Monthly Archives: August 2016

Perpetuation of the Cold War

Posted by on 2016-08-17 No comments

The enemy it was created to fight hasn’t existed for a generation, but NATO was never about common defense. NATO has always been about making the United States the world’s only superpower.

World War II was scarcely over and the victors were salivating over the spoils. The United States had set its sights on being the world’s newest empire and this required beating the competition – the Soviet Union. In 1947 a career diplomat, George F. Kennan, formulated the policy of “Containment.” “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

President Harry S. Truman is best known for the first and last use of nuclear weapons on human beings. But he is also known for the “Truman Doctrine” – which promised to contain communism in Greece and Turkey by any means necessary. The chessboard in the Middle East had already been set up by the departing British, and in 1948 Truman put his own piece on the board by recognizing Israel. The competition between Capitalism and Communism in the Middle East was just getting started.

Dwight D. Eisenhower formulated his own “Eisenhower Doctrine” in 1957. It went a step beyond Truman and decreed that any country that felt threatened by Communism could request help from the United States. This set the stage for America as World Policeman. Shortly after this came the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Egypt nationalized the Suez canal and all the usual suspects – the U.S., Britain, and Israel – attacked Egypt. The following year the United States used Eisenhower’s doctrine to intervene in the Lebanese presidential elections of 1958, assuring Camille Chamoun’s victory. Chamoun, a Christian Maronite, supported the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

NATO was founded in 1949 under Truman’s administration. It bound a number of nations in a mutual defense pact: the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. NATO was an outgrowth of the military coalition formed in World War II, whose Supreme Commander was Eisenhower. Eisenhower was also the natural choice for NATO’s first SACEUR – Supreme Allied Commander Europe. In 1951 Eisenhower set up shop for NATO in Paris in temporary quarters at the Hotel Astoria. A second “Supreme Commander” was installed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1952. That same year Greece and Turkey joined NATO. In 1982, King Juan Carlos, who had been restored to the Spanish throne by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, joined NATO. These were NATO’s earliest members.

Predictably, all this was seen as a threat by the Communist world. The Warsaw Pact was formed in response to NATO five years later, in 1955 when NATO added an additional member, West Germany. The Warsaw Pact’s signatories included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. A bit later came Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The Warsaw Pact was never very strong. In 1958 Hungary tried to withdraw, only to have its independence brutally crushed. In 1962 Albania was kicked out for being closer to Beijing than Moscow, and the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell. The New York Times reported the Warsaw Pact’s obituary, noting that it had died at the relatively young age of 36.

But NATO kept growing even after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. In 1982 the Czech Republic, formerly a Warsaw Pact signatory, joined NATO along with Hungary and Poland. In 2004 Bulgaria and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined them. Then Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, and Croatia. NATO now represented a coalition of over 7 million soldiers from 28 countries with a combined population of almost a billion people.

But NATO was never merely a mutual aid society. Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Greece, and the Netherlands had battalion-sized units attached to U.S. Army divisions in Korea. Turkey also deployed an infantry brigade. NATO’s charter was never limited to encircling the Russian Bear, and NATO has been involved in military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Macedonia, the Mediterranean, and in Africa, Today NATO is an obese 67 year-old man aiming his rifle at a enemy who vanished long ago.

But that’s not really the point of NATO in the 21st Century. NATO is a tool wholly-owned, funded, and led by the United States. In recent years many on both the Right and Left have criticized the exorbitant costs to the United States of maintaining military bases in 150+ countries, the subsidies to European nations who do not have to pay for their own defense – if “defense” is the right word. And plenty of people are aware that NATO no longer has a Soviet enemy to fight, though we have now turned our attentions to the Middle East and a region of the Pacific China now claims.

The United States needs military, economic and global coalitions like NATO, the TPP, and the G8 more than ever – if it wants to remain Top Dog.

People like you and me

Posted by on 2016-08-11 No comments

When Donald Trump’s presidential campaign really started to take off, shocking everyone, pundits ascribed its success to White Anger. The consensus in the Liberal media was that Trump’s supporters were basically all “Abner Snopes” – William Faulkner’s angry white sharecropper, racist white trash. At the time pundits made more of Snopes’ racism than the fact that he burned down the barns of rich white men. In fact Snopes would have happily burned down both Trump Tower and the Clinton mansion in Chappaqua. Ultimately it wasn’t race that made Abner Snopes angry.

But now that Trump is the GOP candidate and shock and awe has truly set in, Liberals are still scratching their heads. The same distrust of globalization has popped up in Britain with the Brexit, and it’s only slowly dawning on Liberals that there’s much more to it than racism or xenophobia. But no matter – Democrats don’t need to address such issues head-on if Trump can be a new Hitler.

The Atlantic Monthly published a piece recently that takes another shot at understanding Donald Trump’s appeal among poor whites and their anger at the “Liberal elites” they say are largely responsible for their misery. And poor whites have a point, though the Republican Party has done nothing to help them either.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/

Liberals see the real racism of poor whites lashing out at demographic shifts and ascendant minorities. It’s not an illusion. But they also judge poor whites to be doing little to “better themselves” – a strange formulation which, if directed at people of color, would sound a lot like unvarnished racism. Yet this is a common view among many well-educated Liberals – people like you and me. In years past we told the lazy bum, “Go get a job.” Now we tell him to go get a master’s degree. This is the essence of the meritocracy: work hard and get ahead. We pat ourselves on the back that we’re not racists because both Mark Zuckerberg and Barak Obama merit our approval.

But just as Capitalists assume markets and resources are infinite, Liberals assume the capacity to replace manufacturing jobs with highly-skilled technology jobs is equally unbounded. Yet, for a multitude of reasons, not every unemployed factory worker is going to make a happy transition to web designer or CNC programmer, particularly if he’s been out of work a decade. And how do Liberal policy makers intend to deal with this fact of life? They have no solutions.

The authors of the Atlantic piece make the case that it is the neoliberalism which upper middle class whites uncritically support – people like you and me – that has created unemployment, trade imbalances, and economic disaster for the working class – and this obviously includes the white working class. Liberals – people like you and me – see ourselves, however fuzzy the image in the mirror, as part of the meritocracy – people who have gotten up early, gone to bed late, attended night school, lifted ourselves up by the boot-straps. Anyone who didn’t manage to replicate our feats of dedication, perserverance and daring is a loser. How very like Trump we really are.

Consider a recent Town Hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, at which President Obama patiently explained to an older Carrier air conditioning employee that there is little that we can do as a nation to help people like him when factories like his move to Mexico. Yes, people like you are affected, the President explained with characteristic eloquence, but America is moving forward with high-tech jobs in exciting new industries and training is the key. End of discussion. Go get some training.

But in what? No one in Free Market paradise has either a crystal ball or a Five Year Plan.

So there seems to be a somewhat magical view that sending people off to community college or paying for everyone to attend four year colleges will solve employment problems without any long-term economic planning or public-private training partnerships. As if there were not enough issues on its plate, Education has now become totally responsible for fixing the social problem of unemployment.

But back to Elkhart, Indiana. The older Carrier employee just stood in the aisle, a bit surprised at the President’s answer, and respectfully mute as the Chief Executive explained why the country was leaving him behind in its wake of progress. When I recounted this story to a friend of mine, she had little sympathy for the air conditioning worker. “I put myself through college. He could have done it too.”

The picture of Poor White America as lazy racist “white trash” – Abner Snopes again – is pervasive. It’s also not easy to reject completely if you’ve ever seen the Tea Party in action. But like everything in this country, the reality is always more complex. The authors of the Atlantic piece argue that we should have seen all this coming long, long ago, and they lay the blame squarely at the feet of people – like you and me – who identify as Democrats and progressives.

We created these policies. We hardened our hearts. We looked away from the misery right in our own backyards – all while saving endangered species and writing checks to truly worthy causes. We do this at a distance – like the far-off wars which Liberals regularly vote for – without once seeing the real human costs. And we do this from our perch of superiority and entitlement.

But here is how Trump’s supporters see it in the small towns where jobs are long gone:

“The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live cannot be underestimated. And the bitterness – the “primal scorn” – that Donald Trump has tapped into among white Americans in struggling areas is aimed not just at those of foreign extraction. It is directed toward fellow countrymen who have become foreigners of a different sort, looking down on the natives, if they bother to look at all.”

And we do this to everyone, not just Poor White America.

Earlier in the year the Atlantic ran another piece on the white working class. Again, the takeaway from this article was that it’s the upper middle class – shrinking by the second – that has transmuted into a meritocracy of college graduates for whom advanced degrees are almost a necessity, who receive the majority of high-paying jobs and leave the rest of America behind:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-working-class-poverty/424341/

The idea of a meritocracy is hardly new, but those who merit have shrunk to a kernel consisting mainly of the white upper middle-class. Though meritocracy seems almost an article of American faith, both Conservatives and Progressives now increasingly see it as a sham, a cruel lie that masks the fact that the true predictor of success in America is your father’s wealth. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sees it:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/12/american-meritocracy-isnt-what-it-used-to-be-in-five-charts/

But don’t say that to a Liberal Democrat.

Democrats are no less rigid or doctrinaire than their Republican brethren. Few who regard themselves as straight-ticket Democrats want to confront the party’s neoliberalism – globalism, trade, the “meritocracy.” Liberals are shocked that a whole new generation of voters hasn’t accepted this article of faith and is holding out for a different kind of America. It was unthinkable that 46% of the Democratic Party membership in Philadelphia actually meant what they said about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And, anyway, they weren’t really Democrats.

But rather than examining what neoliberalsm has actually wrought, Democrats have taken a lazy, even dishonest tack – distracting voters with external threats. A piece in “Overland,” a progressive Australian journal, describes the shameful strategy of presenting Trump as little more than a fascist:

Trump, fascism, Putin and Wikileaks: the anatomy of a liberal nervous breakdown

The basic point of the article is that – without any firm identity or an understanding of who it actually serves – the Democratic party’s survival depends mainly on frightening the bejesus out of members and voters alike. The DNC stands for nothing this year – only against a manufactured threat of “fascism.”

The author of the Overland piece quotes Thomas Frank’s thesis, which is developed in his book “Listen, Liberal:”

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30325613-listen-liberal

Diane Ravich summarizes it this way:

In recent years, the Democrats have been consistently liberal on social issues, but indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic issues. They are as likely to be as hostile to unions as Republicans. Their unabashed support for free trade hurt the working class and exported the manufacturing sector. America used to be a country where a person without a college degree could get a good job, but now a college degree is priced beyond the reach of low-income and even middle-income students.

What happened to the Democrats? He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems. They were wrong. Meritocracy served to put them out of touch and to insulate them from different points of view.

Bill Moyers interivewed Franks as well:

http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/

Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the people. As Franks argues, we – people like you and me – have become neither fish nor fowl – neither “the people” nor the oligarchic 1% that owns and runs the country. Liberals have become almost a separate class, lost and confused about their true identity and unreliable in their allegiances. We are really nothing but the pampered accountants, fixers, and middle management for the 1%. And if you’ve ever listened to Phil Ochs’ “Love me, I’m a Liberal,” it’s been this way longer than any of us can remember.

Zubaida’s Window

Posted by on 2016-08-09 No comments

Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)

Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.

Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.

One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.

Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.

But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.

Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.

Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.

What’s in the TPP?

Posted by on 2016-08-07 No comments

There has been a lot of speculation and an enormous amount of nonsense written about the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The main reason is that few people really know much about the agreement since it was negotiated in secret and the public (even our legislators) were not privy to its provisions.

This alone should be reason #1 for rejecting it, but it has its supporters.

Big Business loves it. Manufacturers love it. Wall Street loves it.

But environmentalists see red flags and the words “global warming” appear nowhere in the document. The Electronic Freedom Foundation finds privacy concerns and troubling intellectual propery language. Unions recognize its anti-worker and union-busting provisions.

Hillary Clinton loves it – though during the primaries she said otherwise. Now she and her running mate love it again. Bernie Sanders opposed it. The Green Party opposes it. The (former Republican) Libertarian candidates support it.

Donald Trump hates it, while the rest of the GOP loves it. But anything that issues from Donald Trump’s mouth must be motivated purely out of xenophobic hate-mongering – so the TPP must really be a good thing. Right?

Wrong. On this one thing Trump’s right. Read the leaked draft of the TPP yourself and click on the top links to display the annotations by environmental, privacy, and worker’s rights lawyers.

http://www.readthetpp.com/

Here is summary of some of the TPP’s more troubling provisions:

  • Chapter 9 (corporate-appointed judges replace national law)

  • Chapter 11 (corporations can block national regulations, including financial regulations)

  • Chapter 12 (short-circuiting of immigration regulations)

  • Chapter 13 (nations give up their rights to control and regulate telecommunications markets, voiding national control over data protection laws – for example, Germany with its strong data privacy laws)

  • Chapter 14 (inadequate provisions for protecting personal information transmitted via electronic commerce)

  • Chapter 15 (eliminates provisions allowing states to protect local jobs or address local environmental concerns)

  • Chapter 17 (permits state-owned enterprises to maintain price-fixing and dumping, preventing the U.S. from challenging such market manipulations)

  • Chapter 18 (overrides domestic laws protecting public health, nutrition, and socio-economic development)

  • Chapter 19 (does nothing to address wage inequity or slave wages, blocks corporate exploitation of public-sector or unionized workers, blocks economic penalties for violations of human rights, anti-gay, or racist discrimination)

  • Chapter 20 (“climate change” does not appear anywhere in this chapter on the environment, blocks environmental laws that create “restrictions on trade”)

  • Chapter 24 (blocks small businesses from seeking certain types of “recourse to dispute settlement”)

  • Chapter 27 (a commission can change the TPP agreement at will – without Congressional approval or public overview – i.e, just like the TPP was crafted in the first place)