Rick Perlstein: Righteous populism holds the key to vanquishing Bush forever: The End of Republican Rule

(Village Voice) How, in this party of the people, do the corporations become the mainstream and the liberals become the insurgents?
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" The Democrats are the party of ideological whiplash. At the Boston Social Forum, a left-wing hootenanny before the national convention, you could find enthusiastic John Kerry voters attending a "hemposium" and hawking "Holy Land Olive Oil" (slogan: Support Palestinian Farmers). And at the palatial Wang Theatre downtown, you could find Democrats who don't think corporations should pay taxes.
It was there that I sipped cocktails with Patty, a securities industries lobbyist who claims to be a Democrat. I asked her about a plank in the platform: "Under John Kerry and John Edwards, 99 percent of American businesses will pay lower taxes." Since 60 percent of American corporations already pay no taxes, I asked, does that mean they'll get free money shoveled back to them from the treasury? She responded by questioning the premise. "I was an econ major in college, so I don't think it's an efficient tax. I think there are better ways to raise revenue."
In the last few decades we've seen a structural shift as tectonic in its way as the sectional crisis that preceded the Civil War. Where in the 30 years or so following World War II, a period of Democratic dominance, the real income of the average American literally doubled—meaning that rural families who once kept outhouses on their property were now able to keep a garage—in the 30 years that followed that same average income stagnated, the amount of individual debt exceeding that of individual savings. It happened coincident with a slow and steady rise in Republican dominance, now nearly complete, as corporations were awarded more and more prerogatives. It's gotten worse. From 2000 to 2002, according to the IRS, the average American income dropped 9.2 percent—and the last time incomes fell in this way for even one year was 1953.
A visionary party of opposition—you might even say a competent party of opposition—would place fixing inequality and stagnating incomes at the center of its political appeal. For all the talk of swing voters, of NASCAR dads and soccer moms, this is the way to beat George Bush—and to recover the Democrats' former status as the ruling party in American politics. Instead, the party invites within its folds securities lobbyists who want to repeal the corporate tax. How do the decisions get made that produce this state of affairs? How, in this party of the people, do the corporations become the mainstream and the liberals become the insurgents? In Boston, I hoped to find some clues.

Mary Rasmussen is the kind of delegate to the Democratic convention who keeps returning to the free T-shirt booth to sign up for a credit card, because she wants to give away shirts to each of the maids back at her hotel. A reading teacher and for 10 years a member of the Democratic National Committee—she calls herself the most "populist" of Wisconsin's four members—she is so emotionally committed to the Democratic party that back when she was an alcoholic, her friends arranged for her intervention to be the day after the 1988 presidential election. "They all knew it was going to be awful, and they knew that I would be hung over and depressed and suicidal." The intervention worked. "So every time there's a presidential election, God willing and the creek don't rise, I can celebrate another four years of sobriety."
Mary is also the kind of loyal soldier some in the Democratic establishment seem to relish stepping on. In 2000 she received a call at school from Terry McAuliffe, the master fundraiser and Clinton operative who was running unopposed for DNC chairman. He wanted to make sure he had her support. "I was less than forthcoming," recalls Mary, "and asked him some question about why I should vote for him. I needed more than that he was a great fundraiser. I needed to know what his vision was. And he couldn't tell me." She told him that her formative moment in politics had come at a time where visionary politics were of utmost importance. "And he laughed! He said, 'Oh, I have an older brother like that.' He was very dismissive. Like, 'Oh, that is so cute.' "
Mary and I run together throughout convention week. Most times she is jovial. Now, she is cutting. "I'm tired of it. I'm tired of being treated by corporate white guys as if my issues are amusing."
We have just repaired from a breakfast meeting of the Wisconsin delegation where John Nichols, the editorial page editor of the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times, told me how frustrated it made a lot of insiders to see Mary—"the last liberal"—accede to the DNC. One of the speakers was Al Franken. Another was an environmentalist who talked about what a bonanza he's yielded organizing voters in four swing states against mercury poisoning in lakes and rivers: Potential voters can't hear enough about this issue.
And a third speaker was an executive from the sponsor of the Wisconsin delegation's sumptuous breakfast, a company called Xcel Energy. As a premium, they gave out fancy water bottles, the kind that retail at camping stores for $10, with their logo on it. Except that these underwriters of Democrats, forgot to remove the sticker at the bottom of each one: "Made in China."
On the elevator, I asked the executive whether there might be at least the appearance of impropriety in a company with business before the government sponsoring one of the government's constituent parties. His shrug suggests a question so odd he had never given it a thought. "It's just a way of giving back to our customers," he finally says.
If you Google "Xcel Energy" and "mercury poisoning," the impropriety becomes less abstract: "In a report titled 'Toxic Neighbors,' a group called Clear the Air said Minnesota's coal-fired power plants dumped 2,300 pounds of mercury into the environment in 2001. More than a third of that, 840 pounds, came from a single plant, Xcel Energy's 1,947-megawatt Sherco facility . . . "

When Mary Rasmussen started getting involved in Democratic politics, her goal was to join the DNC, ostensibly the party's policy-making body—"to be a participant in formulating party goals, party objectives, party strategies," she recalls. "It didn't take long to discover that being there is just part of the window dressing."
Her wake-up call came at the first meeting, at the Michigan resort town of Mackinac Island. She asked a party executive if his kids wanted to join hers to play in the swimming pool. "Well, the look on his face! It was so shriveling: that it was entirely inappropriate. Because, like, he's the executive director of the DNC! And I was just a DNC member!"
She says it with bemusement, not bitterness; she's long past holding on to her illusions. "I envisioned that we would all get together and dialogue," she says, with a laugh—this was, after all, the Age of Clinton, whose White House was bursting over with the intellectual energy of a college seminar room. "But instead, we go, and they give us talking points—and send us out to say those things. We get together to rubber stamp decisions that have been made somewhere else," she says, before correcting herself: "No, not just rubber stamp: We get together to cheer and celebrate those decisions."
What were the decisions? She wanted more populism. She saw more and more corporations. And it wasn't just her idealism speaking. An insistent, consistent, commitment to populism would make for a stellar electoral strategy for beating George Bush, and, four or eight years from now, for beating George Bush's brother, or any Republican. Recently the Democratic consultant Stanley Greenberg published findings that, asked to chose from a list of issues they considered serious, only 30 percent of Americans picked "high taxes" as a problem (77 percent chose health care). "High taxes" are not only the Republicans' signature issue, but a "problem" that Kerry has placed at the center of his campaign as well, promising a tax cut to everyone who makes less than $200,000 a year. Greenberg also found that a large majority of Americans want government to fight income inequality. When he asked focus groups what they thought about "big corporations," he wrote, "They spit out, 'money,' 'greed,' and 'Enron' "—a "revulsion formerly reserved for Hollywood." And this from a predominantly Republican crowd.
The pollster Celinda Lake gave a stunning presentation one afternoon in Boston—though it wasn't the sort of thing the pundits would tend to notice. She provided a statistical portrait of America's 22 million single American women, who are alienated enough to be hugely underrepresented on the voting rolls: If single women voted at the same rate as married ones, there would have been 6 million more voters in 2000—200,000 in Florida alone. Why are they alienated? One reason might be how liberal they are. On every single issue, these voters lean left, especially on economics. Eighty-eight percent worry their incomes might not keep up with rising prices (only 68 percent worry about being the victim of a crime); they are sufficiently environmentalist that only 12 percent are "cool" toward environmental groups. The Democrats, if they stopped talking corporate and spoke to these people's issues, would have won that election, and just about every other one besides.
The speaker after Lake was a young woman who organizes voters from poor rural backgrounds like her own. She drawled out a story about the time she asked a friend out for a beer, who said she couldn't drink because she's still nursing her young toddler.
"Well, how long are you gonna do that?"
"Until it runs out. Because it's free."
Me, when I heard that, I thought of mercury poisoning. Mercury gets into breast milk. My kind of thinking is not about giving conveners of hemposiums more voice in the Democratic party. That's the kind of ostentation that just turns voters off. But tamping down corporations like Xcel, ostentatiously enough so that alienated nonvoters start taking notice, instead of letting them use our party as a branding opportunity (another thing Greenberg found is that voters think both parties are dominated by corporations)—that would only be practical. It is the kind of dare that could turn the Democrats into America's ruling party again.

Some scenes from Boston: Blue-suited thirtysomethings with $100 haircuts stomping around in hotel lobbies, telling the cell phones sprouting from their ears, "I'll keep my ear to the ground." On acceptance-speech night, Alexandra Kerry telling the story about the family's pet hamster, a reporter next to me making a Richard Gere joke; there follow backslaps all around.
Talking heads flap their mouths: about whether and how the Clintons will "overshadow" the nominee; about how (in the absurd, astonishing words of New Republic editor Peter Beinart) "liberalism is on tap virtually every night," stuffing up an activist-run party's "self-congratulatory echo chamber." About how many sentences of his speech John Kerry wrote himself.
This is the audience the convention planners seem to play to. They respond predictably to words like "safer" and "first responder" and "daughter"; a keyword search reveals the phrases showing up 30, eight, and 23 times. Not so much to words having to do with official government malfeasance—which is why, strangely, John Kerry's single greatest achievement as senator, forcing Congress to face up to the Reagan administration's crimes negotiating with Iranian hostage-takers and sending the proceeds to death squads in Central America, was not mentioned at all.
No, this convention was supposed to make us feel good, be relentlessly positive. The theme was unity: national unity, party unity.
Niceness is nice. It makes a body feel good about himself. But it's no strategy with which to win a presidential election. Adlai Stevenson was nice; he lost two presidential elections for the Democrats. Michael Dukakis, Jimmy Carter: They were nice. And look what happened to them.
These days, talking about things like the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is judged not very nice. Fixing it might require breaking some eggs. The pundits would call it "class warfare." So whenever a concession is demanded in the interests of unity, it will be demanded of the party's left wing, never of the corporate types.
Like the time, Tuesday night, one party liberal—this one—returned to find his seat occupied by one of those blue-suited thirtysomethings. I asked him to give it up. He refused. "We gave lots of money to the Democratic Party," he said, and demanded I sit in the aisle. "It would be shameful if I couldn't get a seat."
It was on behalf of all those poor single women who don't vote and who really hold the explosive power for beating George Bush on November 2, 2004, that I refused to give up my seat. "

Dan Falk: The unknown Newton

(Globe & Mail) The genius who gave us three laws of motion wrote even more about the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon. Eventually, all of his work -- about 10 million words -- will be on the Web. DAN FALK reports
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" When we think of Isaac Newton, we usually think of his insight into gravity (remember the falling apple?), or perhaps his work on optics, or his invention of calculus.
Yet if we go by sheer word count, physics was only one of Newton's intellectual priorities. He devoted more time to what we would now regard as non-scientific topics such as theology and alchemy, writing treatise after treatise on early church history and biblical prophecy.
Scholars have long known that Newton dabbled in the occult, but the sheer magnitude of his devotion to such matters has only recently come to light, bolstered by a British-led project trying to put all of his writings -- about 10 million words in all -- on the World Wide Web.
"We think of Newton, obviously, primarily as a scientist," says Stephen Snobelen, a historian of science at King's College in Halifax. "So this awareness that there is this four-million-word corpus of theological texts, and another one million words on alchemy, is quite a revelation for many people."
Prof. Snobelen is the leading Canadian contributor to the Newton Project, which is based at Imperial College, London, and also involves researchers at Cambridge and at universities in France and the United States.
The project was also a major topic of discussion at a conference held at King's College this week. The conference, titled Circulating Knowledge, was jointly organized by the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the leading British and U.S. history-of-science associations.
The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk) began in 1998 with a £330,000 (about $800,000) grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Board, and may take 20 years or more to complete. It is by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated such project dealing with Newton, and one of the largest Web-based projects involving any single historical figure.
The project will involve Web versions not only of transcriptions of Newton's writings, but also colour images of the original documents, as well as the annotations and margin notes from the books he kept in his personal library -- most of it never before made public.
It will use the latest XML (Extensible Markup Language) technology -- essentially "a more robust version of HTML," the familiar code that most Internet sites currently use, says Robert Iliffe of Imperial College, an editorial director of the project.
The XML format allows, among other things, virtually endless "links" between different sections of the website as well as electronic "tagging" that makes the files easier to search and catalogue.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the Newton Project is what it is revealing about the magnitude and depth of Newton's non-scientific output, as well as the contrast between his private writings and those he made public.
"The sheer amount of manuscripts on the Whore of Babylon, the two-horned and 10-horned beasts, the two witnesses, all this stuff -- is amazing," Prof. Iliffe says. "It is 50 years of his work. That's what he spent most of his time on. He never stopped."
Many early-Newton scholars, eager to secure his place as Britain's greatest scientist and an icon of the Enlightenment, played down his non-scientific interests. "The old Enlightenment view was that Newton did his theology when he was senile," Prof. Iliffe says. "But that's not true. He did it when he was at his most powerful as a thinker."
Although Newton was a deeply religious Christian, he held starkly anti-Catholic and anti-Trinitarian views. For him, there was only "God the father." (Denying the Holy Trinity was a criminal offence in England in Newton's day.)
He also obsessed over the early history of the church, especially the third, fourth and fifth centuries, when, in his view, Christianity became corrupted.
Not surprisingly, Newton kept most of his theological musings to himself. And yet he often wrote in a very formal style -- not at all like the kind of writing you would expect to see in notebooks to be read only by their own author.
"I've argued -- I hope it's not banal -- that he's writing it for God," Prof. Iliffe says. "Or maybe for some other people who are yet to come. But there's no evidence that he showed most of this material to anybody."
And yet he did allow an "inner circle" of friends and colleagues -- like-minded individuals whom he could trust to keep his secrets -- in on his speculations.
For example, he once sent an apocalyptic time chart to philosopher John Locke. The chart covers most of the events described in the Book of Revelation, from the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the time when "the Word of God makes war with ye Beasts & Kings of ye earth" and to the creation of a "new heaven, new earth & new Jerusalem."
Yet even some of Newton's published writings seem to contain allusions to his theological beliefs.
For example, Prof. Snobelen argues that Newton left clues to those beliefs hidden "between the lines" even in some of his most famous works. Much of Newton's writing is "layered," he says -- the surface layer being accessible to everyone, with a deeper layer accessible only to an elite group of followers.
For Prof. Snobelen, this aspect of Newton's character is reminiscent of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician who led a cult-like group of young thinkers, all of whom were sworn to secrecy.
"Newton was extremely careful about his wording," he says. "He was walking on a knife edge. If he presented [his theology] too openly, then he would have been caught. If he didn't present it openly enough, no one would have seen the message."
Meanwhile, the larger scholarly debate continues to focus on the links between Newton's theological views and his science. Part of the problem is that so much has changed since his day. For example, we now think of science and theology as completely separate disciplines. But even the term "scientist" is relatively new; it was coined only in the 1830s.
Newton would have seen himself as a "natural philosopher," someone whose interests included -- but were not limited to -- what we would now call science.
He also clearly saw God as an essential part of nature, the "first cause" on which everything else depended. "He thought that doing natural philosophy was a religious activity," Prof. Iliffe says.
In Newton's view, God revealed himself in two books -- Scripture and the "book of nature." The latter Newton investigated directly through his science; the former, presumably, was equally worthy of his attention. "There's certainly a religious and a theological element to his science," Prof. Iliffe says.
And yet scholars are still struggling to comprehend how such a rational thinker -- the man who gave us three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation and so much more -- could have simultaneously immersed himself so deeply in arcane matters. It almost seems, at times, like there were two Isaac Newtons -- or, at the very least, one man who led two very different lives.
"He's one of the most prominent public officials in the country, he's president of the Royal Society, he's Master of the Royal Mint," Prof. Iliffe says. "And then when he goes back to his Chelsea home, he does all this stuff on the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon. . . . This is a guy who lives out his day in the public sphere and deals with this world -- and then he goes home and he deals with the third, fourth, fifth century."
Part of the answer, Prof. Iliffe suggests, is the scope of Newton's hunger for knowledge. Whatever facts he had obtained, whether about nature or theology, were never enough.
"He's just incredibly ambitious," Prof. Iliffe says. "He's supremely confident he's a 'chosen one' -- a chosen person who can overturn centuries and millennia of error. And now is the time when truth is being revealed. And that's the case in both his private theology and in science and mathematics."
The Newton Project will let scholars probe the connections between the many facets of Newton's persona more closely than ever before.
"Not only can you read his manuscripts about theology and church history and heresies, but you can actually 'drill down' and have access to the original manuscripts and books in his own library that he's using to construct his arguments," says Dolores Iorizzo, a colleague of Prof. Iliffe at Imperial College. "And that's a completely new idea about how to do research." "

~ Dan Falk is a science writer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

Kim Zetter: Big Business Becoming Big Brother

(Wired News) " The government is increasingly using corporations to do its surveillance work, allowing it to get around restrictions that protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, according to a report released Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that works to protect civil liberties.
Data aggregators -- companies that aggregate information from numerous private and public databases -- and private companies that collect information about their customers are increasingly giving or selling data to the government to augment its surveillance capabilities and help it track the activities of people.
Because laws that restrict government data collection don't apply to private industry, the government is able to bypass restrictions on domestic surveillance. Congress needs to close such loopholes, the ACLU said, before the exchange of information gets out of hand.
"Americans would really be shocked to discover the extent of the practices that are now common in both industry and government," said the ACLU's Jay Stanley, author of the report. "Industry and government know that, so they have a strong incentive to not publicize a lot of what's going on."
Last year, JetBlue Airways acknowledged that it secretly gave defense contractor Torch Concepts 5 million passenger itineraries for a government project on passenger profiling without the consent of the passengers. The contractor augmented the data with passengers' Social Security numbers, income information and other personal data to test the feasibility of a screening system called CAPPS II. That project was slated to launch later this year until the government scrapped it. Other airlines also contributed data to the project.
Information about the data-sharing project came to light only by accident. Critics like Stanley say there are many other government projects like this that are proceeding in secret.
The ACLU released the Surveillance-Industrial Complex report in conjunction with a new website designed to educate the public about how information collected from them is being used.
The report listed three ways in which government agencies obtain data from the private sector: by purchasing the data, by obtaining a court order or simply by asking for it. Corporations freely share information with government agencies because they don't want to appear to be unpatriotic, they hope to obtain future lucrative Homeland Security contracts with the government or they fear increased government scrutiny of their business practices if they don't share.
But corporations aren't the only ones giving private data to the government. In 2002, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors voluntarily gave the FBI the names and addresses of about 2 million people who had studied scuba diving in previous years. And a 2002 survey found that nearly 200 colleges and universities gave the FBI information about students. Most of these institutions provided the information voluntarily without having received a subpoena.
Collaborative surveillance between government and the private sector is not new. For three decades during the Cold War, for example, telegraph companies like Western Union, RCA Global and International Telephone and Telegraph gave the National Security Agency, or NSA, all cables that went to or from the United States. Operation Shamrock, which ran from 1945 to 1975, helped the NSA compile 75,000 files on individuals and organizations, many of them involved in peace movements and civil disobedience.
These days, the increasing amount of electronic data that is collected and stored, along with developments in software technology, make it easy for the government to sort through mounds of data quickly to profile individuals through their connections and activities.
Although the Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from keeping dossiers on Americans unless they are the specific target of an investigation, the government circumvents the legislation by piggybacking on private-sector data collection.
Corporations are not subject to congressional oversight or Freedom of Information Act requests -- two methods for monitoring government activities and exposing abuses. And no laws prevent companies from voluntarily sharing most data with the government.
"The government is increasingly ... turning to private companies, which are not subject to the law, and buying or compelling the transfer of private data that it could not collect itself," the report states.
A government proposal for a national ID card, for example, was shot down by civil liberties groups and Congress for being too intrusive and prone to abuse. And Congress voted to cancel funding for John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, a national database that would have tracked citizens' private transactions such as Web surfing, bank deposits and withdrawals, doctor visits, travel itineraries and visa and passport applications.
But this hasn't stopped the government from achieving the same ends by buying similar data from private aggregators like Acxiom, ChoicePoint, Abacus and LexisNexis. According to the ACLU, ChoicePoint's million-dollar contracts with the Justice Department, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies let authorities tap into its billions of records to track the interests, lifestyles and activities of Americans.
By using corporations, the report said, the government can set up a system of "distributed surveillance" to create a bigger picture than it could create with its own limited resources and at the same time "insulate surveillance and information-handling practices from privacy laws or public scrutiny."
Most of the transactions people make are with the private sector, not the government. So the amount of data available through the private sector is much greater.
Every time people withdraw money from an ATM, buy books or CDs, fill prescriptions or rent cars, someone else, somewhere, is collecting information about them and their transactions. On its own, each bit of information says little about the person being tracked. But combined with health and insurance records, bank loans, divorce records, election contributions and political activities, corporations can create a detailed dossier.
And studies show that Americans trust corporations more than they trust their government, so they're more likely to give companies their information freely. A 2002 phone survey about a proposed national ID plan, conducted by Gartner, found respondents preferred private industry -- such as bank or credit card companies -- to administer a national ID system rather than the government.
Stanley said most people are unaware how information about them is passed on to government agencies and processed.
"People have a right to know just how information about them is being used and combined into a high-resolution picture of (their) life," Stanley said.
Although the Privacy Act attempted to put stops on government surveillance, Stanley said that its authors did not anticipate the explosion in private-sector data collection.
"It didn't anticipate the growth of data aggregators and the tremendous amount of information that they're able to put together on virtually everyone or the fact that the government could become customers of these companies," Stanley said.
Although the report focused primarily on the flow of data from corporations to the government, data flow actually goes both ways. The government has shared its watch lists with the private sector, opening the way for potential discrimination against customers who appear on the lists. Under section 314 of the Patriot Act, the government can submit a suspect list to financial institutions to see whether the institution has conducted transactions with any individuals or organizations on the list. But once the government shares the list, nothing prevents the institution from discriminating against individuals or organizations on the list.
After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI circulated a watch list to corporations that contained hundreds of names of people the FBI was interested in talking to, although the people were not under investigation or wanted by the FBI. Companies were more than happy to check the list against the names of their customers. And if they used the list for other purposes, it's difficult to know. The report notes that there is no way to determine how many job applicants might have been denied work because their names appeared on the list.
"It turns companies into sheriff's deputies, responsible not just for feeding information to the government, but for actually enforcing the government's wishes, for example by effectively blacklisting anyone who has been labeled as a suspect under the government's less-than-rigorous procedures for identifying risks," the report states.
Last March, the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, created by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to examine government data mining, issued a report (PDF) stating that "rapid action is necessary" to establish clear guidelines for responsible government data mining.
The ACLU's Stanley said companies are in the initial stages of the Homeland Security gold rush to get government contracts, and that the public and Congress need to do something before policies and practices of private-sector surveillance solidify.
"Government security agencies always have a hunger for more and more information," said Stanley. "It's only natural. It makes it easier for law enforcement if they have access to as much info as they want. But it's crucial that policy makers and political leaders balance the needs of law enforcement and the value of privacy that Americans have always expected and enjoyed." "

CIA executives gathered in Santiago de Chile revealed in contingency plot to overthrow Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez Frias

(Venezuela Headline News) " Venezuela state-owned news agency VENPRES is quoting an El Mundo de Madrid (Spain) report that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is set to put a contingency plan in motion in the (likely) event that President Hugo Chavez Frias wins next weekend's Recall Referendum.
The Madrid newspaper says that the White House strategy is to avoid a regional expansion of the President Hugo Chavez Frias 'Bolivarian Revolution' which is seen by Washington D.C. as a direct step into the kind of socialism espoused by many European nations and envisaged in the United States if John Kerry wrests control of the White House from the Bush 2 administration this coming fall.
El Mundo says the CIA plan appears to concede a Chavez Frias victory next weekend "for good or bad" and that Langley spooks are already working on a strategy to "neutralize" Chavez Frias by fair means or foul.
CIA under secretary for southern hemispherical affairs, William Spencer, has been drafted to Santiago de Chile to analyze the "Venezuelan situation" with CIA country directors from Colombia, Ecuador, Brasil and Peru.  Spencer is reportedly convinced that Chavez Frias intends (no matter how fanciful) to create two centers of "revolutionary focus" in South America in preparation to overthrow Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez and Bolivia's Head of State, Carlos Mesa.
Spencer espouses the theory that Chavez Frias will then forge onwards using a domino effect to include the overthrow of Peru's Alejandro Toledo, using multiple corruption scandals there as a pretext for invasion.  Washington apparently sees Chavez Frias' progress as a "corrosive action" in a continuing Bolivarian Revolution which will expand easily into countries such as Ecuador where indigenous political are already reacting strongly to Washington's ideas of neo-liberalism.
The CIA contingency plan against President Hugo Chavez Frias seemingly also includes Argentina and Brazil in the Venezuelan leader's dastardly designs against US Homeland Security ... inciting South American nations further into "contagious anti-USA prejudices..."
According to the Madrid newspaper it is no coincidence that the US CIA delegates have gathered in Chile which is considered by Langley and Crawford (Texas) as the "last bastion of democracy and pro-US economic policies in South America."  They are elaborating a financial strategy in cooperation with US Treasury officials and the Pentagon aimed at covering all possible loopholes in the anti-socialist strategy and to halt Chavez Frias "overwhelming ambition" to "transform Latin America into an impregnable replica of Fidel Castro's Cuba..."
Part of the CIA strategy reveals a plot to have Movimiento Quinta Republica (MVR) suspend the referendum using the argument that serious irregularities have been detected ... alternatively that a conspiracy has been uncovered to assassinate Chavez Frias before the result is known.  "In such a scenario ... if a State of Emergency is declared, the referendum, would be suspended indefinitely along with Constitutional guarantees and the Congress would be dissolved and public protests would immediately be ruled unlawful."
A second scenario would be the fraudulent manipulation of the voting results and the repression of whatever protests that would be called by the opposition Coordinadora Democratica (CD) alliance.  Whichever way, Chavez Frias will use to take whatever means necessary to avoid new elections taking place... "

Must read: Margie Burns: Is an “August Surprise” Brewing in America?

(Intervention Magazine) Why does Karl Rove, President Bush’s political advisor, not want you to know what is happening on the Arizona border?
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" First responders alert: one does not want to cry wolf, but August is widely recognized as the month when no one is on guard. It is a vulnerable time as it was in 2001. As former Secretary of State James A. Baker commented matter-of-factly in his book, The Politics of Diplomacy, most governments and their leaders tend to be scattered on their respective vacations. With media attention focused on the elections, the newspaper item below, oddly, looks like good timing. Could there be an “August surprise” in the making?
The report last week from the small Tombstone Tumbleweed newspaper is jarring. A “flood of middle-eastern males” has been caught entering the country illegally east of Douglas, Arizona, according to the paper, and this recent “flood” is actually part of an increasing trend of “OTMs” (“other than Mexicans”) entering the country illegally somewhere east of the Chiricahua Mountains.
Andy Adame, speaking for the Border Patrol for the Tucson sector, denies the report, according to the Tumbleweed. However, the same official reportedly said that “since October 1, 2003, the beginning of the fiscal year for Border Patrol, agents in the Tucson sector have apprehended 5,510 illegals from countries other than Mexico or other central or South American countries,” described as “people from all over the world.”
“In the last month, the Tumbleweed has confirmed at least two documented accounts of Border Patrol agents encountering large groups of non-Spanish speaking males in the Chiricahua foothills and on trails along the high mountain areas.”
Probably those of us who never imagined communists lurking under every bed, who pity innocent Muslim citizens caught up in someone’s misdirected anger or in an illegal arrest, and who are fed up to nausea with the very word “terrorism” are inclined to view this kind of report with suspicion.
Yet the editor who published the report, Chris Simcox, swears by it. In an emailed response, Simcox said, “I have three separate verifications of this story. Two come from Border Patrol field agents, the other from a rancher in the area.” Simcox points out that the same Border Patrol information officer who denies that any of the apprehended illegal aliens were of Middle Eastern descent “verifies that the groups in question were apprehended on those dates,” and that the numbers of illegals comprising the groups were accurate.
Furthermore, Simcox points out, “Of those 5,510 [foreign nationals apprehended] Adame admits they have caught 5 men from Middle Eastern countries,” proving that people from the Middle East “are getting into Mexico and are coming across our border.” Putting this number into context, “So far, this year Border Patrol has caught over 400,000 people in Arizona; 8,300 were previously convicted felons and spent time in our prisons before being deported--they returned for another go round.” He adds, “Based on the ratio of apprehensions to those who get through, it does not look good.”
As the editor clarifies, “The Border Patrol agent told me the group was whisked away from the agent who was responsible for the paperwork” and “the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security took over the interrogation.” As Simcox notes, “That is the policy when Border Patrol apprehends OTMs from countries identified as a [terrorist] threat.” “I would not have printed the story had I not verified with three sources,” Simcox says. “The Border Patrol agents’ demeanor seemed concerned, so I felt they were truthful in their information; the only way it could not be true is if they were lying and the rancher was in on the lie.”
Not to sound alarmist, but “The thing that concerns me the most is that so many of the two large groups were not apprehended, and are loose in the United States right now.” While using Arizona as a crossing point, it is quite probable that the illegals then fan out all over the United States.
Most people on the East Coast, hearing the words “terrorist” and “Middle East,” might not think next of Arizona. But the idea of an “October surprise” or an “August surprise” warrants attention, given the hyper-intense stakes of the upcoming election. It is taken as a given among most national pundits that another terrorist event would benefit the George W. Bush campaign. Perhaps these events warrant giving Arizona, in particular, a closer look.
To quote the Tumbleweed report: “On or about the early morning hours of June 13, 2004 Border Patrol agents from the Willcox station encountered a large group of suspected illegal border crossers, estimated to be around 158, just east of the Sanders Ranch near the foothills of the Chiricauha Mountains. 71 suspected illegal aliens were apprehended; among them were 53 males of middle-eastern descent.
“According to a Border Patrol field agent, the men were suspected to be Iranian or possibly Syrian nationals. ‘One thing’s for sure: these guys didn’t speak Spanish and after we questioned them harder we discovered they spoke poor English with a middle-eastern accent; then we caught them speaking to each other in Arabic … this is ridiculous that we don't take this more seriously, and we’re told not to say a thing to the media, but I have to,’ said the agent, who spoke to the Tumbleweed with the promise of anonymity.”
“The field agent stated the men were wearing the traditional uniform of migrants -- baseball caps, tennis shoes, some had work boots, denim jeans and many had t-shirts with patriotic American flags and slogans. The agent added the following description ‘A curious thing I noticed was that they all had brand new clothing and they looked as if they had just been to the barber shop--you know--new haircuts. They were clean cut and they all had almost the exact same cut of mustaches.’”
“The information was corroborated by a local rancher in the area who reports that sightings of groups similar to these are on the rise” and part of a broader problem with illegal aliens, cross-border smuggling, and drug traffic.
The second similar incident occurred soon afterward: “On or about the evening of June 21, 2004, agents from the Willcox Border Patrol station apprehended 24 members of a larger group of Arabic-speaking males located just east of the Pierce/Sunsites area of Cochise County. At least half of the males escaped capture and disappeared into the United States.”
Assuming that these incidents cannot be dismissed out of hand, they look even more worrisome in a broader perspective. Arizona has a history aside from the Old West associated with “Tombstone.” The 9/11 Commission Report (Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States) refers to groups of Islamist partisans in Arizona during the first Bush administration. Two, Wadi al Hage and Mubarak Douri, apparently resided near Tucson, where a branch of an international network called Al Khifa was located (along with branches in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Pittsburgh) in the early 1990s. Al Hage, a US citizen, an Al Qaeda operative, and reportedly a personal assistant to Osama bin Laden, was convicted in the embassy bombings trial; Douri is apparently still at large.
This is not just ancient history. According to observers including Steve Elson, an aviation security consultant and former federal Special Agent, a road near Douglas, Arizona, is known as “Arab Road” for the numbers of Middle Eastern nationals on it without documentation. One GOP congressman from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, expressed concern about the issue in several venues including television interviews. The response, from our security-minded administration? Early on, as Tancredo was addressing these issues, he got a call from Karl Rove (presidential advisor) at the White House. Rove accused Tancredo of “betraying the president” and told him he would not be welcome at the White House again.
Elson sums up thus: “NAFTA opened the floodgates. Mexican trains roll right on in. One of the train lines is owned by a drug cartel. Guess Bush doesn’t think that a terrorist, perhaps carrying a nuke, would sneak in on one of those trains. Those CA idiots, like Boxer and Pelosi, wouldn't want to offend anyone by stopping them. The law enforcement folks are frustrated as hell; they are given a job and then told not to do it by the gov. We are doomed!”
Well, let’s hope not. Let’s hope that this August there are no surprises. "

~ Margie Burns writes freelance in Cheverly, Maryland. She can be reached at margie.burns@verizon.net

From the archives: Smedley Butler: War Is A Racket

(ICH) Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.
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“WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.
The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people – not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.
There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.
Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?
Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war – anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.
Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.
Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.
Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war – a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.
Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.
Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.
But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?
Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit.

CHAPTER TWO: WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.
The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:
Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.
Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.
Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.
Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.
A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.
Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.
For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.
International Nickel Company – and you can't have a war without nickel – showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.
American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.
Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.
And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.
But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.
Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.
There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it – so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.
Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!
Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.
There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 – count them if you live long enough – was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them – a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers – all got theirs.
Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment – knapsacks and the things that go to fill them – crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them – and they will do it all over again the next time.
There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.
One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.
The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up – and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee – with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator – to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.
Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses – that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.
There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

CHAPTER THREE: WHO PAYS THE BILLS?

Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.
If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.
In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.
There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement – the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead – they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded – they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too – they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam – on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain – with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.
But don't forget – the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.
Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share – at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
Napoleon once said, "All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them."
So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.
In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed.
But wait!
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back – when they came back from the war and couldn't find work – at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying. . . . "

Smedley Darlington Butler:

Major General - United States Marine Corps [Retired]
Born West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
Educated Haverford School
Married Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
Awarded two congressional medals of honor, for capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914,and for capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
Distinguished service medal, 1919
Retired Oct. 1, 1931
On leave of absence to act as director of Department of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
Lecturer - 1930's
Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940

For more information about Major General Smedley Butler, contact the United States Marine Corps.

(click title for chapters 4-5)

Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy: Resurrecting Hope in Dark Times

(DissidentVoice.org) " Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not, dangerous ideologies of the 21st century. It pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just by profits but by an ability to reproduce itself with such success that, to paraphrase Fred Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of neoliberal capitalism.
Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public goods, the welfare state, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit. Public lands are looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over to powerful broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the public trust; Halliburton gives war profiteering a new meaning as it is granted corporate contracts without any competitive bidding and then bilks the U.S. government for millions; the environment is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; public services are gutted in order to lower the taxes of major corporations; schools more closely resemble either malls or jails, and teachers are forced to get revenue for their school by hawking everything from hamburgers to pizza parties. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as either incompetent or threatening to individual freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments (except for their support for corporate interests and national security) and citizens.
Under neoliberalism, the state now makes a grim alignment with corporate capital and transnational corporations. Gone are the days when the state “assumed responsibility for a range of social needs.” [1] Instead, agencies of government now pursues a wide range of “‘deregulations,’ privatizations, and abdications of responsibility to the market and private philanthropy.” [2] Deregulation, in turn, promotes “widespread, systematic disinvestment in the nation’s basic productive capacity.” [3] Flexible production encourages wage slavery and disposable populations at home. And the search for ever greater profits leads to outsourcing which accentuates the flight of capital and jobs abroad. Neoliberalism has now become the prevailing logic in the United States, and according to Stanley Aronowitz “...the neoliberal economic doctrine proclaiming the superiority of free markets over public ownership, or even public regulation of private economic activities, has become the conventional wisdom, not only among conservatives but among social progressives.” [4]
The ideology and power of neoliberalism also cuts across national boundaries. Throughout the globe, the forces of neoliberalism are on the march, dismantling the historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, defining profit-making as the essence of democracy, and equating freedom with the unrestricted ability of markets to “govern economic relations free of government regulation.” [5] Transnational in scope, neoliberalism now imposes its economic regime and market values on developing and weaker nations through structural adjustment policies enforced by powerful financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Secure in its dystopian vision that there are no alternatives, as England’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once put it, neoliberalism obviates issues of contingency, struggle, and social agency by celebrating the inevitability of economic laws in which the ethical ideal of intervening in the world gives way to the idea that we “have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market.” [6] Coupled with a new culture of fear, market freedoms seem securely grounded in a defense of national security, capital, and property rights. When coupled with a media driven culture of fear and the everyday reality of insecurity, public space becomes increasingly militarized as state governments invest more in prison construction than in education. Prison guards and security personnel in public schools are two of the fastest growing professions.
In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism. Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism.
Neoliberal policies dominate the discourse of politics and use the breathless rhetoric of the global victory of free-market rationality to cut public expenditures and undermine those non-commodified public spheres that serve as the repository for critical education, language, and public intervention. Spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing intellectuals, religious fanatics, and politicians, neoliberal ideology, with its ongoing emphasis on deregulation and privatization, has found its material expression in an all-out attack on democratic values and on the very notion of the public sphere. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, the notion of the public good is devalued and, where possible, eliminated as part of a wider rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of social life as possible in order to maximize their personal profit. Public services such as health care, child care, public assistance, education, and transportation are now subject to the rules of the market. Construing the public good as a private good and the needs of the corporate and private sector as the only source of investment, neoliberal ideology produces, legitimates, and exacerbates the existence of persistent poverty, inadequate health care, racial apartheid in the inner cities, and the growing inequalities between the rich and the poor. [7]
As Stanley Aronowitz points out, the Bush administration has made neoliberal ideology the cornerstone of its program and has been in the forefront in actively supporting and implementing the following policies:
[D]eregulation of business at all levels of enterprises and trade; tax reduction for wealthy individuals and corporations; the revival of the near-dormant nuclear energy industry; limitations and abrogation of labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively; a land policy favoring commercial and industrial development at the expense of conservation and other pro environment policies; elimination of income support to the chronically unemployed; reduced federal aid to education and health; privatization of the main federal pension programs, Social Security; limitation on the right of aggrieved individuals to sue employers and corporations who provide services; in addition, as social programs are reduced, [Republicans] are joined by the Democrats in favoring increases in the repressive functions of the state, expressed in the dubious drug wars in the name of fighting crime, more funds for surveillance of ordinary citizens, and the expansion of the federal and local police forces. [8]
Central to both neoliberal ideology and its implementation by the Bush administration is the ongoing attempts by free-market fundamentalists and right wing politicians to view government as the enemy of freedom (except when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public interest. The call to eliminate big government is neoliberalism’s great unifying idea and has broad popular appeal in the United States because it is a principle deeply embedded in the country’s history and tangled up with its notion of political freedom. And yet, the right wing appropriation of this tradition is racked with contradictions in terms of neoliberal policies.
The advocates of neoliberalism have attacked what they call big government when it has provided essential services such as crucial safety nets for the less fortunate, but they have no qualms about using the government to bailout the airline industry after the economic nosedive that followed the 2000 election of George W. Bush and the events of 9/11. Nor are there any expressions of outrage from the cheerleaders of neoliberalism when the state engages in promoting various forms of corporate welfare by providing billions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to multinational corporations. In short, government bears no obligation for either the poor and dispossessed or for the collective future of young people.

As the laws of the market take precedence over the laws of the state as guardians of the public good, the government increasingly offers little help in mediating the interface between the advance of capital and its rapacious commercial interests. Neither does it aid non-commodified interests and non-market spheres that create the political, economic, and social spaces and discursive conditions vital for critical citizenship and democratic public life. Within the discourse of neoliberalism, it becomes difficult for the average citizen to speak about political or social transformation, or to even challenge, outside of a grudging nod toward rampant corruption, the ruthless downsizing, the ongoing liquidation of job security, or the elimination of benefits for people now hired on part-time.
The liberal democratic vocabulary of rights, entitlements, social provisions, community, social responsibility, living wage, job security, equality, and justice seem oddly out of place in a country where the promise of democracy has been replaced by casino capitalism, a winner-take-all philosophy, suited to lotto players and day traders alike. As corporate culture extends even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, buttressed daily by a culture industry largely in the hands of concentrated capital, it is reinforced even further by the pervasive fear and insecurity of the public that the future holds nothing beyond a watered down version of the present. As the prevailing discourse of neoliberalism seizes the public imagination, there is no vocabulary for progressive social change, democratically inspired visions, or critical notions of social agency to expand the meaning and purpose of democratic public life. Against the reality of low wage jobs, the erosion of social provisions for a growing number of people and the expanding war against young people of color at home and empire-building abroad, the market-driven juggernaut of neoliberalism continues to mobilize desires in the interest of producing market identities and market relationships that ultimately sever the link between education and social change while reducing agency to the obligations of consumerism.
As neoliberal ideology and corporate culture extend even deeper into the basic institutions of civil and political society, there is a simultaneous diminishing of non-commodified public spheres —those institutions such as public schools, independent bookstores, churches, noncommercial public broadcasting stations, libraries, trade unions and various voluntary institutions engaged in dialogue, education, and learning–that address the relationship of the individual to public life and foster social responsibility and provide a robust vehicle for public participation and democratic citizenship. In the vacuum left by diminishing democracy, religious zealotry, cultural chauvinism, xenophobia, and racism have become the dominant tropes of neoconservatives and other extremist groups eager to take advantage of the growing insecurity, fear, and anxiety that result from increased joblessness, the war on terror, and the unraveling of communities.
As a result of the consolidated corporate attack on public life, the maintenance of democratic public spheres from which to launch a moral vision or to engage in a viable struggle over politics loses all credibility–not to mention monetary support. As the alleged objectivity of neoliberal ideology remains largely unchallenged within dominant public spheres, individual critique and collective political struggles become more difficult. [9] It gets worse. Dominated by extremists, the Bush administration is driven by an arrogance of power and inflated sense of moral righteousness mediated largely by a false sense of certitude and never ending posture of triumphalism. As George Soros points out this rigid ideology and inflexible sense of mission allows the Bush administration to believe that “because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. This is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy.” [10]
As public space is increasingly commodified and the state becomes more closely aligned with capital, politics is defined largely by its policing functions rather than an agency for peace and social reform. As the state abandons its social investments in health, education, and the public welfare. It increasingly takes on the functions of an enhanced police or security state, the signs of which are most visible in the increasing use of the state apparatus to spy on and arrests its subjects, the incarceration of individuals coincided disposable (primarily people of color), and the ongoing criminalization of social policies. Examples of the latter include anti-begging ordinances and anti-loitering that fine or punish homeless people for sitting or lying down too long in public places. [11] An even more despicable example of the barbaric nature of neoliberalism with its emphasis on profits over people and its willingness to punish rather than serve the poor and disenfranchised can be seen in the growing tendency of many hospitals across the country to have patients arrested and jailed if they cannot pay their medical bills. The policy, right out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, represents a return to debtors prisons, which is now chillingly called “body attachment,” and is “ basically a warrant for... the patient’s arrest.” [12]
Neoliberalism is not simply an economic policy designed to cut government spending, pursue free trade policies, and free market forces from government regulations; it is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs. Neoliberalism not only enshrines unbridled individualism, it also destroys any vestige of democratic society by undercutting its “moral, material, and regulatory moorings,” [13] and in doing so it offers no language for understanding how the future might be grasped outside of the narrow logic of the market. But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to translate the privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare state. There is also the growing threat of displacing “political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own.” [14] As democracy becomes a burden under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears and the reign of unfettered social Darwinism with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of proto-fascism. None of this will happen in the face of sufficient resistance, nor is the increasing move toward proto-fascism inevitable, but the conditions exist for democracy to lose all semblance of meaning in the United States.
Educators, parents, activists, workers, and others can address this challenge by building local and global alliances and engaging in struggles that acknowledge and transcend national boundaries, but also engage in modes of politics that connect with people’s everyday lives. Democratic struggles cannot under emphasize the special responsibility of intellectuals to shatter the conventional wisdom and myths of neoliberalism with its stunted definition of freedom and its depoliticized and dehistoricized definition of its own alleged universality. As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, any viable politics that challenges neoliberalism must refigure the role of the state in limiting the excesses of capital and providing important social provisions. [15] At the same time, social movements must address the crucial issue of education as it develops throughout the cultural sphere because the “power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual–lying in the realm of beliefs,” and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. [16] Most specifically, democracy necessitates forms of education that provide a new ethic of freedom and a reassertion of collective identity as central preoccupations of a vibrant democratic culture and society. Such a task, in part, suggests that intellectuals, artists, unions, and other progressive movements create teach-ins all over the country in order to name, critique, and connect the forces of market fundamentalism to the war at home and abroad, the shameful tax cuts for the rich, the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on unions, the erosion of civil liberties, the incarceration of a generation of young black and brown men, the attack on public schools, and the growing militarization of public life. As Bush’s credibility crisis is growing, the time has come to link the matters of economics with the crisis of political culture, and to connect the latter to the crisis of democracy itself. We need a new language for politics, for analyzing where it can take place, and what it means to mobilize alliances of workers, intellectuals, academics, journalists, youth groups, and others to reclaim, as Cornel West has aptly put it, hope in dark times. "

~ Henry A. Giroux is the Global Television Network Chair Professor at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Palgrave, 2004); Public Spaces, Private Lives: Democracy Beyond 9-11 (Rowman and Littlefield 2003); The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear (Palgrave, 2003). He can be reached at: hag5@psu.edu.

REFERENCES

1. George Steinmetz, ‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism; Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 15:2 (Spring 2003), p. 337.

2. George Steinmetz, Ibid., ‘The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism; Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” p. 337.

3. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 6

4. Stanley Aronowitz, Ibid. How Class Works, p. 21.

5. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 101.

6. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 7

7.  Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2003); Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway, 2003); Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

8. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 102.

9. Of course, there is widespread resistance to neoliberalism and its institutional enforcers such as the WTO and IMF  among many intellectuals, students, and global justice movements, but this resistance rarely gets aired in the dominant media and if it does it is often dismissed as irrelevant or tainted by Marxist ideology.

10. George Soros, “The US is Now in the Hands of a Group of Extremists,” The Guardian/UK (January 26, 2004).

11. Paul Tolme, “Criminalizing the Homeless,” In These Times (April 14, 2003), pp. 6-7.

12. Staff or Democracy Now, “Uncharitable Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured,” CommonDreams (January 8, 2004).

13.  John and Jean Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming,” Public Culture 12:2 (2000), p. 332.

14. Comaroff, Ibid., (2000), p. 332.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press, 1998).

16. Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, “The ‘Progressive’ Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue,” New Left Review 14 (march-April, 2003), p. 66.

JAMES PETRAS: The Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of Abu Ghraib

(CounterPunch) " After reading hundreds of books and articles and listening to scores of speeches and interviews by experts on terrorism and terrorists from the US, Canada, Israel, Europe, Latin America, Asia and South Africa, I have come to recognize eerily predictable patterns.
They use a common language to describe their subjects and their environment; they are extremely ideological under a thin veneer of scientific jargon; they possess a keen sense of selective observation; they always pretend to possess a psychological understanding though few if any have dealt close up with their subjects in any clinical sense except perhaps under conditions of incarceration and interrogation.
Their style is self-righteous, highly moralistic, vitriolic, hyperventilating and yet slippery with euphemisms when it comes to dealing with the violence of their partisan states. Their analysis is almost always filled with highly charged personal invective. Psychobabble provides a "legitimate" sounding channel for expressing deep-seated hostility, a way of assuming a state of civilized superiority in the face of their dehumanized subjects. Indeed, the dehumanization process is central to the whole terrorist-political-academic enterprise - for the purpose is to present "the terrorist" with no redeeming features, with no "place" in the world, no "time" to exist - in other words worthy of physical extermination.
The Terrorist Experts are the "set-up" people, the motivators.
They project the violence of the rulers, their ambitions to conquer, their greed to seize land and resources, their destructive impulses on to their victims. The responses of the victims are evoked in the rhetoric of pathological behavior. Of course the truly clinical pathologies are found in the minds of the verbal assassins - who cannot distinguish the savageries committed by their patron-states from the desperate cries of the excluded, displaced and exploited.
Almost all the terror experts have a chronic psychological blindness to the systematic and comprehensive violence inflicted by the West and Israel on particular groups. Today it is the "Arabs", at others times it is all insurgents who respond to imperial violence with violence.
The all-pervasive practice of torture is a means of breaking and converting militants, and then infiltrating resistance movements. The techniques of torture receive ideological justification and moral support from the Terror Experts. In their writings insurgents or 'terrorists' are described as beyond the human pale - as sub-human. Their leaders are presented as cynical profiteers and manipulators who have no human values. Their communities are "lawless pockets". Once committed, they know no law, no justice - only death, murder and martyrdom. They live in failed states. They have no history or culture (or at best one inferior to 'Western', 'Judeo-Christian' civilization). In a word, the world will be better without them. To the torturers this means their work is in the best interest of civilization. Of course the Terror Experts are offended when the practitioners are exposed, their handicraft of brutality photographed and published. The Terror Experts are grieved, not for the acts of moral degradation, but because it confirms what the "terrorists" have been saying. They revolt out of the outrage and humiliation they suffer in the hands of their US/Israeli/European torturers, soldiers, mercenaries and bosses. Terror Experts protest at the public exposure: that the dirty secrets absent from their analysis have become public knowledge. They attribute feelings of "anger", "humiliation" to the personality disorders, childhood or family or cultural/religious dysfunctions of the "terrorists". The statements of the Terror Experts become less convincing when confronted by the publicized facts of physical humiliation by the armies and states of the civilizers.
The Terror Experts operate and see themselves on two levels: as 'scholarly researchers' and as political prosecutors and 'security' advisors.
As 'experts' their work is of dubious quality despite the self-declared wealth of sources they claim to have consulted.
Many of the alleged "terrorists" interviewed were in jail where they were most likely tortured, drugged and their conversations monitored. The Terror Expert can be expected to edit out any excerpts that provide a political context for their actions: they are likely to pay more attention to their own jaundiced "impressions" of how the 'terrorist' looks, speaks or listens, usually fixing on their own preconceived "meanings" of particular facial expressions or body movements.
The Terror Experts excel in selecting the worst case sample as "representative" of the leadership of the terrorists, the boastful, the moneygrubber, the affluent. They omit the norm of persecuted resistance fighters who are modest, sacrificing, in solidarity with their people, upon whom they have many times to depend for food, medical care and refuge.
There are "fundamentalist" Moslems who pursue modern professions, use Western critiques of colonialism and imperialism; but who seek self-determination, majority rule and the freedom to practice their religion.
There are fundamentalist Muslims who are pietistic - they seek solace in spiritual practices, who live in a narrow circle of work, mosque and family, who have experienced the violent disruption of their lives and who respond, not only because the imperialists have transgressed the sacred, but because they have destroyed the family network and intergeneration codes of existence
In the midst of the chaos, violence, dislocation, pillage and occupation of a country, a whole people are adversely affected. As they reach out to respond, to protest, to survive, they seek movements and institutions that have some resources, a modicum of power. In the past there were powerful nationalist, socialist and communist parties, dynamic trade unions and peasant movements. In a few countries they are still active and a force to be reckoned with. In many regions however, they have been decimated by US client regimes, local secular or religious dictators, and by the disintegration of the old Communist Parties. Under harsh conditions requiring clandestine activity and mass support, many secular activists have jointed politically-oriented religions movements, which embrace anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and social warfare programs. The secular "conversion" to Muslim-inspired movements is based on politics, not religion. Leon Trotsky once advised his followers during the Nazi occupation of Europe that it might be necessary to join the Catholic Church if that was the only space available for political action. Given the mass base of the Muslim movement, given its engagement in the anti-colonial struggle, it is no surprise that many secularists (who may be leftists, nationalists and democrats) have joined these movements - and may later turn to other political movements.
To subsume the rich mosaic of resistance fighter to one ideological formula because of formal affiliations as these Terror Experts do, is an egregious error. They are eager to prescribe an overall repressive solution to the "terror" problem, truckling to the political interests of their paymasters in the big foundations or state apparatus. They repress inconvenient complexities, diverse motivations, conjunctural convergences between secular and spiritual. Terror Experts evoke the emotive phrase 'Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists' to end debates and considered analysis which might require the public to reconsider their support for imperial wars, Israeli conquests and their opposition to Iraqi nationalists and Palestinian resistance fighters.

Interrogation: Questions for the Terror Experts

Terror Experts claim that objective conditions, or what they refer to disparagingly as "exploitation", "oppression" or "imperialist" (equipped always with quote marks), are only a veneer covering some deeper "personal need". The Terror Experts then proceed to "unmask" the "true" motives - with a stream of psychobabble. In fact the resort to crudely conceived and applied psychological categories, are the principle method that the Terror Experts use to suppress the "objective " world, which impinges on the action of the resistance fighter.
The external world, in which violent resistance movements emerge are by any measure very hostile. The US and Israel, for example, are recognized the world over as aggressive actors considering themselves unaccountable to any and all international laws. The Terror Experts can avoid this fundamental 'fact' impinging on the resistance fighters' behavior by focusing on their supposed "inner world", and "immediate" face to face relations. This allows the Terror Experts to avoid the unpleasant aspects of their own state loyalties.
The Terror Experts were horrified by the photographs of US torture in Iraq - not the acts. The revelations unmasked the savagery of their accomplices, the practitioners of their prescriptions, the whole underworld of crime and punishment that is logically derived from the totalitarian pseudoscience of the Terror Experts. It brings the Terror Experts of Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Johns Hopkins closer to the savage scenes of homo and heterosexual rape, mass sequential genital violence. The Terror Experts , of course, assume a posture of indignation at the brutal guards, interrogators, the military commanders. They are silent as their current paymasters are pilloried - Rumsfeld, Bush - knowing full well that the next President will also employ their services. In any case who is going to look deep and far form the scenes of torture and identify the torture accomplices among the Terror Experts?
The TE simply pronounce their diagnosis of the armed resistance fighters: incurable psychopaths, extremely dangerous when at large. The politicians dictate the commands: capture, confine, torture or kill. The Special Forces break doors in the middle of the night, cut throats or take prisoners. The prison commandants establish the rules of "interrogation". The guards torture. This is s very coherent international division of labor, in which the Terror Experts play an important part in elaborating the rationale, a morally and scientifically justified war-unto-death on the the "inferior" peoples, the "fundamentalist Arab Muslims", the "suicide bombers", the "Terrorists". A common language is spoken between the Terror Experts and their state patrons, and then promoted in and by the mass media.
Questions for the Terror Experts: (1) Why do the imputed terrorists' "personal needs" find expression through politics (and not in a thousand and one personal, cultural, familial, civic channels)? Why do the terrorists' "personal needs" find expression against a certain enemy (the dominant power) rather than a host of other objectives, less dangerous, easier to access, more direct? Why do the terrorists' "personal needs" express themselves in favor of a particular group (family, neighborhood, nation or class) and not another (foreign powers, exclusive elites, etc?) Why do the terrorists' "personal needs" find expression at a particular time (during invasions, occupations, etc.) and place (locus of imperial power, military and political institutions, mercenary police stations)?
Obviously the "personal" has multiple forms, objects, places and times for expression. To explain specific political actions one must examine the political, ideological, class relations, state and international configuration of power.
The second question is a refinement of the first: Why do "personal needs" not express themselves in other non-violent forms of political action such as elections, for example, instead of as a guerrilla, suicide bomber, etc.? More specifically what political obstacles or literal or figurative walls prevented other than violent forms of political action? We can hypothesize that the greater closure imposed on the political system (colonial and neo-colonial rule, long-term military occupation, racist exclusive ideology and practice, systematic widespread torture of "suspects"), the greater the degree of uprooting or ethnic purging, the more likely the choice posed by the ruling power: subject yourself or revolt. Under the circumstances there is a greater likelihood of violent resistance, individual or collective.
Terror Experts attempt to denigrate the politics of popular resistance by attributing the struggle to the manipulation by leaders with unworthy motives. This overlooks all mass movements, which have by their nature a whole range of leaders, activists and sympathizers. Terror Experts imagine leaders who are in search of "money, "status", "power", "jobs" etc. Once again the "unmasking" technique fails to explain obvious facts.
Overwhelming evidence throughout the world, past and present, demonstrates that those who struggle against a dominant colonial, imperial power suffer severe material losses of life, family, jobs, income, houses and property. In the case of the Palestinians, the Israeli Jews punish the whole extended family, steal personal belongings and heirlooms and destroy generations of old orchards and cultivated fields. With resistance movements ,it is very rare that "leaders" enrich themselves in the midst of a life and death struggle. Most leaders who do enrich themselves usually do so after the struggle has ended, especially if they turn to embrace the neo-colonial paymasters of the Terror Experts. In fact it is the Terror Experts' closest collaborators and their informants who enrich themselves by spying and turning in the patriots who the experts call 'terrorists'.
The selective vitriolic libeling of a subject prepares the Western reader to accept the emotionally charged imputation of pathologic behavior. Harvard academic, Jessica Stern provides us with a typical example - almost a parody - of these polemical ejaculations. She describes the purpose of her study "to identify some common themes that might help to explain how violent Islamic nihilism continues to spread beyond the lawless pockets and failed states where terrorists tend to thrive and into the cities of the west".(Jessica Stern, How Terrorists Think, Financial Times, June 12/13, 2004). Nihilism presumes no goals, no values, and no alternatives. Most observers would disagree, based on a simple reading of most of the Islamic revolutionary or radical web sites: they have goals - replace Western dominance with nationalist Islamic rulers. Their values include both traditional religious and modern variants and their alternatives to submission is guerrilla, mass or individual resistance. The neighborhoods, cities, and communities where the putative "nihilists" originate are far more stable, norm-guided and law-abiding before the forceful intrusion of imperial and colonial power, which tear asunder the networks that bind collectivities. "Lawless pockets", to the degree in which they exist, are products of the unwillingness or incapacity of the conquering powers and their proxies to establish a just and stable social order. Moreover, one can observe in many cases that "lawlessness" is selective: occupied peoples disobey colonial 'laws', 'edicts' or 'fiats' while abiding by the laws or rules declared by their legitimate authorities. Moreover, it is generally the case that newly liberated areas run by guerrillas are more lawful than under previous military or colonial occupation with their drugs, brothels and bars.
The notion of "failed states" has achieved a certain notoriety among Western pundits, academics and especially the Teror Experts. Its exponents use the phrase to describe the collapse of nations, which have been devastated by surrogate pro-Western militarists, pillaged by Western banks under the tutelage and protection of the IMF and the World Bank. No doubt there have been gangster rulers in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Third World - but they have more often than not been trained by Western foundations or universities and send their ill gotten fortunes to off shore banks and kindred sanctuaries. In labeling their former progeny as failed rulers, the Terror Experts disown their own offspring. What imperial ideologues mean by "failed states" is the failure of clients to establish a stable neo-liberal regime, necessitating "successful" Euro-US imperial intervention to create "prosperous democracies", as in post-invasion Kosova, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti where white slavery, drug trafficking, warlords, death squads rule with the aid of US helicopter gunships hovering over and firing into unruly neighborhoods.
Stern and other verbal assassins strip the victims of their humanity ("nihilists"), denigrate their place of birth ('lawless pockets"), deny the historical authenticity of their nations ("failed states"), all the better to oversee their extermination, their ghettoization, their torture.
Through the eyes of the Terror Experts Euro-US and Israeli bombing of population centers is seen as doing "humanity" a great favor: preventing the 'spread' of terrorists into the cities of the West.
The fanatic anti-Arab/Muslim rhetoric of the Terror Experts encourages 'moderate', Western politicians to impose more rigid and humiliating administrative and legal measures against Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian travelers, immigrants, visitors, religious leaders, academicians and businesspeople.
Targeted by and subject to systematic denigration by the Western mass media, state functionaries, immigration police, hostile embassy personnel, academic terror experts, the secret police and special assassination teams, oppressed people are forced to transform themselves to meet a chronic "national emergency". Ruler-ruled relations are a series of perpetual impositions, unwelcome visits by colonial operatives granted license by the imperial Terror Experts. Faced with a systematic effort to lower their self-esteem, the oppressed people "find" themselves in their own organizations, public and clandestine, religious and secular. This reaffirmation finds expression in a reassertion of a religious or secular identity, embodied in a mosque, church, political movement or resistance organization.
Colonial/imperial power disrupts the daily routine of the general population: 'going to work' faces roadblocks, work places are destroyed, fruit trees are uprooted. "Taking care of the family" becomes a daily life and death struggle of securing food at black market prices, facing unpredictable hostile fire in the marketplace. 'Enjoying leisure' becomes a memory of the pre-colonial/pre-imperial past. Now there is 'forced leisure' - jobless, policed, futureless - in the street, where individual discontent is socialized by local opinion leaders who provide a focus for action. Taking sides, addressing the oppression, the hardening of attitudes is a fundamental effort to recover the 'daily routine'.
The complex interweaving of powerful spiritual loyalties, family responsibilities and workplace displacement leads to a commitment to direct action and a political movement. This is a rational and complex process. The Terror Experts' colonial preconceptions blind them to this reality. For example, Stern sees the committed resistance fighter as being in a "kind of trance" - irrational, dogmatic and simplistic.
The Terror Experts repeat ad nauseam that the "terrorists" join their organizations in their search for strength - a common response of all those who engage in politics and social action. The Terror Experts thus turn a commonplace observation which has a lineage of over 3,000 years or more into a particular feature of "terrorists". The resistance fighters do have a sense of altruism and an idea of the public good - which the Terror Experts refuse to take serious. To do so would require a profound re-examination of their loyalties, and collaboration with imperial/colonial powers, and a deep critical self-examination of their institutional location and motives. This would be a difficult psychological and material experience for Terror Experts since their prestige, income, status, and influence might be threatened. Their critical introspective analysis might lead them to question their paymasters, their institutions, their colonial/imperial states. What foundations would pay to have a 'renegade' Terror Expert bear witness to their prejudices, falsifications and close ties to politicians who sanction torture and murder? Would their former colleagues describe the renegade as being in a "kind of trance", "victim of the Stockholm complex" (accepting the views of their captors)?
The colonial practitioners and their academic experts specialize in verifying each other's stereotypes of resistance fighters. They oversimplify their motives, decisions and commitments. They rely on blanket categories that obscure deeper structural realities in favor of subjective labeling. Above all they banish any objectivity. Relations of power and dominance, state violence, violent intrusions into Arab, Muslim, Latin American countries, towns and villages are described as "defensive", "retaliation". As the limbs and body parts of Palestinian babies, women and grandparents are exploded over the ruins of homes and neighborhoods, Harvey Morris , the Bureau Chief of the Financial Times in Israel writes of Israeli "retaliation", after killing dozens of children and old people. Banishing objectivity means the incapacity to empathize with the human condition of the colonized victims - for that reason the experts must present the victims as sub-human. Because the Terror Experts are condemning the most abused victims in the name of the most vicious powers, they convince themselves that their vitriolic diatribes are merely a service to truth and science.
The Terror Experts are masters of euphemism, especially in dealing with the muck and gore of empire building. Imperialists become "one worlders". Colonial occupation is called "nation building". Murderous offensive wars become "humanitarian interventions".
Above all the Terror Experts celebrate triumphal imperialism: the defeated colonial peoples, we are told , are "resentful" - "those who feel they can't keep up". Of course with a hood over their head and shackled legs and feet and a cattle prod burning their genitals - they can't keep up, they can't turn around and express gratitude to their torturers.
How is a Palestinian farmer going to "keep up" with a Jewish settler who seizes his land, water and , supported by local thugs and Israeli soldiers, blocks his access to the market? Anything short of "resentful" would be masochistic. Is it any wonder that the deraccinated and dispossessed risk their lives to convert resentment into resistance? By all means. When the tanks roll into Iraqi neighborhoods after shelling homes and mosques, is it any wonder that furious neighbors swarm around an ambushed tank and dance on the shards of smoking metal and corpses? Is it a frightful spectacle of pitiless terrorists or jubilant neighbors, who have silenced the sound of shells bursting over their heads and into some neighbors' homes?
The Terror Experts existed before the Iraqi resistance and they will exist after it. Wherever the oppressed rise and effectively resist imperial rule there will be academic chairs, foundations grants and Centers for International Studies for the ambitious upwardly mobile Terror Expert. The Imperial state will demand their services, the prestigious Councils of Foreign Relations will offer membership and universities will reward them with distinguished professorships. They will be celebrities - the mass media talk shows will feature them. They will be far from the killing fields but their spirit will be there, on the front lines and in the torture chambers, guiding the hands that place the hoods over the unredeemable, nihilists, Muslims, Marxists or national patriots. "

~ James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in brazil and argentina and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jessica Stern, "How Terrorists Think", Financial Times Weekend, June 12/13, 2004 W1-2.

Alan Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works, R.R. Donnelley and Sons, 2002

Scott Altran, "Genesis of Suicide Terrorism", Science March 7, 2003 p. 1534

Rafael Patai, The Arab Mind, WW Norton and Co., 1973 with preface by Norvell B. De Atkine

Harvey Morris, "The State They're In", Financial Times Weekend, July 3-4 p. W1-2.

D. Long, The Anatomy of Terrorism, Free Press, New York, 1990.

E. Stout (ed), The Psychology of Terrorism, Praeger, Westport CT, 2002

Hector Qirko, "'Fictive Kin' and Suicide Terrorism", Science, April 2, 2004 p 49.

"The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism" , Federal Research Division, Library of Congress Washington DC, Sept. 1999.