One of the crucial steps by which the US entered a state of permanent warfare was when acts of ‘terror’ (however one defines that politically malleable word) shifted from being criminal acts that could and should be treated as lying within the province of law enforcement agencies, to political acts that required a military response such as bombing and invading countries or extra-judicial ones such as setting up kangaroo courts where the normal processes did not apply but convictions could be easily obtained or even where people could be held without trial indefinitely.
[Read more…]

The slide into lawlessness by successive US administrations has been aided by the courts which have been cowed by the ‘war on terror’ to essentially give carte blanche to the administration to do whatever it claims it needs to do to ‘keep us safe’. For example, it was ruled that Jose Padilla could not even sue Donald Rumsfeld and others who were responsible for the brutal treatment he received. The Obama administration has continued the process, covering up its own crimes and those of its predecessors while making token gestures towards upholding the rule of law.
[Read more…]

It is now the fashion to claim that the government should stay completely out of people’s lives and that we should manage on own own. What many of the people who make such claims do not seem to realize is that they are the direct beneficiaries of many government programs.

Steve Benen points out a chart shows the enormous number of people who say they have not used a government social program who have in fact benefited in some way or other.

This kind of cluelessness is only possible because, unlike the private sector, the government rarely broadcasts the fact that they are giving you a benefit. The public works signs that say “Your tax dollars at work” may be the only exceptions.

The most obtuse of such people may be the actor Craig T. Nelson who in a TV interview with Glenn Beck condemned government aid to the poor as coddling, giving himself as an example of someone who heroically struggled through difficult times entirely on his own. “They’re not going to bail me out,” Nelson said. “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”

… from Paul Krugman:

[T]he surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon. To be considered credible on politics you have to have considered Bush a great leader, and not realized until Katrina that he was a disaster; to be considered credible on national security you have to have supported the Iraq War, and not realized until 2005 that it was a terrible mistake; to be credible on economics you have to have regarded Greenspan as a great mind, and not become disillusioned until 2007 or maybe 2008.

It should not be a surprise that those who need a job sometimes have to say and do things that they may not agree with. We can understand such behavior when it is done by people occupying lowly positions and who have few options. What is more surprising is when people who have perfectly good and secure careers are willing to betray the principles they stood for simply to be close to power.

Harold Koh, former Dean of the Yale law school and now adviser to the State Department, who used to be a strong voice for the rule of law and opposition to the imperial presidency, provides a sad but perfect case study of this phenomenon. He has become this administration’s John Yoo, an academic who is willing to provide the rationale for whatever his boss wants to do. In Yoo’s case the issue was torture. In Koh’s it is the absurd claim by Obama that the US is not engaged in hostilities in Libya as envisaged by the War Powers Act. Like Yoo, Koh could have easily afforded to stand on principle and even enhanced his career and reputation by doing so. But instead he sold his soul.

As Gene Healy says, “It’s the kind of story you hear again and again in D.C. — on the right and the left — of principles sold out for the dubious rewards of “access” and “relevance.” This town is “Hollywood for the Ugly” in more ways than one.”

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

[I]t’s easy to see how Koh has risen from token liberal placed in an inconsequential “advisory” position at State to the face of the Obama administration and prime Presidential spokesman. As Barack Obama himself has repeatedly shown, and as his underling Koh has dutifully learned, one does not advance in Washington power circles by adherence to any sort of principle or actual conviction. One accumulates power by saying anything and everything necessary to acquire and hold onto it: one key reason I now all but disregard what Obama says, and watch only what he does.

As far back as in 1946, George Orwell described in his classic essay Politics and the English Language how politicians deliberately corrupt language so that certain political terms no longer have any core meaning but become infinitely malleable, designed to fit whatever need the politician has in mind.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
…
[Read more…]

Henry Siegman makes in more detail the point that I made recently, that the US and Israel are pursuing policies that will lead to disaster in the Middle East.

Lawrence Davidson says that the rising numbers of Israeli Jews who are leaving or planning to leave that country permanently is a sign that they too are concerned about the future. The ones who remain are amongst the most fanatically religious and ideological. He adds, “This is what happens when any group gives itself over to a doctrine, be it racial, religious or political, which destroys all notions of common humanity. That is what the prevailing ideology of Israel has done.”

Currently in the US the willingness to mount a sustained protest against injustices is usually lacking. Even the tea party movement, while very vocal, did not take to the streets on a continuous basis. The closest we came to that in recent days was in Wisconsin when there were continuous protests at the state capital against the laws eliminating collective bargaining for public employees. For a while those mass protests spread to Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Why didn’t they take root and spread?

Part of the reason is the fact that in the US voting is still perceived as a viable mechanism for change. This gives the government in power a legitimacy that people are unwilling to challenge. Many people in the US are wary of change that comes about through mass mobilizations in the street because of the sense that elected governments are more representative of the views of the population than crowds of demonstrators, however large.

This raises the question of what makes a government legitimate. One could argue that a government that gets into office as a result of a vote of the people has a presumptive claim to legitimacy, while authoritarian governments that seize and retain power without a vote of any kind are presumptively illegitimate. Those countries that have a tight grip on almost every aspect of their people’s life and can intimidate them into submission (such as North Korea and Burma) are clearly seen as illegitimate.

But things are not that simple. After all, many authoritarian governments (such as in Zimbabwe) conduct elections. Even Hosni Mubarak in Egypt had ‘elections’ that he regularly won by a landslide. Such elections are hardly free and fair since the rulers monopolize the media, restrict, arrest, or otherwise threaten their opponents, rig the ballot boxes, and so on. So the legitimacy of a government ultimately rests on something more subjective, whether large numbers of people in a country feel that their government is legitimate and is responsive to their needs. In Egypt, people clearly felt that it did not, and were willing to challenge it.

In the US, elections are also rigged but not in an obvious way. Here it is done by creating a system in which money rules. The extremely long election season, the dominance of two parties that are merely factions of a single pro-war/pro-business party, a media dominated by corporate interests, the important role that television advertisements play, all conspire to make the ability to raise large sums of money the most important criterion for getting elected to high office, and effectively rules out anyone who wants to challenge the oligarchy. The legitimacy of American governments can be questioned but the abuses are not as yet blatant enough to cause vast numbers of people to take to the streets and demand change.

Conversely, some authoritarian governments that do not hold elections may have more claims to legitimacy than those that do. Take for example China. It is undoubtedly an authoritarian government. It too controls the media to some extent, arrests dissidents, and cracks down on too much open dissent. With its huge population it should be possible to get millions of people into the streets to protest against the government if they felt strongly enough. But the people have not as yet done so, suggesting that they are not as yet willing to challenge the government’s claim to legitimacy.

So how does one measure the legitimacy of a country’s government? The above discussion suggests that one important measure is the ability to mobilize sufficient numbers of people to challenge the government on important issues, people who are willing to risk arrest, beatings, torture, even death for their rights and by doing so are able to inspire enough people to join in the protests that they paralyze the government and even make the military, the ultimate power, hesitant to move against them.

In Egypt, the demonstrators inspired the organized worker trade groups to join them in the later stages and this was an important step in delegitimizing the government. Currently in Greece there have been ongoing protests against the government’s austerity measures that are being forced on the people because of pressures from the IMF and France and Germany as a condition for getting aid that will eventually go to the banksters to bail them out of the crisis they were largely responsible for in the first place. The Greek trade unions have joined the protestors and are calling for general strikes.

The attempt to create a sustained mass protest beginning on October 6 that I wrote about yesterday is an attempt to relight the fires that flickered briefly in Wisconsin. The oligarchy in the US and its representatives in the US in the Democratic and Republican parties have been successful so far in their policy of divide and rule by pitting ordinary people against each other, public sector workers against private, whites against ethnic minorities, blacks against Hispanics, and so on. They will try to create such divisions again among the October 6 movement participants.

In the US, organized labor is often part of the Washington establishment and not eager for a confrontation in the streets and so they tend not to throw their support wholeheartedly into mass movements that they cannot control or which do not serve their narrow interests. This may change in the US as workers find themselves squeezed between losing their jobs overseas and facing cutbacks in wages, benefits, and public services at home. Sandy Pope, a 55-year old woman, is an insurgent candidate running for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, wants to make that union more independent of the Washington establishment.

But in the US, it is the unorganized and diverse middle class, even though getting steadily impoverished, that is the most significant group. How they respond to the protests will be a significant factor in its success. If the tea party groups ever realize that they have far more in common with the October 6 groups than with the oligarchy they have chosen to side with, then we might witness the beginnings of a real movement for change.

It looks like the Israeli government is nervous about the peace flotilla leaving Athens for Gaza and has been involved in some clumsy efforts by front groups to stall or stop it.

One effort involved raising bureaucratic objections with the Greek government, claiming that the boats were not properly insured.

Then a video that tried to discredit the flotilla organizers by claiming that they are dupes of Hamas and discriminate against gays has been exposed as a hoax and is suspected to have been produced with the aid of the Israeli government.

Although it seems to have stalled somewhat, the ‘Arab Spring’ of mass movements that resulted in the ouster of the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and threatens the despotic regimes of Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen is undoubtedly inspiring. It shows that sheer people power, the willingness of large numbers of unarmed people to mount a sustained challenge to the rulers, can result in significant change. (In the case of Libya, the uprising was armed and the intervention of the US and NATO into the conflict means that we can no longer consider this as part of the Arab Spring but more along the lines of a civil war with outside involvement.)
[Read more…]