Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields
  • Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Guest Editorials— By Andre Damon, wsws.org The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report Monday showing that electronics giant Apple Inc. uses offshore tax shelters to avoid taxes on the majority of its income and cheated the US government out of $9 billion in 2012 alone. That same day, a tornado leveled the town [...]

  • Rise Up or Die

    Rise Up or Die

     By Chris Hedges Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion [...]

  • Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric

    Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric, Congo war crimes, Jailed for silence, DOJ assault on Fox Source: RT.com On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin and political commentator Sam Sacks go over the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s latest foreign policy speech. Abby highlights a recent UN investigation bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a [...]

  • Dr. Noam Chomsky breaks the set on war, imperialism and propaganda

    RT’s Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky on current issues stemming from pseudo-democratic governance in the United States. On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic and author of over 100 books Dr. Noam Chomsky about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush [...]

  • OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    By Pepe Escobar, RT.com  Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.  Did you like this? Share [...]

  • Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    AlterNet [1] / By Sean McElwee [2] Last week two important stories about U.S. foreign policy broke. First, the White House released some 100 pages of e-mails confirming a dastardly scandal: rather than call the Benghazi attack a “terrorist act,” President Obama, in a Nixonian power grab, called it an, “act of terror.” Did you like this? Share it:

  • Religious Barbarians

    Religious Barbarians

    From Tbilisi to Worchester by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI (With report & VIDEO by PressTV, see addendum below) It was humanity at its best.  Showing compassion for the quick and the dead.  The quick made news in Tbilisi, Georgia.  The dead made news in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    Despite Annulment, Genocide Trial a Breakthrough for Justice and Truth by LUZ MENDEZ The sentence of 80 years in prison against former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict, emitted on May 10, 2013, was annulled by the Constitutional Court ten days later. The court’s [...]

The decay of American democracy

 COLUMNS  Comments Off
Nov 072010
 
ChristineODonnell
The 2010 US election campaign, now mercifully concluded, marks a further descent by the American two-party system into political imbecility.
None of the major issues confronting the American people—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, two wars, spreading poverty, hunger and homelessness, the plague of foreclosures, mounting attacks on democratic rights, the worst environmental catastrophe in US history—were seriously discussed. Most were not discussed at all.  Instead, the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties engaged in a war of mutual mudslinging, inanities, diversions and outright lying on a scale without precedent even in the dismal history of American elections. More than $4 billion was spent by the two parties and various corporate-backed groups created for the purpose of smearing one set of candidates on behalf of the other.
___________________
PATRICK MARTIN  | [print_link]
The lion’s share of this vast sum went for the purchase of television attack ads that reached a crescendo over the past weekend. It was impossible to watch a news program, drama, comedy or sporting event without being subjected to a torrent of filth, mind-numbing in its viciousness, repetitiveness and obvious insincerity.
RIGHT: Joe Miller, Barbara Murkowski—the first a candidate for the Tea Party, the second a veteran of the corrupt politics that define the GOP. Both poisonous choices for the electorate of Alaska.
     In Nevada, viewers were told that the incumbent Democratic senator, Harry Reid, supported free Viagra for imprisoned child molesters. In Kentucky, they were told that the Republican candidate for the US Senate had trussed up a college co-ed and forced her to worship an idol called Aqua Buddha. In Illinois, the Democratic candidate for Senate was vilified as a “banker for mobsters.” A Republican congressional candidate in Michigan was branded a con-man who cheated business partners out of $6 million.
     Much of the advertising is purchased by “independent” groups created overnight for the purpose of influencing the 2010 vote, usually by an influx of cash from a wealthy donor, a corporate lobby, or one of the major unions. Under an innocuous cover name—“Americans for Prosperity,” “Americans for Jobs,” “American Families First”—the group then buys television time to slime one candidate and promote another.
     A major function of the advertising barrage is to confuse the viewing audience and make coherent reflection about political issues virtually impossible. Neither party wishes to actually communicate with the voters on a rational level. Instead, their spin doctors and admen seek to stun the audience with emotionally loaded attacks on opposing candidates, while the actual agenda of the ad sponsors is concealed.
     The abysmal intellectual level of the 2010 campaign is not merely a bizarre or grotesque aspect of an otherwise healthy electoral process. It is an expression of the fundamentally bankrupt character of American capitalist democracy.
BELOW: Harry Reid celebrates his narrow escape from a humiliating defeat at the hands of a Tea Party imbecile, Sharron Angle. Another bad choice between a corporatist Democrat and a deranged rightwinger. Poor America. 
     It is impossible for the two big business parties to speak to the American people honestly and directly, because both the Democrats and the Republicans represent the financial aristocracy, a tiny handful of the population whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the broad masses.
     The populist posturing of both parties has become stale and unbelievable. Obama pretends that his administration has been the scourge of Wall Street, when it has overseen the handover of trillions from the Treasury to rescue the banks. The Republicans in their turn thunder against the bank bailout, although it was devised by the outgoing Bush administration and ratified by the congressional Republican leadership.
     The absence of any substantive discussion of issues like war and the ongoing attacks on democratic rights is a demonstration of the degraded and false character of the officially sanctioned political process. Neither party will submit to the popular will when it comes to decisions on any critical questions.
     Bush went to war in Iraq despite mass opposition at home. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan after winning the 2008 election as the purported “peace” candidate. Likewise on questions of democratic rights: both parties are committed to the continued buildup of the powers of the military-intelligence apparatus, the scaffolding for an American police state.
     It has been a full decade since the notorious intervention by the US Supreme Court into the 2000 presidential election and the capitulation by the Democrats to the installation of George W. Bush in the White House. At the time, the World Socialist Web Site drew the conclusion that there was no longer any significant constituency in the American ruling class for the defense of democratic rights.
     There have followed a series of elections, each more of a travesty than the one before. The 2002 election was held amid the stampede to war in Iraq, with the Bush administration warning of “mushroom clouds” in American cities if Saddam Hussein was not overthrown.
BELOW: Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina celebrate their primary victories.  In the end both went down to defeats after spending obscene amounts in an effort to buy the election. A reminder that—sometimes—money is not enough to win a place in the political class. 
     In the 2004 election, the Democrats turned their backs on the antiwar sentiments of the American people and ran a candidate pledged to military victory in Iraq.
     In 2006, the Democrats won control of Congress, largely due to popular opposition to the war in Iraq, but the Bush administration escalated the war instead and the Democratic Congress refused to cut off funds or take any action to halt the bloodbath.
     In the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s victory was a triumph of media manipulation and illusion-making. The candidate, a virtual unknown with only four years in the US Senate, was selected and groomed by power brokers and moneymen in the Democratic Party, then packaged as a fresh-faced insurgent who would bring “hope” and “change.” He took office amid celebratory declarations that the first African-American president represented a milestone in democratic progress. Two years later, the disillusionment is all the more profound.
     These years have not been lived in vain, however. Tens of millions of people instinctively grasp, based on harsh experience, that both parties do the bidding of corporate America, whatever their rhetoric at election time. There is a growing realization that working people need a fundamentally new road.
     There is no way out of the degraded and corrupt character of the American political system through such mechanisms as campaign finance “reform” and other efforts to tinker with the rules by which capitalist politicians are bought and sold by their corporate masters.
     American politics will be redefined only through the entrance of the masses into great social and political struggles. The emergence of a genuine popular movement from below will explode everything that is false, untrue, artificial, concocted and phony in American political life, including pseudo-populist diversions like the Tea Party.
     The way forward for the working class is to build an independent political party of its own—of, by and for the working people and all the oppressed—based on a socialist and anti-imperialist program. 
__________
Patrick Martin is a senior political critic and analyst with the World Socialist Web Site. 

 

Did you like this? Share it:

French Fury in the EU Cage

 COLUMNS  Comments Off
Nov 072010
 
frenchProtests101910

“Work Harder to Earn Less”

Once again the French lead the way, while the anglo world watches passively. 

By DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris. [print_link]
______________
The French are at it again – out on strike, blocking transport, raising hell in the streets, and all that merely because the government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.  They must be crazy.
That, I suppose, is the way the current mass movement in France is seen – or at least shown – in much of the world, and above all in the Anglo-Saxon world.
     Perhaps the first thing that needs to be said about the current mass strikes in France is that they are not really about “raising the retirement age from 60 to 62”. This is rather like describing the capitalist free market as a sort of lemonade stand. A propaganda simplification of very complex issues. It allows the commentators to go crashing through open doors.  After all, they observe sagely, people in other countries work until 65 or beyond, so why should the French balk at 62? The population is aging, and if the retirement age isn’t raised, the pension system will go broke paying out pensions to so many ancients.
      However, the current protest movement is not about “raising the retirement age from 60 to 62”. It is about much more.
     For one thing, this movement is an expression of exasperation with the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, which blatantly favors the super-rich over the majority of working people in this country.  He was elected on the slogan, “Work more to earn more”, and the reality turns out to be work harder to earn less.  The Labor Minister who introduced the reform, Eric Woerth, got a job for his wife on the office staff of the richest woman in France, Liliane Bettencourt, heir to the Oreal cosmetics giant, at the same time that, as budget minister, he was overlooking her massive tax evasions. While tax benefits for the rich help empty the public coffers, this government is doing what it can to tear down the whole social security system that emerged after World War II on the pretext that “we can’t afford it”. 
     The retirement issue is far more complex than “the age of retirement”.  The legal age of retirement means the age at which one may retire.  But the pension depends on the number of years worked, or to be more precise, on the number of cotisations (payments) into the joint pension scheme. On the grounds of “saving the system from bankruptcy”, the government is gradually raising the number of years of cotisations from 40 to 43 years, with indications that this will be stretched out further in the future.
     As education is prolonged, and employment begins later, to get a full pension most people will have to work until 65 or 67.  A “full pension” comes to about 40 per cent of wages at the time of retirement.
But even so, that may not be possible.  Full time jobs are harder and harder to get, and employers do not necessarily want to retain older employees.  Or the enterprise goes out of business and the 58-year old employee finds himself permanently out of work.  It is becoming harder and harder to work full-time in a salaried job for over 40 years, however much one may want to.  Thus in practice, the Sarkozy-Woerth reform simply means reducing pensions. 
     That, in fact, is what the European Union has recommended to all member
states as an economy measure, intended, as with most current reforms, to reduce social costs in the name of “competitivity” – meaning competition to attract investment capital.
     Less qualified workers, who instead of pursuing studies may have entered the work force young, say at age eighteen, will have subscribed to the scheme for forty-two years at age 60 if indeed they manage to be employed all that time. Statistics show that their life expectancy is relatively short, so they need to leave early in order to enjoy any retirement at all.
     The French system is based on solidarity between generations, in that the cotisations of  today’s workers go to pay today’s retired people’s pensions.  The government has subtly tried to pit one generation against another, by claiming that it is necessary to protect the future of today’s youth, who are paying for the “baby boom” pensioners. It is therefore extremely significant that this week, high school and university students massively began to enter the protest strike movement.  This solidarity between generations is a major blow to the government.
     The youth are even much more radical than the older trade unionists.  They are very aware of the increasing difficulty of building a career.  The trend is for qualified personnel to enter the work force later and later, having spent years getting an education.   With the difficulty of finding a stable, full-time job, many depend on their parents until age 30.  It is simple arithmetic to see that in this case, there will be no full retirement until after age 70.
.
Productivity and Deindustrialization
As has become standard practice, the authors of the neo-liberal reforms present them not as a choice but as a necessity.  There is no alternative.  We must compete on the global market.  Do it our way or we go broke.  And this reform was essentially dictated by the European Union, in a 2003 report, concluding that making people work longer was necessary to cut pension costs.
     These dictates prevent any discussion of the two basic factors underlying the pension problem: productivity and deindustrialization.
     Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the former Socialist Party man who heads the relatively new Left Party, is about the only political leader to point out that even if there are fewer workers to contribute to pension schemes, the difference can be made up by the rise in productivity.  Indeed, French worker productivity is among the very highest in the world (higher than Germany, for example).  Moreover, although France has the second longest life expectancy in Europe, it also has the highest birth rate.  And even if jobholders are fewer, because of unemployment, the wealth they produce should be adequate to maintain pension levels.
     Aha, but here’s the catch:  for decades, as productivity goes up, wages stagnate.  The profits from increased productivity are siphoned off into the financial sector.  The bloating of the financial sector and the stagnation of purchasing power has led to the financial crisis – and the government has preserved the imbalance by bailing out the profligate financiers.
     So logically, preserving the pension system basically calls for raising wages to account for higher productivity – a very major policy change.
     But there is another critical problem linked to the pension issue: deindustrialization.  In order to maintain the high profits drained by the financial sector, and avoid paying higher wages, one industry after another has moved its production to cheap labor countries.  Profitable enterprises shut down as capital goes looking for even higher profit.
     Is this merely the inevitable result of the rise of new industrial powers in Asia?  Is a lowering of living standards in the West inevitable due to their rise in the East? 
     Perhaps.  However, if shifting industrial production to China ends up lowering purchasing power in the West, then Chinese exports will suffer. China itself is taking the first steps toward strengthening its own domestic market.  “Export-led growth” cannot be a strategy for everyone.  World prosperity actually depends on strengthening both domestic production and domestic markets.  But this requires the sort of deliberate industrial policy which is banned by the bureaucracies of globalization: the World Trade Organization and the European Union.  They operate on the dogmas of “comparative advantage” and “free competition”.  On grounds of free trade, China is actually facing sanctions for promoting its own solar energy industry, vitally necessary to end the deadly air pollution that plagues that country.  The world economy is being treated as a big game, where following the “rules of the free market” is more important than the environment or the basic vital necessities of human beings.
     Only the financiers can win this game.  And if they lose, well, they just get more chips for another game from servile governments.
.
Impasse?
Where will it all end? 
It should end in something like a democratic revolution: a complete overhaul of economic policy.  But there are very strong reasons why this will not happen.
     For one thing, there is no political leadership in France ready and able to lead a truly radical movement.  Mélenchon comes the closest, but his party is new and its base is still narrow.  The radical left is hamstrung by its chronic sectarianism.  And there is great confusion among people revolting without clear programs and leaders.
     Labor leaders are well aware that employees lose a day’s pay for every day they go on strike, and they are in fact always anxious to find ways to end a strike.  Only the students do not suffer from that restraint. The trade unionists and Socialist Party leaders are demanding nothing more drastic than that the government open negotiations about details of the reform.  If Sarkozy weren’t so stubborn, this is a concession the government could make which might restore calm without changing very much.
     It would take the miraculous emergence of new leaders to carry the movement forward.
But even if this should happen, there is a more formidable obstacle to basic change: the European Union.  The EU, built on popular dreams of peaceful and prosperous united Europe, has turned into a mechanism of economic and social control on behalf of capital, and especially of financial capital.  Moreover, it is linked to a powerful military alliance, NATO.  
     If left to its own devices, France might experiment in a more socially just economic system.  But the EU is there precisely to prevent such experiments.
.
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
On October 19, the French international TV channel France 24 ran a discussion of the strikes between four non-French observers.  The Portuguese woman and the Indian man seemed to be trying, with moderate success, to understand what was going on.  In contrast, the two Anglo-Americans (the Paris correspondent of Time magazine and Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French) amused themselves demonstrating self-satisfied inability to understand the country they write about for a living.
     Their quick and easy explanation: “The French are always going on strike for fun because they enjoy it.” 
     A little later in the program the moderator showed a brief interview with a lycée student who offered serious comments on pensions issue.  Did that give pause to the Anglo-Saxons?
     The response was instantaneous.  How sad to see an 18-year-old thinking about pensions when he should be thinking about girls!
     So whether they do it for fun, or whether they do it instead of having fun, the French are absurd to Anglo-Americans accustomed to telling the whole world what it should do.
______________
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions.Write her for the French version of this article, or to comment, at diana.josto@yahoo.fr

 

Did you like this? Share it:

Obama Still Doesn't Get It / He failed To Lead

 American Parties, CITIZEN TOOLS, Policies & Politicians, THE USA  Comments Off
Nov 072010
 
Obama-american_gulag
President Obama still doesn’t get that the 2010 mid-term elections were a referendum on him ~ and specifically his failure to deliver on the mandate of change that he promised in 2008. His progressive and Independent base fled the scene but he still doesn’t get that his spineless passivity has left him alone at the table still drinking his own kool aid.
___________________________
By Allen L Roland  | November 5, 2010  [print_link]
 I’ve read all the postmortems on the midterm elections which was not a surprise to me ~ mainly because I’m one of the millions of Americans who voted for change in 2008 and saw Barack Obama as an agent of that change and was quickly disappointed by not only his cabinet selections but his reluctance to deliver on those promises he glibly offered before his election. As Ted Rall correctly writes ~” People are pissed. They hate the bailouts, but the bailouts aren’t the main point. More than anything else, the American people are angry that their government doesn’t even pretend to give a damn about them.”
     Or as Marshall Ganz also correctly wrote in the LA Times ~ ” The nation was ready for transformational leadership, but the president gave us transactional leadership ( horse-trading, operating within the routine, maintaining, rather than changing the status quo). And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public’s anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead.”
     David Degraw , author of The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America , and his forthcoming book The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World W ar III offers an incisive analysis of the Mid Term election and how Obama got what he deserved ~

“The Obama referendum came in and he got what he deserved. When you run on change and leave the same criminals in positions of power and don’t hold anyone accountable for obvious crimes, and allow them to continue to commit those crimes, you deserve to lose your power. This is what happens when you put Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy, and support Ben Bernanke for reconfirmation as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This is what happens when you keep Robert Gates as your Secretary of Defense and General Petraeus in charge of your wars. This is what happens when you lie to protect the interests of BP over the American people. This is what happens when you bailout Wall Street and the health care industry and sell out everyone else. This is what happens when your rhetoric is the opposite of your actions. The past two years have clearly exposed Obama as a spineless corporate puppet and he deserves to be voted out in 2012 .”
.
DeGraw goes on to define the real problem ~ ” Hopefully by 2012 the American public will finally understand that they must support Independent candidates and alternative political structures, and cannot vote for Democrats or Republicans, if they ever want to achieve the needed change. Both parties serve the same corporate masters. Yes, there are some differences between the two. The Democrats serve half of the top economic one percent, and the Republicans serve the other half. We have Neo-liberals to the left and Neo-cons to the right, leaving99% of us without representation.”
     The loss of both Russ Feingold and Alan Grayson, who led the fight against the corporate elite are outstanding examples of how the progressives have been run over by both parties ~ ” Two politicians in Congress who actually fought for us against the Economic Elite just lost their reelection bids. Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold lost because record amounts of cash went to funding the candidates who ran against them. Even their own party’s leadership didn’t support their reelection efforts. The bottom line in this money rigged system is that you cannot run against the most powerful corporations and win. They will just pour unlimited funds into defeating you, and your own party will desert you . “
     So what can we do? How can we defeat the corpocracy and return the Republic to the people?
DeGraw offers a bottom up approach that just might work if we can get beyond our own political cynicism ~ ” Yes, I sound extreme, but these are extreme times. I’m not going to sit quietly as our future is ripped out from under us. I will not let my family’s well being and our country’s fate be decided by short-sighted greed addicted forces that have looted the global economy and brought poverty, death and destruction throughout the world.
     I see the path we are on and I intend to change it!
It is evident that the overwhelming majority of the population has become cynical and feels that it is useless to try to change things. If these people would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority and take action, we can change things. We have power in numbers. We are 99% of the population. If we organize on common ground and fight back, we will win!”
__________________
Click on common ground 
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/339/t/10594/signUp.jsp?key=4898
and see how we can all aggressively move on common sense political reforms.
We are the ones we have been waiting for!
__________________
Author’s Website: http://www.allenroland.com
Author’s Bio: Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on hisweblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio http://www.conscioustalk.net

 

Did you like this? Share it:

Iron Man and the sad state of American cinema

 ARTS & FILM, COLUMNS, KULTURKAMPF, MEDIA SCUM  1 Response »
Nov 072010
 
Mickey Rourke Whiplash Iron Man 2 movie image

Repulsive heroes to the rescue…? 

Is it a coincidence that Batman and Iron Man have so much in common? Like Batman, aka “The Dark Knight“, and “The World’s Greatest Detective“, and whose true identity is that of Bruce Wayne, an American millionaire (later billionaire) playboy, industrialist, and philanthropist, Iron Man’s Tony Stark is also scion to an industrial fortune (made on military hardware), a flamboyant chauvinist (Superman himself was proud to “fight for freedom, truth, and the American Way”), and a fierce capitalist. His egotism is seemingly boundless. Some models for the young to imitate.
_______________________________________
By Hiram Lee
26 May 2008 |  [print_link] 
IRON MAN is the latest in a barrage of comic book superhero films to come to the big screen in recent years. Like a number of the others, it is done very well for itself at the box office and with mainstream critics. While all of these movies, from Batman Begins to The Fantastic Four, have been slight and drawn on thin sources, hardly any have been adapted from a source as repulsive as Iron Man.
     The Iron Man character first appeared in Tales of Suspense, issue number 39. Published in 1963, the comic told the story of Tony Stark, a wealthy playboy described as “the dreamiest thing this side of Rock Hudson” and an inventor of high-tech weaponry for the US military. In the comic book, Stark is injured during an explosion in the Vietnamese jungle and captured by Wong-Chu, “the red guerrilla tyrant.” Ordered by Wong-Chu to build an advanced weapon for his own army, Stark instead creates the first Iron Man armor which he dons to become an invincible opponent of the evil “red” and everything the latter stands for.
     It is striking that this profoundly anticommunist character, who was used to promote illusions about capitalism in general and the brutal US role in Vietnam in particular, should find a screen adaptation at the present time. At a moment when the American government is mired in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iron Man once again steps forward to fulfill his role of attempting to foster illusions about United States’ neo-colonial adventures, secretive intelligence agencies, terrorism and capitalism. It is a film so divorced from reality one can hardly believe one’s eyes.
     The movie, directed by Jon Favreau (Elf, Zathura) transplants Iron Man’s origins from Vietnam to a more modern setting. We first meet Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) as he is riding in a military convoy in Afghanistan. He has just demonstrated, with considerable arrogance, his latest weapon designed for the US military. When the convoy is suddenly attacked by terrorists, Stark receives near-fatal injuries from a rocket made by his own company, Stark Enterprises, that has somehow fallen into enemy hands.
     Replacing the ‘red tyrants’ of the original comic book, a terrorist group whose power mad leader idolizes Genghis Khan captures Stark this time. The essential details of his captivity remain the same. Told to build an advanced weapon for the terrorists, he instead creates Iron Man and makes his daring escape.
     Having returned to the US deeply affected by his experiences, Downey’s Stark immediately moves to shut down the weapons program of his vast Stark Enterprises. He cannot, he says, go forward knowing these weapons have fallen into the wrong hands. “I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them,” he tells the press. This is a curious line which deserves some thought. Was this budding superhero not bothered by the horrors inflicted on the people of Afghanistan by his weapons? It appears not. Stark has doubts about his profession, but not the role of the US military in Afghanistan. His conscience extends only so far.
     From here, the movie continues along the path well established for superhero films. Stark will build and test new armor and equipment, take his first awkward flights through the night sky before mastering his new abilities and find himself in various battles that grow in intensity until the final clash with another superpowered being. Virtually nothing comes as a surprise.
     One battle worth noting takes Stark, in his Iron Man persona, to a village in Afghanistan where the terrorist group he encountered in the beginning of the story is now threatening the lives of the local inhabitants. The CEO-superhero quickly dispatches them with the small arsenal hidden away in his armor. There is something unseemly at work in the cool way Iron Man strolls away from an enemy tank he has just blown apart with a rocket.
     What are we to make of this militaristic superhero? While Iron Man is a fantasy, it is still a fantasy with its basis in reality. One cannot ignore the setting of the film and all the implications that go along with it, nor the context in which this film has been made and released.
     The US has been pursuing a colonial-style war in Afghanistan for more than six years now, resulting in thousands of deaths. Just within the past week, the World Socialist Web Site reported on plans to build a $60-million prison near Kabul capable of holding up to 1,100 prisoners, a facility in which one can be certain the brutal treatment and torture of Afghan prisoners housed in other locations will continue.
     This week also brought word, in the form of a preliminary United Nations report, of widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, with many occurring at the hands of the CIA and other intelligence agencies working with the US occupation.
     What is one to think, then, of a film released in the same month showing an armor-clad weapons manufacturer, an ally of the secretive government agency SHIELD, fighting off ‘terrorists’ and saving the innocent civilians of one village from their attacks? It simply turns reality on its head. The comic-book superhero revival of recent years has clearly been something of an unhealthy trend, but never has this been clearer than in the present case.
     The fact that the film is so dreadful and dishonest has not, however, kept critics from praising it. A.O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, while compelled to acknowledge that “it all plays out more or less as expected,” nevertheless glowingly comments about the film that “Within the big, crowded movements of this pop symphony is a series of brilliant duets that sometimes seem to have the swing and spontaneity of jazz improvisation.”
     Richard Corliss, with Time Magazine, writes that Iron Man possesses “lots more intelligence than the genre usually demands,” adding that the work has yanked “movies and the worldwide box office out of its months-long doldrums and into the stratosphere.”
     “Fallible, ordinarily engaging, human-size, earthbound characters just don’t measure up when the weather turns warmer,” says Corliss, “We need another hero, and lots of ‘em, the bigger, stronger and cartoonier the better.”
     Newsweek’s David Ansen spoke favorably of the film’s political stance and its depiction of terrorists, “Though they use Afghanistan as a backdrop, [the filmmakers] carefully avoid any political specifics—you won’t hear the word Muslim uttered here—and the bad guys, led by the nasty Raza (Faran Tahir), are generic power-hungry villains who could have been plucked out of a James Bond movie of any era.” It is remarkable to observe a critic praising filmmakers for creating generic and two-dimensional characters.
     Peter Travers of Rolling Stone went a step further than Ansen, not only doing away with his own critical faculties, but also urging audiences to do the same. “Don’t question,” he wrote, “just lap it up.”
The list goes on, shamefully. If nothing else, Iron Man has at least provided us with a good long look at the wretched state of so-called film criticism with which we are presently plagued.
_______

Iron Man 2 and the sad state of American filmmaking today

By Hiram Lee 
18 May 2010
The state of American filmmaking at the moment is pretty appalling. In hardly a single recent Hollywood film do we find a hint of life as it is lived by millions of people in the United States and internationally, and certainly no hint of social opposition.
     We have entered extraordinarily tense and convulsive times that would seem to demand the most serious attention from film writers and directors, however that might find artistic expression. Where is the filmmakers’ response? Their anger, their ideas, even their interest? At a time when films—dramas or comedies—animated by the desire to get to the bottom of things are sorely needed, audiences instead by and large confront superficial, complacent, and light-minded works. The professional cynic, of course, will blame the viewers—as though they had any serious choice in the matter.
     A glance at the current “USA Top 10” at the box office reveals the fare Hollywood is presently inflicting on a mass audience. There is, first of all, Iron Man 2, the latest comic book blockbuster, and a sequel. This is followed by yet another (and not a promising) version of Robin Hood, a few tepid romantic comedies that come and go indistinguishably, a computer-generated cartoon about dragons, remakes of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Clash of the Titans, along with something called Furry Vengeance. By and large, these are dismal, unimaginative offerings for which no one should feel obliged to settle.
     In regard to Iron Man 2, the emergence of so many comic book and superhero films following the events of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has been one of the least attractive phenomena in recent filmmaking. These works, in which super-powered police figures—and in the case of Iron Man, a highly militarized policeman—battle pure evil on a global scale, often carrying out the bloodiest acts of violence and vengeance, as fantasy-like as they are, no doubt speak to a real phenomenon: the extent to which a whole social grouping, including prominent and wealthy figures in the entertainment industry, has signed on to the “global war on terror” or the Obama version of that. That is to say, they identify with, more or less openly, or at least find no reason to object to America’s drive to dominate the globe. (It is not inappropriate, of course, that such stupid fantasies should be done in cartoonish style—it would be difficult to make them believable in more down-to-earth surroundings.)
     Iron Man 2 is the second installment in a planned trilogy about the Marvel Comics superhero. In this episode, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), the wealthy CEO of Stark Industries who also fights crime in a high-tech armored suit, has almost entirely rid the world of war. Now he faces a new foe: the Senate Armed Services Committee.
     Subpoenaed to appear before the committee, Stark is told his Iron Man suit is a weapon and must be handed over to military authorities. No such weapon can be left in the hands of one person, he is warned.
     In a scene worthy of free enterprise fanatic Ayn Rand, Stark defends himself, telling the committee that Iron Man is his own creation, cannot be considered as separate from himself, and that he will not relinquish it. As Stark storms out of the hearing in victory, he declares, “I have successfully privatized world peace!” We are meant to congratulate him.
     There continues to be something genuinely repulsive about the Stark/Iron Man character. As the first film established, Stark is the billionaire CEO of a weapons manufacturing corporation who, as a militarized superhero, fought against “terrorists” in Afghanistan during his earlier adventures. Now, he is the subject of worldwide adulation, a fact that makes the egocentric playboy even more of a narcissist. The filmmakers clearly want us to admire or find amusing the recklessly self-centered exploits of the character, but one simply can’t go along with it.
     While Stark struggles to keep his armored suit out of the hands of the government, he must also contend with a new super-nemesis. The son of a Russian physicist who claims his experimental breakthroughs were stolen by Stark Industries decades earlier, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a physicist like his father, constructs his own power suit and goes after Stark. Defeated by Iron Man in their first encounter, Ivan joins forces with one of Stark’s competitors in the weapons industry and creates an army of drones in preparation for their next battle.
     In a film filled with markedly unbelievable moments, it is perhaps especially difficult to believe that Ivan Vanko is a physicist; the hulking, tattooed Rourke looks as though he could still be wearing his make-up from The Wrestler.
     This is not the only feature of the film that is, unintentionally, absurd. One is treated to scenes in which Downey, clad in his Iron Man armor, snacks while seated in the giant donut atop Inglewood, California’s well-known Randy’s Donut shop, or becomes drunk at a party and dances wildly while shooting at bottles thrown into the air by party-goers with rockets contained in his armor; it is virtually impossible to take any of this seriously.
     Actress Scarlett Johansson also joins the cast in this segment of the Iron Man trilogy, appearing as a super-spy called Black Widow. She performs complex martial arts maneuvers in a skintight suit and is asked to do little else. Also coming aboard for this film is Don Cheadle, who plays Stark’s friend James Rhodes. Rhodes dons his own armored suit during the film to become the superhero known as War Machine (the name is revealing). Just what are Johansson, Cheadle and, for that matter, Downey, doing here? It would do everyone a lot of good if some of these actors would simply learn to say “No.”
     As with most films of this kind, the special effects and action are center stage, while the dramatic scenes placed in between—only because they have to be—are forced, unconvincing and built around the most exhausted banalities. One’s eyes glaze over when forced to watch such material.
     Unhappily, there are several more superhero films on the way. The entertainment press reports on films in the works starring such comic book favorites as “The Green Lantern,” “Thor,” “Captain America,” “Batman,” and “Spider-Man”—and the list goes on. We can hardly wait.
_________
HIRAM LEE is a senior cultural analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.
Did you like this? Share it:

The Democratic Party Debacle

 ANNOTATED NEWS, COLUMNS, HISTORY, Liberaloids & Radical Centrists, THE USA  Comments Off
Nov 072010
 
Felipe_González_(2010)

And the Demise of the Left-Center Left: A Worldwide Trend

The central question is why the left-center left governing parties are everywhere in crisis and will be for the foreseeable future?

Introduction:
The November 2, 2010 electoral debacle of the Democratic Party in the US cannot be solely ascribed to the failed policies of President Obama, the Congressional leadership or their senior economic advisers. Nor is the demise of what passes for the American “center-left” confined to the US – it is a world-wide pattern, expressed in countries as diverse as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Great Britain and Japan.
____________________________
James Petras  |  [print_link]

The Left-Center Left: Past Winners, Present Losers
In the past leftist parties had been the beneficiaries of capitalist crises: Incumbent conservative regimes, which had presided over economic recessions or had been held responsible for military debacles, were ousted from power by leftist parties prepared to make large-scale, long-term public investments, funded by progressive taxes on wealth and capital, and to impose austerity programs on the rich and wealthy.
RIGHT: Obama and Clinton: Social Democracy American style. 
     In contrast, today the left/center-left (L-CL) regimes preside over crisis-ridden capitalist economies and administer regressive socio-economic policies designed to promote the recovery of the biggest financial and corporate enterprises while rolling back wages, social programs, pensions and unemployment benefits.
     As a result, the L-CL has become the prime political loser in the current economic crisis, reaping hostility and rejection from the great mass of its former working class and salaried supporters.
Wherever the Left has been elected in recent years, a deep polarization developed between its electoral base and the governing party leadership. Nowhere has the Left dared to infringe on the power and prerogatives of the very capitalist class of bankers and investors, who caused the crisis. Instead with perverse and reactionary logic the Left- Center Left parties have wielded stated power through the treasury to refinance capital, through the police and judiciary to repress labor and through the mass media to justify its regressive policies (especially via anti-‘chaos’ hysteria).
     In Greece, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist regime (PASOK) has fired tens of thousands of public employees and its tight fiscal policies have raised unemployment from 8% to 14%. It has increased the age of retirement, reduced pensions and welfare provisions and raised fees for public services, while foreign and domestic bankers, ship owners and overseas investors have benefited by accumulating property and distressed enterprises on the cheap.
     Similar polices have been adopted in Spain and Portugal where public employees’ salaries and jobs have been slashed, pensions and welfare payments have been reduced, job security has been deregulated and employers are free to hire and fire as never before.
RIGHT: Spain’s “Socialist” PM Felipe Gonzalez was a good example of the political dead end represented by socialists in name doing the bidding of the plutocracy.
     Prior to the British Labor Party’s defeat, after more than a decade of promoting wild unregulated financial and real-estate speculation leading to the economic crash, the Labor leadership was planning massive layoffs and cuts in social programs.
     In the United States, Obama and the Democrats were elected, on the basis of their promises to redress the grievances of the workers and salaried employees, who had been battered by the collapse of Wall Street. Instead, the White House poured trillions of tax dollars to rescue the major banking, financial and speculative institutions responsible for the collapse while unemployment and underemployment has climbed to over 20% and 10 million homeowners lost their homes through mortgage foreclosures.
.
Why the L-CL Deepens the Crises
Over the past 30 years the L-CL parties, which were once identified with working class interests and welfare reforms, have become deeply embedded in managing the capitalist system – going so far as to promote the most parasitic and volatile forms of speculative capital. As long as capitalist profits grew and speculative investments grew, the L-CL regimes believed that sufficient tax revenue would accrue to allow for a degree of social spending to pacify their popular voting constituency. The L-CL parties systematically eliminated the last traces of a socialist, social welfare or redistributive alternative.
     The L-LC political leadership was unwilling to envision an alternative to their promotion of the policies of big corporate and banking interests as they led to financial crisis. When the big crash of 2007-2010 took place, the entire leadership of the L-CL was so deeply embedded in the institutions, policies and practices of the leading private financial structures, that the only solution they were capable of proposing was to sacrifice the public treasury in order to restore capitalist leaders and speculative institution to profitability. In other words, the U.S and European L-CL parties were prepared to jettison over 50 years of social advances. The past ties to their working-class voters, trade union allies, public employees and pensioners were severed, none were spared. The only interest that mattered to the L-CL parties was to restore conditions for profitability to benefit big overseas and domestic investors.
     This economic recession has forced the L-CL parties to give up any pretext that they could satisfy bankers and public employees, corporations and workers, investors and pensioners. The crisis revealed the profound distance separating the working class from the political leaders of the L-CL.
The savage class austerity measures, repeatedly imposed on the working class every 3-6 months, in contrast to the vast and repeated subsidies to capital, reveal the true vocation of the current L-CL regimes. There was never a question of choice: From their entry into the government and from their leading economic appointments, to their subsequent agreements with the world’s leading banks, it has become obvious that the Papandreous (Greece), Socrates (Portugal), Zapatero (Spain) and Obama (USA) regimes were prepared to use the full power of the state to sacrifice labor to save capital.
.
Consequences of L-CL Policies and Practices
From the start, the L-CL parties decided there was everything to negotiate (and concede) with the bankers and nothing to negotiate and compromise with Labor. The recession was too profound, capitalist interests and institutions were “too big to fail”, and labor was, in the eyes of the L-CL parties, too expendable: ‘Let them march and yell in the streets’. Unemployment and under-employment climbed to double digits everywhere. The old arrangements of accommodation between the trade unions and the L-CL parties came under intense pressure everywhere (except in the US and UK) from the workers in factory assemblies, the offices of the public employees, and among the pensioners in the senior centers.
     Repeated general strikes broke out in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. The L-CL regimes absolutely refused to make any concession to the workers. The crises and austerity policies became the base for a real class war: The Left-Center Left regimes were determined to roll back over 50 years of working class advances. The general strikes were defensive battles to protect hard won advances in decent living standards. Workers everywhere in Europe recognized the abominable working and welfare conditions in the US, where trade unions have become doormats and the millionaire trade union bosses continue to use union funds to bankroll the Democrats and protect the bureaucracy’s privileges and wealth.
.
Conclusion
The Left-Center Left regimes are paying a high electoral price for sacrificing the working class in order to save the bankers: Obama’s recent electoral defeat is only a forerunner of future losses for the Spanish, Greek, Portuguese Socialists and other L-CL regimes. Their austerity policies have led them to ‘fall between two chairs’: They alienate workers and strengthen the capitalist class, which already has its own “natural” conservative capitalist parties. The “hard right” everywhere is advancing, sensing the debacle of the center-left as an opportunity to deepen and widen the frontal assault on labor rights, social welfare and any semblance of legal protection.
     Faced with this assault, the main defense of militant workers in Southern Europe is the general strike, (totally absent for over a century in the US). But even so, given the ferocious backing of all of Europe’s (and the US) ruling classes for the regressive austerity policies, it is becoming clear that the positive experience of massive class solidarity is not enough. Greece has had half dozen general strikes. France has been shut down by a nationwide strike. Spain has more to come. But their L-CL rulers continue slashing and burning workers rights and living standards now and for years to come.
What will it take to stop and reverse this capitalist juggernaut? It is clear, that the L-CL parties, as we know them, are part of the problem and not the solution. Will new working class parties and movements emerge that can combine mass general strikes with challenges for state power? Will the rising power of the electoral right lead to a parallel rise of the left?
     As of today, little or nothing of a left-right political polarization appears on the horizon in the United States where most of the union and social movement leaders are tied to the Democratic Party. In contrast, in Europe, particularly in France, Greece, Portugal and Spain, extra-parliamentary mass struggles will continue and perhaps intensify, raising the specter of possible popular uprisings as conditions continue to deteriorate.
____________
JAMES PETRAS’ books and insightful political analyses on contemporary history have long illuminated complex struggles in Europe, the USA, and Latin America. 

 

Did you like this? Share it: