The Illusion of Democracy

By David Cromwell, Media Lens

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley: as superficial as he is self-impressed, and all of it fits the mould.

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley: overpaid conveyor of evasions, lies, and superficialities, for the most part. The norm in American news. No hope of salvation in such “news” services.

Liberal Journalism, Wikileaks And Climate Deceptions

In an era of permanent war, economic meltdown and climate ‘weirding’, we need all the champions of truth and justice that we can find. But where are they? What happened to trade unions, the green movement, human rights groups, campaigning newspapers, peace activists, strong-minded academics, progressive voices? We are awash in state and corporate propaganda, with the ‘liberal’ media a key cog in the apparatus. We are hemmed in by the powerful forces of greed, profit and control. We are struggling to get by, never mind flourish as human beings. We are subject to increasingly insecure, poorly-paid and unfulfilling employment, the slashing of the welfare system, the privatisation of the National Health Service, the erosion of civil rights, and even the criminalisation of protest and dissent.

The pillars of a genuinely liberal society have been so weakened, if not destroyed, that we are essentially living under a system of corporate totalitarianism. In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges notes that:

‘The anemic liberal class continues to assert, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that human freedom and equality can be achieved through the charade of electoral politics and constitutional reform. It refuses to acknowledge the corporate domination of traditional democratic channels for ensuring broad participatory power.’ (p. 8)

Worse, the liberal class has: ‘lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.’ (pp. 9-10)

This pretense afflicts all the major western ‘democracies’, including the UK, and it is a virus that permeates corporate news reporting, not least the BBC. For example, the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson has a new book out with the cruelly apt title, ‘Live From Downing Street’. Why apt? Because Downing Street is indeed the centre of the political editor’s worldview. As he explains in the book’s foreword:

‘My job is to report on what those in power are thinking and doing and on those who attempt to hold them to account in Parliament.’ (Added emphasis).

Several observations spring to mind:

1. How does Nick Robinson know what powerful politicians are thinking?

2. Does he believe that any discrepancy between what they really think and what they tell him and his media colleagues is inconsequential?

3. Why does the BBC’s political editor focus so heavily on what happens in Parliament? What about the wider spectrum of opinion outside Parliament, so often improperly represented by MPs, if at all? What about attempts in the wider society to hold power to account, away from Westminster corridors and the feeble, Whip-constrained platitudes of party careerists? No wonder Robinson might have regrets over Iraq, as he later concedes when he says:

‘The build-up to the invasion of Iraq is the point in my career when I have most regretted not pushing harder and not asking more questions.’ (p. 332).

4. Thus, right from the start of his book Robinson concedes unwittingly that his journalism cannot, by definition, be ‘balanced’.

But, of course, corporate media professionals have long propped up the illusion that the public is offered an ‘impartial’ selection of facts, opinions and perspectives from which any individual can derive a well-informed world view. Simply put, ‘impartiality’ is what the establishment says is impartial.

The journalist and broadcaster Brian Walden once said: ‘The demand for impartiality is too jealously promoted by the political parties themselves. They count balance in seconds and monitor it with stopwatches.’ (Quoted, Tim Luckhurst, ‘Time to take sides’, Independent, July 1, 2003). This nonsense suggests that media ‘impartiality’ means that one major political party receives identical, or at least similar, coverage to another. But when all the major political parties have almost identical views on all the important issues, barring small tactical differences, how can this possibly be deemed to constitute genuine impartiality?

One of the biggest failures of the liberal class has been its inability to see, far less challenge, the inherently destructive and psychopathic nature of corporations.

The major political parties offer no real choice. They all represent essentially the same interests crushing any moves towards meaningful public participation in the shaping of policy; or towards genuine concern for all members of society, particularly the weak and the vulnerable.

The essential truth was explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson in his book Golden Rule (University of Chicago Press, 1995). When major backers of political parties and elections agree on an issue – such as international ‘free trade’ agreements, maintaining a massive ‘defence’ budget or refusing to make the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – then the parties will not compete on that issue, even though the public might desire a real alternative.

US media analyst Robert McChesney observes:

‘In many respects we now live in a society that is only formally democratic, as the great mass of citizens have minimal say on the major public issues of the day, and such issues are scarcely debated at all in any meaningful sense in the electoral arena.’ (McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, The New Press, 2000, p. 260).

As the Washington Post once noted, inadvertently echoing Ferguson’s Golden Rule, modern democracy works best when the political ‘parties essentially agree on most of the major issues’. The Financial Times put it more bluntly: capitalist democracy can best succeed when it focuses on ‘the process of depoliticizing the economy.’ (Cited by McChesney, ibid., p. 112).

The public recognises much of this for what it is. Opinion polls indicate the distrust they feel for politicians and business leaders, as well as the journalists who all too frequently channel uncritical reporting on politics and business. A 2009 survey by the polling company Ipsos MORI found that only 13 per cent of the British public trust politicians to tell the truth: the lowest rating in 25 years. Business leaders were trusted by just 25 per cent of the public, while journalists languished at 22 per cent.

And yet recall that when Lord Justice Leveson published his long-awaited report into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the British press’ on November 29, he made the ludicrous assertion that ‘the British press – I repeat, all of it – serves the country very well for the vast majority of the time.’

That tells us much about the nature and value of his government-appointed inquiry.

The Flagship Of British Liberal Journalism On The Rocks

Damning indictments of the liberal media were self-inflicted by its vanguard newspaper, the Guardian, in two recent blows. First, consider Decca Aitkenhead’s hostile interview with Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange in which he is described as a ‘fugitive’ who has been ‘holed up’ in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six months. Aitkenhead casts doubts over his ‘frame of mind’, with a sly suggestion that he might even be suffering from ‘paranoia’. She claims Assange ‘seems more like an in-patient than an interviewee […]. If you have ever visited someone convalescing after a breakdown, his demeanour would be instantly recognisable. Admirers cast him as the new Jason Bourne, but in these first few minutes I worry he may be heading more towards Miss Havisham.’

He ‘talks in the manner of a man who has worked out that the Earth is round, while everyone else is lumbering on under the impression that it is flat’. Aitkenhead continues: ‘it’s hard to read his book without wondering, is Assange a hypocrite – and is he a reliable witness?’ Indeed ‘some of his supporters despair of an impossible personality, and blame his problems on hubris.’

Aitkenhead asks him ‘about the fracture with close colleagues at WikiLeaks’ and wants him to ‘explain why so many relationships have soured.’ She gives a potted, one-sided history of why the relationship between the Guardian and Wikileaks ‘soured’, saying dismissively that ‘the details of the dispute are of doubtful interest to a wider audience’.

The character attack continues: ‘the messianic grandiosity of his self-justification is a little disconcerting’ and ‘he reminds me of a charismatic cult leader’. Aitkenhead concludes: ‘The only thing I could say with confidence is that he is a control freak.’

The hostile, condescending and flippant tone and content contrast starkly with the more respectable treatment afforded to establishment interviewees such as Michael Gove, Michael Heseltine, Christopher Meyer and Alistair Darling. Aitkenhead almost fawns over Darling, then the Chancellor:

‘His dry, deadpan humour lends itself to his ironic take on the grumpy old man, which he plays with gruff good nature. […] He reminds me of childhood friends’ fathers who seemed fearsome until we got old enough to realise they were being funny.’

Darling says that ‘I was never really interested in the theory of achieving things, just the practicality of doing things.’ Aitkenhead sighs:

‘One might say this has been Darling’s great strength. The pragmatic clarity made him a highly effective minister… But it may well also be his weakness – for at times he seems almost too straightforward, even high-minded, for the low cunning of political warfare.’

Sometimes people would approach the Chancellor in public and demand that he fix the economy. Darling recalls that one chap accosted him at a petrol station:

‘ “I know it’s to do with oil prices – but what are you going to do about it?” People think, Well, surely you can do something, you are responsible – so of course it reflects on me.’

Aitkenhead asks him sweetly: ‘Is it painful to be blamed so personally?’

Two days after the Guardian’s hit job on Julian Assange, it was followed by the paper’s low-key announcement of its public poll for person of the year: Bradley Manning, the US soldier suspected of leaking state secrets to Wikileaks. The implication of the Guardian’s grudging note was that Manning had only won because of ‘rather fishy voting patterns’:

‘Manning secured 70 percent of the vote, the vast majority of them coming after a series of @Wikileaks tweets. Project editor Mark Rice-Oxley said: “It was an interesting exercise that told us a lot about our readers, our heroes and the reasons that people vote.”’

Although the short entry appeared in the Guardian’s online news blog, there was no facility for adding reader comments, thus avoiding any possible additional public embarrassment. Perhaps the paper is mortified that it has been shown up by Wikileaks and Manning for not doing its job of holding power to account.

As Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian journalist, wrote last year:

‘The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.’

So much for the British flagship of liberal journalism then.

Climate Betrayal And Deceptions

One of the biggest failures of the liberal class has been its inability to see, far less challenge, the inherently destructive and psychopathic nature of corporations.

We once wrote to Stephen Tindale, then executive director of Greenpeace UK, and asked him why they did not address this in their campaigning:

‘Let us see Greenpeace (and other pressure groups) doing more to oppose, not so much what corporations do, but what they are; namely, undemocratic centralised institutions wielding illegitimate power.’ (Email, January 7, 2002)

Ignoring or missing the point, Tindale replied: ‘We will continue to confront corporations where necessary […] we are an environmental group, not an anti-corporate group. We will therefore work with companies when we can do so to promote our campaign goals.’ (Email, January 28, 2002)

Corporate Watch has pointedly asked of nongovernmental organisations, such as Greenpeace: ‘Why are NGOs getting involved in these partnerships?’ One important factor, it seems, is ‘follow the leader’. Corporate Watch notes:

‘For many NGOs, the debate on whether or not to engage with companies is already over. The attitude is “all the major NGOs engage with companies so why shouldn’t we?” ‘ (Corporate Watch, ‘What’s Wrong with Corporate Social Responsibility?’, 2006, p. 2).

The sad reality is that Greenpeace and other major NGOs accept the ideological premise that the corporate sector can be persuaded to act benignly. To focus instead on the illegitimate power and inherent destructive nature of the corporation is a step too far for today’s emasculated ‘pressure groups’, whether they are working on environmental protection, human rights or fighting poverty.

Adding to the already overwhelming evidence of corporate power protecting itself at almost any cost, a recent book titled Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark (Pluto Books, 2012) exposes the covert methods of corporations to evade democratic accountability and to undermine legitimate public protest and activism. Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Eveline Lubbers, an independent investigator with SpinWatch.org, provides compelling case studies on companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonalds. ‘The aim of covert corporate strategy’, she observes, ‘is not to win an argument, but to contain, intimidate and ultimately eliminate opposition.’

Lubbers also points out that dialogue, one of the key instruments of ‘corporate social responsibility’, is exploited by big business ‘as a crucial tool to gather information, to keep critics engaged and ultimately to divide and rule, by talking to some and demonizing others.’ Lubbers’ book, then, is yet another exposure of corporate efforts to prevent civil society from obtaining real power.

And yet virtually every day comes compelling evidence showing how disastrous this is for humanity. A new scientific report this month reveals that global carbon emissions have hit a record high:

‘In a development that underscores the widening gap between the necessary steps to limit global warming and the policies that governments are actually putting into place, a new report shows that global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will likely reach a record high of 35.6 billion tonnes in 2012, up 2.6 percent from 2011.’

This is a disaster for climate stability. Meanwhile, a new study based on 20 years of satellite observations shows that the planet’s polar ice sheets are already melting three times faster than they were in the the 1990s.

In September, senior NASA climate scientist James Hansen had warned of a ‘planetary emergency’ because of the dangerous effects of Arctic ice melt, including methane gas released from permafrost regions currently under ice. ‘We are in a planetary emergency,’ said Hansen, decrying ‘the gap between what is understood by scientific community and what is known by the public.’

As ever, the latest UN Climate Summit in Doha was just another talking shop that paid lip service to the need for radical and immediate action in curbing greenhouse gas emissions in the face of climate chaos.

The failure of the liberal class to rein in, or seriously challenge, corporate power is typified by this appalling gap between climate change rhetoric and reality. The rhetoric is typified by the political call to keep the average global temperature rise to under 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. The appalling reality is that the rise is likely to be in the region of 4-6 deg C (but potentially much higher if runaway global warming kicks in with the release of methane). This gap – actually a chasm of likely tragic proportions – is graphically depicted by climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University in a recent powerful and disturbing presentation.

Anderson cites an unnamed ‘very senior political scientist’ who often advises the government. This adviser says:

‘Too much has been invested in two degrees C for us to say it is not possible. It would undermine all that has been achieved. It would give a sense of hopelessness that we may as well just give in.’

Anderson also reports that on the eve of the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in 2010, he had a 20-minute meeting in Manchester with Ed Miliband, then the of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Miliband told Anderson:

‘Our position is challenging enough. I can’t go with the message that two degrees C is impossible – it’s what we’ve all worked towards.’

Anderson also relates that he attended a Chatham House event where the message from both ‘a very senior government scientist and someone very senior from an oil company’ – which he strongly hinted was Shell – was this:

‘[We] think we’re on for 4 to 6 degrees C but we just can’t be open about it.’

Anderson warns that this deception is ‘going on all the time behind the scenes’ and ‘that somehow we can’t tell the public’ the truth. The consequences could be terminal for large swathes of humanity and planetary ecosystems.

In short, we desperately need to hear the truth from people like Kevin Anderson, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

To return to Chris Hedges on ‘the death of the liberal class’:

‘The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures. When dissidents step outside these boundaries, they become pariahs. Specific actions can be criticized, but motives, intentions, and the moral probity of the power elite cannot be questioned.’ (Hedges, op. cit., pp. 152-153)

and he warns:

‘We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilizations will blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites, who successfully convinced us that we no longer possessed the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe, will use their resources to create privileged little islands where they will have access to security and goods denied to the rest of us.’ (p. 197)

We must have the vision to imagine that, however bleak things appear now, things can change: if we put our minds to it and work together.
________

DAVID CROMWELL is a founding editor of Media Lens, Britain’s leading progressive media watch organization.
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BOOKS: Get Bill Ayers!

A Review of Bill Ayers’ “Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident”

by RON JACOBS
Originally in Counterpunch. Thank you, CP.

Sean Hannity: Be sure to wear nose clips when approaching this tower of excrement.

I remember reading the New York Times review of Bill Ayers’ first book Fugitive Days while sitting on a curb in Greenwich Village on September 11, 2001. The haze from the demolished towers hung on the air as thick as the fear felt by almost every person in the city that day. After reading the review, I thought to myself about how the book’s release could not have come at a worse time. The destruction of the Twin Towers and the media hullabaloo around that destruction was already overriding any shred of common sense. It would be a long while before any rational discussion of the Weather Underground would take place in the United States. For some segments of US society, there would never be a rational discussion.

Bill Ayers writes about that first book and the reaction to it in his newest release, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident. He discusses why he wrote Fugitive Days, the interaction with the media in the wake of its publication and the attacks of September 11, 2001, and much, much more. It is the much, much more that is the real story in this book. Ayers writes about raising children and he writes about teaching them. He also writes about helping friends in prison and responding to public campaigns attacking himself and his family. The narrative Ayers provides is honest, personal, political and occasionally funny. The best example of the latter is the story he tells about him and his wife Bernardine Dohrn having dinner with a group that included right-wing bloggers Andrew Breinbart and Carlson Tucker. The dinner was the result of a fundraiser for a humanities council Ayers and Dohrn were part of. The dinner guests had bid the highest for the opportunity to get inside the Ayers/Dohrn home. Despite whatever they were anticipating, it seems everyone had a great time, enjoyed the food, drink and even the conversation. Ayers’ retelling is bound to evoke a few chuckles from almost every reader, if only for the absurdity of the spectacle.

During Obama’s first presidential campaign Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) became a campaign issue. In Public Enemy, Ayers writes about receiving death threats thanks in large part to (what he calls) the caricature of him being broadcast by the mainstream media, especially from the studio of FOXNews host Sean Hannity. Reading his narrative about those months, and as another indication of how implacable this element of the media can be, I was reminded of my own interaction with Hannity’s staff when they called me in October 2008 asking if I would like to appear on his show to discuss the WUO. I responded by telling the staffer on the phone that I disagreed with pretty much everything Hannity said and found him to be a disagreeable human being. After a quick consultation with Hannity, the staffer called me back and rescinded my invitation by saying that they would find a more agreeable guest.

Public Enemy is mostly a collection of anecdotes from Bill Ayers recent life. He does begin the book with a chapter about his last years underground and he touches on the reasons he and Bernardine decided to surface in 1980. He also writes about the circumstances he and Bernardine faced after the 1981 Black Liberation Army/May 19^thCommunist Organization Brinks holdup in Nyack, NY went wrong and resulted in the deaths of lawmen and robbers. Two former WUO members were involved in the action and both were charged with several crimes, including murder. As part of a fishing expedition by the authorities, Bernardine was called before a grand jury, refused to testify and ended up behind bars. Ayers writes tellingly about the stress and emotional changes the entire episode put him and his family through. Politics are part of the story in these pages, but the primary impetus is on family and friendship. Indeed, the truest hero in the book is the family’s New York child care provider, BJ.

In no way apologetic, the book is a well-written consideration of an engaged life lived in a contentious time. In his anecdotes and discussion, Ayers portrays a political world where too much (if not everything, to borrow a line from Bob Dylan) is broken. When one lives in such a world, the best we can do is to try and make it work for as many as possible. Just as importantly, one must try and live a life that one will not be ashamed of when the reckoning day comes. To be sure, there are those whom Ayers discusses in his book that think Bill Ayers very existence is a major blemish on the human race. However, to his credit, the book doesn’t spend time lambasting his critics, although it does poke a little fun in their direction. Public Enemy is not an attempt by Ayers to reconstruct his public persona. He makes it clear that he has no control over how people perceive him and, even if he did, he probably wouldn’t change much. The title itself seems slightly tongue in cheek, but pointedly so. Here, says Ayers, is your public enemy. Take it however you want.

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

Major New Polls: Americans Are Sick of War

Posted on September 27, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Assad Syrian supporter. Even Bashar al-Assad is given higher marks than Obama and his assigned court liar John Kerry for honestly seeking peace in the Middle East. This is surprising (and highly encouraging) given the unrelenting media campaign to sell Americans the government line.

Americans Think that Putin and Even Assad Have Done a Better Job than Obama—
A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows :

More Americans disapprove than approve of how Mr. Obama is handling relations with Iran.

***

Americans overwhelmingly favor (82 percent) the deal reached between the U.S. and Russia for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons.

Americans still would not support airstrikes against the Syrian government, even if Syria fails to comply — an option that the U.S. says remains on the table if the diplomatic solution ultimately fails.

***

Underlying these views, a large majority (68 percent) continues to believe in principle that the U.S. doesn’t have a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria. As was the case earlier this month, majorities of Democrats and Republicans don’t view this as a U.S. responsibility, and there has been little shift in the public’s views about this in recent weeks, or over the longer term.

Most Americans don’t differentiate in how civilians are killed: 68 percent say the international community should respond to all civilian killings the same, while 25 percent say civilian killings from chemical and biological weapons warrant a stronger response than killings using conventional weapons.

***

The president’s rating on foreign policy overall is more negative than in July, before the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Syria crisis. Just 40 percent approve of his handling of foreign policy, while 49 percent disapprove – the highest disapproval he has ever received on this measure.

An Economist/YouTube poll shows that – by a margin of 49% to 25% – Americans think that Putin has been a more effective leader than Obama on Syria:

Even more stunning, when the question – who was the least effective leader on Syria – was asked, Obama was voted least effective … even less effective than Syrian leader Assad:

It’s not because Americans particularly like Russian or Arab leaders. Rather, it’s because Americans want to avoid another war. The Syrian leader agreed to give up his chemical weapons, and the Russian leader brokered the deal. Obama, on the other hand, wanted war, and was dragged kicking and screaming to the negotiating table.

As the Economist/YouGov poll notes:

58% oppose action. Even if Syria fails to abide by the agreement, few Americans favor military action. Only 28% say they would support a military strike by a coalition of countries that included the United States.

A new German Marshall Fund of the United States finds even higher levels of opposition against a war in Syria. Indeed, Americans oppose arming the Syrian rebels … even if we keep our own troops out of the war.

A September 2012 poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed overwhelming opposition to the idea of attacking Iran among American voters, with 70 percent saying they are opposed to the idea of a unilateral US attack on Iran. And that was before the new moderate Iranian leader started negotiating a nuclear deal.

The truth is that Americans have been sick and tired of war in the Middle East for years.

Ending One War, Ending All Wars

By David Swanson

_{We have it in our power to reject the next war and the next war and the next war and make John Kerry the last man to have tried to sell us a dead idea.}

John Kerry: What a bastard this guy has turned out to be. Apparently everyone in the current political generation is a card-carrying hypocrite and a criminal, to boot.

John Kerry: What a bastard this guy has turned out to be. Apparently just about everyone in the current American establishment is a card-carrying hypocrite and a criminal, to boot. The true face of the plutocracy.

Remarks on September 21, 2013, at the Nashville Festival for Peace, Prosperity, and Planet.

Thank you to Elizabeth Barger and the Nashville Peace and Justice Center and to all of you, and happy International Day of Peace!

From a certain angle it doesn’t look like a happy day of peace. The U.S. government is engaged in a major war in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated by the current U.S. president, who has been bizarrely given credit for ending it for so long now that a lot of people imagine it is ended. The same president goes through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays, picks which ones to have murdered, and has them murdered, often with missiles shot out of unmanned drones, drones that circle people’s villages endlessly threatening immediate annihilation moment after moment for weeks on end, missiles that often miss their targets and often kill random people too close to their targets. The CIA with war powers. Secret military operations in dozens of nations. Expansion of U.S. troop presence in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Some 90 percent of the world’s nations with U.S. troops in them. Prisoners force-fed in Guantanamo. Black sites. Iraq ruined without reparations. Libya thrown into anarchy without apology. Activists treated as enemies. Journalists treated as spies. Whistleblowers locked up in cages. Our Constitutional rights treated as dispensable. The United Nations used, abused, and circumvented. U.S. weapons provided to dictatorships and democracies around the globe. Tennessee’s U.S. Senator Bob Corker going on television repeatedly for weeks to tell us that the United States is covertly aiding one side of a war in Syria. Does he not know what “covertly” means, or does he not know how television works?

But I believe that, despite all of that and much more, there is huge reason to celebrate a happy international day of peace. At most events where I speak there is a time for questions, and almost always there is someone whose question is really more of a speech to the effect that war opposition is delusional and hopeless; if the government wants a war, it gets a war — so this person always tell us. Well, no more. From this day forward, that person’s comments should be no match for the laughter that greets them, because we just prevented a war.

Congress members heard from many thousands of us, and what they heard was over 100-to-1 against attacking Syria. When it became clear that not even the Senate would authorize such an attack, talk shifted immediately from the inevitability of war to the desirability of avoiding war.

[pullquote] Syria had tried in the past to negotiate a Middle East free of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but the United States had been opposed, not wanting to stop arming Egypt and Israel. [/pullquote]

Secretary of State John Kerry said that President Bashar al-Assad could avoid a war by handing over all the chemical weapons his government possessed. Russia quickly called that bluff and Syria agreed to it. Syria had tried in the past to negotiate a Middle East free of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but the United States had been opposed, not wanting to stop arming Egypt and Israel.

Secretary Kerry, apparently panicked by the possible delay or prevention of missile strikes, put out a statement that he had only been making a “rhetorical argument,” not a real proposal. But when the White House saw the writing on the wall in Congress, Kerry claimed to have meant his comment seriously after all. He was for his own idea after he’d been against it.

Of all the many ways in which John Kerry has tied himself in knots before, this is the first time he’s had to do so because the people of this country and the world rejected a war. Remember when Kerry asked how you could ask someone to be the last man to die in the war on Vietnam? We have it in our power to reject the next war and the next war and the next war and make John Kerry the last man to have tried to sell us a dead idea.

War is a dead idea, an idea whose time has gone. The abolition of war is an idea whose time has come. But the government isn’t ready to announce that for us. That’s why we need to celebrate this victory. And not just us at this festival. This was everybody. This was the people of Syria who spoke against an attack on their nation. This was the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who said don’t do to others what you’ve already done to us. This was the people of the world and of Russia and of China who said you won’t paint this crime as legal with our help. This was the people of Britain who moved their House of Commons to reject a prime minister’s request for war for the first time since the surrender to the French and Americans at Yorktown. This was low and high ranking members of the U.S. military saying “We didn’t sign up to fight for al Qaeda.” This was government experts risking their careers and their freedom to say “If President Obama’s excuse for a war happened, he’s guessed it right, because the evidence doesn’t establish it.” This was the majority of the U.S. public telling pollsters, yes, we care about suffering children; send them food and medicine, don’t make it worse by sending in missiles.” This was the victory not of a moment but of a decade of cultural enlightenment. When you’ve got the Pope and Rush Limbaugh on your side you’ve built something very broad. Remember when they called resistance to war “The Vietnam Syndrome” as if it were a disease? What we’ve got now is the War on Terror Inoculation. This is health, not sickness. War is the health of the state, said a World War I resister. But war resistance is the health of the people. The people are the world’s other super power.

So, yes, I say celebrate! Start seeing successes. Drone attacks are down dramatically. Environmental groups are beginning to oppose military base constructions. States are beginning to work on conversion of war industries to peaceful industries. Larry Summers has been denied a chance to do more economic damage.

Imagine the euphoria — or don’t imagine it, just remember it — when this country elects a new president whose main redeeming feature is that he isn’t the previous president. For personality fanatics that’s big stuff. And there are big parties. For policy fanatics — for those of us interested in seeing policies change rather than personalities — that kind of moment is right now. The first step in overcoming an addiction, whether to war or alcohol, is recognizing that you have a problem. The second step is believing that you can shake it if you try. We’ve just taken the first two steps! The war addicts said Syria needed an intervention. We gave the war junkies an intervention instead. We pointed them toward the path of recovery and showed them a preview of what it will look like.

Now, if you don’t want to celebrate because there’s too much work to do, because Syria is in greater danger without its weapons (look what happened to Iraq and Libya), and because the pressure for war is still on, I can respect that. I’ll be with you starting tomorrow. But it’s hard to imagine we’ll find the most effective strategy, much less motivate all the doom and gloomers to work their hardest, if we refuse to recognize when we’ve actually made progress, no matter how limited.

If you don’t want to celebrate because you don’t think public pressure made any impact and don’t think it ever can, I’ve looked at enough of the recent history and distant history to say, with all due respect: I don’t believe you. And if you believed yourself you wouldn’t be here today.

Now, there is endless work to be done when we get back to it in the morning. Congressman Cooper was pretty noncommittal, I understand, as quite a few Congress members were. He kept an open mind. Maybe, just maybe, he must have thought, it makes sense to deescalate a war by escalating it, maybe these magic missiles with Raytheon pixie dust on them will kill only the people who really need killing while empowering fanatic heart-and-liver eaters who execute their prisoners to establish a secular democracy, and perhaps we really can uphold the norm against chemical weapons that our own nation violates with some regularity by blatantly violating the norm against attacking other countries with missiles, and maybe we’ll enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention against a nation that never signed it by shredding the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact as long as we call ourselves “The International Community” and if we can’t get France to help maybe Puerto Rico would count as a Coalition of the Willing, and perhaps, perhaps just maybe Assad really is out to get us and just might be a threat to Nashville, Tennessee, and if not isn’t the only thing that really matters President Obama’s manhood and the respect he can only maintain if he behaves like a sociopath? Some part of this must be roughly how undecided members of Congress looked at this thing. Senator Harry Reid said Syria was the return of the Nazis, and he himself looked just like Elmer Fudd warning of a dangerous wabbit, but maybe he was right, think our elected representatives. There is work to be done.

Republicans in Congress turned against war more than they might have with a Republican president. And some Democrats, including a co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, cheered for war. The Black Caucus told its members to shut their mouths and not speak about Syria. But they didn’t all listen. The leadership of the two parties pushed for war, and most members of both parties said No Way. That’s something to build on. Anything that has happened is automatically acceptable and respectable, and in that category now is war rejection, regardless of who is president in the future.

Senator Corker thinks the United States has lost credibility. I think it’s gained it. The United States claims to use war as a last resort. When an occasion finally arrives in which it doesn’t use war as a first resort, that boosts the credibility of its claim. The U.S. justifies its wars with the word “democracy.” When it listens to its people for once, it demonstrates democracy by example rather than by dropping cluster bombs or napalm or using those depleted uranium weapons giving the workers who make them cancer over in eastern Tennessee. The world was skeptical of the U.S. case for war because of past U.S. lies, not because of past U.S. failures to bomb people.

The threat to attack Syria is still on the table. If you listen to these people enough you really come to hate tables, by the way. The White House claims Syria has signed the Chemical Weapons Convention under threat of attack, even though any signing of any treaty under threat of attack is illegal and invalid. Meanwhile, if we wanted to find a stockpile of chemical weapons, there’s 524 tons of poison gas at the Blue Grass Army Depot, just up the road toward Lexington, Kentucky, from here. The United States wants 10 more years to destroy that, although maybe it can go a little faster since John Kerry seems to think a week is more than enough time for Syria to destroy its stockpile. The Army spokesman in Kentucky says the delays there are a sign of democracy and public input. Our leading spreaders of democracy to the rest of the world, on the other hand, believe the most important consideration is that nothing ever be credited to diplomacy if it can be credited to violence. The U.S. has a stash five times the size of Kentucky’s out in Colorado, where climate-induced floods and fires pose a danger of combining with the madness of militarism if we don’t switch soon from preparing for wars to preparing for a sustainable existence — If we don’t start paying attention to Fukushima and global warming and keep laughing, as we have been, at the idea that Assad is going to kill us.

But, our government also has peculiar views about different types of weapons that I don’t claim to understand. Chemical weapons are good, apparently, when the U.S. uses them on Iraqis, or Iraq uses them on Iranians, or Israel uses them on Palestinians, but they’re bad if Iraq uses them on Iraqis or the Syrian government uses them on anyone — although they aren’t so bad if it is Syrian rebels using them. In cases of bad chemical weapons use, missiles could fix the problem. But with missiles you have to ask Congress. So, instead, you can fix the problem of people getting killed with chemicals by making sure that more of them get killed with guns. With guns, for some reason, you don’t have to ask Congress. Senators can even chat on TV about what they’re doing “covertly,” and we’re supposed to say “Oh, well that’s OK then, as long as it’s covertly.”

Only . . . when people bleed and scream in agony and turn cold do they do it covertly? Because I think the entire operation needs to be done covertly, not just parts of it.

Maybe the problem is that we just don’t think guns are weapons of mass destruction. Guns must be weapons of minimal destruction, I guess. Guns only kill 30,000 people in the United States each year, ten times the number of people killed on September 11, 2001. Imagine the size of the war we’d have started if someone had killed 30,000 people with airplanes. Would we have had to kill 10 million Iraqis instead of 1 million? But with guns, deaths are OK, and 60% of them don’t really count because they’re suicides.

Only . . . why are people desperate enough to kill themselves in the wealthiest nation on earth when we have a bigger military and more billionaires than any other society in the history of the world? Shouldn’t that satisfy us? Anyone too dense to appreciate that great good fortune, well, at least we’ve made sure there’s always a gun or two within easy reach.

I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not joking. We have a serious problem with acceptance of violence. This past Sunday night on “60 Minutes” John Miller of CBS News said, “I’ve spoken with intelligence analysts who have said an uncomfortable thing that has a ring of truth, which is: the longer this war in Syria goes on, in some sense the better off we are.”

Now, why would that be uncomfortable, do you suppose? Could it be because encouraging huge numbers of violent deaths of human beings seems sociopathic?

The discomfort that Miller at least claims to feel is the gauge of our moral progress, I suppose, since June 23, 1941, when Harry Truman said, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”

On Monday, Time magazine’s Aryn Baker published an articleunder the headline “Syria’s Rebels Turn on One Another, and That’s Not a Bad Thing.” Baker’s point wasn’t that more would die this way, but that this would allow the U.S. to escalate the war (which of course would mean more dying).

Remember that President Obama’s reasonfor wanting to attack Syria is to “confront actions that are violating our common humanity.” How is it that support for mass killing rarely seems to violate our common humanity if it’s that other 96 percent of humanity getting killed, and especially if it’s this 4 percent doing it? Why is the excuse to kill more people always that people are being killed, while we never starve people to prevent them from starving or rape people to protect them from rape?

The uncomfortable “60 Minutes” interviewer addressed his remarks to a former CIA officer who replied by disagreeing. He claimed to want the war to end. But how would he end it? By arming and aiding one side, just enough and not too much — which would supposedly result in peace negotiations, albeit with a risk of major escalation. While nobody ever extends peace in order to generate war, people are constantly investing in war in the name of peace.

As this man may be very well aware, arming one side in this war will encourage that side’s viciousness and encourage the other side to arm itself further as well. But suppose it were actually true that you could deescalate a war by escalating a war. Why are the large number of people who would be killed in the process unworthy of consideration?

We’ve seen lawyers tell Congressional committees that killing people with drones is either murder or perfectly fine, depending on whether Obama’s secret memos say the killings are part of a war. But why is killing people acceptable in a war? We’ve just watched public pressure deny Obama missile strikes on Syria. Those strikes were optional. Had they happened that would have been a choice, not an inevitability. What of the immorality involved?

The best news is that we’re beginning to feel uncomfortable. We’re even feeling uncomfortable enough to doubt the tales we’re told about justifications for wars. The fact is that, were the White House telling the truth about the need for an attack on Syria, it would be a first in history. Every other case for war has always been dishonest.

The United States sought out war with Mexico, not the reverse. There was never any evidence that Spain sank the Maine. The Philippines didn’t benefit from U.S. occupation. The Lusitania was known to be carrying troops and arms. The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. Iraq didn’t take any babies out of incubators. The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over to be tried in a neutral court. Libya wasn’t about to kill everyone in Benghazi. And so on.

Even wars that people like to imagine as justified, such as World War II, were nonetheless packaged in lies; FDR’s tales about the Greer and the Kearney and supposed secret Nazi maps and plans were a step on the steady trajectory from Woodrow Wilson to Karl Rove.

The idea that Syria used chemical weapons is more plausible than the idea that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical, biological, and (in some versions) nuclear weapons and was working with al Qaeda. But the evidence offered in the case of Syria was no stronger than that for Iraq. It was harder to disprove merely because there was nothing to it: no documentation, no sources, and until the UN report came out, no science. Congress members who have seen the classified version of the White House case say it’s no better than the declassified. Experts within the government and reporters in Syria who have seen more than that say they don’t believe the White House’s claims.

The assertions masquerading as a case come packaged in dishonest claims about the make-up of the rebels, and how quickly Syria gave access to inspectors. And the claims are written in a manner to suggest far greater knowledge and certainty than they actually assert on careful examination. The latest claims follow a series of failed claims over a period of months and stand to benefit a Syrian opposition that has been found repeatedly to be manufacturing false propaganda aimed at bringing the United States into the war. It seems, at this point, unlikely that the Assad government used chemical weapons (as opposed to the rebels or someone in the Syrian military defying Assad by using them), but it seems certain that if Assad did it, Obama and Kerry don’t know that — they’ve only guessed it at best. It also seems certain that escalating the war makes everyone worse off regardless of who used chemical weapons. Attacking Iraq would have been immoral, illegal, and catastrophic (and probably more so) if all the weapons stories had been true.

Then there are the depictions of Assad as a threat to the United States, at which moments President Obama has almost begun to sound like his predecessor. But, as he came on stage second, nobody believed him. Assad is guilty of horrible crimes, but he’s not yet-another new Hitler. There’s a cute story about Assad from 11 years ago this week that some of us may have forgotten. A Canadian man named Maher Arar had been born in Syria. U.S. officials nabbed him for the crime of switching planes in New York City. They interrogated him for weeks, denying him access to a lawyer or to the Canadian government. They asked Arar to go to Syria, and he refused. So they stuck him on a CIA plane, flew him to Jordan, beat him for 8 hours, and then delivered him to the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad. President Assad’s government beat and whipped Arar for 18 hours a day for weeks, asking him similar questions to those the Americans had asked. For 10 months he was kept in a 3 by 6 by 7 foot underground cell, then released with no charges. Four years later, the Canadian government, which had done nothing, apologized to and compensated Arar. Former CIA case officer Bob Baer said, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear–never to see them again–you send them to Egypt.”

The Syrian government is, like any government the United States wants to attack, a brutal government that the United States worked with until recently, situated in a region full of brutal governments the United States still supports. In this case, the brutal governments still armed and supported by the U.S. government include Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Yemen. If the US. government wanted to reduce violence, it could end its 2001-begun war on Afghanistan, it could end its drone strikes, and it could stop supplying Saudi Arabia with cluster bombs and Egypt with tear gas and Bahrain with ex-police chiefs. Wars are not driven by generosity, despite what you’ll often — and increasingly — hear.

Syria needs humanitarian aid, not weapons that threaten the good aid work being done by Americans among others. The Iraqi Student Project was bringing Iraqis to study in U.S. colleges. Its office was in Syria, where many Iraqi refugees had fled from the U.S. liberation. Now that office is closed, and Syria has its own refugee crisis to rival Iraq’s. Our government should be urging both sides to stop providing arms, to agree to a ceasefire, and to open negotiations without preconditions. Syria has needed help for years, but our government tends to wait until missiles look like a proper solution to get serious about solving a problem.

Syria’s crisis was brought on in part by climate induced drought and water shortage. The solution of sending in missiles (blocked for now) or of sending in guns (underway as we speak) misses that source of the problem and in fact exacerbates it. The U.S. military is our greatest consumer of petroleum, which it consumes in the course of fighting wars and occupying countries to control petroleum. The roughly $1 trillion spent by the United States and roughly $1 trillion spent by the rest of the world on militarism every year could coat the planet with sustainable green energy sources beyond the wildest imaginings of those sources’ proponents.

As long as we continue to view war as an acceptable institution, serious reductions in the military will be impeded by the desire to win wars when they happen. Instead of reduced war making, we need war abolition. 180 million people died in wars in the 20th century. Enough is enough. War has not brought security. War endangers us rather than protecting us. War has failed as a tool for ending war. War is draining our economies, eroding our civil liberties, devastating our natural environment, and stealing resources away from critical human and environmental needs. Nonviolent tools have proven themselves more effective and less costly than war. War’s unpredictability and existing weaponry including nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction threaten our very existence, while the reallocation of resources away from war promises a world whose advantages are beyond easy imagination. We could even stop paying farmers not to farm and start paying weapons makers not to make weapons while they convert their factories to begin making something useful. Cutting $40 billion from food stamps will kill more people than spending it for a few months of occupying Afghanistan will kill.

Anti-war sentiment, at least in some key parts of the world, is at a high point now, relative to other moments in recent decades. We need to direct that sentiment into a movement for abolition. Resisting each new war is not enough. We must be for peace and by peace we must mean, first and foremost, the elimination of the institution of war. We’re all fond of saying that peace is more than just the absence of war. True enough. And freedom is more than just the absence of chains. But first you had to abolish slavery. Then new possibilities opened up. So, today I’m not going to say, “No Justice, No Peace.” Today I say, “With No Peace, There Is No Justice.” Stop the wars. End the slaughter. Dismantle the weapons. Abolish the military. Build a sustainable peaceful prosperous world. Make this point in time a turning point. Thank you for being here. Happy International Day of Peace!
Author’s Website: http://davidswanson.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Swanson is the author of “When the World Outlawed War,” “War Is A Lie” and “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.” He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org

Obama’s Blowback Against Big Labor

Can the “New” Trumka Trump Trumka?

Trumka: Until labor is ready to sever its links with the corporate parties, it is doomed to a self-inflicted garrote. And time is running out.

by RALPH NADER
Sitting in the office of the AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, one sees books on labor history, economics, corporate crimes and proposals for change piled up everywhere. Perhaps that helps explain why Mr. Trumka, a former coal miner who became a lawyer, presented his besieged organization’s quadrennial convention in Los Angeles last week with a fiery visionary “big tent” design to develop more alliances with citizen and worker organizations that are not trade unions (see http://www.aflcio.org/Multimedia/Videos/AFL-CIO-2013-Convention-President-Richard-Trumka-Keynote-Speech).

Citing common ground on some public policies, Mr. Trumka wants to strengthen ties with the likes of the NAACP, Working America, the Sierra Club, the Economic Policy Institute, Women’s groups, and the Taxi Drivers, the Domestic Workers Alliance and worker centers. He would like some of these organizations to be brought into the governing bodies of labor unions and the AFL-CIO’s executive council.

The latter was too much for some unions fearful of being diluted or “Trojan horsed,” such as the construction unions that want the XL pipeline to be built regardless of the Sierra Club’s contrary position. However, the resolution approved by the assemblage did endorse Trumka’s open door to advocacy on behalf of temporary workers or non-unionized poverty groups, on a more informal basis.

Eighty-eight percent of all workers are not unionized. Union membership has been declining for more than four decades. The AFL-CIO has known this, but cannot seem to push its member unions to greatly increase their organizing budgets at a time when global companies can easily leave America for China or elsewhere. On the other hand, there are tens of millions of low-income workers in the service sector whose jobs cannot be exported and who want opportunities for unionization.

[pullquote] Labor must open its eyes to a new role in society, a role that goes way beyond mere syndicalist demands. [/pullquote]

Trumka has problems in implementing his vision. First, he is not in functional control of his largest member unions. Second, there is surplus labor and there are too few well-paying jobs. Third, he has allegiances to the Democratic Party leaders and President Obama who do not tolerate much public criticisms or rebellion by a weakened labor movement, which they know believes it has nowhere to go in a two-party duopoly.

The more aggressive members of the AFL-CIO are not well received by the larger more cautious counterparts. The fast growing California Nurses Association, and its national affiliate National Nurses United, want Obamacare replaced with single-payer, everybody in, nobody out, under public insurance and private delivery of health care. Single-payer or full Medicare for all, with free choice of physician and hospital, has been supported by a majority of the public, including doctors and nurses, for many years. It is more efficient and humane. Yet, because Trumka et al do not want single payer on the table, the Nurses stayed home and there was no single-payer exhibit permitted at the AFL-CIO Convention.

Yet, Obamacare has angered many established unions with Taft-Hartley healthcare plans. Mr. Trumka now has his hands full with Barack Obama over how these plans are jeopardized by a very complex Obamacare, which he and other labor leaders supported before the blowback occurred.

Will Trumka’s grand inclusiveness work? Paul Tobias, who founded the National Employment Lawyers Association in 1985 to help non-unionized workers with their legal problems, says such outreach can benefit these laborers but “the devil is in the details.” He has seen organized labor talk like this before. The question awaiting an answer is: How many resources/organizers will the Trumka camp put into the alliance and what is the specific agenda?

Clearly Trumka and the AFL-CIO could help many deprived workers. Underpaid workers are rallying in front of Walmarts and McDonalds demanding a living wage and union representation. Others are demanding that President Obama simply issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a living wage to workers who are at the frozen federal minimum wage of $7.25.

The problems with the AFL-CIO and most unions were regularly described by the venerable labor activist, Harry Kelber, who passed away in late March just before his 99th birthday. As you can see by visiting his website www.laboreducator.org, Mr. Kelber wrote scores of articles about the bureaucratization of smug labor leaders and their failure to stand up to the big employers and the Democratic Party.

With eighty years in the labor movement, Mr. Kelber was running for the presidency of the AFL-CIO just to give one alternative, however symbolic, to the AFL-CIO delegates. Under AFL-CIO rules, losing candidates get 15 minutes to speak before the Convention. Harry Kelber undoubtedly would have called on them to recover their nerve, lead by example, be more democratic, fight for single-payer health insurance, work to repeal the notoriously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, and above all tap union treasuries to hire many more organizers to expand union protection for tens of millions of powerless workers who can’t pay for the necessities of life.

Richard Trumka dismissed Harry Kelber and others who have criticized him from the progressive Left. Too bad he doesn’t apply his book learning to fearlessly advance the labor agenda, starting with abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ famous phrase “power concedes nothing without a demand.” That approach, in its specifics, must be directed to Barack Obama, the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and the corporate barons who are paid $10,000 per hour and have been bringing workers to their knees while pouring campaign money into the indentured Democratic Party’s coffers.

Workers understand the difference between their unions’ political rhetoric and independent political action for their future.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.