Sunday, August 30, 2009


The Revolution of the Elites

Global War and Dying Democracy
Global Power and Global Government

by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Transnational Totalitarianism

Global trends in political economy suggest that “democracy” as we know it, is a fading concept, where even Western industrialized nations are retreating from the system. Arguably, through party politics and financial-corporate interests, democracy is something of a façade as it is. However, we are entering into an era in which even the institutions and image of democracy are in retreat, and the slide into totalitarianism seems inevitable.

The National Intelligence Council report, Global Trends 2025, stated that many governments will be “expanding domestic security forces, surveillance capabilities, and the employment of special operations-type forces.” Counterterrorism measures will increasingly “involve urban operations as a result of greater urbanization,” and governments “may increasingly erect barricades and fences around their territories to inhibit access. Gated communities will continue to spring up within many societies as elites seek to insulate themselves from domestic threats.”[1] Essentially, expect a continued move towards and internationalization of domestic police state measures to control populations.

The nature of totalitarianism is such that it is, “by nature (or rather by definition), a global project that cannot be fully accomplished in just one community or one country. Being fuelled by the need to suppress any alternative orders and ideas, it has no natural limits and is bound to aim at totally dominating everything and everyone.” David Lyon explained in Theorizing Surveillance, that, “The ultimate feature of the totalitarian domination is the absence of exit, which can be achieved temporarily by closing borders, but permanently only by a truly global reach that would render the very notion of exit meaningless. This in itself justifies questions about the totalitarian potential of globalization.” The author raises the important question, “Is abolition of borders intrinsically (morally) good, because they symbolize barriers that needlessly separate and exclude people, or are they potential lines of resistance, refuge and difference that may save us from the totalitarian abyss?” Further, “if globalization undermines the tested, state-based models of democracy, the world may be vulnerable to a global totalitarian etatization.”[2]

Russia Today, a major Russian media source, published an article by the Strategic Cultural Fund, in which it stated that, “the current crisis is being used as a mechanism for provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make mankind – plunged as it is already into chaos and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.” The author pointed out that, “The events are following the same path as the Great Depression in 1929-1933: a financial crisis, an economic recession, social conflicts, establishing totalitarian dictatorships, inciting a war to concentrate power, and capital in the hands of a narrow circle.” However, as the author noted, this time around, it’s different, as this “is the final stage in the ‘global control’ strategy, where a decisive blow should be dealt to the national state sovereignty institution, followed by a transition to a system of private power of transnational elites.”

The author explained that a global police state is forming, as “Intelligence activities, trade of war, penitentiary system, and information control are passing into private hands. This is done through so-called outsourcing, a relatively new business phenomenon that consists of trusting certain functions to private firms that act as contractors and relying on individuals outside an organization to solve its internal tasks.” Further, “he biggest achievements have been made over the last few years in the area of establishing electronic control over people’s identities, carried out under the pretext of counterterrorism. Currently, the FBI is creating the world’s biggest database of biometric indexes (fingerprints, retina scans, face shapes, scar shapes and allocation, speech and gesture patterns, etc.) that now contains 55 million fingerprints.”[3]

Global War

Further, the prospects of war are increasing with the deepening of the economic crisis. It must be noted that historically, as empires are in decline, international violence increases. The scope of a global depression and the undertaking of restructuring the entire global political economy may also require and produce a global war to serve as a catalyst for formation of the New World Order.

The National Intelligence Council document, Global Trends 2025, stated that there is a likely increase in the risk of a nuclear war, or in the very least, the use of a nuclear weapon by 2025, as, “Ongoing low-intensity clashes between India and Pakistan continue to raise the specter that such events could escalate to a broader conflict between those nuclear powers.”[4]

The report also predicts a resurgence of mercantilist foreign policies of the great powers in competition for resources, which “could lead to interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources to be essential to maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime.” In particular, “Central Asia has become an area of intense international competition for access to energy.”[5]

Further, “Sub-Saharan Africa will remain the most vulnerable region on Earth in terms of economic challenges, population stresses, civil conflict, and political instability. The weakness of states and troubled relations between states and societies probably will slow major improvements in the region’s prospects over the next 20 years unless there is sustained international engagement and, at times, intervention. Southern Africa will continue to be the most stable and promising sub-region politically and economically.” This seems to suggest that there will be many more cases of “humanitarian intervention,” likely under the auspices of a Western dominated international organization, such as the UN. There will also be a democratic “backslide” in the most populous African countries, and that, “the region will be vulnerable to civil conflict and complex forms of interstate conflict—with militaries fragmented along ethnic or other divides, limited control of border areas, and insurgents and criminal groups preying on unarmed civilians in neighboring countries. Central Africa contains the most troubling of these cases, including Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Central African Republic, and Chad.”[6]

In 2007, the British Defense Ministry released a report in which they analyzed future trends in the world. Among many of the things predicted within 30 years are: “Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx's proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe's drops as fertility falls. ‘Flashmobs’ - groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.”

It further reported that, “The development of neutron weapons which destroy living organisms but not buildings ‘might make a weapon of choice for extreme ethnic cleansing in an increasingly populated world’. The use of unmanned weapons platforms would enable the ‘application of lethal force without human intervention, raising consequential legal and ethical issues’. The ‘explicit use’ of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons and devices delivered by unmanned vehicles or missiles.” Further, “an implantable ‘information chip’ could be wired directly to the brain. A growing pervasiveness of information communications technology will enable states, terrorists or criminals, to mobilise ‘flashmobs’, challenging security forces to match this potential agility coupled with an ability to concentrate forces quickly in a small area.”

In regards to social problems, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” Interestingly, “The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: ‘The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest’. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the ‘sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism’.”

The report also forecasts that, “Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.”[7]

RAND corporation, a Pentagon-linked powerhouse think tank, connected to the Blderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations, came up with a solution to the financial crisis in October of 2008: for the United States to start a major war. Chinese media reported that RAND “presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.” Further, “the target country would have to be a major influential power,” and Chinese media “speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country.”[8]

Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, the most highly respected trend forecaster in the United States, has been sounding the alarm over the trends to come in the next few years. Having previously predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bubble burst, and the 2008 housing bubble burst, these forecasts should not be taken lightly.

Celente told Fox News that, “by 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts.” He stated that this will be “worse than the great depression.” In another interview, Celente stated that, “There will be a revolution in this country,” and, “It’s not going to come yet, but it’s going to come down the line and we’re going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.” He further explained, “The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That’s going to be the big one because people can’t afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You’re going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”[9]

In June of 2009, Gerald Celente reported that, “The measures taken by successive governments to save the politically corrupt, morally bankrupt, physically decrepit [American] giant from collapse have served to only hasten its demise. While the decline has been decades in the making, the acceleration of ruinous policies under the current Administration is leading the United States — and much of the world — to the point of no return.” This coming catastrophe, which Celente refers to as “Obamageddon,” will become the “Greatest Depression.”[10]

In May of 2009, Celente forecasted that a major issue is the “bailout bubble” which is bigger than the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble that preceded it, and is made up of 12.8 trillion dollars. He states that with the bursting of this bubble, the next trend would be what he calls “fascism light” and that it will be followed by war.[11] He stated that, “this bubble will be the last one. After the final blowout of the bailout bubble, we are concerned that the government will take the nation into war. This is a historical precedent that’s been done over and over again.” He elaborated, “So, it’s not the dollar that will survive. We may not even survive. Look at the German mess after WWI. It gave rise to Fascism and WWII. The next war will be fought with weapons of mass destruction.”[12]

The Imperial Project

War should not be understood as a recent phenomenon in regards to accelerating capitalism through expansion and transition, as this has been a continual theme throughout the history of capitalism. The notion of “surplus imperialism” is what describes the function and role of war and militarism within capitalism. The concept is built around the function of “constant war.”

Ellen Wood explains the notion of ‘surplus imperialism,’ in that, “Boundless domination of a global economy, and of the multiple states that administer it, requires military action without end, in purpose or time.”[13] Further, “Imperial dominance in a global capitalist economy requires a delicate and contradictory balance between suppressing competition and maintaining conditions in competing economies that generate markets and profit. This is one of the most fundamental contradictions of the new world order.”[14]

Shortly after George Bush Sr. declared a “new world order coming into view,” in 1991, the US strategic community began setting forth a new strategy for the United States in the world. This first emerged in 1992, with the Defense Planning Guidance. The New York Times broke the story, reporting that, “In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union,” and that, “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”

The main figure that drafted this policy was the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, who would later become Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, as well as President of the World Bank. Wolfowitz is also a member of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and is currently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank.

The document places emphasis “on using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe,” and that, “What is most important, it says, is ‘the sense that the world order is ultimately backed by the U.S.’ and ‘the United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’ or in a crisis that demands quick response.” Further, “the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document “postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea,” and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further “suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf.”[15] The Secretary of Defense at the time of this document’s writing was none other than Dick Cheney.

When George Bush Sr. was replaced by Bill Clinton in 1993, the neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration formed a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC. In 2000, they published a report called, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. Building upon the Defense Policy Guidance document, they state that, “the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars,”[16] that there is “need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars,”[17] and that “the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times.”[18] Further, “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[19] In describing the need for massive increases in military spending, rapidly expanding the armed forces and “dealing” with threats such as Iraq, North Korea and Iran, they state, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[20]

Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, former National Security Adviser and key foreign policy architect in Jimmy Carter’s administration, also wrote a book on American geostrategy. Brzezinski is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group, and has also been a board member of Amnesty International, the Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy. Currently, he is a trustee and counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major US policy think tank.

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski outlined a strategy for America in the world. He wrote, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power.” Further, “how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination.”[21] Brzezinski explained that, “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”[22] Brzezinski also outlines Russia and China, in cooperation with Iran and possibly Pakistan, as the most significant coalition that could challenge US hegemony.

With the George W. Bush administration, the neo-conservative war hawks put into action the plans set out in their American imperial strategic documents. This made up the Bush doctrine, which called for “a unilateral and exclusive right to preemptive attack, any time, anywhere, unfettered by any international agreements, to ensure that ‘[o]ur forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hope of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States’.”[23]

In 2000, the Pentagon released a document called Joint Vision 2020, which outlined a project to achieve what they termed, “Full Spectrum Dominance,” as the blueprint for the Department of Defense in the future. “Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.” The report “addresses full-spectrum dominance across the range of conflicts from nuclear war to major theater wars to smaller-scale contingencies. It also addresses amorphous situations like peacekeeping and noncombat humanitarian relief.” Further, “The development of a global information grid will provide the environment for decision superiority.”[24]

The War on Terrorism, as a war with invisible enemies and borderless boundaries, a truly global war, marks a major stage in the evolution of the constant war “surplus imperialism” of the American empire. The US military, while being used as a vehicle for surplus imperialism; is also creating and maintaining and expanding NATO. NATO is expanding its role in the world. The wars in Yugoslavia following the collapse of the Soviet Union were used to legitimize NATO’s continued existence, which was created to have an alliance against the USSR. When the USSR vanished, so too did NATO’s purpose, until it found a new calling: becoming a global policeman. NATO has undergone its first major war in Afghanistan and its expansion into Eastern Europe is enclosing Russia and China.

Ivo Daalder, the US representative to NATO, also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he advocated for a “global NATO” to “address the global challenges of the day.”[25] In April of 2009, NATO began to review its Strategic Concept “in order to stay relevant in a changing security environment,” and that, “The leaders envisage cyber-attacks, energy security and climate change as new threats to NATO, which would mean big changes in NATO's future operations.”[26] Since 2008, NATO has been re-imagining its strategy and moving to a doctrine of advocating for pre-emptive nuclear warfare.[27]

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

The Revolution of the New World Order

The new system being formed is not one based upon any notion of competition or “free markets” or “socialist morality”, but is, instead a system based upon consolidation of power and wealth; thus, the fewer, the better; one government, one central bank, one army, one currency, one authority, one ruler. This is a much more “efficient” and “controllable” system, and thus requires a much smaller population or class to run it, as well as a much smaller population to serve it. Also, with such a system, a smaller global population would be ideal for the rulers, for it limits their risk, in terms of revolt, uprising, and revolution, and created a more malleable and manageable population. In this new capitalist system, the end goal is not profit, but power. In a sense, this is how the whole capitalist system has functioned, as profit has always acted as a means and lever to achieve power. Power itself, was the goal, profit was merely the means of achieving such a goal.

Shortly following the origins of the capitalist system, central banking emerged. It was through the central banking system that the most powerful figures and individuals in the world were able to consolidate power, controlling both industry and governments. Through central banks, these figures would collapse economies, destroying industry and thus, profits; bankrupt countries and collapse their political structures, destroying a base for the exercise of power; but in doing so, they would consolidate their authority over these governments and industry, wiping out competition and eliminating dissent. It is these individuals who have played the greatest roles in shaping and reshaping the capitalist system, and are the main figures in the current reorganization of world order.

However, such is the nature of individuals whose lives revolve around the acquisition and exercise of power. Like the saying goes, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.” Those who are driven by the lust for power often eliminate and remove all of those who helped them reach such a position. Hitler undertook the Night of Long Knives, in which a series of political executions were carried out, targeting prominent figures of the SA, who helped Hitler rise to power. Stalin similarly, also purged the Soviet Union of those who helped him rise to power.

Power alters the psychology of the individual that holds it. It is an extremely lonely condition, in which, once power is achieved, and with no more power to gain, the obsession turns to the preservation of power, and with that, paranoia of losing it. This is why those that assist the powerful in gaining more power are doomed to a fate that is similar or worse than those who fight against such a power. This, ultimately, is why it is futile to join forces with such systems of power, or ally oneself with such powerful figures.

Power is a cancer; it eats away at its host. The greater the power held, the more cancerous it is, the more malignant it becomes. The less power held by individuals, the less chance there is for growth of this cancer, or for it to become malignant. Power must be shared among all people, for the risk carried thus becomes a risk to all, and there is a greater degree of cooperation, support, and there is a more efficient and effective means through which everyone can act as a check against the abuse of power.

Theoretical Foundations of Global Revolution

Currently, we are witnessing, in the wake of the massive economic crisis, a revolution in the global political economy. This revolution, like all revolutions, is not simply a top-down or a bottom-up revolution. Historically, revolutions are driven by a combination of both the grassroots and the elite. Often, this materializes in clashes between social groups, such as with the American Revolution. Although, the American Revolution itself was primarily waged by the American landed elite against the foreign imperial elite of Great Britain. The French Revolution was the combination of the banking and aristocratic elite co-opting, manipulating and controlling the grassroots opposition to the established order. The Russian Revolution, also being able to see rising social tensions among the lower classes, was co-opted by an international banking elite.

Currently, the transnational elite are very aware of the increasing social tensions among the worlds majority. As the crisis deepens, tensions will rise, and the chances of revolt and revolution from below greatly increase. Governments everywhere, particularly in the Western industrialized nations are building massive police states to monitor and control populations, and are actively preparing for martial law and military rule in the event of such a situation unfolding.

However, the transnational elite are undertaking their own revolution from above. This revolution is encompassing the restructuring of the global political economy through their orchestrated economic crisis.

Neo-Gramscian political economic theory can help us understand how this revolution has been and is currently being undertaken. Neo-Gramscian IPE (International Political Economy) emerged in the 1980s within the critical camp of theory. Largely based off of the Italian Marxist writer, Antonio Gramsci, it places a great focus on analysis of global power, order and structure. There has been much analysis within Neo-Gramscian theory on the nature and structure of the transnational capitalist class. Among the analysis of transnational classes, Neo-Gramscian theory also places emphasis on the notions of hegemony and resistance, or counter-hegemony.

The Gramscian notion of hegemony differs from other perspectives in, particularly mainstream, Global Political Economy. With the Gramscian concept of hegemony, it does not focus simply on the use of state power at exerting power, but rather defines hegemony as a system of power that is dual; it requires both coercion and consent. Consent is key, as it implies the active consent of “subaltern” or “subordinate” groups (in other words, the great majority of the world’s people), to being submissive to the system itself. This hegemony is built around the notion of conformity; thus, conformity is an active consent to hegemony. By conforming, one is submitting to the system and their place within it. This is also an internationalizing concept, in that this hegemony is not nation-based, but transnational, and backed by the threat of coercive force.

In discussing resistance to hegemony, or counter-hegemony, Gramsci identified two forms of resistance; the war of position and the war of movement. Robert Cox, the most well known Neo-Gramscian theorist, analyzed how Gramsci defined these notions by comparing the experiences of Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution as compared with experiences in Western Europe. As Cox explained, “The basic difference between Russia and Western Europe was in the relative strengths of state and civil society. In Russia, the administrative and coercive apparatus of the state was formidable but proved to be vulnerable, while civil society was undeveloped. A relatively small working class led by a disciplined avant-garde was able to overwhelm the state in a war of movement and met no effective resistance from the rest of civil society.”[28]

So a war of movement was characterized by a small vanguard seizing power and overthrowing the state. “In Western Europe, by contrast, civil society, under bourgeois hegemony, was much more fully developed and took manifold forms. A war of movement might conceivably, in conditions of exceptional upheaval, enable a revolutionary vanguard to seize control of the state apparatus; but because of the resiliency of civil society such an exploit would in the long run be doomed to failure.” As Gramsci himself noted, “In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.”[29]

In this instance, a war of movement was impossible to achieve in Western Europe, and thus, “The alternative strategy is the war of position which slowly builds up the strength of the social foundations of a new state. In Western Europe, the struggle had to be won in civil society before an assault on the state could achieve success.” This undertaking is massive to say the least, as it implies as a necessity, “creating alternative institutions and alternative intellectual resources within existing society and building bridges between workers and other subordinate classes. It means actively building counter-hegemony within an established hegemony while resisting the pressures and temptations to relapse into pursuit of incremental gains for subaltern groups within the framework of bourgeois hegemony.” In other words, it is a “long-range revolutionary strategy,” as compared to social democracy, which is “a policy of making gains within the established order.”[30]

However, I wish to take the concept and notion of the “war of position” and re-imagine it, not as a means of counter-hegemony, but as a means of supra-hegemony. This is not a war of position on the part of a counter-hegemonic group (grassroots opposition, etc), but is rather a war of position on the part of an embedded international elite, or supra-hegemonic group. Supra is Latin for “above,” which implies that this group is above hegemony, just as supra-national institutions (such as the European Union) are above nations. This is the elite of the elite, beyond national elites, and composing the top tier of the hierarchy within the transnational superclass. In terms of composition, this group is the highly concentrated international bankers, the dynastic banking families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, who control the major banking institutions of the world, which in turn, control the international central banking system. Their centralized power is exemplified in the Bank for International Settlements.

I will refer to this group as the Global Cartel. This Cartel has usurped global authority and power through an incremental, multi-century spanning war of position. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, constituting two separate treaties, created the notion of the nation state and state sovereignty within Western Europe. Feudalism dominated Europe from the medieval period through the 16th century, and was slowly replaced by the emergence of Capitalism. Major European empires had, since the 15th century, been pursuing empire building, such as with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and expansion into the Americas. This formed the first truly global economy. The empires worked under and in service to the monarchies that oversaw them.

It was with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 that a European group of bankers overtook one of the major European empires. Great Britain then became the dominant empire, experiencing the Industrial Revolution prior to any other nation, and became a global hegemon. With the French Revolution, these European bankers took over another major empire through the establishment of the Bank of France, and then financed and profited off of all sides of every major war, and expanded imperial reach.

Through the expansion of the central banking system, a highly concentrated group of European bankers were able to overtake the major nations of the world. The entire history of the United States is the story of a Republic’s struggle and battle against a central bank. Finally, the bankers usurped monetary authority with the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and built up and created the American empire.

It was in the 20th century that the war of position of the cartel is most apparent. As the world globalized, so too did the war of position. The major banking dynasties founded powerful philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. These organizations shaped civil society in the United States and set their sights internationally in scope. Through the establishment of think tanks like the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in Britain and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States, this cartel was able to bring in and centralize the intellectual, academic, strategic, military, economic and political establishments under the cartel’s influence. This was expanded by the cartel through organizations such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission.

Centralizing and controlling debate and discussion within these vital socio-political-economic realms was a vital component of institutionalizing hegemony, as Gramsci understands it, in that the cartel used their monetary and financial hegemony (controlling the printing and value of currencies) to stimulate an active consent among the socio-political-economic elite. National elites consented to the hegemony of the cartel, whose coercive hegemony was in their ability to destroy a national economy through monetary policy.

This hegemony, both coercive and consenting, based within the elite class themselves, facilitated the war of position of the cartel to advance their interests and proceed with their incremental revolution. The aim of this cartel, like many tyrants and power-hungry people before it, was world domination. Bankers command no army, lead no nation, and motivate no people. Their influence lies in co-opting the commanders, controlling the leaders, and manipulating motivation.

Thus, it was of absolute necessity for the cartel to undertake their ultimate aim of world domination and world government through a war of position, as no person would fight for, surrender a nation to, or be motivated to help any banker achieve their own selfish goals. Rather, they had to slowly usurp power incrementally; control money, buy politicians, own economies, build empires, engineer wars, mold civil society, control their opposition, overtake educational institutions and ultimately, control thought.

Conclusion

As George Orwell wrote, “Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The more people that think for themselves; the worse it is for the cartel. People, free thinking individuals, are the greatest threat to this cartel and their war of position. That is why the answer and solution to exposing the supra-hegemonic war of position, challenging and triumphing over the New World Order, lies in the free-thinking individual. The challenge is global and globalized; the solution is local and localized. The problem is conformity and controlled thought; the answer is individuality and free thought.

While humanity is faced with such monumental crises the likes of which in scope and size, we have never before faced, so too, are we faced with the greatest opportunities for an ultimate change in the right direction. While people are controlled and manipulated through crisis and disorder, so too can people be awoken to seeing the necessity of knowledge and critical thought. When one’s life is thrown into disorder and chaos, suddenly observation, information and knowledge become important in understanding how one got into that situation, and how one can escape it.

With this in mind, while facing the potential for the greatest struggle humanity has ever faced, so too are we facing the greatest potential for a new Enlightenment or a new Renaissance; an age of new thought, new life, new potential, and peace. No matter how much elites think they control all things, life has a way of making one realize that there are things outside the control of people. With every action, comes an equal and opposite reaction.

We may not reach a new age of thinking and peace before we enter into a new age of oppression and war. In fact, the former may not be possible without the latter. People must awake from their slumber; their immersion in consumerist society and pop culture distractions, and awake to both the malevolence of world systems and the wonder of life and its potential. Through crisis, comes control; through control, comes power; through power, comes resistance; through resistance, comes thinking; through thinking, comes potential; through potential, comes peace.

We may very well be entering into the most oppressive and destructive order the world has yet seen, but from its ruins and ashes, which are as inevitable as the tides and as sure as the sun rises, we may see the rise of a truly peaceful world order; in which we see the triumphs of individualism merge with the interests of the majority; a people’s world order of peace for all. We must maintain, as Antonio Gramsci once wrote, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”


Sunday, August 23, 2009


The US War against Iraq

The Destruction of a Civilization
by James Petras

Introduction


The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Top pro-Israeli policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

Assassinations

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline

The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death squads’ under US occupation.

Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.

At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’(a child’s game)”( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.

Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).

The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.

In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.

The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007

The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.

The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics – with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.

The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.

Warning to Iran

The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO’s during their post-election ‘Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.

Conclusion

What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and backward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.

In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.

Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.

This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.


Saturday, August 22, 2009


The Hostage Dream

Loving Oneself at the Expense of Another

by Gilad Atzmon

“As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing- the one cannot escape nor the other overtake.” (Homer’s Iliad, XX11.)

Greece Revisited
In his valuable book Looking Awry, Slavoj Zizek offers a Lacanian interpretation of Zeno’s Achilles and the Tortoise paradox (1) “The libidinal economy of the case of Achilles and the Tortoise is here made clear: the paradox stages the relation of the subject to the object cause of its desire, which can never be attained. The object cause is always missed” (Looking Awry, Slavoj Zizek pg’ 4). Our object of desire always eludes no matter what we try to do to attain it. Achilles can never arrive at the tortoise, he can only get closer and closer.

Nightmare
A few days ago, in a London meeting between people who spend the best part of their time campaigning for Palestine, a leading activist, an adorable woman who supports the Palestinian cause since the 1960’s, shared with us a nightmare of a dream she had back in the 1980’s. In her dream she was kidnapped and held hostage by the Lebanese paramilitary Amal. While the Amal combatants were making their final preparation for her execution, the activist made a desperate effort to persuade them that she was actually on their side. She stated again and again that she was in South Lebanon to support the Lebanese people and the Palestinian refugees. In her dream, to her dismay, her hijackers ignored her plea. She was murdered (2).
The activist’s interpretation of her horrendous dream was pretty elegant, coherent and valid. She grasped that, in the eyes of her imaginary captors, she was personally liable for the entire list of crimes committed by the ‘white man’. In her eyes she was punished for a reason. To a certain extent her reasoning is similar to Robert Fisk’s interpretation of his own personal experience in Pakistan in 2001. After being attacked by a (real) mob he said “If I had been them, I would have attacked me."(3)
Interestingly enough, it took me a day to realize that I myself had experienced some very similar dreams in the past. In my dreams I was also held hostage, and very much like in the case of the above dream, I was quick to announce my support of liberation movements and resistance. In my hallucination I was similarly ignored or dismissed. Preparing my self to meet my creator I would wake up sweating, only to find out that I was well and safe and still amongst the living. When I started to ask around I grasped that the ‘activist hostage dream’ is actually a very common nightmare amongst the people who support Palestine, Arab and Islamic liberation movements. As if this is not enough, the above interpretation is also widespread amongst humanists and activists. We tend to understand why others hate us so much. We occasionally tend to agree with them, for we, ourselves, happen to resent that which we are associated with.
However, after thinking about the activist and her dream for a day or two I grasped that as much as her interpretation was elegant, coherent and valid, it would also be intriguing to find out why we experience such dreams in the first place. What is it that sets our mind into such a frantic creative mode that speculates our own destruction by the very object of our solidarity? In Lacanian terms we may extend the question and ask why it is that our minds are speculating on the possibility of being murdered by our political objects of desire?

Interpretation
The dream, as we understand it, is in the realm of the inexpressible. It is in the dream where thoughts, desires and fears are transformed involuntarily into sensations, ideas, and emotions. It is in the dream where symbolism, signifiers and identification explode into shrapnel of doubts and anxiety.
While being awake, we happen to say very many things, occasionally enough we believe what we say, other times we just pretend or even lie. While being awake, we also claim to follow some ideas, we avow to possess a consistent moral value system, we also maintain our support of ideologies we barely understand. We assert acceptance of cultures that are rather remote to us. Many of us support the Palestinian, the Iraqi and the Afghan struggle for liberation. Some of us support Islamic resistance, others are happy to affirm the logos behind armed Jihad. However, while being asleep, our mind liberates itself; like a moth soaring to the light, it drifts towards integrity. It occasionally hints to us that there may be some truth out there which we are reluctant to admit or even face.
While being asleep, our mind is willing to confess (at least to itself) that as much as it is willing to support, approve and affirm, our object of solidarity, the oppressed, remains elusive to us. They are rather foreign and for obvious reasons: it is the language, the spices and the sounds. Their value system seems to be distant. Sometimes it is the religious belief that opposes our modernist, rational secularist and so called ‘humanist’ precept. Other times it is the awareness that our political object of desire is not as ‘kind’ to women as we ourselves claim to be. As if this isn’t enough, our fantasmic comrades do not seem to ‘value life’ as much as we pretend to. We somehow experience a total cognitive dissonance once we are pushed to admit that our political object of desire is holding enough chutzpah to dismiss our Western intellectual achievement. Our camaraderie fails to see the light in our highly praised enlightened individualism. They don’t even approve our technological achievements. At least in the dream, we are willing to confess that the object of solidarity is not very impressed with us, not even with our solidarity. In fact, as much as we want to give, there is hardly anything he or she is willing to take from us.

Challenging Self Love
For Lacan (4), the act of love-making can be interpreted as ‘loving oneself through the other’. I have already maintained in earlier writings that solidarity activism can be realized as ‘loving oneself on the expense of the other’. We are basically loving ourselves on the expense of Palestinians and Iraqis. Similarly, the hostage dream can be interpreted as an unconscious burst of ‘self-loathing through the other’.
‘Unconsciousness is the discourse of the other’, according to Lacan. And in fact, it is in the hostage dream where we are willing to admit that our political object of desire (the other) manages to see through us. The dream challenges our ‘symbolic order’(5) by threatening our physical existence. Unconsciousness, in that sense, is functioning here as a willingness to admit that the other may know our deepest and most hidden secrets. It knows that which we struggle to conceal even from ourselves. The threatening murderous other, is a reflection of our guilt. And yet, we must remember that the ‘murderous other’ is an imaginary one. He or she is a fantasmic product of our mind. In the dream, it is our own mind (unconsciousness) that is desperately trying to combat our ethical, intellectual and political discrepancies; we do it all through our (political) object of desire.
The hostage dream brings to light a devastating duality within the Left psychosis. It confronts the overwhelmingly conscious symbolic discourse with the innocent fear that our lifetime political project is in vain. In the dream we juxtapose our solipsistic digital rationality with the puzzling mystifying yet analogous other. While we are up and around we saturate ourselves with symbolism: badges, banners, scarves, flags, affiliated texts, thinkers and statements but once we shut our eyes, our own sense of ethics and truth sends us a devastating message through an imaginary other: the more symbolic you are, the less genuine you happen to be. The more you identify the less you feel.
The hostage dream is our reaction to our repetitive failure to attain a real comprehensive bond with our subject of solidarity. Like Achilles who is closing in on the tortoise but never manages to reach it, the solidarity activist, at least in the dream, faces his or her doomed failure to reach a true bond with his or her (political) object of desire. The more we empathize, sacrifice and give, the greater is the abyss that threatens to swallow us while we are asleep.
The hostage dream should be interpreted as a genuine call for integrity. It is a moment of moral awakening. It is the mind that demands that we replace our empty symbolism with dynamic ethical awareness.
The hostage dream is a beam of truth; it is there to suggest to us that we may never understand. This is probably the real meaning of true solidarity, the acceptance of the other as a mystery.


Friday, August 21, 2009


Planning Mass Graves

Fear, Intimidation & Media Disinformation: U.K Government is Planning Mass Graves in Case of H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic

by Michel Chossudovsky

An official UK government report --quoted extensively in Britain's tabloid media-- is warning the British public that there will be countless deaths in the case of a swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO, a Worlwide public health emergency situation will take place in the Fall.

A high death toll is predicted without corroborating evidence.

The official report confirms government plans to set up mass graves for the victims of the swine flu pandemic:

"Plans for mass graves have been drawn up to cope with a second wave of swine flu this Autumn. The chilling proposals are spelled out in a Home Office document discussed at a meeting of Whitehall officials and council leaders last month.

It warns emergency plans may be needed in areas where there are not enough graves to cope.

The 59-page document talks about using "a grave that is for a number of unrelated persons, excavated mechanically in advance and designed for efficient preparation and use". (The Sun, Augsut 19, 2009)

The mass graves, according to the report, "are being planned to deal with the rising death toll from swine flu if the pandemic escalates":

"The grim revelation will see the mass burial sites dug in advance to cope with any potential crisis.

The Government is planning to create a series of communal graves to cope with the second outbreak expected in the autumn and through the winter.

A Home Office document published earlier this year sets out plans for how local councils should deal with a high death toll – estimates of the number of deaths range from 55,000 to as high as 750,000 from the H1N1 killer virus – including setting up temporary mortuaries.

So far, 44 people in England have been confirmed as dying after contracting swine flu and another five have died in Scotland. The document says that while most cemeteries have sufficient burial capacity for a number of years, this could be put to the test at the peak of a pandemic. (Daily Express, August 19, 2009)

The chilling proposals contained in the government report serve to intimidate the British public and create an atmosphere of panic. A public health crisis is being planned in a diabolical fashion.

The report suggests unequivocally that there will be countless deaths resulting from the level 6 WHO pandemic, which require the development of mass graves:

Within weeks of a full-blown pandemic emerging, the number of burials could more than double. Inner city areas “may experience a shortage of grave space”, the report stated.

Freight containers and “inflatable” storage units may be needed to provide extra mortuary space. But it stated that “refrigerated vehicles and trailers should not be used”.

Other contingency plans being suggested were the need for cemeteries and crematoriums to work seven days a week and to hire extra staff to cope with demand.

There may also be a need for more “basic and shorter services at the chapel” or for “memorial services” to be held at a person’s home instead.

Retired doctors could be called back to work to issue death certificates so GPs can focus on patients, while NHS Blood and Transplant has appealed to the public to give blood to ensure banks were well stocked.

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “This is prudent, precautionary planning that has been taking place over a number of years, with the health service, other essential services and local authorities. It is important to stress that these are possible scenarios, not certainties, so that our stakeholders can plan for the worst and be prepared to deal with the outbreak effectively.” (Ibid)

These assertions are totally fabricated. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support these claims.

Realities are turned upside down. The British government is deliberately misleading the British public.

With some exceptions, the British media bears a heavy burden of responsibility in failing to analyse these "authoritative" statements emanating from Her Majesty's Government.

The WHO has not provided the evidence, nor has the British government.

There is ample evidence, documented in numerous reports, that the WHO's level 6 pandemic alert is based on fabricated evidence and a manipulation of the figures on mortality and morbidity resulting from the N1H1 swine flu.

The data initially used to justify the WHO's Worldwide level 5 alert in April 2009 was extremely scanty.

The WHO asserted without evidence that a "global outbreak of the disease is imminent". It distorted Mexico's mortality data pertaining to the swine flu pandemic. According to the WHO Director General Dr. Margaret Chan in her official April 29 statement: "So far, 176 people have been killed in Mexico". From what? Where does she get these numbers? 159 died from influenza out of which only seven deaths, corroborated by lab analysis, resulted from the H1N1 swine flu strain, according to the Mexican Ministry of Health.

The swine flu has the same symptoms as seasonal influenza: fever, cough and sore throat. What is happening is that the widespread incidence of the common flu is being used to generate the data pertaining to the H1N1 swine flu.

And all of sudden, the British authorities are predicting widespread mortality resulting from an influenza related ailment. What is the evidence. Big Pharma is behind the official reports and the media disinformation campaign.

Similarly, in the US the intervention of the military (as well as martial law provisions) are being envisaged in the case of a public health emergency.

Is this emergency being planned ahead of time. Are these various national emergencies (Britain, France UK) being coordinated through inter-governmental consultations, which serves to trigger a Worldwide public health emergency, based on fabricated evidence?

Deadly Vaccines

On the other hand, amply documented and denied by Western governments, the proposed vaccines could result in more deaths than those caused by the H1N1 influenza, as confirmed by Britain's Health Protection Agency:

A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent to the Government by senior neurologists in a confidential letter.

The letter from the Health Protection Agency, the official body that oversees public health, has been leaked to The Mail on Sunday, leading to demands to know why the information has not been given to the public before the vaccination of millions of people, including children, begins.

It tells the neurologists that they must be alert for an increase in a brain disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which could be triggered by the vaccine.

GBS attacks the lining of the nerves, causing paralysis and inability to breathe, and can be fatal.

The letter, sent to about 600 neurologists on July 29, is the first sign that there is concern at the highest levels that the vaccine itself could cause serious complications.

It refers to the use of a similar swine flu vaccine in the United States in 1976 when:

* More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu.

* 500 cases of GBS were detected.

* The vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times.

* The vaccine was withdrawn after just ten weeks when the link with GBS became clear.

* The US Government was forced to pay out millions of dollars to those affected. (Mail on Sunday, August 16, 2009)

The British government has announced that more than 13 million people will be innoculated. The proposed vaccines for the H1N1 swine flu have not, as yet, been tested.


Saturday, August 15, 2009


Self-Inflicted


Capitalism's Self-Inflicted Apocalypse


by Michael Parenti


After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history.

The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.


Plutocracy vs. Democracy

Let us consider democracy first. In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, "capitalist democracies." In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.

The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.

In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently "malfunction" to the benefit of the more conservative candidates.

At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings-applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy's social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one's own choosing.

About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws-was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses. From this, Debs concluded that capitalism was not just an economic system but an entire social order, one that rigged the rules of democracy to favor the moneybags.

Capitalist rulers continue to pose as the progenitors of democracy even as they subvert it, not only at home but throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Any nation that is not "investor friendly," that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as "a threat to U.S. national security."

Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us. So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates.


Capitalism vs. Prosperity

The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy's notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work-for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.

In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.

To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.


A Self-devouring Beast

The capitalist state has two roles long recognized by political thinkers. First, like any state it must provide services that cannot be reliably developed through private means, such as public safety and orderly traffic. Second, the capitalist state protects the haves from the have-nots, securing the process of capital accumulation to benefit the moneyed interests, while heavily circumscribing the demands of the working populace, as Debs observed from his jail cell.

There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency-as we are seeing today-toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace.

In addition, there is the frequently overlooked self-destruction created by the moneyed players themselves. If left completely unsupervised, the more active command component of the financial system begins to devour less organized sources of wealth.

Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country's productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.

Some years later, in the United States, came the multi-billion-dollar plunder perpetrated by corporate conspirators at Enron, WorldCom, Harkin, Adelphia, and a dozen other major companies. Inside players like Ken Lay turned successful corporate enterprises into sheer wreckage, wiping out the jobs and life savings of thousands of employees in order to pocket billions.

These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism's self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance- in any case coming too late-was a product of democracy's accountability and transparency, not capitalism's. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save "caveat emptor."

In the meltdown of 2008-09 the mounting financial surplus created a problem for the moneyed class: there were not enough opportunities to invest. With more money than they knew what to do with, big investors poured immense sums into nonexistent housing markets and other dodgy ventures, a legerdemain of hedge funds, derivatives, high leveraging, credit default swaps, predatory lending, and whatever else.

Among the victims were other capitalists, small investors, and the many workers who lost billions of dollars in savings and pensions. Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as "a longstanding leader in the financial services industry," Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back "with money that wasn't there," as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.

In the midst of the meltdown, at an October 2008 congressional hearing, former chair of the Federal Reserve and orthodox free-market devotee Alan Greenspan confessed that he had been mistaken to expect moneyed interests--groaning under an immense accumulation of capital that needs to be invested somewhere--to suddenly exercise self-restraint.

The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it. In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint. This unbridled competition supposedly will produce maximum benefits for all because the free market is governed by a miraculously benign "invisible hand" that optimizes collective outputs. ("Greed is good.")

Is the crisis of 2008-09 caused by a chronic tendency toward overproduction and hyper-financial accumulation, as Marx would have it? Or is it the outcome of the personal avarice of people like Bernard Madoff? In other words, is the problem systemic or individual? In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them. The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.

Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.

Those who scold us for "running to the government for a handout" are themselves running to the government for a handout. Corporate America has always enjoyed grants-in-aid, loan guarantees, and other state and federal subventions. But the 2008-09 "rescue operation" offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve. Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.

The big bankers used some of the bailout, we do know, to buy up smaller banks and prop up banks overseas. CEOs and other top banking executives are spending bailout funds on fabulous bonuses and lavish corporate spa retreats. Meanwhile, big bailout beneficiaries like Citigroup and Bank of America laid off tens of thousands of employees, inviting the question: why were they given all that money in the first place?

While hundreds of billions were being doled out to the very people who had caused the catastrophe, the housing market continued to wilt, credit remained paralyzed, unemployment worsened, and consumer spending sank to record lows.

In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen. Its essence is the transformation of living nature into mountains of commodities and commodities into heaps of dead capital. When left entirely to its own devices, capitalism foists its diseconomies and toxicity upon the general public and upon the natural environment--and eventually begins to devour itself.

The immense inequality in economic power that exists in our capitalist society translates into a formidable inequality of political power, which makes it all the more difficult to impose democratic regulations.

If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens "our way of life," it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.

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