Senator Al Franken and the Significance of 60

Column No. 227

So Al Franken is Senator Al Franken. The GOP hates him (politically) because he is a reasonable liberal and even moreso because he is, as all readers of TPJmagazine know, Democratic Senator no. 60. 

Funnily enough, Al is no progressive, as a number of left-wing analysts are letting us know loud and clear, but the GOP hates him anyway. The Republican Scream Machine hates him (viscerally) because he would not have been in the Senate were it not for the success of his books “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” which exposed that very same RSM for what they are. The personal attacks have been vitriolic and likely to get even moreso (that is if there are different levels of vitriol). They focus on Sen. Franken’s earlier career as a comedian and comic writer. 

Dipping to the level of the Republican Scream Machine, one really classy GOP Senator (it was either Kyl or Coburn, the latter of whom, by-the-by, seems to be caught up in the Ensign scandal, both far-Rightists in any case) called him a “clown” on the floor of the Senate. Not quite at the level of Cheney saying “f__k you” to Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont on the Senate floor a few years ago, but close.  When screaming about Franken, not one of these clowns includes any information of the facts that, for example, he a Harvard College Graduate (with honors) and that before he decided to run for the Senate he was a thoughtful liberal analyst on the first (and best) iteration of Air America Radio. But a Senator with a sense of humor, especially about politics and politicians, so many of whom take themselves so seriously, who can also actually think? How awful. So they just do riffs, not funny ones either, on the fact that he was also a professional comedian.

But let’s pause for a moment to look at entertainers in politics. Republicans do come to mind, mind you. First of course is the hero of the current generation of Republican “leadership,” Ronald Reagan. Graduating from being a sportscaster (Rush Limbaugh anyone?) he became a decent B movie actor. He was left-wing enough in his younger days to have been the President of the Screen Actors Guild. But he was a very happy cooperator (1947) with the House Un-American Activities Committee when its Hollywood Witch Hunt was beginning. In the 1950s he became a cigarette pitchman (a time when the tobacco industry, internal memos much later showed, already knew that cigarettes were deadly. There is no evidence that they shared this knowledge with Ronnie. But there is no evidence that they did not, either.) In the 1950s and 60s he was the principal public spokesman for General Electric, at a time when its labor relations were handled by one by Lemuel Boulware. “Boulwarism” was the name given to the man’s very vicious and very successful union-crushing strategy and tactics. 

And so with this as his background this former actor, former labor leader, former squealer, former pitchman for personal poisons, became first governor and then President. Experience in running anything? Well, no. Experience as a legislator? Well know. Any higher education in history or political science? Well, no. And then there was George Murphy, previously best-known as a tap dancer (not in a class with Jimmy Cagney, but a pretty good one), who became a one-term GOP Senator from California in 1964. And then of course there is Ahnold, who shows us that you can take steroids and still live a seemingly normal life.  But in government or its study any experience? Well, no. But the GOP now complains about Al Franken, Harvard grad., political analyst and author, and yes, comedian and comic writer.

But even worse for the GOP than who he is, is the fact that Sen. Franken is the 60th Democratic member of the Democratic Caucus (which includes the two independents, from the left, Sen. Sanders and from the right, Sen. Lieberman). Now according to the GOP minority leader, Mitch McConnell, this means that the “Democrat” Party will be able “to ride roughshod” and “get what they want.” Actually that is not at all the case. The majority party in the Senate has never needed 60 votes to pass legislation or confirm Presidential nominations for positions in the Administration, something many people seem not to understand. They simply need 60 votes to make sure that the item in question gets to the floor of the Senate for a vote. That is, the “cloture rule” is invoked, cutting off debate after a specific time and allowing the item to come to a vote. One would assume that Sen. McConnell does understand, but if he does, he ain’t tellin’. To do so would not serve his party politically, and for the GOP that’s often what it’s all about. 

What 60 votes means, then, is that democracy might actually become the rule of the day in the Senate. For when proposed legislation or votes on Presidential nominees are brought to the Senate floor for a vote, democracy can now rule. Just because a Democratic Senator votes for cloture does not mean that he/she would necessarily vote for the legislation or the nomination. But since the Democrats hold the Vice-Presidency and the Vice-President gets to vote in case of a tie, they can actually pass legislation with 50 votes, plus the big One.

Where democracy has not been in effect in the Senate is first in the “when proposed legislation is brought to the Senate floor for a vote” part. The power that McConnell has possibly lost is precisely that he has been able to prevent the democratic process from taking place in the Senate. “Filibusters” don’t defeat proposed legislation or nominations; they do prevent proposed legislation or nominations from being voted upon. If the Democratic caucus can stick together and if its two very sick members, Sens. Byrd and Kennedy, can get to the floor if needed, democracy will be able to rule in the Senate for the first time since President Obama was elected. 

“Sticking together” could be a big “if,” of course. There is the small posse of right-wing Democratic senators. Only one of them has to vote against bringing proposed legislation or a nomination to the floor for a vote and the item doesn’t get there.   But if the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gets some cojones, cloture might actually happen. And Senator Reid, not previously known for his militancy as a Democrat, may actually be growing a pair of the aforementioned appendages.  He has issued some fairly strong, actually anti-Republican statements of late, dontchaknow.

If Sen. Reid does get tough with his caucus, democracy can thus be brought to the Senate. Democrats always allowed it when they were in the minority but could have filibustered endless times had they had collectively what Sen. Reid seems to be possibly developing individually. But that of course means nothing to the GOP. It’s not that they “hope Obama fails,” a la Limbaugh. It’s that they are doing everything within their power to make sure that that happens. Part of that process is preventing proposed legislation from coming to the floor. Possibly more important in the still early days of the Obama Administration is that they have used the filibuster to tie up the confirmation process in knots. For example, the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, an outspoken opponent of the Cheneyite “Unitary Executive” (read “dictator”) theory of US government, has yet to be confirmed to be head of the Dept. of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Only when that position is filled can there be a real investigation of the depths to which the office was taken under Cheney/Bush/Gonzales/Mukasey/Yoo/Bybee. And that is a definite “we don’t want that” for Republicans.

So this is why the election of Senator Franken is so significant. Not because “the Democrats can ride roughshod,” but because so many matters for which the Senate GOP has prevented democracy from working, can now be subject to ---- the democratic process.

GOP Meddling In Iran

Column No. 226

So the Republican Scream Machine, this time both in Congress and on the airwaves, have been indeed screaming that President Obama should "do something about Iran,” or by now possibly “should have done something in Iran.”

He should be going (or should have gone) hammer and tongs on the issue of the obviously stolen election there.  Of course if President Obama had done that foolish thing and proclaimed long and loud about what is happening inside Iran, the Republicans would be yelling at him for doing that, claiming among other things that he is “just all talk and not action.” But that reality just reflects what the GOP is all about: “Just Saying ‘No’ to everything the President says ‘Yes’ to.” And yelling about it too. But you can't really blame them, can you? After all, they have nothing positive to offer.

So let's analyze what previous U.S. meddlings in Iranian affairs have produced, all but one of them the product of Republicans in office and, in all cases the product of Republican policies. Of course one does wonder why the GOPers are so upset with the present Iranian government. After all, I said in a BuzzFlash commentary some time ago, George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have a lot in common.

For example: Both think they have a direct connection with God.  They both fit under Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s characterization of Iran’s President Ahmedinejad as "a petty and cruel dictator." President Ahmedinejad is clearly the nominal head of state of a country that is actually a theocracy. Who is actually in charge in that country has been made plain for the world to see in the last three weeks.  A theocracy is just what the hard core of GOP support wants to establish in the U.S.  Ahmedinejad and the GOP both view women as second-class citizens. Bush and Ahmedinejad both had/have the power to lock up anyone they want to without charges, without any demonstrable evidence, and without any rights either to counsel or trial, and with the power to torture when, as, and if. Finally, homophobia is central to the policies of both Ahmedinejad and the GOP.

Despite this concordance of policy, Ahmedinejad has been on the GOP enemies list since his election. Just think, if McCain had been elected President (yes, my friends on the Left who are SOOO dissatisfied with President Obama, just think about that one a bit), the bombast would be coming out of Washington thick and fast. This is especially so since a McCain/Palin Administration (how about them apples?) would have had so many negative happenings occurring on its watch that they would be desperate to distract the country's attention from. So, within the limits of actually not being able to do anything like “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” because of a) the sorry state of the military they would have inherited and b) the sorry state of the relationships with allies they would have inherited, they would have meddling away to beat the band. In that light, let's see just what GOP governmental meddling in Iranian affairs has brought about in the past.  What a track record, but that wouldn’t stop the imaginary McCain/Palin Admin. from doing it or the real McCain from screaming for it.

The GOP overthrow of the moderate government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, mediated by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit Jr., is so well documented and so much considered a negative that even President Obama has referred to it as what not to do, several times. Once the Shah took back power, using increasingly violent repression over time to make sure he stayed in place, the CIA took an active role in training his terror-secret police, the SAVAK. One of these fellows' instruments of torture was to tie their victims to a set of red-hot bedsprings. (Might have been ordered for Gitmo by Cheney and approved by Bybee/Yoo as not-torture for all we know, just as long as the victims didn’t die from the event.) So for a variety of reasons (oil, “containment” of the Soviet Union) that support continued unabated under both Republican and Democratic administration for 25 years. 

As for a variety of reasons over time resistance to the Shah’s rule became more widespread, he became evermore repressive. In January 1979, with the military standing aside and the SAVAK presumably neutralized, he was eventually overthrown. His government was replaced by a moderate, bourgeois-democratic pro-Western one, lead by Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar. The Shah went into exile.

President Jimmy Carter was warned by the U.S. Embassy in Tehran not to include the U.S. on the Shah's visiting list. The embassy predicted that if that were to occur anti-U.S. violent protests would break out, threatening both U.S. interests there and the still shaky civil government.  Carter listened not to his embassy but to Republicans such as Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and his own National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (an avid Polish refugee Cold Warrior) and let the Shah in. U.S., GOP-lead, meddling, again. We all know what happened then. A budding, pro-Western moderate government was replaced by the repressive theocracy that has ruled Iran down to the present time.

Then, during the 1980 U.S. election it may well have been that the Reagan campaign negotiated directly with the newly-installed Muslim theocracy to get them not to make any deal for release of the hostages. This act, treason if it did actually occur, likely prolonged the captivity of Americans for GOP political gain and also helped the Khomeini regime to cement its place in power (by, in part, taking over the originally CIA-trained SAVAK pretty much unchanged). The next meddling was the secret sale of arms in the early 1980s to a now supposed U.S. enemy, theocratic Iran. This was the “Iran-Contra” affair. The proceeds supplied the money for the illegal support provided by the Reagan Administration to the right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. The GOP openly supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War that was going on at the time, but that secret arms deal actually was supporting both sides at the same time. This meddling was designed to achieve certain non-Middle Eastern foreign policy objectives that they otherwise could not have because US law at the time banned aid to the Nicaraguan Rightists. (Let’s hear for law and order, shall we?)

In our own time, under Bush-Cheney, the U.S. has apparently been supporting armed guerilla forces recruited from certain Iranian ethnic minorities fighting against the present government. They apparently use methods that if used against the U.S. would be labeled as "terrorism." This is direct meddling, of course, again with a political goal. In fact, since, if Seymour Hersh's reporting on this is correct, this effort was under Cheney's direct control, outside of the Pentagon's chain of command. (Who knows, if it is still going on, maybe he is still running it.) There is no way that such small scale efforts could lead to an overthrow of the existing government, but they sure can strengthen its resolve not to deal with the United States on anything. Thus this meddling totally served the domestic political interests of the Bush/Cheney regime, if nothing else: that is to keep the pot boiling overseas in as many places as possible.

So, no U.S./GOP efforts at meddling since 1953 have produced anything positive for the U.S., Iran, or the world, although some have had positive outcomes in terms of GOP domestic politics and policies. No wonder that they are once again screaming "meddle." Good on President Obama for turning a deaf ear to them.

There are a few prominent GOPers, like Sen. Richard Lugar and (mirabile dictu) John Bolton. (Bolton was, ironically, was one of the leaders of the assault threatened by GOP thugs on the Dade County election board in December, 2000, that prevented their recount from moving forward, an event that directly enabled the selection of Bush by the GOPers on the Supreme Court.) They have been saying quite properly that Pres. Obama is doing the proper thing. The reasoning is that should Ahmedinejad retain the Presidency (now all but certain), he is the person with whom Obama is going to have to negotiate over such issues as the Iranian nuclear development program. But the GOP is split over this and their non-Congressional leadership is going at it hammer and tongs. And so we must ask why?

Well, let’s see. Having any influence on the outcome of the stolen election, like having a recount or even a do-over, can’t be it. Even President Obama’s measured tones brought forth screams from the Iranian side (so much do they have in common with the GOP) about how it is he who has been entirely responsible for the demonstrations and the violence there. (How remarkably like GOP reasoning that sounds, doesn’t it? There could not possibly be any legitimate grievances among the Iranian electorate now, could there?) But what is the primary goal of the current GOP, as announced right after the election of President Obama? They want him to fail. And it has become everso apparent that they not only want him to fail, but that they will do what ever they can to assure that outcome.

A peaceful settlement of the Iranian situation, with Iran returning to the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and pursing the peaceful use of nuclear energy under the watchful eyes of the International Atomic Energy Agency would be a major foreign policy triumph for Obama. Furthermore it would de-power to some extent the Israeli Right. This is that last thing that the GOP would want. So this is why they are once again meddling in Iran as hard as they can. And even before they could possibly be negatively influencing any Obama attempts at achieving a diplomatic settlement, they at least could be achieving a certain level of deligitimization of him here at home: “he’s just weak, weak, weak, like we always said he was.” So. Meddling in Iran they go and has almost always been the case since the original meddling for oil in 1953, it is done, everso cynically, for domestic political purposes.

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This column is based in part on one of the same name that appeared on BuzzFlash on June 19, 2009.

Winning the War on Drugs

Column No. 225

“Winning the War on Drugs?”  Is that you, Dr. Steve?  Isn’t that “War” just a construct designed to achieve political and economic aims, while oppressing with it one particular sector of the population?  How can it be “won?” 

This column considers that conundrum in almost telegraphic form.  I have written at length on it in the academic literature.  Interested readers are welcome to get in touch with me for references.  The “War on Drugs” has never been such a thing.  From its inauguration by Richard Nixon it has always been a War on Drug Users, for the most part minority drug users at that, although some non-minorities have occasionally been caught up in its tentacles.  The so-called War on Drugs was begun shortly after the invention of the race-based “Southern Strategy” that has controlled the fortunes of the GOP and unfortunately the country for most of the time since Nixon installed it. 

The correctly labeled “War on Drug Users” has primarily been a racist enterprise too.  It has been aimed at the users of one minor class of the Recreational Mood Altering Drugs (RMADs), those that are currently “illicit” (as alcohol was nationally between 1920 and 1933 and cigarettes were in 15 states at various times during the 19th century.  Although the ratios have declined a bit in the last few years, for most of its duration under the War on Drug Users, while approximately 75% of those in prison for drug-related offenses are non-white approximately 75% of illicit-drug users are white.  Further, the War on Drug Users has been race-based in terms of the neighborhoods in which it has been waged.  There was one major previous true War on Drugs, Prohibition.  It was for the most part actually aimed at the drug, ethyl alcohol, not at the users.

The commonly used RMADs are alcohol, nicotine in tobacco, the non-prescription use of prescription drugs, and the illicits, primarily marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and fairly recently, methamphetamine.  In terms of negative outcomes of RMAD use, for example, tobacco kills about 430,000 people per year, alcohol between 60,000 and 100,000, depending upon how one counts, and the illicits kill about 20,000, half that number as a result of drug-trade violence that would not exist absent the War on Drug Users and some of the other half due to forced unsterile use of the drugs.  Tobacco and alcohol are not only the major drug killers but they are the “starter drugs,” most often in childhood, for almost every problem-user of them in adult life and almost every user of the illicits, regardless of age.

Logic has not ended the War on Drug Users.  Neither has the mainstream drug policy reform movement which views RMAD use as the same false duality the Drug Warriors do.  Logic did not end Prohibition either.  Over-riding policy concerns did: rampant crime on the one hand and a major need for new tax revenues to deal with the Depression on the other.  Major funding for the final Repeal campaign of the early 1930s came from a John D. Rockefeller-lead group of financiers who wanted to prevent any increases in income tax levels that an incoming Democratic Administration might enact.

In dealing with the War on Drug Users the stars would seem to be aligned, that is if the unitary-RMAD understanding of reality were to be adopted.  There is a major series of problems that could be addressed by ending the War on Drug Users.  Legalizing the currently illicit would create a major new source of tax revenues.  Doing so would significantly reduce the prison population resulting in major reductions in Federal, state and local spending on incarceration.  Doing so would significantly unclog the courts, especially at the Federal level where they are so over-burdened with drug cases that the waits for trials on much more important matters, especially in the civil realm, can become interminable.  Obviously, there would be a significant reduction in the demands on the law enforcement sector of government, which could either save money or enable the diversion of resources to other important areas, such as financial fraud, that do not always receive the attention they deserve.  

The Taliban would be largely defunded.  That the heroin trade is a major source of their funding is the subject a new book that is currently featured on BuzzFlash.com: Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.  As well, of course, the true Drug Wars that are killing thousands of Latin Americans, especially in Mexico and Colombia, would be brought to a sudden, well-deserved end.  Finally, the recognition of the unitary nature of RMAD use would enable for the first time a comprehensive public health program to deal with all of the negative aspects of that use, especially among children for whom it is the major licit drugs which are the stepping stones both to later habitual, damaging use of them, and, currently, to the use of the illicits. 

As to the practical matter of how to implement the legalization of the illicits, it has been said that the tobacco companies have been prepared for marijuana legalization, up to and including the registration of trade names.  Heroin and cocaine could be sold by Federal or state-operated stores, similar to the “package stores” that dispense certain alcoholic beverages in such states as Vermont.  As for the synthetic RMADs, and the non-prescription use of the prescription drugs (the latter of which has been a much more serious problem than the use of heroin and cocaine combined), a variety of approaches could be explored.  This all would have be combined with a major public-health based anti- and safe-RMAD use program, combining tax policy, controls on advertising, packaging, and marketing, and effective education programs for both adults and children.  The result would be a much healthier nation.  Since finding sources of new government revenues in the face of ever-increasing deficits have become such a major concern and since certain major foreign policy aims could be achieved so easily, now is the time to end the War on Drug Users, once and for all.

Cheney, Netanyahu, Permanent War, and Why

Column No. 224

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – June 7, 2009

As Dick Cheney makes the media rounds attempting to justifying both the War on Iraq and torture, since Bush has virtually gone into hiding he has revealed to the world just who was running the show. He has also revealed its true goals.

Of course the Iraq and torture policies were closely tied together, and not simply because the first reason for doing torture was to try to get some captive to falsely “confess” that Saddam and bin Laden were working together. Cheney wanted the War on Iraq and he also wanted the use of torture to become institutionalized in the United States. But why Iraq? Well, we know that it was not because “Saddam had WMD and was prepared to unleash them within 45 minutes” (courtesy of the lap-dog Tony Blair). We also know that it was not because of any link between Saddam and bin Laden. None existed. If that supposed “meeting in Prague” really did happen, it is overwhelmingly likely that, given Saddam’s well-known hatred for bin Laden, his envoy responded to bin Laden’s messenger asking for aid in two words: “F__k off!” 

It was not done to “bring Democracy to the Middle East” beginning with the country in the middle of it. No one has ever successfully established democracy at the barrel of a gun. Re-established, yes. Established, no. (Iraq, sharply riven along ethnic and geographic lines with continuing violence, can hardly be considered a democracy even though there is voting.) But there is a first time for everything. Suppose that the experiment were successful. Can you imagine Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and etc. suddenly becoming true, Western-style democracies? So if it was none of the above, what was it?

Many of us on the left thought right from the start that it was about oil and bases. But as the war wore on it gradually became apparent that they weren’t it. At least they weren’t the primary reasons. Too much went wrong with the invasion from the beginning. Not nearly enough troops to bring order to the country. Allowing vandalism, from the national museum to the electric power system to the oil industry itself. Not having a comprehensive post-war reconstruction plan. (Remember? The State Department had prepared one. It was 2200 pages long. It was completely ignored by Rumsfeld et al who were running things there.) Bremer disbanding the Iraqi army. No notion about how to make peace between the Sunnis, the Shiites, and the Kurds. 

Accidental? I don’t think so. I have thought for some time now that the true objective was to create an Orwellian Permanent War: some level of US troops always there and always engaged in combat at some level. Remember McCain talking about a “100 year presence?” Indeed that objective was well on its way to being achieved by the Georgites during the latter stages of the Bush Administration when, even with a Democratic Congress, cowed into submissiveness however, they continued to get war funding and their Scream Machine continued to called for some totally undefined “victory” that would take forever to achieve. Only when even the US-installed Shiite-lead government demanded a time-line for American withdrawal did Bush suddenly do a complete volte-face and agree to one. And now with his fear-mongering, Cheney is still trying oh-so-very hard to achieve what would be the same objective: to keep the US on a war-footing even after a future withdrawal from Iraq.

What about the Israeli Right, then? In the 1980s, the right-wing, former Irgun terrorist, Yitzhak Shamir, said words to the effect of “sure, we’ll have negotiations with the Palestinians. We’ll just make sure they go on forever. In the meantime, we just continue taking their land and putting up settlements.” In 1991, outside the Madrid Conference which lead to the Oslo Agreement which was supposed to have lead to a settlement of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu was heard by an American journalist to say “this cannot happen.” When in 1996 under the leadership of the former hawk Yitzhak Rabin it looked like a settlement was actually going to be achieved, he was conveniently assassinated by a far-right “religious” type. 

When in the fall of 2000, it looked like Bill Clinton was going to be able to forge a peace agreement, Ariel Sharon arranged to march onto the holiest spot in the Islamic world outside of Mecca, the Temple Mount, surrounded by 800 troops conveniently provided by the Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. When Sharon became Prime Minister the following year, and “peace talks” of sorts continued, somehow, every time it looked like there was going to be some sort of break-through even with the Neocons in charge in Washington as well as in Jerusalem, there was some sort of terrorist attack. Certain EU and UN staffers and even certain Israeli observers, including at least one MK, thought that there occurrence was somehow just too “coincidental.” False flag operations to avoid peace? Nah, impossible, right? Right. 

In the meantime, theft of Palestinian land and settlement construction continues unabated, the Gaza outrage occurs (and who knows exactly who was responsible for those short-range rocket attacks which, when described by the US media made one think that they were volleys of Nazi V-2s or Soviet Katyushas), and then comes Netanyahu. “Peace? Of course. Just don’t take notice when we once again move the goal-posts. Not only are we not talking about a Palestinian state. We are talking about Palestinian Bantustans. We are talking about Jerusalem being all ours. And oh yes, not only do we want recognition of the State of Israel (already granted by the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League but also, if one reads between the lines, by Hamas as part of a true two-state solution) we want recognition of Israel as a JEWISH state, thereby dis-enfranchising all of its non-Jewish citizens.”

A formula for peace? No. A formula for a continuation of the 60-year war, with no end in sight. Just like Cheney’s objective. So why do they want this state of affairs? The answer is a simple one that just stares us in the face. Because both in Israel and in the United States it is the only way that the Right can stay in power. In the US it has very quickly become obvious that the only card the GOP has to play is the fear card. Nothing else, not big deficits, not the threat of a national health insurance program that would both cover all Americans and bring down costs while improving quality, not the threat of an end of oil company domination and profiteering from the energy policy that has been in place ever since it was established by Reagan, not screaming “socialism,” is working for them. New ideas? Since it’s their ideas that got our nation into the fix it’s in, how could they possibly have new ones that could work? 

So. Promote fear. Promote torture. Promote continuing “low level conflicts” in Afghanistan, advocate broadening the guerilla War on Iran that according to Seymour Hersh Cheney was (perhaps still is) already running directly. Hope that North Korea does something really crazy. Hope for (or possibly create?) the next 9/11. Then you’ve got your only possible road back to power. 

As for the Israeli Right, Permanent War is the only way they can stay in power. With any kind of real peace do you think that the Israeli public would continue to advocate the continued slashing of the traditional Israeli social service economy and the continued flourishing of the Israel Defense Force and its ever-broadening military industrial base? 

Cheney and Netanyahu. Both run by the US/Israeli Neocon clique, some of whose members we know of and, most likely, some of its most-powerful members we don’t. Brothers under the skin.

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Please note: This column was previous published on The Planetary Movement (http://www.planetarymovement.org/) on May 29, 2009, and is re-published here with permission.

The Crisis of Finance Capitalism

Column No. 223

Among all of the others that we know of on Earth, the human species is unique in a number of ways. One is that while members of other species certainly can communicate with each other in a variety of ways, including sound, we are the only one (as far as we know, and outside of Pixar films) that has a complex language. We are unique in that we are the only one that for our survival needs to convert various elements found in our natural environment into more complex substances. And so foodstuffs, raw meat, vegetables, grains and etc., become food. Trees become wood, become shelter. Iron ore becomes iron, becomes at first various tools and other implements, and then more complex things, especially when we make it into steel. Thus the members of the other species can each take what they need for survival from the environment directly (assuming there is enough of it). If we are to survive, as individuals and as a species, ours needs to make the various elements that we find in the environment into a whole range of products made from those elements. 

One term for the various modes of conversion from environmental elements into usable substances, structures, and so forth is “means of production.” Because the existence of each of us is dependent on such means, without them, our species would quickly die out. Very early humans presumably did their own personal conversions, for themselves and/or their family units, of hunted and gathered foodstuffs into food, of trees into wood into shelter, of animal skins into clothing, and so on and so forth. As those early humans began to organize themselves into social units, it certainly would have been possible for them to organize the control of the means of production so that it was shared in one way or another among all of the members of each social unit. But that is not what happened.

We cannot be certain just when it occurred, but back in the mists of time by one means or another certain members of each social unit would take over control of the means of production, leaving all of the other members without such control. This may have happened at some point in the hunter-gatherer phase of the development of our species, but it certainly happened when, for example, food production started to switch over from hunting-gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry, and where possible, fishing. Some individuals were owners of various elements of the means of production the use of which could supply relatively large numbers of individuals with various products. The rest were either not-owners entirely, or owners of a limited set of means of production, like their own animals and small agricultural plots, and/or their own fishing boats, from which they could supply their own needs, at least for the basic elements of human survival: food, clothing, and shelter. 

But for most everything else, over a period of some millennia, to a greater or lesser extent depending upon their own particular circumstances, the not-owners became dependent upon the owners for their survival. The not-owners did have their labor-power, of course. Increasingly, they voluntarily or involuntarily put it in the service of the means of production owners. A combination of self-supporting and non-self-supporting peasantry, dependent and independent craftsmen, slaves, and means-of-production owners became the norm for the societal structure of that lengthy period. 

The modern system of economic organization that we call “capitalism” has been under development since the Middle Ages. It is based on the private ownership of the means of production, just as under the slavery/peasant/craftsman system, but it took on a different nature. Capitalists were able to take accumulated wealth of one sort or another and use it to employ others to work for them, and pay them for doing that work. The system evolved such that the owners were able to earn more from the work of others, using their original investment plus the raw worth of the workers’ labor power, than the simple sum of the two. So there was an excess of value produced, that, as the system developed on top of the by-then age-old formulation of the private ownership of the means of production, went to its owners.

The first form was mercantile capitalism, in which money was made by organized trading at a level much higher than anything previously seen.  Trade and the accumulation of surpluses from it had of course been going on for millennia. But in most cases the excesses, if any, earned, were earned by the persons doing the trading themselves. In mercantile capitalism, the capitalists invested their funds in the work of others and then proceeded to accumulate the profits earned, without actually doing any of the work themselves. Of course this wasn’t a totally “clean” break from the past forms. Certain mercantilists both worked in trading directly and also accumulated profits from the enterprises earned by others. The “capital” that they provided/paid for consisted of the land and sea-going vessels used for trading and the systems developed to keep track of everything.

The second form was industrial capitalism, still going strong in many countries around the world, especially those with cheap labor. In this form, profits are made by the owners of the means of production using the labor of others for which they pay (as little as possible in most cases), making and selling things in large numbers.   The “capital” is literally the means of production that they own: the factories, the mines, the refineries, the means of transportation, on which they employ others and then accumulate the excess value, profit, produced by those others in the course of their work.

The third form is finance capitalism, in which money is made from the business of buying, selling and trading various financial instruments, for example, home mortgages, and most recently, their "securitized" form. That is the form which more and more is taking over American capitalism. In the first decade of this century, the financial sector made 41% of the total profits accumulated in the United States (“The Quiet Coup,” Simon Johnson, The Atlantic, May, 2009). Some that profit was made the old-fashioned way, by collecting interest on loans made. 

But increasingly, in the financial sector, profits were made by trading pieces of paper, some of which were of such a complicated structure that very few people actually understood how they were pieced together, to say nothing of being to explain their structures to anyone else. The key to making profits with these instruments was to be able to convince a potential buyer that they would become evermore valuable. This was the case even though their intrinsic worth was based on other pieces of paper that had been sliced and diced into such small bits of supposed base value that no one could ever trace them to their source. We all know what happened when the belief-in-the-ever-increasing-value-of-financial-instruments-that-few-people-understood collapsed. 

And therein lies the rub for financial capitalism and its potential for recovery. The “capital” on which profits were made is/was these financial instruments. They, the “toxic assets,” have no intrinsic value and thus cannot produce anything, ever again. In previous recessions/depressions, the capital was always there, in the form of the ships and etc. under mercantile capitalism, the factories, mines, and etc. under industrial capitalism. Once the market for goods and services under either system revived or was caused to be revived in one way or another, the capital, the “stuff” of production was there. It simply had to be brought back to a reasonably efficient functioning state. Then the capitalist could employ the workers once again, accumulate the excess value they produced once again, and the capitalist cycle would start over again.

But if the “capital,” the means by which profits were made, is simply pieces of paper that now have no intrinsic value and unlike a closed factory cannot be simply started up again, where does capitalism go from here? This is the question that the Obama Administration, the US owners of the means of production and indeed their counterparts all around the world are struggling mightily to come up with a workable answer for. I certainly do not have the answer in this case. I must say that I hope that these “captains of industry (and finance)” can come up with one soon or we will all really be in for it, at a level of economic and political suffering that presently one can only imagine.

What Cheney is All About?

Column No. 222

George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency. For example, he apparently really thought that: he was a uniter, not a divider; Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (until it was absolutely proven otherwise); cutting taxes for the rich would boost the economy; as President, he had all of those powers that Dick Cheney, Richard Addington, and John Yoo pretended to find for him in the Constitution; abolishing Social Security would benefit everyone whose social security was thereby abolished as well as the country as a whole; as President he had the authority under the Constitution to say "I'll follow this Act of Congress but not that one, at my own discretion;" he could, on his own authority, abrogate ratified treaties if his White House Legal Counsel thought they were "quaint;" Saddam really did buy "yellow cake" in Niger.

While George Bush really is an undereducated, ignorant, and dumb, person, he, in his alternate reality certainly never thought of himself in that light. No, he was not a secret voracious reader, as "Turdblossom," otherwise known as Karl Rove, was so fond of telling us. There were never any references to such readings except on the occasions that such were written into speeches for him. But he probably thought that he was, given that Rove told the world he that was. What a nice fit for Bush’s alternate reality.

Dick Cheney is cut from an entirely different cloth. He is very knowledgeable, very smart, and knows exactly what he is doing every minute. He had a very clear agenda when he was in office: to run both the presidency and the President to the extent that he could. He was very clear in his own mind, and even on occasion in public by indirection that his ultimate objective was to establish an authoritarian government in the United States., something he called "The Unitary Presidency." Most not otherwise prejudiced observers, under the brief definition (of mine) that follows, would call it "fascism:”

"Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy."

Dick Cheney does not make off-hand remarks. Dick Cheney knows the truth from falsehood. Dick Cheney does not live in an alternate reality. Dick Cheney does try very hard to conceal the reality that he lives in. That is why, during his vice presidency, he made very few public appearances where one or more members of the media could question him. However, he did make such an appearance on a Sunday back in March on CNN.

In that interview he uttered several palpable falsehoods. First he made the claim that Iraq was a "state sponsor of terrorism," by implication related to 9/11. There was absolutely no evidence to substantiate this claim. Bill Safire among others did like to cite a supposed meeting between a supposed al-Qaida operative with a supposed representative of the Hussein regime. The meeting supposedly took place in Prague, Czech Republic. There is no firm proof that such a meeting ever took place. But if it did, given the prior relationship between Hussein and bin Laden, the message delivered most likely to have been delivered by the Iraqi to the Saudi was one that could be summarized in two words: “F__k off!” It is a fact Saddam went out of his way to avoid associating with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden (who happened to hate Saddam as a secularist) if for no other reason than not to give the U.S. an excuse to attack him.

In that interview, Cheney stated that the Democrats are responsible for the current economic crisis and that his administration and the Republican-led Congress that controlled policy and monetary blank checks through 2006 had no responsibility for any of the mess, even though no one but the Republican Scream Machine holds to that view. Since Cheney, unlike Bush, clearly does not live in an alternate reality, he knows the truth. He just chose not to state it. 

Not a falsehood, but a totally unsupportable position stated with total conviction, Cheney stated that President Obama's policy of closing Guantanamo would make the U.S. "unsafe," when only a handful of the persons held there are known terrorists or potential terrorists, when it was Bush/Cheney who ignored (or not, because they already knew that something was up and were determined NOT to stop it) that clear warning of an impending bin Laden-led attack on the US they received from the CIA on August 5, 2001. At the same time, it is now widely acknowledged that the Iraq War that Cheney largely ginned up has become, over the years, a major recruiting and training ground for potential terrorists. (I was pleased to note that after I originally penned these lines, the President too used this line of attack on Cheney.)

So why did he offer these falsehoods and misrepresentations? To score current political points? To indicate that he is now, post-position-of-power, falling into his political dotage and succumbing to the George W. Bush alternate reality disease? Certainly not. What Dick Cheney did was to make it very clear that his battle to establish an essentially fascist state in our country for the benefit of the primary power elements that he represents -- the extractive industries, the military/industrial complex, the prison/industrial complex, the agribusiness sector, and certain elements of the other major economic sectors -- is far from over. If the Cheney Wing of the Republican Party, now lead by Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Scream Machine clones, is ever to make it back to power, the first essential endeavour for them is to establish a mythology on which they can run. For they cannot possibly run on reality and hope to come close to winning.

The German Right in the 1920s did it with the "Stab in the Back" claim for the German loss of the World War I. Never mind that by 1918 Germany had been thoroughly bled of men, material, and money, that the U.S. with its relatively limitless supply of men and materiel was fully engaged on the British/French side, and that following the failure of the 1918 Summer Offensive under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, even the Kaiser was ready to quit. No. It was the "Socialists" and the "Communists" who "stabbed the German nation in the back." They (in the Limbaugh/Coulter sense) did it. So "we," the patriotic Germans, have to get them. For it is all their fault.

And here, now, Cheney is marching down the same track. He has the full collaboration of O'RHannibaugh and their clones, the Republican leadership in the Congress and outside of it (Gingrich) who see nowhere else to go, and their echo chambers, such as NewsMax (the voice of the American Conservative (sic) Union), the Fox "News" Channel, and the Heritage Foundation. Yes, the Rovian Privatized Ministry of Propaganda is very much in play. With them all, Cheney is laying the groundwork for their hoped-for GOP comeback. But this time it would be with a vengeance, both figurative and literal. It's "The Liberals," those traitors who, so Limbaugh and Coulter tell us, are responsible for everything that is wrong with the U.S., and "we" have to get "them," "squash them like cockroaches," so the self-parodying Mark Le-vin tells us.

One big difference now, as compared with the Clinton years, is that the Obama White House hits back. So much and with so much effectiveness, that Rove, et al feel impelled to go back after them, especially the sharp-tongued Vice-President. He in fact has been so effective that the mouthpiece NewsMax has to spread rumors of “White dis-satisfaction with the Vice-President” that have absolutely no basis in fact.

Stay tuned. Indeed we all better stay tuned, because Limbaugh out loud and Cheney to himself and privately to his friends are serious when they say that they want Obama to fail. For that failure, combined with the mythology they are quickly developing, would very easily lead them back to power. And were that to happen, the even GW Bush Presidency, moving down the road to fascism but not there yet by any stretch of the imagination, could become something that we would look back upon with longing.

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This column is based in part on a column of mine entitled “What Cheney is Really About” that appeared on BuzzFlash.com on March 19, 2009.