Optopia

War, Budgets and Blind Ambition

By CHRIS FLOYD

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd02022010.html

The American elite’s unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance — based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war — is one of the defining characteristics of our age. And if you would like to see a glaring example of this attitude in action, look no further than the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, where one David Sanger gives us his penetrating “news analysis” of the Administration’s just-announced $3.8 trillion budget.

Sanger focuses on the huge, continuing deficits that the budget forecasts over the next decade. Completely ignoring the plain truth that his own expert source tell him later in the story — that “forecasts 10 years out have no credibility” — Sanger boldly plunges forward to tell us just what it all means. You will not be surprised to hear that the upshot of these big deficits is that neither Obama nor his successors will be able to spend any money on “new domestic initiatives” for years to come. But let’s let Sanger, savant and seer, tell it in his own words:

“In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.

“The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

“But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. …

“For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.”

What is most interesting here, of course, is not Sanger’s noodle-scratching over imaginary numbers projected into an unknowable future, but his total and apparently completely unconscious adoption of the mindset of militarist empire. For as he puzzles and puzzles till his puzzler is sore on how in God’s name the United States can possibly find any money at all to spend on bettering the lives of its citizens over the next 10 years, it becomes clear that Sanger — like the rest of our political and media elite — literally cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers literally cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries.

And so this consideration, this possible outcome, does not figure in Sanger’s “analysis” because it cannot: it lies far outside the scope of his consciousness. The only possible alternative he can conceive to the empire’s bloody and bankrupting business as usual is some kind of divine intervention, “miraculous growth” or some “miraculous political compromise.”

And make no mistake: the “miraculous political compromise” he is talking about has nothing to do with ending or even trimming the empire. A “compromise” on this issue could only be posited if there was some present conflict over it. But both parties are deeply committed to increasing spending on the wars and the war machine.

No, by “compromise” Sanger means some sort of “Grand Bargain” between the parties to cut Social Security and Medicare, along the lines of the “blue-ribbon panel” of entitlement cutters now being pushed by the Obama Administration. The first effort to impose this elitist, unaccountable commission failed in the Senate a few weeks ago — although the Republicans have proposed such panels before, they didn’t like this one because Obama proposed it — but the idea will keep coming back, and Sanger and the elite will doubtless get their “miracle” of slashing the remaining bits of the safety net to shreds in due time.

These are the only possibilities for deficit-cutting that Sanger can even remotely contemplate: some whiz-bang new gizmo — or maybe some hot new “financial instruments” cooked up by Wall Street — that will goose the economy with a bright new bubble … or else finally telling our old, sick, vulnerable and unfortunate to just crawl off and die already. That’s it. That’s all that our elite can envision.

Yet the ending of the imperial wars and the dismantling of America’s global military empire — and its global gulag — would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for “Homeland security” funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants — and inciting revenge and resistance.

This would release a flood of money for any number of “new domestic initiatives,” while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be bettered, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation’s citizens.

This is no utopian vision. Many problems, much suffering would remain. But it would be a better society — more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more prosperous than it is now. Such an alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary humans; it would require no divine miracles, no god-like heroes to bring it about.

But such a society is precisely what our elites cannot — or, to be more accurate, will not — imagine. Because, yes, it would “erode” their “influence” around the world to some extent. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire — a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.

And on a more prosaic level, the end of empire would mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors. And so, yes, those who have feasted so gluttonously for so long on blood money would not be quite as rich as they are now.

A better world — not perfect, by no means perfect, but much better — is entirely possible. We could easily dismantle the empire — carefully, safely, with deliberation — over the next ten years. It is a reasonable, moderate, serious option. It would not require violent revolution, or vast social upheaval. But our elites do not want this. They can no longer fathom life without the exercise — and worship — of power that empire entails. They will not accept — or even contemplate — any alternative to it.

And thus every option and policy we are offered — whether from right-wing Republicans or “progressive” Democrats, or from “serious” news analysts on “serious” papers — must fall within these pathetically cramped, constricted mental horizons. Empire — the imposition of dominion by violence and threat of violence, and the financial and moral corruption this breeds, the example it sets at every level of society — is the canker in the body politic. Until it is dealt with, there will be no healing, no hope, no change — just more degradation and disaster all down the line.

Chris Floyd is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His blog, “Empire Burlesque,” can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

The D.C. Doublecross times 2

http://www.salon.com/ent/comics/this_modern_world/2010/02/01/this_modern_world

Guess I’m a Counterpuncher. Those guys seem to have it about right.

Obama’s Fog Machine

SOTU Whoppers

By DAVE LINDORFF

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01292010.html

President Obama gives a good speech. He’s smooth, unruffled by audience response, good at a timely ad-lib remark, and knows how to win over a tough crowd–all skills that were in evidence at last night’s State of the Union address. But he’s also good at telling whoppers.

Here are a few.

Talking about health care, and the stalled bills in House and Senate which have become so encrusted with pro-industry amendments that the whole process should be referred to as the Health Industry Enrichment Act, Obama said at one point, addressing the doubts many in Congress and among the broader public have about those bills, “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.”

Hm-m-m. Actually, he has not been eager to see other ideas at all. John Conyers has had another idea: extending Medicare to cover everyone. He had it in the form of a bill, HR 676, but at the urging of the White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept that bill from even getting a hearing. Earlier, almost a year ago, Obama held a conference at the White House to hear ideas about health care reform, but he excluded from that conference any advocates of what is called “single-payer”–shorthand for a Canadian-style health system in which the government insures everyone, and sets the reimbursement amounts for doctors and hospitals, medical services of all kinds, and drugs.

And yet, expanding Medicare to cover everyone, as I’ve written several times on this site, would probably end up costing less than the federal government and state and local governments (and of course ultimately taxpayers) already are spending on Medicaid, Veteran’s health care, hospital charity care, and other public medical programs, and in any event would, even if raising taxes slightly, simultaneously eliminate the health care costs for insurance currently paid by employers, employees and the self-employed, while also giving the government enormous power to negotiate lower costs for drugs, doctors and hospitals. Because the program would be larger and more powerful with respect to the private health care delivery system, it would also be able to reduce the cost of providing health care to the elderly who are already on Medicare.

That is to say, there is, already operating for 45 million elderly citizens, a health care program that, if expanded to all, would, as the president asked, “bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses.”

But the truth is, he doesn’t want to talk about it and doesn’t want to even hear about it
The second big whopper was Iraq. There the president, to loud applause, said he would have all combat troops out of Iraq by August of this year. At another point, though, he went further, saying that “all our troops” would be “coming home.” The truth, though, is that they won’t be. In fact, though, as many as 50,000 US troops will remain in Iraq after this August. Whether they will be “in combat” or not is really not up to them. If they are attacked, of course they will be in combat. They may well be sent into battle too, though who knows if we’ll hear about it. There are unlikely to be too many members of the press with them, as the focus shifts to Afghanistan. But 50,000 is a lot of troops–much more than the US has in South Korea, for instance. It’s hardly an end to the war in Iraq.

Third, the president slipped by the new big war, Afghanistan, in an astonishingly abrupt single paragraph. Think about it. He has ordered an escalation of that conflict, where the US already has committed 70,000 troops, with another 30,000 on the way, not counting perhaps 50-60,000 more private mercenaries, and has called for a new aggressive strategy of capturing and holding territory–a strategy that is bound to increase both US and innocent Afghani casualties–and he only said a couple of sentences about it.

And those sentences were full of lies. Obama said the US is “training Afghan security forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home,” but he knows his own advisors are telling him that those Afghan military forces are incapable of being expanded to do that job. The whole country is basically illiterate and not capable of being trained to handle much of the equipment, the military and police are hopelessly corrupt, and the tribal system makes a unified national army a pipe-dream. He said the US will “reward good governance,” but in fact has allied itself with a corrupt narco-regime led by Hamid Karzai, whose own brother is a leading drug kingpin.

There were more lies and misleading statements through the speech, for example his lie that his administration has “prohibited torture,” but these three alone make it amply clear that the president was not doing his constitutional duty of giving Congress an accurate report on the “state of the union.”

Still Pandering to Those Who Villify Him

The Political Capital is Gone, Now What About Political Will?

By JIM GOODMAN

http://www.counterpunch.org/goodman01292010.html

It’s not surprising that people are fed up with politics.

When money determines who gets elected, when campaign promises are as easily tossed out as garbage and when most elected officials knowingly support policy that puts the special interests ahead of the people’s interests, why bother with a rigged game?

The Senate is firmly under the control of a Republican minority of 41, the House is stalled and thinking about re-election, the Supreme Court has decided that political office should be for sale to the special interest that is willing to spend the most on behalf of their chosen candidate and the President continues to “play nice” instead of pushing a progressive agenda.

Just a year ago there was a great sense of hope, not seen since the end of WWII.

A president whose idea of peace might not mean more “boots on the ground”.

A President who supported health care for all.

A President who believed in fair trade, not free trade.

A President who felt banks should help people better their lives, not gamble away their money.

Boy did we take the bait, the drift to the right continues with President Obama still thinking he can work with a Republican party whose game plan is blocking legislation.

Just as people used to hide those they were ashamed of away from public view, the Republicans have successfully hidden George Bush and the failures of his administration away.

The ills of the nation are now Obama’s problem, Obama’s fault and still he panders to those who vilify him; to those who want less oversight, more war, more for the rich and less for everyone else.

The militarism, the Wall Street free for all, the bankruptcies, the mortgage foreclosures, the top down bail out at the expense of the bottom; all the legacies of the Bush Administration are dumped on Obama and for solutions he turns to those who created the problems and offer more of the same as a solution.

In his State of the Union Address the President stated that “jobs must be our number one focus in 2010”, yet he intends to push for more free trade agreements, policies Presidents Clinton and Bush championed, policies that shipped jobs overseas and crushed the workers, the farmers, the labor unions and the families of America. Policies that have caused pain, policies that Obama seems reluctant to stop.

He barely mentioned Afghanistan and the nearly one hundred thousand American troops there, what could he say? It’s good? It’s working? How about the truth, that it’s bad policy with no end in sight.

The President said he was open to better ideas on how to remake the nation’s health care system, but he offered no ideas of his own, nothing he was willing to push forward.

What might the late Howard Zinn have said about President Obama’s speech? I doubt he would have criticized the President as a failure, but I do think he would have criticized him because he was afraid to try, because he was afraid to formulate his own policy and to push it relentlessly.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc WI and a 2008-2009 IATP Food and Society Policy Fellow.

Welcome to the Corporocracy

The Trouble with Corporate Personhood

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham01222010.html

I often correspond with a long-time Washington DC operator named Leigh Ratiner, who spent 40 years in government, serving under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Reagan, with cabinet-level posts in the Defense Department, under the Secretary of the Interior, in the Department of Energy, and in the State Department. Usually I’m prompted to contact him while investigating this or that instance of criminality or stupidity in the federal government. We’re in conversation a lot. “Chris, no disrespect intended,” Leigh once wrote, “but I’m not sure yet that you truly understand how profoundly corrupt the government really is. Lying, perjury, devious deception, law breaking have been a constant pattern in the American government for several decades and have driven us to the point where it has become impossible for an intelligent person to trust the government.” Leigh sometimes goes on for pages like this.

In the annals of lying and devious deception we can now add what will hopefully be remembered as one of the foulest decisions – but not a surprising one – by the Supreme Court to be imposed on the American public, namely the majority opinion in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission. I’ll let the New York Times summarize: “Corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.” Or, better yet, as Leigh Ratiner puts it: “Obama’s failures amount to a thimble of sugar compared to this decision, which is equivalent to a truckload of oil barrels filled with rat poison. The spending limits the court overturned were the unlimited sums of money that Lockheed, Boeing or Bank of America can take out of the corporate treasury and give to NBC in exchange for a two minute spot attacking a candidate without the stockholders’ permission. This is gigantic.”

Par for the course in the dying republic, where judges with the regularity of sun-up defend corporate interests against the public interest. But what’s compelling here is that the decision hinges on another longstanding idea, which is that corporations have the rights of living breathing people. The Supreme Court claims in this matter to be defending the corporate right of free speech. The laws of corporate personhood go back to the 1860s, in decisions offered by judges with close ties to the very corporations whose rights they were asked to judge. Corporate citizens, needless to say, have been a plague upon the land ever since (Joel Bakan, the law professor, has correctly observed that corporate citizenship often accords with sociopathic behavior, the kind of behavior that as a society we do not tolerate from individuals). In any case, corporate freedom is not a constitutional right, and corporations do not very much care about freedom of speech, press or assembly as it involves the individual. What a corporation cares about it is its collective endeavor. To provide a collectivist institution with the rights of the individual, to announce a corporation as a citizen, is one of those wonderful juridical inventions that could only be taken seriously in a system where law is exploited to veil reality and to render lies as truth. As Leigh Ratiner notes, no intelligent person can trust such a system. And as regards “corporate persons,” Ratiner asks the right question: “If they are natural citizens and commit crimes, why don’t we liquidate them as punishment (since they can’t be put in jail)? Of course, the answer is that if you liquidate them it will hurt the economy and the innocent shareholders. But doesn’t that make it very clear that a corporation is not a person who can be put in a cage or hung by the neck until dead? That’s the kind of person the Founders were trying to protect.”

Right…so, for example, I can’t take a corporation out in the backyard and bury it alive. I can’t smack a corporation flat across the face and break its nose. I can’t take a corporation’s head and split it with an axe, nor can I chop off all its fingers, nor stab out its eyes with a rusty screwdriver, nor burn off its flesh with a blowtorch, nor flay it with an electric sander, nor stomp its kneecaps with a sledgehammer, nor cut its head off and parade it around the room on a broomstick, nor use its entrails as a rappel rope, nor smash its testicles with a spiked bat, nor do any of the things that really should be done to corporations these days – if they were people – but which one would never do to a human being. If only corporate persons would finally show their fleshy faces.

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about secessionist groups in the US.  You can write him atcketcham99@mindspring.com.

The game is rigged

Rachel Maddow- Haitian ambassador

RNC Slaveowners To Take Away Michael Steele’s Profits At Gay Luau

Most people who know anything about politics recognize that Katon Dawson and other influential slaveowners at the RNC will be drafting a plan to both re-enslave and kill Michael Steele, simultaneously, at their upcoming gay slaveowner retreat in Hawaii. But only now are we learning of the first step in this process. According to the very healthy Washington Times slavery money trade pamphlet, the retreaters “are preparing a motion demanding that RNC Chairman Michael S. Steele cancel promotional events for the book he wrote as chairman.” They’re also seizing his profits — not a very capitalist move, but Michael Steele is from Africa so whatever.

Senior Republican National Committee members are preparing a motion demanding that RNC Chairman Michael S. Steele cancel promotional events for the book he wrote as chairman, The Washington Times has learned.

The proposed motion, to be presented to the 168-member RNC at its annual winter meeting in Honolulu at the end of this month, also would direct him to donate to the RNC and Republican candidates all proceeds from the book.

A storm of criticism has swirled around Mr. Steele over his missteps, retractions, and profiting from speeches and his new book, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” Three of his predecessors have publicly castigated his actions. His critics say the controversy is distracting voter attention from the Democrats’ problems 10 months before midterm elections.

Ha ha ha, you fool, Steele! We are supposed to be attacking Democrats, not devising a platform for Republicans!

It turns out Haley Barbour made all sorts of money doing these things when he was RNC chair, but Haley Barbour did not have quite as much melanin as Michael Steele and was allowed to do such things.

EXCLUSIVE: RNC members will urge Steele to end book tour [Washington Times]

Corporate tools

This is GLENN GREENWALD’s take on Harold Ford’s recent opportunistic flipflop:

It’s just a reminder that most national politicians are so desperate for the petty perks of power that they’re willing to publicly humiliate themselves by making it clear that they believe in nothing and are willing to recite whatever will please those around them and those funding them.http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html

How true this is and how accurately it can also be applied to Harold’s clone, Barack Obama. Ford’s obvious ambitions are Presidential and one could imagine his Presidential priorities would be identical to Obama’s.