Thoughts on MLK Day:

"Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. We must, of course, be well-adjusted if we are to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the cripping effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militariism and the self-defeating effects of physical violation."

"Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. ... Not a few men, who cherish lofty and noble ideals, hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different."

"If Americans permit thought-control, business-control, and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism."

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., whose holiday we celebrate today.

P.S. If you haven't read his speech at Riverside Church in a while, it's worth checking out.

The End of Politics:
Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (Guilford, 2000)
by Carl Boggs

Masters of War:
Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire (Routledge, 2003)
Edited by Carl Boggs

"The broadest measure of a depoliticized society ... is the overall decline of civic consciousness. A civic culture (understood in the broadest sense) requires extensive processes of interaction in the public sphere, a sense of community, general citizen access to decision making, and social obligation, but historical trends in the United States have worked inexorably against such a culture. In its place has emerged a phenomenon quite different, an ethos of extreme individualism, consumerism, and parochialism that devalues not only politics but any form of civic involvement."

When I first read The End of Politics in 2001, I found it to be the most eloquent assessment of one of the most obvious systemic dilemmas we currently face in American politics: a popular detestation of politics. I've since been surprised by how few of my friends and colleagues (generally more politically active and astute than the average) have read this tremendous book. That only proves Boggs' point.

Still, if I were to recommend one book to people about how to understand the general political culture in America (not the culture of those who are political professionals, but of this country as a whole), this would be a strong contender.

Boggs writes in the tradition of the best of American political sociology. Like C. Wright Mills, he strives for an accessible and convincing synthesis. And it is his ability to write clearly and engagingly throughout this rigorous and far-ranging assessment of the depoliticization of American culture and its sources in corporate power that makes Boggs' book much stronger, for instance, than Bowling Alone, the bestseller that makes some of the same points.

The sources of this detachment appear almost irreversible. They include the marketing of consumer-based values, the location of solutions to common problems in personal habits instead of systemic design (hence the rise of self-help "movements" and the location of answers to the ecological crisis in consumer choice instead of a collective push to democratize fundamental technological decision-making -- considered the inviolable prerogative of corporate managers), the spread of technologies like computers (blogging can isolate people in their own cynicism as much as Meetup style organizing on the Internet can quickly connect them) and the general corrosion of civic values and political thinking.

Our deep detachment from politics has resulted in the fetishization of individual personalities as a substitute for candidacies that bring an analysis accountable in any significant way to a movement-building process; private forms of alienation (drugs, alcohol, and their obverse in self-centered recovery programs); "vague planetary (or interplanetary) conspiracies," and spontaneous outbursts of collective action (e.g. Seattle) that have the potential to be misinterpreted as evidence of mature developments in movement-building. [Allow me to pause here and explain: although Seattle catalyzed some of that "Teamsters and Turtles" optimism and a convergence of different movements against a common target -- a rare phenomenon for the U.S. Left -- it's also true that the "summit-hopping" since then, particularly among Americans who apart from the World Bank bonds boycott have made little little permanent connection between the World Bank/IMF protests and mainstream culture ("IMF riots" have been going on in countries like Indonesia and Argentina for decades) though the protests were a huge leap forward, and it would be a mistake to read the catharsis of such mass-protests as a sign of mature movement-building -- though there is much potential for global synergies). As long as most people see mainstream political activism as corrupt and futile, rather than as a viable means of collective action (how much has voter participation increased since Seattle?), they will cede most everday important decisions to corporate interests, and protests like Seattle will be a momentary surge. That's largely because the central issue in the Seattle WTO protest is rarely so centrally addressed: corporate power.]

Indeed, "nothing has undermined the public sector or eviscerated political discourse more than [the] process of corporate colonization," Boggs writes. "The issue of corporate power, manifest today in every area of social life, has never been placed on the public agenda, owing not only to the vast power of corporations but surely also to the profound cynicism among so many people convinced that the political game is rigged in favor of the dominant interests."

Corporations foster a mood of antipolitics by dominating the two major parties through the vast machinery of campaign finance and lobbying, eviscerating their engagement with real issues (by, for example, sanitizing the Presidential debates), controlling the mass media (e.g. keeping popular opinions against war or corporate ownership of the media itself from being aired over the people's own airwaves), and fostering a sense of futility in the face of economic globalization and the rise of remote and unaccountable centers of corporate power, such as the WTO.

Meanwhile, social life is increasingly atomized outside the confines of the corporation (inside, the hierarchies are virtually totalitarian, despite superficial and unconvincing suggestions to the contrary such as Wal-Mart's use of "team member" to describe a low-paid employee).

Of course, the extreme individualism that has resulted from American consumerist culture was always a strand in the country's liberal tradition. But corporate conservatives have stripped it of any connection to an ethos of civic action for the collective good.

In exploring all of this Boggs avoids offering any easy answers, instead adopting a healthy pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will, as suggested by his intellectual mentor the Italian political philosopher Gramsci. It may be true that there may be no easy answers, but I wish Boggs had suggested how a significant challenge to corporate power and the colonization of our politics might take form -- beyond simple platitudes about public funding of elections and other campaign finance reforms.

For example, Jason Mark and Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange suggest some interesting ideas in their new book: Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. The Multinational Monitor also has explored this issue in a couple of recent issues and other groups like POCLAD and Reclaim Democracy offer a analysis that points to a more fundamental conceptual framework for challenging corporate power.

We can regain a faith in civic action -- the notion of government as a legitimate vehicle for asserting our collective will -- only when we see it as a means of asserting our right as a sovereign people to govern over corporations, which we should view as potentially worse tyrannies than governments. People already see HMOs as a bigger threat than the HHS. And they should. But they want to know what they can do. Poll after poll taken even before Enron revealed people already believe corporations have too much power. The challenge we face is an organizing challenge -- giving that impetus constructive form (the alternative, as Boggs also suggests, is misdirected rage).

There is a serious debate about all this among a growing network of activists, many of whom believe it would be activist malpractice to offer corporate reforms such as changes in internal governance as a serious organizing objective. Shareholder activism has done much to challenge CEO pay and other abuses (I believe that's largely because wealthy outside stockholders' interests are aligned with those of the reformers here). But if we think the political game is rigged, the notion of "shareholder democracy" should be laughable on its face: a Democracy is defined by one-person/one-vote, not by proportional representation based on ownership, which of course is corporate plutocracy. And since corporate laws defined the maximization of shareholder value as the obligation of corporate officers and directors, having proxy access to nominate pension fund reps, unionists, environmentalists, or whoever to a corporate board won't make much difference until the duties and obligations of corporate officers are changed -- because even those directors who wish to do the right thing often can't, a phenomenon described by Ralph Estes as the Tyranny of the Bottom Line. A new initiative that has sprouted in California and Minnesota -- the Code for Corporate Responsibility attempts to address this question of the duties of officers and directors as defined by state corporate laws. Those duties could be redefined to reflect a broader set of interests (including the protection of jobs, the environment, etc.) and redefined in a way that challenges deeply-embedded corporate doctrines that shield ruthless corporate behavior, such as doctrine of limited liability.Other fledgling efforts to challenge corporate power have been moving from theory to action, including California's Corporate 3 Strikes campaign, which would require the state to revoke a company's charter (or business license if they are incorporated out-of-state) for recidivist or criminogenic behavior were also initiated even before Enron.

Meanwhile, POCLAD, CELDF and other groups are educating activits in strategies that would challenge illegitimate corporate claims to Constitutional Rights and the doctrine of corporate personhood (by which courts have conferred the rights of the people to nonliving fictional entities -- show me where corporations are mentioned in the Constitution or Bill of Rights).

All of these efforts point in a direction that suggests possible ways to challenge corporate power in a significant way. None of them have a significant organizing constituency, though interest is growing.

Thus our challenge is politicize our culture in a way that is tied to an effort to reassert our authority over corporations as a collective citizenry. (The fight against the media monopoly -- supported by both the left and right -- may be a hopeful sign of how this new populism could take shape. That fight has yet to figure out a way to use some of these other ideas).

The point is that the legitimacy of a corporation's existence is not merely as a contract between private parties, but as a public institution whose legitimacy is granted by the People, through our government (corporate charters and the process of incorporation are a rote bureaucratic process, but this wasn't always so. In our nation's early history, corporate charters were given a limited life, and had to be renewed by state legislatures, which used to regularly review a company's operations before the charters were renewed. See this piece in Multinational Monitor for more.)

Getting to the point where we demand this kind of thing means a fundamental shift in our understanding. We must view ourselves as citizens rather than consumers -- which is the point of Boggs' book. The colonization of our thinking by corporations is not just measured by the number of brands we can recognize, but by our own alienation from our own government.

After four years, it's easy to see a few things that Boggs got wrong -- largely due to the consequences of unpredictable events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Bush administration's response. For example, he groups the neo-conservatives with others -- identity groups, new-agers and the 1960s counterculture (including the New Left) and others who retreated from politics. Now we know better. And few would probably agree today with his Nader-like assertion that "the real ideological gulf separating Republicans and Democrats had narrowed beyond recognition," though that certainly seemed obvious at the end of 8 years of Clinton, who moved the Dems further towards the Republicans than any Democratic president before him (e.g. by keeping the minimum wage down to $5.15 during a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity, passing welfare "reform", escalating the ruthless war on drugs, putting 100,000 more police on the streets, pushing for NAFTA, etc.)

Yet despite the radical nature of Bush's agenda, in the long run Boggs' description of the convergence of the two parties may be more true than we want to believe (accepting this as fact means many intelligent people will further detach from politics, especially if they hold out the hope that the nomination of a Democrat could turn much of this around) -- and will lead to deeper cynicism and despair, as well as more marginal experimentation on the fringes, at least for some time, until such efforts can connect with mainstream America.

Unfortunately, it will be hard to discuss these questions until after the election. The hijacking of the Republican party by the neocons and the possible rise of a non-DLC candidate like Dean, along with new forms of organizing like MoveOn.org has made the 2004 choice between the two parties potentially the most significant in a generation, and there are signs of a significant lift in new voter participation (though it's hard to imagine Move On is activating a large percentage of people that didn't vote before). The palpable fear of the consequences of another four years of Bush will probably activate many Democrats and liberals who have been pretty apolitical in the past, but the organizing ability of the Right should also not be underestimated (in terms of mobilizing their own base).

Underneath all this, the same political currents are continuously flowing:

"The erosion of civic values is no momentary phase but is rather the product of deep material and cultural forces at work since at least the 1950s. Vital elements of the political enterprise -- participation, community, governance -- have been distorted or obliterated bypostwar depoliticizing trends."

Which makes me want to suggest (heresy?) that this political season's battles may be less important than we'd like to believe, unless we're ready to begin to analyze those currents and address them. Perhaps we could close the gap by using a Dean (or whoever) victory as an opening, or, in the nightmarish event that Bush wins, building a more fundamental resistance from the ground up that can do more than put up modest speedbumps against Bush's next imperial adventure and ruthless domestic policies.

The point is that, apart from minor flaws in his argument discussed above (and below), after 4 years much of Boggs' analysis seems as apt and urgent as ever; sometimes it seems downright prescient. For example, at one point he contrasts a political culture that pays more attention to the president's sexual pecadillos with deep regulatory reforms that no one seems to be paying attention to, such as energy deregulation, which is certain to have much greater consequence for the majority of Americans (this was written before Enron, the California crisis, last summer's blackouts, the Cheney task force and the debacle known as the Energy bill, which has a clause that would further deregulate the industry by totally gutting the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, the New Deal era-law that kept companies from jeopardizing essential services through speculation in unrelated businesses).

The downward spiral of public life cannot be measured simply in terms of passivity and cynicism. As Boggs observes, "there is also the phenonomenon of sustained citizen anger -- an anger that is deep-seated, increasingly overt, sometimes directed against hated or feared "others," most commonly focused on "government" but rarely channeled in the direction of the military-industrial complex or "private" corporations." ... "Strong antigovernment feelings, of course, can be a prelude to mobilization for radical change--but only where such feelings take shape in a milieu of widely shared values of public engagement and collective action."

Which brings up another point: Without general engagement and education around the question of the dangers of unaccountable corporate power, we should be suspicious of the direction that rapidly-developing mass movements can take.

In 2000 Boggs wrote, "striking parallels between the present-day American extreme Right and European fascism of the 1920s and 1930s clearly exist and deserve further analysis." But he dismisses the possibility of fascist totalitarianism taking over the U.S. government. Yet I wonder, if Boggs was given a chance to rewrite this book now -- after 9/11 and resulting mass psychological fear, the emergence of the neocon cabal, Iraq and other signs like Nuremberg-style rallies sponsored by Clear Channel (and all the other stuff Harvey Wasserman wrote in his book) -- would he have made a stronger case for the potential for an emerging American fascism?

Perhaps he would agree with Sheldon Wolin that we live in a kind of "inverted totalitarianism" (Wolin: "while the current sysem and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism [but] their methods and actions seem upside down. For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the "streets" were dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was of democracy was confined to the government. In the United States, however, it is the streets where democracy is most alive -- while the real danger lies with an increasinly unbridled government.")

In 2000, however, Boggs' skepticism was based upon his identification of the potential for American fascism in fringe groups like the scattered militias, cults and fundamenlists -- groups that are "undoubtedly a long way from seizing state power. ... There is probably no Mussolini, Hitler, or Franco on the horizon. Yet the ideological affinity of such groups with earlier incarnations of fascism and neofascism, along with certain undeniable similarities in the historical context, cannot be overlooked."

There may not be any charismatic dictator in the wings, or any threat that these militia-like groups will ever come into power, politically, but does it make any difference if, instead, they align themselves with other right political movements like the neoconservatives. It's easy to imagine them functioning in a manner similar way as the brownshirts -- as a radical base that the right can call upon to intimidate dissent, especially if their energy is fed by escalating economic despair and their consequent rage is directed at "liberals" who don't support the country's war on terrorism. As Boggs puts it:

"The fascist party-state set out to either destroy or incorporate autonomous groups and subcultures, albeit with mixed results. The state assumed primacy ... in most cases (Italy, Germany, Spain) the party actually wound up subordinated to the state system. As Mussolini once stated: "Everything for the state, nothing against the state, no one outside the state. Although such monolithic rule always remained outside the grasp, and probably the intentions, of fascist regimes, Mussolini's dictat nonetheless reflects the essence of fascist ideology. The very genius of fascist leadership in Europe resided in its capacity to forge a coherent social bloc of forces among widely dispersed and often conflicting groups..." When two parties converge into one government dominated by the military-industrial complex how far can it be from moving towards becoming this kind of system, especially if hijacked by an ideological cabal?

Another reason Boggs was skeptical that fascism could happen here is that "present-day reactionary populist groups lack a coherent, future-directed ideology that could give political shape to their vast assortment of antistatist beliefs and irrational fantasies."

Again, I'm not sure that matters, so long as the right has people like Ralph Reed or Grover Norquist (described by Bob Dreyfuss as the "Field Marshall of the Bush Plan") who has a multi-decade ideological plan to use the anti-political sentiments of most Americans to push a plutocratic economic agenda.

Grover is building a grassroots base ("little me's") state-by-state. In a recent Washington Post article("Sewing the Seeds of GOP Domination," 1/12/04), he said his group (the supposedly "center-right" Americans For Tax Reform, which has pushed the paradoxical anti-big-government line for tax cuts for the rich, never talking about the military, which is far and away the fastest-growing part of the budget) had to shut down one of its "mini-Grover" state coalition meetings in New Mexico, after the "black helicopter crowd" took it over. A sign of what I mean -- Norquist and other political operatives are creating legitimate political space for dangerous right-wing political movements.

Boggs' last reason to be skeptical that fascism could happen here reads like a dire omen to this pessimist: "Finally, fascist movements and parties were able to seize state power in Europe because large sectors of the power structure -- the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, big business, the military -- swung over to the fascist side at decisive moments. ... In the United States today, however, there are few signs of such a critical alignment: corporations, Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the bulk of the political estalishment are all lined up resolutely against the extreme Right, particularly where destabilizing forms of insurgency or domestic terrorism enter the picture."

So much has happened since 9/11, hasn't it? Many foreign policy establishment figures voiced opposition to the Iraq war once it was announced, including Admiral Zinni, Schwarzkopf (remember the article that came out the morning of last year's State-of-the-Union speech, where he criticized the proposal to go to war? Then he was the first responder on TV, suggesting how great Bush's speech was. A Rove set-up? Or did they manage to turn him that quickly?) and many other members of the intelligence and foreign policy establishment. Yet we live in a time when even the inertia of a foreign policy establishment reluctant to go to war for unwarranted reasons can succumb to an atmosphere of fear, party discipline and reprisal, especially if popular sentiments are pushed along by right-wing propaganda such as Clear Channel radio, and the Democratic party is so compromised that it can rarely pull together long enough to take a stand before the ground shifts (why did it take an ex-Klan member to make the most eloquent case against war on the floor of the Senate? Where was Kerry?). It's hard to stop something like war once the gears are set in motion. Yes, it could easily happen here -- and the conditions for it to happen may already be in place.

But Boggs makes a good point: it isn't coming in the same form, so that if we can be critical of people like Christopher Hitchens for calling stateless terrorist networks like al Qaeda "fascistic," so could using the F-word be an imprecise term for what's happening here:

"Surely corporate colonization in the early twenty-first century America will depend far more on the workings of ideological hegemony than on the tools of institutional coercion or terror. If the "new world order" means anything, it refers to an administered system in which popular consciousness is shaped and contained by the media spectacle, the culture industry, the shopping malls, and the charade of democratic politics -- all inducing privatized retreat, depoliticization, and withdrawal from the public sphere, against a backdrop of reinforced state-corporate networks of surveillance and controls. (Fascism, on the other hand, always set out to mobilize the masses, hoping to instill new modes of active participation- however narros these turned out to be.) In such a rationalized, high-tech, globalized universe there seems to be little role for a Mussolini, Hitler or Franco; instead of charismatic passions and adventurous schemes, what the system requires is more the routinized managerial intervention of market-oriented CEOs who reside at places like IBM, Bank of America, Mitsubishi, General Motors, and Walt Disney/ABC. Hence, the menacing incursions of reactionary populist groups in the Unied States represent not so much the harbinger of a coming fascist nighmare as the localized, defensive, antipolitical, and ultimately impotent response to globalizing forces that seem outside the purview of active human control."

All of this would make it interesting to find out how Boggs' thinking has evolved since 2000.

You can find out by reading his new collection of essays about a related topic that suggests how far he believes the situation has evolved: Empire.

In fact, apart from Boggs' Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire there are a number of recent books that pick up on the theme of Empire, including Chalmers Johnson's Sorrows of Empire and Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire has probably stirred up the most debate on the topic, including assertions that the faddish use of the E-word is as unpersuasive and imprecise a description of modern global capitalism as use of the word "globalization" was in recent years. (There are many more books on the American Empire: 267 if you search "U.S. Empire" as Title on Amazon.com; 1467 titles include "globalization." So it will probably be a few years before the intellectual fetish for understanding Empire exhausts itself).

This fetish is shared by writers across the spectrum. On the right, we have Max Boot's pro-imperial editorials in the Wall Street Journal and books like Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and Zbiegnew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.

Any progressive/radical bibliography on the question of American Empire would have to include books such as William Blum's Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Sidney Lens' The Forging of the American Empire: From the Revolution to Vietnam, a History of U.S. Imperialism, both which were recently reissued. Also Larry Everest's Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda and Peter Gowan's The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for World Dominance (Verso).

Regardless of one's views, unchallenged American global dominance in military, political and (to a lesser extent) economic arenas is a certainty, and even if "Empire" conjures up difficult-to-swallow notions of legions of soldiers conquering distant lands (Johnson points out that we have over 700 mmilitary bases on foreign soil) there is certainly some truth in framing an understanding of U.S. politics around this question, particularly if we are willing to engage the question as a complex one. E.g. It would also be a mistake to understand the concept of American Empire as simply a military-industrial agenda completed by force. Much of what is understood to be the central process of globalization could also be considered to be part of the process of Empire. E.g., as Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance explores, U.S. foreign policy has worked through surrogate institutions and in partnership with capitalist allies -- hence -- a view of the history of financial diplomacy that formed, sustained and used the Bretton Woods triad (World Bank-IMF-GATT/WTO) as an instrument of global imperialism.

Boggs' book -- which includes essay by Chalmers Johnson and Noam Chomsky -- attempts to grapple with some of the more obvious variables involved with this question of Empire. As a collection of different essays by a variety of writers, it pulls the evidence together from different directions. The chapters on the evolution of the domination of space (where the technology has evolved from observatory spy satellites to being part of an aggressively-postured, integrated global battlefield), oil wars, "The Geopolitics of Plan Columbia" (James Petras), the role of media in wartime (Norman Solomon) and the depoliticization of the public sphere (Boggs, again) present important evidence of the direction we're headed, even if they are only part of a grim picture.

N.B.:
In Masters of War, he has this to say about Wesley Clark, referring to the 1999 war in Yugoslavia: "NATO Commander Wesley Clark boasted that te aim of the war was to "demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure" of Yugoslavia. As Takis ftopoulos has persuasively argued, the NATO destruction of Servia can best be understood as the first war systematically waged in defense of the global market system, a "war" involving few if any casualties for the perpetrators. Do you want a guy like that heading a country that has developed an aggressive and preemptive military posture not just through Bush's most recent National Security Doctrine, but by the inherent nature of the technologies it is developing? If you're enamored with Clark, as Michael Moore seems to be, check out "Clark's True Colors," the Nation, December 15, 2003)

Iraq Stories You May Have Missed (and other key links)

Sam Gardiner's National War College Report which suggests the White House and Pentagon made up or distorted over 50 war stories (e.g. Jessica Lynch).

Some of Nicholas Kristof's Name That War Contest Winners:

Operation Quicksand
Iraqmire
Buskrieg
The Mother of Oil Wars
Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)
Bush's Botch
The Empire Strikes Out
"Coup d'États Unis"
A'bombin'nation
Rolling Blunder

The documents that O'Neill was holding up on 60 Minutes last week which show a map of the oil regions of Iraq were first revealed by Judicial Watch, who didn't get them from the Pentagon, but from their lawsuit against Cheney for his secret energy task force.

National Security Archive's Saddam Hussein Sourcebook documents U.S.-Saddam ties going back to 1960s, and include the documents SEEN discovered in its research, which uncovered the story about Rumsfeld lobbying Hussein on behalf of a Bechtel pipeline after it was known Saddam was gassing his own citizens. Hence the story behind the handshake.

Calvin Trillin's questions for Bush at press conference.

The opening of a new military mortuary.

Sy Hersh: The Stovepipe

Bushitters' lies about how much the war would cost

George H.W. Bush gives award to Teddy Kennedy!! See story by Georgie Anne Geyer.

A detailed analysis of how wrong Bush was by Thomas Powers, NY Review of Books (12/3/03)

American Dynasty:
Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
by Kevin Phillips

Kevin Phillips is a former Republican strategist, a sharp political commentator and author of nine books, including the Politics of the Rich and Poor and Wealth and Democracy. He has an explosive new book out about the Bush family, wich he contends "has used all its resources to create a political dynasty that has gained the White Hosue to further its family and ideological agenda, which would have horrified America's founding fathers."

"The Bush family has never produced a doctor, judge, teacher, scholar, or lawyer of note. As far back as World War I, the family's single-minded focus has been on three major areas: intelligence, energy, and national security."

Of course it's not a flattering portrait of the Bushes -- but like O'Neill, Phillips is a lifelong Republican who can hardly be tagged as unsympathetic to conservative or corporate interests.

If you want a preview, read this he piece penned for the L.A. Times

Democracy Now interviewed Phillips on Monday, listen here.

What's Nader up to? By now you've probably heard the rumors that he may run as an independent and not a Green.
See his exploratory committee web site for his own explanation.

Other views:

Norman Solomon 1/8/03

Response to Solomon from Tarek Milleron (Ralph's nephew, worked on 2000 campaign)

Ted Glick (National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive Politics Network)

Green Party


Matt Rothschild (editor of the Progressive and old friend of Ralph's, plus Green Party responses)

Micah Sifry (who wrote Spoiling for a Fight -- a book about Third Parties)

After the New Economy
By Doug Henwood

Economics deserves its reputation as “the dismal science” for being so dismally disconnected from reality. In Mexico they call mainstream neoclassical economic theory (learned by elite Mexican scholars and policymakers at the University of Chicago) “chalkboard economics" because it looks good on the chalkboard, and may even improve the national GDP (on paper). But Mexicans don’t eat chalk or paper, they eat tortillas.

Most economists write so dismally that non-insomniacs rarely read their work.

That’s why Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy, while nowhere near as comprehensive as his previous tome, Wall Street, has been worth waiting for (he announced it years ago, delaying publication when the dot.com bomb began). This is the most entertaining critical deconstruction of the U.S. economy in recent years .

Henwood, who lives in New York City, is editor of the Left Business Observer. His previous experience working on Wall Street is unusual for a radical economist. But he doesn't write from the gut until he's had a chance to research and evaluate the statistical facts, a methodology which allows him to cut through all the cant about class mobility, “shareholder democracy” and shared prosperity. The statistics alone make this book a useful reference.

Armed with the facts, Henwood exposes the fallacy of arguments put out by well-known pundits and activists across the political spectrum. He not only takes on the New Economy's biggest boosters, but its most vociferous critics -- including those who would have us believe that "globalization" is something radically new, instead of just late-stage capitalism.

Of course, most of the fire is appropriately directed at people like George Gilder and other easy targets on the right who never seem to go away. It's amazing how all the post-materialist fantasies about the "overthrow of matter," the "End of History" (Fukuyama) and the Dow hitting 36,000 (James Glassman, who continues to pick stocks for the Washington Post) have done nothing to ruin their authors' reputations. Henwood dutifully reminds us of these and other hysterical fantasies of the "new economy." Readers of The Baffler and Boob Jubilee will recognize the tone here.

Yet combining that kind of research and critical bemusement is a diffcult balancing act. His gadfly tendencies can sometimes get the best of him. The problem is that Henwood’s contrarian editorializing is often erratic. It can either be spot on or a bit too cranky.

In his chapter on globalization, for example, one of his points is this notion that globalization is nothing new (itself not a new point, but the explanation is better here than in most writing you’ll find out there, and the notion that globalization is new -- rather than just late-stage capitalism -- is still a common myth). But his examples aren't always the most convincing.

For instance, he accurately quotes World Bank statistics to show that multinational corporations are not investing in the poorest countries of the Third World, but mostly in each other and middle-tier countires like Brazil and Mexico. He's right to point out that this pattern of investment is not a repeat of what Lenin described as the super-exploitation of the third world. (MNCs, as a rule, don't go to the poorest countries unless they harbor certain resources like oil.) What he fails to mention is that this same data points to a failure of the dominant development model, as pushed by the World Bank itself, along with the IMF. The World Bank, whose mission is to help poor countries develop, is the leader of the banking pack. Where its investments go, MNC investments often follow. MNCs rarely invest in countries unless the bank has been there first. In effect, the bank does due diligence on third world risks for the multinationals. The problem is that most of the Bank's money (particularly investments from the IFC, the World Bank's own corporate investment bank) has gone to middle-tier countries, despite its professed mission to help the most impoverished areas of the world. Most of the Bank's loans and investments in poor regions like Africa go for export-oriented development projects rather than for projects that develop the infrastructure needed to feed and otherwise provide for the basic needs of the majority of the population. And the Bank's own studies have demonstrated that certain corporate investments in the third world -- especially as oil, mining and gas -- lead not to the enrichment of countries that have an abundance of such resources, but just the reverse -- corruption and impoverishment. A similar phenomenon occurs with trade. As CEPR economist Mark Weisbrot has pointed out, an increase in trade in Latin American countries like Brazil and Mexico in the past 20 years has not helped those countries' economic growth rates -- in fact just the reverse, in comparison with the previous two decades (1960 to 1980) when they didn't follow the IMF/Bank's prescriptions for growth so closely. Unfortunately, Henwood leaves these points out. It's almost as if he wishes to ignore the strongest arguments of the left, or sets up a sectarian straw man to argue with.

Henwood also makes fun of Wayne Ellwood’s No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization (by quoting this passage:

“Whether you walk the streets of New York or Nairobi, Beijing or Buenos Aires, globalization has introduced a level of commercial culture which is eerily homogenous. The glittering, air-conditioned shopping malls are interchangeable; the fast food restaurants sell the same high carbohydrate foods with minor concessions to local tastes. Young people drink the same soft drink, smoke the same cigarettes, wear identical branded clothing and shoes, play the same computer games, watch the same Hollywood films and listen to the same Western popular music. … Welcome to the world of the multinational corporation, a cultural and economic tsunami (tidal wave) that is roaring across the globe and replacing he spectacular diversity of human society with a Westernized version of the good life….In the worlds of the sociologist Helena Norberg-Hodge, there is a ‘global monoculture which is now able to disrupt traditional cultures with a shocking speed and finality and which surpasses anything the world has witnessed before.' ”

Henwood’s response:

“Really? Let’s read this text closely. According to the World Bank, Kenya’s average income is about 3% of the U.S.’s, China’s about 11% and Argentina’s about 32%. I doubt there are as many air-conditioned shopping malls in China as in the U.S. or that many Kenyan kids are playing video games. But even within New York City, there isn’t anything like a monoculture; Queens, one of the five boroughs that make up New York City, is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse jurisdictions in the world, wth Chinese, Indians, Central Americans, and third-generation descendants of Italian migrants living side by side.”

There’s something a bit tendentious in an argument that concedes nothing. Queens does have its McDonald’s and Subways (though not as many Starbucks as Manhattan). And the upper middle class in virtually every country -- as slim a sliver of the demographic pie as that may be -- is increasingly captive of commercial culture. Rich Argentines shop for the same brands in New York and Europe that they can find in Buenos Aires. The upper classes may be a tiny part of Kenyan society, but it’s a huge and growing class in China, and they have many shopping malls where western brands are rapidly being introduced (even authentic, non-knock-offs).

There’s nothing wrong with a sober reconsideration of globalization, but Henwood undermines his point by taking a lot of fairly gratuitous swipes at key leaders of the anti-globalization movement without acknowleging (or realizing) that they have often made the same points he does. For instance, he seems willing to pick on David Korten’s work without acknowledging its strongest points, particularly Korten's useful deconstruction of neoclassical economics and its betrayal of Adam Smith in When Corporations Rule the World.

Or take this paragraph:

“Among NGOs and intellectuals working on development issues, there is talk of apartheid South Africa and Smith’s Rhodeisa as models of a possible autarkic delinking from the world economy, and admiration for Mahathir’s capital controls in Malaysia during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. It’s often overlooked that Mahathir is a repressive bigot, and that the Southern African examples were part of strategies to sustain horrible societies. Any “progressive” alliance with national capitalism in the name of resistance to international capitalism can get very smelly.”

There’s a similarly snarky remark about Ralph Nader’s alliance with right-wing protectionists like textile tycoon Roger Milliken on the next page: “That’s bad enough, but Naderite trade rhetoric about how the [WTO] threatens U.S. sovereignty is pretty bad too; the world has suffered from too much U.S. sovereignty and could do with a little less.”

Just five pages later, Henwood describes the WTO (along with the IMF and other trade agreements like NAFTA) as “the cells of an embryonic transnational state,” a point that could have been lifted from Nader’s speech. But why bother explaining how the WTO serves the interests of transnational corporations, a good third of which are American (the threat of the WTO and other trade pact provisions NAFTA Chapter 11 is to the sovereignty of all nations, including the U.S., not to mention the decision-making authority of local and state governments here in the U.S. (Nader's point, the nuance of which Henwood doesn't bother with.)

And what about Mahathir’s capital controls? Would they be useful (and worthy of consideration) if applied by a more progressive democracy? Henwood won’t say. The contrarian’s purpose is less to sort through these issues than to expose the hypocrisy of activists who fly half way across the world to talk about local solutions and the fallacy of their and others' arguments. That's where the balance between solid, objective research and critical enterprise becomes lost.

An attempt at the end to avoid being labeled a cynical curmudgeon is unconvincing: he finds optimism in Hardt and Negri’s book, Empire. But if the two Marxists are to be faintly praised for not being “gloomy and resigned” like much of the left, the reader is still forewarned that they are often “uncritical and credulous.” That's not a ringing endorsement. Nor does it leave the reader with the idea that there's much with any concerns about economic justice (no mention of groups like United for a Fair Economy).

Nevertheless, if you're looking for an entertaining response to right-wing popular economists like George Gilder (he's an easy target), answers to questions like why the U.S. has such a polarized income structure, and a quick explanation of how Enron can be viewed as the logical outcome of the Dot.com economic hysteria (the market bubble burst a year before Enron declared bankruptcy), this is a useful read.

Incidentally, Robert Pollin's new book, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity might be better, if you're looking for a more sweeping structural economic critique of Clintonomics and how the U.S. economy fits within the global capitalist economy of the last decade.


PS for a group-blog discussion of this book see Crooked Timber (1/27)

How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?
(A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration)
by William Hartung

"Our current debacle in Iraq is just the beginning of the troubles that this obscenely irresponsible approach to national security policy may bring down on our nation if all of us don't stand up and say no," says Bill Hartung, who runs the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center. Hartung has written an excellent introduction to the U.S. military-industrial complex, which is on the verge of being out of control.

"Crony capitalism" was always bad in countries like Suharto's Indonesia. But now it's time to look at this dynamic within our own government.

For instance, of the thirty-two major Bush administration appointees with direct or indirect links to the arms industry, eight once worked for Lockheed Martin, whose ties to Bush go back to his days as governor when they attempted to privatize Texas's state welfare and Medicaid programs. That bid was blocked by a skillful counter-campagn run by the state employees union, which ran a series of radio ads featuring the sound of a toilet flushing, followed by a narrator saying "Remember the company that brought you the $3,000 toilet seat? Well now that same company wants to come here and run public services...").

Lynne Cheney served on Lockheed Martin's board from 1994 to 2001. Others with L-M ties include Otto Reich (the right-wing Cuban -American and Iran-contra re-tread who was Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs until shortly after the attempted coup against Chavez in Venezuela failed, and Ex-Lockheed COO Peter B. Teets, who was appointed to serve as Undersecretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, a new post created by Rumsfeld with an eye towards putting the responsibility for acquiring military space assets for the Pentagon under one person's command...and more and more.

With so many ex-employees, lobbyists etc. passing through the revolving door, it's no wonder that Lockheed Martin's annual "take" in federal contracts exceeds the entire payout of the largest federal welfare program -- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) -- which is responsible for providing millions of poor families with income support. So much for cracking down on welfare cheats.

Obviously, Cheney, who continues to receive $162,000 a year from Halliburton, epitomizes the revolving door:

"Of all the loyal, secretive, inside-delaing cronies in the Bush camp, Cheney is the unrivalled master of the game. He is like the guy at the poker game who never makes a joke, never brags about his hand, but always seems to go home with the big pot of money at the end of the night while everyone else wonders what hit them. ... Dan Baum revealed in his analysis of the (no-bid Halliburton contract) in the New York Times magazine that Halliburton was uniquely situated to win the Iraqi oil industry rebuilding contract because the company actually wrote the contingency plan that the Army used to determine what work was needed. As Army spokesman Lt. Col. Gene Pawlik put it, "They were the company best positioned to executive the oil field work becase of their involvement in the planning." (This all sounds a bit like Dick Cheney's "self-selection" of himself to be Dubaya's VP candidate...)"

Bob Dreyfuss and Jason Vest have an excellent piece in Jan/Feb Mother Jones about the Secret Intelligence Unit at the Pentagon.

Check out the new GI Joke.

(Update: Ireland was interviewed about this story on Democracy Now)

Here's a story to watch:

The Nation (Doug Ireland) is the first U.S. publication to follow up on Le Figaro's explosive revelations that Halliburton may be charged with bribery for activities in Nigeria that happened on Cheney's watch.

Halliburton self-reported this case to the SEC back in May, as required under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It appears they may have tried to make a preemptive strike against any inquiries into Cheney's role:

"The payments were made in 2001 and 2002, Halliburton spokeswoman Zelma Branch told AFP's business ethics news service, AFX Global Ethics Monitor." ("Halliburton admits it paid Nigerian bribe," AFP, 5/9/03).

I.e. Halliburton claimed the bribes occurred AFTER Cheney left.

But that's not what the French prosecutor is saying. He's saying the scam extends back to the mid-1990s.

Moreover, the company's original story was that the bribes amounted to just $2.4 million (according to Ireland, Judge van Ruymbeke believes the secret "retrocommissions" may amount to as much as $180 million in bribes).

Halliburton also said the bribes were strictly the work of local employees (AFP: " "Based on the findings of the investigation we have terminated several employees," Halliburton said in the filing, adding that none of its senior officers was involved in the bribe.")

But the scheme appears far too complicated to have escaped the notice of someone in Houston, involving multiple layers of offshore bank accounts and subsidiaries.

The story should remind skeptics of the first stories that came out about Enron and how a brilliant CFO set up hundreds of offshore Special Purpose Entities to hide billions in debt. Clearly Fastow was involved, and he looked like quite a genius until it was revealed that banks like Citi had cooked up the deals and pitched them to Fastow. (The banks pitched these deals to other countries before Enron.)

In Corporate Crime (considered the classic on the topic) Clinard and Yeager point out that "many decisions regarding foreign bribery are made at the highest corporate levels. In other cases, the internal organization of transnational corporations seems to facilitate the use of bribery at lower levels. Top executives delegate responsibilities yet fail to follow them up, thus creating a general atmosphere in which corruption can exist and even flourish ... In this milieu, executives may issue a directive to exhort exmployees to obey the law, yet they may fail to determine the general level of compliance within the firm. Instead of closely watching the day-to-day activities of subordinates, top executives simply use such output measures as sales, market shares, or profit margins to evaluate foreign operations, all of which tend to put pressure on lower levels of management to use bribery."

"We are cooperating with the SEC in its review of the matter," Halliburton told AFP back in May.

Of course they are, just as the SEC is cooperating with Halliburton.

SEC/DOJ have joint responsibility for enforcement of the FCPA, which was first passed in the wake of Watergate. Which is one reason it doesn't get enforced very aggressively -- there's a kind of bureaucratic hot potato in these cases, which also require far more resources to pursue than most of the insider trading and accounting fraud cases that have received attention in recent years.

Although Justice Department officials will neither confirm nor deny that they are investigating specific cases, they do confirm that they are aware of reports that some of the same U.S. companies under investigation for accounting fraud and other alleged violations stemming from their domestic operations may have also bribed foreign officials to obtain business.

Xerox, for example, admitted in a July, 2002 filing with the SEC that “[I]n India, we have learned of certain improper payments made over a period of years in connection with sales to government customers by employees of our majority–owned subsidiary in that country. … We estimate the amount of such payments in 2000, the year the activity was stopped, to be approximately $600 to $700 thousand.”

Business Week also that the SEC is investigating whether Tyco subsidiary Earth Tech Venezuela may have used illegal means to win a $200 million contract to build an industrial water-treatment complex in Venezuela. ("The Tax Games Tyco Played," Business Week, July 1, 2002, pp 40 –41.)

Other recent cases:
* Accenture (formerly Arthur Andersen consulting) announced on 7/15 that it had violated the law during its Middle East operations. The company wouldn’t identify which business unit in what country was involved, and said it was conducting its own investigation. (Paul McDougall, Information Week, 7/15).
* Cardinal Health and Syncor. Cardinal Health’s 10-Q forms (for the quarterly period ending December 31st 2002 pp. 13 & 24, and period ending March 31st 2003 pp. 14 & 28) made mention of Syncor’s improper payments to Taiwanese foreign customers, in a scheme to artificially inflating the price of Syncor shares. A consolidated complaint was expected to be filed by May 2003. Shareholders of voted to support a merger in December, 2002 after news of the alleged scandal reduced the overall price tag.
* AES. According to company 10-Q forms (for the quarterly period ending June 30th 2002 p. 19, for the quarterly period ending September 30th 2002 p. 21 and for the quarterly period ended March 31st 2003, p.16), the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an investigation into allegations that persons and/or entities involved with the Bujagali hydroelectric power project which the Company is developing in Uganda, have made or have agreed to make certain improper payments in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Company is conducting its own internal investigation and is cooperating with the Department of Justice in this investigation.
* Bribery allegations against Enron extend around the world. In India, the company was accused of bribing government officials to gain the contract to build the Dabhol power plant and then sell power back to the government at grossly exorbitant prices. In the UK, the CEO of Enron subsidiary Wessex Water was indicted for taking $1.5 million in bribes, as part of a $1.77 billion sale of the company. According to the Wall Street Journal, “claims of corruption in Enron power or water projects have arisen over the years in many countries, including Ghana, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic.” (See “Enron Criminal Probe Focuses On Alleged Corruption Abroad,” By John R. Wilke, Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2002)

SEC is unlikely to pursue these cases (whether or not your ex-CEO is the Vice President) because it endangers our relations with other governments and the image of American businesses in general. Until recently, the FCPA allowed U.S. corporations to claim a superior standard in business ethics. Enron and the other scandals kind of ruined that rap.

The Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted only about 40 cases since the law was passed in 1977. Not only are such cases tough to win, but corporate lobbyists have successfully weakened the law since its passage.

In March, the Senate Finance Committee issued a report on a bribery case that involved an Enron power project in Guatemala. The case was discovered by the IRS and referred directly to both SEC and DOJ. But the SEC and DOJ "failed to act on the non-tax criminal referral."

Think SEC will get tougher with Halliburton?

Recall that the SEC has yet to even settle with Halliburton for the accounting fraud that occurred on Cheney's watch.

Remember back in July 2002, before Cheney changed the subject to war against Iraq, how the President and Vice President's involvement in scandals at Halliburton and Harken were beginning to grab headlines on a daily basis?.

Perhaps the Dems should pull out that video where Cheney brags about how he got "over and above" the normal kind of accounting advice from Arthur Andersen.

Indeed.

Michael Moore ends Dude, Where's My Country? with two chapters that suggest two things we can do to begin to reverse the rightward tilt in the U.S.

First ("How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law"�), progressives need to learn how to communicate their ideas within a culture that is deeply conservative. Second, we need to do all we can to throw Bush out of office.

These are important goals, but they aren't enough.

Ask yourself this painful question: What happens if we don't get rid of Bush? A lot of people will conclude that all is lost, and throw their hands up in cynicism and despair. (I know a lot of people in DC who have said, "If Bush wins, I'm out of here," which is exactly what Karl Rove and Grover Norquist want to hear!).

I agree with the anyone-but-Bush strategy in 2004. Even if Dean turns out to be a centrist and corporatist (I'm more a skeptic of Clark than Moore, because he's kind of an autocrat in style, and less a peacemaker than is assumed, as Matt Taibbi explained in a recent Nation piece), the fact that he's a Democrat means that at least he'd be a speedbump against the accelerating rightwing hegemony that we face if the Republicans get all three branches of government (no serious observer of Congress has suggested the Dems can take back the House or Senate, esp. since there are only a dozen or so races that will be competitive and with at least 6 Democratic Senators planning to retire).

If we face 4 more years of Bush, it WILL be depressing. So I agree it's important to try to put someone in the White House whose natural instinct will automatically be to veto any bill that Tom DeLay et al. is drafting in coordination with the huge conservative coalition that meets every Wednesday morning at Grover Norquist's offices. (See Jan/Feb issue of Mother Jones).

That said, I'm afraid of the pitiful despair that many on the left will sink into if Bush wins. The crisis we face is systemic and not just the consequence of letting a neocon cabal take over our foreign policy and letting hypocritical libertarians run our domestic political economy into the ground by professing to want to cut taxes in order to cut back on government, ignoring the fact that the biggest part of government is the bloated Pentagon budget (has Grover Norquist ever lobbied against Star Wars?).

The point is, if we hang too much hope on the anyone-but-Bush strategy, without thinking about what we can do to build our movement from the base, we reveal the poverty of our imagination as political organizers.

Michael Moore got one thing right -- we are a predominantly liberal-leaning country. 80 percent of us believe in universal health care and racial diversity on college campuses. "I'm telling you, this country is so commie-pinko-weirdo, its conservative party can never get more than 25 percent of its recurring voters to join it, while the vast majority of its citizens define themselves as either members of the liberal party, or worse ... independent or anarchist (the latter just simply refusing ever to vote!)"

The problem, therefore, is not that we've become such a conservative country. The problem is that the conservatives are better organized and, maybe, better organizers. Which I guess is the subtext for his chapter on talking with your brother-in-law. But seriously, ask yourself, what's the best organizing campaign going on in the country right now? The living wage campaigns? The sweatshop movements? The anti-war movement? The global justice activists and black bloc anarchists who hop from summit to summit with little connection to everyday community concerns?

Is the left by definition doomed to be left out? Or can we ever imagine the most subversive thing being taking over the instruments of power? (What kind of message would show people how to use government as an instrument of their collective self-interest?)

The left has nothing like Norquist in Washington. Bob Borosage's Campaign for America's Future holds an annual conference. And the Fair Taxes for All Coalition is pretty big. But nowhere near as sophisticated.

Face it, it's not just the corporate cash that gives Grover an advantage (though clearly that helps!).

An old friend who is a better organizer than I once reminded me of Alinsky's old adage that "you can't take the Chinese army on in hand-to-hand combat." The point is that we're not going to beat the right wing by playing the same game it does, but better, or by following a gameplan that mirrors the Powell memo. We should undestand the Right's strategy, but we just won't ever have as many Richard Mellon Scaife's wiling to fund left-wing think tanks to compete with Heritage (although it was nice to see the Center for American Progress get up and running in 2003). We have to figure out how to involve more people with less money.

In addition to Michael Moore's book (and a rereading of Populist-era history, which I'll get to some day), I read two things recently that suggest how impoverished our imagination as organizers has become.

First, there's an interesting interview with Bernard Cassen of ATTAC in the January, 2003 New Left Review. Second is a collection of essays recently published by the New Press about Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil.

ATTAC is a leader in the European civil resistance to neoliberalism and corporate globalization. Formed in the late 1990s to fight the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, they were also instrumental in organizing the first World Social Forum, in partnership with South American (especially Brazilian activists).

Cassen:

"...representation from Asia, Africa and even the United States was so weak. I personally made no particular effort to ensure a strong American presence, or to hinder it. But when the American NGOs, who had been informed just like all others throughout the world, arrived only in small numbers, I was not worried. Globalization is essentially an American-led process, and it was important that anti-globalization not be American-led as well. So in my view it was strategically vital that the Forum started along a Franco-Brazilian, and then more broadly Euro-Latin American axis, which the Americans were welcome to join once the ground was well prepared. Otherwise there was a risk that American NGOs would immediately dominate the proceedings." And why would anyone have faith in our ability as organizers, given what's been going on in our country?

There is much to consider in the interview in terms of perspective on the struggle we face. If we frame the battle around Bush, we shouldn't forget that in the real war we may not be able to win through electoral politics until the optimal conditions are created, until people are educated to understand what is at stake (i.e. have a certain level of political and economic literacy), until our communities are organized enough to withstand the misinformation the corporate media spreads and compensate for the crushing economic burdens of federal cutbacks in social services (in the U.S. just as they have come via structural adjustment in the poorer countries). Until we are able to overcome the issues that divide us (e.g. race) in order to build true grassroots networks and institutions to whom our candidates are accountable.

Cassem:

"Our [ATTAC's] fundamental aim, as I have often said, is to decontaminate people's minds. Our heads have been stuffed with neoliberalism, its virus is in our brain cells, and we need to detoxify them. We have to be able to start thinking freely again, which means believing that something can be done. For the overwhelming conviction at present is that, politically speaking, nothing can be done. That is why our slogan, "Another world is possible," amounts to something like a cultural revolution. It means that we are not condemned to neoliberalism, we can envisage other ways of living and organizing society than those we have at present."

Cassem and ATTAC understand that local organizing projects must somehow be networked to a global movement:

"A global constellation is coming into being that is beginning to think along the same lines, to share its strategic concepts, to link common problems together, to forge the chains of a new solidarity. All this is now moving with astonishing speed. There has just been an Asian Social Forum in India, an area with which we hitherto had virtually no contact. In Brazil, the government's agenda is set by all the problems identified at Porto Alegre. What will Lula do about the enormous debt that is crushing the country? He has said, of course, that Brazil will be meticulous in meeting its obligations. But will it actually be able to? I believe that a moment of truth is arriving in Argentina and Brazil."

Perhaps the closest equivalent we have to ATTAC's decentralized structure in the U.S. is the Cities for Peace network established by IPS and the National Priorities Project. Yet networks like this need to build upon an understanding of the links between war and economic policies whose pain is felt most acutely at the local level. The activists and political networks that pass resolutions against the war are the same ones that have supported a living wage and, in some cases, backed the World Bank bonds boycott. The problem is that the institutional interstices that allow for continuity and stability are lacking, so that the linkages between domestic economic policies like tax cuts and pressures on state and local budgets and foreign policy issues are weak. Part of that has to do with our two-party system. No party is committed to building the institutional infrastructure to respond to this crisis or even push an agenda the frames our understanding around these questions.

The U.S. left could learn not just from the ATTAC movement in Europe, but also from the Brazilian Labor Party's (PT) formation of a National Mass Movements Secretariat and National Forum of Democratic and Popular Organizations, which both promote links between the different parts of the social movement. (Where's the U.S. equivalent? The Democrats seem too ossified and anti-ideological to care, while the Greens are still too green to provide significant enough leadership. It's a shame that Ralph Nader didn't enter electoral politics much earlier and that Jesse Jackson's 1986 campaign left nothing like this kind of cross-issue, multicultural organizing infrastructure behind, because by now something significant might exist along these lines.)

Getting rid of Bush would be a salutary step, and an important one that people around the world would thank us for. But the crisis goes much deeper and our response must be based on a bigger vision. The election of Dean would probably result in political gridlock. A lot of blame would be thrown at Dean and liberals. Any compromises would at best be a step back to Clinton-era neoliberal politics. Yes, it could stall the right-wing's plans for more wars and the privatization of social security. And that's good. But, we could be facing a backlash -- and could only be biding time before a disgruntled electorate decides that at least the Republicans know how to get things done in Washington. To prevent right-wing populism, we face a significant organizing challenge.

With a ballooning budget deficit caused by a skyrocketing military budget and deep tax cuts for the rich and corporations, state and local governments are beginning to face painful budget decisions that will only get worse as federal social programs are cut further. Bush et al. would love to use the right (including its religious ideological shock troops) to channel the coming popular discontent into a populist right-wing movement. The left needs to beat them to the organizing punch.

There's an interesting example at the end of Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil by Sue Branford and Bernardo Kucinski. In the final chapter, Hilary Wainwright describes Porto Alegre's struggle to create a bottom-up approach to city government (especially through the participatory budget process).

Despite the election of Lula and the Worker's Party in 2002, Lula has continued to follow neoliberal policies dictated by the IMF, largely to avoid an immediate crisis. As a result, the federal government has strengthened central control over public spending and has cut the funds going back to the cities whose citizens pay the taxes. Funds going to local authorities were reduced from 17 percent of the revenue received in 1990 to 14 percent in 1999, and have been cut deeper since.

Porto Alegre, which depends on federal funds for its budget (like most cities in Brazil) has struggled to improve health, education, infrastructure and job creation. But its ability to do so is tied to national policies.“ thus the city that hosted the first two annual World Social Forums is under siege, part of the front line of a global economic and political war that we Americans are also facing at the local level. National governments the world over, many of them under the thumb of the IMF, have willingly cut back their capacity to meet the needs of the poor by cutting public spending and lowering taxes on the rich. While in the U.S. we face an increased reliance on the culture of "volunteerism" and religious charity (the logical alignment of corporate and right-wing ideological interests), in cities like Porto Alegre, the conscientious involvement of people in local decision-making builds a base of resistance to neoliberal program. (The government of Porto Alegre's willingness to host the World Social Forum reflected an understanding of these dimensions to the struggle and the need to link between and among communities directly).

When the urban planning process involves a conscientious effort to involve people in the workings of their own government (each year there are hearings in the budget process that are used as a way to prioritize community needs), there is a reduction in bureaucratic inefficiency and municipal corruption. This is a sharp contrast to what happens when corporate charity comes along and takes over different aspects of the "social economy," from childcare to recycling to schools. In Reclaiming America, Randy Shaw describes how neighborhood organizations in the U.S. (patronized by municipal distribution of corporate largesse) have been hollowed out as a driving force for participatory decision--making, becoming less able to stand up for the rights and needs of their communities. Wainwright suggests the same thing can happen in many parts of Brazil: "They will become in effect minnows keeping the water clean for the big fish." Instead, the Porto Alegre participatory budgeting process allows for challenges to corporate perks, and has led to significant concessions for infrastructure improvements and social improvements (e.g. training programs for young employees) that are the complete reverse of the kind of corporate welfare (e.g. TIF districts, tax breaks, etc.) typically given to the Wal-Marts and corporate developers.

Here in the U.S. the process of corporate control over the political process is so advanced that it's difficult for us to even perceive all this, and what the possible alternatives are. Constructing the kind of participatory mechanisms that are on display in Porto Alegre will be a long and difficult challenge. We've essentially become so colonized politically and psychologically that the first step is to recognize that there is such an alternative.

Thus our challenge goes way beyond the 2004 election. We shouldn't set ourselves up for despair if he wins. And face it, should Dean win, we'll still have to pressure him hard to give him the impetus to make the right decisions. Either way, the real task is assembling some sort of infrastructure through which we can begin to revitalize our democratic ideals.

During the holiday season our better selves strive to feel compassion for others.

Scott Peck offers us some related words of wisdom in People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil:

"At one point I defined evil as the exercise of political power -- that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion -- in order to avoid ... spiritual growth."

"I have learned these past years that evil -- whether it be demonic or human -- is suprisingly obedient to authority. Why this is I do not know. But I know that it is so."

"The spirit I witnessed at each exorcism was clearly, utterly, and totally dedicated to opposing human life and growth. ... When asked in one exorcism why it was the Antichrist, it answered, "Because Christ taught people to love each other." When further questioned as to why human love was distasteful, it replied, "I want people to work in business so that there will be war." "

"In the Road Less Traveled I defined mental health as an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs."

(Sounds much like Gandhi's definition of Satyagraha, doesn't it?)

"I think it is necessary that we should hate Satan as well as fear it. Yet, as with evil people, I think it is ultimately more to be pitied."

"It is characteristic of those who are evil to judge others as evil. Unable to acknowledge their own imperfection, they must explain away tyheir flaws by blaming others."

"Remember Saint Augustine's advice to hate the sin but love the sinner."

Buzzflash has a good interview with Jack Huberman, Author of The Bush-Hater's Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years

Remember: Saddam was our man

NEW YORK TIMES
March 14, 2003, Friday

EDITORIAL DESK

A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making

By Roger Morris ( Op-Ed ) 980 words
SEATTLE -- On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.

Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A.

From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt -- much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East -- all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form -- Kassem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies -- chiefly France and Germany -- resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s ''Health Alteration Committee,'' as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.

Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. ''Almost certainly a gain for our side,'' Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy the day of the takeover.

As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.

According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad -- for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers -- including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time -- speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.

This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.

The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce, then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers, scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's long rule? Why should they believe America and its latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less vengefully, now than in the past?

If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (movie)

If you get the chance to see this film -- probably the time an attempted coup has been documented from the inside -- do it. This is history, high drama, and political intrigue at its finest.

Irish documentarians Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were in Venezuela months before the coup began, making a movie about the country's lef-leaning president, Hugo Chavez, whose detractors (including the oiligarchy and the corporate media) paint him as a Castro-esque tyrant, and whose support comes from the 80% of the population that lives in or near poverty. Although they did make a film about Chavez, they unexpectedly found themselves in the heart of a coup d'etat.

The film is great for many reason, not just because the events are so unbelievable but because the filmmakers have so much access to events on the inside of the Presidential palace as the balance of power flip-flops. They caught just about every important development, and present the coup as it unfolds in a quick, tight and thorough manner.

The strategy of the coup-makers seemed to follow the traditional playbook set out in Luttwak's book (and CIA manuals). First, the 20% of the population that hate Chavez (the upper class and corporate technocrats) are mobilized to march on the Presidential palace. When they're close to confronting the thousands of Chavez supporters that defiantly defend Chavez by surrounding the Presidential palace, snipers start suddenly shooting down from high-rise balconies.

The corporate-owned media (4 of 5 channels) begin to tip the balance in favor of the crisis by repeatedly showing footage of Chavez supporters firing pistols at some unseen targets. (The insinuation being that they are the snipers, rather than firing back under fire -- one in four Venezolanos carries a pistol). The bias of the commerical media -- just like it was during the Iraq war -- is so blatant that it's clear that in times of crisis, the other side needs its own means of communication.

At this point, the elite military move in with tanks, surrounding the Palace and cutting off the state-owned news channel (the only one that Chavez and his supporters have to get their message out). After the military coup-leaders storm the palace, Chavez refused to resign, so they "arrest" him (essentially kidnap him, and remove him to an offshore island).

At this point, when all seems lost, interesting things begin to happen that restores one's faith in the people. Despite the coup-plotters' control of the media and the military and a vocal 20% of the population (and well wishers in Washington and their proxies sitting offshore), the vast majority of the people begin to protest en masse.

After his election in 1998, Chavez worked hard to build the strength of community-based organizations. These groups taught people how to read, and one of the key documents people became literate in is the country's Constitution. As a result, a groundswell of resistance to the illegal coup begins to grow in the slums, and come down from the hills like a mudslide.

Despite facing police violence, tens of thousands of people re-surrounded the Palace.

Next, the palace guard turn around and arrest the coup-plotters, the cabinet is brought back in from hiding, and the state TV station is brought back online as news comes in from military barracks all over the country that most of the military did not support the coup. Eventually, Chavez is brought back by helicopter. (Barranco, the illegitimate president, moved to Miami.)

There are a lot of lessons in this movie about the role of the media, how popular governments are paid back when they organize and educate their base of support, and how careful the U.S. government is to not to leave any fingerprints when it meddles in the affairs of other countries. (It's still left unclear if the coup was organized and orchestrated by the CIA, but there is lots of evidence suggesting U.S. involvement, particularly given the fact that the coup's plotters were seen going in and out of the U.S. embassy in Caracas in the months leading up to the coup. The New York Times reported that the National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA conduit in the past) funded groups opposed to Chavez. ("Of particular concern is $154,377 given by the endowment to the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, the international arm of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., to assist the main Venezuelan labor union in advancing labor rights." -- The Venzuelan unions led the anti-Chavez protests before the coup. And the Center for International Labor Solidarity is the successor to AIFLD, which was notorious for collaborating with the CIA in countries like Honduras and Guatemala, where death squads regularly targeted labor leaders in the 1980s.)

More on Venezuela and the film:
Gregory Wilpert's account from Venezuela
London Observer: coup plot linked to Bush
Mark Weisbrot: Bush still pushing for regime change in Venezuela
NYTimes Review of this movie.
Iran-Contra figure Otto Reich's role in the coup and demotion after it failed.

Note: Harvey’s sent me an email suggesting that I don't mention the book soon enough in this review.
I agree that we shouldn’t beat around the bush if we’re gonna beat Bush, but haven't change it much.

George W. Bush vs. The Superpower of Peace
By Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis
(Published by the Columbus, Ohio-based Free Press, www.freepress.org)

Even if it's more accurate to trace the neoconservatives' philosophy to its origins in Trotsky's belief in "permanent revolution," it's time someone took off the gloves and compared George W. Bush's radical agenda to previous right-wing revolutions, even and especially the Nazis. The problem, of course, is that anyone who dares to do so in polite company immediately gets tarred and feathered as a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Of course, the same analysis is being put forth in more polite ways. The most accurate depiction of Bush's revolutionary agenda in the mainstream media are the adept and urbane columns of the New York Times' Paul Krugman:

"It has gradually become clear that something deeper than mere bad economic ideology is at work," Krugman explains in the introduction to The Great Unraveling, his collection of columns. "The bigger story is America's political sea change. ... It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement -- which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media -- as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system."

(Of course Indonesians, Chileans and Argentines know that "Kissinger" is synonymous for a kind of fascism, given his complicity with right-wing dictators in those countries and their genocidal campaigns.)

Krugman's deft, incisive prose ties the neocons' imperialist foreign policy agenda to Bush's brutal domestic agenda, with its rollback of civil liberties, tax cuts for the rich and skyrocketing deficit (which, if you understand Grover Norquist's plan, are being built up for strategic reasons, to serve as justification for future deep cuts in social programs like Head Start and, in the future, social security).

But if you're looking for something a little more blunt, pick up this new book by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis who, dispensing with any polite courtesies, set to the task of undoing the trap door on the underbelly of the Trojan horse known as "compassionate conservatism," so that all the ugly truth about the Bush right-wing revolution comes spilling out in column after column.

These guys called it early on. On inaugural day, Wasserman wrote: "After the early skirmishes, and except for the easy battles, the Democrats will roll over for the Bush junta. Their money comes from the same corporations. They won't withstand a focused, massively financed right-wing juggernaut intent on substituting pure muscle for the lack of a popular mandate. That's the way they do it in the Third World. Who will stop them here?"

So far, no one, since there isn't much of an ideological counterweight to the far right in the U.S. right now. As a result, ever since 9/11, the Bush administration's ability to "shock and awe" has worked more effectively against congressional Democrats than it has in Baghdad.

Think of how astonishing it is that the Democratic leadership failed to make anything of the corporate scandals in the 2002 elections (Enron had 40 ex-execs and lobbyists embedded in the Bush administration; his own SEC whitewashed Bush's inside-trading history at Harken; remember the video that surfaced of Cheney praising the "above the normal" accounting advice he got from Arthur Anderson?). And how easily they rolled over for a series of tax cuts that benefit less than 10% or the public (as Steve Brouwer points out in the newly-released Robbing Us Blind, it's not "class warfare" when the 90 % of Americans who stand to lose never made it to the battlefield).

And, of course, there was the war:

"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.“ -- Hermann Goering

Fitrakis and Wasserman aren't the only ones to compare the Bush league to the Nazis. Remember the German official who got canned after making the comparison at an obscure community meeting? Thom Hartmann has written similar pieces for Common Dreams. And on October 17, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, explicitly compared the Bush media operation to that run by Hermann Goering, mastermind of the Nazi putsch against the German people, on the floor of Congress.

For more conspiratorial-minded people, the Bush-Nazi connection is easy to see not just from his policies, but from family connections. (Krugman wisely avoids going there, but someone has to.) The same day that Byrd made his speech, for instance, AP published a story circulating around the web for some time that linked Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Wasserman and Fitrakis heap a bunch of provocative evidence onto all the other family skulls and bones. Just after 9/11, for example, Bush attended a New York Yankees game (soon after the 9/11 disaster), where he wore a fireman's jacket. Karl Rove, sitting in George Steinbrenner's box, likened the roar to "a Nazi rally."

A month after Byrd's speech, the son of an Austrian "brown shirt" -- Hitler's street muscle for the Anschluss (invasion of Austria) -- took over the governorship of California. Two weeks before Byrd's speech, ABC News broke the story of the 1975 interview in which Schwarzenegger was asked whom he admired: "I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."

It probably won't happen here. But before you finish this book, you start thinking that maybe it already is. Wasserman and Fitrakis' training as historians and activist roots give these essays a strong feel for the trajectory of events, which lends a certain power to the analogy.

I think some of the essays toward the end are much stronger than the beginning, and would advise readers to jump around. It's probably difficult for most readers to imagine why they begin part one with an essay on the Bush family's ties to Reverend Moon unless you remember the Reagan era, although I thought there were some very provocative things in there. (The New York Times noted in 1997 that Moon "has been reaching out to conservative Christians in this country in the last few years by emphasizing shared goals like support for sexual abstinence outside of marriage and opposition to homosexuality." Where's today's Wilhelm Reich to explain the function of sexual repression in the development of fascist societies?)

Perhaps it's just a matter of temperament, but it's often surprising that Fitrakis and Wasserman end so many of their columns on an optimistic note. (E.g. "Bush himself has handed an organized, focused and optimistic SuperPower of Peace the tools it needs to get stomping. So let's roll.") Because, as activists always say, Power never voluntarily concedes anything. Of course, it's good to be reminded that Bush didn't win the 2000 election, and a lot of people who voted for him now (including many in the military) will most likely not be voting for him next time.

A lot is riding on the outcome of the 2004 election. Despite some of the problems endemic to the Democratic party, and the instrumentalist forces driving history, at this point I would consider Dean's centrism an acceptable check on the juggernaut of fascism. The Republicans will use fear. And we should be afraid. Be very afraid. For very different reasons.

It could get very ugly (according to a friend of mine with a similarly pessimistic temperament, we could have four or five Floridas in 2004, because of a clause in the Help America Vote Act which established a category of "provisional" votes that would have to be counted in the event of a close election -- cast by voters who for some reason or another have a voting card but are not showing up on the precinct rolls -- hence the need for Ralph Reed's brownshirts).

It's true that "fascist" has been thrown around loosely, ineptly used to describe the Klan, manufacturers of napalm and nukes, and even al Qaeda (it's surprising to see such sloppy diction coming from people like Christopher Hitchens -- al Qaeda is largely a stateless network of terrorist fanatics, not a political party seeking to dominate a state, through which it seeks imperial expansion through military means, unless the argument is that their goal is to take over Saudi Arabia).

It's a lot easier to label foreign terrorists as fascists than a faction that controls your own government.

In his book on the topic, James D. Forman describes Fascism: "few Fascist groups have risen above the status of a minority party with a hysterical chip on its shoulder. Some, however, have obtained power within a national state, at which point the last democratic veneer has been rapidly abandoned. National solidarity has been asserted. Class differences have been denied and so-called misfits have been eliminated. Politically speaking, the individual has ceased to exist. The party has become the state, and the state has looked around for more enemies in order to fulfill its final objective. That final objective, of course, is imperialistic expansion..."

Wasserman and Fitrakis will no doubt be dismissed as cranks. And I have to say, to those who don't read much of this stuff, some of these essays involve a stream of associative logic that is pure latenight rant. But there's a lot here that can't easily be tossed aside. And I'm glad someone put it all down for the record.

What ultimately matters, as they suggest, is that "if the Bush administration objects to being compared with the Nazi elite, perhaps it should act less like it."