Barack Obama’s speechwriters are, no doubt, polishing just such a commentary by their boss. In terms of political energy, the event is as inert as Labor Day, itself just around the corner at the start of September. But this year brings welcome relief from such pietism. The premier anniversary celebration of the March has been hijacked by the right-wing commentator, Glenn Beck. The prime speaker will be Sarah Palin, the Tea Party’s pinup girl and as unlikely as any woman in Alaska ever to have had a pinup of MLK on her dorm wall. To have the March on Washington honored by Beck and Palin is as shocking to liberal America as installing Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern slave states in the Civil War, next to Lincoln in the Memorial — an insertion which will no doubt be approved by Congress, and endorsed by Obama in the interests of bipartisanship, just as soon as the 14th Amendment is repealed.

Beck admits that when he scheduled a rally in Washington on August 28 to boost his new book, The Plan, and strut his stuff to the Tea Party masses, he had no idea it was the anniversary of the March. But he swiftly turned ignorance into opportunity. He’s now saying that’s he is working “to finish the job” that was at the heart of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s vision. Beck claims the ideas of Dr. King have been corrupted and that he will resurrect the true King. As part of this mission, Beck is trying to separate Dr. King from social justice and limit King to advocacy of individual Christian salvation.

According to Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, writing on our CounterPunch.org website last week, “Beck has even reached out to distant relatives of Dr. King, like Dr. King’s niece. After questioning her several times he gets her to say that King was not about social justice or government redistribution of the wealth.”

From the left comes the angry response that King was, indeed, committed to the need to redistribute wealth in order to advance a juster nation and was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, in the course of a visit to black city workers on strike.

If Beck’s hijacking provokes some honesty among the left in general about King and about black leadership today, then Beck will have performed a useful service. Too late now to organize the obvious, a huge counter demonstration to call Beck to accounts and run him and Palin off. The left is too weak for that, having now given up gluten which has given us leavened bread for 5,000 years.

The March of 1963 was actually called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It wasn’t King’s idea, but that of A. Philip Randolph who had planned a similar march in 1941. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only one of five main sponsoring groups. Some of these saw the march’s purpose not as high-flown talk about dreams but as harsh reproof of President John Kennedy. They accused him of dragging his feet on giving legislative heft to the civil rights movement that had moved into high gear three years earlier. Julian Bond’s speech denouncing Kennedy’s weakness was famously censored by the March’s organizers.

King’s political career was heading into crisis. Three years later, in 1967, he was booed by blacks at a rally in Chicago. He recalled later what he thought that night: “I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom ‘all, here and now.’ I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they had felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. … They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”

It was one thing to force a chain restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, to allow blacks to sit at a previously Whites Only counter; it was quite another to attack the racism embedded in the American system so savagely excoriated by the greatest American black revolutionary of the 1960s, Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965.

Beck, to a certain extent, has it right. In 1963 King was on the same tack as another man professing confidence in the American system to engender justice out of an innate, individually virtuous moral tropism to do the right thing — Barack Obama in 2008. King was wrong then, just like Obama is two generations later. It’s a matter of class war, not individual character traits.

King moved to the left in the mid-60s. He had to. In Riverside Church in New York, a year before his death he gave a far more powerful speech than 1963’s “I have a dream” address. He called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …[T]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar… it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

This was a far cry from what White Power wanted from King, which was the soft rhetorical pillow on which all Dreamers could lay their heads: MLK’s 1963 dream that “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”

On August 28, 2010, 47 years after the March for Jobs and Freedom, America has plunged into the vortex of long-term mass unemployment. No jobs, particularly for young blacks. So much for jobs.

What about freedom? Thirty years ago, fewer than 350,000 people were held in prisons and jails in the United States. Today, the number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 2,000,000. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32%, or 1 in three. Black boys are five times as likely as white boys to go to jail. Former prisoners are permanently relocated on society’s margins, these days some five million of them, denied the right to vote in most states.

Professor Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow argues convincingly that we have a purposeful system of mass incarceration, with blacks as the prime victims. Today, in this fearful crisis there is no effective black leadership, starting with President Obama who has marvelously fulfilled his function as political sedater of black aspirations, starting with the promotion of his own success story. “Yes, we can.”

Oh, no they can’t. It’s not in the Master Plan. Black politicians are well aware that most of their black constituents will stay with Obama till the end, whatever he does. So most of them remain quiet — and yield the stage to an opportunist like Beck, flanked by Ms. Palin. Malcom X, who called the 1963 March on Washington “a picnic” and “a circus,” would have had a good laugh about that.

The Left & Iraq: Snatching Defeat

from the Jaws of Victory

“The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all — it’s rebranding the occupation… What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon.”

So declared Seumas Milne of The (UK) Guardian on August 4. Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, they say that Uncle Sam still effectively occupies Iraq, still rules the roost there. They gesture at 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, “advising” and training the Iraqi army, “providing security” and carrying out “counter-terrorism” missions.

Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the “coming surge” of contractors in Iraq, swelling up from the present 100,000. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000. Of these contractors 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly “third country nationals,” typically from the developing world.

“The advantage of an outsourced occupation,” Milne writes, “is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq.“

“Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East ?,” Tariq Ali asked in the New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously, “They have reason to exult, and reason to doubt.” But the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the American Empire, with a “predominantly Shia army — some 250,000 strong— …trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance,” all this with “the blessing of the saintly Sistani’s smile.”

The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali is oil. Milne gestures to the “dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies.”

Is it really true that though the US troop presence has dropped by 120,000 in less than a year, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though now no US troops patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the US Embassy — deployed in its Vatican City-size compound, (mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California and planned in the same phase of megalomania) cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs; nor are the private contractors.

Is a Shia-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani who forced the elections of 2005, calling Bush on his pledge of free elections, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunni — who boycotted the election anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break “the Iraqi resistance” how come the United States constantly invokes the menace of Iran and decries its influence in Iraq?

The “Iraqi resistance” invoked in worshipful tones by Tariq Ali, as opposed to his ironic “saintly” reserved for Sistani, means, in his perspective, the Sunni. But if the Sunni ever had a strategy beyond a strictly sectarian agenda, it was scarcely advanced by blowing up Shi’a pilgrims and their shrines and setting off bombs in marketplaces. If Moqtada al Sadr has been side-lined by the US and its supposed creature, Sistani, why has he been described as the “kingmaker” since his success in the parliamentary election this past March?

As for the contractors, those sinister Third World mercenaries should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like, who will now be supposedly handing down orders to the Iraqi government. This takes a very imperial, and contemptuous attitude towards the capabilities of the Iraqi people.

If this really was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.

Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion-barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion-barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.

Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh. … Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No’.”

So either the all powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking, or the all powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, “the war for oil” doesn’t look in very good shape.

Milne advances the odd idea that with the (entirely imaginary) US “control” of Iraqi oil “the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.” In fact, the last thing the majors want is to cut world oil prices.” Ask BP.

Milne and Ali are being naive and credulous in taking at face value US officials declaring that they are not wholly withdrawing and they will still be in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The reason for saying this is that they don’t want to see their influence go wholly to zilch. They therefore have to maintain — and are dutifully echoed on the left — that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by reduction of troop numbers from 150,000 to less than a quarter of that number.

The US line on this is in one sense sensible: In Iran many Iranians saw the hidden hand of Britain behind developments long after the Brits’ real power had faded almost to nothing. In the case of the US in Iraq it is easy to sell this when the right and left agree that the US is too powerful to have suffered a defeat.

The American right tried to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by claiming that “the surge” — a pr ploy by General David Petraeus to mask US withdrawal — was a military success, rather than the Sunni abandoning “national resistance” and throwing in their lot with the Americans. The left — or the substantial slice of it hewing to the Milne/Ali line — snatches defeat from the jaws of a victory over America’s plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has successfully established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.”

Iraq is in ruins — always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should report this, but also hammer home the message that in terms of its proclaimed objectives the US onslaught on Iraq was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

Courtesy, Fibonacci Blue

It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker, struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the courthouse. His ruling was the first in the country to strike down a marriage ban on federal constitutional grounds.

Walker ruled that a California referendum known as Proposition 8, mostly paid for by the Mormons, passed in 2008 and declaring marriage in the state was legal only when transacted between men and women, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution because it discriminates against gay men and lesbians by denying them a right to marry the person of their choice, whereas heterosexual men and women may do so freely.

A final judicial verdict is years away, because appeals will now wend their way slowly through the system until they reach the US Supreme Court, six of whose nine current members are Catholics.

Back in 2004 18,000 same-sex couples were married in San Francisco in the brief period before SF mayor Gavin Newsom’s okay to license same-sex marriages in his jurisdiction was overruled by the state of California. It’s unclear whether there’ll now be a huge boom in San Francisco’s gay tourist economy. Walker has yet to rule whether he’s fired such a starting pistol for renewed gay marriage or whether they’ll have to wait final resolution of the appeals.

On the progressive side there’s a torrent of applause from liberal commentators at Walker’s 136-page vitriolic assault on traditional Christian family values, as represented by the Defense of Marriage Act, the California law passed by the voters in 2000 which started the whole ball rolling by reserving the married state to men and women — one of each.

The Tea Party crowd will be similarly heartened because the ruling buttresses their basic charge that America has been taken over by communist sons and daughters of Sodom.

The posture of politicians has often been circumspect, because Americans are pretty much evenly divided on the matter. Barack Obama has hopped backward and forward over the fence, letting it be known he “doesn’t personally support gay marriage,” but thinks Prop 8 was wrong and that the Defense of Marriage Act should be repealed. He’s for civil unions. In the race to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican, former ebay ceo Meg Whitman, says her religious beliefs — Presbyterian — compel her to oppose same sex marriage, though she’s all for civil unions. The Democratic candidate, Jerry Brown, twittered his support for Judge Walker.

Legal experts say Walker wrote a crafty decision supposedly establishing a vigorous factual support base supportive of gay marriage. In fact his animus against the Prop 8 crowd fairly steams off the page. Most of their arguments, Walker writes, “are nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples. The evidence shows that, by every available metric, opposite-sex couples are not better than their same-sex counterparts; instead, as partners, parents and citizens, opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are equal.”

Walker marshals the testimony mustered by the plaintiffs, those challenging Prop 8, into a veritable thesaurus of the miracles wrought by the marriage ceremony. At the mere overture of “Wilt thou take…” it seems that anxieties about self-worth, the burdens of low self esteem, the shadows of social ostracism dissipate in the warm glow of the marriage contract.

By contrast Judge Walker has nothing but contempt for the crudities of Prop 8’s prime witness, David Blankenhorn, who testified that marriage is “a socially-approved sexual relationship between a man and a woman” with a primary purpose to “regulate filiation.” The state, so Walker coldly characterized Blankenhorn’s views, “has an interest in encouraging sexual activity between people of the opposite sex to occur in stable marriages because such sexual activity may lead to pregnancy and children, and the state has an interest in encouraging parents to raise children in stable households. Entrenchment of this norm increases the probability that procreation will occur within a marital union. Because same-sex couples’ sexual activity does not lead to procreation, according to proponents the state has no interest in encouraging their sexual activity to occur within a stable marriage. Thus, according to proponents, the state’s only interest is in opposite-sex sexual activity.”

Blankenhorn, the judge went on with the suspicion of a sneer, “testified that others hold to an alternative and, to Blankenhorn, conflicting definition of marriage: ‘a private adult commitment’ that focuses on ‘the tender feelings that the spouses have for one another’.”

Judge Walker then dismissed Blankenhorn’s testimony as worthless, remarking that the writings of this former Harvard man were not peer-reviewed!

Tender feelings notwithstanding, financial factors were often invoked in the plaintiffs’ testimony. Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami, a male gay couple, said they challenged Prop 8 because marriage has a “special meaning” that would alter their relationships with family and others. Zarrillo described daily struggles that arise because he is unable to marry Katami or refer to Katami as his husband. ‘My partner and I want to open a joint bank account,’ and we’re hearing, ‘Is it a business account? A partnership?’

Other witnesses cited favorably by the judge testified San Francisco “lost and continues to lose money” because Proposition 8 slashed the number of weddings performed in San Francisco and “decreases the number of married couples in San Francisco, who tend to be wealthier than single people because of their ability to specialize their labor, pool resources and access state and employer-provided benefits.”

“What we’re really talking about in the nonquantifiable impacts,” declared one pro-gay marriage witness, “are the long-term advantages of marriage as an institution, and the long-term costs of discrimination as a way that weakens people’s productivity and integration into the labor force.”

Same-sex marriage was hailed in Judge Walker’s courtroom as a social stabilizer, an essentially conservative force. It seems, there are more than than 107,000 same-sex couples living in California and in Judge Walker’s approving resume of testimony, “are similar to married couples. According to Census 2000, they live throughout the state, are racially and ethnically diverse, have partners who depend upon one another financially, and actively participate in California’s economy. Census data also show that 18% of same-sex couples in California are raising children.” Mind you, California has 37 million people in it, so 200,000 or so people in same-sex stable relations is a pretty small drop in the turkey baster.

In fact the drive for gay marriage is against the trend of the times, which is the single state, or people increasingly united — depending on the state they live in — by some form of civil union for the purpose of benefits, pensions, healthcare, wills, inheritances and so forth. Across America, on the last Census, there were 100 million unmarried employees, consumers, taxpayers, and voters who headed up a majority of households in 22 states, more than 380 cities.

Gays are crowding to board a sinking ship. Married couples with kids, who filled about 90% of residences a century ago, now total about 20%. Nearly 30% of homes are inhabited by someone who lives alone — no doubt awaiting foreclosure. The 2010 Census should show further dramatic changes.

If he’s for civil union, Barack Obama should give marriage, straight or gay, the coup de grace by pressing for a revision of federal laws to allow those in civil unions — straight and gay — to inherit their due portion of Social Security benefits of their deceased partners. That really would be a gamechanger.

I’m for anything that upsets the applecart, but why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about. Assimilation is not liberation, and the invocation of “equality” as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged.

As that excellent San Francisco lesbian paper, Ultra Violet, once put it,

“Marriage isn’t a civil right. It’s a civil wrong. We always thought that one of the good things about being a lesbian, or gay man, is that you don’t have to get married. There is a basic conflict here, between those who see the gay movement as a way to gain acceptance in straight society, and lesbians and gay men who are fighting to create a society in our own image. A decent and humane society where we can be free. The origins of the LGBTQ movement are revolutionary. The rebellions at Stonewall and San Francisco City Hall were led by drag queens and butches who rejected heterosexual roles and restrictions… According to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, there are 1,138 federal rights and responsibilities that are automatically accorded to married people. Why should we fight for 1,138 rights for some people, instead of all rights for all people?

“The right wingers say marriage is a sacred religious institution. We agree. The state has no business getting involved in religious institutions, from sanctioning personal unions to legislating what schoolgirls should wear on their heads.”

Mind you, as a friend of mine remarks, “Practically in this poisonous capitalist climate where marriage is being promoted as a principle of female and child submission, the desire for marriage by gays is nothing but a security measure to obtain equal right in property and inheritance rights. Since we all live and perform within this bondage why deny them the rights to profit by this system too? To be holier than thou, expecting gays to be above this kind of domination is the worst sort of oppression.”

Final irony. The Tea Party howls that communist sodomites are destroying America. Judge Walker, one of two openly gay federal judges in America, was given his first appointment to the bench by Ronald Reagan, advanced by George Bush Sr and, as a libertarian, avers that selection of lawyers judging financial and drug cases should be governed by public auction. He’s no Commie. Anyway, Commies were often notable for their enormously long marriages.

In the old days I was always being asked along to some spry Red couple’s golden or diamond anniversary, the premises invariably wreathed in cigarette smoke. There are some no doubt still out there, heading for the granite anniversary, which is the 90th — which surely must take the physical form of the tombstone at their heads, cigarettes extinguished at last. ¥¥

The Mothers’ Rebellion: Defending the 700,000 Most Despised People in America

Our new newsletter is hitting the mailbox, and the pdf-carrying ether, this weekend. Meet the women trying to reform America’s insane sex offender laws. JoAnn Wypijewski describes their struggle. 80,000 dead, 8,000 disappeared: Peter Lee reports on the savage struggles in Kashmir. “Food security”… “sustainable agriculture”…“slow food”… “food sovereignty.” R.G. Davis separates the real from the phony in the world of organic food. ¥¥

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

In our latest newsletter, hot off the press — What do the W.R. Grace Company, the Trade Towers, Libby Montana and asbestos have in common? Andrea Peacock weaves the fatal threads together in a brilliant investigation. The terrible bottom line:

“If asbestos-related diseases begin showing up in rescue workers and others exposed at Ground Zero in the next few years, there’s little doctors can do about it. There’s medication to ease the symptoms of asbestosis — in which scar tissue caused by asbestos fibers gradually suffocates victims — but no cure. Those with lung disease can forestall the inevitable decline by taking care of themselves: quit smoking, get plenty of exercise to keep their lung capacity as high as possible. It could take another 30 years for mesothelioma cases to manifest — an asbestos-related lung cancer that kills fast once it hits. The full legacy of that day, for which W.R. Grace now bears some responsibility, will be unfolding for decades. ”

Also in this powerful latest edition: After a mine disaster in western Siberia Russian workers rise up. Boris Kagarlitsky describes the social explosion. Jeffrey Blankfort reviews Quicksand, the book the Israel lobby doesn’t want you to read.

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)

]]> http://theava.com/archives/7032/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/5913 http://theava.com/archives/5913#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:42:38 +0000 Alexander Cockburn http://theava.com/?p=5913 Jeffrey St. Clair contributed to this story.

With the impending departure from the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice John Paul Stevens at the age of 89, we lose one of the nation’s last substantive ties to Great Depression and to the effect of that disaster on the political outlook of a couple of generations.

Stevens’ father, Ernest, owned a famous hotel in Chicago – the Stevens, with 3,000 rooms, now the Hilton. It was built in 1927, and there young John Paul met Amelia Earhart, Charles Linbergh and Babe Ruth.

But by 1934 hard times took their toll. The hotel went bankrupt. John Paul’s father, grandfather and uncle were all indicted on charges that they’d diverted money from the Illinois Life Insurance Co. (founded by the grandfather) to try and bail out the hotel. The uncle committed suicide, and Stevens’ father was convicted. The Illinois Supreme Court exonerated him two years later, stating, “there’s not a scintilla of evidence of any concealment or fraud.”

Thus did John Paul, still in his teens, acquire his life-long skepticism of police and prosecutors. Between the year  he went on the Court (put up by Gerald Ford in 1974 on the recommendation of Ford’s attorney general, Chicagoan Edward Levi), and 2010,  John Paul Stevens voted against the government in criminal justice and death penalty cases 70 per cent of the time. Only one justice – William O. Douglas, whose seat Stevens took over – served longer on the Court. When Justice Harry Blackmun retired in 1994, Stevens became the senior associate justice and, thus, able to assign opinions to the justice of his choice. Stevens played his field expertly, time and again maneuvering the swing vote – Anthony Kennedy – onto his side by assigning him the task of writing the opinion.

The most famous case of this sort was the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, which became the equivalent for gay rights as Brown v. Board of Educationfor racial discrimination. Among other Stevens-written or Stevens-influenced landmark opinions: Atkins v. Virginia, where Stevens successfully won the necessary majority for the view that executing the mentally retarded constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Stevens was also the Court’s most powerful opponent of the so-called doctrine of unitary executive power, which takes the view that the U.S. president and his executive wield constitutionally unchallengeable power. Stevens – again, a true conservative – opposed all such assertions and extensions of dominance by the executive. The relevant case was Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Stevens wrote the majority opinion that Bush Jr. could not unilaterally set up military commissions to try detainees in Guantanamo.

Stevens, the last protestant on the high court, described himself as a conservative, and in one sense he was, because he tried to preserve the spirit of the progressive Warren court through the decades-long swing of the court toward the right, both among the Republican nominees and the ones put up by Clinton (Breyer and Ginsburg) and by Obama (Sotomayor). As Stevens himself has said to law professor Jeffrey Rosen, “Including myself, every judge who has been appointed to the Court since Lewis Powell [1971] has been more conservative than his or her predecessor.”

As Obama and his counselors ponder potential nominees, the air is filled with counsel that Obama should avoid a protracted fight and should pick “a moderate” – i.e., pro-business, pro-government – nominee, like Elena Kagan, 49, now solicitor general and in earlier years head of the Harvard Law School, where she hired Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, where he was intimately tied to the torture and detainee abuse scandals. He’s Harvard’s version of John Yoo. Before that, Kagan served as Clinton’s deputy domestic policy advisor, in which capacity she oversaw, among other assignments, welfare “reform.” One of her colleagues at the White House at that time was Christopher Edley, now the Dean at Boalt, the law school at UC Berkeley. Edley says of Kagan that her politics were “center to center right.”

In the Clinton administration, Kagan helped formulate the Democratic equivalent of what became, in the subsequent W. Bush years, the assertion of unitary executive power. There’s zero evidence that Kagan would do anything to redress the right-wing tilt of the Court and plenty that she might exacerbate it, in the areas of executive power, civil liberties, and assertion of presidential war powers. In her confirmation hearings as solicitor general, she so entranced the right with her proclamations in favor of the War on Terror, indefinite detention, and against any pursuit of war crimes investigations, that Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) said, “it sounded like she was getting a standing ovation from the Federalist Society.”

Kagan is the worst possibility thus far to surface, but the others potential nominees are  scarcely inspiring. There’s the mainstream liberal Diane Wood, who sits the Federal Appeals Court in Chicago, and Merrick Garland, a neoliberal Clinton appointee in the mold of Justice Steven Breyer, corporate America’s judicial representative on the Court. (Stevens, by contrast, began his legal career as an anti-trust lawyer.) Garland, another Chicagoan, is now on the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia.

These are the three frontrunners. The left has put up no preferred nominee, expressing concerns that the Republicans might filibuster. So, why not provoke just such a filibuster with a decent candidate? This appointment, remember, is Obama’s last chance to vindicate the hopes of the left that our African-American president is, at least, as liberal as Gerald Ford and would leave as enduring a legacy as Stevens. Come November, the Democrats will lose control of the House and Obama’s legislative powers will be extinguished, unless he goes into full Clintonian triangulation. It is now, and only now, that Obama can actually install a nominee with the ability to defend and advance progressive interpretations of the Constitution over the next 40 years.

Who could the left put up, as an assertion of what a truly progressive justice might look like? How about Steven Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, the country’s leading anti-Death Penalty litigator from Kentucky? Or, David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown? Or, Pamela Carlan, at Stanford, a former counsel for the NAACP  and openly gay? Or, Jonathan Turley, at George Washington, who is particularly strong on civil liberties and the environment? Turley defended Sami al-Arian, the Rocky Flats workers, attacked warrantless wiretapping. Or, within the administration, Harold Koh, Korean American and one of the principle legal opponents of the torture policies of the Bush years? Koh was originally a Reagan appointee to the Office of Legal Counsel. Turley says Koh is the closest we have to Justice Brandeis.

There’s one more name that has been nervously circulated among progressive circles, that of Elizabeth Warren, currently head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the banking bailout. Warren originally hails from Oklahoma and a professor at Harvard Law School. Warren is as close as we can now get to Stevens’ economic populism and has been eloquent on the topic of corporate skullduggery and on the pro-bank tilt of the bailout. She would, actually, be a shrewd choice for Obama, because it would turn the Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a debate on  economic justice, consumer protection and regulation of Wall Street  where Warren’s Republican opponents be forced to take the side of the rich, at a moment when the rich are not popular with a large number of Americans.
Don’t hold your breath.

Of course there was ritual backslapping for Uncle Sam’s benign role in the planet’s affairs, starting with valiant rescue work in Haiti, a nation for which every US intervention since the time of Thomas Jefferson has been an unmitigated disaster. But on Wednesday night, there was barely time for even a swipe at Iran and North Korea, reduced to offhand mentions, as opposed to the starring roles they formerly enjoyed as members of the “Axis of Evil” in George Bush Jr’s State of the Union speech in 2002. Yemen, surely a strong contender strongly for Axis ranking, wasn’t even mentioned. Plucky little Guinea elicited a nod for its corruption.

Instead, last Wednesday’s night’s Axis of Evil featured a home team, of the banks and the US Supreme Court, whose members were mustered in a small clump almost directly under Obama’s lectern. Last week the Court kicked away most of the few remaining restraints on the ability of corporations to buy the legislators and the laws they desire, and Obama — gazing down at Chief Justice Roberts, leader of the conservative majority of five out of nine on the court which overturned a century’s worth of laws and precedents — called on Congress to redress the situation with new laws. It was amid Obama’s speech last September to a joint session of Congress about health reform that a cracker congressman for South Carolina, Joe Wilson, shouted “You lie” at the president. This time Associate Justice Samuel Alito, an ultra-right Catholic on the Court, started mouthing objections and I thought we’d be treated to the lively spectacle of a member of the US Supreme Court heckling Obama but Alito, warned perhaps by the stiffening back of Roberts, who was sitting directly in front of him, shut his mouth.

As campaign speeches go, albeit dressed up as a State of the Union, Obama delivered his with jaunty aplomb, sometimes light-heartedly, matching the open merriment of Vice President Joe Biden, sitting directly behind him, next to House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi. It wasn’t always clear exactly why Biden was laughing, though I assume it was the same reason that stirred many in the chamber to snigger when Obama started urging them to pass laws ending fiscal excess, along with deficits, earmarks, and undue lobbyist influence on lawmakers. Obama himself seemed to chortle at the manifest absurdity of requesting Congress to do any such thing, and the legislators felt thus empowered to chortle along with him, at the one of the oldest Washington sports of all: running against Washington.

Obama got elected by pledging hope and change and calling for the nation to unite and banish divisiveness. This time he did admit room for undefined philosophical differences which he promptly tried to bridge by offering an anthology of pledges, culled from Carter (green energy), Reagan (line item veto and reducing the world’s nuclear arsenal to zero), earmarks (John McCain), plus the usual commitment to lower the deficit (mandatory in every state of the union speech in living memory.)

There was some fancy political footwork here, which may explain why in the wake of the Massachusetts debacle last week, Obama precipitously proposed a spending freeze on most domestic spending starting in 2011. His proposal was promptly savaged by leftish economists such as Joe Stiglitz and Robert Reich as being the worst possible wound one could inflict on a tottering economy, which is certainly true. It seems, so the economist James Galbraith suggests, that the freeze plan might have been quickly boiled up to head off a proposal for a bipartisan commission empowered by Congress to promote mandatory legislation involving politically horrifying tax hikes and budget cuts. Under cover of the unrealistic “freeze” the deficit busters will now have to content themselves with a mere “presidential commission” on deficit reduction, whose recommendations will be entirely toothless.

Neither bankers specifically nor corporations generally are popular right now. On Tuesday voters in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, voted to raise taxes on corporations and the rich. The measures romped through 54% to 46%, hiking taxes on households with taxable income above $250,000, and setting higher minimum taxes on corporations, with increased tax rates on upper-level profits. In Oregon, there hasn’t been this kind of popularly — sanctioned tax bite out of the backsides of the rich — since the 1930s.

This sets the political stage for the November mid-term elections, and every politician sniffs the popular mood. Hence Obama’s belated dash to head the populist jacquerie. But there’s virtually no chance of any serious financial reform transpiring. Already, in dead of night, Wall Street lobbyists in December — as reported by Andrew Cockburn on CounterPunch.org — crushed legislative language in a financial reform bill to ban Wall Street’s “dark markets” trading in over-the-counter derivatives such as credit default swaps. These were what impelled the financial crisis in 2008.

The bankers will resign themselves to a glancing blow like Obama’s proposed $30 billion levy. But they will surely fight off Paul Volcker, for months languishing in obscurity as head of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, until mustered last week to the president’s side to preside over the White House’s Great Leap Sideways into economic populism. He’s been assigned the task of promoting legislation that will haul the banks back into the Glass-Steagall era when the paltry sums in one’s checking account weren’t immediately securitized and packaged into a CDO squared. Already the Los Angeles Times — normally in Obama’s corner — has editorially savaged Volcker’s plan, as have the Washington Post and, needless to say, the Wall Street Journal.

State of the Union addresses are mostly political window dressing. All those fine proposals have to become laws. It’s one thing to hail Michele Obama, as her husband did on Wednesday evening, for spearheading a movement to combat child obesity. It’s quite another to get through Congress a law banning Chicken McNuggets.

The longer Obama solemnly lectured the Joint Session about the need to change the way Washington does business, the more one had time to study the faces of the legislators and burnish one’s utter confidence in Washington’s unchanging ways. It was the one fact that evening that commanded total agreement, from Republicans, Democrats and the President himself.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Coakley, a former prosecutor and attorney general of Massachusetts, ran a dumb, complacent campaign, allowing Brown, a state senator, to charge that she seemed to believe she had an inherent right to the seat. Coakley ladled out platitudes; Brown, pelting about the Commonwealth in a manly GMC truck, made the Democrats’ health reform bill his prime issue, which was scarcely rocket science, since people of moderate income accurately believe that “reform” is going to cost them money, with zero improvement in overall service.

A year after his inauguration Obama has disappointed so many constituencies that a rebuke by the voters was inevitable. Yesterday it came in Massachusetts, often categorized as the most liberal in the union. This is entirely untrue. It’s a disgusting sinkhole of racism and vulgar prejudice, as five minutes in any taxi in the state, listening to Talk Radio or reading the local newspaper, will attest.

Brown’s achievement is not novel. His type of Republican has been elected governor in Massachusetts three or four times in the last 18 years by the real “majority party” –which is the “unenrolled” independents who are 1 and 1/2 times the size of Democrats in number among registered voters and tower over the Republicans of whom less than 12 per cent are registered as such.

CounterPuncher Steve Early, a labor organizer in the state wrote to us on Monday that Brown is in the mould of two recent Republican governors of Massachusetts, William Weld , and Paul Celluci, the latter two actually being backed by later Change to Win local affiliates like HERE Local 26 and the Teamsters. These were genial, likeable, clean-cut jocks, presenting themselves to independent voters as a much needed public rebuke to “an increasingly corrupt, arrogant or personally screwed up Beacon Hill clique of Democrats (see recent spate of House and Senate member/leader indictments, jailings, and/or resignations pending trial). A lot of folks, at the moment, are again just plain pissed about the self-serving political class of Democratic Donkeys who run our one-party state, including the now unpopular Obama pre-cursor, Deval Patrick.”

Because the Democratic majority in the US senate is now reduced to 59, the common prediction is that the Democrats’ health reform bill is doomed, since it takes 60 votes to override a filibuster, which the Republicans would mount to kill the bill. More likely is that the insurance companie , (which dictated the basic terms of the “reform” and stands to gain millions of new customers who will be forced by law to take out health insurance), will be loath to throw away months of successful lobbying and will dictate some new “compromise” that will allow both Republicans and Democrats to claim victory. Obama will delightedly sign any insurance bill landing on his desk bearing the necessary label, “reform”.

Certainly Coakley’s resounding defeat is grim news for Democratic politicians limbering up for the midterm elections this coming fall. The parallel is with the midterms of 1994, when voters, furious at the bumbling failures of Clinton’s first two years, handed both the senate and the house to Republicans for the first time in decades. Obama has caused fury and disillusion across the spectrum. The nutball right bizarrely portrays him as a mutant offspring of the Prophet Mohammed and Karl Marx, demonstrating that cretinism flows more strongly than ever in Uncle Sam’s bloodstream. The Republican small business crowd tremble at the huge deficits. The independents see no trace of the invigorating change pledged by Obama. Working people in the labor unions who supplied the footsoldiers for Obama’s campaign see no improvement in their economic condition. Everyone knows that Obama is the champion of bankers, not bankrupts. The liberals morosely list twelve months of disasters, from a wider war in Afghanistan, to major betrayals of pledges to restore constitutional restrains after eight years of abuse by Bush and Cheney.

Obama richly deserves the rebuke from Massachusetts. Armed with a nation’s fervent hopes a year ago, he spurned the unrivalled opportunity offered by economic crisis to do what he pledged: usher in substantive change. He’s done exactly the opposite . Wall Street has been given the green light to continue with business as usual. The stimulus package was far too weak. The opportunity for financial reform has passed. Trillions will be wasted in Afghanistan.

A final note on Coakley. She rose to political prominence by peculiarly vicious grandstanding as a prosecutor, winning a conviction of 19-year old child minder Louise Woodward for shaking a baby to death. An outraged judge later freed Woodward, reducing her sentence to less than a year of time served. Then Coakley went after headlines in child abuse cases. Innocent people are still rotting in prison as a consequence of Coakley’s misuse of her office. For this alone, regardless of the setback the Democrats richly deserved, I rejoice in her humiliation.

Even though he’s had to perform all the usual acts of contrition, tumid with “deep regrets” and “sincere apologies” Harry Reid of Nevada is surely getting a bum rap. A forthcoming campaign book, “Game Change,” by Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin and New York’s John Heilemann, quotes the US Senate’s top Democrat as saying of Obama early in his 2008 president bid, that he was “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Republicans have gleefully been painting Reid as a racist for the references to skin tone and the use of “Negro” and “dialect.”

Obama is indeed light skinned and there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out. Forty years ago “Negro” was a correct way of describing African Americans. It’s rather quaint now, but not by definition racist, any more than is “dialect.”

On the other hand, if the late Ted Kennedy was quoting Bill Clinton correctly, the former president most certainly *was* making a racist remark when he said to Kennedy of the black man then battling Mrs Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

The only way Clinton could have wriggled out of that one is to claim that he was actually trying to express to Kennedy his delighted amazement at Obama’s candidacy and at how far America had come in shaking off its racist past. But he hasn’t taken that tack, and Kennedy, in furiously retailing Clinton’s remark, left no doubt about his opinion that it was a racist put-down by Bubba Clinton.

Clinton reinforced the racist interpretation when he called Kennedy after the senator endorsed Obama and snarled, “the only reason you’re supporting him is because he’s black.”

Clinton had it coming to him. For years he’s coasted along on the black novelist Toni Morrison’s supposed compliment that he was “our first black president.” What Morrison actually wrote in 1998, when Clinton was impeached, was as follows: “Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” And what Morrison meant, so she said a decade later, was that “President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. … like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”

There’s plenty of evidence that in terms of effective politics Clinton was an appalling bigot. Fighting for political survival amid the Flowers sex scandal in the 1992 presidential campaign he raced back from New Hampshire to Arkansas to be present in the governor’s mansion to ensure no last minute hitch occurred in the execution of a mentally retarded black man, Ricky Ray Rector. Later in the campaign he made a great show of denouncing a rap singer, Sister Souljah.

In office Clinton consistently demonized black teenage mothers, and promoted legislation, on crime and welfare — delightedly backed by Republicans — that impacted blacks with particular savagery. As with Tiger Woods, his sexual rampages appear to have detoured black women, possibly in Clinton’s case because Bill thought that while he might survive a fling with a nice Jewish girl, getting blowjobs in the Oval Office from a black woman would have been immediate political suicide. Among the black men he caused to suffer were the musicians invited to the White House who had to endure his inevitable intrusions with his saxophone, which he played very badly. Imagine Obama, or any other president, sticking a fiddle under his chin and rushing up to saw away on the instrument amid a White House recital by Itzhak Perlman.

The black men Clinton favored were of unprincipled character, like Ron Brown and Vernon Jordan. Jesse Jackson was summoned to counsel Clinton, not about improving the lot of the poor, but to publicly pray with and spiritually guide the president out of the moral darkness of the Lewinsky scandal. (This is an ongoing duty for which the Rev presumably exacts some form of material quid pro quo, though he may have waived it in Clinton’s case, on the grounds that it was reward enough to be invited to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at that momentous hour. Jackson has similarly counseled beleagured politicians like Trent Lott, the Republican minority leader of the Senate, who got into bad trouble for saying on Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday that the country would have been better off if the south’s most notorious racist had been running the show. The stricken Lott connected to Jackson via Clinton’s lawyer-fixer Lanny Davis, which shows that in matters of spiritual regeneration there can be found the beauty of bipartisanship — or perhaps a complicated plot to finish off Lott. Maybe through his servant Jesse the Almighty hinted to Lott that he would be more forgiving if the Mississippi senator resigned from the post of Senate Minority Leader — which Lott duly did.

The Republicans are sticking it to Reid to distract attention from the fact that the prime activity of their chief spokesmen at the moment — Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh — is to convey to the general population in as vivid terms as possible, short of putting on white robes and cone hats, that the country’s going to the dogs, prostrating itself before Islamic terror, because a black man is ensconced in the Oval Office. On his radio show Wednesday Limbaugh said the earthquake in Haiti will play right into Obama’s hands by allowing him to play up his “compassionate” and “humanitarian” credentials, and that the President will use this crisis to “boost his credibility with the black community.”

Limbaugh, like many Republicans, thinks that Uncle Sam should be stinting in aid to stricken Haiti: “We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the US income tax.” Pat Robertson, America’s top right-wing Christian, announced on his tv show Wednesday that Haiti’s sufferings were the result of a “pact with the devil” that Haitian rebels made in the 18th century. “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. ”

The offhand way Robertson said “true story” to the visibly embarrassed young black woman sitting next to him in the 700 Club studio reminded me very much of his fellow Yalie, George Bush Sr., recycling cherished historical nonsense.

Of course Obama has gone in for Clinton-style grandstanding about blacks to white audiences. Bill and Hillary went after black teenage moms. Obama prefers to talk about the irresponsibility of young black males. He’s not had time to inflict the damage that Bill supervised against poor blacks generally, but his eagerness to bail out bankers rather than bankrupts has been conspicuous from the getgo. As Kevin Alexander Gray recently remarked on our Counterpunch.org website, “So as wealth, poverty, education and health disparities between blacks and whites grow wider, and as the number of black homeless, jobless and incarcerated increases, there is a host of questions blacks need to find answers to and act on. How do they pursue a political agenda, recognizing that Obama is not the ‘president of black America’ and is unwilling to go to the mat for black Americans or any really progressive policies? … And if Obama is not part of the solution, he’s part of the problem. Right now, he’s the latter.”

It’s always sadly comic to listen to these arguments about decorum and whether Reid said something bad or not. It implies that America is sensitive to issues of race. But the indices of rampant, unchanging racism inscribed in almost every economic statistic put out by the US government proclaimed exactly the opposite. Bickering about decorum is a useful red herring.

Goodbye California

The Golden State is going the way Mesopotamia did at the time of the Abbassids 1,400 years ago, with excessive water use sucking the water tables dry and turning prime farm land into saline desert. From the vantage point of Merced, contributor Bill Hatch gives us a pitiless, hugely knowledgeable profile of California’s death plunge, the consequence of political domination of the state by the real estate speculators, acting in concert with big ag “farmers” hawking California’s second most vital resource after air.

As Hatch writes, “The anxiety of the California population, the largest of any state in the country, has created a fertile field for political hysteria. State politics has begun to resemble New Guinea cargo cults, insisting on forcing through infrastructure on more borrowed money in the desperate hope — because our leaders are actually unable to imagine anything else — of more population growth.” They need the population growth — five million since 2000 — since that fuels real estate speculation.

“The odds are better than four to one that by June 1 there will be a medical marijuana law in D.C.” Such is the knowledgeable estimate cited by Fred Gardner in his brilliant overview in the latest newsletter of the marijuana reform movement, one year into the age of Obama. As Gardner makes clear, it’s overwhelming popular support for medical marijuana that is driving reform forward. The tide is sweeping the movement’s reform “leaders” along.

The Goldstone Report has been excoriated by the Israel lobby, denounced by the US Congress and cheered by the left for its unsparing condemnation of Israel’s conduct during its onslaught on Gaza a year ago. But Goldstone insisted as part of his brief that he would equate the actions of the occupied with those of the occupier. This is the premise of his report, and Jennifer Loewenstein describes the consequences of this fatal flaw.

All this, plus Sousan Hammad’s report on the travails of Miss Palestine in the new print edition of our newsletter.

Connoisseurs of the ritual known as “accepting full responsibility” will surely grade Obama a mere B for his performance last Thursday at his White House press conference.

“Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” Obama said, apropos Terror’s near Christmas Day miss on Northwest Flight 253. “As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.”

First strike against Obama’s speech writer is the weasel-use of “ultimately,” not to mention the mawkish use of “solemn.” Second strike is his habitual dive into “systemic failure,” as he termed it earlier in the week. Everyone knows that systemic failure — which Obama has been hawking all week — spells out as “No one is to blame. This is bigger than all of us.” That’s the phrase’s singular beauty. I give John Brennan low marks too. “I told the president today I let him down,” said Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, who followed his boss at the press briefing. Okay so far. Exciting, even. In medieval Japan he would have stuck a sword in his stomach at this point.

Not Brennan. “I am the president’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism and I told him I will do better and we will do better as a team.” The all-time champ at not accepting, while purporting to accept, “full responsibility” was Ronald Reagan, shouldering blame for the criminal saga known as “Iran-Contra,” for which he was indeed entirely responsible and for which he should have been impeached and thrown into prison. The 76-year old president addressed the nation on March 4, 1987, after the Tower Commission had issued uts damaging report about the White House’s guiding role.

Stage one: artful deflection of blame: “First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds — well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.”

A small masterpiece, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Stage 2: Manly openness about some trifling blunders: “One thing still upsetting me, however, is that no one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just can’t say specifically when.” (A lot better than Nixonian lawyer-speak: To the best of my recollection I cannot recall at this point in time.) Then Reagan’s pledge to do better. “Well, rest assured, there’s plenty of recordkeeping now going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Stage 3. Onward and upward! “You know,” Reagan concluded affably, ” by the time you reach my age, you’ve made plenty of mistakes. And if you’ve lived your life properly — so, you learn. You put things in perspective. You pull your energies together. You change. You go forward.” And all this from a man with incipient Alzheimer’s.

The problem with all the gabble about systemic failure and with not making Brennan or at least the head of the US embassy in Lagos resign is that it reminds people that Obama hasn’t got much of a spine, also that systemic failures are impossible to fix within the system’s terms, a judgment wonderfully ratified by Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s insistence on December 27 that “the system worked.”

America’s defenses against terror fouled up on December 25, 2009 for the same reasons they fouled up on September 11, 2001, even though the 9/11 attacks were followed by vast bureaucratic upheavals and searching scrutinies of intelligence procedures.

Now Obama is listing the orders he’s issued to improve interagency cooperation: expand the Watch List, enlarge the overall Terror database, train-up more security personnel at airports. It fulfills the first law of reactive politics, Do something. Issue orders. Look busy. But beyond that, will it stop the next bomber?

It was Napolitano herself, formerly governor of Arizona, who said of the wall being built to stop illegal migrants crossing the southern border, “You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That’s the way the border works.” By the same token, show me a top red alert urgent intelligence report and I’ll show you 100 other red alert intelligence reports piled on top of it. Show me the sixteen agencies which maker up the “U.S. Intelligence Community,” plus tactical military intelligence and security organizations, plus those responsible for security responses to transnational threats including terrorism, cyber warfare and computer security, narcotics trafficking, and international organized crime, and I’ll show you bureaucratic rivalry and confusion, buck-passing, active sabotage of rival agencies, incompetence, sloth and all the sins and inefficiencies familiar to anyone who has ever read a decent work of history about such matters.

Add to all this the fact that no one “responsible” ever does have to pay any sort of price. A lot of people lost their lives on September 11, 2001 but so far as I can recall not one lost their job for letting it happen. No lives at all were lost on December 25, 2009, but no jobs lost either, from Brennan on down.

Maybe there’s progress. The lowly TSA guard who didn’t notice that man going through the “No Entry” gate to give his girlfriend another goodbye kiss at Newark Airport (mass panic, total shut-down) has been placed on leave.

Now there’s an avalanche of punditry about Britain’s Islamic minority as the petri dish in which toxic cultures of militant Islam flourish and multiply. At this rate they’ll soon be deploying the Delta Force in Tower Hamlets and assassinating imams.

As noted here last week, the petri dish for terror is US national policy, abetted by junior partners in the UK, France and Germany: widening attacks on Afghanistan, an unfolding record of torturing captives to death since 2001, full support for Israel’s onslaughts on Palestinians and calculated mass murder. It’s scarcely surprising that we’ve now had this terror bid in the new Age of Obama, and a supposed swerve into rationality. The swerve has been the other way and guess what, the Muslim world has noticed.

What words can a radical imam in the UK or Yemen have to offer as incitement to attack America as vividly persuasive as the policies adopted by Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, expanding the war in Afghanistan, cheerleading for Israel and — it turns out — initiating a dirty war in Yemen? When the US Congress on November 4 last year voted 334 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report for its charge that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza how many young Muslims exclaimed, That does it, and headed for their local Terrorist recruiting office?

How the terrorists — Al Qaeda or some cognate organization — must be exulting! All that has to be done is to get someone on a plane bound for a US city, with explosives deployed on or in their person. The carrier doesn’t need even to successfully detonate the bomb, just be discovered. Result: political hysteria in the US; another savage blow at the aviation industry and tourism here in the Homeland. The latest US Dept. of Commerce statistics show a continued drop in foreign visitors to the US. Since 9/11/2001 there’s been a 17% decline — 60 million tourists. A survey concludes a negative impression of the US is the primary reason for this decline. The wearisome new security screenings, with travelers fretting about TSA guards chortling lewdly over full-body scans, will accelerate that trend.

Back in 1962 Roberta Wohlstetter published “Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,” a famous reconstruction of the indications and warning process preceding the successful Japanese surprise attack of December 7, 1941. The book was a disingenuous one since part of Wohlstetter’s agenda was to discredit the fairly persuasive evidence that Roosevelt was aware of an impending Japanese attack — though not its dimensions — and saw it as something that would finally allow him to trump all opposition to the US’s entry into World War Two. But Wohlstetter, excavating all the “systemic” obstructions to the efficient use of intelligence, did accurately conclude that “We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it.” It’s no solution to requisition bigger and better x-ray machines at points of departure and entry, to expand watch lists and computer data bases. Obama promised change, in his campaign and in Cairo. So far as the Islamic world is concerned — he’s betrayed that promise. That’s the systemic failure.

Sometimes, on the edge of a new decade, things look dismal but one has the feeling that something good just might be around the corner. The 70s for example: at their onset, Nixon was in the high noon of his first term, drenching Vietnam in blood, while his attorney general John Mitchell pored over plans to lock up the left at home. It looked as though darkest night was falling.

And yet there was a certain edgy, desperate hope in the air — and four short years into the 70s the hopers, no longer desperate but exultant, saw Nixon clamber into a helicopter and take off from the White House lawn towards his version of St Helena, in San Clemente; and nine months later on April 30, 1975, Gunnery Sgt. Bob Schlager and ten other Marines finally caught the last helicopter off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.

Ah, those raucous, wonderful 70s! Those who missed them will never know the sweetness of life, as Talleyrand said of the Ancien Regime. Sweet and sharp. I spent them in New York and there was no better place to be.

With the 80s you could feel the air beginning to seep out of the tires. For one thing, Death kept missing his appointments in Samarra, after years of rigorous punctuality with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers. He’d already fumbled two dates with Gerald Ford, when his chosen messengers, Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme, messed up. On March 30, 1981, another of death’s chosen messengers, John Hinckley, tried to shoot Reagan and failed to get his man.

That would have been a game changer! We’d have had three months of Ron instead of eight weird years when America plunged into fantasy, where it still resides. We wouldn’t have heard Ron give the Star Wars speech, or Nancy just saying No. Or Ron saying he expected Armageddon to come in his lifetime. Or Nancy running the country with the help of Mrs. Quigley, her astrologer. We’d have had George Bush Sr., surely a one-termer. It would have all been different.

But would it really? Clinton and the 90s suited each other fine, and Bill gave us our last known dose of politics as fun, with the Lewinsky affair, but the decade would have had the same general contour — though a Republican president would have had much bigger problems getting the poor tossed off welfare.

And then in 2000 we had Bush and Gore, and the American people very reasonably couldn’t figure out which one to go for. The folks who knew Al best — the voters of Tennessee, went for George. And then in September of Bush’s first term we had a game changer here in America. Death finally rounded up a gang of messengers with a real commitment to getting the job done.

But game changer isn’t quite the word for the event that launched the Noughts. 9/11 just speeded up basic tendencies which were already in train. Invasion of Iraq? The onslaught had been in full spate through most of Clinton-time via a lethal embargo and almost daily bombings — and the course of Iraqi politics had been set back in 1963 when the Kennedy administration okayed CIA complicity in the overthrow and murder of the Iraqi nationalist, General Kassim, setting the stage for the CIA’s man, Saddam Hussein.

The Afghan mess, now about to get messier, was set up in the late 1970s, when the Carter administration supervised the overthrow of Afghanistan’s one shining moment of hope, the left reformist governments that took power in 1978. That’s when Osama was ushered onto the stage of history, as one of the CIA’s men. Israel, the Palestinians? Rewind the decades back to Truman and beyond.

What made the American 70s exciting was that the left — in its broadest antinomian contours — had life in it, still pumped up by successive radical generations all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. The last time we saw that left in action was in the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 and the solidarity movement during Reagan’s wars in Central America.

In 1992 the left went hook, line and sinker for Bill Clinton and lost all independent traction. By 1996 fealty to the Democratic Party had become a habit. There was the brief flare up in Seattle during the WTO confab, but that turned out to be more of a final flicker than a new ignition point. Same story in 2000. Same again in 2004 (all in behind the Democrat Kerry, in case you forget) and finally, most deliriously, there was the left’s love affair with the salesman of hope in 2008, Barack Obama.

Yes, there are many candles in the darkness. Brave souls soldier on, whether battling the military recruiters, defending Palestine, or advancing labor’s cause. Gaze out across the political landscape and there are many vigorous, dogged people at work. But, as a vital, compelling, creative force in American political life, the left is dead and gone, many of its erstwhile or potential members lost in the new Age of Superstition, fretful captives in the thickets of kookdom, whether in the form of 9/11 conspiracism — au revoir Cindy Sheehan! — or gazing aghast at Michael Mann’s bogus hockey-stick graph instead of improving their minds and political potential by reading the Eighteenth Brumaire. What a grim and revealing irony that it was the Medieval Warm Period — which Al Gore and the IPCC have sought to purge from natural history — that gave birth to some of the most glorious chapters in human intellectual and artistic achievement!

The corporations run the show and the only vivid opposition comes from Christian populists, who’ve bought several million copies of Sara Palin’s memoir.

The teens? Raise your glass along with Mr William Hazlitt.

Happy Ending!

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Such is the downward swoop of our neoliberal era. In Oslo Obama went one better than Carter who, you may recall , proclaimed in 1977 that his crusade for energy conservation was “the moral equivalent of war.” Obama trumped this with his claim that war is the moral equivalent of peace. As he was proffering this absurdity, Copenhagen was hosting its global warming jamboree, surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic — human-caused — global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web over a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr. Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post — whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.

Coolers transmuted into warmers in the early 80s and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the tainted data from which the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC ) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception — particularly the executive summaries — carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science. Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters Shell and BP, also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.

After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, “Climategate” the reaction amid progressive circles — 99% inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming — has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause.

Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers — always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail — that they commanded the moral high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There’s now a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

By the same token magazines and newspapers, reeling amidst the deadly challenge of the internet to their circulation and advertising base have seen proselytizing for the menace of man-made global warming, as a circulation enhancer — a vital ingredient in alluring a younger audience. Hence the abandoned advocacy of AGW by Scientific American, the New Scientist, Nature, Science, not to mention the New York Times (whose lead reporter on this topic has been Andrew Revkin, who has a personal literary investment in the AGW thesis, as a glance at his publications on Amazon will attest.)

Many of the landmines in the CRU emails tend to buttress long-standing charges by skeptics that statistical chicanery by Professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the twentieth century, a historical fact which made nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the twentieth century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an email written on September 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple… I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

Now, in the fall of 1999 the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policy-Makers” — essentially a press release — one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into non-existence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th century temperatures. Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-twentieth-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a September 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.” Like politicians trying to recover from a racist outburst, AGW apologists say the “trick” was taken out of context. It wasn’t.

Other landmines include particularly telling emails from Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist and the head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On October 14, 2009, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

In other words, only a few weeks before the Copenhagen summit, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are not close to knowing” whether the supposedly proven AGW model of the earth’s climate actually works, and that therefore “geo-engineering” — global carbon-mitigation, for example — is “hopeless.”

This admission edges close to acknowledgement of a huge core problem — that the “greenhouse” theory and the vaunted greenhouse models violate the second law of thermodynamics which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body XX. Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere, even when warmed a bit by absorbed infrared, cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. Readers interested in the science can read mathematical physicist Gerhard Gerlich’s and Ralf Tscheuchner’s detailed paper published in The International Journal of Modern Physics, updated in January , 2009, “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics.”

“For the last eleven years,” as Paul Hudson, climate correspondent of the BBC said on October 9, “we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” In fact recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly for the last 8 years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras, long before the advent of manmade emissions, at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with those emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance of carbon.

As for the nightmare of vanishing ice caps and inundating seas, the average Arctic ice coverage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 20 years, and has actually increased slightly over the last 3 years. The rate of rise of sea level has declined significantly over the last 3 years, and its average rate of rise for the last 20 years is about the same as it has been for the last 15,000 years, that is, since the last glacial cooling ended and the earth, without help from mankind, entered the current interglacial warming period. The sea rise of that still on-going interglacial warm spell, among other things, flooded the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska to form the Bering Straits — without which we might be a province of Russia today. So much for the terrors of sea rise.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith-based, with no relation to science or reason. seventeen centuries later, so were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by a man-made CO2 build-up and that human intervention — geo-engineering — could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, the Copenhagen dogmata are a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, they are a terrible tragedy.

The Deceivers

As a teenager one of my favorite novels was John Masters’ 1951 classic, The Deceivers, about the stranglers in nineteenth century India, known as the Thugs. It was great history and, for the 50s, it was hot. A few weeks ago I read a very interesting essay on a site called The Immanent Frame by William Pinch, professor of history at Wesleyan. Pinch was part of a panel of writers — CounterPunch’s Vijay Prashad was another — writing about the Mumbai terror attacks of a year ago. Pinch discussed one consequence of Mumbai, the creation, in December 2008, of a central Indian police body, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), charged with the investigation of “terror-related offenses.” This agency has wide powers and jurisdiction, including the power to bypass state police units and convene special courts.

What particularly caught my eye was Pinch’s mention in passing of the creation of the NIA as being not unlike the creation of the Department of Thuggee and Dacoity in the 1830s, part of a “war on terror” — against Kali-crazed stranglers — promoted by a bureaucratic empire builder in the East India Company called William Sleeman.

Pinch readily agreed to write the essay — a marvelous one — in our latest newsletter, about criminal conspiracies and religious violence, starting with the Thugs and looking forward to the “wars on terror” after 9/11/01 and Mumbai.

Who were the Thugs, as they were called? Were they simply members of a unified all-India cult devoted to satisfying the bloodlust of an ever-thirsty goddess, or was the religion in thug violence simply a language of expression for acts that had myriad social and economic origins? The story, set forth by Pinch, has profound reverberations in our terror-transfixed times. As he concludes, “moments of dramatic expansion of state power are often accompanied by a demonization of criminal conspiracies as a thing of evil that needs to be fought on a quasi-war footing.”

Also in this latest newsletter, you’ll find Andrew Cockburn on how Wall Street effortlessly wiped out the possibility of serious financial reform ever emerging from Congress. Serge Halimi, director of Le Monde Diplomatique, writes on the political uses of fear-mongering about deficits. ¥¥

(Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.)