Discontented Soul

Our Friends, the Torturers
by Bob Herbert
Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by the New York Times

The United States has long purported to be outraged over Syria's bad behavior, the latest flash point being the possible Syrian involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
From the U.S. perspective, Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here's the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him?
The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large...

Hail, Hail The Gang's All Here
by Ray McGovern
Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by TomPaine.com

The appointment of John Negroponte to be director of National Intelligence is the latest evidence that President Bush is strengthening his cabinet's capacity to mislead Congress and trample civil liberties. Ray McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, examines the meaning of the Negroponte appointment and the dark trend it confirms.
The nomination of John Negroponte to the new post of director of National Intelligence (DNI) caps a remarkable parade of Bush administration senior nominees. Among the most recent:
Alberto Gonzales, confirmed as attorney general: the lawyer who advised the president he could ignore the US War Crimes Act and the Geneva Conventions on torture and create a "reasonable basis in law...which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."
Michael Chertoff, confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security: the lawyer who looked the other way when 762 innocent immigrants (mostly of Arab and South Asian descent) were swept up in a post-9/11 dragnet and held as "terrorism suspects" for several months. The dictates of PR trumped habeas corpus; the detentions fostered an image of quick progress in the "war on terrorism."
John Negroponte: the congenial, consummate diplomat now welcomed back into the brotherhood. Presently our ambassador in Baghdad, Negroponte is best known to many of us as the ambassador to Honduras with the uncanny ability to ignore human rights abuses so as not to endanger congressional support for the attempt to overthrow the duly elected government of Nicaragua in the '80s. Negroponte's job was to hold up the Central American end of the Reagan administration's support for the Contra counterrevolutionaries, keeping Congress in the dark, as necessary...

From the first days of the US-British invasion of Iraq, oil workers have resisted foreign occupation
by Hassan Juma'a Awad
Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by the Guardian/UK

We lived through dark days under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. When the regime fell, people wanted a new life: a life without shackles and terror; a life where we could rebuild our country and enjoy its natural wealth. Instead, our communities have been attacked with chemicals and cluster bombs, and our people tortured, raped and killed in our homes...

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.

[Imagine an Aussie sportsperson DARING to criticize Australian politicians over their policies? (S)He would be told that "cobblers should stick to their lasts."]

Blame America? When Necessary, Yes
by Reggie Rivers
Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by the Denver Post

Partisanship has denuded the political landscape of meaningful debate to the point that anyone who criticizes President Bush's policies is presumed to be a Democrat who is still angry about the outcome of the election.
However, as a critic of the president, I speak for a lot of people when I say that it's not simple partisanship that motivates us. Many of us believe that President Bush is doing great harm to the United States, and we're concerned about where our nation will stand four years from now.
As the Bush administration gears up for an invasion of Iran, Americans need to ask whether we can fight another pre-emptive war. To understand how wrong this doctrine really is, you need merely to reverse roles. Imagine that, in the face of all this saber-rattling, Iran decided to attack us pre-emptively. Would Americans shrug and say that it was legitimate for Iran to hit us first?...
[H]ow many rules can the United States break before it's guilty of engaging in simple violence rather than legitimate warfare? Can you imagine us giving our blessing to any nation that held American POWs without giving them protection of the Geneva Convention? We would immediately condemn that action. But somehow, when we're the nation committing the same offense, we shrug as if it's no big deal.
I know I'll be accused of being a member of the Blame-America-First crowd, and that's OK. Too many of our citizens are part of the Blame-America?-Never! mindset, and that has the danger of leading us down a very tyrannical path.

© 2005 Denver Post

The Take
Documentary Tracks Workers Who 'Take' Chance at Revival
by Roger Ebert
Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by the Chicago Sun Times

As one documentary after another attacks the International Monetary Fund and its pillaging of the Third World, I wish I knew the first thing about global economics. If these films are as correct as they are persuasive, international monetary policy is essentially a scheme to bankrupt smaller nations and cast their populations into poverty, while multinational corporations loot their assets and whisk the money away to safe havens and the pockets of rich corporations and their friends. But that cannot be, can it? Surely the IMF's disastrous record is the result of bad luck, not legalized theft?
I am still haunted by "Life and Debt" (2001), a documentary explaining how tax-free zones were established on, but not of, Jamaican soil...
Now here is "The Take," a Canadian documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, shot in Argentina, where a prosperous middle-class economy was destroyed during 10 years of IMF policies, as enforced by President Carlos Menem (1989-1999)...
In the face of this disaster, workers at several closed factories attempted to occupy the factories, reopen them and operate them. Their argument: The factories were subsidized in the first place by public money, so if the owners didn't want to operate them, the workers deserved a chance. The owners saw this differently, calling the occupations theft. Committees of workers monitored the factories to prevent owners from selling off machinery and other assets in defiance of the courts. And many of the factories not only reopened, but were able to turn a profit while producing comparable or superior goods at lower prices...
Is this sort of thing a threat to capitalism, or a revival of it? The factories are doing what they did before -- manufacturing goods and employing workers -- but they are doing it for the benefit of workers and consumers, instead of as an exercise to send profits flowing to top management. This is classic capitalism as opposed to the management pocket-lining system, which is essentially loot for the bosses, and bread and beans for everybody else. Sounds refreshing to anyone who has followed the recent tales of corporate greed in North America. Is it legal? Well, if the factories are closed, haven't the owners abandoned their moral right to them? Especially if the factories were built with public subsidies in the first place?
I wearily anticipate countless e-mails advising me I am a hopelessly idealistic dreamer, and explaining how when the rich get richer, everybody benefits. I will forward the most inspiring of these messages to minimum-wage workers at Wal-Mart, so they will understand why labor unions would be bad for them, while working unpaid overtime is good for the economy. All I know is that the ladies at the garment factory are turning out good-looking clothes, demand is up for Zanon ceramics, and the auto parts factory is working with a worker-controlled tractor factory to make some good-looking machines. I think we can all agree that's better than just sitting around.

© 2005 rogerebert.com

The real issue in the Eason Jordan controversy is the US military's killing of journalists in Iraq
by Jeremy Scahill

Published on Friday, February 18, 2005 by The Nation

One of the most powerful executives in the cable news business, CNN's Eason Jordan, was brought down after he spoke out of school during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in January. In a rare moment of candor, Jordan reportedly said that the US military had targeted a dozen journalists who had been killed in Iraq. The comments quickly ignited a firestorm on the Internet, fueled by right-wing bloggers, that led to Jordan's recanting, apologizing and ultimately resigning after twenty-three years at the network, "in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy."
But the real controversy here should not be over Jordan's comments. The controversy ought to be over the unconscionable silence in the United States about the military's repeated killing of journalists in Iraq...

© 2005 The Nation

Historians in Cahoots
by Tristram Hunt
Published on Thursday, February 17, 2005 by the Guardian/UK

In his messianic inauguration address, President Bush spoke of America's global duty being defined by "the history we have seen together". Inevitably, this was a reference to the events of 9/11. But given how much a sense of US revolutionary heritage is now informing current policy, the broader history that Americans are experiencing together should be an equal cause for concern...

The bookshelves of Borders and Barnes & Noble are dominated by a very specific reading of the 18th century. This does not, in God-fearing America, represent a new found interest in the secular ideals of enlightenment and reason. Rather, an obsessive telling and retelling of that great struggle for liberty: the American Revolution.
Heroic biography has become the bestselling history brand of Bush's America...

Sadly, none of this has resulted in any substantive reinterpretation of the revolution or its principal actors. As Simon Schama rightly puts it, this is history as inspiration, not instruction. Instead of critical analysis, the public is being fed self-serving affirmation: war-time schlock designed to underpin the unique calling, manifest destiny and selfless heroism of the US nation and, above all, its superhuman presidents.
Needless to say, this goes down very well at the White House. We are told that the president's current reading matter includes biographies of Washington as well as Alexander Hamilton. For the biographical emphasis on the Great Man who has the character and vision to transcend as well as define his times fits well with a presidency that values personal instinct and prayer above reason and empiricism.
In fact, the historical community seems to be providing the ideal conditions for the Nietzschean approach of the Bush administration. As one senior presidential adviser scarily informed journalist Ron Suskind, We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ... we'll act again, creating other new realities ... We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Rather than tempering such terrifying ambition, US scholars are happy to play up to it...

We Need The Oil, Right? So What’s the Problem?
by Ray McGovern
Published on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...Oil
Canadian writer Linda McQuaig, author of It’s the Crude, Dude, has noted that decades from now it will all seem a no-brainer. Historians will calmly discuss the war in Iraq and identify oil as one of the key factors in the decision to launch it. They will point to growing US dependence on foreign oil, the competition with China, India, and others for a world oil supply with terminal illness, and the fact that (as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has put it) Iraq “swims on a sea of oil.” It will all seem so obvious as to provoke little more than a yawn.
But that will be then. Now is now. How best to explain the abrupt transition from early-nineties prudence to the present day recklessness of this administration? How to fathom the continued cynicism that trades throwaway soldiers for the chimera of controlling Middle East oil?
The Earlier Cheney on Our Soldiers
In August 1992, Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under a very different President Bush, was asked to explain why US tanks did not roll into Baghdad and depose Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. Cheney said:
“I don’t think you could have done that without significant casualties. And the question in my mind is how many additional casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not that damned many. And we’re not going to get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.”
Where the Prize Ultimately Lies
Later, then-CEO Dick Cheney of Halliburton found himself focusing on different priorities. In the fall of 1999 he complained:
“Oil companies are expected to keep developing enough oil to offset oil depletion and also to meet new demand. So where is this oil going to come from? Governments and national oil companies are obviously in control of 90 percent of the assets. The Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
What had changed in the seven years between Cheney’s two statements?
The US kept importing more and more oil to meet its energy needs.
Energy shortages drove home the need to ensure/increase energy supply.
Oil specialists concluded that “peak oil” production was but a decade away, while demand would continue to zoom skyward.
The men now running US policy on the Middle East appealed to President Clinton in January 1998 to overthrow Saddam Hussein or “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will be put at hazard.”
In October 1998 Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill declaring it the sense of Congress that “it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.”
International sanctions left a debilitated Iraq with greatly weakened armed forces headed by an “evil dictator.”
Shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Vice President Cheney’s energy task force dragged out the maps of Iraq’s oil fields...
To be fair, taking over Middle East oil fields was not a new idea. In 1975 Henry Kissinger, using a pseudonym, wrote an article for Harpers titled “Seizing Arab Oil," outlining plans to do just that, preventing Arab countries from having absolute control over the modern world’s most vital commodity. But in those days there was a USSR to put the brakes on such adventurism...

When Guantánamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib was finally released and flown home to his family after three years of mistreatment at the hands of the US government, Australia's radio shock-jocks whipped up a frenzy of public outrage that "taxpayers money" was used to fly him home and is now being aid to him in the form of a Disability Pension.

When he appeared on 60 Minutes to tell his story, the shock-jocks exoriated him for not baring his soul, and for being "evasive."

It constantly amuses me that these "opinion-moulders" think they can decide for us what uses of the "taxpayers' money" we ought to get upset about. In their view, we should turn a blind eye to the millions being spent on prosecuting illegal wars dictated by the US, or the millions given as "inducements" to investment by private companies, but we should froth at the mouth because one person gets a government benefit to which the shock-jocks believe he /she is not entitled.

What is more worrying however is that the capitalist West has now abandoned the "presumption of innocence" in favour os puritan Salem's assumption that it is the duty of the ACCUSED to prove him/herself innocent.

[In a recent current affairs program, a Canberra-based intelligence officer claimed that he and other Australians were involved in the interrogation of Iraqis held prisoner by the forces of the "Coalition of the Willing," contradicting Defence Minister Robert Hill's statement to Parliament saying that they were not. After the program was aired, Hill claimed that the prisoners were only being "interviewed."]

So the Iraqis forced into a room at gun-point with bags over their heads were being “interviewed” by Dr Rod Barton, not “interrogated” by him?
What a remarkable verbal facility our Robert Hill has! He must be an ex-police officer, since we all know that when suspects are said to be “helping police with their enquiries,” they are actually having the living daylights beaten out of them in the cells.

Bush Erasing FDR's Legacy While Waging Class Warfare
by Floyd J. McKay
Published on Wednesday, February 16, 2005 by the Seattle Times

Considering past failures to privatize the Bonneville Power Administration, the Northwest may wonder what is in President Bush's mind when he proposes yet another anti-Bonneville measure...
This is not the first Republican shot at Bonneville, but in this case it illustrates Bush's obsession with wiping out any vestiges of the New Deal and turning the entire nation over to private business.
Bonneville ... would be relegated to the scrap heap that the president wants to use for Social Security, another legacy of the New Deal. Privatization has become the grand mantra of this administration, ranking equally with American military superiority abroad.
There are links. Since we moved, post-Vietnam, to a professional military, many duties once handled by military personnel are contracted out to private industry. In Iraq today, tasks ranging from food service to bodyguards for high-ranking officials have been privatized. That may be fine in some instances, but it further strengthens what the general-turned-president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, termed the "military-industrial complex." And it's very good politics — military units cannot contribute to campaigns, but private contractors can, and do at very high rates...
Privatization and militarization are two legs of the legacy Bush hopes to leave to history. The third leg is the virtual elimination of social-welfare programs, many of them dating to the New Deal. It's called "starving the beast."
George W. Bush is one of two radical presidents in my lifetime. The first, Franklin D. Roosevelt, saved the poor and middle classes and built a nation of opportunity. Bush is destroying FDR's legacy and waging class warfare on behalf of wealthy Americans who don't need his help.

© 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Greed Behind 'Reform' Pitch to Let Wall Street at Nest Eggs
by Pierre Tristam
Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

Sears in its early years was famous for clever advertising. ... Advertising for a $1 sewing machine ... drew many takers. What they got in the mail was a needle and thread.
These days laws protect against deceptive advertising - except when the government is the advertiser and the sewing machine is Social Security "reform." ... Yet the political climate is such that, whatever the numbers say, Bush's astonishing offer is being taken seriously.
Two reasons come to mind. First off, it is no longer about the math and probably never was. It is about a shift in what an embarrassingly sizable number of people believe they, through their government, ought to be responsible for. Franklin Roosevelt instituted Social Security on the assumption that most Americans agreed that it's fair, decent and necessary to give up part of one's earnings to alleviate others' poverty (namely, the elderly's) and ward off one's own. Most agreed, too, that giving up more money than one received, as some do, was not necessarily a sin, that a measure of wealth redistribution was something the wealthiest nation on the planet could afford. It might have seemed just as fair and decent to give up a fraction more of one's earnings (that's all it would be if it came to that) to ensure the retirement of baby boomers. In its working days that generation has, after all, insured the greatest prosperity any economy has ever known. A little payback would not be out of line.
But sharing minimally in the care of the poor or the elderly is no longer considered to be the national responsibility it has been for a few decades. That thinking is out of line now. It's been replaced by the coarse materialism of dizzy prosperity. That is, selfishness. An ownership society is another way of saying, "Get as much as you can now and let others take care of themselves, come what may."
The second reason Bush's proposal is finding a greedy audience is about a belief in the stock market indistinguishable from belief in God, and just as pointless to argue with. (It is not a coincidence that fewer people attend church than tend to their stock portfolio.) Blessed are the investors, for the kingdom of Mammon will be theirs. There's no reason to take issue with the belief or its practice through the market. It is every individual's right to invest where he pleases, assume the risks he chooses, gamble all he wants, or make little deities of stock market symbols. But that right has always been there for those who could afford it ... It is a fallacy to suggest that the government is somehow preventing anyone from taking "ownership" of his retirement, if that kind of risk is what he chooses to own.
Social Security privatization is not about enhancing that right. It is about Wall Street salivating at the sight of ordinary Americans' guaranteed nest egg. Wall Street doesn't want it invested in Treasuries (as most of the Social Security surplus is invested). Wall Street wants it invested, and risked, in Wall Street. The sales pitch is that it'll benefit investors, make them part of the money class, as if a mutual fund is a synonym for wealth ... As the economic historian Kevin Phillips put it, "The middle class has often been pulled into the 'money class,' but frequently to be relieved of some of its savings." It is about to be fleeced.
Why the persistent buy-in? Because a $1 sewing machine always sounds better than the cost of true, decent mending. Hold on to your needle and thread when you get them. You'll need them.

© 2005 News-Journal Corporation

Pharisee Nation
by John Dear
Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...I was not at all surprised that George W. Bush was reelected president. As I travel the country speaking out against war, injustice and nuclear weapons, I see many people consciously siding with the culture of war, choosing the path of violence, supporting corporate greed, rampant militarism, and global domination. I see many others swept up in the raging current of patriotism. Since most of these people, beginning with the president, claim to be Christian, I am ashamed and appalled that they support war and systemic injustice, that they do it in the name of God, and that they feign fidelity to the nonviolent Jesus who gave his life resisting institutionalized injustice...

The reality of climate change is that the engines of progress have merely accelerated our rush to the brink
by George Monbiot
Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

It is now mid-February, and already I have sown 11 species of vegetable. I know, though the seed packets tell me otherwise, that they will flourish. Everything in this country - daffodils, primroses, almond trees, bumblebees, nesting birds - is a month ahead of schedule. And it feels wonderful. Winter is no longer the great gray longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are, unless the Gulf Stream stops, unlikely to recur. Our summers will be long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.
And this is surely one of the reasons why we find it so hard to accept what the climatologists are now telling us. In our mythologies, an early spring is a reward for virtue. "For, lo, the winter is past," Solomon, the beloved of God, exults. "The rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come." How can something which feels so good result from something so bad?...

Lies, Damned Lies And Rice
by Harley Sorensen
Published on Monday, February 14, 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle

The lies never stop. They lie not only to you and me, but also to their friends and colleagues, Republicans as well as Democrats.
I speak (as you might guess) of those masters of deceit in the Bush administration...

The Truth about Social Security
by Charles R. Morris
Published on Saturday, February 12, 2005 by Commonweal

The first important fact about the Social Security “crisis” is that there is no crisis. The second important fact is that the Bush administration’s proposals for fixing the “crisis,” especially its “privatization” scheme, are perversely designed to make the system’s finances much more precarious than they are now and to impose deep benefit cuts. In fact, it would be hard to conceive of a more destructive set of policy initiatives than those the president is advocating. And it’s all completely unnecessary. Here’s why...

Copyright © 2005 Commonweal Foundation