1) Miller has said that he would phase out both Social Security and Medicare, cut Medicaid, and completely eliminate the Department of Education.
2) He said he doesn't believe that unemployment benefits are "constitutionally authorized," and wouldn't extend this assistance to Alaskans struggling to find work in a still-recovering economy -- even though the only people eligible for unemployment are those who have already had it deducted from their paychecks.
3) He recently told Fox News that Republican lawmakers need to have the "courage to shut down the government" in order to eliminate the programs that he wants gone.
4) His campaign posted a message on Twitter, crudely attacking Senator Lisa Murkowski, asking "What's the difference b/n selling out your party's values and the oldest profession?"
5) According to the Anchorage Daily News, "Miller said the Second Amendment exists to protect the right of people to be a threat to their government."
The opinions, views, thoughts, and ramblings of editors of PoliticalAffairs.net – and other stuff worth reading or viewing.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
THE BACKLASH: BOOK REVIEW
Book Review-- The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politicsin the Age of Obama by Will Bunch
Review by Geri Spieler [reprinted from The Huffington Post]
It would be easy to write an Obama-backlash book using buzzwords with cliché' ridden accounts of the right-wing talk show blather-babblers.
Fortunately, Will Bunch does not resort to such pedestrian style bloggisms. As an experienced and award winning journalist, Bunch does his homework and reports on what he has learned in this straightforward accounting of the paranoid fringe tilting at delusions of conspiracy.
Stories about the "Oath Keepers," "Birthers," the Tea Party, Knob Creek militia, FEMA internment camps, the resurrection of the John Birch Society and Sarah Palin is all here in Bunch's over-the-top horrific telling of right-wing populism.
The Backlash goes into the deep background and the bizarre rise of Glenn Beck, the current darling of the Fox News rabid reporters. What is more shocking than Beck's popularity is the stark indifference of Beck's handler's to his lack of proficiency as a news caster or that he has a passing relationship with the truth.
Beck's raw ambition got him into radio when was only 13 years old in Seattle, WA, where he had an on-air job at an FM station doing the overnight shift on weekends. From that first job he never left radio and moved from one station to the next immediately after high school.
Bunch tells Beck's story in a series of personal and professional vignettes mixing his failed personal life with his ever-increasing success as a radio personality. His self-styled showmanship was modeled after a format called the "Morning Zoo." It was a mid-1980's drive-time fast-paced show with skits, parody songs and caricatures. Beck was riding high in the jocular, content-free teenybopper radio-land for while, but his lack of discipline got him into trouble more than once.
"An admitted sufferer from attention-deficit disorder, Beck clearly struggles with impulse control even after he finally stopped drinking and doing drugs in 1994 with the help of a then-friend, Senator Joe Lieberman," Bunch wrote.
Beck's troubles began long before his attempt at recovery as Bunch describes Beck's downfall both in his personal and professional life.
This was especially true in the late 1980s in Phoenix when, desperate to get his Morning Zoo out of a deep ratings rut, he staged a series of inane pranks against the show's number-one drive-time rival -- crashing the wedding of its program director to plaster his own show's bumper stickers on the bridal car, and finally, unbelievably, calling the wife of his rival deejay to make fun of... her recent miscarriage.
Bunch weaves Beck throughout the entire book as a backdrop for the many right-wing organizations and events dotting the country.
In his report on the Tea Party Convention, he reveals that as the event planners tried to paint the Tea Party as saving the country for the poor, oppressed, unemployed, retired and small business owners. It failed miserably in trying to make the case it was the right wing baby boomers Woodstock while charging attendee's $549 a ticket.
It was in fact the fundraising scheme of a small-time lawyer, Judson Phillips, just one of many who took advantage of the many Tea Party believers eager to buy a piece of the myth.
As Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin stump for the little guy, both are fanatically exploiting their celebrity by raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking engagements to the unemployed faithful, while offering no solace to those unable to pay their utility bills, but quick to blame Obama.
The convention itself became so controversial, Michele Bachmann and Marcia Blackburn, two two right-wing congresswomen, cancelled their appearances, as well as American Majority president, Ned Ryun. Bunch quotes Ryun as telling the media, "Listen, I'm all for a person making a buck, but this seems very crass, very opportunitistic."
In a philosophic bent, Bunch refers to Neil Postman's prophetic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, to illustrate the obvious of how television is doing our thinking for us, and "people medicate themselves into bliss," according to Postman, by believing anything they see and hear on television, as evidenced by the fiction that is accepted as fact on Fox News.
The Backlash is disturbing in that it validates what we don't want to believe, and that is while "fake news" began on the Comedy Channel's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a parody, Fox News has become reality as the most widely watched cable news show in the country.
If you are looking for an answer or some solace to the disconcerting uneasiness that the Glenn Beck's of the world are multiplying, you won't find it in the The Backlash. Bunch is just reporting here and offers no predictions of whether this marginal world of extremists will succeed in taking over the White House or Congress. He offers no philosophical musings beyond the Huxleyan references to what the deliberate manufacturing of falsehood is doing to our lives.
Yet, like Bunch's excellent previous book, Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, The Backlash is a must-read for those who want to understand what is happening on the political scene and a context behind the doctrine of fear and hate.
This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books, www.nyjournalofbooks.com
Review by Geri Spieler [reprinted from The Huffington Post]
It would be easy to write an Obama-backlash book using buzzwords with cliché' ridden accounts of the right-wing talk show blather-babblers.
Fortunately, Will Bunch does not resort to such pedestrian style bloggisms. As an experienced and award winning journalist, Bunch does his homework and reports on what he has learned in this straightforward accounting of the paranoid fringe tilting at delusions of conspiracy.
Stories about the "Oath Keepers," "Birthers," the Tea Party, Knob Creek militia, FEMA internment camps, the resurrection of the John Birch Society and Sarah Palin is all here in Bunch's over-the-top horrific telling of right-wing populism.
The Backlash goes into the deep background and the bizarre rise of Glenn Beck, the current darling of the Fox News rabid reporters. What is more shocking than Beck's popularity is the stark indifference of Beck's handler's to his lack of proficiency as a news caster or that he has a passing relationship with the truth.
Beck's raw ambition got him into radio when was only 13 years old in Seattle, WA, where he had an on-air job at an FM station doing the overnight shift on weekends. From that first job he never left radio and moved from one station to the next immediately after high school.
Bunch tells Beck's story in a series of personal and professional vignettes mixing his failed personal life with his ever-increasing success as a radio personality. His self-styled showmanship was modeled after a format called the "Morning Zoo." It was a mid-1980's drive-time fast-paced show with skits, parody songs and caricatures. Beck was riding high in the jocular, content-free teenybopper radio-land for while, but his lack of discipline got him into trouble more than once.
"An admitted sufferer from attention-deficit disorder, Beck clearly struggles with impulse control even after he finally stopped drinking and doing drugs in 1994 with the help of a then-friend, Senator Joe Lieberman," Bunch wrote.
Beck's troubles began long before his attempt at recovery as Bunch describes Beck's downfall both in his personal and professional life.
This was especially true in the late 1980s in Phoenix when, desperate to get his Morning Zoo out of a deep ratings rut, he staged a series of inane pranks against the show's number-one drive-time rival -- crashing the wedding of its program director to plaster his own show's bumper stickers on the bridal car, and finally, unbelievably, calling the wife of his rival deejay to make fun of... her recent miscarriage.
Bunch weaves Beck throughout the entire book as a backdrop for the many right-wing organizations and events dotting the country.
In his report on the Tea Party Convention, he reveals that as the event planners tried to paint the Tea Party as saving the country for the poor, oppressed, unemployed, retired and small business owners. It failed miserably in trying to make the case it was the right wing baby boomers Woodstock while charging attendee's $549 a ticket.
It was in fact the fundraising scheme of a small-time lawyer, Judson Phillips, just one of many who took advantage of the many Tea Party believers eager to buy a piece of the myth.
As Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin stump for the little guy, both are fanatically exploiting their celebrity by raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking engagements to the unemployed faithful, while offering no solace to those unable to pay their utility bills, but quick to blame Obama.
The convention itself became so controversial, Michele Bachmann and Marcia Blackburn, two two right-wing congresswomen, cancelled their appearances, as well as American Majority president, Ned Ryun. Bunch quotes Ryun as telling the media, "Listen, I'm all for a person making a buck, but this seems very crass, very opportunitistic."
In a philosophic bent, Bunch refers to Neil Postman's prophetic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, to illustrate the obvious of how television is doing our thinking for us, and "people medicate themselves into bliss," according to Postman, by believing anything they see and hear on television, as evidenced by the fiction that is accepted as fact on Fox News.
The Backlash is disturbing in that it validates what we don't want to believe, and that is while "fake news" began on the Comedy Channel's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a parody, Fox News has become reality as the most widely watched cable news show in the country.
If you are looking for an answer or some solace to the disconcerting uneasiness that the Glenn Beck's of the world are multiplying, you won't find it in the The Backlash. Bunch is just reporting here and offers no predictions of whether this marginal world of extremists will succeed in taking over the White House or Congress. He offers no philosophical musings beyond the Huxleyan references to what the deliberate manufacturing of falsehood is doing to our lives.
Yet, like Bunch's excellent previous book, Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, The Backlash is a must-read for those who want to understand what is happening on the political scene and a context behind the doctrine of fear and hate.
This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books, www.nyjournalofbooks.com
Class warfare and the U.S. Presidency
by Joel Wendland
This new graph from Slate.com via VisualizingEconmics.com by way of Socialist-Economics shows income growth between 1948 and 2005:
If everyone does better or as well as under a Democratic president, why are the billionaires and the big corporations and their right-wing media the big polluters going after President Obama with comparisons to Nazis and racist attacks on his national origins befitting Tea Party zealots?
If he is the representative of big business, I'll eat my hat. (First, I'll have to go buy one.)
This new graph from Slate.com via VisualizingEconmics.com by way of Socialist-Economics shows income growth between 1948 and 2005:
If everyone does better or as well as under a Democratic president, why are the billionaires and the big corporations and their right-wing media the big polluters going after President Obama with comparisons to Nazis and racist attacks on his national origins befitting Tea Party zealots?
If he is the representative of big business, I'll eat my hat. (First, I'll have to go buy one.)
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
"Tea Party" Politics: Something Old or Something New?
by Norman Markowitz
Many foreign observers across the political spectrum have long considered the U.S. to be the most media saturated society in the world.
Others have mentioned that U.S. media bombards readers and viewers with endless facts and clips, without a framework to put those facts together (Marxists have long contended that the framework is there, hidden or closeted, and reflects and highlights capitalist principles and prejudices).
The huge amount of coverage for the "tea party" movement is an example of this. First, tea party activists and leaders are shown for their entertainment value(with right wing Fox News as their uncritical promoter). Neither the business leaders funding this "movement," nor the background of the right wing Republican politicians who have played a leading role in it are mentioned.
Yesterday the New York Times reported a "tea party" rally in Washington. Dick Armey, the old Texas righting Congressmen (a sort of minor league Dick Cheney) was a featured speaker. Armey, best known for privately calling Representative Barney Frank "Barney fag" heads a right wing pressure group called Freedom Works(where the money comes for this group and what it is all about wasn't explained).
The article used the term "populism" as a sort of generic term for any demonstration attacking "elites" and quoted the wife of ultra right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attacking "elitism".
First, the use of the term "populism" in this way isn't knew. Michael Paul Rogin in a classic study, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1963) made the point that those who saw McCarthy as an expression of "populist" anti-elitist politics of the kind represented from the left in Wisconsin previously by Senator Bob La Follette misunderstood American politics.
Appeals to the "common man" and against the rich, the banks, etc., had been a tactic of politicians and groups representing the rich since the 1830s, since the U.S. was the first country in the world to establish universal white male suffrage. Andrew Jackson, the very rich slaveholder and landowner had been the most important early practitioner of such politics.
Abolitionists had been condemned by Jackson and many others as members of the privileged classes, more interested in Blacks than poor whites. Radicals and reformers of all kinds had been portrayed as enemies of the "common man," seeking to destroy the "common man's" freedom by establishing public schools, reforming prisons, giving women the right to vote, and other tricks. Labor unions and socialists were also condemned as foreign conspiracies seeking to take away individual freedom by making workers pay dues to unions, keeping workers from becoming self -employed businessmen, etc.
What Rogin contended scholars through the world have long argued, that is, that the right learns from the left to engage in mass politics when it has to but the fact that the right engages in mass politics does not make it in any way like the left.
In Germany for example, the Nazis used slogans like "Deutschland Erwache"(Germany Awake) and called their party the "National Socialist German Workers Party" but their ideology and policies were racist, xenophobic, militarist, an expression in an extreme form of traditional German rightist ideology and policies. That Germany had lost WWI and the Weimar Republic, a liberal republic with a strong left opposition, had been established after the war both made them more extreme and also made sections of the German ruling classes ready and willing to support them against the socialists and the communists . Later, when the depression enabled them to garner a large voting bloc these ruling classes supported them in forming a dictatorship.
We don't have anything like the strong left of Weimar Germany and we don't have a depression of the magnitude of the early 1930s.
But we have a president who is both African-American and the first advocate of progressive domestic policies in forty years. That he has done far less than many hoped is not really the point. The Weimar Republic, for all its liberalism and constitutionalism, didn't change the economic and social structure of Germany. Neither with all of its successful reforms did the New Deal in the U.S. But both were opposed by the the respectable right because they were seen as the beginning of radical changes, an opening to a new politics in which the old prejudices would no longer work.
Although the "tea party" campaigns for the repeal of national health care legislation, opposition to all attempts to tax the wealthy a "balanced budget constitutional amendment"(this is support of a Republican Party whose tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and military spending and other subsidies to corporations increased the national debt from one trillion in 1981 to 10 trillion in 2008) it apparently has the support of the corporations and the rich.
Why should the these ruling groups support policies which led directly to the stock market crash of 2008 and indirectly to the Obama victory---policies which have lost trillions not only for the people but for large corporations, investment banks, brokerage houses, compelling "bailouts" that the "tea party" groups promise to eliminate.
A good question--something like why did the German corporations continue to support the Hitler regime after D day at the time of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler when it was clear to all non Nazis that the war was lost and ending the Nazi regime was in the best interests of the German ruling class. Many have argued that the Nazi regime had enriched German capital so much with the loot of Europe, not to mention the earlier military subsidies and the destruction of the labor movement, that they could not turn against the regime. I would argue that the Reagan-Bush policies have enriched the corporations and the rich so much over the last thirty years that they cannot even in their own interest turn against those policies, even to support the tax reform of President Obama, which would eliminate the Bush tax cuts for families with incomes above 250,000 or the very modest attempts at regulation of wall street and banking, or the very limited health reform legislation.
That is why I believe that they and the media they control are highlighting the "tea party" groups, who represent a mish-mash of traditional rightwing ideologies and policies in the U.S. context, i.e., opposition to "big government" which aids the people, constitutionalism to protect property, not defense of the bill of rights to defend civil liberties and civil rights, and a very clear undercurrent of hatred--hatred of social welfare, hatred of undocumented workers, hatred of a president who dares to be both progressive and African-American.
The corporations and the rich are clearly hoping to use the "tea party" groups as shock troops to ride back to power and turn Obama into Clinton. However, when you play with such groups, as the German ruling classes discovered, they really become difficult to control and eventually it becomes unclear who is using who.
That is why we must carry forward the fight to keep these groups from gaining a foothold through the 2010 elections. If they do, their influence will become more pervasive. If they don't, they may very well dissipate as rapidly as they took shape, since they will lose much of their ruliing class sponsors.
Many foreign observers across the political spectrum have long considered the U.S. to be the most media saturated society in the world.
Others have mentioned that U.S. media bombards readers and viewers with endless facts and clips, without a framework to put those facts together (Marxists have long contended that the framework is there, hidden or closeted, and reflects and highlights capitalist principles and prejudices).
The huge amount of coverage for the "tea party" movement is an example of this. First, tea party activists and leaders are shown for their entertainment value(with right wing Fox News as their uncritical promoter). Neither the business leaders funding this "movement," nor the background of the right wing Republican politicians who have played a leading role in it are mentioned.
Yesterday the New York Times reported a "tea party" rally in Washington. Dick Armey, the old Texas righting Congressmen (a sort of minor league Dick Cheney) was a featured speaker. Armey, best known for privately calling Representative Barney Frank "Barney fag" heads a right wing pressure group called Freedom Works(where the money comes for this group and what it is all about wasn't explained).
The article used the term "populism" as a sort of generic term for any demonstration attacking "elites" and quoted the wife of ultra right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas attacking "elitism".
First, the use of the term "populism" in this way isn't knew. Michael Paul Rogin in a classic study, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1963) made the point that those who saw McCarthy as an expression of "populist" anti-elitist politics of the kind represented from the left in Wisconsin previously by Senator Bob La Follette misunderstood American politics.
Appeals to the "common man" and against the rich, the banks, etc., had been a tactic of politicians and groups representing the rich since the 1830s, since the U.S. was the first country in the world to establish universal white male suffrage. Andrew Jackson, the very rich slaveholder and landowner had been the most important early practitioner of such politics.
Abolitionists had been condemned by Jackson and many others as members of the privileged classes, more interested in Blacks than poor whites. Radicals and reformers of all kinds had been portrayed as enemies of the "common man," seeking to destroy the "common man's" freedom by establishing public schools, reforming prisons, giving women the right to vote, and other tricks. Labor unions and socialists were also condemned as foreign conspiracies seeking to take away individual freedom by making workers pay dues to unions, keeping workers from becoming self -employed businessmen, etc.
What Rogin contended scholars through the world have long argued, that is, that the right learns from the left to engage in mass politics when it has to but the fact that the right engages in mass politics does not make it in any way like the left.
In Germany for example, the Nazis used slogans like "Deutschland Erwache"(Germany Awake) and called their party the "National Socialist German Workers Party" but their ideology and policies were racist, xenophobic, militarist, an expression in an extreme form of traditional German rightist ideology and policies. That Germany had lost WWI and the Weimar Republic, a liberal republic with a strong left opposition, had been established after the war both made them more extreme and also made sections of the German ruling classes ready and willing to support them against the socialists and the communists . Later, when the depression enabled them to garner a large voting bloc these ruling classes supported them in forming a dictatorship.
We don't have anything like the strong left of Weimar Germany and we don't have a depression of the magnitude of the early 1930s.
But we have a president who is both African-American and the first advocate of progressive domestic policies in forty years. That he has done far less than many hoped is not really the point. The Weimar Republic, for all its liberalism and constitutionalism, didn't change the economic and social structure of Germany. Neither with all of its successful reforms did the New Deal in the U.S. But both were opposed by the the respectable right because they were seen as the beginning of radical changes, an opening to a new politics in which the old prejudices would no longer work.
Although the "tea party" campaigns for the repeal of national health care legislation, opposition to all attempts to tax the wealthy a "balanced budget constitutional amendment"(this is support of a Republican Party whose tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and military spending and other subsidies to corporations increased the national debt from one trillion in 1981 to 10 trillion in 2008) it apparently has the support of the corporations and the rich.
Why should the these ruling groups support policies which led directly to the stock market crash of 2008 and indirectly to the Obama victory---policies which have lost trillions not only for the people but for large corporations, investment banks, brokerage houses, compelling "bailouts" that the "tea party" groups promise to eliminate.
A good question--something like why did the German corporations continue to support the Hitler regime after D day at the time of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler when it was clear to all non Nazis that the war was lost and ending the Nazi regime was in the best interests of the German ruling class. Many have argued that the Nazi regime had enriched German capital so much with the loot of Europe, not to mention the earlier military subsidies and the destruction of the labor movement, that they could not turn against the regime. I would argue that the Reagan-Bush policies have enriched the corporations and the rich so much over the last thirty years that they cannot even in their own interest turn against those policies, even to support the tax reform of President Obama, which would eliminate the Bush tax cuts for families with incomes above 250,000 or the very modest attempts at regulation of wall street and banking, or the very limited health reform legislation.
That is why I believe that they and the media they control are highlighting the "tea party" groups, who represent a mish-mash of traditional rightwing ideologies and policies in the U.S. context, i.e., opposition to "big government" which aids the people, constitutionalism to protect property, not defense of the bill of rights to defend civil liberties and civil rights, and a very clear undercurrent of hatred--hatred of social welfare, hatred of undocumented workers, hatred of a president who dares to be both progressive and African-American.
The corporations and the rich are clearly hoping to use the "tea party" groups as shock troops to ride back to power and turn Obama into Clinton. However, when you play with such groups, as the German ruling classes discovered, they really become difficult to control and eventually it becomes unclear who is using who.
That is why we must carry forward the fight to keep these groups from gaining a foothold through the 2010 elections. If they do, their influence will become more pervasive. If they don't, they may very well dissipate as rapidly as they took shape, since they will lose much of their ruliing class sponsors.
Monday, September 13, 2010
The Goldberg flap: Journalist declares Castro "sane" and "moral"
by Joel Wendland
After Fidel Castro stirred up some controversy last week with an offhand comment made to The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg about ineffectiveness of Cuba's socialist "model," Goldberg thinks the former Cuban president may have sought to alleviate some controversy within Cuba's governing institutions by "walking back" his comment. In explaining further his take on Fidel's widely disseminated remarks, Goldberg ended up describing Castro positively, declaring some of his comments as "sane" and "moral."
During a several hours long interview over the course of three days in Havana, Goldberg asked Fidel Castro about Cuba's economy in the context of a larger discussion of Latin America and trade. In a manner that Goldberg described as almost a "throw away remark" Castro said, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
Interpreting the remark literally and borrowing insights about the context of the comment from his friend Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba with the Council on Foreign Relations, who traveled with him and listened to the conversation, Goldberg wrote that the former president's comments suggested the need for big changes in Cuba's political and economic system, changes that have been underway for several years now, including in the final years of Fidel's presidency. In his original post, Goldberg went on to describe some of those changes and even hinted that the ongoing U.S. policy toward Cuba is "hypocritical" and "stupidly self-defeating."
After Goldberg's reporting was published at The Atlantic's website late last week, President Castro delivered a talk Friday, Sept. 10, at the University of Havana promoting his new book, The Strategic Counteroffensive, in which he said Goldberg had misinterpreted his comment. Though insisting Goldberg had quoted him accurately and praising Goldberg's skills and professionalism, Castro said, "the truth is that the meaning of my response was exactly the opposite of the interpretation made by both American journalists of the Cuban model."
"My idea, as everybody knows," Castro explained, "is that the capitalist system does not work anymore either for the United States or the world, which jumps from one crisis into the next, and these are ever more serious, global and frequent and there is no way the world could escape from them. How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?"
This clarification of the comment didn't sit well with Goldberg. In a teleconference with reporters Sept. 13, in which both Goldberg and Sweig sought to clarify their perspective on the situation, Goldberg expressed some doubts about Castro's response. "I don't know how you can interpret [the quote] as its opposite," Goldberg said in defense of his reporting.
Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, added that Castro's "clarification was intended to signal to certain domestic constituents that although, it's not even an open secret, it's common knowledge, widely discussed, in terms of how they're going to fix the model and where they're going to go in terms of economic liberalization, what he wanted to say is that although we're changing our model, that doesn't mean that we're importing U.S.-style capitalism." She added that she believes both Fidel and Raul Castro are of a single mind on the need for these changes to Cuba's economic system.
Cuba's leading institutions of governance have set the stage for a number of important systemic changes toward a market-oriented economy, Sweig explained. New proposals include private ownership of land, the shift from collective farming to cooperative farming with private ownership rights, the licensing of the 250,000 to 500,000 small businesses with non-family employees (as long as Social Security taxes are paid), and introduction of limited foreign investments in real estate. Just this week, the Cuban government announced a plan to shift 500,000 government workers into the private sector in order to cut unsustainable budget expenditures.
Sweig added that Cuba's internal changes and other global realities show that U.S. attempts at economic isolation of Cuba have failed and are unnecessary. The embargo is not a foreign policy; it is a domestic policy aimed at nothing more than addressing "a perception of the Cuban American vote" in Florida. "I think it's time for the United States to recognize that 50 years of one policy haven't achieved the intention which was to block the revolution, stop them from exporting it, and overthrow etc.," she noted. "I think it is time to take 'yes' for an answer."
"To be fair," she continued, "this administration, the Obama administration, while moving very slowly, recognizes that this is an obsolete policy." Right now, other major foreign policy considerations have pushed Cuba policy to the back burner and the Florida issue remains a stumbling block in terms of domestic U.S. elections. She described as positive President Obama's lifting of harsh Bush era travel bans on Cuban Americans and recent considerations in Congress to change the rules governing trade and travel with Cuba. "I think it is just a matter of time," she indicated, referring to the likelihood of lifting the embargo.
For his part, Goldberg initially insisted that Castro's motives for opening this discussion were personal rather than part of a strategic Cuban foreign policy initiative. "I think it's Fidel wanting to insert himself on the international stage a little bit," he said.
Goldberg revisited Castro's original remarks to him on anti-Semitism. In the original interview Castro stated that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism from some quarters, especially in the Iranian government, were an anathema and especially harmful to pursuing peace. To reporters Goldberg said, "I have no way of judging this for sure, I can't look into a man's heart, but I think that the idea of holocaust denial in particular seems to genuinely offend him, as it should offend any sane moral person. And I think he had a very specific strong feeling to what Ahmadinejad has been saying."
Goldberg described his experience with Castro as "very spontaneous." "In other words," he added, "I don't think this was a foreign ministry derived plan."
"Fidel's Fidel," Goldberg explained. "It's good to be in essence the retired king, and I think a lot of it has been spontaneous. I have no doubt that the Council of State, the Foreign Ministry, and various other people would like to harness his new energy … in ways they thought were productive."
"He wants to talk about Iran one day and go to the Aquarium the next, and that's what he's going to do," Goldberg insisted.
Sweig took a different tack and suggested Fidel's actions may not be an official act but were by no means "in contradiction" Raul Castro's agenda.
When pressed further on whether or not the trip and the comments may have originated as an unofficial signal in favor of resetting U.S.-Cuba relations, Goldberg backed away a bit. "It is very hard to see the deliberateness of what we experienced when we were there. It might be true that there might be a deliberateness, or that, that Fidel certainly didn't do what he did and say what he said without Raul's knowledge and approval. Those things are all possibilities. We have no way of discerning that."
"Functionally," Goldberg went on, "I would have to say yes, some of the things he is doing could set the stage for a slightly different relationship between the U.S. and Cuba."
Sweig agreed, but emphasized that changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba will happen only after domestic political dynamics within the U.S. change in favor of opening friendlier relations with the island country.
My two cents
This whole episode reminds me of a couple of scenes from the 2000 Kevin Costner movie Thirteen Days in October about the Cuban Missile Crisis, a movie Fidel Castro saw and praised strongly at the time it was shown in Havana a couple years later. Notably, of course, Fidel Castro was intimately involved in the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. During his interview with Goldberg, he suggested he now regretted some of his personal role in the crisis, comments which he did not "walk back" in his subsequent response to Goldberg's article.
At one point in the movie, President Kennedy struggles to keep on top of the generals who desperately want to bomb Cuba to smithereens. One tactic he uses to attempt to regain control of the situation is to bring in the venerated Washington journalist Walter Lippmann to float a trial balloon announcing the possible peaceful resolution of the crisis with a deal to remove U.S. nukes from Turkey in exchange for removal of the Soviet nukes from Cuba. If the movie is true to real events, the leaked story tactic was done without the knowledge of his closest advisors except for Robert F. Kennedy.
Simply put, Kennedy used a reporter to send a diplomatic message to the Cubans and the Russians that he sought a peaceful resolution to the crisis, a "reset" of the situation which found the world on the brink of nuclear war.
While it may have been a point of prestige and pride for Lippmann to be used that way by President Kennedy, Goldberg probably has a personal, professional and political motive for refusing to see himself as having been used by Fidel Castro, hence his vigorous refusal to accept the possibility that the meeting and subsequent hubbub were on some level deliberate. Journalists are supposed to be smart and above being used, especially by former Communist leaders.
Regardless of the controversy, Cuba's choices about how to organize its society are its own to make. How it chooses to reorganize its economic system will likely be based on its own experiences and needs, not on formulas or the political intrigues of outside parties, especially the U.S. The events of this past week suggest the need for Americans to continue to demand a reevaluation of and change in U.S. policy toward Cuba that sees the beginning of the end of hypocritical travel and trade restrictions.
After Fidel Castro stirred up some controversy last week with an offhand comment made to The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg about ineffectiveness of Cuba's socialist "model," Goldberg thinks the former Cuban president may have sought to alleviate some controversy within Cuba's governing institutions by "walking back" his comment. In explaining further his take on Fidel's widely disseminated remarks, Goldberg ended up describing Castro positively, declaring some of his comments as "sane" and "moral."
During a several hours long interview over the course of three days in Havana, Goldberg asked Fidel Castro about Cuba's economy in the context of a larger discussion of Latin America and trade. In a manner that Goldberg described as almost a "throw away remark" Castro said, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
Interpreting the remark literally and borrowing insights about the context of the comment from his friend Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba with the Council on Foreign Relations, who traveled with him and listened to the conversation, Goldberg wrote that the former president's comments suggested the need for big changes in Cuba's political and economic system, changes that have been underway for several years now, including in the final years of Fidel's presidency. In his original post, Goldberg went on to describe some of those changes and even hinted that the ongoing U.S. policy toward Cuba is "hypocritical" and "stupidly self-defeating."
After Goldberg's reporting was published at The Atlantic's website late last week, President Castro delivered a talk Friday, Sept. 10, at the University of Havana promoting his new book, The Strategic Counteroffensive, in which he said Goldberg had misinterpreted his comment. Though insisting Goldberg had quoted him accurately and praising Goldberg's skills and professionalism, Castro said, "the truth is that the meaning of my response was exactly the opposite of the interpretation made by both American journalists of the Cuban model."
"My idea, as everybody knows," Castro explained, "is that the capitalist system does not work anymore either for the United States or the world, which jumps from one crisis into the next, and these are ever more serious, global and frequent and there is no way the world could escape from them. How could such a system work for a socialist country like Cuba?"
This clarification of the comment didn't sit well with Goldberg. In a teleconference with reporters Sept. 13, in which both Goldberg and Sweig sought to clarify their perspective on the situation, Goldberg expressed some doubts about Castro's response. "I don't know how you can interpret [the quote] as its opposite," Goldberg said in defense of his reporting.
Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, added that Castro's "clarification was intended to signal to certain domestic constituents that although, it's not even an open secret, it's common knowledge, widely discussed, in terms of how they're going to fix the model and where they're going to go in terms of economic liberalization, what he wanted to say is that although we're changing our model, that doesn't mean that we're importing U.S.-style capitalism." She added that she believes both Fidel and Raul Castro are of a single mind on the need for these changes to Cuba's economic system.
Cuba's leading institutions of governance have set the stage for a number of important systemic changes toward a market-oriented economy, Sweig explained. New proposals include private ownership of land, the shift from collective farming to cooperative farming with private ownership rights, the licensing of the 250,000 to 500,000 small businesses with non-family employees (as long as Social Security taxes are paid), and introduction of limited foreign investments in real estate. Just this week, the Cuban government announced a plan to shift 500,000 government workers into the private sector in order to cut unsustainable budget expenditures.
Sweig added that Cuba's internal changes and other global realities show that U.S. attempts at economic isolation of Cuba have failed and are unnecessary. The embargo is not a foreign policy; it is a domestic policy aimed at nothing more than addressing "a perception of the Cuban American vote" in Florida. "I think it's time for the United States to recognize that 50 years of one policy haven't achieved the intention which was to block the revolution, stop them from exporting it, and overthrow etc.," she noted. "I think it is time to take 'yes' for an answer."
"To be fair," she continued, "this administration, the Obama administration, while moving very slowly, recognizes that this is an obsolete policy." Right now, other major foreign policy considerations have pushed Cuba policy to the back burner and the Florida issue remains a stumbling block in terms of domestic U.S. elections. She described as positive President Obama's lifting of harsh Bush era travel bans on Cuban Americans and recent considerations in Congress to change the rules governing trade and travel with Cuba. "I think it is just a matter of time," she indicated, referring to the likelihood of lifting the embargo.
For his part, Goldberg initially insisted that Castro's motives for opening this discussion were personal rather than part of a strategic Cuban foreign policy initiative. "I think it's Fidel wanting to insert himself on the international stage a little bit," he said.
Goldberg revisited Castro's original remarks to him on anti-Semitism. In the original interview Castro stated that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism from some quarters, especially in the Iranian government, were an anathema and especially harmful to pursuing peace. To reporters Goldberg said, "I have no way of judging this for sure, I can't look into a man's heart, but I think that the idea of holocaust denial in particular seems to genuinely offend him, as it should offend any sane moral person. And I think he had a very specific strong feeling to what Ahmadinejad has been saying."
Goldberg described his experience with Castro as "very spontaneous." "In other words," he added, "I don't think this was a foreign ministry derived plan."
"Fidel's Fidel," Goldberg explained. "It's good to be in essence the retired king, and I think a lot of it has been spontaneous. I have no doubt that the Council of State, the Foreign Ministry, and various other people would like to harness his new energy … in ways they thought were productive."
"He wants to talk about Iran one day and go to the Aquarium the next, and that's what he's going to do," Goldberg insisted.
Sweig took a different tack and suggested Fidel's actions may not be an official act but were by no means "in contradiction" Raul Castro's agenda.
When pressed further on whether or not the trip and the comments may have originated as an unofficial signal in favor of resetting U.S.-Cuba relations, Goldberg backed away a bit. "It is very hard to see the deliberateness of what we experienced when we were there. It might be true that there might be a deliberateness, or that, that Fidel certainly didn't do what he did and say what he said without Raul's knowledge and approval. Those things are all possibilities. We have no way of discerning that."
"Functionally," Goldberg went on, "I would have to say yes, some of the things he is doing could set the stage for a slightly different relationship between the U.S. and Cuba."
Sweig agreed, but emphasized that changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba will happen only after domestic political dynamics within the U.S. change in favor of opening friendlier relations with the island country.
My two cents
This whole episode reminds me of a couple of scenes from the 2000 Kevin Costner movie Thirteen Days in October about the Cuban Missile Crisis, a movie Fidel Castro saw and praised strongly at the time it was shown in Havana a couple years later. Notably, of course, Fidel Castro was intimately involved in the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. During his interview with Goldberg, he suggested he now regretted some of his personal role in the crisis, comments which he did not "walk back" in his subsequent response to Goldberg's article.
At one point in the movie, President Kennedy struggles to keep on top of the generals who desperately want to bomb Cuba to smithereens. One tactic he uses to attempt to regain control of the situation is to bring in the venerated Washington journalist Walter Lippmann to float a trial balloon announcing the possible peaceful resolution of the crisis with a deal to remove U.S. nukes from Turkey in exchange for removal of the Soviet nukes from Cuba. If the movie is true to real events, the leaked story tactic was done without the knowledge of his closest advisors except for Robert F. Kennedy.
Simply put, Kennedy used a reporter to send a diplomatic message to the Cubans and the Russians that he sought a peaceful resolution to the crisis, a "reset" of the situation which found the world on the brink of nuclear war.
While it may have been a point of prestige and pride for Lippmann to be used that way by President Kennedy, Goldberg probably has a personal, professional and political motive for refusing to see himself as having been used by Fidel Castro, hence his vigorous refusal to accept the possibility that the meeting and subsequent hubbub were on some level deliberate. Journalists are supposed to be smart and above being used, especially by former Communist leaders.
Regardless of the controversy, Cuba's choices about how to organize its society are its own to make. How it chooses to reorganize its economic system will likely be based on its own experiences and needs, not on formulas or the political intrigues of outside parties, especially the U.S. The events of this past week suggest the need for Americans to continue to demand a reevaluation of and change in U.S. policy toward Cuba that sees the beginning of the end of hypocritical travel and trade restrictions.
Cuba looking for a "reset" with the U.S.?
by Joel Wendland
After Fidel Castro stirred up some controversy last week with an offhand comment he made to The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Coldberg about ineffectiveness of Cuba's socialist "model," Goldberg thinks the former Cuban president may have sought to alleviate some controversy within Cuba's leading institutions by "walking back" his comment.
During a several hours long interview over the course of three days in Havana, Goldberg asked Fidel Castro about Cuba's economy in the context of a larger discussion of Latin America and trade. In a manner that Goldberg described as almost a "throw away remark," Castro said, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
Adopting a literal interpretation of the remark and borrowing insights from his friend Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba with the Council on Foreign Relations, who traveled with him and listened to the conversation, Goldberg interpreted the president's comments as suggesting the need for big changes in Cuba's political and economic system, changes that have been underway for several years now. In his original post, Goldberg went on to describe some of those changes and even hinted at the silliness of the ongoing U.S. policy toward Cuba as "hypocritical" and "stupidly self-defeating."
After publishing these remarks at The Atlantic's website, President Castro wrote in one of his "Reflections" that Goldberg had dramatically misinterpreted his comment, though insisting that he had been quoted accurately and praising Goldberg's skills and professionalism.
In a teleconference with reporters Sept. 13, in which both Goldberg and Sweig sought to clarify the situation, Goldberg reiterated Castro's reply to the quote and to the article not as a misquote but as a misinterpretation. "He said that the quote was correct," Goldberg said, "but he said the meaning was the opposite of what I took it to be."
"I don't know how you can interpret [the quote] as its opposite," Goldberg said in defense of his reporting. Goldberg went on to note that Castro has said similar things before and that important changes have already taken place in Cuba, facts which caused him to be surprised at Fidel's response to his article.
Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, added that Castro's "clarification was intended to signal to certain domestic constituents that although, it's not even an open secret, it's common knowledge, widely discussed, in terms of how they're going to fix the model and where they're going to go in terms of economic liberalization, what he wanted to say is that although we're changing our model, that doesn't mean that we're importing U.S.-style capitalism."
More on this a little later...
After Fidel Castro stirred up some controversy last week with an offhand comment he made to The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Coldberg about ineffectiveness of Cuba's socialist "model," Goldberg thinks the former Cuban president may have sought to alleviate some controversy within Cuba's leading institutions by "walking back" his comment.
During a several hours long interview over the course of three days in Havana, Goldberg asked Fidel Castro about Cuba's economy in the context of a larger discussion of Latin America and trade. In a manner that Goldberg described as almost a "throw away remark," Castro said, "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."
Adopting a literal interpretation of the remark and borrowing insights from his friend Julia Sweig, an expert on Cuba with the Council on Foreign Relations, who traveled with him and listened to the conversation, Goldberg interpreted the president's comments as suggesting the need for big changes in Cuba's political and economic system, changes that have been underway for several years now. In his original post, Goldberg went on to describe some of those changes and even hinted at the silliness of the ongoing U.S. policy toward Cuba as "hypocritical" and "stupidly self-defeating."
After publishing these remarks at The Atlantic's website, President Castro wrote in one of his "Reflections" that Goldberg had dramatically misinterpreted his comment, though insisting that he had been quoted accurately and praising Goldberg's skills and professionalism.
In a teleconference with reporters Sept. 13, in which both Goldberg and Sweig sought to clarify the situation, Goldberg reiterated Castro's reply to the quote and to the article not as a misquote but as a misinterpretation. "He said that the quote was correct," Goldberg said, "but he said the meaning was the opposite of what I took it to be."
"I don't know how you can interpret [the quote] as its opposite," Goldberg said in defense of his reporting. Goldberg went on to note that Castro has said similar things before and that important changes have already taken place in Cuba, facts which caused him to be surprised at Fidel's response to his article.
Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, added that Castro's "clarification was intended to signal to certain domestic constituents that although, it's not even an open secret, it's common knowledge, widely discussed, in terms of how they're going to fix the model and where they're going to go in terms of economic liberalization, what he wanted to say is that although we're changing our model, that doesn't mean that we're importing U.S.-style capitalism."
More on this a little later...
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Secret World of the Chinese Communist Party?
Thomas Riggins
The New York Review of Books for 9-30-10 has an interesting article by Ian Johnson, former Beijing bureau chief for the WSJ, reviewing Richard McGregor's THE PARTY: THE SECRET WORLD OF CHINA'S COMMUNIST RULERS. I don't know how secret it can be if there is a whole book about it.
There are some interesting facts revealed in this review that readers of our sites will find useful. We are told that the CPC is basically the heart and soul of contemporary China and that the views of some, that the party is becoming irrelevant, are dead wrong. Johnson informs us that while many polices of the party are not actually "communist" it is still "Leninist in structure" and its organization and workings "would be recognizable to the leaders of the Russian Revolution." Coming from a WSJ reporter I don't know if this a compliment or not. McGregor's book also shows that despite its "secretive tendencies" the CP "can be usefully analyzed." Maybe the secret world is not really so secret after all.
Johnson says one big misunderstanding about China, and it is a BIG one, is that China "has been privatizing the economy." There is a stock market to be sure and many shares have been sold to investors around the world but "almost all Chinese companies of any size and importance remain in government hands." This is a socialist sine qua non I would think.
This fact is relatively unknown to outside investors due to "ignorant or unethical Western investment banks and lawyers." It seems that ultimate decision making in all really important Chinese companies is made by the Organization Department of the CPC and the NOT the board of directors of the company-- i.e., the party remains "in control of all personnel decisions." CEOs and directors thus dance to the tune of the party.
What about smaller companies, those not belonging to the commanding heights of the economy? Here too "government control still remains pervasive" if less direct. What Johnson means is that "the manager is often a former official or close to Party circles." Johnson is wrong to call this "government control" since even he admits "that these companies are run as the manager sees fit." What he really means is that there is a climate of shared values and aspirations between middle management and the party.
The party also has control of the government as the party, through the medium of "leading small groups" of experts and senior party leaders that have been set up to advise each of the ministries. These groups exist from the top "down to the grass roots." Westerners object to this system, especially in the legal system because judges are not independent and merely "translate court decisions made by Communist Party legal affairs committees into rulings." This objection is based on the Western notion that the only free and democratic organization of government has to be based on bourgeois notions of democracy and any other notions of democracy, especially socialist or people's democracy is bogus. This overlooks the fact that most bourgeois democracies are themselves bogus.
While many Western "experts" on China write off the CPC in the long term, Johnson shares the view that "the West has consistently underestimated the Party's ability to adapt and thus might be excessively negative about its future."
Johnson has some criticisms of his own but they seem to be motivated by his WSJ background. He thinks China needs more reform efforts and while he says "reforms haven't quite ground to a halt" nevertheless the state sector is making a comeback because the CPC has a policy "of recentralizing control." But this is what you would expect a socialist state to do.
He also faults Chinese foreign policy for being concerned with only two "narrow concerns." The first is territorial (Tibet and Taiwan) and the second is "resource extraction in Africa and Central America." Well the first is a concern with the territorial integrity of the country, which is actually being threatened, and is hardly a "narrow concern." Nor is the second, which deals with China's relation to the Third World and its trade policies. By all accounts most African and Central American countries have had better and fairer deals with the Chinese than with the West. Johnson doesn't even mention the CPC's push to increase the unionization of its workforce, which is in complete harmony with socialist principles.
All in all this is an interesting article which should be read by anyone interested in contemporary China and certainly by anyone contemplating buying and reading Richard McGregor's THE PARTY.
The New York Review of Books for 9-30-10 has an interesting article by Ian Johnson, former Beijing bureau chief for the WSJ, reviewing Richard McGregor's THE PARTY: THE SECRET WORLD OF CHINA'S COMMUNIST RULERS. I don't know how secret it can be if there is a whole book about it.
There are some interesting facts revealed in this review that readers of our sites will find useful. We are told that the CPC is basically the heart and soul of contemporary China and that the views of some, that the party is becoming irrelevant, are dead wrong. Johnson informs us that while many polices of the party are not actually "communist" it is still "Leninist in structure" and its organization and workings "would be recognizable to the leaders of the Russian Revolution." Coming from a WSJ reporter I don't know if this a compliment or not. McGregor's book also shows that despite its "secretive tendencies" the CP "can be usefully analyzed." Maybe the secret world is not really so secret after all.
Johnson says one big misunderstanding about China, and it is a BIG one, is that China "has been privatizing the economy." There is a stock market to be sure and many shares have been sold to investors around the world but "almost all Chinese companies of any size and importance remain in government hands." This is a socialist sine qua non I would think.
This fact is relatively unknown to outside investors due to "ignorant or unethical Western investment banks and lawyers." It seems that ultimate decision making in all really important Chinese companies is made by the Organization Department of the CPC and the NOT the board of directors of the company-- i.e., the party remains "in control of all personnel decisions." CEOs and directors thus dance to the tune of the party.
What about smaller companies, those not belonging to the commanding heights of the economy? Here too "government control still remains pervasive" if less direct. What Johnson means is that "the manager is often a former official or close to Party circles." Johnson is wrong to call this "government control" since even he admits "that these companies are run as the manager sees fit." What he really means is that there is a climate of shared values and aspirations between middle management and the party.
The party also has control of the government as the party, through the medium of "leading small groups" of experts and senior party leaders that have been set up to advise each of the ministries. These groups exist from the top "down to the grass roots." Westerners object to this system, especially in the legal system because judges are not independent and merely "translate court decisions made by Communist Party legal affairs committees into rulings." This objection is based on the Western notion that the only free and democratic organization of government has to be based on bourgeois notions of democracy and any other notions of democracy, especially socialist or people's democracy is bogus. This overlooks the fact that most bourgeois democracies are themselves bogus.
While many Western "experts" on China write off the CPC in the long term, Johnson shares the view that "the West has consistently underestimated the Party's ability to adapt and thus might be excessively negative about its future."
Johnson has some criticisms of his own but they seem to be motivated by his WSJ background. He thinks China needs more reform efforts and while he says "reforms haven't quite ground to a halt" nevertheless the state sector is making a comeback because the CPC has a policy "of recentralizing control." But this is what you would expect a socialist state to do.
He also faults Chinese foreign policy for being concerned with only two "narrow concerns." The first is territorial (Tibet and Taiwan) and the second is "resource extraction in Africa and Central America." Well the first is a concern with the territorial integrity of the country, which is actually being threatened, and is hardly a "narrow concern." Nor is the second, which deals with China's relation to the Third World and its trade policies. By all accounts most African and Central American countries have had better and fairer deals with the Chinese than with the West. Johnson doesn't even mention the CPC's push to increase the unionization of its workforce, which is in complete harmony with socialist principles.
All in all this is an interesting article which should be read by anyone interested in contemporary China and certainly by anyone contemplating buying and reading Richard McGregor's THE PARTY.
E. coli might give us the right kind of gas, say scientists
This new post at ScienceDaily.com shows how scientists are working on changing the genetic structure of the malevolent bacteria E. coli "to produce biodiesel fuel derived from fatty acids."
Desmond Lun, an associate professor of computer science at Rutgers University-Camden, is researching how to alter the genetic makeup of E. coli to produce biodiesel fuel derived from fatty acids.
"If we can engineer biological organisms to produce biodiesel fuels, we'll have a new way of storing and using energy," Lun says.
Creating renewable energy by making fuels, like making ethanol out of corn, has been a common practice in trying to achieve sustainability.
However, Lun says, "It's widely acknowledged that making fuel out of food sources is not very sustainable. It's too expensive and it competes with our food sources."
One alternative is to modify the E. coli microorganism to make it overproduce fatty acids, which are used to make biodiesel.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Some Questions and Answers About the September 11 attacks
by Norman Markowitz
This is ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I have written about the attacks before, from the immediate aftermath on, on many occasions. These are some questions and possible answers that I think are of special importance for our readers as we try to use Marxism as a tool of analysis to relate the past to the present.
Question 1. Why did the Carter, Reagan and Bush I administrations enter into and then escalate the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which led directly to the formation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban?
Answer: At first Carter's advisors saw the war as a way to give the Soviets "their Vietnam; Reagan saw it as first a way to extend his policy of strengthening U.S. support for rightwing regimes through the world from South Africa and El Salvador to Pakistan and fighting low intensity wars, using groups like the Afghan mujahadeen and Nicaraguan contras as pawns in what was a recycling of classic imperialist policy. Bush I went beyond Reagan's settlement with Gorbachev, which was a victory for the anti-Communist forces with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to bring first brutal warlords and then the barbaric Taliban to power as an expression to everyone that the U.S. had the power to do what it wished anywhere, now that the Soviet Union was destroyed.
Question 2--why didn't the Commission investigating the 9/11 attack deal with the whole history of the CIA and its Pakistani underlings involvement with the individuals and forces that created Al Qaeda.
Answer. They could not have done that in any way without exposing to tens of millions of Americans both the purposes and policies of imperialism.
Question 3: Why didn't the U.S government use its power against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when it was harboring bin laden and Al Qaeda, which had already launched attacks against the U.S, and its allies?
Answer: Afghanistan became very important for U.S. corporations as a route for an oil and gas pipeline that would skirt Russian and Iranian territory and permit U.S. based corporations to defeat their competitors in the battle to control the oil and gas of what were former Soviet Republics. The U.S did nothing to dissuade its Pakistani and Saudi "allies" from continuing to support the Taliban regime.
Question: why didn't the CIA and other U.S. military/police institutions take the Al Qaeda seriously after its early attacks?
Answer: All U.S. military/policy institutions were organized after WWII to fight socialist/communist/anti-imperialist movements and in effect to use groups like Al Qaeda as pawns in that struggle. Also, it is likely that the Saudi Regime and the Pakistani military and intelligence services, filled with backers of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, were able to manipulate their longtime U.S. colleagues into what was a policy of disinterest?
Question: Why were the hijackers able to move freely through the U.S. take flight courses without even returning to learn how to land the plane, and carry out their attacks?
Answer: They came mostly from Saudi Arabia and other "allies" of the U.S., not from Iran or Iraq. Two decades of deregulation and the fact that they had all the money that they needed enabled them to buy everything that needed. In that sense they were not only blowback from the Afghan war, the Frankenstein monster created by Reagan policies, but also blowback from the "greed is good" open everything up to those with capital policy of the Reagan and subsequent eras?
Question: Why were members of the bin laden family given red carpet treatment while so many innocent people of Muslim faith were arrested in guilt by association responses?
Answer: The bin ladens are a big capitalist family, with the largest private fortune in the region as of 2001 and longterm connections with U.S. corporations, banks, brokerage houses, and the Bush family and its Texas allies?
Question:Why wasn't the disastrous immediate response of the Bush administration--in effect to protect itself by hiding rather than provide leadership--and the failure of the most expensive military in human history to shoot down the second suicide plan over New York or the plane that hit the Pentagon or the plane that would have tried to hit the White House had its heroic passengers not given their lives to bring it down--not seriously discussed.
Answer: See answer to Question 2 and ask yourself whose class interests media represents and how it, as Michael Parenti once wrote, "invents reality."
Patriotism is love of what is positive in a country, a civilization, not its ruling class or its state apparatus. Patriotism cannot really flower when fear and the herd mentality prevail.
This is ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I have written about the attacks before, from the immediate aftermath on, on many occasions. These are some questions and possible answers that I think are of special importance for our readers as we try to use Marxism as a tool of analysis to relate the past to the present.
Question 1. Why did the Carter, Reagan and Bush I administrations enter into and then escalate the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which led directly to the formation of Al Qaeda and the Taliban?
Answer: At first Carter's advisors saw the war as a way to give the Soviets "their Vietnam; Reagan saw it as first a way to extend his policy of strengthening U.S. support for rightwing regimes through the world from South Africa and El Salvador to Pakistan and fighting low intensity wars, using groups like the Afghan mujahadeen and Nicaraguan contras as pawns in what was a recycling of classic imperialist policy. Bush I went beyond Reagan's settlement with Gorbachev, which was a victory for the anti-Communist forces with the collapse of the Soviet Union, to bring first brutal warlords and then the barbaric Taliban to power as an expression to everyone that the U.S. had the power to do what it wished anywhere, now that the Soviet Union was destroyed.
Question 2--why didn't the Commission investigating the 9/11 attack deal with the whole history of the CIA and its Pakistani underlings involvement with the individuals and forces that created Al Qaeda.
Answer. They could not have done that in any way without exposing to tens of millions of Americans both the purposes and policies of imperialism.
Question 3: Why didn't the U.S government use its power against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan when it was harboring bin laden and Al Qaeda, which had already launched attacks against the U.S, and its allies?
Answer: Afghanistan became very important for U.S. corporations as a route for an oil and gas pipeline that would skirt Russian and Iranian territory and permit U.S. based corporations to defeat their competitors in the battle to control the oil and gas of what were former Soviet Republics. The U.S did nothing to dissuade its Pakistani and Saudi "allies" from continuing to support the Taliban regime.
Question: why didn't the CIA and other U.S. military/police institutions take the Al Qaeda seriously after its early attacks?
Answer: All U.S. military/policy institutions were organized after WWII to fight socialist/communist/anti-imperialist movements and in effect to use groups like Al Qaeda as pawns in that struggle. Also, it is likely that the Saudi Regime and the Pakistani military and intelligence services, filled with backers of both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, were able to manipulate their longtime U.S. colleagues into what was a policy of disinterest?
Question: Why were the hijackers able to move freely through the U.S. take flight courses without even returning to learn how to land the plane, and carry out their attacks?
Answer: They came mostly from Saudi Arabia and other "allies" of the U.S., not from Iran or Iraq. Two decades of deregulation and the fact that they had all the money that they needed enabled them to buy everything that needed. In that sense they were not only blowback from the Afghan war, the Frankenstein monster created by Reagan policies, but also blowback from the "greed is good" open everything up to those with capital policy of the Reagan and subsequent eras?
Question: Why were members of the bin laden family given red carpet treatment while so many innocent people of Muslim faith were arrested in guilt by association responses?
Answer: The bin ladens are a big capitalist family, with the largest private fortune in the region as of 2001 and longterm connections with U.S. corporations, banks, brokerage houses, and the Bush family and its Texas allies?
Question:Why wasn't the disastrous immediate response of the Bush administration--in effect to protect itself by hiding rather than provide leadership--and the failure of the most expensive military in human history to shoot down the second suicide plan over New York or the plane that hit the Pentagon or the plane that would have tried to hit the White House had its heroic passengers not given their lives to bring it down--not seriously discussed.
Answer: See answer to Question 2 and ask yourself whose class interests media represents and how it, as Michael Parenti once wrote, "invents reality."
Patriotism is love of what is positive in a country, a civilization, not its ruling class or its state apparatus. Patriotism cannot really flower when fear and the herd mentality prevail.
The importance of the Steelworkers' recent steps
by Joel Wendland
The United Steelworkers this week filed a petition with the US Trade Representative "identifying a broad array of Chinese policies and practices that threaten the future of America’s alternative and renewable energy sector."
According to a USW statement:
See the full complaint here.
In a statement, Sept. 10, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka expressed support for the USW petition:
These charges, in addition to an ongoing campaign by the U.S. labor movement generally for new approaches to how China values its currency, came on the heels of an historic agreement in August between the USW and two Chinese-based companies to build wind farms in Texas using components made by unionized workers in America:
My two cents, for what they're worth:
I strongly support Leo Gerard recent discussions of the issue of "economic patriotism" and it is clear that reaching the agreement with Chinese companies to create clean energy jobs here is huge and important thing. Both American workers and these companies will reap big rewards.
Some will say the USW petition goes too far because it targets China as a sort of economic enemy of the U.S., and that the rhetoric in the USW statement about the Chinese trying to "control" the clean energy industry is over-heated.
And they would have a point. U.S. global dominance – through economic, political, but mostly violent military pressure – of traditional dirty energy, like oil has forced developing economies like China's (and India's) have to seek alternatives. It seems only natural – not particularly greedy or power hungry as implied in some possible interpretations of the language of the USW statement – that China would try to develop its clean energy sector as swiftly as possible. And it is the nature of capitalism that cutthroat competition will benefit some at the expense of others.
Overheated rhetoric about other countries can often turn into waves of hate when used demagogically. One need only look at the carefully crafted Islamphobia generated by right-wing media and Republican Party officials over the past few months for an example.
I am convinced that neither USW leaders nor labor movement leaders generally would use the issue demagogically to inspire hate, but right-wing political leaders and pundits do and will and may co-opt the kind of rhetoric in the USW to further their own divisive causes.
Beyond this issue, however, another important consideration is that this petition, as well as the push for new currency values, is not primarily aimed at China-as-enemy. USW has no direct power to make U.S. policy with China or to impose rules on that country.
The petition is aimed at forcing the U.S. government to restructure its relationship with China, as evidenced by the statement's implied referral to the tricky position the step puts the Obama administration in.
The petition pressures the U.S. government to adopt an even more serious position with regard to developing the clean energy industry here (and as has been pointed elsewhere the Obama administration's efforts in this regard have been far more serious than any previous presidency).
Often, for those of us who favor dramatic changes in energy policy in order to address global climate change, the "global" part causes us to abstract the issue from the very specific needs of local communities. For example, some denounce developing economies for not moving fast enough to adopt clean energy alternatives, when of course those countries have few options. Others will also denounce developing countries for taking steps to protect themselves from bigger and more aggressive economies like the U.S. And still others will ignore the very special and very real needs of workers even in the developed economies for jobs when capital has organized their communities to be overly dependent on a single economic resource, like coal, for example, in West Virginia.
In this case, the Steelworkers are trying to address the specific needs of the members of the union and workers in the sector it seeks to organize. That is for new job creation. And the union is doing this in a responsible way: 1) it seeks to build itself by creating political pressure to develop a domestic clean energy sector that helps the U.S. as a whole shift from dirty energy to energy usage with a smaller carbon footprint 2) it has taking a number of very important steps to build positive and meaningful international relationships, only one of which was described above.
I think the ball is the Obama administration's court. It may not be in a position to demand much from China as that country holds some $843 billion in U.S. debt instruments. One important step for the U.S. to change this imbalance, however, is to develop its own exporting sector, i.e. building a manufacturing, clean energy or otherwise, that exports goods; not the current dynamic in which manufactures export themselves seeking countries with lower wages and benefits in order to make higher profits.
Some important alternatives to current U.S.-China policy:
1) reduce military-related tensions with China
2) create conditions for more cooperative energy projects between entities from the two countries
3) open serious negotiations over currency issues that highlight the specific needs of each country and seek mutually beneficial compromises
Alternatives to domestic policy that may impact U.S.-China policy:
1) Fight for and win new infrastructure investments in domestic clean energy manufacturing
2) Seek to create rules and guidelines for these investments to benefit companies that keep the work in the U.S.
3) Close existing tax loopholes that benefit companies looking to make an easy buck elsewhere
4) Swing the political/economic pendulum much further away from dirty energy
Any other ideas?
The United Steelworkers this week filed a petition with the US Trade Representative "identifying a broad array of Chinese policies and practices that threaten the future of America’s alternative and renewable energy sector."
According to a USW statement:
The 5,800-page submission identifies five major areas of protectionist and predatory practices utilized by the Chinese to develop their green sector at the expense of production and job creation here in the U.S. Under the law, the Obama Administration has 45 days from the date of filing to determine whether to accept the petition for further action. This will put the Administration’s decision date on or before Oct. 24.
“Green jobs are key to our future,” said Leo W. Gerard, International President of the USW. “Right now, China is taking every possible step – many of them illegal under international trade laws – to ensure that it will control that sector. America can’t afford to cede more of its manufacturing base to China.
“It’s a national priority to reduce our dependence on foreign energy supplies. But if all we do is exchange our dependence on foreign oil for a dependence on Chinese alternative and renewable energy production equipment, we will have traded away our nation’s energy, economic and job security.”
See the full complaint here.
In a statement, Sept. 10, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka expressed support for the USW petition:
It is time for the U.S. government to put an end to the unfair trade practices by countries like China that undermine the push for good jobs and clean energy investment. The AFL-CIO applauds the action by the United Steelworkers in filing a comprehensive clean energy trade case against the Chinese government. The predatory trade practices of the Chinese government have consistently violated the rules they promised to follow upon joining the World Trade Organization. Their actions have directly led to massive outsourcing and unrelenting trade deficits that have cost millions of American workers their jobs.
These charges, in addition to an ongoing campaign by the U.S. labor movement generally for new approaches to how China values its currency, came on the heels of an historic agreement in August between the USW and two Chinese-based companies to build wind farms in Texas using components made by unionized workers in America:
Last week the United Steelworkers union (USW) announced important agreements with two Chinese clean energy companies. The Chinese companies, A-Power Energy Generation Systems Ltd. and Shenyang Power Group, are world leaders in clean power generation.
The historic agreement states that the "USW will guide and work collaboratively on all aspects of the companies' U.S. market strategies including manufacturing, assembly, component sourcing, distribution and wind energy project development."
The agreement involves building one of the largest U.S. wind farms ever, in Texas. The steelworkers estimate that the massive 650 megawatt wind farm will use 50,000 tons of steel, to be made in the U.S.
The extraordinary agreement insures a large percentage of the wind farm components will be made by union workers in America. Under the agreement the Chinese companies will build a state of the art wind turbine plant in Nevada with an ongoing domestic supply chain. And further, the agreement includes the promise of company neutrality in union organizing drives connected to the project.
"We will work with A-Power and SPG to create long-term, good-paying, green American jobs," said USW International President Leo Gerard. "The USW is committed to building a strong domestic supply chain that will be key to the future of America's global renewable energy leadership."
My two cents, for what they're worth:
I strongly support Leo Gerard recent discussions of the issue of "economic patriotism" and it is clear that reaching the agreement with Chinese companies to create clean energy jobs here is huge and important thing. Both American workers and these companies will reap big rewards.
Some will say the USW petition goes too far because it targets China as a sort of economic enemy of the U.S., and that the rhetoric in the USW statement about the Chinese trying to "control" the clean energy industry is over-heated.
And they would have a point. U.S. global dominance – through economic, political, but mostly violent military pressure – of traditional dirty energy, like oil has forced developing economies like China's (and India's) have to seek alternatives. It seems only natural – not particularly greedy or power hungry as implied in some possible interpretations of the language of the USW statement – that China would try to develop its clean energy sector as swiftly as possible. And it is the nature of capitalism that cutthroat competition will benefit some at the expense of others.
Overheated rhetoric about other countries can often turn into waves of hate when used demagogically. One need only look at the carefully crafted Islamphobia generated by right-wing media and Republican Party officials over the past few months for an example.
I am convinced that neither USW leaders nor labor movement leaders generally would use the issue demagogically to inspire hate, but right-wing political leaders and pundits do and will and may co-opt the kind of rhetoric in the USW to further their own divisive causes.
Beyond this issue, however, another important consideration is that this petition, as well as the push for new currency values, is not primarily aimed at China-as-enemy. USW has no direct power to make U.S. policy with China or to impose rules on that country.
The petition is aimed at forcing the U.S. government to restructure its relationship with China, as evidenced by the statement's implied referral to the tricky position the step puts the Obama administration in.
The petition pressures the U.S. government to adopt an even more serious position with regard to developing the clean energy industry here (and as has been pointed elsewhere the Obama administration's efforts in this regard have been far more serious than any previous presidency).
Often, for those of us who favor dramatic changes in energy policy in order to address global climate change, the "global" part causes us to abstract the issue from the very specific needs of local communities. For example, some denounce developing economies for not moving fast enough to adopt clean energy alternatives, when of course those countries have few options. Others will also denounce developing countries for taking steps to protect themselves from bigger and more aggressive economies like the U.S. And still others will ignore the very special and very real needs of workers even in the developed economies for jobs when capital has organized their communities to be overly dependent on a single economic resource, like coal, for example, in West Virginia.
In this case, the Steelworkers are trying to address the specific needs of the members of the union and workers in the sector it seeks to organize. That is for new job creation. And the union is doing this in a responsible way: 1) it seeks to build itself by creating political pressure to develop a domestic clean energy sector that helps the U.S. as a whole shift from dirty energy to energy usage with a smaller carbon footprint 2) it has taking a number of very important steps to build positive and meaningful international relationships, only one of which was described above.
I think the ball is the Obama administration's court. It may not be in a position to demand much from China as that country holds some $843 billion in U.S. debt instruments. One important step for the U.S. to change this imbalance, however, is to develop its own exporting sector, i.e. building a manufacturing, clean energy or otherwise, that exports goods; not the current dynamic in which manufactures export themselves seeking countries with lower wages and benefits in order to make higher profits.
Some important alternatives to current U.S.-China policy:
1) reduce military-related tensions with China
2) create conditions for more cooperative energy projects between entities from the two countries
3) open serious negotiations over currency issues that highlight the specific needs of each country and seek mutually beneficial compromises
Alternatives to domestic policy that may impact U.S.-China policy:
1) Fight for and win new infrastructure investments in domestic clean energy manufacturing
2) Seek to create rules and guidelines for these investments to benefit companies that keep the work in the U.S.
3) Close existing tax loopholes that benefit companies looking to make an easy buck elsewhere
4) Swing the political/economic pendulum much further away from dirty energy
Any other ideas?
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