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Incipient Fascist State |
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Friday, 31 December 2010 18:10 |
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Intro: "Anyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) 'no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,' turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making 'anti-American comments.'"
American flag behind barbed wire, and all that implies, 06/15/09. (photo: Public domain)
Incipient Fascist State
By Paul Craig Roberts, Reader Supported News
31 December 10
 nyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."
The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: "you are with us or against us."
Bush's words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government's respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:
"No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary.... Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment."
The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse "and sometimes even anger public opinion."
In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers:
"I'm not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed."
The America of Kennedy's day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to. If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.
President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that "it is to the printing press, the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent." Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?
Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.
Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush's "we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here."
No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel's similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.
Today no one believes that our country's success depends on an informed public and a free press. America's success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people's god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.
Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington's assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks' demise, we are cheering for our own.
Paul Craig Roberts [
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of "Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington," "Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy," and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of "The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice." Click here for Peter Brimelow's Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.
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Saving the Senate From Itself |
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Thursday, 30 December 2010 10:47 |
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Rep. Jim McDermott writes: "If the Senate filibuster rules are not changed so that elections again matter and the majority can govern, then our country will be paralyzed by the unrelenting parliamentary manipulation of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his compliant colleagues."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell looks on before the signing of the tax bill in Washington, DC, 12/17/10. (photo: Getty Images)
Saving the Senate From Itself
By Rep. Jim McDermott, Reader Supported News
30 December 10
 his month's tax deal starkly illustrates the enormous power wielded by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In fact, his role confirms our government is not operating as a democracy ruled by the will of the majority, but as a strangled entity tightly in the grasp of the Senate Republican minority and its take-no-prisoners minority leader.
For the last 23 months, this country has been stymied by Senator McConnell and his cohorts through their abuse of the filibuster in the United States Senate. The most recent tax bill enactment and the failure of the Omnibus appropriations act (which finances the costs of running the government) are just hints of what we can expect in the next two years if the rules of governing do not change.
For the last two years the House of Representatives has passed legislation addressing a range of issues, and sent it to the United States Senate for consideration. Rather than honestly arguing those bills in the Senate, Senator McConnell and his fellow Republicans repeatedly have prevented debate and votes on any measure they oppose or on any measure that might be perceived as politically positive for the president - even if the legislation was originally proposed by Republicans. So, for two years, the Congress has been ruled by the Senate Republican minority. The United States government is no longer functioning on principles of majority rule, and this is entirely due to flagrant abuse of Senate rules.
The Senate is a deliberative body, and its minority members certainly should have a voice in the development of legislation. But Senator McConnell's use of the filibuster - to block consideration of all manner of legislation - is a cynical distortion of a long-established Senate procedure. Senate rules should not be twisted to prevent Congress passing laws which the elected majority deems necessary and appropriate.
Abuse of the filibuster and its action-stalling 60-vote threshold has resulted in a fundamentally corrosive fact that undercuts basic democratic principles: abusing the filibuster means that elections do not really matter. Senator McConnell does not use the filibuster to give the minority a voice, but instead to shut down the Senate - to stop deliberation, to stop the advance of legislation, to make sure elections don't have consequences. The American people elected a strong majority of Democrats in 2008 to both the Senate and the House of Representatives, but Senator McConnell's abuse of the filibuster repeatedly has frustrated the will of the people reflected by that election.
Recently, Senator McConnell announced that his sole objective is to prevent the reelection of President Barack Obama in 2012, and that his abuse of the filibuster in the last two years was just a warm-up. The next two years are going to be even more undemocratic. Republicans have announced that "compromise" is not in their vocabulary. Compromise is UnRepublican. So, finding solutions to the confounding problems the country faces - restoring our tattered social safety net, reforming our tax system so it is fair, helping the private sector remake the economy for the 21st century, safeguarding our fragile environment - will grind to a halt until every demand of Senator McConnell and the Republican minority of the United States Senate is satisfied.
Fortunately, this grim scenario does not have to happen. The situation is not hopeless. Contrary to common misunderstanding, today's Senate rules were not written in 1789 and they are not immutable. The current rules governing the procedures of the Senate were adopted in the 1970s. Many also believe Senate rules can be changed only with a super majority (67 of 100 Senators) voting for change - this, too, is false.
Senate rules can be changed, and several senators presently are working hard to modify them to overcome the vice-grip of the filibuster. On the first day of the new 112th Congress, January 5th, 2011, a senator may propose to change the filibuster rule. The vice president of the United States, the presiding officer of the U.S. Senate, may determine that Senate rules may be changed by a simple majority vote of the Senate. Appeal of any ruling by the presiding officer may be subject to a simple majority vote.
If the Senate filibuster rules are not changed so that elections again matter and the majority can govern, then our country will be paralyzed by the unrelenting parliamentary manipulation of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his compliant colleagues. Enough is enough. It is time to change the rules to allow the Senate to function as the great deliberative, and decisive, body it can be.
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Will the Commons Become Tragic? |
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Tuesday, 28 December 2010 10:37 |
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Gary Hart writes: "Every man for himself would be a (more or less) rational approach to life ... if men and women were merely economic creatures. But there is also such a thing as moral man. And it is moral man (and woman) who confront the necessity of protecting the commons and preventing a tragedy brought on by greed."
Roughly 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to clean water. (photo: getinvolved.ca)
Will the Commons Become Tragic?
By Sen. Gary Hart, Reader Supported News
28 December 10
 t is quite possible that the greatest human challenge in this century will be how or whether we humans can fairly share what belongs to all. Aristotle stated the issue: "... what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest." Garrett Hardin summarized this issue for the present age: "Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons."
Our economic system is built on the proposition that markets allocate resources best. But what is true of private resources may not also be true of public resources, those we hold in common. The conservative response to this is, of course, privatize all public resources. 20 years ago this was accomplished in Russia, and about a dozen and a half oligarchs ended up with most of the public assets.
In the industrial age we let private interests allocate our most precious public resources, our air and water, and we see how that worked out. In this century we are now competing with the rest of the world as to how and whether together we can prevent carbonization of our very climate from fundamentally altering life on earth.
Every man for himself would be a (more or less) rational approach to life ... if men and women were merely economic creatures. But there is also such a thing as moral man. And it is moral man (and woman) who confront the necessity of protecting the commons and preventing a tragedy brought on by greed.
We will either learn to live together and protect and preserve our common resources or our children and future generations - with the exception of the very wealthy - will have to learn how to perish separately. And the prospect of a world of all against all may not even prove to be that attractive to the children of the very wealthy.
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The National Image and Its Contradictions |
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Monday, 27 December 2010 11:02 |
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Lawrence Davidson writes: "Benjamin Disraeli once labeled Britain's government 'an organized hypocrisy.' That was circa 1845. Things have not changed much, and by now hypocrisy might well be seen as a common sin of democratic government. This is because in democracies straightforward honesty about behavior that runs counter to the idealized national image is usually bad politics."
Supporters of Ivory Coast opposition leader Alassane Ouattara confront the camera as they protest in the city of Abidjan, 12/04/10. (photo: Schalk van Zuydam/AP)
The National Image and Its Contradictions
By Lawrence Davidson, Reader Supported News
27 December 10
Reader Supported News | Perspective
 art One: What Is the Problem?
Benjamin Disraeli once labeled Britain's government "an organized hypocrisy." That was circa 1845. Things have not changed much, and by now hypocrisy might well be seen as a common sin of democratic government. This is because in democracies straightforward honesty about behavior that runs counter to the idealized national image is usually bad politics. Among today's democracies none proves this point more than the United States. The United States, like Great Britain in the 19th century, simultaneously acts like an imperial power and cultivates a national image as the world's prime purveyor of good government, stability and progress. However, history has taught us that a nation cannot be both of these things at once. So the folks in Washington have created for themselves an environment wherein principle and consistency are impossible. Take, for instance, the following:
1. A stolen election in the Ivory Coast has resulted in active disapproval on the part of the US government. After all, this is not good government. President Obama slapped sanctions on the fellows who stole the vote and urged the United Nations to send more troops (some 9,000 are already in the country) to set things right. On the other hand, the November parliamentary elections in Egypt (presently a US ally) were an outright farce. The opposition was banned, jailed and otherwise intimidated. Not at all good government. And Washington's response? Nada (nothing). If you claim to be the prime purveyor of democracy in the world, are you not supposed to be consistent?
2. Then there is the yet unproven Iranian nuclear weapons program. According to studies done by US intelligence this program is a myth. Nonetheless, Israeli paranoia has stirred up US Congressional passions. Iran is now proclaimed a destabilizing rogue nation. The United States has proceeded to apply one package of sanctions after another on Teheran. There are actually men and women among our elected officials (obviously more swayed by the whisperings of Zionist lobbyists than by US intelligence reports) who are quite willing to go to war over this unsubstantiated threat. Considering the cost and horror of such action, I think that they, regardless of age or sex, should be in the front combat lines of any conflict resulting from their misplaced enthusiasm. Not to be undone in this effort, European Union countries also seek to put pressure on Iran to stop something that is not happening.
On the other hand, there is Israel (America's "strategic" ally), the source of much of this mania. That country is in violation of international law in ways that Tehran could never match. Its expansionist policies are the main destabilizing force in the entire Middle East. It is religiously devoted to the ethnic cleansing of an entire people while claiming that it is civilized and "Western." And, Israel has 200 or more nuclear warheads, the missile systems to deliver them, and a leadership whose reckless disregard for world peace makes Ahmadinejad look like a model of sanity. If the United States seeks stability in the Middle East so that region may be a reliable source of oil, should it not be concerned with Israel as well as Iran? So, what does Washington have to say about the loaded warheads in Israel? Nada. And the EU, well, they plan to admit Israel into the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
3. Latin America has always been an arena wherein the US preaches good government and development. But on the ground hypocrisy rules. Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador are or were hounded by one American administration after another because their leftist governments were, by definition, bad governments. Simultaneously, the same administrations backed the murderers and torturers who once passed for political leaders in places like Argentina and Chile. Washington also backed the Contras and called these violators of human rights "freedom fighters." It has gotten to the point where the number of people living south of the Rio Grande who now trust the US government is dwindling fast. And some of those who still do so also cheer the South and Central American death squads funded by various American corporations and trained by the US military's infamous School of the Americans in Georgia. What does Washington have to say about this skewed situation? Nada.
These are just a few examples of the contradictions that beset the idealized US national image. As the skepticism that can be found in Latin America, and now the Middle East too, suggests, belief in this America really stops at the its borders. Beyond that point the ideal image is increasingly seen as masking a form of aggressive narcissism. Yet inside the borders, most are still true believers. Our national self-image dominates to the point that we can apply Andre Gide's adage, "The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity." I think many of our politicians fall into this category.
Part Two: Why Is It So?
Why are things this way? Well, as mentioned above, believing in a national image that is unhinged from reality has something to do with it. American politicians know that identifying yourself with the idealized US (democracy, stability, progress, etc.) is a winning political formula. But how do you bury the contradictions? You either hide your hypocrisy behind a thick cloud of secrecy (a la the WikiLeaks affair) or you obscure your double standards with mass propaganda. Washington uses both strategies. If you pursue these strategies long enough and consistently enough you build yourself a "thought collective" - groupthink on a national level. Within the thought collective self-deception and rationalization become high arts, and soon both the leaders and the followers no longer notice the underlying hypocrisy. It also helps that most of the public is indifferent toward the world beyond their local sphere. Indifference results in ignorance and the void left by ignorance is readily filled with manipulative misinformation. Nor do the indifferent care about government secrecy on subjects that appear to have no relevance to their daily lives.
To make all this a bit clearer, think about your own experiences. When you act in the world things usually work out if the ideas and beliefs in your head match well with the reality outside you. However, when those ideas and beliefs do not match up with outside reality, things almost never go well. Indeed, at such times you can walk right off a cliff. America's idealized national image, along with all the spin coming from its powerful political and media elites, constitutes a good part of the notions floating around the collective "US head." Over the last fifty years or more those notions have become ever more detached from reality. Viet Nam, Iraq and the September 11th attacks were all symptoms of this growing fact. Much of the rest of the world can see this, but rather than face the grim truth, most Americans are determined to maintain their collective self-image through stubborn self-deception and hypocrisy. And there is no telling how much longer this can go on.
Lawrence Davidson is a professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, and author of the works listed below.
Contributing Editor: Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture
http://www.logosjournal.com
"Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest"
http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Category_ID=I&Group=55&ID=1490
"America's Palestine: Popular and Offical Perceptions From Balfour to Israeli Statehood"
http://www.upf.com/authorbooks.asp?lname=Davidson&fname=Lawrence
"Islamic Fundamentalism"
http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/GR2429.aspx
Keep your eye on the language: When South Africa assigned rights according to race they called it apartheid. When Israel assigns rights according to religion they call it the only democracy in the Middle East.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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emember "freedom fries"? That's what the House Republicans, when they were last in the majority, renamed french fries, after France refused to support the invasion of Iraq. It seems like renaming fries might be just about the extent of food regulation that some in Congress are willing to support.
