A narcissist8217s defense8221 As a description of Obama8217s Peace Prize speech Macdonald8217s phrase could hardly be bettered But the intense nearpathological selfregard in the speech was not Obama8217s alone of course we must do him the credit of acknowledging that in this regard at least he was what we so often proclaim our leaders to be the embodiment of the nation His soaring proclamation of American exceptionalism in a setting supposedly devoted to universal principles of peace was breathtaking in its chutzpah 8211 but entirely in keeping with the feelings of the vast majority of his countrymen and the ruling elite above all Many have already remarked on Obama8217s adoption of Bush8217s principle of unilateral 8220preemptive8221 military action anytime anywhere whenever a leader declares his nation is under threat This approach 8212 which Bush called 8220the path of action8221 8212 was roundly scorned by critics of the former regime many of whom now scramble to praise Obama8217s 8220nuanced8221 embrace of aggression But again let us give credit where it is due in this aspect of the speech Obama did in fact go beyond Bush8217s more narrowly nationalist conception saying 8220I 8212 like any head of state 8212 reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation8221 Thus Obama would apparently extend the right of unilateral military action to 8220any head of state8221 that feels the necessity of defending his or her nation But of course this is just empty verbiage a pointless baldfaced lie that not even Bush would have tried to get away with Would Obama accept a unilateral preemptive strike by Tehran against Israel where top legislators and government officials routinely talk of attacking Iran Would Obama cheer the 8220right8221 of Russia to strike unilaterally at Poland if the US 8220missile shield8221 deal now on hold was suddenly consummated Would Obama support a unilateral strike by India at Pakistan 8212 or vice versa 8212 in the stillseething cauldron of tensions on the subcontinent where both nations legitimately feel threatened by the other Would he support the right of Kim Jongil to 8220defend his nation8221 by attacking South Korea the next time there is a threatening border incident there No it is clear that only the United States 8212 and its allies like Israel 8212 are to be allowed the supreme privilege of unilateral war The line was inserted in the speech simply because it would sound good in the moment and create a temporary emotional reaction that might carry listeners past the macabre incongruity underlying the entire event giving a peace award to the bloodstained leader of a military machine hipdeep in the coagulate gore of two vast civilianslaughtering wars Obama staked his boldest claim to American exceptionalism with a passage that he lifted almost verbatim from his West Point speech just a few days before when he announced his second massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan 8220Whatever mistakes we have made the plain fact is this The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will We have done so out of enlightened selfinterest 8212 because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren and we believe that their lives will be better if other people8217s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity8221 Here is chutzpah 8212 and hubris 8212 raised to the level of the sublime Obama has taken the words he used to instigate the certain death of thousands of human beings and the acceleration of hatred extremism chaos and brutal corruption around the world 8212 and offered them as justification for the hideous unabashedly Orwellian doctrine at the core of his speech War is Peace In this perverse inversion of values Obama as a warmaker is actually a peacemaker you see 8212 and thus a legitimate heir to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr who was evoked at several points in the speech And here we come to what was for me the most revolting part of the speech And perhaps the most significant too All the cant about America8217s altruism and 8220enlightened selfinterest8221 in killing millions of people Indochina was one of many convenient blank spots in Obama8217s historical survey for the sake of all the children of the world red and yellow black and white they are precious in our sight was just par for the rhetorical course It was nothing that had not been said many times before including the references 8212 so lauded by Obama8217s liberal apologists 8212 to those inadvertent 8220mistakes8221 America seems to keep making out of a surfeit of good intentions no doubt But I don8217t think an American president has so openly and directly traduced the work of Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas Gandhi before And to do it while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize no less Oh that sublime brass8230 Although larded with usual hyperyetflaccid floridyetfalse oratorical stylings that have become Obama8217s trademark his words about King and Gandhi drip with scorn and condescension I was actually taken aback when I read these passages 8220I make this statement about the moral justification for war mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago 8220Violence never brings permanent peace It solves no social problem It merely creates new and more complicated ones8221 As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr King8217s life8217s work I am living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence I know there is nothing weak nothing passive nothing naive in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King 8220But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation I cannot be guided by their examples alone I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people For make no mistake Evil does exist in the world A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler8217s armies Negotiations cannot convince alQaeda8217s leaders to lay down their arms8221 The intellectual incoherence and arrogant sneering behind this supposedly laudatory passage is staggering After claiming to be the personal embodiment of King and Gandhi8217s philosophy of nonviolent action Obama gives the game away with this line 8220I face the world as it is8221 Those two guys they were just dreamers they were unrealistic they were unserious they didn8217t 8220face the world as it is8221 they weren8217t savvy and pragmatic like me I have to go to war because I8217m a head of state 8220sworn to protect and defend my nation8221 Here Obama indulges in a trope that is pandemic among his apologists the idea that he was somehow forced to become the head of a militarist state waging endless war around the world that he has somehow woken up and found himself 8220the CommanderinChief of a nation in the midst of two wars But of course he chose to pursue this kind of power in this kind of system 8212 chose it pursued it fought like hell to win it It8217s what he wanted Yet still this notion of Obama as a helpless victim of fate 8212 lost in a world he never made 8212 persists He then goes on to give the lie to his previously stated admiration for Gandhi and King 8220A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler8217s armies Negotiations cannot convince alQaeda8217s leaders to lay down their arms8221 Thus King Gandhi and any practitioner of nonviolent resistance to evil are ultimately naive ineffectual 8212 weak Notice the incoherence 8211 or perhaps deliberate elision 8211 at work here Obama says he must face down 8220threats to the American people8221 8212 and then talks about Hitler8217s armies immediately coupling and rhetorically equating them with alQaeda8217s scattered handful of hidden fugitives Are the American people now threatened by Hitler8217s armies Are alQaeda8217s paltry forces 8212 less than 100 of them in Afghanistan according to Obama8217s own warwagers 8212 the equal of Hitler8217s armies of millions of men But there is a deeper untruth beyond these cheap rhetorical tricks For it is blatantly untrue to say that 8220a nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler8217s armies8221 First of all one cannot make that statement because this approach was never tried Therefore you cannot state categorically that it would not have worked Doubtless it would have cost millions of lives but as Gandhi himself pointed out the violent resistance to Hitler8217s armies also cost tens of millions of lives But Obama8217s formulation 8212 which is a hackneyed one indeed 8212 only deals with one view of nonviolent resistance to Hitler ie from the outside resisting his armies as they poured across the borders There is another way in which a nonviolent resistance movement without any doubt could have 8220halted Hitler8217s armies8221 if it had taken root and spread throughout Germany itself including among the armed forces and its supporting industries In the event this did not happen But it was not and is not an impossibility for humankind to pursue such an approach Therefore it is fatuous and false to state what cannot possibly be known whether nonviolent resistance would have thwarted Nazism and whether this would have been more or less costly than the way of violence Similarly it is false to say that 8220negotiations cannot convince alQaeda8217s leaders to lay down their arms8221 The only response to this bald statement is How do you know Has anybody tried it No Therefore you cannot call it an impossibility 8212 and then use this supposed untested 8220impossibility8221 as your justification for laying waste to whole nations You may say that it would be unjust to negotiate with alQaeda that those who use murderous violence to achieve their ends should simply be killed or prosecuted Where then would that leave the leaders of the exalted exceptional unilateral United States But of course this is precisely what Gandhi did he sat down and negotiated with the representatives of an empire that had caused the deaths of millions of his own people He negotiated with them in good faith with good will despite what they had done and were doing to his people 8212 and despite the fact that many of his interlocutors such as Winston Churchill hated him with a blind racist fury And he was successful 8212 although again not without cost both before and after the liberation But Gandhi and King knew the costs of nonviolence 8211 because they were genuinely savvy and genuinely realistic about the nature of evil In any case aside from the particulars of any real situation or hypothetical scenario the speech is a glaring example of Obama8217s deepseated and perhaps unconscious contempt for the path of peace and its practitioners It is also a manifestation of his own inferno of his desperate need to justify 8212 to himself and to the world 8212 his free deliberate choice to follow the bloodchoked 8220path of action8221 as the commanderinchief of a bloated brutal war machine No one forced any of these decisions 8211 or these specious obscene justifications 8211 on Obama or Blair Their own narcissism 8212 their own lust for power and their love for the system that gave them that power 8211 has covered them with the blood and shame that now taint their every word and deed CHRIS FLOYD is an American writer and frequent contributer to CounterPunch His blog Empire Burlesque can be found at wwwchrisfloydcom amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 | In/ADP recent/ADJ days/NOUN we/PRON have/AUX all/ADV witnessed/VERB two/NUM vomitous/ADJ eruptions/NOUN of/ADP moral/ADJ nullity/NOUN that/PRON would/AUX tax/VERB the/DET powers/NOUN of/ADP a/DET Voltaire/PROPN or/CCONJ a/DET Vidal/PROPN to/PART do/VERB them/PRON proper/ADJ justice/NOUN they/PRON quite/ADV o8217ercrow/VERB the/DET meager/ADJ gifts/NOUN of/ADP a/DET hack/NOUN like/ADP me/PRON But/CCONJ I/PRON will/AUX sketch/VERB a/DET few/ADJ observations/NOUN here/ADV nonetheless/ADV if/SCONJ only/ADV to/PART add/VERB one/NUM more/ADJ small/ADJ voice/NOUN to/ADP those/DET few/ADJ 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<p>Jessica Moore showed up at the Daley Center, shaken and without a lawyer. She had a bad feeling about how things might play out in court.</p>
<p>A lawyer hired by a company that manages Chicago Housing Authority properties approached her. She followed him into courtroom 1302 and was ushered into a small conference area tucked away in the corner. A steady stream of eviction cases were called at the bench as they talked.</p>
<p>The CHA wanted to cut a deal: If she agreed to move out, the agency would let her and her six children stay seven days.Moore balked.</p>
<p>“I’ll take it to trial,” she told him.</p>
<p>Moore, 39, is just one of hundreds of low-income residents the CHA has taken to eviction court for violating the agency’s one-strike policy during the past six years. The rule is part of a set of national guidelines created in 1996 to make public housing developments safer by ridding them of people who commit crime.</p>
<p>But there was a problem. Moore was no criminal.</p>
<p>When the national policy was drafted, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development empowered local housing authorities to tailor their own one-strike rules for best rooting out criminal activity as long as it was relevant to the peace and safety of its residents.</p>
<p>By the CHA’s standard, all arrests are subject to one-strike. As a result, tenants have lost their homes over nonviolent offenses, including shoplifting and marijuana possession.</p>
<p>The CHA had also chosen to evict leaseholders under one-strike for crimes committed by their children and anyone living in the unit, even if the crime occurred on property not owned by the CHA. Tenants are also culpable if their guests commit a crime on CHA property.</p>
<p>A new Chicago Reporter analysis found that from 2005 to 2010 the CHA opened 1,390 one-strike cases. The vast majority of them—86 percent in 2010—had nothing to do with the primary leaseholder.</p>
<p>When people were arrested, the person named on the lease was automatically summoned to eviction court, a civil matter, even though the criminal court cases were still pending in many instances.</p>
<p>If the CHA had considered how those cases played out in criminal court, it would have discovered that more than half of the defendants were found not guilty, their cases were thrown out or they were never prosecuted, the Reporter analysis found. Instead, one in three tenants whose criminal cases were tossed out or ended with a “not guilty” verdict, had their entire household evicted or moved out without a fight, the analysis shows.</p>
<p>CHA lawyer Scott Ammarell said that his agency takes an across-the-board approach to pursuing a one-strike eviction policy, regardless of the severity of the charges.</p>
<p>“If we get an arrest report and the charge on the arrest report is an offense that will end somebody’s eligibility to continue to receive a subsidy from the federal government, we pursue it,” he said.</p>
<p>It’s a policy that newly elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel appears to stand by. The mayor’s office declined an interview but issued a statement that said, “The Chicago Housing Authority has an obligation to provide the 30,000 individuals who currently reside in public housing with affordable and safe housing. The safety of CHA residents, its children and families as well as its neighbors is a top priority.”</p>
<p>Some critics say that the evictions are not only too harsh, but also premeditated. Earlier this year, the CHA demolished the last of its 51 high-rise public housing buildings. It was part of the agency’s Plan for Transformation. Eligible residents will get new units in mixed-income neighborhoods or subsidies to move into the private rental market. By barring many from public housing, some speculate that the CHA can avoid having to move them into replacement units, which are currently in short supply.</p>
<p>The Reporter’s analysis found that the number of one-strike cases across the city increased sharply in CHA developments where demolition was eminent. Cabrini-Green, Harold Ickes, Henry Horner and the ABLA housing developments accounted for more than a third of all one-strike cases in the past six years.&#160; Combined, those four developments accounted for more than half of all public housing units demolished during that time.</p>
<p>A large number of one-strike evictions have occurred in the new mixed-income communities, which replaced traditional public housing in gentrifying neighborhoods in the Near North, Near South and Near West sides. It’s in those same mixed-income communities that residents’ ability to fight one-strike evictions has been weakened the most.</p>
<p>One-strike cases are the only type of public housing eviction where tenants have no chance to file a grievance or request an internal hearing. Their only shot at beating the case is in civil court.</p>
<p>But most CHA tenants can’t afford a lawyer. And they can face long odds at winning the case—even with a legal defense. Meanwhile, in the spring, the CHA attempted to revoke its “innocent tenant” clause, residents’ main avenue for fending off evictions in the courtroom.The clause gives the head of household—the person who was not arrested, even if someone in their household was—a chance to plead their innocence and protect the housing unit for the rest of the family who wasn’t involved in the crime.</p>
<p>The CHA’s proposal to revoke the clause was quashed in late June after public uproar. But the defense is becoming a moot point in most of the newest one-strike cases because the private developers hired to create mixed-income communities aren’t required to consider culpability in pursuing an eviction. That’s because the innocent tenant defense is not written into the lease agreement that tenants in the privatized developments are required to adhere to. Meanwhile, the number of one-strike cases continues to climb in these developments.</p>
<p>“We know the game,” said Shannon Bennett an organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, which has been an outspoken critic of the policy for more than a decade. “These policies are intended to push people out.”</p>
<p>No community has experienced more one-strike cases than Cabrini-Green.</p>
<p>The CHA had 74 public housing developments sprawled across the city. Yet, roughly one in five of the one-strike arrests involved Cabrini residents.</p>
<p>A decade ago, nearly 13,000 people lived in the Near North Side public housing community, which was anchored by 1230 N. Burling St. and seven other decaying concrete towers.</p>
<p>Today, the buildings are all gone; some have been replaced by mixed-income homes, apartments and condos. Many of the new residents of the area are increasingly white and college-educated, and just 444 of the units there are for public housing.</p>
<p>Moore moved in when she was 23.</p>
<p>Her paychecks never came close to covering rent in the private market. So for more than a decade, she and her children squeezed into a two-bedroom Cabrini-Green apartment at 624 W. Division St.</p>
<p>When a four bedroom at 1230 N. Burling St. opened in 2005, she and her children—whose ages at the time ranged from 1 to 13—jumped at the chance to spread out. She had just quit her job as a cashier at a Walgreens and enrolled in classes part-time at Robert Morris College working toward a business degree.</p>
<p>She crossed paths with her boyfriend Ricky Dyer not long after moving in. Dyer had a history with Cabrini. He was born in 1983 and grew up in the development. As a teenager, he earned a reputation as a drug dealer and was given the nickname “Rickdog.” By the time he was 20, he was convicted of selling drugs. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was sentenced to one year in prison.</p>
<p>Once he got out, Dyer moved back in with his mom and steered clear of major trouble, but he had a few run-ins with police. He was arrested for trespassing and public drinking, but both cases were tossed out.</p>
<p>Around that time, he and Moore began dating.</p>
<p>By 2009, their neighborhood had changed dramatically. Moore’s building was one of the last two Cabrini-Green high-rises left standing. Her building sat to the far left of a rusting gate that served as the official, but least used, entrance to the 15-story buildings known as “the whites” for their pale concrete exterior.</p>
<p>The other 21 mid- and high-rise buildings had been knocked down by the wrecking ball and replaced with red-brick townhomes with lush shrubs, flawless concrete and quaint names, like North Town Village. Police were brought in to pay special attention to Burling Street, which was one of the last corners of the neighborhood occupied exclusively by public housing residents.</p>
<p>Under an agreement with the CHA, the agency and the Chicago Police Department freely exchanged arrest information. The two agencies signed off on the pact in 2000. If someone with a public housing address was arrested, or an arrest was made on the CHA’s property, police automatically passed along the police report to the CHA.</p>
<p>Burling residents became suspicious when police began showing up by the dozens. Moore knew that all it took was a single arrest to open a criminal-activity eviction. No conviction was required. No internal investigation was launched. And Moore knew from experience that the cops patrolling her building rarely flinched at throwing cuffs on her neighbors.</p>
<p>“The police would come into the building each day either knocking into somebody’s apartment or grabbing guys downstairs,” Moore said.Arrests climbed as demolition of the building inched closer. Burling began to empty quickly. In the fall of 2010, only 39 of the building’s 134 units were occupied. During the last 20 months that the 1230 N. Burling St. building was occupied, 19 households were hit with a one-strike eviction. The leading cause for arrest was misdemeanor marijuana possession.</p>
<p>Moore had a love-hate relationship with the police. On one hand, she feared them because she knew that her eldest son, Devonte, was becoming a troublemaker. At 16, he’d already been in and out of rehab after getting arrested for drugs.</p>
<p>While many of Moore’s neighbors did their best to avoid the police, she saw them as her last hope for reining in Devonte. He was hardheaded.</p>
<p>“I couldn’t tell him anything,” she said. She appealed to a couple of trusted cops known around Cabrini as “Eddie Murphy” and “Babyface” for their help. “I told them, ‘Stop him if he’s selling drugs. I don’t want to get put out.’”</p>
<p>Nothing prepared Moore for the morning of Sept. 25, 2009, when a team of 19 officers busted down her front door just after 8 a.m. as her children slipped on their shoes and backpacks on their way out to school.</p>
<p>For two hours, the officers picked through Moore’s four-bedroom apartment, finding $48 worth of marijuana stashed on a shelf in Devonte’s bedroom. During a pat down, a dime bag of cannabis, worth $12, was recovered from Dyer’s right shorts pocket. He was charged with misdemeanor pot possession.</p>
<p>Within days of the raid, Moore got her notice that her lease would be terminated.</p>
<p>The Reporter found that a growing number of families have similarly faced eviction based on low-level, misdemeanor charges. More than 70 percent of the one-strike cases involved drug possession; less than 10 percent were attributed to the drug dealing that one-strike was created largely to address.</p>
<p>A growing number of these cases are based on low-level crimes. In 2005, 40 percent of all one-strike arrests involved a misdemeanor charge. By 2010, that figure had grown to 76 percent, the Reporter found. A disproportionate number of those arrests involved black teens and men living in the two rapidly gentrifying Chicago wards, the 2nd and 27th, which have flipped from being majority black to racially mixed over the past decade.</p>
<p>Alderman Walter Burnett, whose 27th Ward includes Cabrini where he grew up, chalked up the spike in arrests in the area to the increased pressure city officials, the CHA and police face from new homeowners.</p>
<p>“Just look at 1230 Burling,” Burnett said. “Those [neighbors] complained about the building every day. Every day. Why? Because they wanted the building down. Why did they want the building down? One, because they thought it was affecting their property values.”</p>
<p>Moore fought for her apartment for six months. When her trial date finally came, police testified about Dyer’s pot possession. She lost, and a judge gave her and her children seven days to move.</p>
<p>“I’m like, ‘Where I’m gonna go with six kids?’” she asked.</p>
<p>In a gesture of mercy, Moore said, the CHA extended her move-out date to 60 days.</p>
<p>Cook County Sherriff’s police hauled the last bit of broken furniture out of her apartment on June 30, 2010. Nine months later, the Burling high-rise was demolished.</p>
<p>What happened to Moore, Burnett said, runs counter to what the CHA is given millions in federal anti-poverty dollars each year to do: stabilize families.</p>
<p>“CHA should be thinking about how to keep people in those apartments. They should be advocating toward helping people to keep their places, not finding ways to put them out,” said Burnett, who was convicted of armed robbery, a felony, at 17 when he was joy riding with friends in Kankakee. “Everybody deserves a second chance.”</p>
<p>In June, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan issued a letter reminding housing authorities that there are only two types of people who are prohibited from living in public housing: methamphetamine producers and registered sex offenders. “[E]vidence of rehabilitation or evidence of [a] family’s participation in or willingness to participate in social services such as counseling programs should be considered,” Donovan wrote.</p>
<p>CHA officials, however, point to a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2002 that upheld a California housing authority’s right to evict an Oakland woman although she wasn’t responsible for the crime that got her evicted under one-strike.</p>
<p>Still, even within the CHA, the importance of arrest histories is inconsistent. Arrests alone, for example, don’t preclude applicants from joining the agency’s housing waiting list, which currently has roughly 40,000 names.</p>
<p>Ultimately, HUD cedes to housing authorities the power to draft policies that protect the safety and well-being of their residents. But under the Obama administration, the agency isn’t quick to endorse them.</p>
<p>“Housing authorities tend to point the finger at HUD, saying [one-strike] is a federal policy,” HUD spokeswoman Donna White said. “We leave it to them to use discretion.”</p>
<p>As Linda Couch, senior vice president for policy with the National Low Income Housing Coalition sees it, “Both HUD and local agencies play both sides when it serves their purposes.”</p>
<p>The Chicago-based Legal Assistance Foundation negotiated an innocent tenant defense back in the mid-1990s to help soften Chicago’s one-strike policy. Because private firms own the new mixed-income communities, they aren’t bound to the defense.&#160; But the number of new one-strike cases is becoming more prevalent in those areas. For example, in the Westhaven Park community, which replaced the Henry Horner Homes on the Near West Side, 41 percent of all one-strike cases in the past six years occurred in 2010 alone.</p>
<p>As far as lawyer Elizabeth Rosenthal is concerned, the innocent tenant defense is the only avenue public housing residents have to defend themselves. “Otherwise, CHA operates with no discretion in these cases,” she said.</p>
<p>&#160;It’s particularly important because in 84 percent of the eviction arrests, the primary leaseholder wasn’t responsible for the criminal activity, the Reporter’s analysis found.</p>
<p>The CHA’s expectation is that tenants who successfully evoke the defense will end up barring the person they describe as the “bad actor.” Typically, the rest of the family is allowed to stay under the condition that the person barred will never return to CHA property. One slip, and the deal is broken with no chance for appeal, even if the person barred is the tenant’s own child.</p>
<p>Moore found an apartment in West Englewood. Her family squeezed into the two bedroom for six months until the building went into foreclosure.</p>
<p>People suggested she move into a transitional housing shelter until she could get back on her feet. But she feared Devonte, who’s now 18, would have been pushed into an adult shelter and that her 17-year-old daughter would be next.</p>
<p>“I’m not leaving my kids,” she said. “My kids are my life.”</p>
<p>Moore maxed out her student loans—taking out $8,000 last fall—to cover the rent in her current two-bedroom in Avalon Park on the South Side. Three children sleep in a sunroom filled with garbage bags full of clothes that were soiled by a leak in the first apartment. There’s mold in the kitchen and a hole in the bathroom ceiling where water gushes in from time to time. There’s no washing machine, so she sometimes washes the family’s clothes by hand.</p>
<p>Moore’s rent is now $750 a month—a far cry from the $72 a month she paid at Cabrini-Green.&#160; “Plus I have to pay the gas bill,” she said. “Plus the light bill.”</p>
<p>After six years, Moore and Dyer are still together. Finding permanent work has been tough, though. He’s handy and has been able to pick up odd janitorial jobs.</p>
<p>Moore has also turned to the state for welfare through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families fund, which she hadn’t done in nearly two decades. It brings in another $555 a month.</p>
<p>“I felt I didn’t want it or need it before. I was working,” she said. “But now it’s really hard to find a job. And I really don’t want to quit school. I’m at the door of my associate’s degree.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, her children catch a train and a bus to get to the same North Side schools they went to while living on Burling Street. “I didn’t want to switch schools because I didn’t know if I was going to be moving,” Moore said.</p>
<p>Two are at Suder Montessori, which she describes as a good magnet school. Her two youngest boys attend Jenner, the neighborhood school closest to Cabrini-Green. And her eldest daughter is going to be a senior at Lincoln Park High School this fall. In one more year, she’ll be off to college.</p>
<p>Both Moore and her daughter are trying to stay positive and think of college as their best chance to open new doors. When her daughter starts stressing about tuition and considers downgrading her plans to community college, Moore pushes her.</p>
<p>“I’m like, ‘No, you’re going to go out of Chicago,’” Moore said. “I want her to get a good education so she can go wherever she wants to go.”</p>
<p>Dylan Cinti, Alexis Pope, Caitlin Huston and Louis McGill helped research this article.</p> | One and done | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/one-and-done/ | 2011-09-01 | 3left-center
| 3,071 | Jessica Moore showed up at the Daley Center shaken and without a lawyer She had a bad feeling about how things might play out in court A lawyer hired by a company that manages Chicago Housing Authority properties approached her She followed him into courtroom 1302 and was ushered into a small conference area tucked away in the corner A steady stream of eviction cases were called at the bench as they talked The CHA wanted to cut a deal If she agreed to move out the agency would let her and her six children stay seven daysMoore balked 8220I8217ll take it to trial8221 she told him Moore 39 is just one of hundreds of lowincome residents the CHA has taken to eviction court for violating the agency8217s onestrike policy during the past six years The rule is part of a set of national guidelines created in 1996 to make public housing developments safer by ridding them of people who commit crime But there was a problem Moore was no criminal When the national policy was drafted the US Department of Housing and Urban Development empowered local housing authorities to tailor their own onestrike rules for best rooting out criminal activity as long as it was relevant to the peace and safety of its residents By the CHA8217s standard all arrests are subject to onestrike As a result tenants have lost their homes over nonviolent offenses including shoplifting and marijuana possession The CHA had also chosen to evict leaseholders under onestrike for crimes committed by their children and anyone living in the unit even if the crime occurred on property not owned by the CHA Tenants are also culpable if their guests commit a crime on CHA property A new Chicago Reporter analysis found that from 2005 to 2010 the CHA opened 1390 onestrike cases The vast majority of them821286 percent in 20108212had nothing to do with the primary leaseholder When people were arrested the person named on the lease was automatically summoned to eviction court a civil matter even though the criminal court cases were still pending in many instances If the CHA had considered how those cases played out in criminal court it would have discovered that more than half of the defendants were found not guilty their cases were thrown out or they were never prosecuted the Reporter analysis found Instead one in three tenants whose criminal cases were tossed out or ended with a 8220not guilty8221 verdict had their entire household evicted or moved out without a fight the analysis shows CHA lawyer Scott Ammarell said that his agency takes an acrosstheboard approach to pursuing a onestrike eviction policy regardless of the severity of the charges 8220If we get an arrest report and the charge on the arrest report is an offense that will end somebody8217s eligibility to continue to receive a subsidy from the federal government we pursue it8221 he said It8217s a policy that newly elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel appears to stand by The mayor8217s office declined an interview but issued a statement that said 8220The Chicago Housing Authority has an obligation to provide the 30000 individuals who currently reside in public housing with affordable and safe housing The safety of CHA residents its children and families as well as its neighbors is a top priority8221 Some critics say that the evictions are not only too harsh but also premeditated Earlier this year the CHA demolished the last of its 51 highrise public housing buildings It was part of the agency8217s Plan for Transformation Eligible residents will get new units in mixedincome neighborhoods or subsidies to move into the private rental market By barring many from public housing some speculate that the CHA can avoid having to move them into replacement units which are currently in short supply The Reporter8217s analysis found that the number of onestrike cases across the city increased sharply in CHA developments where demolition was eminent CabriniGreen Harold Ickes Henry Horner and the ABLA housing developments accounted for more than a third of all onestrike cases in the past six yearsamp160 Combined those four developments accounted for more than half of all public housing units demolished during that time A large number of onestrike evictions have occurred in the new mixedincome communities which replaced traditional public housing in gentrifying neighborhoods in the Near North Near South and Near West sides It8217s in those same mixedincome communities that residents8217 ability to fight onestrike evictions has been weakened the most Onestrike cases are the only type of public housing eviction where tenants have no chance to file a grievance or request an internal hearing Their only shot at beating the case is in civil court But most CHA tenants can8217t afford a lawyer And they can face long odds at winning the case8212even with a legal defense Meanwhile in the spring the CHA attempted to revoke its 8220innocent tenant8221 clause residents8217 main avenue for fending off evictions in the courtroomThe clause gives the head of household8212the person who was not arrested even if someone in their household was8212a chance to plead their innocence and protect the housing unit for the rest of the family who wasn8217t involved in the crime The CHA8217s proposal to revoke the clause was quashed in late June after public uproar But the defense is becoming a moot point in most of the newest onestrike cases because the private developers hired to create mixedincome communities aren8217t required to consider culpability in pursuing an eviction That8217s because the innocent tenant defense is not written into the lease agreement that tenants in the privatized developments are required to adhere to Meanwhile the number of onestrike cases continues to climb in these developments 8220We know the game8221 said Shannon Bennett an organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization which has been an outspoken critic of the policy for more than a decade 8220These policies are intended to push people out8221 No community has experienced more onestrike cases than CabriniGreen The CHA had 74 public housing developments sprawled across the city Yet roughly one in five of the onestrike arrests involved Cabrini residents A decade ago nearly 13000 people lived in the Near North Side public housing community which was anchored by 1230 N Burling St and seven other decaying concrete towers Today the buildings are all gone some have been replaced by mixedincome homes apartments and condos Many of the new residents of the area are increasingly white and collegeeducated and just 444 of the units there are for public housing Moore moved in when she was 23 Her paychecks never came close to covering rent in the private market So for more than a decade she and her children squeezed into a twobedroom CabriniGreen apartment at 624 W Division St When a four bedroom at 1230 N Burling St opened in 2005 she and her children8212whose ages at the time ranged from 1 to 138212jumped at the chance to spread out She had just quit her job as a cashier at a Walgreens and enrolled in classes parttime at Robert Morris College working toward a business degree She crossed paths with her boyfriend Ricky Dyer not long after moving in Dyer had a history with Cabrini He was born in 1983 and grew up in the development As a teenager he earned a reputation as a drug dealer and was given the nickname 8220Rickdog8221 By the time he was 20 he was convicted of selling drugs He pleaded guilty to two felony counts and was sentenced to one year in prison Once he got out Dyer moved back in with his mom and steered clear of major trouble but he had a few runins with police He was arrested for trespassing and public drinking but both cases were tossed out Around that time he and Moore began dating By 2009 their neighborhood had changed dramatically Moore8217s building was one of the last two CabriniGreen highrises left standing Her building sat to the far left of a rusting gate that served as the official but least used entrance to the 15story buildings known as 8220the whites8221 for their pale concrete exterior The other 21 mid and highrise buildings had been knocked down by the wrecking ball and replaced with redbrick townhomes with lush shrubs flawless concrete and quaint names like North Town Village Police were brought in to pay special attention to Burling Street which was one of the last corners of the neighborhood occupied exclusively by public housing residents Under an agreement with the CHA the agency and the Chicago Police Department freely exchanged arrest information The two agencies signed off on the pact in 2000 If someone with a public housing address was arrested or an arrest was made on the CHA8217s property police automatically passed along the police report to the CHA Burling residents became suspicious when police began showing up by the dozens Moore knew that all it took was a single arrest to open a criminalactivity eviction No conviction was required No internal investigation was launched And Moore knew from experience that the cops patrolling her building rarely flinched at throwing cuffs on her neighbors 8220The police would come into the building each day either knocking into somebody8217s apartment or grabbing guys downstairs8221 Moore saidArrests climbed as demolition of the building inched closer Burling began to empty quickly In the fall of 2010 only 39 of the building8217s 134 units were occupied During the last 20 months that the 1230 N Burling St building was occupied 19 households were hit with a onestrike eviction The leading cause for arrest was misdemeanor marijuana possession Moore had a lovehate relationship with the police On one hand she feared them because she knew that her eldest son Devonte was becoming a troublemaker At 16 he8217d already been in and out of rehab after getting arrested for drugs While many of Moore8217s neighbors did their best to avoid the police she saw them as her last hope for reining in Devonte He was hardheaded 8220I couldn8217t tell him anything8221 she said She appealed to a couple of trusted cops known around Cabrini as 8220Eddie Murphy8221 and 8220Babyface8221 for their help 8220I told them 8216Stop him if he8217s selling drugs I don8217t want to get put out82178221 Nothing prepared Moore for the morning of Sept 25 2009 when a team of 19 officers busted down her front door just after 8 am as her children slipped on their shoes and backpacks on their way out to school For two hours the officers picked through Moore8217s fourbedroom apartment finding 48 worth of marijuana stashed on a shelf in Devonte8217s bedroom During a pat down a dime bag of cannabis worth 12 was recovered from Dyer8217s right shorts pocket He was charged with misdemeanor pot possession Within days of the raid Moore got her notice that her lease would be terminated The Reporter found that a growing number of families have similarly faced eviction based on lowlevel misdemeanor charges More than 70 percent of the onestrike cases involved drug possession less than 10 percent were attributed to the drug dealing that onestrike was created largely to address A growing number of these cases are based on lowlevel crimes In 2005 40 percent of all onestrike arrests involved a misdemeanor charge By 2010 that figure had grown to 76 percent the Reporter found A disproportionate number of those arrests involved black teens and men living in the two rapidly gentrifying Chicago wards the 2nd and 27th which have flipped from being majority black to racially mixed over the past decade Alderman Walter Burnett whose 27th Ward includes Cabrini where he grew up chalked up the spike in arrests in the area to the increased pressure city officials the CHA and police face from new homeowners 8220Just look at 1230 Burling8221 Burnett said 8220Those neighbors complained about the building every day Every day Why Because they wanted the building down Why did they want the building down One because they thought it was affecting their property values8221 Moore fought for her apartment for six months When her trial date finally came police testified about Dyer8217s pot possession She lost and a judge gave her and her children seven days to move 8220I8217m like 8216Where I8217m gonna go with six kids82178221 she asked In a gesture of mercy Moore said the CHA extended her moveout date to 60 days Cook County Sherriff8217s police hauled the last bit of broken furniture out of her apartment on June 30 2010 Nine months later the Burling highrise was demolished What happened to Moore Burnett said runs counter to what the CHA is given millions in federal antipoverty dollars each year to do stabilize families 8220CHA should be thinking about how to keep people in those apartments They should be advocating toward helping people to keep their places not finding ways to put them out8221 said Burnett who was convicted of armed robbery a felony at 17 when he was joy riding with friends in Kankakee 8220Everybody deserves a second chance8221 In June HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan issued a letter reminding housing authorities that there are only two types of people who are prohibited from living in public housing methamphetamine producers and registered sex offenders 8220Evidence of rehabilitation or evidence of a family8217s participation in or willingness to participate in social services such as counseling programs should be considered8221 Donovan wrote CHA officials however point to a US Supreme Court decision from 2002 that upheld a California housing authority8217s right to evict an Oakland woman although she wasn8217t responsible for the crime that got her evicted under onestrike Still even within the CHA the importance of arrest histories is inconsistent Arrests alone for example don8217t preclude applicants from joining the agency8217s housing waiting list which currently has roughly 40000 names Ultimately HUD cedes to housing authorities the power to draft policies that protect the safety and wellbeing of their residents But under the Obama administration the agency isn8217t quick to endorse them 8220Housing authorities tend to point the finger at HUD saying onestrike is a federal policy8221 HUD spokeswoman Donna White said 8220We leave it to them to use discretion8221 As Linda Couch senior vice president for policy with the National Low Income Housing Coalition sees it 8220Both HUD and local agencies play both sides when it serves their purposes8221 The Chicagobased Legal Assistance Foundation negotiated an innocent tenant defense back in the mid1990s to help soften Chicago8217s onestrike policy Because private firms own the new mixedincome communities they aren8217t bound to the defenseamp160 But the number of new onestrike cases is becoming more prevalent in those areas For example in the Westhaven Park community which replaced the Henry Horner Homes on the Near West Side 41 percent of all onestrike cases in the past six years occurred in 2010 alone As far as lawyer Elizabeth Rosenthal is concerned the innocent tenant defense is the only avenue public housing residents have to defend themselves 8220Otherwise CHA operates with no discretion in these cases8221 she said amp160It8217s particularly important because in 84 percent of the eviction arrests the primary leaseholder wasn8217t responsible for the criminal activity the Reporter8217s analysis found The CHA8217s expectation is that tenants who successfully evoke the defense will end up barring the person they describe as the 8220bad actor8221 Typically the rest of the family is allowed to stay under the condition that the person barred will never return to CHA property One slip and the deal is broken with no chance for appeal even if the person barred is the tenant8217s own child Moore found an apartment in West Englewood Her family squeezed into the two bedroom for six months until the building went into foreclosure People suggested she move into a transitional housing shelter until she could get back on her feet But she feared Devonte who8217s now 18 would have been pushed into an adult shelter and that her 17yearold daughter would be next 8220I8217m not leaving my kids8221 she said 8220My kids are my life8221 Moore maxed out her student loans8212taking out 8000 last fall8212to cover the rent in her current twobedroom in Avalon Park on the South Side Three children sleep in a sunroom filled with garbage bags full of clothes that were soiled by a leak in the first apartment There8217s mold in the kitchen and a hole in the bathroom ceiling where water gushes in from time to time There8217s no washing machine so she sometimes washes the family8217s clothes by hand Moore8217s rent is now 750 a month8212a far cry from the 72 a month she paid at CabriniGreenamp160 8220Plus I have to pay the gas bill8221 she said 8220Plus the light bill8221 After six years Moore and Dyer are still together Finding permanent work has been tough though He8217s handy and has been able to pick up odd janitorial jobs Moore has also turned to the state for welfare through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families fund which she hadn8217t done in nearly two decades It brings in another 555 a month 8220I felt I didn8217t want it or need it before I was working8221 she said 8220But now it8217s really hard to find a job And I really don8217t want to quit school I8217m at the door of my associate8217s degree8221 Meanwhile her children catch a train and a bus to get to the same North Side schools they went to while living on Burling Street 8220I didn8217t want to switch schools because I didn8217t know if I was going to be moving8221 Moore said Two are at Suder Montessori which she describes as a good magnet school Her two youngest boys attend Jenner the neighborhood school closest to CabriniGreen And her eldest daughter is going to be a senior at Lincoln Park High School this fall In one more year she8217ll be off to college Both Moore and her daughter are trying to stay positive and think of college as their best chance to open new doors When her daughter starts stressing about tuition and considers downgrading her plans to community college Moore pushes her 8220I8217m like 8216No you8217re going to go out of Chicago82178221 Moore said 8220I want her to get a good education so she can go wherever she wants to go8221 Dylan Cinti Alexis Pope Caitlin Huston and Louis McGill helped research this article | Jessica/PROPN Moore/PROPN showed/VERB up/ADP at/ADP the/DET Daley/PROPN Center/PROPN shaken/VERB and/CCONJ without/ADP a/DET lawyer/NOUN She/PRON had/VERB a/DET bad/ADJ feeling/NOUN about/ADP how/SCONJ things/NOUN might/AUX play/VERB out/ADP in/ADP court/NOUN A/DET lawyer/NOUN hired/VERB by/ADP a/DET company/NOUN that/PRON manages/VERB Chicago/PROPN Housing/PROPN Authority/PROPN properties/NOUN approached/VERB her/PRON She/PRON followed/VERB him/PRON into/ADP courtroom/NOUN 1302/NUM and/CCONJ was/AUX ushered/VERB into/ADP a/DET small/ADJ 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<p>(This is the second part of an essay published in the columns of Counterpunch a year ago. In the first part I had related the story of an Afghan refugee, Jamal, who journeyed perilously from Afghanistan to Norway over a period of 6 years. You can read the first part at <a href="" type="internal">http://counterpunch.org/aseem08072004.html</a>)</p>
<p>“People everywhere, under very different conditions, are asking themselves–where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?”</p>
<p>John Berger, “Written in the Night” (2002, before the US invasion of Iraq)</p>
<p>If there are any heroes in our modern world, Jamal is surely one of them.</p>
<p>True heroes are usually unsung. Their daring deeds are hidden from the eyes of the world. Nor do they care much for appearances. It sometimes takes a Dostoevsky to make us notice and celebrate the pluck and courage of ordinary humanity. That too after the great writer has been canonized after his death and taught decades later by tweed-jacketed professors with long prefixes to their titles.</p>
<p>Most readers of this article would not have been able to negotiate the terrain that Jamal has. No one with a ‘law-abiding’ baggage of respectability would even consider making so many border crossings without the requisite papers. Nor would we have to.</p>
<p>Our privileges guard us from the need to put our courage to the test. So the huge cowardice of privileged classes ­ globally ­ goes undetected and we carry on living within the apparently secure cocoons of ‘civilization’, ‘freedom’ or some other laudable label, our rationalizations of the rotten world unchallenged.</p>
<p>People like Jamal are infinitely more imperiled. History has prepared them differently. Living deep under the boots of assorted rulers, they have always had to scrounge the stingy earth to survive. As children they had learnt to evade Russian bullets. Thereafter, the marauding mobs of the Taliban came after them. And they fell from that frying pan into an American fire. They were soon seeking shelter from surgically guided smart bombs. Finally, when they could not shoo themselves away from those either, and their homes had been reduced to rubble, their brothers and sisters killed or maimed, their livelihoods lost, they had to learn to bribe petty officials and agents, bow before jailers and police officers and endure their wanton violence, in order to earn their passage to safer lands. Where they are often met with indifference, discrimination, racism and an absence of empathetic understanding that only a certain degree of ‘civilization’ ­ and remoteness from life’s harsher realities ­ can confer on the human spirit. There are of course redeeming acts of kindness, like the one that saved Jamal in Italy. The question is whether they are enough to change the prospects of the hundreds of millions who live through predicaments similar to Jamal’s.</p>
<p>To constantly be able to evade the snare of the law and to not take the daily slurs, insults and humiliations dealt to them by authority to heart constitute the art of patience and restraint that people like Jamal have had to master ­ not for any goal more ethereal than the mere task of everyday survival for themselves. Their lives are obstacle courses from one end to the other, the hurdles they have to negotiate, having been put in their path by ‘civilization’.</p>
<p>Jamal dreams of working one day for the welfare of the children of Afghanistan. He longs to see them healthy and educated. No “compassion fatigue” there. I realized as I heard Jamal that there was no divergence in his mind between his interests and those of his people.</p>
<p>Nowadays, in the age of false individualism, one hears more and more, from young and old alike, the tiring drumbeat of justifications for self-interest. The young celebrate their narcissism on TV screens, while many university professors and intellectuals are busy carving elegant theories drawn from specious science, holding up selfishness as one of the great virtues of humanity, a gift without which it could not have evolved ­ as poor students of Darwin would have it ­ to this stage of moral perfection.</p>
<p>So, to meet Jamal, of multiple bereavements, and kin to chronic conditions of pain, deprivation and insecurity, and to hear him speak from the depths of his abundant heart about his wishes for the children of Afghanistan, was a breath of fresh air in the stench that consumer civilization has become today. What is remarkable is that he, unlike so many immensely more privileged than him, has not forsaken his dreams in the face of the harsh realities that the world has rudely flung in his face. On the contrary, he is carried by a hearty spirit about realizing at least some of his hopes during the time allotted to him.</p>
<p>Is Jamal shooting darts in the dark at a board that does not exist? Or can his efforts in a world as hopeless as his bring a smile to his face some day? Whether this would happen depends crucially on how readily he will be able to make the return journey back to Afghanistan some day (should he wish to). It also assumes that the journey would be worth making. It also assumes that American bombs would stop raining on them in the future.</p>
<p>Conduct this thought experiment. Jamal traversed a dozen-odd countries “illegally” to make his solitary way to Norway. Do state boundaries mean anything to someone who finds himself hunted wherever he goes? What changes would the world have to go through before he can make the return journey legally, and, importantly, not against his will?</p>
<p>Dream for a second. A planet without national boundaries, a “borderless world” would surely make that possible. But such a utopia is all too simplistic for a civilization which is founded on bureaucracies that thrive on making human lives complicated. (The British government spends 2 billion pounds a year to control immigration.) It implies, after all, no less than the death of the world system of nation-states, if not that of the state itself as a human institution of long and hoary standing. Too much stands in the way of such a momentous change in human affairs.</p>
<p>But when, if not in the brave new world of globalization, rife with tall talk about the shrinking global village, are we entitled to express such a dream? Global environmental crises make such a vision imperative to embrace. The technology available today makes it possible to realize the dream. Even the impending fiscal crises in rich countries (on account of rising social security payments for ageing populations) in decades to come point towards the desirability of free movement of labor across the surface of the globe. If human hearts are willing.</p>
<p>However, short of this vision of planetary freedom there are others that one can contemplate.</p>
<p>Reduced to dimensions of worldly pragmatism, the issue boils down to the following priority: How soon will the world be ready to allow an Afghan passport-holder, with an obviously Muslim name, to travel freely and unhampered, to any country of his choice, much like a citizen from a rich Western country already does? How many Abu-Ghraibs and Guantanamos, not to speak of the secret torture chambers in countries as different and far-flung as Saudi Arabia and Colombia would have to be closed down before that can happen?</p>
<p>To solve Jamal’s problem is to solve the problem of the modern world. It is to recall the promises ­ of liberty, equality and, importantly, fraternity ­ made at the dawn of modernity. It means, among countless other things, to demand that the war on terror be called off, since it is an escape from the quest for a just, global peace.</p>
<p>Even today ­ especially today ­ one has to start with the humbling recognition that the ideals in the name of which every revolution of the modern world since the French has been fought, today lie all but buried under the caked capitalist earth. The perversion and final destruction of communism means that one has to resume our struggles with baby steps today. The self-appointed guardians of democracy have succeeded in making everyone forget that freedom was not handed out on a platter to commoners and working people by the kings and queens of feudal Europe. The evangelists of democracy today have perpetuated the amnesia that makes people think that democracy was not resisted tooth and nail before a semblance of it was finally granted, that in the US for instance, African-American people won their voting rights after prolonged struggle only 40 years ago.</p>
<p>A common predicament</p>
<p>Since meeting and listening to Jamal last year I got to know several other Afghan refugees living in Norway. We became friends. We cooked and ate together. We would often listen together to songs from Bombay films. They helped me pack my house when I had to move from Norway at the end of this summer. Their stories were all too similar to the one I had heard from Jamal. Lives lived in the shadows, dodging cops and guards both by night and by day wherever they have been–Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden. Each one had been cheated by agents and has had to bribe officials. The loss of loved ones haunts their hearts, even when they have been chased by thirst and hunger.</p>
<p>Norway is a relief, though they continue to be mistaken for Al-Qaeda as soon as their Afghan origins are disclosed. While they are not exactly asked to prove their bona fides, a certain distance quickly develops precisely with the people who get close to them in the first place. Yes, there is food and drink, and television. Even if you know it hides and lies, it is still good fortune to have a window into the world outside. They learn Norsk while they earn small wages as helpers at local establishments. There is the prospect of a job after these internships, hopefully in Oslo or Bergen. Only then might the thought of “starting a family” arise.</p>
<p>To dream is to live. What is remarkable about each one of them is that, like Jamal, they haven’t surrendered the courage that allows them to dream. There is going to be life in the future. The world is not ending. But it will endure not because today’s rulers will ensure that it does, but despite them. Four days before the first elections to the Afghan National Assembly and the Provincial Councils, I called and spoke to them. How was it going to be in Afghanistan now? One of them had just been watching BBC: “This is going to be a democracy only in name. The great powers will continue to run Afghanistan as they always have. They will each back their men in Parliament. Yesterday’s murderers and thieves will be tommorrow’s leaders. But at least people will be getting into the habit of voting.” And what then, I persisted. “America will have to leave one day, like the Russians had to. Katrinas will remind them of their priorities. For Afghanistan the story is far from over. You know, in Kabul musicians have resumed playing and singing.” Immediately after talking to him I happened to read two interviews that the BBC has recently done with musicians in Kabul. I also found out that a young film-maker, after getting trained in Bollywood has returned and made the first commercial film since the fall of the Taliban, “Spring of Hope”.</p>
<p>Elections and the future</p>
<p>I have also been reading reports from Afghanistan filed by observers at UNICEF and Human Rights Watch.</p>
<p>The country is recovering from a quarter-century of bloodletting. Tank shells, bomb craters and bullet holes mark the landscape. Red Stones warn against uncleared minefields. Of the estimated 100 million anti-personnel landmines that lie unexploded somewhere on and under the earth, 5-7 million are in Afghanistan. One for every four people living there. (Or shall we say one for every four personnel living there? The truth is that the bulk of deaths from landmines are precisely not personnel deaths.)</p>
<p>Thousands of child soldiers have been demobilized. 5.5 million students are back in school, playing volleyball, learning carpet-weaving or some other marketable skills. In one village, people with their bare hands have built a school for their children. Doctors, nurses and medical attendants all over the country continue to work with sacred dedication.</p>
<p>Human Rights Watch reports that the parliamentary elections were held in an atmosphere of great fear. 582 of the 5800 candidates are women. But images of their faces cannot be displayed for publicity and information on billboards. (In Kabul the most popular candidate appears to be a “woman in yellow”.) They are constantly being threatened, both by the Taliban, who have made a vigorous comeback in the southern and eastern parts of the country, and by the commanders and warlords, most of whom are themselves candidates in the election, having enriched themselves from the growth in the poppy economy during the past few years. The Taliban executed a woman last month because she was taken to be an American “spy”.</p>
<p>My mind returns to my Afghani friends in Norway.</p>
<p>Here are people who have continued to fight with their backs to the wall. When human brutalities have hurled them face down to the earth they have sneaked a view of the clear blue sky above and behind them, mustered the faith to slowly stand up, dust their clothes and walk fearlessly towards new unknown horizons. These are new horizons not just for them but for all humanity. With their very lives and attendant harsh choices they wordlessly challenge the reigning mythologies of modernity. How far do the promises of liberty and prosperity extend? Who is in and who is out of their range? What happens to those who are left outside? Does the West still remember the French revolution and the Enlightenment?</p>
<p>They have not had the opportunity to read history. Their learning is all unlettered, drawn from the pains that have left residues on their faces. But their innate vitality is fierce and unmistakeable. Life is never bleak to them. Having never suffered any loss of reality, they know nothing of anxiety and depression. They have no fear of suffering. They have never had time or opportunity to consider themselves desperate. The engines of necessity and its child, raw hope, have pulled them from one point in their journeys to the next.</p>
<p>The most remarkable quality that I recognized in them was a resilient dignity that makes them stubbornly unwilling to put the blame for their misfortunes on others. They know nothing of self-pity. When the case for it–given the gruesome barbarity inflicted on them in rapid succession by the Soviets, the Taliban and the Americans–is so easy and obvious, they refuse to pin the ultimate responsibility anywhere except at their own doorstep. “We have been divided too long among ourselves and have for decades betrayed our own people. Afghan people–whether they are Pashtoons, Hazaras, Uzbeks or Tajiks–have shared the same fate, even when we have imagined it to vary from one tribe to the next”, one of them said.</p>
<p>The elections may ultimately pave the way for the unity that has been missing from Afghan history.</p>
<p>There are many candles being lit in the emergence from decades of darkness. There is the courageous 21-year-old editor of one of the two dailies that are published from Mazhar-e-Sharif, who is writing columns asking for the government to ensure the security of candidates and the integrity of the electoral process. A Koochi nomad in Eastern Afghanistan is arguing for greater representation of the interests of the nomads in the National Assembly. Sabrina Sagheb is a member of the national basketball team. She has lived the first 23 years of her life in Iran. At the age of 24, she is the youngest candidate to stand for the national elections. She campaigns without the security of bodyguards. She is in fact the “woman in yellow” whose posters are all over Kabul.</p>
<p>UNICEF reports that an ex-military commander wishes to turn his soldiers into carpenters. There are Mullahs who are defending women’s right to health, Councils of Elders that have been encouraging women to register for voting. Despite open threats from the Taliban, plenty of women are standing for the elections. The fact that 25% of the seats are reserved for women means that after the elections there will be a higher fraction of women legislators in Afghanistan compared to the proportion in the US (15%) and the UK (17%), the presumptuous guardians and prosyletizers of democratic faith.</p>
<p>There is more than just irony in that statistical comparison. It underlines the remarkable courage that Afghani people, especially women–supposedly paralyzed by the customary burkhah–have shown in their struggles against multiple oppressions. There is in the making here a possibly different trajectory of modernity from the tyranny of corporate consumer society that hides behind lofty, age-worn slogans, hegemonizing every society that it can and brutally desecrating and pulverizing those it cannot. Some time will need to pass before it starts becoming clearer that the American dream will have to contend with more sustainable, egalitarian and universal visions for the future of our beleaguered species.</p>
<p>ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA is a free-lance writer. He can be reached at aseem62@yahoo.com.</p>
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<p>CLARIFICATION</p>
<p>ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH</p>
<p>We published an article entitled “A Saudiless Arabia” by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the “Article”), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the “Website”).</p>
<p>Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.</p>
<p>We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism.</p>
<p>As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi’s lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website.</p>
<p>We are pleased to clarify the position.</p>
<p>August 17, 2005</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Beyond the Wasteland | true | https://counterpunch.org/2005/10/08/beyond-the-wasteland/ | 2005-10-08 | 4left
| 3,073 | This is the second part of an essay published in the columns of Counterpunch a year ago In the first part I had related the story of an Afghan refugee Jamal who journeyed perilously from Afghanistan to Norway over a period of 6 years You can read the first part at httpcounterpunchorgaseem08072004html 8220People everywhere under very different conditions are asking themselves8211where are we The question is historical not geographical What are we living through Where are we being taken What have we lost How to continue without a plausible vision of the future Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime8221 John Berger 8220Written in the Night8221 2002 before the US invasion of Iraq If there are any heroes in our modern world Jamal is surely one of them True heroes are usually unsung Their daring deeds are hidden from the eyes of the world Nor do they care much for appearances It sometimes takes a Dostoevsky to make us notice and celebrate the pluck and courage of ordinary humanity That too after the great writer has been canonized after his death and taught decades later by tweedjacketed professors with long prefixes to their titles Most readers of this article would not have been able to negotiate the terrain that Jamal has No one with a 8216lawabiding8217 baggage of respectability would even consider making so many border crossings without the requisite papers Nor would we have to Our privileges guard us from the need to put our courage to the test So the huge cowardice of privileged classes 173 globally 173 goes undetected and we carry on living within the apparently secure cocoons of 8216civilization8217 8216freedom8217 or some other laudable label our rationalizations of the rotten world unchallenged People like Jamal are infinitely more imperiled History has prepared them differently Living deep under the boots of assorted rulers they have always had to scrounge the stingy earth to survive As children they had learnt to evade Russian bullets Thereafter the marauding mobs of the Taliban came after them And they fell from that frying pan into an American fire They were soon seeking shelter from surgically guided smart bombs Finally when they could not shoo themselves away from those either and their homes had been reduced to rubble their brothers and sisters killed or maimed their livelihoods lost they had to learn to bribe petty officials and agents bow before jailers and police officers and endure their wanton violence in order to earn their passage to safer lands Where they are often met with indifference discrimination racism and an absence of empathetic understanding that only a certain degree of 8216civilization8217 173 and remoteness from life8217s harsher realities 173 can confer on the human spirit There are of course redeeming acts of kindness like the one that saved Jamal in Italy The question is whether they are enough to change the prospects of the hundreds of millions who live through predicaments similar to Jamal8217s To constantly be able to evade the snare of the law and to not take the daily slurs insults and humiliations dealt to them by authority to heart constitute the art of patience and restraint that people like Jamal have had to master 173 not for any goal more ethereal than the mere task of everyday survival for themselves Their lives are obstacle courses from one end to the other the hurdles they have to negotiate having been put in their path by 8216civilization8217 Jamal dreams of working one day for the welfare of the children of Afghanistan He longs to see them healthy and educated No 8220compassion fatigue8221 there I realized as I heard Jamal that there was no divergence in his mind between his interests and those of his people Nowadays in the age of false individualism one hears more and more from young and old alike the tiring drumbeat of justifications for selfinterest The young celebrate their narcissism on TV screens while many university professors and intellectuals are busy carving elegant theories drawn from specious science holding up selfishness as one of the great virtues of humanity a gift without which it could not have evolved 173 as poor students of Darwin would have it 173 to this stage of moral perfection So to meet Jamal of multiple bereavements and kin to chronic conditions of pain deprivation and insecurity and to hear him speak from the depths of his abundant heart about his wishes for the children of Afghanistan was a breath of fresh air in the stench that consumer civilization has become today What is remarkable is that he unlike so many immensely more privileged than him has not forsaken his dreams in the face of the harsh realities that the world has rudely flung in his face On the contrary he is carried by a hearty spirit about realizing at least some of his hopes during the time allotted to him Is Jamal shooting darts in the dark at a board that does not exist Or can his efforts in a world as hopeless as his bring a smile to his face some day Whether this would happen depends crucially on how readily he will be able to make the return journey back to Afghanistan some day should he wish to It also assumes that the journey would be worth making It also assumes that American bombs would stop raining on them in the future Conduct this thought experiment Jamal traversed a dozenodd countries 8220illegally8221 to make his solitary way to Norway Do state boundaries mean anything to someone who finds himself hunted wherever he goes What changes would the world have to go through before he can make the return journey legally and importantly not against his will Dream for a second A planet without national boundaries a 8220borderless world8221 would surely make that possible But such a utopia is all too simplistic for a civilization which is founded on bureaucracies that thrive on making human lives complicated The British government spends 2 billion pounds a year to control immigration It implies after all no less than the death of the world system of nationstates if not that of the state itself as a human institution of long and hoary standing Too much stands in the way of such a momentous change in human affairs But when if not in the brave new world of globalization rife with tall talk about the shrinking global village are we entitled to express such a dream Global environmental crises make such a vision imperative to embrace The technology available today makes it possible to realize the dream Even the impending fiscal crises in rich countries on account of rising social security payments for ageing populations in decades to come point towards the desirability of free movement of labor across the surface of the globe If human hearts are willing However short of this vision of planetary freedom there are others that one can contemplate Reduced to dimensions of worldly pragmatism the issue boils down to the following priority How soon will the world be ready to allow an Afghan passportholder with an obviously Muslim name to travel freely and unhampered to any country of his choice much like a citizen from a rich Western country already does How many AbuGhraibs and Guantanamos not to speak of the secret torture chambers in countries as different and farflung as Saudi Arabia and Colombia would have to be closed down before that can happen To solve Jamal8217s problem is to solve the problem of the modern world It is to recall the promises 173 of liberty equality and importantly fraternity 173 made at the dawn of modernity It means among countless other things to demand that the war on terror be called off since it is an escape from the quest for a just global peace Even today 173 especially today 173 one has to start with the humbling recognition that the ideals in the name of which every revolution of the modern world since the French has been fought today lie all but buried under the caked capitalist earth The perversion and final destruction of communism means that one has to resume our struggles with baby steps today The selfappointed guardians of democracy have succeeded in making everyone forget that freedom was not handed out on a platter to commoners and working people by the kings and queens of feudal Europe The evangelists of democracy today have perpetuated the amnesia that makes people think that democracy was not resisted tooth and nail before a semblance of it was finally granted that in the US for instance AfricanAmerican people won their voting rights after prolonged struggle only 40 years ago A common predicament Since meeting and listening to Jamal last year I got to know several other Afghan refugees living in Norway We became friends We cooked and ate together We would often listen together to songs from Bombay films They helped me pack my house when I had to move from Norway at the end of this summer Their stories were all too similar to the one I had heard from Jamal Lives lived in the shadows dodging cops and guards both by night and by day wherever they have been8211Pakistan Iran Russia Turkey Greece Italy France Belgium Netherlands Germany Denmark Sweden Each one had been cheated by agents and has had to bribe officials The loss of loved ones haunts their hearts even when they have been chased by thirst and hunger Norway is a relief though they continue to be mistaken for AlQaeda as soon as their Afghan origins are disclosed While they are not exactly asked to prove their bona fides a certain distance quickly develops precisely with the people who get close to them in the first place Yes there is food and drink and television Even if you know it hides and lies it is still good fortune to have a window into the world outside They learn Norsk while they earn small wages as helpers at local establishments There is the prospect of a job after these internships hopefully in Oslo or Bergen Only then might the thought of 8220starting a family8221 arise To dream is to live What is remarkable about each one of them is that like Jamal they haven8217t surrendered the courage that allows them to dream There is going to be life in the future The world is not ending But it will endure not because today8217s rulers will ensure that it does but despite them Four days before the first elections to the Afghan National Assembly and the Provincial Councils I called and spoke to them How was it going to be in Afghanistan now One of them had just been watching BBC 8220This is going to be a democracy only in name The great powers will continue to run Afghanistan as they always have They will each back their men in Parliament Yesterday8217s murderers and thieves will be tommorrow8217s leaders But at least people will be getting into the habit of voting8221 And what then I persisted 8220America will have to leave one day like the Russians had to Katrinas will remind them of their priorities For Afghanistan the story is far from over You know in Kabul musicians have resumed playing and singing8221 Immediately after talking to him I happened to read two interviews that the BBC has recently done with musicians in Kabul I also found out that a young filmmaker after getting trained in Bollywood has returned and made the first commercial film since the fall of the Taliban 8220Spring of Hope8221 Elections and the future I have also been reading reports from Afghanistan filed by observers at UNICEF and Human Rights Watch The country is recovering from a quartercentury of bloodletting Tank shells bomb craters and bullet holes mark the landscape Red Stones warn against uncleared minefields Of the estimated 100 million antipersonnel landmines that lie unexploded somewhere on and under the earth 57 million are in Afghanistan One for every four people living there Or shall we say one for every four personnel living there The truth is that the bulk of deaths from landmines are precisely not personnel deaths Thousands of child soldiers have been demobilized 55 million students are back in school playing volleyball learning carpetweaving or some other marketable skills In one village people with their bare hands have built a school for their children Doctors nurses and medical attendants all over the country continue to work with sacred dedication Human Rights Watch reports that the parliamentary elections were held in an atmosphere of great fear 582 of the 5800 candidates are women But images of their faces cannot be displayed for publicity and information on billboards In Kabul the most popular candidate appears to be a 8220woman in yellow8221 They are constantly being threatened both by the Taliban who have made a vigorous comeback in the southern and eastern parts of the country and by the commanders and warlords most of whom are themselves candidates in the election having enriched themselves from the growth in the poppy economy during the past few years The Taliban executed a woman last month because she was taken to be an American 8220spy8221 My mind returns to my Afghani friends in Norway Here are people who have continued to fight with their backs to the wall When human brutalities have hurled them face down to the earth they have sneaked a view of the clear blue sky above and behind them mustered the faith to slowly stand up dust their clothes and walk fearlessly towards new unknown horizons These are new horizons not just for them but for all humanity With their very lives and attendant harsh choices they wordlessly challenge the reigning mythologies of modernity How far do the promises of liberty and prosperity extend Who is in and who is out of their range What happens to those who are left outside Does the West still remember the French revolution and the Enlightenment They have not had the opportunity to read history Their learning is all unlettered drawn from the pains that have left residues on their faces But their innate vitality is fierce and unmistakeable Life is never bleak to them Having never suffered any loss of reality they know nothing of anxiety and depression They have no fear of suffering They have never had time or opportunity to consider themselves desperate The engines of necessity and its child raw hope have pulled them from one point in their journeys to the next The most remarkable quality that I recognized in them was a resilient dignity that makes them stubbornly unwilling to put the blame for their misfortunes on others They know nothing of selfpity When the case for it8211given the gruesome barbarity inflicted on them in rapid succession by the Soviets the Taliban and the Americans8211is so easy and obvious they refuse to pin the ultimate responsibility anywhere except at their own doorstep 8220We have been divided too long among ourselves and have for decades betrayed our own people Afghan people8211whether they are Pashtoons Hazaras Uzbeks or Tajiks8211have shared the same fate even when we have imagined it to vary from one tribe to the next8221 one of them said The elections may ultimately pave the way for the unity that has been missing from Afghan history There are many candles being lit in the emergence from decades of darkness There is the courageous 21yearold editor of one of the two dailies that are published from MazhareSharif who is writing columns asking for the government to ensure the security of candidates and the integrity of the electoral process A Koochi nomad in Eastern Afghanistan is arguing for greater representation of the interests of the nomads in the National Assembly Sabrina Sagheb is a member of the national basketball team She has lived the first 23 years of her life in Iran At the age of 24 she is the youngest candidate to stand for the national elections She campaigns without the security of bodyguards She is in fact the 8220woman in yellow8221 whose posters are all over Kabul UNICEF reports that an exmilitary commander wishes to turn his soldiers into carpenters There are Mullahs who are defending women8217s right to health Councils of Elders that have been encouraging women to register for voting Despite open threats from the Taliban plenty of women are standing for the elections The fact that 25 of the seats are reserved for women means that after the elections there will be a higher fraction of women legislators in Afghanistan compared to the proportion in the US 15 and the UK 17 the presumptuous guardians and prosyletizers of democratic faith There is more than just irony in that statistical comparison It underlines the remarkable courage that Afghani people especially women8211supposedly paralyzed by the customary burkhah8211have shown in their struggles against multiple oppressions There is in the making here a possibly different trajectory of modernity from the tyranny of corporate consumer society that hides behind lofty ageworn slogans hegemonizing every society that it can and brutally desecrating and pulverizing those it cannot Some time will need to pass before it starts becoming clearer that the American dream will have to contend with more sustainable egalitarian and universal visions for the future of our beleaguered species ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA is a freelance writer He can be reached at aseem62yahoocom amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 amp160 CLARIFICATION ALEXANDER COCKBURN JEFFREY ST CLAIR BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY COUNTERPUNCH We published an article entitled 8220A Saudiless Arabia8221 by Wayne Madsen dated October 22 2002 the 8220Article8221 on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity CounterPunch wwwcounterpunchorg the 8220Website8221 Although it was not our intention counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests or could be read as suggesting that Mr Al Amoudi has funded supported or is in some way associated with the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi8217s lawyers we have removed the Article from the Website We are pleased to clarify the position August 17 2005 amp160 | This/PRON is/AUX the/DET second/ADJ part/NOUN of/ADP an/DET essay/NOUN published/VERB in/ADP the/DET columns/NOUN of/ADP Counterpunch/PROPN a/DET year/NOUN ago/ADV In/ADP the/DET first/ADJ part/NOUN I/PRON had/AUX related/VERB the/DET story/NOUN of/ADP an/DET Afghan/ADJ refugee/NOUN Jamal/PROPN who/PRON journeyed/VERB perilously/ADV from/ADP Afghanistan/PROPN to/ADP Norway/PROPN over/ADP a/DET period/NOUN of/ADP 6/NUM years/NOUN You/PRON can/AUX read/VERB the/DET first/ADJ part/NOUN at/ADP httpcounterpunchorgaseem08072004html/PROPN 8220People/NUM everywhere/ADV under/ADP very/ADV different/ADJ conditions/NOUN are/AUX asking/VERB themselves8211where/NOUN are/AUX we/PRON The/DET question/NOUN is/AUX historical/ADJ not/PART geographical/ADJ What/PRON are/AUX we/PRON living/VERB through/ADP 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<p />
<p>Like many countries trying to wedge their way into economic prosperity Mexico has affirmed an emphasis on education but in practice has negated its importance. Recently passed constitutional reforms relegate educators to temporary employment controlled by the federal government and private investors who have little or no interest in universal coverage or academic excellence. &#160;A huge portion of federal money designed for education goes to administrative personnel and is not subject to audit.</p>
<p>Demands for improved education have fallen into a void because economic philosophy based on supply and demand not does recognized non-consumer (i.e. non-marketable) demands. The purpose of the supply side is to provide, thereby achieving financial gain. When the demand is educating the nation’s children the government, being a third party not a producer, shifts the responsibility to the private sector. To profit financially private sector suppliers need to be recompensed for providing education, making education a product that those on the demand side must pay for. As with automobiles, computers and beer those who can’t afford the supply sides’ prices must do without the product, i.e. receive no education.</p>
<p>Like most world governments Mexico is constitutionally committed to providing schools and teachers to its populace—an archaic concept that does not fit twenty-first century economics. Money spent on education becomes an unrecoverable expenditure. To mitigate the amount of loss Mexico’s federal government year after year has cut its budget for public education. The 2013 constitutional reforms centralized control of teacher salaries, placements, firings and promotions, opened the way for hiring non-trained teachers from the private sector to replace unionized teachers and imposed mandatory teacher evaluations. Under these new definitions no longer are teachers considered professionals but become salaried (and sometimes paid-by-piecework) government employees.</p>
<p>Supply and demand economics rewards the most proficient suppliers: In Mexico, as in the United States and Europe, one’s “worth” is defined by his or her financial status, a top-to-bottom scale that puts CEOs, sports stars, entertainment celebrities in the highest brackets and immigrant workers, pensioners and ambulatory vendors in the lowest. Economic status and social status are not visibly different one from the other: The clothes one wears, the car one drives, the neighborhood one lives in define one’s place in society.</p>
<p>The beginning salary for teachers in Mexico’s rural and central city areas is approximately $8,000 pesos a month ($600 U.S.) depending on the location of the schools. The beginning salary for policemen is $5,000 ($375 U.S.), again depending upon location. State and federal Congressmen garner $150,000 a month ($12,500 U.S.) plus benefits that exceeded 1 million pesos for federal Congressmen in 2014, jumping them into higher economic and social brackets.</p>
<p>Fifteen-year-old and sixteen-year-old school dropouts recruited by highly organized business conglomerates called “drug cartels” receive $800 U.S. cash every month without deductions, an amount twice that of police and more than that of teachers. As they become proficient in their profession the cartel recruits climb economically and socially. The most proficient become immensely wealthy and hobnob with politicians and entrepreneurs. By contrast the most proficient teachers seek alternate ways to earn money when they retire.</p>
<p>By reducing the overall amount paid to educators the 2013 reforms enabled administrators to replace top-level employees—in this case experienced teachers—with lesser-paid new hirees. The reforms also authorized the shifting of functions like providing meals, school maintenance and improvements, transportation and school supplies to the private (i.e. supply side) sector. This not only redefined the importance socially and economically of the teachers but of the schools as well.</p>
<p>In 2014 over 18,000 of Mexico’s schools lacked electricity, 20,000 did not have bathrooms and over 82,000 had no drainage. Six million of Mexico’s 26 million who attend schools do so in structures designed for other purposes than schools including old buses, derailed train cars and circus tents. Many of the bathrooms in schools that have them no longer function. Other schools lack roofs and walls, have neither textbooks nor libraries, do not offer breakfast or lunch programs and have no playgrounds or athletic facilities. Many urban and rural schools are located in unguarded neighborhoods where merely walking to school imperils one’s life.&#160;</p>
<p>By contrast schools in wealthy suburban districts equip gymnasiums and science laboratories, offer scholarships, organize field trips and attract distinguished educators. A UNESCO study reported that children from the wealthiest 25 percent of the population tested 25-30 percent higher than those from the lowest 25 percent and the dropout rates were highest in impoverished southern states where 17-22 year-olds averaged a mere 5.5-6.5 years of schooling. During the first decade of the twenty-first century illiteracy in Mexico increased by one percentage point. Mèxico Primero, a citizens’ initiative, concluded in 2013 that “59 percent of Mexico’s schools are a simulation,” not really educative institutions but poorly equipped way stations for children who otherwise would be idle or part of Latin America’s poorest paid workforce.</p>
<p>Part of the simulation is the multi-billion peso textbook industry channeled through the federal bureaucracy and the governing party-controlled central teachers union, a depository for monies authorized for education but for which there is little or no accounting. With each new federal administration new textbooks are written and distributed, textbooks that reflect the political whims of those in power. Grammar lessons incorporate patriotic slogans, biology texts replace scientific investigation with Catholic Church doctrines, history text revisions redefine the Spanish conquest, the submission to the United States and the bloody 1910-1926 revolutions.</p>
<p>“What difference does it make? We wind up on the streets anyway,” a third-year university student dropout named Jorge de Jesùs asked me. Despite having what he described as “some—a majority—of very dedicated teachers” his education proved meaningless. If one can’t use one’s education to get a job, earn a living, it loses value, becomes worthless. Although Jorge de Jesùs is working as a chemical products assembler he doesn’t earn enough to rent a place of his own, to get married or replace the motor scooter that he wrecked.</p>
<p>“I’m too cowardly to hook up with drug dealers,” he scoffs. “And too honest to be a politician.”</p>
<p>Even before passage of the reforms the dropout rate in Mexico’s schools was horrendous. The Secretary of Public Education reported in 2014 that over a million students abandoned their studies during the previous school year, an average of over 5,000 a day. Many of junior and senior highschool age left to work or seek work, the majority in the so-called “informal” sector, i.e. as non-salaried day workers, laborers, ambulatory vendors, etc. Many others slid into the already swollen ranks of the&#160;“ninis”—those who&#160;ni trabajan, ni estudian&#160;(neither working nor studying).</p>
<p>According to the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) Mexico has the highest rate of 15-29-year-olds who neither study nor are employed in Latin America and third highest (behind Turkey and Israel) in the world. Their numbers increased dramatically as the United States government strangled the “safety valve”—undocumented employment north of the border, which had provided income opportunities for previous generations. The lack of meaningful employment has nurtured recruitment by criminal groups, contributing to increasing discontent with social values and morality.</p>
<p>Despite the “simulation” teachers ranked higher on “in whom do you have the most confidence” polls than any other profession, including doctors, lawyers and judges. (Legislators ranked lowest, police second lowest.) But the overall effectiveness of the education these teachers provide falls short of that achieved in other developing nations. Those who should be most involved in education—parents, teachers, and students—have been shoved to the sidelines by political and financial manipulations.</p>
<p>Mexico’s system of financing education begins with the federal government but is managed by individual state bureaucracies and is rife with loopholes. The money is funneled through the Secretary of Education to the various states, each of which has a centralized department of education. Theoretically distribution of funds is regulated and subject to audit, but state audits often are cursory if not actually criminal. Education funds wind up in officeholders’ campaign chests, enrich education department officials and flocks of&#160;aviadores&#160;(“aviators,” persons who collect salaries for no-show positions within the bureaucracy) and reward districts within the state that elected municipal presidents from the same political party as the state governor while excluding those that elected opposition party presidents.</p>
<p>State heads of education are political appointees whose backgrounds and experience may or may not have anything to do with education. Although the cabinet level Secretary of Education and the Mexican Teachers Union (el SNTE) were intended to have separate responsibilities and functions, the Secretary of Education representing the government and SNTE the teachers, the federal government co-opted the union (as it did with other major unions) to create what National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) investigators describe as “a two-headed monster with a gargantuan appetite” able to digest without accounting for millions of pesos in educational funding.</p>
<p>“As far as SNTE is concerned education should be obedient, disciplined, and organized to serve those in power. Plans, programs, courses aren’t important, what is important is that there’s peace, that the teachers don’t criticize, don’t think, don’t organize,” Pedro Echeverrìa V. insists in his blog. A United Nations evaluator connected Mexico’s dropout rate among primary and junior high school students with teachers’ inadequate levels of ability and training, which he described as “primitive, irregular and inconsistent.”</p>
<p>The dropout among qualified teachers also is very high, especially among those with less than five years experience. “Salaries are so low that many grab the first non-teaching opportunity that comes up,” a Oaxaca private school teacher explained. Public school teachers pay union dues; those in rural areas often commute miles between their homes and the schools in which they teach; urban and rural schools in low income areas lack even basic supplies—notebooks, workbooks, calculators—that teachers have to provide. Even married teachers whose spouses work take on second jobs in order to make ends meet.</p>
<p>Although teachers and members of the communities in which they work often have very close ties, hiring, the individual state sections of the national union control transfers and placements. Accusations of corruption are widespread, not only the political diversion of education monies by state and local functionaries but in the selling of&#160;plazas&#160;(teacher placements in individual schools) by the state unions. Until the passage of the 2013 constitutional reforms, teachers through their unions had permanent contracts but unions had to renegotiate the funding of these contracts with the state government every year, a more or less automatic process in the majority of states whose teachers were represented by the SNTE.</p>
<p>But in 1979 a number of state sections of SNTE, primarily from Mexico’s poverty-encrusted southern states, which have large&#160;indígena&#160;populations, created the National Coordinating Committe of Educational Workers (CNTE), a caucus within el SNTE. Unlike el SNTE, la CNTE adopted—at least in theory—a more horizontal structuring based on assembly approval of statutes and elected leaders. Over the years la CNTE won control of some SNTE local unions.</p>
<p>CNTE—correctly in the opinion of many educators—viewed the so-called educational reforms as a continuation of the federal government’s repression of independent labor unions. Led by Oaxaca’s Section 22, la CNTE teachers took over Mexico City’s Plaza de la Revolución in a massive demonstration that paralyzed much of the city’s central business district and triggered confrontations with teargas firing police units. The “great losers in the conflict,” Antonio Limón-López insists, were Mexico’s President Peña Nieto who miscalculated the extent of CNTE’s protests and the government-controlled SNTE “incapable of fighting for the legitimate interests of its members.”</p>
<p>Not that CNTE’s methods of protesting were popular. Blockading highways, taking over toll booths and disrupting commercial businesses created traffic jams, obstructed commerce and angered parents. In the words of a Mexico City middle-range bureaucrat they made “a manure pit” out of the Plaza de la Revoluciòn and other places that they occupied. The CNTE protests also upset Peña Nieto’s government’s plan to trailer the educational changes through the House of Deputies and Senate behind more controversial measures, particularly those involving taxes and the television and telephone monopolies.</p>
<p>Media reportage, often sensationalized, publicized CNTE’s challenges and mass demonstrations. Front page photos and primetime television videos flashed angry faces, Robocop-dressed police and tent city encampments. Protests aroused previously servile union sections to challenge state legislatures’ approval of the other proposed reforms. They also aroused the indignation of commuters, working parents and property and business owners. A no-win situation resulted: Teachers wee maligned for their protests and not being in their classrooms and the government was accused of being disorganized and weak.</p>
<p>The conflicts further revealed the debilities of SNTE, which wound up being a passive observer of the conflicts. A powerful mover and shaker of money and politics under its general secretary Esther Elba Gordillo, el SNTE sank in national importance after new elected President Peña Nieto’s government arrested her for money laundering, organized crime and diverting union funds for her own extravagances. According to many analysts Gordillo’s real crime had to do with party loyalty since Gordillo bolted the PRI to support opposition party president Felipe Calderón in 2006. In her absence SNTE shrank into obscurity, a mere chattel of the federal government.</p>
<p>Changes to Mexico’s constitution require approval by the legislaures of at least two-thirds of the thirty-one states. Since the congresses of most states are controlled by the PRI and obedient to PRI (i.e. federal government) dictates the constitutional changes gained approval but the CNTE unions in the south filed legal actions against them and tried to force their own state governments to approve alternative changes more concerned with educating and less with labor issues.</p>
<p>Not only did CNTE’s rebellion upset the federal government’s planned program of constitutional reforms it encouraged other groups and organizations to use similar tactics to protest changes that would give the federal government greater control of the media and to privatize many functions of the state-controlled oil monopoly. Peña Nieto’s popularity, already damaged by assertions of fraud committed by PRI operatives, nosedived as public opposition to the privatizations, media control and increased taxation forced delays, financial expenditures and court actions. They also revived memories of student strikes in 1968 and 1999 that culminated in brutal government repression of students, teachers and bystanders.</p>
<p>Many political analysts credit the 1968 takeover of UNAM and the Tlalcoloco massacre during which hundreds of demonstrators were killed, wounded and arrested with exposing Mexico’s authoritarian political system and forcing the government to adopt more liberalized national policies. But the power the student strikers generated and the public support they gained triggered a negative reaction to higher education and to education in general within the PRI.</p>
<p>No longer did the government appoint distinguished literary and scientific personalities to ambassadorships and cabinet posts. Funding for all except scientific and technical education decreased. Pressured to reduce emphasis on the humanities, state and national universities did so. In the eyes of the PRI—and of the PAN governments from 2000-2012—higher education was geared towards producing technicians, not intellectuals. The federal government shunted aside university-generated analyses of and plans for dealing with criminality, ecology and the economy and paved the way for increased private elitist school and university attendance.</p>
<p>Throughout three centuries of Spanish domination and the first century of independence Mexico lacked a national system of public education. In 1900 literacy barely exceeded 9 percent of the population; the Catholic Church funded the majority of schools that existed, although in the major cities some government-established primary, secondary and high schools existed. Families that could afford to do so sent their sons to be educated in Europe, primarily in Spain but also in France, Germany and other countries. The creation of a public education system in the 1920s sparked a drive towards greater literacy although the majority of students left school before completing six years of study. As late as 1946 only one out of ten public school teachers were university graduates.</p>
<p>Greater focus on education during the next two decades, notably under President Adolfo López Mateos, triggered school construction and the creation of normal schools. Earlier in his bureaucratic career López Mateos had sponsored free distribution of educational books and pamphlets, many of which were translations of Russian didactic texts. As president he inaugurated the distribution of free textbooks to the country’s primary and secondary schools.</p>
<p>By 1962, according to Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM)-Xochimilco professor Carlos Ornelas, Mexico’s education system surpassed those of Brazil, Taiwan and Korea, three countries that like Mexico had begun intensive programs of basic education. Thirty years later Mexico trailed all three countries, not only in education and levels of scholarship but also in health, percentages of poverty and the distribution of wealth. While those countries were prospering Mexico was sliding backwards towards the nineteenth century. &#160;</p>
<p>Reducing primary, secondary and high school educators to poorly paid state worker status with few benefits and little government support is a primary reason for the bottoming out of Mexico’s educational system. In Finland, the nation that scores highest on OCDE education evaluations, teachers are considered to fulfill one of the most important positions in society.</p>
<p>Aspiring teachers in Finland spent three years as teacher assistants before finishing their university educations and have to have a master’s degree in order to qualify for a teaching position. School attendance through the age sixteen is free and obligatory and rural and urban schools have the same standards, curriculum and infrastructure. Granted, Finland is smaller than Mexico and has a more homogeneous population; nevertheless, that a system based on highly educated, well-paid teachers produces well-educated, accomplished citizens is evident. &#160; &#160;</p>
<p>But educated, accomplished citizens who are not subservient, who probe, ask questions, demand accountability are not the type of citizens that an authoritative government can manipulate. They resist being a product like potatoes, beer and automobiles to be marketed so that speculators can profit financially. Products that fail to conform to the system are worthless to the system and have to be discarded—or eliminated—so that the system continues to move smoothly. Teachers should be packagers that turn out all-alike replicas who vote the way they should, acquire what they need to know from television and view conformity as a virtue. Packagers that try to do something different—including improve the quality of the product—bollix the brand name conformity.</p>
<p>As a football coach once told me: “Don’t think, you’re hurting the team!”</p>
<p>*Robert Joe Stout is a freelance journalist, novelist and poet in Oaxaca, Mexico. His latest work has appeared in&#160;Garbanzo, America, Fox Cry Review&#160;and&#160;Weber Studies&#160;among many other magazines and journals.</p>
<p><a href="/filter/tips" type="external">More information about formatting options</a></p> | Mexican Education: A Mere Simulation | true | http://newpol.org/content/mexican-education-mere-simulation | 2016-03-19 | 4left
| 3,073 | Like many countries trying to wedge their way into economic prosperity Mexico has affirmed an emphasis on education but in practice has negated its importance Recently passed constitutional reforms relegate educators to temporary employment controlled by the federal government and private investors who have little or no interest in universal coverage or academic excellence amp160A huge portion of federal money designed for education goes to administrative personnel and is not subject to audit Demands for improved education have fallen into a void because economic philosophy based on supply and demand not does recognized nonconsumer ie nonmarketable demands The purpose of the supply side is to provide thereby achieving financial gain When the demand is educating the nation8217s children the government being a third party not a producer shifts the responsibility to the private sector To profit financially private sector suppliers need to be recompensed for providing education making education a product that those on the demand side must pay for As with automobiles computers and beer those who can8217t afford the supply sides8217 prices must do without the product ie receive no education Like most world governments Mexico is constitutionally committed to providing schools and teachers to its populace8212an archaic concept that does not fit twentyfirst century economics Money spent on education becomes an unrecoverable expenditure To mitigate the amount of loss Mexico8217s federal government year after year has cut its budget for public education The 2013 constitutional reforms centralized control of teacher salaries placements firings and promotions opened the way for hiring nontrained teachers from the private sector to replace unionized teachers and imposed mandatory teacher evaluations Under these new definitions no longer are teachers considered professionals but become salaried and sometimes paidbypiecework government employees Supply and demand economics rewards the most proficient suppliers In Mexico as in the United States and Europe one8217s 8220worth8221 is defined by his or her financial status a toptobottom scale that puts CEOs sports stars entertainment celebrities in the highest brackets and immigrant workers pensioners and ambulatory vendors in the lowest Economic status and social status are not visibly different one from the other The clothes one wears the car one drives the neighborhood one lives in define one8217s place in society The beginning salary for teachers in Mexico8217s rural and central city areas is approximately 8000 pesos a month 600 US depending on the location of the schools The beginning salary for policemen is 5000 375 US again depending upon location State and federal Congressmen garner 150000 a month 12500 US plus benefits that exceeded 1 million pesos for federal Congressmen in 2014 jumping them into higher economic and social brackets Fifteenyearold and sixteenyearold school dropouts recruited by highly organized business conglomerates called 8220drug cartels8221 receive 800 US cash every month without deductions an amount twice that of police and more than that of teachers As they become proficient in their profession the cartel recruits climb economically and socially The most proficient become immensely wealthy and hobnob with politicians and entrepreneurs By contrast the most proficient teachers seek alternate ways to earn money when they retire By reducing the overall amount paid to educators the 2013 reforms enabled administrators to replace toplevel employees8212in this case experienced teachers8212with lesserpaid new hirees The reforms also authorized the shifting of functions like providing meals school maintenance and improvements transportation and school supplies to the private ie supply side sector This not only redefined the importance socially and economically of the teachers but of the schools as well In 2014 over 18000 of Mexico8217s schools lacked electricity 20000 did not have bathrooms and over 82000 had no drainage Six million of Mexico8217s 26 million who attend schools do so in structures designed for other purposes than schools including old buses derailed train cars and circus tents Many of the bathrooms in schools that have them no longer function Other schools lack roofs and walls have neither textbooks nor libraries do not offer breakfast or lunch programs and have no playgrounds or athletic facilities Many urban and rural schools are located in unguarded neighborhoods where merely walking to school imperils one8217s lifeamp160 By contrast schools in wealthy suburban districts equip gymnasiums and science laboratories offer scholarships organize field trips and attract distinguished educators A UNESCO study reported that children from the wealthiest 25 percent of the population tested 2530 percent higher than those from the lowest 25 percent and the dropout rates were highest in impoverished southern states where 1722 yearolds averaged a mere 5565 years of schooling During the first decade of the twentyfirst century illiteracy in Mexico increased by one percentage point M232xico Primero a citizens8217 initiative concluded in 2013 that 822059 percent of Mexico8217s schools are a simulation8221 not really educative institutions but poorly equipped way stations for children who otherwise would be idle or part of Latin America8217s poorest paid workforce Part of the simulation is the multibillion peso textbook industry channeled through the federal bureaucracy and the governing partycontrolled central teachers union a depository for monies authorized for education but for which there is little or no accounting With each new federal administration new textbooks are written and distributed textbooks that reflect the political whims of those in power Grammar lessons incorporate patriotic slogans biology texts replace scientific investigation with Catholic Church doctrines history text revisions redefine the Spanish conquest the submission to the United States and the bloody 19101926 revolutions 8220What difference does it make We wind up on the streets anyway8221 a thirdyear university student dropout named Jorge de Jes249s asked me Despite having what he described as 8220some8212a majority8212of very dedicated teachers8221 his education proved meaningless If one can8217t use one8217s education to get a job earn a living it loses value becomes worthless Although Jorge de Jes249s is working as a chemical products assembler he doesn8217t earn enough to rent a place of his own to get married or replace the motor scooter that he wrecked 8220I8217m too cowardly to hook up with drug dealers8221 he scoffs 8220And too honest to be a politician8221 Even before passage of the reforms the dropout rate in Mexico8217s schools was horrendous The Secretary of Public Education reported in 2014 that over a million students abandoned their studies during the previous school year an average of over 5000 a day Many of junior and senior highschool age left to work or seek work the majority in the socalled 8220informal8221 sector ie as nonsalaried day workers laborers ambulatory vendors etc Many others slid into the already swollen ranks of theamp1608220ninis82218212those whoamp160ni trabajan ni estudianamp160neither working nor studying According to the OECD the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Mexico has the highest rate of 1529yearolds who neither study nor are employed in Latin America and third highest behind Turkey and Israel in the world Their numbers increased dramatically as the United States government strangled the 8220safety valve82218212undocumented employment north of the border which had provided income opportunities for previous generations The lack of meaningful employment has nurtured recruitment by criminal groups contributing to increasing discontent with social values and morality Despite the 8220simulation8221 teachers ranked higher on 8220in whom do you have the most confidence8221 polls than any other profession including doctors lawyers and judges Legislators ranked lowest police second lowest But the overall effectiveness of the education these teachers provide falls short of that achieved in other developing nations Those who should be most involved in education8212parents teachers and students8212have been shoved to the sidelines by political and financial manipulations Mexico8217s system of financing education begins with the federal government but is managed by individual state bureaucracies and is rife with loopholes The money is funneled through the Secretary of Education to the various states each of which has a centralized department of education Theoretically distribution of funds is regulated and subject to audit but state audits often are cursory if not actually criminal Education funds wind up in officeholders8217 campaign chests enrich education department officials and flocks ofamp160aviadoresamp1608220aviators8221 persons who collect salaries for noshow positions within the bureaucracy and reward districts within the state that elected municipal presidents from the same political party as the state governor while excluding those that elected opposition party presidents State heads of education are political appointees whose backgrounds and experience may or may not have anything to do with education Although the cabinet level Secretary of Education and the Mexican Teachers Union el SNTE were intended to have separate responsibilities and functions the Secretary of Education representing the government and SNTE the teachers the federal government coopted the union as it did with other major unions to create what National Autonomous University of Mexico UNAM investigators describe as 8220a twoheaded monster with a gargantuan appetite8221 able to digest without accounting for millions of pesos in educational funding 8220As far as SNTE is concerned education should be obedient disciplined and organized to serve those in power Plans programs courses aren8217t important what is important is that there8217s peace that the teachers don8217t criticize don8217t think don8217t organize8221 Pedro Echeverr236a V insists in his blog A United Nations evaluator connected Mexico8217s dropout rate among primary and junior high school students with teachers8217 inadequate levels of ability and training which he described as 8220primitive irregular and inconsistent8221 The dropout among qualified teachers also is very high especially among those with less than five years experience 8220Salaries are so low that many grab the first nonteaching opportunity that comes up8221 a Oaxaca private school teacher explained Public school teachers pay union dues those in rural areas often commute miles between their homes and the schools in which they teach urban and rural schools in low income areas lack even basic supplies8212notebooks workbooks calculators8212that teachers have to provide Even married teachers whose spouses work take on second jobs in order to make ends meet Although teachers and members of the communities in which they work often have very close ties hiring the individual state sections of the national union control transfers and placements Accusations of corruption are widespread not only the political diversion of education monies by state and local functionaries but in the selling ofamp160plazasamp160teacher placements in individual schools by the state unions Until the passage of the 2013 constitutional reforms teachers through their unions had permanent contracts but unions had to renegotiate the funding of these contracts with the state government every year a more or less automatic process in the majority of states whose teachers were represented by the SNTE But in 1979 a number of state sections of SNTE primarily from Mexico8217s povertyencrusted southern states which have largeamp160ind237genaamp160populations created the National Coordinating Committe of Educational Workers CNTE a caucus within el SNTE Unlike el SNTE la CNTE adopted8212at least in theory8212a more horizontal structuring based on assembly approval of statutes and elected leaders Over the years la CNTE won control of some SNTE local unions CNTE8212correctly in the opinion of many educators8212viewed the socalled educational reforms as a continuation of the federal government8217s repression of independent labor unions Led by Oaxaca8217s Section 22 la CNTE teachers took over Mexico City8217s Plaza de la Revoluci243n in a massive demonstration that paralyzed much of the city8217s central business district and triggered confrontations with teargas firing police units The 8220great losers in the conflict8221 Antonio Lim243nL243pez insists were Mexico8217s President Pe241a Nieto who miscalculated the extent of CNTE8217s protests and the governmentcontrolled SNTE 8220incapable of fighting for the legitimate interests of its members8221 Not that CNTE8217s methods of protesting were popular Blockading highways taking over toll booths and disrupting commercial businesses created traffic jams obstructed commerce and angered parents In the words of a Mexico City middlerange bureaucrat they made 8220a manure pit8221 out of the Plaza de la Revoluci242n and other places that they occupied The CNTE protests also upset Pe241a Nieto8217s government8217s plan to trailer the educational changes through the House of Deputies and Senate behind more controversial measures particularly those involving taxes and the television and telephone monopolies Media reportage often sensationalized publicized CNTE8217s challenges and mass demonstrations Front page photos and primetime television videos flashed angry faces Robocopdressed police and tent city encampments Protests aroused previously servile union sections to challenge state legislatures8217 approval of the other proposed reforms They also aroused the indignation of commuters working parents and property and business owners A nowin situation resulted Teachers wee maligned for their protests and not being in their classrooms and the government was accused of being disorganized and weak The conflicts further revealed the debilities of SNTE which wound up being a passive observer of the conflicts A powerful mover and shaker of money and politics under its general secretary Esther Elba Gordillo el SNTE sank in national importance after new elected President Pe241a Nieto8217s government arrested her for money laundering organized crime and diverting union funds for her own extravagances According to many analysts Gordillo8217s real crime had to do with party loyalty since Gordillo bolted the PRI to support opposition party president Felipe Calder243n in 2006 In her absence SNTE shrank into obscurity a mere chattel of the federal government Changes to Mexico8217s constitution require approval by the legislaures of at least twothirds of the thirtyone states Since the congresses of most states are controlled by the PRI and obedient to PRI ie federal government dictates the constitutional changes gained approval but the CNTE unions in the south filed legal actions against them and tried to force their own state governments to approve alternative changes more concerned with educating and less with labor issues Not only did CNTE8217s rebellion upset the federal government8217s planned program of constitutional reforms it encouraged other groups and organizations to use similar tactics to protest changes that would give the federal government greater control of the media and to privatize many functions of the statecontrolled oil monopoly Pe241a Nieto8217s popularity already damaged by assertions of fraud committed by PRI operatives nosedived as public opposition to the privatizations media control and increased taxation forced delays financial expenditures and court actions They also revived memories of student strikes in 1968 and 1999 that culminated in brutal government repression of students teachers and bystanders Many political analysts credit the 1968 takeover of UNAM and the Tlalcoloco massacre during which hundreds of demonstrators were killed wounded and arrested with exposing Mexico8217s authoritarian political system and forcing the government to adopt more liberalized national policies But the power the student strikers generated and the public support they gained triggered a negative reaction to higher education and to education in general within the PRI No longer did the government appoint distinguished literary and scientific personalities to ambassadorships and cabinet posts Funding for all except scientific and technical education decreased Pressured to reduce emphasis on the humanities state and national universities did so In the eyes of the PRI8212and of the PAN governments from 200020128212higher education was geared towards producing technicians not intellectuals The federal government shunted aside universitygenerated analyses of and plans for dealing with criminality ecology and the economy and paved the way for increased private elitist school and university attendance Throughout three centuries of Spanish domination and the first century of independence Mexico lacked a national system of public education In 1900 literacy barely exceeded 9 percent of the population the Catholic Church funded the majority of schools that existed although in the major cities some governmentestablished primary secondary and high schools existed Families that could afford to do so sent their sons to be educated in Europe primarily in Spain but also in France Germany and other countries The creation of a public education system in the 1920s sparked a drive towards greater literacy although the majority of students left school before completing six years of study As late as 1946 only one out of ten public school teachers were university graduates Greater focus on education during the next two decades notably under President Adolfo L243pez Mateos triggered school construction and the creation of normal schools Earlier in his bureaucratic career L243pez Mateos had sponsored free distribution of educational books and pamphlets many of which were translations of Russian didactic texts As president he inaugurated the distribution of free textbooks to the country8217s primary and secondary schools By 1962 according to Autonomous Metropolitan University UAMXochimilco professor Carlos Ornelas Mexico8217s education system surpassed those of Brazil Taiwan and Korea three countries that like Mexico had begun intensive programs of basic education Thirty years later Mexico trailed all three countries not only in education and levels of scholarship but also in health percentages of poverty and the distribution of wealth While those countries were prospering Mexico was sliding backwards towards the nineteenth century amp160 Reducing primary secondary and high school educators to poorly paid state worker status with few benefits and little government support is a primary reason for the bottoming out of Mexico8217s educational system In Finland the nation that scores highest on OCDE education evaluations teachers are considered to fulfill one of the most important positions in society Aspiring teachers in Finland spent three years as teacher assistants before finishing their university educations and have to have a master8217s degree in order to qualify for a teaching position School attendance through the age sixteen is free and obligatory and rural and urban schools have the same standards curriculum and infrastructure Granted Finland is smaller than Mexico and has a more homogeneous population nevertheless that a system based on highly educated wellpaid teachers produces welleducated accomplished citizens is evident amp160 amp160 But educated accomplished citizens who are not subservient who probe ask questions demand accountability are not the type of citizens that an authoritative government can manipulate They resist being a product like potatoes beer and automobiles to be marketed so that speculators can profit financially Products that fail to conform to the system are worthless to the system and have to be discarded8212or eliminated8212so that the system continues to move smoothly Teachers should be packagers that turn out allalike replicas who vote the way they should acquire what they need to know from television and view conformity as a virtue Packagers that try to do something different8212including improve the quality of the product8212bollix the brand name conformity As a football coach once told me 8220Don8217t think you8217re hurting the team8221 Robert Joe Stout is a freelance journalist novelist and poet in Oaxaca Mexico His latest work has appeared inamp160Garbanzo America Fox Cry Reviewamp160andamp160Weber Studiesamp160among many other magazines and journals More information about formatting options | Like/ADP many/ADJ countries/NOUN trying/VERB to/PART wedge/VERB their/PRON way/NOUN into/ADP economic/ADJ prosperity/NOUN Mexico/PROPN has/AUX affirmed/VERB an/DET emphasis/NOUN on/ADP education/NOUN but/CCONJ in/ADP practice/NOUN has/AUX negated/VERB its/PRON importance/NOUN Recently/ADV passed/VERB constitutional/ADJ reforms/NOUN relegate/ADJ educators/NOUN to/ADP temporary/ADJ employment/NOUN controlled/VERB by/ADP the/DET federal/ADJ government/NOUN and/CCONJ private/ADJ investors/NOUN who/PRON have/VERB little/ADJ or/CCONJ no/PRON interest/NOUN in/ADP universal/ADJ coverage/NOUN or/CCONJ academic/ADJ excellence/NOUN amp160A/PROPN huge/ADJ portion/NOUN of/ADP federal/ADJ money/NOUN designed/VERB for/ADP education/NOUN goes/VERB to/ADP administrative/ADJ personnel/NOUN and/CCONJ is/AUX not/PART subject/ADJ to/AUX audit/NOUN Demands/NOUN for/ADP improved/ADJ education/NOUN have/AUX fallen/VERB into/ADP a/DET void/NOUN because/SCONJ economic/ADJ philosophy/NOUN based/VERB on/ADP supply/NOUN and/CCONJ 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<p>Whether the fascist Marine Le Pen wins or loses in the second round of the French presidential elections on 7 May, the first round produced a profound upheaval in the country’s political landscape. Coming on top of Brexit and Trump, these elections are influenced by and give further impetus to the overall right-wing lurch in Europe. These developments are very dangerous, both for the stability of capitalism in France, and, in a different way and for different reasons, for the people of France, and, ultimately, everywhere.</p>
<p>The first round of the elections brought two momentous changes that are interrelated and interacting. One, it eliminated the candidates of the two main political currents that have alternated in office and dominated French politics since the end of World War 2, the “centre-right” party now called Les Républicains and the “centre-left” Socialists. This brings the governance of France into uncharted waters at the very least and very possibly into a maelstrom. The other is that it’s not impossible that Le Pen could be elected, if not now, then maybe soon. Again, at the very least her National Front (FN) party, long consigned to the fringes, has been awarded the seal of legitimacy, if far from broad acceptance, by the electoral process and the makers of public opinion.</p>
<p>The 7 May second-round run-off will see Le Pen face off against Emmanuel Macron, a former Socialist minister who only a year ago formed his own party, En Marche, which describes itself as neither left nor right. A young investment banker, Macron was brought into politics by François Hollande, the current Socialist president, who, with his public approval ratings dipping into single digits, became the only post-war president not to seek a second term. Macron has been compared to the UK Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, social democrats who began to dismantle the welfare state model that has prevailed in most of Europe since the last world war. This model brought political stability by making small concessions to a few very basic human needs in a way denied most of the world’s people.</p>
<p>Macron promises that more globalisation – making French capitalism more competitive in international markets – will ameliorate the problems that globalization has already produced in France. The compulsion of facing international capitalist competition brought an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent for decades, while making work more intense and life much more stressful for many people struggling to keep their jobs. Budgetary constraints have steadily eroded health care, education, public housing and other benefits. The sense that the conditions for working people will gradually get better, as they have for previous generations, is gone.</p>
<p>The fact that Macron advocates taking France further down the same road as his predecessors makes him more or less the consensus candidate for the country’s ruling capitalist class, at least right now, but it also means that he represents a worsening status quo that a great many people reject. He is considered “the least worst”, at best, by most voters who hate what Le Pen represents. For the moment, many people say they will refuse to vote for either candidate, casting a blank ballot or staying home instead.</p>
<p>Le Pen declares herself the only candidate of radical change. But in calling herself anti-system, she is lying. She is not an opponent but a would-be representative of the capitalist-imperialist system that over centuries brought France its major position and relative privileges,including through the slave trade, the brutal colonialization of Africa and other parts of the world, and the continuing flow of superprofits from oppressed nations and its own “spheres of influence”.As the number two financial power in the European Union, France has fattened, for instance, on the looting of Greece as well as countries of the global South. But Le Pen is telling the truth in terms of her radical opposition to the political model and ideology that have characterized France since the end of the last world war, when the country’s rulers affirmed their allegiance to the “values” of the (bourgeois) French Revolution and declared France a Republic again, after the establishment of a fascist French state in collaboration with the Nazi German occupiers during the war.</p>
<p>Macron’s programme and career trajectory (a banker working for the financial empire headed by the Rothschilds, a Jewish family targeted by the populist politics of resentment for two centuries before anti-Semitism was swapped for Islamophobia) make him Le Pen’s dream opponent. Her charge that he is “in the pocket” of Islamists might seem like just another bizarre “alternate fact” of the kind adored by her counterparts abroad, but like so many such lies it resonates with her supporters as part of a narrative in which the problem is not the functioning of the world capitalist system but an “arrogant elite,” an “oligarchy” that has to be brought under Le Pen’s baton because their “worship of money” and “lack of patriotism” has led them to betray “the people”.</p>
<p>Le Pen’s definition of “the people” clearly marks her as a fascist. It represents not only a rupture with the country’s post-war model but a rejection of the defining ideology and proclaimed values of the French Republic since the 1789revolution against the monarchy. In fact, she is the heir both to very powerful counter-currents rooted in traditional Catholicism that surfaced repeatedly in different forms since then as well as to more modern secular fascist traditions. She has complained that the unity of the major political parties (what’s called the Republican Front) against hers is unfair, since hers is as much an electoral party as theirs, but her programme is in opposition to the Republic’s founding slogan, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”. She outright rejects the concept of the same rights for all. Her promise is to lead not the people of France – the country’s inhabitants, or the citizens of the French Republic – but the French people, those who share a common “blood”, the volk, to use the German equivalent, with all the similarities to Nazi ideology which that makes obvious.</p>
<p>Le Pen’s programme, while vague on many points, especially when it comes to pledges of tangible benefits, is precise on this subject: she promises to close the borders; hire vast numbers of police to keep out immigrants; restrict, and at least temporarily halt, all legal immigration; reserve public housing and public and private sector jobs for French citizens and give them priority in access to health care; bar citizenship to, potentially, millions of French-born people (ending the almost routine granting of citizenship at age 18 to those born in France of foreign parents); no longer recognizedual nationality, which could lead to expulsions of French-born people. This is aimed particularly atpeople from Islamic-majority countries where children inherit their father’s citizenship automatically, even if they don’t live there. It also heralds much more police terror, especially in the banlieues, which include concentrations of public housing on the outskirts of Paris and other major cities, home to people whose forefathers came from former French colonies, some working-class “native French” and recent immigrants.</p>
<p>Le Pen’s extreme enmity toward a substantial section of the population is not only in the name of fighting jihadi Islamic fundamentalists whose attacks have rightly repulsedmost people whatever their religion or non-relgious beliefs. It is also in the name of an imagined Frenchness, directed against the part of French society that originated when people were recruited from their home villages abroad to lend their shoulder to France’s “three glorious decades” of economic expansion after the war, people who played a huge role in creating the prosperity whose future so worries Le Pen’s social base today. This can only mean an almost mind-boggling step-up of massive violent repression. During WW2, this same kind of discourse, the same kind of ideology and policies, led to mass round-ups and concentration camps for Jewish people and others and to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers who killed many millions throughout Europe.</p>
<p>It is often said that Le Pen’s social base is largely composed of those who have “lost out” in globalisation, especially much of the former industrial working class and merchants and other small businessmen whose fortunes are related to theirs. It is true that the former mining and factory towns of northern France, until recently stalwart bastions of the left, gave their votes to Le Pen. So did traditionally more reactionary regions in rural eastern France and the well-off Riviera. It is seldom recognized that globalization’s “losers” also include the millions of people from immigrant backgrounds whose parents and grandparents were brought to France on false promises, like being treated as more than arms and backs, only to be discarded when worn out or no longer needed, with a future in French society denied to their children and children’s children. Not to mention those today forced to flee the Middle East and black Africa because of wars fuelled by France and other imperialists and the collapse of their livelihood and prospects for a future under the pressure of globalised capitalist development.</p>
<p>Actually, Le Pen’s programme promises concrete improvements mainly for employers and the self-employed, and little for any of the lower classes. What seems much more importantthan economic distress, as real as that may be, to all too many people is a more generalized, hard to define but very – deadly – real sentiment among many people that “the French” have lost their rightful place in the world, and that the values they were brought up to believe – “work, family, fatherland”, as the French World War 2 fascists put it – have evaporated. They often blame the changing nature of French society on the presence of people seen as “different”, “intruders” in “our home”, and are dismayed by the whole society’s development, including its changing ethnic and religious composition and shifts in class structure and in the role of women. This is reactionary in the literal sense of the word – a nostalgic longing to go back to an earlier point in time when the system might have seemed to be working in their favour.</p>
<p>Le Pen represents only one stream of the fascist far right in France. François Fillon, the candidate of the traditional centre-right party who came in a close third in the first round, threw in his lot with a particularly reactionary strain in the French Catholic church (not so much lower-class religious people as the better-off and others who yearn for the Church as it used to be when religious mass was in Latin). This is often focused in opposition to abortion and homosexual rights in the name of preserving the family, explicitly meaning the patriarchal family and patriarchy in general. While Fillon paid lip service to his party’s grudging acceptance of these rights, he also stated opposition to allowing women access to medically assisted fertility procedures if they are in a lesbian relation or otherwise not in a relationship with a man. Again, symbolism is at work in communicating that which can’t now be pronounced openly: a call to bring back the authority of the Church to draw what it calls “red lines” in society – and once a church has that authority, it will draw more such lines. This, too, is a direct challenge to the separation of church and state touted as a “Republican core value”, even though secularism in France today is basically used to target Islam and largely Moslem communities and not to fight religious obscurantism and superstition in general.</p>
<p>Many of Fillon’s supporters, members of the Républicains party, will go for Le Pen and against the Republic. This is another example of the collapse in France of the traditional political model and cohering beliefs. But the collapse is coming from all sides of the power structure. The currently governing Socialists may have been all but reduced to a fringe party in this election, but it played a major part in preparing the ground for the surge of fascism. The party whose prime minister declared that the Rom people (Eastern European “Gypsies”) have no place in France did a lot to make ethnic hatred “respectable”. If you replace the word “Rom” with “Jews”, you get a discourse most people could instantly recognise as worthy of the Nazis. For decades, and increasingly, French presidents of both parties have legitimised what they called “the debate around national identity”, which is really a debate about whether racism would do a better job of cohering French society than the Republican values that never described French reality anyway. Similarly, Le Pen’s insistence that French colonialism was a blessing for the Middle East and Africa – in contrast to the crocodile tears of repentance from the Socialists, for instance, who helped administer colonialism and wage atrocious wars to prevent independence – is beneficial for French imperialism’s multiplying armed interventions in those regions and what its interests may soon require in countering its rivals.</p>
<p>No matter what happens in the second-round elections, Le Pen’s party has played a very useful role for the ruling finance capitalist class as a whole and for the “political class” that represents them bylegitimizing ideas once considered anathema. Only a few decades ago kids were encouraged to sing “We are the children of the world” and protect their ghetto “buddies”, masking the prevailing inequality, exclusion and oppression in France and the world. This hypocritical benevolence is no longer so useful in dealing with what French imperialism has to deal with at home and abroad. Preaching narrow self-interest and acceptance of cruelty is more the order of the day.</p>
<p>Not only has Le Pen’s candidacy helped legitimize the “system” she denounces, this system haslegitimized her. It is really striking that “everybody knows” she is a fascist, even just by looking at her party’s history and formal ties with neo-Nazi and other openly fascist groups, but, at least now, none of the leaders of any of France’s major parties are calling her a fascist. Perhaps they feel that if they did, they would be challenging the electoral system, the media structures and the whole set-up that they are part of and that brought her to where she is today. Despite the disapproval that hangs over her head among most political opinion makers, and her own project of overturning the political set-up that has so well served French imperialism so far, there is a convergence of interests between Le Pen and all the so-called Republican Front. This was blatantly illustrated when President Hollande invited Le Pen and Macron to stand beside him, along with the previous prime ministers and heads of state, at a ceremony honouring a policeman killed recently in a reportedly Islamist attack, and the forces of order in general. This was similar to Obama’s statement that he and Trump are “on the same team”.</p>
<p>Another important player on that team, although loath to wear its uniform, is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is generally labelled “far left” in the media and who came in a close fourth in the very tight first round. He combines strident nationalism with promises to bring back the good old days of social-democratic welfare programmes, with a laundry list of promises such as higher pay for less work and other ideas that are out of whack with what French capitalism requires today.Mélenchon’s fantasy of restoring prosperity by loosening France’s ties with its imperialist alliances (the European Union and Nato) is not just impossible to realize, but poison, as it converges with Le Pen’s stands on these issues, and, worse, her nationalist ideology. Racism aside – which is no detail, their programmes have much in common. Le Pen’s supporters are actively trying to poach his supporters, just as Mélenchon made only semi-disguised overtures to Le Pen’s base in the first round. Practically and ideologically, Mélenchon’s “far left” cover for nationalism has contributed to today’s very bad situation.</p>
<p>The slogan “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” covers up the fact that society is divided into classes with very different, antagonistic interests. Today it is a slogan for the disguised dictatorship of French monopoly capitalists seeking to unite the people, including the oppressed and exploited inside the country, in conflict and war with rival capitalist countries, for the subjugation of other peoples and in the acceptance of the bourgeois dictatorship. That is the social content of the Republic. Even if some people wish it could be otherwise, they need to stop conciliating with oppression and exploitation and face the truth. The Republican Front is no solution: it attempts to consolidate the capitalist state and it will not stop the fascists who are the system’s Plan B if today’s form of rule proves impossible to continue, again due to contradictions produced by the system itself.</p>
<p>The idea of Le Pen becoming president is a frightening prospect to millions in France as well as elsewhere, and there should be, and needs to be, much more militant and vigorous rejection of this possibility throughout the society. One frightening indication of how far fascism has been “normalized” in France is how much less expression of shock and outrage there is today compared to 2002 when Le Pen’s father made the second round of the presidential election.</p>
<p>But voting “against” Le Pen (in other words, voting for Macron) can only mean accepting (however unhappily) France as it is today, with all that many people find unacceptable, and in opposition to the interests of humanity. It means legitimising and strengthening the system, going along with a resolution of the French ruling classes’ problems in a way that is favourable to them. What is needed instead is to seek to use this situation and the turmoil that it is creating to begin to work for a revolution to topple French imperialism and support revolution everywhere. Supporting Macron also means falling into passivity and expecting elections and the parliamentary parties to save the day, when this is the day they all played a key role in bringing about. However reactionary, Le Pen represents a coherent response to the system’s problems, with a minority but large and very energized and enthusiastic social base rallied around her programme and many willing to fight for it by any means necessary. No matter what happens in the second round, the contradictions to which Le Pen offers an extremely reactionary response will remain unresolved The question will be: resolve it which way, in whose interests?</p>
<p>Juan Sui writes for <a href="http://www.aworldtowinns.co.uk" type="external">A World to Win News Service</a>.</p> | The French Elections: What is the Republic? Will It Stand? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2017/05/02/the-french-elections-what-is-the-republic-will-it-stand/ | 2017-05-02 | 4left
| 3,075 | Whether the fascist Marine Le Pen wins or loses in the second round of the French presidential elections on 7 May the first round produced a profound upheaval in the country8217s political landscape Coming on top of Brexit and Trump these elections are influenced by and give further impetus to the overall rightwing lurch in Europe These developments are very dangerous both for the stability of capitalism in France and in a different way and for different reasons for the people of France and ultimately everywhere The first round of the elections brought two momentous changes that are interrelated and interacting One it eliminated the candidates of the two main political currents that have alternated in office and dominated French politics since the end of World War 2 the 8220centreright8221 party now called Les R233publicains and the 8220centreleft8221 Socialists This brings the governance of France into uncharted waters at the very least and very possibly into a maelstrom The other is that it8217s not impossible that Le Pen could be elected if not now then maybe soon Again at the very least her National Front FN party long consigned to the fringes has been awarded the seal of legitimacy if far from broad acceptance by the electoral process and the makers of public opinion The 7 May secondround runoff will see Le Pen face off against Emmanuel Macron a former Socialist minister who only a year ago formed his own party En Marche which describes itself as neither left nor right A young investment banker Macron was brought into politics by Fran231ois Hollande the current Socialist president who with his public approval ratings dipping into single digits became the only postwar president not to seek a second term Macron has been compared to the UK Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder social democrats who began to dismantle the welfare state model that has prevailed in most of Europe since the last world war This model brought political stability by making small concessions to a few very basic human needs in a way denied most of the world8217s people Macron promises that more globalisation 8211 making French capitalism more competitive in international markets 8211 will ameliorate the problems that globalization has already produced in France The compulsion of facing international capitalist competition brought an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent for decades while making work more intense and life much more stressful for many people struggling to keep their jobs Budgetary constraints have steadily eroded health care education public housing and other benefits The sense that the conditions for working people will gradually get better as they have for previous generations is gone The fact that Macron advocates taking France further down the same road as his predecessors makes him more or less the consensus candidate for the country8217s ruling capitalist class at least right now but it also means that he represents a worsening status quo that a great many people reject He is considered 8220the least worst8221 at best by most voters who hate what Le Pen represents For the moment many people say they will refuse to vote for either candidate casting a blank ballot or staying home instead Le Pen declares herself the only candidate of radical change But in calling herself antisystem she is lying She is not an opponent but a wouldbe representative of the capitalistimperialist system that over centuries brought France its major position and relative privilegesincluding through the slave trade the brutal colonialization of Africa and other parts of the world and the continuing flow of superprofits from oppressed nations and its own 8220spheres of influence8221As the number two financial power in the European Union France has fattened for instance on the looting of Greece as well as countries of the global South But Le Pen is telling the truth in terms of her radical opposition to the political model and ideology that have characterized France since the end of the last world war when the country8217s rulers affirmed their allegiance to the 8220values8221 of the bourgeois French Revolution and declared France a Republic again after the establishment of a fascist French state in collaboration with the Nazi German occupiers during the war Macron8217s programme and career trajectory a banker working for the financial empire headed by the Rothschilds a Jewish family targeted by the populist politics of resentment for two centuries before antiSemitism was swapped for Islamophobia make him Le Pen8217s dream opponent Her charge that he is 8220in the pocket8221 of Islamists might seem like just another bizarre 8220alternate fact8221 of the kind adored by her counterparts abroad but like so many such lies it resonates with her supporters as part of a narrative in which the problem is not the functioning of the world capitalist system but an 8220arrogant elite8221 an 8220oligarchy8221 that has to be brought under Le Pen8217s baton because their 8220worship of money8221 and 8220lack of patriotism8221 has led them to betray 8220the people8221 Le Pen8217s definition of 8220the people8221 clearly marks her as a fascist It represents not only a rupture with the country8217s postwar model but a rejection of the defining ideology and proclaimed values of the French Republic since the 1789revolution against the monarchy In fact she is the heir both to very powerful countercurrents rooted in traditional Catholicism that surfaced repeatedly in different forms since then as well as to more modern secular fascist traditions She has complained that the unity of the major political parties what8217s called the Republican Front against hers is unfair since hers is as much an electoral party as theirs but her programme is in opposition to the Republic8217s founding slogan 8220Libert233 Egalit233 Fraternit2338221 She outright rejects the concept of the same rights for all Her promise is to lead not the people of France 8211 the country8217s inhabitants or the citizens of the French Republic 8211 but the French people those who share a common 8220blood8221 the volk to use the German equivalent with all the similarities to Nazi ideology which that makes obvious Le Pen8217s programme while vague on many points especially when it comes to pledges of tangible benefits is precise on this subject she promises to close the borders hire vast numbers of police to keep out immigrants restrict and at least temporarily halt all legal immigration reserve public housing and public and private sector jobs for French citizens and give them priority in access to health care bar citizenship to potentially millions of Frenchborn people ending the almost routine granting of citizenship at age 18 to those born in France of foreign parents no longer recognizedual nationality which could lead to expulsions of Frenchborn people This is aimed particularly atpeople from Islamicmajority countries where children inherit their father8217s citizenship automatically even if they don8217t live there It also heralds much more police terror especially in the banlieues which include concentrations of public housing on the outskirts of Paris and other major cities home to people whose forefathers came from former French colonies some workingclass 8220native French8221 and recent immigrants Le Pen8217s extreme enmity toward a substantial section of the population is not only in the name of fighting jihadi Islamic fundamentalists whose attacks have rightly repulsedmost people whatever their religion or nonrelgious beliefs It is also in the name of an imagined Frenchness directed against the part of French society that originated when people were recruited from their home villages abroad to lend their shoulder to France8217s 8220three glorious decades8221 of economic expansion after the war people who played a huge role in creating the prosperity whose future so worries Le Pen8217s social base today This can only mean an almost mindboggling stepup of massive violent repression During WW2 this same kind of discourse the same kind of ideology and policies led to mass roundups and concentration camps for Jewish people and others and to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers who killed many millions throughout Europe It is often said that Le Pen8217s social base is largely composed of those who have 8220lost out8221 in globalisation especially much of the former industrial working class and merchants and other small businessmen whose fortunes are related to theirs It is true that the former mining and factory towns of northern France until recently stalwart bastions of the left gave their votes to Le Pen So did traditionally more reactionary regions in rural eastern France and the welloff Riviera It is seldom recognized that globalization8217s 8220losers8221 also include the millions of people from immigrant backgrounds whose parents and grandparents were brought to France on false promises like being treated as more than arms and backs only to be discarded when worn out or no longer needed with a future in French society denied to their children and children8217s children Not to mention those today forced to flee the Middle East and black Africa because of wars fuelled by France and other imperialists and the collapse of their livelihood and prospects for a future under the pressure of globalised capitalist development Actually Le Pen8217s programme promises concrete improvements mainly for employers and the selfemployed and little for any of the lower classes What seems much more importantthan economic distress as real as that may be to all too many people is a more generalized hard to define but very 8211 deadly 8211 real sentiment among many people that 8220the French8221 have lost their rightful place in the world and that the values they were brought up to believe 8211 8220work family fatherland8221 as the French World War 2 fascists put it 8211 have evaporated They often blame the changing nature of French society on the presence of people seen as 8220different8221 8220intruders8221 in 8220our home8221 and are dismayed by the whole society8217s development including its changing ethnic and religious composition and shifts in class structure and in the role of women This is reactionary in the literal sense of the word 8211 a nostalgic longing to go back to an earlier point in time when the system might have seemed to be working in their favour Le Pen represents only one stream of the fascist far right in France Fran231ois Fillon the candidate of the traditional centreright party who came in a close third in the first round threw in his lot with a particularly reactionary strain in the French Catholic church not so much lowerclass religious people as the betteroff and others who yearn for the Church as it used to be when religious mass was in Latin This is often focused in opposition to abortion and homosexual rights in the name of preserving the family explicitly meaning the patriarchal family and patriarchy in general While Fillon paid lip service to his party8217s grudging acceptance of these rights he also stated opposition to allowing women access to medically assisted fertility procedures if they are in a lesbian relation or otherwise not in a relationship with a man Again symbolism is at work in communicating that which can8217t now be pronounced openly a call to bring back the authority of the Church to draw what it calls 8220red lines8221 in society 8211 and once a church has that authority it will draw more such lines This too is a direct challenge to the separation of church and state touted as a 8220Republican core value8221 even though secularism in France today is basically used to target Islam and largely Moslem communities and not to fight religious obscurantism and superstition in general Many of Fillon8217s supporters members of the R233publicains party will go for Le Pen and against the Republic This is another example of the collapse in France of the traditional political model and cohering beliefs But the collapse is coming from all sides of the power structure The currently governing Socialists may have been all but reduced to a fringe party in this election but it played a major part in preparing the ground for the surge of fascism The party whose prime minister declared that the Rom people Eastern European 8220Gypsies8221 have no place in France did a lot to make ethnic hatred 8220respectable8221 If you replace the word 8220Rom8221 with 8220Jews8221 you get a discourse most people could instantly recognise as worthy of the Nazis For decades and increasingly French presidents of both parties have legitimised what they called 8220the debate around national identity8221 which is really a debate about whether racism would do a better job of cohering French society than the Republican values that never described French reality anyway Similarly Le Pen8217s insistence that French colonialism was a blessing for the Middle East and Africa 8211 in contrast to the crocodile tears of repentance from the Socialists for instance who helped administer colonialism and wage atrocious wars to prevent independence 8211 is beneficial for French imperialism8217s multiplying armed interventions in those regions and what its interests may soon require in countering its rivals No matter what happens in the secondround elections Le Pen8217s party has played a very useful role for the ruling finance capitalist class as a whole and for the 8220political class8221 that represents them bylegitimizing ideas once considered anathema Only a few decades ago kids were encouraged to sing 8220We are the children of the world8221 and protect their ghetto 8220buddies8221 masking the prevailing inequality exclusion and oppression in France and the world This hypocritical benevolence is no longer so useful in dealing with what French imperialism has to deal with at home and abroad Preaching narrow selfinterest and acceptance of cruelty is more the order of the day Not only has Le Pen8217s candidacy helped legitimize the 8220system8221 she denounces this system haslegitimized her It is really striking that 8220everybody knows8221 she is a fascist even just by looking at her party8217s history and formal ties with neoNazi and other openly fascist groups but at least now none of the leaders of any of France8217s major parties are calling her a fascist Perhaps they feel that if they did they would be challenging the electoral system the media structures and the whole setup that they are part of and that brought her to where she is today Despite the disapproval that hangs over her head among most political opinion makers and her own project of overturning the political setup that has so well served French imperialism so far there is a convergence of interests between Le Pen and all the socalled Republican Front This was blatantly illustrated when President Hollande invited Le Pen and Macron to stand beside him along with the previous prime ministers and heads of state at a ceremony honouring a policeman killed recently in a reportedly Islamist attack and the forces of order in general This was similar to Obama8217s statement that he and Trump are 8220on the same team8221 Another important player on that team although loath to wear its uniform is JeanLuc M233lenchon who is generally labelled 8220far left8221 in the media and who came in a close fourth in the very tight first round He combines strident nationalism with promises to bring back the good old days of socialdemocratic welfare programmes with a laundry list of promises such as higher pay for less work and other ideas that are out of whack with what French capitalism requires todayM233lenchon8217s fantasy of restoring prosperity by loosening France8217s ties with its imperialist alliances the European Union and Nato is not just impossible to realize but poison as it converges with Le Pen8217s stands on these issues and worse her nationalist ideology Racism aside 8211 which is no detail their programmes have much in common Le Pen8217s supporters are actively trying to poach his supporters just as M233lenchon made only semidisguised overtures to Le Pen8217s base in the first round Practically and ideologically M233lenchon8217s 8220far left8221 cover for nationalism has contributed to today8217s very bad situation The slogan 8220Libert233 233galit233 fraternit2338221 covers up the fact that society is divided into classes with very different antagonistic interests Today it is a slogan for the disguised dictatorship of French monopoly capitalists seeking to unite the people including the oppressed and exploited inside the country in conflict and war with rival capitalist countries for the subjugation of other peoples and in the acceptance of the bourgeois dictatorship That is the social content of the Republic Even if some people wish it could be otherwise they need to stop conciliating with oppression and exploitation and face the truth The Republican Front is no solution it attempts to consolidate the capitalist state and it will not stop the fascists who are the system8217s Plan B if today8217s form of rule proves impossible to continue again due to contradictions produced by the system itself The idea of Le Pen becoming president is a frightening prospect to millions in France as well as elsewhere and there should be and needs to be much more militant and vigorous rejection of this possibility throughout the society One frightening indication of how far fascism has been 8220normalized8221 in France is how much less expression of shock and outrage there is today compared to 2002 when Le Pen8217s father made the second round of the presidential election But voting 8220against8221 Le Pen in other words voting for Macron can only mean accepting however unhappily France as it is today with all that many people find unacceptable and in opposition to the interests of humanity It means legitimising and strengthening the system going along with a resolution of the French ruling classes8217 problems in a way that is favourable to them What is needed instead is to seek to use this situation and the turmoil that it is creating to begin to work for a revolution to topple French imperialism and support revolution everywhere Supporting Macron also means falling into passivity and expecting elections and the parliamentary parties to save the day when this is the day they all played a key role in bringing about However reactionary Le Pen represents a coherent response to the system8217s problems with a minority but large and very energized and enthusiastic social base rallied around her programme and many willing to fight for it by any means necessary No matter what happens in the second round the contradictions to which Le Pen offers an extremely reactionary response will remain unresolved The question will 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<p>Standing at the front door of her two-story home on a quiet, residential Oak Park street, Kimberly Stevens kissed her three foster children goodbye on a sun-drenched April morning in 2006, telling them she would see them later.</p>
<p>Stevens did not know that “later” would turn out to be more than two-and-a-half years for her foster son and more than three for her two foster daughters.</p>
<p>She did not know that the boy would spend time in a psychiatric hospital and would return to her care a shadow of his former exuberant self.</p>
<p>She did not know that she was about to enter a legal process that would cost her thousands of dollars and consume nearly all of her waking time and energy. All Stevens knew was that it had been a typical morning of rousing the children, dressing them, feeding them and preparing them for school. She was a little surprised when Janelle, the case worker from the child welfare agency she had been working with, showed up and offered to take the children. Janelle had done that many times before, so she thought little of it.</p>
<p>When Stevens’ 12-year-old biological daughter came home after school that day, she asked where the other children were. Stevens did not know.</p>
<p>She called the case manager and her supervisor. Neither answered.</p>
<p>But soon enough, she learned what had happened.</p>
<p>The children had been taken. The first reason given was that she was going through a divorce, even though she had previously disclosed that information.</p>
<p>The allegations came later. She was told that a call had come into the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services hotline. It alleged that her daughter had abused two foster children.</p>
<p>Sexually.</p>
<p>Shame and humiliation churned within Stevens. Yet, as she started to talk with neighbors, those feelings morphed to anger and then outrage. She decided to take action.</p>
<p>A native of Chicago’s West Side, Stevens is black. So is the father of the three foster children whom she had hoped to adopt.</p>
<p>So, too, are more than half the Cook County children about whom allegations of child sexual abuse are made.</p>
<p>Despite studies showing that black children are not statistically more likely to be sexually abused than white children, African-American families in Cook County are nearly twice as likely to be subjected to sexual abuse investigations than the share of black children in the county’s population, according to a Chicago Reporter analysis of DCFS records of about 110,000 child sexual abuse cases from 2005 to 2009.</p>
<p>Yet, when DCFS investigates these allegations, a lower percentage of them are found to be valid than those about white and Latino children, the analysis shows. This means that thousands of black children and their families during the past five years have gone through an investigative process and have endured difficulty similar to what Stevens, her daughter and the three foster children have experienced.</p>
<p>The situation could worsen, as the department’s less-seasoned investigative workforce navigates an increased workload under budget cuts.</p>
<p>Asked about the Reporter’s findings, experts offered various explanations that fell mostly into two divergent camps.</p>
<p>One side argued that the disproportionate number of allegations about black children was the result of higher levels of attention paid to them and their families than youth of other racial and ethnic backgrounds.</p>
<p>The other side countered that it was more a function of the poverty into which many black children are born, pointing out that the rate of sexual abuse allegations is higher in poorer communities.</p>
<p>But both sides agreed on this much: These investigations can take a toll on the children and families involved.</p>
<p>“Child abuse investigations are enormously traumatic for children and their families,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an Alexandria, Va.-based organization that works to change public policy about child abuse and family preservation. “There is a far greater trauma if the child is removed from the home. For all those reasons, it is not better to provide additional scrutiny based on little more than an anonymous call and a case worker’s guess. All that time wasted on trivial investigations is stolen from the children who are actually in need.”</p>
<p>Erwin McEwen, director of DCFS, said his agency is in what amounts to a Catch-22. In order to keep the state’s children safe and to respond to the horrible sexual acts on youth, the agency must encourage as many people as possible to call the hotline. But in doing so, the hotline is likely to receive many calls that are without merit and that drain the department’s tight resources.</p>
<p>Operating with occasionally staggering caseloads and against a backdrop of historic public distrust, the investigators often put themselves at risk of physical harm and act with the knowledge that sexual abuse is underreported and difficult to prove. Yet, in conducting those investigations, the department almost inevitably inflicts trauma similar to what Stevens experienced, especially when no abuse can be reasonably proven to have taken place.</p>
<p>“There will probably always be trauma, but we are working to make investigations less intrusive” said McEwen in acknowledging the system’s need for improvement.</p>
<p>Dorothy Roberts, a law professor at Northwestern University, agreed, noting that the brunt of these practices are borne most heavily in certain neighborhoods. Racial disparities persist despite the reduction in the number of children in DCFS custody from more than 50,000 in the mid ’90s to less than 16,000 today, she said. This includes children removed from homes for sexual abuse. In Cook County, from 2005 to 2009, black children were removed from their homes at twice the rate of Latino children and three times the rate of white children.</p>
<p>“It still is a huge impact on a handful of neighborhoods in the city,” Roberts said. “The numbers are less, but the impact is still strong in a few poor, black neighborhoods.”</p>
<p>A person dials 1-800-25-ABUSE. A worker answers the phone and listens to allegations of abuse or neglect. If there is enough specific information, a report is taken.</p>
<p>From 2005 to 2009, about 110,000 allegations of child sexual abuse came into the hotline, which the state maintains in compliance with federal law. The alleged abuse fell into five categories: sexually transmitted diseases, sexual penetration, sexual exploitation, sexual molestation and substantial risk of sexual injury.</p>
<p>Black children were the subject of more than half of 29,600 calls alleging abuse in Cook County.</p>
<p>In 2008, the county’s 358,900 black residents younger than 18 made up 27 percent of the 1.3 million residents of the same age group, according to a Reporter analysis of census data. Yet 15,400 of 29,700, or 52 percent, of the calls from 2005 to 2009 were about black children.</p>
<p>By contrast, white youth constituted 33 percent of the young people and just 27 percent of the calls.</p>
<p>This disparity stemmed in part from the calls made by people like social workers, police officers, school personnel and physicians, who are required to report suspicions of abuse and neglect.</p>
<p>Law enforcement and social service workers made up the largest group of these “mandated reporters,” together accounting for more than 30 percent of all calls made. Black children constituted 50 percent of the children about whom calls were made by people in these agencies–”a figure that Carl Bell, director of the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, attributed to higher levels of attention on black families and higher levels of interaction with police.</p>
<p>Brad Stolbach, a licensed clinical psychologist and director of the Chicago Child Trauma Center at La Rabida Children’s Hospital, said mandated reporters’ unintentional bias could also play a role in the overrepresentation of black children. “It would be silly to think that there’s no system of institutional unconscious bias that might influence the decision of the reporter,” he said. “It shouldn’t surprise anybody that people in America would be more likely to make reports to authorities based on racial and economic status.”</p>
<p>Police officers made the highest number of calls, more than 5,400, alleging abuse, but the Chicago Police Department would not comment on the reasons for these numbers.</p>
<p>Liane Jackson, spokeswoman for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, attributed the high numbers to the fact that police are the first responders whenever these crimes are committed. She added that the office patrols unincorporated Cook County and predicted that the statistics for those areas would be different than the countywide data.</p>
<p>“People of color are more scrutinized, have more surveillance and are thought to be doing wrong than anyone else,” said Bell of the University of Illinois at Chicago. “That’s a stereotype. Some have suggested the police hunt black teenagers and black youth to find them doing wrong because they know that they’re doing wrong. They go and find them. That’s kind of easy to do. That’s responsible for all the hotline calls.”</p>
<p>The scrutiny was not only external, though.</p>
<p>Twenty-eight percent of calls about black children came from nonmandated reporters–”people like relatives and neighbors who were not required to call the hotline. This was higher than the 10 percent of calls about Asian children, the 16 percent of calls about Latino children and the 18 percent of calls about white children.</p>
<p>In all, 63 percent of the 3,700 calls made by relatives and neighbors were made about black children.</p>
<p>Bell said this higher percentage comes from well-meaning people who want to protect children from being abused without getting directly involved themselves. “There’s a social fabric,” he said. “Neighbors and relatives are seeing problems in a family but are not stepping into the family to help. They’re dropping a dime on the family.”</p>
<p>Bell added that the higher percentage of calls from relatives and neighbors may also stem from more contact with, and knowledge about, DCFS than people from other backgrounds. This greater familiarity with the department and concern about the children’s safety may trump people’s historic distrust of the agency, he said.</p>
<p>The hotline’s use of an anonymous reporting system is another double-edged tool in child abuse prevention and redress. While the ability to report abuse without giving one’s name can be an incentive for people to speak up, that same quality also lends itself to less detail for the investigator and to the hotline occasionally being used for other purposes like settling scores in acrimonious custody battles or even disputes between neighbors.</p>
<p>Close to 2,200 of the 31,400 calls in Cook County from 2005 to 2009 were made anonymously, the fourth-highest total among different groups of callers. But of these calls, just 6 percent were ultimately deemed valid after investigation. The figure was the lowest of the 30 types of callers placing at least 100 calls during the five-year period.</p>
<p>In ZIP codes where African Americans made up more than 80 percent of the population, anonymous calls had a particularly low rate of allegations being deemed valid. In ZIP codes 60621, 60637 and 60644, which cover parts of South Side neighborhoods such as Englewood, Hyde Park and Woodlawn as well as the West Side’s Austin, DCFS deemed just two of the more than 200 anonymous calls as valid.</p>
<p>The countywide rate for all calls deemed valid was 24 percent, with 45 percent of the 103 allegations made by “juvenile officers” being substantiated.</p>
<p>Valerie McDaniels, DCFS regional administrator for child protection for Central Cook County and a former investigator, said anonymous calls can be harder than others to find valid because there is less access to additional information other than what the caller leaves on the hotline.</p>
<p>Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform said changing the call line from anonymous to confidential could improve the system. “There should be a high threshold before you launch and substantiate an investigation and remove a child,” he said. “Anonymous reports are the least accurate. Not only will you avoid this harm, you will free up resources to look into the real harm,” he said.</p>
<p>But others were less convinced.</p>
<p>“It gives the safety of call, but [we] don’t know if I’m mad at you. People will drop a dime in a minute,” Bell said. “It’s a good thing because someone’s watching, but it’s a bad thing because in many cases it’s not legitimate.”</p>
<p>“If you didn’t have anonymous, nobody would call,” Bell said.</p>
<p>After the initial report is filed, an investigation is triggered, and one of the state’s hundreds of investigators is assigned to find out what happened. While conducting their inquiries, investigators use the Child Endangerment Risk Assessment Protocol to determine whether the child is in immediate danger and needs to be removed from the home right away.</p>
<p>Richard H. Calica, executive director of the Juvenile Protection Association, an agency in Chicago that seeks to promote children’s healthy development, helped design the protocol. It calls for the investigator to use an evidence-based approach to evaluate a child’s immediate safety should that youth remain in the home. The investigator must then present the results of his or her assessment to a supervisor.</p>
<p>Calica acknowledged that accurately forecasting future behavior is hard to do. “Our capacity to predict the future stinks,” he said, emphasizing that this difficulty is independent of whatever tool is used to assess children’s safety.</p>
<p>For his part, McEwen acknowledged that the department’s investigators are not exempt from racial and class bias, and explained that the department has conducted anti-racism trainings to try to reduce it.</p>
<p>But further training may still be necessary to eliminate all investigator bias, according to Diane Redleaf, executive director of the Family Defense Center, an organization in Chicago that advocates justice for children in the child welfare system. “The system is fraught with racial, class and gender bias,” she said. “I would say that the decisions are being made on racial grounds, independent of the merits.”</p>
<p>After the initial investigation, DCFS has 60 days to complete a more thorough investigation, according to the department’s procedure. But in a 2008 report commissioned by DCFS, Tamara Fuller, director at the University of Illinois Child and Family Research Center, wrote that more than one in 10 investigations in Illinois took more than 60 days.</p>
<p>Roi Montalvo, DCFS regional administrator for child protection for Cook County North, said the delay stemmed, in part, from cases being more complex than in the past and from investigators having more potential areas of harm to investigate.</p>
<p>Investigators are slated to take in about 150 new cases per year, but Montalvo said investigators do not turn away cases after they have reached their monthly limit.</p>
<p>McDaniels said a 2006 internal reorganization led to fewer investigators being in central Cook County as part of a departmental strategy to allocate investigators where a higher number of cases were. This led to the office’s losing investigators and being replaced by less-experienced ones.</p>
<p>That figure could rise in coming years, as the number of inspectors at the child protection division has seen a 16 percent decrease from 2008 to 2010, according to a Reporter analysis of DCFS data.</p>
<p>For Stevens’ family, the months of separation meant her foster children had to establish new bonds in a new home and to give up the bond they had established in Stevens’ home. The boy did not adjust well in the second foster home, so he was placed in a psychiatric hospital–”a searing experience that contributed to his difficulty in trusting people.</p>
<p>In Stevens’ case, it took many months for an investigator to come after the children had been removed. The man was neither aggressive nor hostile, she remembered. He actually seemed a bit sheepish.</p>
<p>Even with the investigator’s restrained demeanor, Stevens absorbed a clear message. “It seemed like a conviction without being a conviction,” she said. “I thought we were innocent until proven guilty, but it felt guilty.”</p>
<p>Eventually, an investigator, in conjunction with a team of professionals from the State’s Attorney’s Office, police department and medical providers who meet at Child Advocacy Centers, determines whether an allegation is credible.</p>
<p>In Cook County, just 20 percent of the calls alleging abuse of black children were substantiated by the department’s investigation process. This figure was lower than the 23 percent of allegations about white children and the 32 percent of allegations about Latino children.</p>
<p>Lisa Aronson Fontes, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “Child Abuse and Culture,” pointed out that a failure to find an allegation valid does not necessarily mean that no abuse occurred but rather that the investigators were unable to find sufficient evidence to prove it. “Families with allegations that are unfounded are different than those with no abuse,” she said.</p>
<p>Substantiated cases lead to a range of possible actions, including the temporary removal of the child from the home. Removal of black children occurred at more than twice the rate of Latino children and three times the rate of white children.</p>
<p>In December 2008, more than two-and-a-half years after the temporary removal of the children from her home, Stevens had the oldest child, the boy, return. She still had not seen the girls. The boy’s first statement to her: “What happened to you? You said you would see us later.” The boy had changed. Whereas before he exuded a bright spunkiness, he was, and remains, wary and reserved. A heaviness hangs over him.</p>
<p>Stevens said the boy needs an inordinate amount of structure in his day to feel safe and fears being abandoned again.</p>
<p>His sisters remained at the second foster home. Stevens continued to fight to get the girls back–”until February, when she decided to relinquish her claim so that the other foster family could adopt them.</p>
<p>The siblings see each other four hours per month, she said. The girls always ask when they are coming home.</p>
<p>McEwen said the agency is working to reduce the trauma associated with investigations through a variety of measures.</p>
<p>On the top of the docket: a $4 million pilot program starting in November in which families in high-need areas are approached before abuse happens and given financial assistance and other support. McEwen believes this could help build greater trust between the community and the department.</p>
<p>More broadly, he said he wants to continue a shift to a more supportive department in which more children are served and fewer children are taken into protective custody.</p>
<p>But the program and department’s progressive rhetoric do not impress Stevens. “They need a watchdog,” she said.</p>
<p>Contributing: Rebecca Freitag, Samantha Winslow and Brittney Wong</p> | Safe at home? | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/safe-home/ | 2010-11-01 | 3left-center
| 3,076 | Standing at the front door of her twostory home on a quiet residential Oak Park street Kimberly Stevens kissed her three foster children goodbye on a sundrenched April morning in 2006 telling them she would see them later Stevens did not know that 8220later8221 would turn out to be more than twoandahalf years for her foster son and more than three for her two foster daughters She did not know that the boy would spend time in a psychiatric hospital and would return to her care a shadow of his former exuberant self She did not know that she was about to enter a legal process that would cost her thousands of dollars and consume nearly all of her waking time and energy All Stevens knew was that it had been a typical morning of rousing the children dressing them feeding them and preparing them for school She was a little surprised when Janelle the case worker from the child welfare agency she had been working with showed up and offered to take the children Janelle had done that many times before so she thought little of it When Stevens8217 12yearold biological daughter came home after school that day she asked where the other children were Stevens did not know She called the case manager and her supervisor Neither answered But soon enough she learned what had happened The children had been taken The first reason given was that she was going through a divorce even though she had previously disclosed that information The allegations came later She was told that a call had come into the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services hotline It alleged that her daughter had abused two foster children Sexually Shame and humiliation churned within Stevens Yet as she started to talk with neighbors those feelings morphed to anger and then outrage She decided to take action A native of Chicago8217s West Side Stevens is black So is the father of the three foster children whom she had hoped to adopt So too are more than half the Cook County children about whom allegations of child sexual abuse are made Despite studies showing that black children are not statistically more likely to be sexually abused than white children AfricanAmerican families in Cook County are nearly twice as likely to be subjected to sexual abuse investigations than the share of black children in the county8217s population according to a Chicago Reporter analysis of DCFS records of about 110000 child sexual abuse cases from 2005 to 2009 Yet when DCFS investigates these allegations a lower percentage of them are found to be valid than those about white and Latino children the analysis shows This means that thousands of black children and their families during the past five years have gone through an investigative process and have endured difficulty similar to what Stevens her daughter and the three foster children have experienced The situation could worsen as the department8217s lessseasoned investigative workforce navigates an increased workload under budget cuts Asked about the Reporter8217s findings experts offered various explanations that fell mostly into two divergent camps One side argued that the disproportionate number of allegations about black children was the result of higher levels of attention paid to them and their families than youth of other racial and ethnic backgrounds The other side countered that it was more a function of the poverty into which many black children are born pointing out that the rate of sexual abuse allegations is higher in poorer communities But both sides agreed on this much These investigations can take a toll on the children and families involved 8220Child abuse investigations are enormously traumatic for children and their families8221 said Richard Wexler executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform an Alexandria Vabased organization that works to change public policy about child abuse and family preservation 8220There is a far greater trauma if the child is removed from the home For all those reasons it is not better to provide additional scrutiny based on little more than an anonymous call and a case worker8217s guess All that time wasted on trivial investigations is stolen from the children who are actually in need8221 Erwin McEwen director of DCFS said his agency is in what amounts to a Catch22 In order to keep the state8217s children safe and to respond to the horrible sexual acts on youth the agency must encourage as many people as possible to call the hotline But in doing so the hotline is likely to receive many calls that are without merit and that drain the department8217s tight resources Operating with occasionally staggering caseloads and against a backdrop of historic public distrust the investigators often put themselves at risk of physical harm and act with the knowledge that sexual abuse is underreported and difficult to prove Yet in conducting those investigations the department almost inevitably inflicts trauma similar to what Stevens experienced especially when no abuse can be reasonably proven to have taken place 8220There will probably always be trauma but we are working to make investigations less intrusive8221 said McEwen in acknowledging the system8217s need for improvement Dorothy Roberts a law professor at Northwestern University agreed noting that the brunt of these practices are borne most heavily in certain neighborhoods Racial disparities persist despite the reduction in the number of children in DCFS custody from more than 50000 in the mid 821790s to less than 16000 today she said This includes children removed from homes for sexual abuse In Cook County from 2005 to 2009 black children were removed from their homes at twice the rate of Latino children and three times the rate of white children 8220It still is a huge impact on a handful of neighborhoods in the city8221 Roberts said 8220The numbers are less but the impact is still strong in a few poor black neighborhoods8221 A person dials 180025ABUSE A worker answers the phone and listens to allegations of abuse or neglect If there is enough specific information a report is taken From 2005 to 2009 about 110000 allegations of child sexual abuse came into the hotline which the state maintains in compliance with federal law The alleged abuse fell into five categories sexually transmitted diseases sexual penetration sexual exploitation sexual molestation and substantial risk of sexual injury Black children were the subject of more than half of 29600 calls alleging abuse in Cook County In 2008 the county8217s 358900 black residents younger than 18 made up 27 percent of the 13 million residents of the same age group according to a Reporter analysis of census data Yet 15400 of 29700 or 52 percent of the calls from 2005 to 2009 were about black children By contrast white youth constituted 33 percent of the young people and just 27 percent of the calls This disparity stemmed in part from the calls made by people like social workers police officers school personnel and physicians who are required to report suspicions of abuse and neglect Law enforcement and social service workers made up the largest group of these 8220mandated reporters8221 together accounting for more than 30 percent of all calls made Black children constituted 50 percent of the children about whom calls were made by people in these agencies82118221a figure that Carl Bell director of the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago attributed to higher levels of attention on black families and higher levels of interaction with police Brad Stolbach a licensed clinical psychologist and director of the Chicago Child Trauma Center at La Rabida Children8217s Hospital said mandated reporters8217 unintentional bias could also play a role in the overrepresentation of black children 8220It would be silly to think that there8217s no system of institutional unconscious bias that might influence the decision of the reporter8221 he said 8220It shouldn8217t surprise anybody that people in America would be more likely to make reports to authorities based on racial and economic status8221 Police officers made the highest number of calls more than 5400 alleging abuse but the Chicago Police Department would not comment on the reasons for these numbers Liane Jackson spokeswoman for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart attributed the high numbers to the fact that police are the first responders whenever these crimes are committed She added that the office patrols unincorporated Cook County and predicted that the statistics for those areas would be different than the countywide data 8220People of color are more scrutinized have more surveillance and are thought to be doing wrong than anyone else8221 said Bell of the University of Illinois at Chicago 8220That8217s a stereotype Some have suggested the police hunt black teenagers and black youth to find them doing wrong because they know that they8217re doing wrong They go and find them That8217s kind of easy to do That8217s responsible for all the hotline calls8221 The scrutiny was not only external though Twentyeight percent of calls about black children came from nonmandated reporters82118221people like relatives and neighbors who were not required to call the hotline This was higher than the 10 percent of calls about Asian children the 16 percent of calls about Latino children and the 18 percent of calls about white children In all 63 percent of the 3700 calls made by relatives and neighbors were made about black children Bell said this higher percentage comes from wellmeaning people who want to protect children from being abused without getting directly involved themselves 8220There8217s a social fabric8221 he said 8220Neighbors and relatives are seeing problems in a family but are not stepping into the family to help They8217re dropping a dime on the family8221 Bell added that the higher percentage of calls from relatives and neighbors may also stem from more contact with and knowledge about DCFS than people from other backgrounds This greater familiarity with the department and concern about the children8217s safety may trump people8217s historic distrust of the agency he said The hotline8217s use of an anonymous reporting system is another doubleedged tool in child abuse prevention and redress While the ability to report abuse without giving one8217s name can be an incentive for people to speak up that same quality also lends itself to less detail for the investigator and to the hotline occasionally being used for other purposes like settling scores in acrimonious custody battles or even disputes between neighbors Close to 2200 of the 31400 calls in Cook County from 2005 to 2009 were made anonymously the fourthhighest total among different groups of callers But of these calls just 6 percent were ultimately deemed valid after investigation The figure was the lowest of the 30 types of callers placing at least 100 calls during the fiveyear period In ZIP codes where African Americans made up more than 80 percent of the population anonymous calls had a particularly low rate of allegations being deemed valid In ZIP codes 60621 60637 and 60644 which cover parts of South Side neighborhoods such as Englewood Hyde Park and Woodlawn as well as the West Side8217s Austin DCFS deemed just two of the more than 200 anonymous calls as valid The countywide rate for all calls deemed valid was 24 percent with 45 percent of the 103 allegations made by 8220juvenile officers8221 being substantiated Valerie McDaniels DCFS regional administrator for child protection for Central Cook County and a former investigator said anonymous calls can be harder than others to find valid because there is less access to additional information other than what the caller leaves on the hotline Wexler of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform said changing the call line from anonymous to confidential could improve the system 8220There should be a high threshold before you launch and substantiate an investigation and remove a child8221 he said 8220Anonymous reports are the least accurate Not only will you avoid this harm you will free up resources to look into the real harm8221 he said But others were less convinced 8220It gives the safety of call but we don8217t know if I8217m mad at you People will drop a dime in a minute8221 Bell said 8220It8217s a good thing because someone8217s watching but it8217s a bad thing because in many cases it8217s not legitimate8221 8220If you didn8217t have anonymous nobody would call8221 Bell said After the initial report is filed an investigation is triggered and one of the state8217s hundreds of investigators is assigned to find out what happened While conducting their inquiries investigators use the Child Endangerment Risk Assessment Protocol to determine whether the child is in immediate danger and needs to be removed from the home right away Richard H Calica executive director of the Juvenile Protection Association an agency in Chicago that seeks to promote children8217s healthy development helped design the protocol It calls for the investigator to use an evidencebased approach to evaluate a child8217s immediate safety should that youth remain in the home The investigator must then present the results of his or her assessment to a supervisor Calica acknowledged that accurately forecasting future behavior is hard to do 8220Our capacity to predict the future stinks8221 he said emphasizing that this difficulty is independent of whatever tool is used to assess children8217s safety For his part McEwen acknowledged that the department8217s investigators are not exempt from racial and class bias and explained that the department has conducted antiracism trainings to try to reduce it But further training may still be necessary to eliminate all investigator bias according to Diane Redleaf executive director of the Family Defense Center an organization in Chicago that advocates justice for children in the child welfare system 8220The system is fraught with racial class and gender bias8221 she said 8220I would say that the decisions are being made on racial grounds independent of the merits8221 After the initial investigation DCFS has 60 days to complete a more thorough investigation according to the department8217s procedure But in a 2008 report commissioned by DCFS Tamara Fuller director at the University of Illinois Child and Family Research Center wrote that more than one in 10 investigations in Illinois took more than 60 days Roi Montalvo DCFS regional administrator for child protection for Cook County North said the delay stemmed in part from cases being more complex than in the past and from investigators having more potential areas of harm to investigate Investigators are slated to take in about 150 new cases per year but Montalvo said investigators do not turn away cases after they have reached their monthly limit McDaniels said a 2006 internal reorganization led to fewer investigators being in central Cook County as part of a departmental strategy to allocate investigators where a higher number of cases were This led to the office8217s losing investigators and being replaced by lessexperienced ones That figure could rise in coming years as the number of inspectors at the child protection division has seen a 16 percent decrease from 2008 to 2010 according to a Reporter analysis of DCFS data For Stevens8217 family the months of separation meant her foster children had to establish new bonds in a new home and to give up the bond they had established in Stevens8217 home The boy did not adjust well in the second foster home so he was placed in a psychiatric hospital82118221a searing experience that contributed to his difficulty in trusting people In Stevens8217 case it took many months for an investigator to come after the children had been removed The man was neither aggressive nor hostile she remembered He actually seemed a bit sheepish Even with the investigator8217s restrained demeanor Stevens absorbed a clear message 8220It seemed like a conviction without being a conviction8221 she said 8220I thought we were innocent until proven guilty but it felt guilty8221 Eventually an investigator in conjunction with a team of professionals from the State8217s Attorney8217s Office police department and medical providers who meet at Child Advocacy Centers determines whether an allegation is credible In Cook County just 20 percent of the calls alleging abuse of black children were substantiated by the department8217s investigation process This figure was lower than the 23 percent of allegations about white children and the 32 percent of allegations about Latino children Lisa Aronson Fontes a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of 8220Child Abuse and Culture8221 pointed out that a failure to find an allegation valid does not necessarily mean that no abuse occurred but rather that the investigators were unable to find sufficient evidence to prove it 8220Families with allegations that are unfounded are different than those with no abuse8221 she said Substantiated cases lead to a range of possible actions including the temporary removal of the child from the home Removal of black children occurred at more than twice the rate of Latino children and three times the rate of white children In December 2008 more than twoandahalf years after the temporary removal of the children from her home Stevens had the oldest child the boy return She still had not seen the girls The boy8217s first statement to her 8220What happened to you You said you would see us later8221 The boy had changed Whereas before he exuded a bright spunkiness he was and remains wary and reserved A heaviness hangs over him Stevens said the boy needs an inordinate amount of structure in his day to feel safe and fears being abandoned again His sisters remained at the second foster home Stevens continued to fight to get the girls back82118221until February when she decided to relinquish her claim so that the other foster family could adopt them The siblings see each other four hours per month she said The girls always ask when they are coming home McEwen said the agency is working to reduce the trauma associated with investigations through a variety of measures On the top of the docket a 4 million pilot program starting in November in which families in highneed areas are approached before abuse happens and given financial assistance and other support McEwen believes this could help build greater trust between the community and the department More broadly he said he wants to continue a shift to a more supportive department in which more children are served and fewer children are taken into protective custody But the program and department8217s progressive rhetoric do not impress Stevens 8220They need a watchdog8221 she said Contributing Rebecca Freitag Samantha Winslow 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