This statement of defeat and imminent flight comes in an election year. Panetta’s speech was the first time any senior American official has publicly put the Afghan government and the Taliban, not to mention We the Peo­ple and Gov. Romney, on notice that Uncle Sam will be packing his bags well ahead of the all-troops-out dead­line of the end of 2014.

Big story? Initially, not everyone seemed to think so. The New York Times ran a dispatch on Feb 2 from Elisa­beth Bumiller in Brussels, but not in the top headline deck of its electronic edition. A bigger NYT headline the same day went to a story by Rod Nordland and Alissa Rubin, datelined Kabul, reporting that Taliban prisoners were tell­ing their US interrogators that they — the Tali­ban — were winning the war.

Finally Romney tottered from Donald Trump’s embrace to grasp at the issue of the Obama administra­tion providing further proof that the president is a traitor to the flag. “There are now hints from the White House that Panetta spoke out of turn. Before nailing himself to the colors, Romney should remember that his father lost a strong chance of winning the Republican nomination in 1968 after saying that he’d been “brainwashed” by the Pentagon during a visit to Vietnam.

Footnote: “Civilian deaths due to drones are not many, Obama says.” So that’s okay then. This was a headline in the New York Times for January 31, accu­rately reflecting Obama’s expressed views. It was back in the mid-1920s that my father Claud, then working as a night editor at the London Times, won a prize for writing the dullest headline actually printed in the Times for the following day. Headline: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillo­tineiduring the French Revolution.

Quitting time in Afghanistan brings us back to “in harm’s way” — a phrase usually occurring in the same paragraph as “blood and treasure” which went to the guillo­tine last week amid particularly delighted cackles from the tricoteuses knitting in the Place de la Révolu­tion.

Among those pressing Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville to haul “in harm’s way” into the dock was my brother Patrick, who was also trying to shove “go-to person” into the tumbrils. I use this phrase from time to time and felt a twinge. Fortunately, Patrick changed his mind, writing to me, “I have rather changed my mind on ‘Go-to per­son.’ ‘Sejanus, becoming known as the go-to person in the court of Tiberius’ — Easy to mock, but is there a word or phrase convey­ing same idea? I am not sure there is and uncertain Fou­quier-Tinville would have been wholly satisfied that it was a case for the tumbril.”

Denny Chericone advises that “For a good time if you haven’t seen it before — In Harm’s Way with The Duke, The Kirk, Henry Fonda, Patricia Neal, Franchot Tone, Franchot Tone!? All brought together by Otto Preminger. Worth a view because I’ve never seen a WWII movie shot in a bathtub before. Then you’ll really be looking for that tumbril.”

There can be no debate about “if you will,” a particu­lar favorite of the CNN crowd, and recommended to me for the fatal blade by Leslie Cockburn. The phrase serves the function of a pre-emptive apology every time the reporter or commentator makes something approaching a substan­tive statement. The late Christopher Hitchens used it a lot, archly. Off it goes to the tumbrils.

I’ve learned once more that it is always dangerous — if you will — to make any statement regarding sports history. Last week I cited CounterPuncher Jeremy Pikser on the source for “it’s not over till the fat lady sings.” Pikser wrote to say the phrase “was actually first popular­ized by the coach (or owner?) of the Baltimore Bullets basketball team in 1978.” James Blum promptly wrote that “your source on the Fat Lady was wrong in a detail, the NBA champion Bullets of Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes were in Washington in 1978.” (Blum, thirsty for blood, added, “May I nominate for the tumbrils the pomo-prog ‘excavate’ and ‘unpack’?”

And then:

From: Richard Stack <rstack1@cogeco.ca>

Date: January 29, 2012 2:56:25 AM PST

Alex, Just a note on the actual origin of ‘It’s not over till the fat lady sings’. It is a line in an old 1930/40 movie with Wallace Beery and Jackie Coogan. The two of them are improbably at an opera. The kid says “When can we leave?” Beery says “ Not till it’s over” The kid says “When will be over?” Beery says “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” Regards R Stack.

It’s time too for clôture on “closure,” beloved of Ameri­can families mustered in front of prisons on execu­tion day. It’s an odious word, fragrant with fake feeling, with the cold breath of an undertaker lowering the coffin lid. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville is mustering the neces­sary docu­mentation and witnesses with his usual scrupu­lous attention to the rights of the accused.

From: Sandra Marr <marrsandra@gmail.com>

Date: January 28, 2012 2:52:06 PM PST

To: alexandercockburn@asis.com

Subject: For the tumbril

Hello Alex, Greetings from Guilford! Am I too late to propose ‘defending our freedom’; which seems to be the only way most media can talk about the activities of brutal US troops conducting appalling aggressions around the world? All the best, Sandra.

Finally, from this just in from Okinawa:

From: Douglas Lummis <ideaspeddler@gmail.com>

Alex, The bottom line is, to the tumbril with ‘the bot­tom line.’ I think it was about 15 or 20 years ago, sud­denly everybody was talking about ‘the bottom line.’ I asked around, The bottom line to what? Nobody seemed to know. On the bottom line of a letter is the signature. On the bottom line of an invoice is how much you owe. In fishing, I suppose a bottom line will be good for catch­ing bottom fish. In the language of seduction, pre­sumably the bottom line will be something obscene. In comedy, it would be the punch line. But in politics there is no bottom line, because there’s always the next page. — Doug Lummis

The Port Huron Statement — 50 Years On 

Fifty years ago a group of students in the American midwest issued a document rather portentously titled “The Port Huron Statement.” It was the founding mani­festo of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and became one of the most famous documents of that momentous and crea­tive decade.

Read any history of the upsurges in the United States in the 1960s written over the past three decades and you’ll at once encounter tributes to SDS as on the cutting edge of radical organizing — in the battles against racial discrimination, particularly in the South; in the protests against the Vietnam War; and more largely in the aim of young people in the 1960s to break the shackles of the cold-war consensus that had paralysed independent thought and spread fear of McCarthyite purges through the whole of what remained of the organized left in America, in the labor movement, the churches and in the universities.

SDS was founded in 1960 and in the summer of 1962 held its first convention just outside the Michigan town of Port Huron, on the US-Canadian border an hour’s drive north of Detroit. Presented to this gathering was a manifesto initially drafted by a former student at the University of Michigan — Tom Hayden — and revised by committee and finally delivered to the world as the Port Huron statement.

“We are people of this generation,” it began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, look­ing uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. …As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too trou­bling to dismiss…”

I’m going to leave you hanging there, because the remainder of this essay on the Port Huron statement is to be found in our latest newsletter, being released to subscribers over this weekend.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Await a presidential State of the Union address with keen anticipation? It’s like saying one looks forward to taking a niece to the Nutcracker. The last time I truly enjoyed one — the speech, not the ballet — was Bill Clinton’s in 1998, and it wasn’t because of anything he said. It was his terrific aplomb, despite the fact that the Lewinsky scandal was breaking over his head. He was rewarded with a bounce of ten points, from 59 to 69 per cent popular approval. The message was clear. We, the people, couldn’t care less about Monica. In fact, we the people thoroughly approve. The following year, the US Senate was trying him for impeachment, after months of steady servings in the press of Monica’s semen-stained dress, and here was Bill as bouncy as ever, rock solid at 69 per cent.

Normally, the American people don’t set much stock by State of the Union addresses. Half the times Ronald Reagan — the Great Communicator — gave the annual State of the Union address across his two terms in office, he promptly sank in the polls by 3 or 4 points. People turned on the tv set, gasped and said, “He’s the presi­dent?”

By all rights, Obama should be a natural at the job. The desired mix is inspirational — his forte — and notion­ally programmatic, though the history books are knee deep in empty pledges made on such occasions. But somehow the methodical rhythms of Obama’s high-minded eloquence has a narcotic effect on me.

Last year Obama said the American people did “big things,” omitting to qualify this with the fact that mostly they’re big stupid things. This year the menu seemed to be a potpourri of things big and small, of the sort Clinton could gabble about by the hour: retraining schemes, pub­lic/corporate partnerships.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a ringing pledge to prosecute those responsible for the mortgage crisis. Next day, Glenn Ford gave a useful summary in Black Agenda Report.

“President Obama had hoped to put on a big show — a huge con, really — at his State of the Union address, by announcing a monetary ‘settlement’ of massive banker criminality in housing foreclosures. Obama’s operatives have doggedly pressed for a settlement that would effectively give banks immunity from prosecu­tion. But he was thwarted by a small group of state attor­neys general who wanted a real investigation into the crime of the century. So the president was finally forced to set up a federal unit of his own. Since Obama’s own law enforcers have failed to send a single banker to jail, Wall Street immunity is likely to remain the real State of the Union.”

Obama’s announcement was no doubt also a defen­sive reaction to a recent Reuters expose which suggested that the failure of the Department of Justice to launch any foreclosure fraud prosecutions during Obama’s first term might have something to do with the fact that US Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a huge Washington law firm, Covington and Burling, that represented big banks at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud.

Then Obama herded us back into “green energy,” though not the vast program for “green jobs” pledged last year; then an abrupt switch to the bad business of teenagers dropping out of high school, a swipe at the oil companies and then, finally, a paean to the core national achievement of 2011 — the killing of bin Laden, which the President rather tastelessly used as his finale on the theme of American unity. It’s no surprise that Presidents laud the American fighting man in such addresses, but Obama really does go over the top.

The whole 65-minute speech will be forgotten in a week. It would have been far better if Obama had simply read out selected portions of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, perhaps with an aside on one number that jumped from the page. Though they have three large homes in Massa­chusetts, Boston and California the Romneys took a deduction of just above $20,000 in 2010 for domestic help. So who keeps those mansions up and running? Mor­mon volunteers?

Watching Obama proposing economic programs that will never come to pass, one’s prime thought was, It’s all far, far too late, by three years. Obama’s one opening for doing anything substantial about the crashed economy and the banks was the honeymoon period, which last about 48 seconds after taking office.

Thursday’s Jacksonville debate was fun. There have been 19 such debates so far, and this was maybe my fourth, so the engagement had the freshness of relative novelty. By its end, Romney was glowing with the know­ledge that at last he’d put in a robust performance and given Newt Gingrich three sound wallops in the solar plexus. The commentators kept referring to Rom­ney’s “new debate coach,” who turns out to be the per­son who honed Michele Bachmann’s modest skills in this department.

There was a turning point which possibly assured Romney’s victory in Florida next Tuesday, maybe the nomination itself, perhaps the White House, conceivably even, as his ultimate reward in the Mormon hereafter, a really nice big planet with lots of beautiful wives await­ing his beck and call. The turning point came early on.

BLITZER (to Gingrich): “Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?”

Gingrich saw an opening for the sort of grandstand­ing against CNN’s John King in the South Carolina debate that won him the evening there.

GINGRICH: “Wolf, you and I have a great relation­ship, it goes back a long way. I’m with him. This is a non­sense question.

(APPLAUSE)

… Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we’ll actu­ally talk about issues that relate to governing Amer­ica?”

Blitzer could have taken it on the chin, as King did — but it looks as though he had already decided to take a stand.

BLITZER: “But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, ‘He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts.’ I didn’t say that. You did.”

GINGRICH: “I did. And I’m perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.”

BLITZER: “But if you make a serious accusation against Governor Romney like that, you need to explain that.”

At this point Romney jumped in:

ROMNEY: “Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t make accusations somewhere else that they weren’t willing to defend here?”

He had the better of the subsequent to-and-fro. Then he came out ahead on points in a lengthy spat about immi­gration, beginning with the stern admonition to Gingrich that “The idea that I’m anti-immigrant is repul­sive. Don’t use a term like that.” I wouldn’t have expected “repulsive” to be part of Romney’s verbal arse­nal. It had shock value, like a pistol shot. Then he whacked Newt in a go-round on personal investments in Fanny Mae. By the end of it Romney was swelling up like Popeye after a mouthful of spinach and Gingrich stayed decidedly subdued for the rest of the night.

Ron Paul played the role of avuncular, anti-imperial libertarian very well, even though the everybody’s-uncle image was dented a few hours later by the declaration in the Washington Post of a former secretary that Paul had closely supervised the editorial production of those racist newsletters of yesteryear. On Thursday night he certainly did well against Rick Santorum’s ringing call for counter-revolutionary war across Latin America.

Thursday night, assuming it’s cashed with a Romney victory in Florida next Tuesday, must have come as a huge relief to the Republican establishment which had become so desperate after Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina and initial surge in Florida that it was contem­plating a draft of Mitch Daniels at the convention next summer. But they’d have to revive Daniels first. In his response to Obama in Tuesday on behalf of the Republi­cans he gave every appearance of having been dead for at least a week.

It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to figure out how to deal with Gingrich after the latter became Speaker of the House in ’95. Clinton would constantly invite Gingrich over to the White House, saying that he craved the Speaker’s depth and vision. So Newt would hasten over and blather on about moon colonies and the future. Then he’d return to the Hill where his colleagues in the Republican leadership would discover that in the midst of the palavering about space Bill had outwitted him in some crucial negotiation about highway funding. In the end they insisted that in any trip to the White House Gingrich had to take along Dick Armey as chaperone.

Gingrich’s affair with the woman who later became his third wife, Callista Bisek, became public in 1998. But it was certainly no secret in the House Agriculture Com­mittee where Callista worked from 1995. According to one witness her phone rang frequently. If she was away from her desk one of her colleagues would pick it up, and call across the room, “The speaker.”

Joke: Q. How did Newt get Sheldon Adelson to give him $18 million?

A. He promised his next wife would be Jewish.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Last week revolutionary Prosecutor Fouqier-Tinville announced the capture and imminent trial of “grow,” long sought in its counter-revolutionary mutation as a tran­sitive verb governing an abstraction, as in “grow the economy,” a formulation popular among the Girondin fac­tion. “Grow,” said the Prosecutor, was being held in the Conciergerie, under constant surveillance.

I’ve no doubt that the Tribunal will not long delay in sending “grow” in this usage to a well-deserved rendez­vous with the fatal blade. I associate the usage with the 1992 Clinton campaign, where talk about “growing the economy” was at gale force. My friends and neighbors here in Petrolia, Karen and Joe Paff, tell me that when they were starting up their coffee business, Goldrush, at the start of the 1980s, the local bank officials were already hard at it, talking about “growing the business.” I hate the usage, with its smarmy implication of virtuous horticultural effort. As CounterPuncher Michael Green­berg writes, “It sounds phony, aggressive, and even grammatically incorrect, not the nurturing ‘grow’ that one associates with living things.

Joining “grow” in the tumbril will, I trust, be “blood and treasure,” used with great solemnity by opinion form­ers to describe the cost, often the supposedly worthy sacrifice, attached to America’s wars. The usage appar­ently goes back to Jefferson, but that’s no excuse. The catch-phrase seeks to turn slaughter and the shoveling of money to arms manufacturers into a noble, almost mythic expenditure.

Shackled to “blood and treasure” should be its co-con­spirator, “in harm’s way.” Jack Flannigan writes from Kerala, “Mr. Cockburn, Somebody might have beat me to it but my candidate for the squeaky old tumbril is ‘in harm’s way.’ It has, especially in the last ten years, acquired a treacly red, white and blue patina about it that is overwhelmingly connected to the military and police.

“Someone sailing on a Gaza flotilla or staring down a line of sneering, rabid cops is not very likely to be referred by our political/media elites as ‘in harm’s way’.”

Last week, dispatching the phrase to the tumbrils, I said the G. H.W Bush campaign of 1979 for the Republi­can nomination hefted “It’s not over till the fat lady sings” to national prominence. Jeremy Pikser writes to say the phrase “was actually first popularized by the coach (or owner?) of the Baltimore Bullets basketball team in 1978. As usual G. H.W. Bush was only capable of feeble imitation when he used it, hoping to sound like a ‘real guy’.”] Further research discloses its use in sports journalism has been attributed to writer/broadcaster Dan Cook around the same time, and in the mid-70s by a Texas Tech sports official.

Back to “narrative,” en-tumbrilled recently. Here’s a good example of its baneful penetration into the lan­guage, in a Reuter’s news story: “Rubio initially cast him­self as the US-born son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. That narrative ran aground when records surfaced showing that his parents actually had left Cuba years earlier.”

Rubio is caught telling a big lie, and it gets demurely tricked out as a “narrative.”

I also passed sentence on the hiccupping “well” con­struction. Here it is in the first paragraph of Paul Krug­man’s column for January 27. “Mitch Daniels, the for­mer Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s gover­nor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring.”

What’s coy little “well” doing in that sentence?

From: kathy@polarfocus.com

“Dear Alex, My nomination for tumbril baggage is ‘It is what it is.’ Way overused, and vacuous in any case. Thanks, Kathy.”

From: “Kevin Rath” <kevinr@lmi.net

“Mr. Cockburn, Recently I have been accosted with the phrase “reaching out to you” by sales people. While it may be inappropriate since your focus is the news, this stupid phrase people from marketing use in their email subject titles and language is really annoying. “Reaching out to your Tumbril cart, Kevin Rath, A CP member.”

Thank you, Kevin.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

One has to feel for Romney, thrashing about amidst the Newt horror. Here comes the portly Georgian, brush­ing aside the Mormon priests guarding Mitt’s hotel suite, kicking open the bedroom door, seizing Romney by the throat… Aaaargh! And then Romney is awake, realizing that this is a cold-sweat nightmare that will last … maybe until they close in Florida on January 31, maybe until Super Tuesday on March 6, when nine states hold their primaries, maybe….

We left Romney amidst the supposed flush of victory in Iowa (now awarded to Santorum), and triumph in New Hampshire, with polls in South Carolina showing him a solid ten points ahead of Gingrich, who made a poor showing in New Hampshire on top of a fourth place in Iowa below Santorum and Ron Paul.

Gingrich burned for revenge for his rough treatment in New Hampshire by Romney’s campaign commercials. But how, on a tight timeline, to acquaint South Carolina Republicans with Romney’s infamies?

He needed money, lots of it, double-quick.

Occupy Las Vegas!

Some things don’t change in American politics, and rich people sitting in Las Vegas with pots of cash is one of them. Joel McCleary, a friend, remembers fund-rais­ing in Las Vegas when he was working for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976. The crucial Pennsylvania pri­mary was coming up and the Carter people (their chief fundraiser was Morris Dees) needed a big wad of cash for the final push against Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, known as “the senator from Boeing,” also running for the Democratic nomination and favored by powerful labor chieftains in Pennsylvania.

Joel was told the go-to guy for untraceable campaign cash was Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun was a notoriously tough egg, former gun-run­ner for the Haganah, the man who, in the midst of the Cold War witch hunts, outed Senator Joe McCarthy in the Sun as a homosexual. Joel was told to act manly. Greenspun duly received him in his office. “Why the hell should I get money for Jimmy Carter?” he asked.

“Because Jimmy Carter is going to be president,” Joel answered boldly, “and if you don’t support his cam­paign he’ll fuck you.”

Greenspun told Joel to come back in two hours. He returned to find Greenspan sitting at a table surrounded by other toughs. In the middle of the table was a paper bag. “So the Baptist fuck wants money,” Greenspun growled, as he pushed the bag over to Joel. “Remember, this comes from the state of Israel. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Greenspun was no doubt also sluicing money to Jack­son, a particularly slavish errand boy for Israel. With Carter he was hedging his bets. Wisely, as it turned out. They called the odds right in Las Vegas. Carter won the Pennslyvania primary, beating Jackson 36 per cent to 27 per cent. Jackson pretty much gave up after that, saying frankly, “We’re out of money.” At least Greenspun, who died in 1989, didn’t live to know that he invested $100,000 in a man later to denounce Israel as an apart­heid state.

Las Vegas paper bags notwithstanding, in former times there were certain pettifogging constraints on how much a billionaire could lavish on his favored candidate. But then came the “Citizens United” decision by the US Supreme Court (split 5-4) , issued in January, 2010, rul­ing that the First Amendment, protecting free speech, prohibits the government from placing limits on inde­pendent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. As Ralph Nader correctly pointed out at the time, “With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of corporate money, through inde­pendent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dol­lars.”

Enter 78-year old Sheldon Adelson, the world’s 16th richest man, a bit dented by the property crash in Nevada but still with $23 billion at his disposal. The sun rises on his empire in Las Vegas, sets on it in the east in Macao, with its zenith over the state of Israel, whence his second wife hails. On Israel Adelson entertains very harsh views about the advisability of negotiations of any sort with Palestinians and lately has been lobbying fiercely — he owns the free weekday Israel Hayom, the largest circu­lation newspaper in Israel — for an attack on Iran.

When Newt Gingrich, fishing for Zionist money, abandoned his previous, relatively temperate posture on the Israel/Palestine issue, and declared that Palestinians were an “invented people,” he was directing his remarks to an audience of one.

Adelson was exceedingly pleased and expressed his gratification in material terms, with a further $5 million, now staking Gingrich’s campaign ads in South Carolina. To date Adelson has donated about $13 million to Gingrich’s campaign — a US record. The ads put out by the Gingrich forces derive in origin from Senator Ted Kennedy’s successful effort to defend his US senate from Romney’s challenge back in 1994. The Kennedy campaign put together ferocious spots depicting Rom­ney, erstwhile boss of the private equity firm Bain Capi­tal, as one of the most vicious operators in the history of American capitalism, never happier than when taking over factories, destroying jobs, kicking workers into the snow, and sneering at the tears of their distraught wives and children.

Chunks of just such a film have been broadcast this week across South Carolina, airtime bought by a Politi­cal Action Committee backing the Gingrich campaign. They are brilliantly done, so effective that the New York Times — evidently worried for the overall reputation of capitalism — ran a very comical piece a few days ago critiquing the commercials as going altogether too far and being marred by error. Gingrich announced piously that “I’m calling on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film. They cannot run the film if it has errors in it.” But the nominally independent Political Action Committee refused, demanding a clarifi­catory interview with Romney.

South Carolina has been faring badly in the current national slump. Tough talk about job-killers, particularly Mormon millionaire job-killers, commands a sympa­thetic audience. By Tuesday the press was hailing Gingrich’s Monday debate performance as worthy of Edmund Burke, which indeed it was, since in its rancid racism towards black people it rivaled Burke’s slurs on the French revolutionaries.

It became clear by midweek the ads were taking their toll on Romney. By Wednesday the polls were showing the Mormon millionaire with 30 per cent support and Gingrich surging, with 27 per cent of the vote. By Fri­day, Gingrich was running ahead 32-30 in some polls, after his carefully rehearsed “Have you no shame, Sir” reproof to CNN’s John King following the latter’s opening question about the “open relationship” Gingrich’s second wife Marilyn says he proposed after disclosing his affair with Callista. Marilyn’s disclosure probably won Gingrich an extra slice of the state’s male vote, on ground that this is the sort of thing men blurt out when driven into a corner in a “her or me” confrontation with the Missus.

On Tuesday Romney finally lifted a corner of the pre­viously tightly sealed file containing his tax returns. The partial disclosure won’t help him nor his evasive­ness in the debate. He said his effective tax rate was “probably closer to the 15% rate than anything.” That 15% is on investment income — a huge perk for the very rich — as opposed to the higher rates on wages and salaries — up to 35% — paid by many Americans. He also deprecated his speaking fees last year of $374,327 as “not very much.” This man definitely lacks the com­mon touch. So much for my fears last week for the future of the election industry after what looked like an immi­nent Romney closeout.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a farm cart often used for carrying manure, also to carry prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Any headline modeled on “It’s the economy, stupid.” This tedious phrase derives from the Clinton campaign of 1992, and is still echoing on opinion pages 20 years on. To the tumbrils with it!

“Well…” , as in constructs like “His performance was.. well… frankly bad.” Equally awful is “…er,” as in “Is Angeline Jolie a great actor? Er… no.” The British are particularly keen on this piece of stylistic coyness.

“Staunch,” as so often used to describe right-wing­ers: “a staunch Republican,” “a staunch Conservative,” though not I think, “a staunch fascist.” I see left writers using this phrase freely about Republicans and Conser­vatives. Don’t they know that “staunch” carries the aroma of unstinting, courageous loyalty. It’s an honor­ific. How about “fanatic Republican”? “crazed Conser­vative”? No rightwinger would talk about “staunch lib­erals” — admittedly an oxymoron, just like “staunch Democrat.” Now, there really are staunch pacifists. Save the word for them.

Michael Donnelly offers “At the end of the day,” which, I need scarcely remind you, is the hour when the fat lady sings, after the rubber has met the road. The fat lady line was first popularized in George H.W. Bush’s run for the Republican nomination in 1980. When he finally threw in the towel, the press corps hired a fat Valkyrie with a horned helmet to rush up to him and sing at the top of her voice, waving a trident.

From Jean-Pierre Duboucheron: “Bad guys.” Spot on, Jean-Pierre.

From Sean Dunne in Ireland: “this ain’t my first rodeo” ; “just sayin’”; “Really.” True, one does see the terse “Really” all too often. Time for the final haircut.

“I would like to request that you consign one more word to the tumbrils. And that word is ‘stakeholder.’” Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga. Happy to oblige, Vukoni.

From Egidio Mondolfi: “Natalie Bauman and I sub­mit ‘folks’ for your consideration. If ever a word was long overdue for a ride in the farm cart…”

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

It was a big win for Romney who showed he could break 25%. He wiped out the opposition and took a big stride towards the nomination. All the same, as New Hampshire primaries go, it was a very dull affair, at least for those of us who remember such excitements as the trickle of Ed Muskie’s tears — or was it merely snow? — turning his 1972 front-runner campaign into a mighty river of defeat.

The much touted grudge debates last weekend between Romney and Gingrich were pallid. Sheldon Adel­son, a billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul and fanatic supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, poneyed up $5 million for a Friends-of-Newt operation, which did pro­duce a brilliant campaign ad against Romney, the Job-Slayer. No traction for Gingrich came of it, though maybe further outpourings from Adelson and friends could pump life back into his campaign down south.

Romney’s big foot-in-mouth moment came when he remarked in a campaign trail speech that “I like firing peo­ple.” He was actually talking about the freedom to fire your health insurance company, a luxury supposedly enjoyed by Americans until Obama passed his health bill, but he’ll be whacked over the head with the line for a while.

Now Romney heads down south to a likely victory in South Carolina and probably in Florida. Such triumphs, should they come to pass, will plunge the election indus­try into profound crisis. At this stage in the game, pre­cisely one week after the presidential year opened with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, no one — except per­haps the candidate himself — wants to have the race locked up. The news business, led by the TV networks, wants cliffhangers. Campaign managers, dirty tricksters, and kindred consultants want volley after volley of cam­paign ads rolling dollars into their pockets. There are armies of “strategists” to be fed their campaign stipends.

At this stage in the game back in 1992, Bill Clinton was fighting for his life after his affair with Gennifer Flowers gradually seeped into public consciousness. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out, round after round and well into the summer.

Will scandal breathe life into the campaign? Does the limber Romney have any dark personal secret still pant­ing in the closet? Could he emulate the shameful John Edwards and be faithless while his wife Ann endures MS, just as Edwards’s wife Elizabeth fought cancer even as John carried on his romance with Rielle Hunter? It seems very unlikely, and even if some affair from Rom­ney’s pre-marriage days doing his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in Paris surfaces it probably wouldn’t do him any harm.

The same problem of being the locked-in nominee confronted John McCain in 2008. He won New Hamp­shire, South Carolina, Florida and then the super-Tues­day primaries, just as Romney is likely to do. Desperate to give his campaign a lift, McCain used the opportunity of the Republican convention to pluck Sarah Palin from her grizzly-skin rug in the governor’s mansion in Alaska. Last week, Tea Party queen Michele Bachmann, perhaps hoping for the Palin role, was notably restrained in her comments on Romney.

Ron Paul will fight on, and give the campaign season at least the semblance of life. In New Hampshire he won strong support from low-income Republicans and the young. It’s conceivable he could bolt onto the Libertar­ian third party ticket. It would certainly juice up the political year. High-level Republicans are reportedly threatening Paul that if he does bolt, they’ll make sure that his son Rand is not re-elected Senator in Kentucky in 2016.

Meanwhile Obama is running the sort of campaign incumbent presidents usually wage, seeking to display mastery on the international stage, preferably by waging war or threatening to do so. With this in mind, Obama has been steadily driving Iran into a corner with boycotts and sanctions. It seems likely that what Obama is maneuvering towards is for a desperate Tehran, its back to the wall with a collapsing currency, to make the first bellicose move.

It’s nothing new. President Roosevelt pushed a desper­ate Japan into war with his embargoes and eco­nomic sanctions. For the attack on Pearl Harbor, substi­tute the Iranians mining the straits of Hormuz.

War on Iran: It’s Not A Matter of “If”

The world’s press is choc-a-bloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he launch the bomb­ers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a corner, methodi­cally demolishing its economy by embargoes and sanc­tions so that in the end a desperate Iran strikes back?

As with sanctions and covert military onslaughts on Iraq in the run up to 2003, the first point to underline is that the US is waging war on Iran. But well aware of the US public’s aversion to yet another war in the Middle East, the onslaught is an undeclared one.

The analogy here is the run up to Pearl Harbor. Let me quote from a useful timeline. On October 7, 1940, a US Navy IQ analyst, Arthur McCollum, wrote an eight-point memo on how to force Japan into war with US. Beginning the next day FDR began to put them into effect and all eight were eventually accomplished.

On February 11, 1941 FDR proposed sacrificing six cruisers and two carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: “I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom.

In March 1941 FDR sold arms and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe — both acts of war and both viola­tions of international law — the Lend-Lease Act. On June 23, 1941 Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. FDR was pleased with Admiral Richmond Turner’s report read July 22: “It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies…it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philip­pine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war.”

The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in US cut­ting off their main supply of oil. US. Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward. Against protests from US naval commanders the West Coast fleet was moved to Hawai’i.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” Ronald Reagan used to attrib­ute this insight to the man he loved to call “Nikolai Lenin,” thundering from podium after podium across America, that Lenin had said, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

You want a graphic illustration of what US embar­goes are doing in the way of debauching Iran’s currency?

Imagine if the Iranians had done this to the US dol­lar? Can you imagine any American politician who would have refrained from calling this an act of war?

To further inflame the leadership in Iran we had last week the murder of Iran nuclear scientist Ahmadi Roshan which came on the one-year anniversary of the murder of two other Iranian nuclear scientists by similar methods. As CounterPuncher Peter Lee writes, “It came at a time of heightened tensions (anyway, tensions higher than the usual heightened tensions), inviting the infer­ence that somebody, probably somebody in the region, wants to goad the Iranian government into a response that could start the military action ball rolling.”

As for the embargoes of Iranian oil, Obama is most certainly doing the oil industry a big favor. There have been industry-wide fears of recession-fueled falling demand and collapse of oil prices. That has led to indus­try-wide enthusiasm (aided by heavy pressure from the majors) for strongly cutting total world oil production (and enjoying the bonuses flowing from the subsequent world price rise), with all the cuts to be taken out of the hide of the Iranians. The Financial Times made clear the need to shrink world production in the following key paragraph in a report last week: “Oil prices have risen above $110 a barrel since Iran threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint, accounting for about a third of all seaborne traded oil. Oil fell to a low of $99 in October amid global economic growth worries.”

As Pierre Sprey remarked to me, “Note also that this is one of those rare but dangerous moments in history when Big Oil and the Israelis are pushing the White House in the same direction. The last such moment was quickly followed by Dubya’s invasion of Iraq.”

It’s somewhat immaterial to ask whether Obama really wants war with Iran, thus interfering with the “strategic pivot” to Asia. Presidents are creatures of cir­cumstances and lobbies, and Obama is certainly no exception. We have to hope that the traditional prudence of Iran’s leadership prompts them not to make some des­perate retaliatory lunge, such as mining the Straits of Hormuz, or offering some kindred excuse to the US to up the tempo of the undeclared war it is already waging.

To the Tumbrils! 

Some readers of my consignment last week of certain words to the tumbrils expressed curiosity about the word. A tumbril was a farm cart. They were used to carry pris­oners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Some more candidates. Fred Gardner writes: “Add ‘Gamechanger’ to the mis- and over-used words of 2011. For years I’ve winced as lawyers and businessmen and reporters casually used ‘game’ in reference to the legal system, finance, war itself… You sometimes see a bumper sticker on a sports car that says ‘the one with the most toys wins.’ It makes me want to give them a little nudge with the old Volvo…”

Jon Swift: “Also the drug-treatment shibboleth: ‘The user’s always chasing that first high.’ As though they couldn’t possibly enjoy it the 875th time. You never hear ‘Religious worshippers are always chasing that first feeling of being at one with God,’ or ‘Voters are always chasing that first thrill they got on entering the booth at 18’….”

Wat Stearns: “I nominate ‘expensed’ and ‘leveraged’ for the tumbrils as well.”

Let me toss in the odious “project,” initially favored by the left but now in general currency, attached to almost every human endeavor. Also “conversation” — a way of taming all debate and doctrinal struggle into demure prattle. And let us note the meteoric rise of “existential.”

Tumbril time! And if you want a vivid sense of what it was like for French aristos condemned to death to hear the rattle of the tumbril as it arrived to take him to the guillotines, I advise a trip to the Conciergerie in Paris. Very creepy.

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

Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore

A Catholic former US senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa’s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes, a count that Santorum will inevitably question and perhaps contest. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas run­ning third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes.

Only a couple of weeks ago Newt Gingrich seem poised for exactly the same unexpected surge that blessed Santorum across the last week. But battered by volleys of viciously negative campaign ads financed by big Republican money backing Romney, Gingrich ran fourth with just under 16,000 votes. Hobbling along in the rear came Texas governor Rick Perry, Tea Party star Michele Bachmann and – with 668 votes – Utah million­aire Jon Huntsman.

Exactly four years ago, Santorum’s surprise showing last night was prefigured by the upset victory of a Protes­tant evangelical, former Arkansas governor Mike Hucka­bee who won with 41,000 votes, Romney came second on that occasion with 30,000 votes, a little more than he managed last week, with a similar 25% of the vote. Third, with 15,000 votes came the man who actually won the Republican nomination, John McCain.

So, as far as Republicans are concerned, Iowa can be a poor predictor. On Tuesday January 10 the surviving candidates went head to head in New Hampshire. Rom­ney has spent months in the state and has one of his sev­eral dreary homes there. Santorum, who committed months of seemingly fruitless effort clasping the hands of countless Iowans, has little presence in New Hamp­shire and a tiny war chest of campaign cash. Romney’s big-money attack dogs who were too busy battering Gingrich in Iowa to notice Santorum’s late surge, will unleash a torrent of abuse via tv and radio.

New Hampshire is a must-win for Romney if he is to escape the charge that he simply can’t clinch any race. Two debates are scheduled and an embittered Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the campaign-debate setting, will be quivering to get his revenge.

Watching the Iowa results with some satisfaction are Obama’s campaign chieftains. To them, the Iowa contest showed that Iowa’s Republicans simply couldn’t figure out who to vote for. No one pleased them for long. Bach­mann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich each had their moment in the sun, then faded. A week ago Ron Paul seemed set to win. Had the Iowa vote been held a week from now, Santorum might too have been eclipsed and Huntsman limped to the front.

The Republican high command decided some time ago that Romney is their best chance of beating Obama. Though infinitely elastic in political doctrine he’s not a nut. It’s imaginable that the all-important independent voters in the general election in the fall could vote for him. He made his millions buying and selling compa­nies, very often firing workers in the process. He gov­erned Massachusetts without egregious failure, passing the precursor to Obama’s health insurance reform, which achievement has been a red rag to the conservatives, who regard him as (a) a crypto-liberal and (b) an agent of Satan, since he is a Mormon. No Mormon has ever been president and reservation about the Church of Latterday Saints extends beyond conservatives. For example, Mormon theology is not friendly to the children of Ham.

Troubling to this same Republican high command is Ron Paul who has won passionate adherents across the political spectrum. The right likes him for his libertarian economics, which prompt Paul to denounce the basic elements of the social safety net – Social Security and Medicare. He would abolish the Federal Reserve (a laudable objective). He’s a gold bug, and in his speech to his supporters last week he shouted a line which I’ll haz­ard has never before been uttered on an election night podium – “We’re all Austrians now” – thereby pro­claiming his allegiance to the economist Ludwig van Mises and parodying the line actually coined by Milton Friedman, though often attributed to Richard Nixon, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

A lot of leftists like Paul because he really is an ardent anti-imperialist – the only one in the race – vigor­ously denouncing America’s wars, its overseas bases and its alliance with Israel. He’s also an eloquent foe of the imperial presidency and of constitutional abuses such as the law signed by Obama on December 31, giving the military a role in domestic enforcement against terrorists and opening US citizens to military detention without benefit of counsel, without charges, and without trial.

Part of Paul’s vote in Iowa was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa’s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus. Republicans fear that if Paul gets sufficiently incensed at his treatment by their party, he might bolt and run on the Libertarian third party ticket, thereby draining votes from the Republican candidate next November. For their part the Obama forces simi­larly fear that Paul would steal vital left votes from those thoroughly disillusioned with the President. In the run-up to the Iowa vote The New York Times ran more than one aggressive onslaught on Paul for newsletters, racist in content, which ran under Paul’s name 20 years ago, and which he has since disavowed.

It’s hard to imagine Santorum getting long term trac­tion, particularly given his scrawny campaign finances. He is a very conservative Catholic, actually a member of Opus Dei. Perhaps the Vatican will organize a hasty funding drive through Catholic billionaires like Tom Monaghan, Opus Dei member and founder of Domino’s Pizzas (which was bought in the late 1990s by Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital).

Santorum says that as president he would bomb Iran tomorrow. Romney and Gingrich don’t lag far behind in their ravings against the Islamic Republic. Obama ratch­ets up sanctions against Iran while supposedly telling Netanyahu that the US will not endorse any attack by Israel on Iran. Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus. Given a chance, I’ll vote for Paul, even though he hasn’t a prayer of taking over the Oval Office. One has to draw the line somewhere, though I don’t feel in the least Austrian.

Into The Tumbrils With Them

First up: “sustainable.” It’s been at least a decade since this earnest word was drained of all energy, having become the prime unit of exchange in the argot of pur­poseful uplift. As the final indication of its degraded status, I found it in President Obama’s “signing state­ment” which accompanied the whisper of his pen, as on New Year’s Eve — a very quiet day when news editors were all asleep — he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 which handed $662 billion to the Pentagon and for good meas­ure ratified by legal statute of the exposure of US citi­zens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of coun­sel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die, abolishing habeas corpus. Don’t bother asking what happens to non-US citizens.

As he set his name to this repugnant legislation the president issued a “signing statement” in which I came upon the following passage: “Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustain­able framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists…”

So much for “sustainable.” Into the tumbrils with it.

Obama is against signing statements, at the theoreti­cal level. In 2008 he said, “I taught the Constitution for ten years, I believe in the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.” Whatever Obama may have taught, a signing statement, whether issued by Bush or Obama, doesn’t have the force of law. Obama’s December 31 signing statement was part of a diligent White House cam­paign to suggest that (a) there is nothing in the NDAA to perturb citizens, but (b) anything perturbing is entirely the fault of Congress, and (c) Obama solemnly swears that so long as he is president he’ll never OK any­thing bad, whatever the NDAA might be construed as authorizing, and anyway (d) there’s nothing new about the detention provisions because they merely reiterate those of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, signed by Bush in 2001.

Next up: “iconic.” I trip over this golly-gee epithet 30 times a day. No warrant for its arrest is necessary, nor benefit of counsel or trial in a US court. Off to the tum­brils, arm in arm with “narrative.” These days everyone has a narrative, an earnest word originally recruited, I believe, by anthropologists. So we read “according to the Pentagon’s narrative…” Why not use some more ener­getic formulation, like, “According to the patent non­sense minted by the Pentagon’s press office…”? Sud­denly we’re surrounded by “narratives,” all endowed with equal status. Into the tumbrils with it.

I think “parse” has almost run its course, though occa­sionally this shooting star of 2011 is spotted panting along in some peloton of waffle from the Com­mentariat. Off with its head, along with “meme,” an exhausted little word that deserves the long dark rest of oblivion.

Back to janitors and the flailing of Newt’s’s master­plan for youth. Doug Lummis writes from Okinawa:

“Alex,

You should know that the public schools in Japan do not hire janitors. The kids do it, boys and girls, all of them. Nobody gets paid for it, so it doesn’t have any­thing to do with rich or poor. It’s just something you do at school. They dust and sweep, and wipe down the floors with damp rags, and clean the toilets. I don’t know if it teaches a ‘work ethic,’ but it teaches them some valuable skills, and it also teaches them that that kind of work is not ‘beneath them,’ something only poor people do. I suppose some of the kids dislike doing it, but a lot of them seem to enjoy it, and take pride in their skill at wielding the broom, or bending over and laying your wet cloth on the floor, putting your weight on it and running to the end of the hall, leaving a clean damp streak behind. Of course this is utterly different from what Gingrich is proposing which, like the present US system of hiring adults to clean the children’s schools, is bound to teach that certain jobs are only for certain classes. The Japanese system doesn’t produce an egalitar­ian society, but it does have a good educational effect.

“You might mention that I consider myself qualified to talk about janitoring because when I was in the fifth and sixth grades I was the janitor for the one-room Don­ner Trail Elementary School at Norden, California. I was chosen not because we were the poorest family but because I was one of the few who didn’t have to take the school bus to get home. They gave me $20 a month, which in those days (1947-48) was very nice money for a kid to get.”

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

Photo courtesy Everett Taasevigen

From John Walsh’s letter to Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, on the program’s coverage of Ron Paul:

“I have a bone to pick about your coverage of Ron Paul and the five comments that appeared in his newslet­ter a generation ago.

“First, contrary to what you say, the rest of the MSM does publish the exact words of the statements — in fact they appear ad nauseam in semi-official publications like the NYT.

“Second, as you surely know, Paul has said he did not write those statements, did not read them or know of them at the time and DISAVOWS them. You did not mention that.

“Third Ron Paul is against the death penalty and man­datory minimum sentences in part because they are racist — and he has said so. You did not mention that.

“Fourth, the head of the NAACP in Austin who has known Ron Paul for 20 years says that the man can in no way be considered a racist. You did not mention that.

“Fifth, in an interview with Bill Moyers Ron Paul spe­cifically says that Libertarianism is incompatible with racism. You do not mention that. I think you have a duty to tell the whole truth on the matter because a half truth is a full lie — as the saying goes.

“Finally I might ask which is more racist — bombing people of color all around the world as Obama has done, for example in the war on Libya for which your constant guest CIA ‘consultant’ Juan Cole was a cheerleader — or five statements written by someone else a generation ago which have now been repudiated by Paul?

“Have you forgotten that your program is subtitled the War and Peace Report? My friends in NYC have taken to calling it Hypocrisy Now! I hope that soon it can reclaim its older tradition of principled and consis­tent anti-interventionism and report the full truth on anti­war candidates like Ron Paul, the only anti-imperialist and peace candidate in the race.

John V. Walsh, MD,

Professor of Microbiology and Physiological Systems, University of Massachusetts Medi­cal School.”

One question Paul should be asked is whether or not the doctor believes, as Lew Rockwell (the imputed author of the memos, though he denies it) and most other southern libertarians do, that plantation owners should have been compensated after the freeing of the slaves for their lost ‘property’?

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

At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the last best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, start­ing with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago came a mile marker in Amer­ica’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, with­out trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates — don’t glide too easily past that word — that all accused terrorists be indefi­nitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civil­ian court system; this includes US citizens within the bor­ders of the United States. Obama supporters have made strenuous efforts to suggest that US citizens are excluded from the bill’s provisions. Not so. “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” says Senator Lindsay Graham, a big backer of the bill. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a law­yer.’” The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic senator Carl Levin, says it was the White House itself that demanded that the infamous Section 1031 apply to American citi­zens.

Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legisla­tion knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the deten­tion bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.” Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly sup­ported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it’s not fanciful to expect the thud of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of Evil and Dark­ness.

Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military person­nel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome peo­ple to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan’s time, in the 1980s, Lt Col Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the for­mer lecturer on the US Constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There’s been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have raised a stink. The New York Times has denounced it editori­ally as “a complete political cave-in.” Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn’t codify “indefinite detention.” But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes “detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities.”

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Liberals are never very energetic in protecting con­stitutional rights. That’s more the province of libertari­ans and other wackos like Ron Paul actually pre­pared to draw lines in the sand in matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private mili­tary contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. Last Wednesday we ran an important article on CounterPunch.org on the matter from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitu­tional Rights.

The US military has been outsourcing war at a stag­gering rate. Even as the US military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights is currently repre­senting Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, seeking to hold account­able two private contractors for their violations of interna­tional, federal and state law. In Raymond’s words, “By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the US-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases — Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 — aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.”

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports that “they are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed ‘battle­field preemption’ and aims to eliminate any civil law­suits against contractors that take place on any ‘battle­field’.”

You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces,” an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Ter­ror the entire world is a “battlefield.” So unless the CCR’s suit prevails, a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel will stand and private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a “battle­field.”

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military dele­gates these powers to private military contractors. CACI International or a company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any US citi­zen here within the borders of the USA, “who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly sup­ported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” tor­ture them to death and then claim “battlefield preemp­tion.”

Don’t laugh.

On this issue of the “privatization,” T.P.Wilkinson has a brilliant essay in our latest CounterPunch newslet­ter on “corporate nihilism and the roots of war.” Wilkin­son starts with a critique of the familiar argument that a return to the draft would bring America’s wars home to the citizenry and the prospect of their children being sent off to possible mutilation by IEDs or death would spark resistance. Wilkinson suggests that this underestimates the saturation of our society by militarism. He goes on:

“But does the new warfare even need the large battal­ions of expendable troops? Just as financial “engineer­ing” has replaced industrial production as a means of wealth extraction, remote-control weapons deployment and mercenary subcontracting have largely replaced the mass armies that characterized US and UK warfare in Korea and Vietnam. In this sense, warfare has become even more “corporate.” The fiction that wars of invasion and conquest are the result of state action is obsolete. The entire ‘national security’ process has been fully depoliticized; in other words, the state is more clearly than ever a mere conduit for policies and practices whose origin and essential characteristics are those of boardroom strategic planning and marketing. The differ­ence between global business and global warfare has, in fact, dissolved.

“This presents a serious cognitive problem for any­one trying to find the root of this poisonous plant in order to tear it from the ground that nurtures it. The mili­tary sustained by the draft was mimetic of the steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or the cotton plantation in the south? Today’s military operates like the headquarters of Micro­soft or USX — the actual physical violence has been out­sourced.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

***

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As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a US citi­zen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indige­nous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Pro­gress and should not be mourned.

On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the “Octo­ber surprise,” denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire — bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abomi­nably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actu­ally I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obvi­ously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a num­ber of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?

Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention — which fueled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst.

He courted the label “contrarian,” but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being. He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, not­ing that “despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish” and noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the defi­nitions of the Nuremberg laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”

As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extem­pore speeches and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at The Nation. I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.

The People vs “Europe”

On our Counterpunch.org website this weekend the great historian Gabriel Kolko makes a persuasive case that in the end the eurozone, inded the EU, will go into meltdown. This is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better in the long run. It used to be as much a part of going to France as choking on Gauloise smoke to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu, instead of the characterless but somehow always expen­sive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what’s needed is a lot more centralizing — in the words of Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times for Novem­ber 28, “a fiscal union”: “This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credi­ble institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well.”

I’ve read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enter­prise needs is an impregnable fortress of Eurocrats dis­patching its disciplinary legions — first technocrats and then, if necessary, NATO’s shock troops to crush all resistance.

Two generations years ago, when Britain shook with acrid debates about the pros and cons of joining the EU, a big chunk of the left was in favor of joining, the notion basically being that in terms of potential for socialist advance, EU membership would at least offer a shot at liberating the sceptred isle from the suffocating, reac­tionary constrictions of post-imperial infarction. (Also, Gaullism — meaning in this case defiance of the United States — was translated into a hope that the EU would be a left counterbalance to the American Empire.) Here we are 40 years on, with social democrats across Europe toiling even more diligently than their nominally more right-wing rivals to bail out the rich and grind down the poor at the behest of the bankers and panic-stricken bondholders.

Crisis is often invoked as the midwife of revolution­ary change, and here are Greece, Italy, Spain and even France at various levels of crisis, with political ortho­doxy and the normal order of things increasingly dis­credited. Yet perhaps only in Greece and possibly Portu­gal — both with active Communist parties — is there any organizational vigor on the left, and some sense that one could see some emulation of the glorious path taken by Argentina in 2003 and 2004, with factory occupations and immense popular outrage, combined with decisive leadership by the late President Nestor Kirchner. The international debt collectors were successfully defied. Maybe in Italy there are some flickers of resistance, but France?

As Serge Halimi, the director of Le Monde diplo­matique, put it recently, “There is no reason to believe that François Hollande in France, Sigmar Gabriel in Germany or Ed Miliband in the UK will succeed where Obama, Jose Luis Zapatero and Papandreou have failed… In the current political and social situation, a federal Europe would strengthen the already stifling neoliberal mechanisms and reduce the sovereign power of the people by handing it over to shadowy technocratic bodies.”

The EU “project,” a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with “iconic,” “meme,” “parse” and “narrative,” is in potential outline a totali­tarian nightmare. Down with federalism! Remember Simone Weil’s hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to Europe’s cultural richness and diversity: “If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the bar­barian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Medi­terranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State.” As Weil’s biographer, Simone Pétre­ment, comments, “The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspira­tion that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn.”

But as Halimi concludes, “But when the people cease to believe in a political game in which the dice are loaded, when they see that governments are stripped of their sovereignty, when they demand that banks be brought into line, when they mobilize without knowing where their anger will lead, then the left is still very much alive.”

“What did the Roman Empire ever do for us?” the left nationalist asks in Monty Python’s imperishable The Life of Brian. “Roads,” the federalist begins tentatively. My native country of Ireland has been covered with vast roads, courtesy of the EU. We’ve got enough of them. Europe’s got enough of them. Enough of the eurozone, enough of the “European project.”

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s in every Democratic president’s playbook. TR was presi­dent from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon and nearly expiring on the River of Doubt. He was an imperialist con amore, charging up San Juan Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world, proclaiming America’s destiny as an enforcer on the world stage. He loved wilderness, mostly through the sights of a big game hunter’s rifle — a wilder­ness suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indi­ans,” he wrote in The Winning of the West , “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the trusts, railing against “the male­factors of great wealth”. But on TR’s watch the mod­ern, centralized corporate American state came of age. H.L. Mencken writes of him in Prejudices II that

“Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn’t believe in democracy. He believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a disper­sion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen… He was for a paternal­ism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights… When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind’s eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust with himself at its head.”

Mencken compared TR to the German Kaiser:

“Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as the Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft-pedal on the duty of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitu­ally gravid wife. Both believed in the armed pur­suit of the lower fauna… Both were intimates of God and announced His desires with authority.”

LBJ loved TR for his “toughness.” Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked TR as his ideal. At least Johnson and Clinton had elements in them of TR’s most admira­ble trait – gusto, something of which Obama is dismally devoid.

But now Obama has seized on TR as his role model in denouncing those destroying the supposed guarantee of the American Way, strangely defining TR’s philoso­phy as one guaranteeing that every citizen gets a fair bounce on the trampoline, soaring into the safe harbor of “the middle class”.

As for imperial destiny, last month Obama did his own reprise on the Great White Fleet, opening a new US Marine base in Australia and shaking his fist at China.

Last Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, where TR, attempting a political comeback in 1910, slagged corpo­rate power for the benefit of his audience of 30,000 prai­rie populists, Obama told a crowd of 1,200: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

He went on: “There are some who seem to be suffer­ing from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s hap­pened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.”

Obama and crew are obviously betting that there won’t be too much unseemly sniggering at the sight of a president thus blithely denying the prime feature of his conduct during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, which was to pick an economic team – Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers as his chief eco­nomic adviser — determined precisely to “return to the same practices that got us into this mess,” to head off any serious economic reform of those institutions and prac­tices that prompted the great crash of 2008.

Obama could have played the populist card back at the start of August amid the Republicans’ efforts to force savage cuts in the social safety net. But he blinked. Now, four months later, there’s the Occupy Wall Street move­ment reminding Americans that in practice as opposed to rhetoric Obama has been a doughty protector of the 1%. OWSers heckled him fiercely in New Hampshire three weeks ago.

But of course Republicans aren’t going to be attacking Obama as the pawn of the bankers. They favor the absurd script that designates him as a closet commie, scheming night and day to bring the most bloodthirsty sce­narios of Karl Marx to fruition. So from their point of view the Osawatomie speech was gratifying vindication of all their most lurid charges.

Ever the trimmer, Obama was obviously aware that with this lunge into rhetorical populism he was exposing himself to just such charges. So amid his execrations against the Republicans for not supporting the Democ­rats’ effort to extend the 2% reduction in the payroll tax, he suddenly threw in a homage to deficit reduction, thus doing a mini-reprise on his collapse in August.

The irony is that the continued reduction of the payroll tax Obama is campaigning for means that the Social Security fund is getting 2% less. Even though the missing 2% is suppos­edly meant to be replaced by money from elsewhere in the federal budget, the drop in Social Security revenues from the payroll tax will allow those urging “reform” of Social Security – i.e., its eventual destruction – to claim ever more fiercely that the system is in budgetary crisis.

A new poll out of Iowa, scheduled to hold its Republi­can caucuses a month from now, shows Newt Gingrich now well ahead of Mitt Romney. Whatever his own many substantive flip-flops, Gingrich is certainly capable of making fun of Obama’s gyrations. After Osawatomie he swiftly designated Obama as President Food Stamp, thus highlighting Obama’s failure to lower the unemployment rate significantly, and also supplying a racist subtext about Obama’s supporters. It won’t be hard for Gingrich to flip through Obama’s speech and point out the contradictions.

Obama at Osawatomie: “Factories where people thought they would retire sud­denly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper.” True – and Gingrich can point out that Democ­rats cheerfully voted through the trade pacts that allowed this to happen.

Final caution: careful how you bet on the outcome in Iowa. The New York Times, which in concert with CBS, conducted that recent Iowa poll, points out that only “30% of likely caucus-goers say that they had been con­tacted by the Gingrich campaign, raising questions about his ability to identify his supporters and lure them to more than 1,600 precinct caucus locations on a winter night. By comparison, 60% say that they have been con­tacted by the [Ron] Paul campaign and 47% by the Rom­ney campaign, underscoring a stealth operation that has been under way for months.”

Thus far Gingrich is running a shoestring operation. He’ll have to weather possible adversity in Iowa and New Hampshire before getting to friendlier territory in South Carolina and Florida. ·

Meanwhile supporters of Ron Paul eagerly devour reports of his campaign’s diligent grass-roots organizing in Iowa and New Hampshire and scan their crystal balls for omens of a January surprise on the order of Gene McCarthy’s ambush showing against LBJ in New Hamp­shire in 1968, followed by victories against Bobby Ken­nedy in Wisconsin and Oregon.

One of the strongest arrows in Paul’s quiver is his anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism and so some were shaken by an interview Paul recently conducted with the right-wing Newsmax:

“Newsmax: What then, if anything, should we do for Israel?

Ron Paul: We should share intelligence for mutually agreed-upon goals. We should honor our pledge to refuse any arms sales that would undermine Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region.

But we should stop interfering with them. We should not announce bargaining positions even before she begins her negotiations. We should not dictate what she can and cannot do. We should stop trying to buy her alle­giance. And Israel should stop sacrificing their sover­eignty as an independent state to us or anybody else, no matter how well-intentioned.”

Sending me this exchange, Jeffrey Blankfort com­mented: “Maybe the Republican Zionist Coalition will give the old boy another look.” John Walsh, an ardent Paul fan strove to reassure me:

“Of this a friend writes me: ‘It’s a tack he’s taken for years: calling for non-intervention in Israel’s disputes by saying it’s bad for Israel. He may be right; he may be wrong. I’m just interested in the non-intervention.’

I tend to agree. I think the Jewish Republicans knew exactly what they were doing when they told him he was not welcome to their debate today. That with RP’s call for friendship with Iran and his consistent non-interven­tionism is about all I can hope for now.”

Dead Indians? Multiply by Five

Did you catch the New York Times’s “On this Day” for December 3?

“ON THIS DAY

On Dec. 3, 1984, more than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.”

Not even in the ballpark. Back in June, 2010, we published  P. Sainath’s commentary on the light sen­tences handed out by an Indian court:

“Over 20,000 killed. Over 500,000 victims maimed, disabled or otherwise affected. Compensation of around 12,414 rupees per victim on average on the 1989 value of the rupee. $470 million total. (And that divided between 574,367 victims.) Over a quarter of a century’s wait. To see seven former officials of Union Carbide Corporation’s Indian subsidiary sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2100. Not a single person from the far more responsible parent US company punished.

“Yet, the notion that the main injustice to Bhopal is a failure to extradite then UCC chief Warren Anderson from America is mildly ridiculous. Trying to evade the lessons the 1984 Bhopal Gas disaster threw up on the tyr­anny of giant corporations is completely so. Well over two decades after its MIC gas slaughtered 20,000 (mostly very poor) human beings, Bhopal still pays the price of Carbide’s criminality. (Evident from the long-term impact on the health of the gas-affected. And from the poisoned soil and water around the former Carbide plant.) While the Indian government’s appalling Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, if adopted, would give legal cover to such conduct across the country.

“Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power… Seven years after Bhopal, Larry Summers, then chief economist at the world bank, wrote his infamous memo. This said, among other things: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” Summers suggested that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Summers was to later say that he was joking, being sarcastic, and so on. Few buy that pathetic plea. Still, he went on to become President of Harvard and is now President Obama’s chief economic adviser, And his memo’s logic holds in the real world. It is exactly what has happened since Bhopal.”

Today Union Carbide is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, which has just ada­mantly refused yet again to give the victims any money.

Dow Chemical is currently a prime sponsor of the upcoming Olympics in London, arousing a storm of pro­test in Britain and India. The company is commissioning 336 fabric panels, each 25 meters high and 2.5 meters wide, to embrace the Olympic Stadium for the Games, featuring its red diamond corporate logo. Jacquelin Mag­nay, Olympics Editor of the Daily Telegraph reported back in August that “London organizers, in an unusual step, have awarded the company the right to have adver­tising on the panels from the time of installation, expected to be finished around Easter, up until June 26, 2012, which is the date that the official Olympic period begins. The IOC has demanded that all Olympic venues remain free of advertising during the Olympic period but the logo will be displayed in the lead-up to the Games and during the test events at the Olympic Park.”

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

Just when the Mormon millionaire thought he’d got the nomination sewn up, the polls showed him still stuck at about 23% with huge numbers of Republicans saying they didn’t trust the former governor of Massachusetts, that Mormons are in league with Satan, that he took his dog on holiday, tied to the roof of his car, that he’s a flip flopper, that he made his money firing people, that…. On and on.

So there was the Rick Perry challenge. The governor of Texas soared in the polls. He was a cert. Romney raged. Then Perry turned out to be a moron. Romney was on his feet again. A cert. But did his polling numbers surge? Nope. Stuck at 23% and then came another pile of elephant crap, in the form of Herman Cain. Yes, Republi­cans told pollsters they liked his style, his feistiness, his 9-9-9 tax plan, and above all his consummate skill in not being Mitt Romney.

At this point, the pretty smart New York Times con­servative columnist Ross Douthat got weary of the slap­stick and stated categorically in his column on October 22 that “barring an unprecedented suspension of the laws of American politics, Mitt Romney has this thing wrapped up. Note that I am not saying that he will win every primary or caucus. He could easily lose Iowa to somebody, and if he loses Iowa, he will probably lose some Southern primaries as well, giving political report­ers grist for the horse race narrative they crave. But Rom­ney’s path to the nomination is more wide open than for any nonincumbent in decades. He should win New Hampshire and Nevada, Florida and Michigan. “

When it emerged that Cain had some sexual harass­ment problems, plus a very tentative grasp of interna­tional affairs, it looked as though Douthat was entirely right — a wrap for Romney. Inevitability lasted the pre­cise length of time it took to get the elephant back in the ring again. Here we are at the start of December, and a political has-been, an adulterer who dictated harsh terms of divorce to a wife dying of cancer, who has pocketed millions from some of the tackiest corporate lobbies in America, has now roared past Romney, who as usual is face down in elephant crap with the ladder on top on him.

If Republicans are prepared to bet on the has-been — former House speaker and Newt Gingrich — it shows that the most vehement diehards in America are the Republicans who will never, ever vote for Mitt Romney. There are millions of them.

So Newt is having his hour in the sun. Quite an hour. Nationally in the polls of Republican candidates for the nomination, he’s leading Romney 26.6 to 20.4. In Iowa, whose caucuses on January will kick off the year, Gingrich is currently leading Romney 26.3 to 15.

Then, a week later, comes New Hampshire. Relief for Romney. Right now he’s leading Gingrich 36.2 to 19.6. But then on January 21 comes South Carolina. Gingrich currently polls 26.3, Romney, 17.7.

Next, the big, all-important state of Florida — one of the crucial swing states in the ultimate election next November. The elephant, please. Not since the robber baron Henry Flagler blazed a path through Florida in the 19th century with his railroad has there been so trium­phant a progress through the Sunshine state as Newt’s, fittingly so, since Florida is stuffed with hucksters. Newt a staggering 41%, Romney 17%, the sample being 600, questioned by the Florida Times Union.

Back in October Douthat had factored in a Newt surge: “Next week, perhaps, it will be Newt Gingrich’s surprising resilience or Ron Paul’s potential strength in the early caucuses or the appeal of Perry’s flat-tax plan. Then there will come a debate in which Mitt Romney looks shabby instead of smooth, a poll that shows one of his rivals surging, a moment when all his many weak­nesses are on every pundit’s lips. Please do not listen to any of them.”

But maybe there has been one elephant, one pratfall too many. After some tetchy moments with interviewers, Romney is now being whacked for being unable to take a punch, for being a whiner, for being a guy who can’t get above 23%, for a man who… but we’ll leave that joke to Gail Collins.

But can Gingrich survive any kind of resolute scru­tiny? The answer is that in a world that didn’t contain Mitt Romney, probably not. This former college history teacher entered Congress in 1978. His peak moment came in 1994 when Time magazine made him Man of the Year, for being the architect, the prime mover in the ending of Democratic majority rule in the US Congress after 40 years.

At this moment of supreme triumph, when he became Speaker of the House, Gingrich went into a long slide. Bill Clinton outsmarted him in a face-off over Gingrich’s threat to shut down government. Then he whined publicly about not getting a decent seat on Air Force One. Then he plunged ever deeper into the mire of scandal. In 1997, the House of Representatives voted to discipline him for ethical wrongdoing, misusing charita­ble donations. He had to pay a $300,000 penalty as part of a settlement. In 1998 he was reelected for an eleventh term but resigned as speaker and as a member of Con­gress — in January 1999, suggesting that someone might have whispered in his ear that staying out of the slammer required immediate departure from the halls of Congress. Or maybe he just needed more money and decided that one dose of “ethical wrongdoing” charges from House colleagues was enough. He became a lobbyist.

Like another college lecturer, Barack Obama, Gingrich is a glib fellow. Unlike Perry, he’s got several answers to everything. He can take any side of a ques­tion. His past is disreputable in so many egregious ways that it is hard to see how the big Republican donors would want to invest substantial money in his campaign, except perhaps as insurance. His campaign organization is an utter mess. It’s surely a better than even bet that IEDs of scandal await detonation along his campaign trail.

But he’s not Mitt Romney. This year, that’s appar­ently a game changer. If Newt goes down, the Republi­cans will be left with the next in line in the polls — namely Ron Paul. Trouble is, Paul really does have princi­ples, starting with a refusal to endorse torture, assas­sinations, abuses to the Constitution, including end­less wars. That puts him out of the picture.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Drummin' in Zuccotti. Courtesy, David Shankbone.

From Manhattan, to Nashville, to St Louis, to Port­land, Oregon, to Oakland, California, the police this week moved in to clear out the Occupy Wall Street pro­testers from the various downtown plazas or squares where they’d established their peaceable focos. The mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, had earlier acknowledged a conference call between 18 mayors (at obvious federal instigation from the Justice Department) across the US discussing strategy, and the mode elected was clear enough. Get them out, by any means necessary.

These marching orders were taken most seriously in — where else? — the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement back in 1964, at Sproul Plaza, entry way into the University of California at Berkeley. FSM’s birth was prompted by the arrest of Jack Weinberg for solicit­ing money for the civil rights movement. He was put into a police car, but a spontaneous sit-down trapped it. Eventually the roof was used as a FSM platform.

Last week 100s of students massed in Sproul Plaza to protest proposed fee hikes of 81% that would bring UC tuition from $13,000 to over $22,000. The stu­dents pointed out that the banks caused the financial cri­sis, which in turn caused the budget crisis. So the banks, not the students, should pay for it. The students set up their own small encampment on the lawn outside Sproul Hall.

An eyewitness, Michael Levien, described on Coun­terPunch last week what happened at around 9.30 pm last Monday night:

“A phalanx of police in riot gear turned the corner of Sproul Hall and rapidly charged, thrusting their batons with violent force into the crowd. Chanting ‘non-violent protest’ and ‘stop beating students,’ student after student took fierce baton thrusts to their chests and limbs.

“Then the police started swinging, brutally beating people’s chests, arms, knees, and backs. They were swinging to hurt. With the crowd behind and the police in front there was no way for people to leave even if they wanted to. A few people tried to escape in the narrow gap between the students and police. They were savagely beaten. Throughout what can only be described as a terri­fying physical attack that has left many with serious injuries, the students stayed entirely non-violent.”

Enter Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who often likes to reminisce about his Freedom Rider days. At the 40th anniversary of the founding of FSM, they had a mock po­lice car and platform and Chancellor Birgeneau spoke from it, reminiscing warmly about the birth of FSM and the importance of free speech. I spoke at the same anniver­sary, giving measured praise for subversive free speech in an event organized by Lenni Brenner, “FSM and the Sixties: Lessons for Today.”

Chancellor Birgeneau seems to be a man changed from the freedom rider of the mid-1960s or even the man perched on the platform in 2004. Last week he emailed the campus, defending the administration’s response by saying that it was necessary to remove the encampment for “practical” considerations of “hygiene, safety, space and conflict issues.” He remarked: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.” So Rosa Parks prevented a white per­son from sitting in the seat reserved for them on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Club her to the ground!

So chapter 1 of the Occupy movement draws to a close; maybe the concerted onslaught by uniformed goons actually did the movement a favor—scant comfort to those battered to the ground—by leaving the Occupi­ers with a positive bank balance in ·terms of imagery at the moment of their enforced departures. Besides, this will allow trained teams of OWSers to hunt down all members of those drumming circles and dispose of them by any means necessary. This is not protected speech.

What next? Thus far the OWS movement has mostly been evoked by its participants in terms of self-education and consciousness-raising about the nature of America’s political economy. There’s been a lot of talk about a brave new world being born. One fellow chided me for not writing more about the movement which he hailed as “the most militant upsurge from the Left since the Viet­nam War, the most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression.”

This is a vast overstatement. In terms of substantive achievements, OWS has a long way to go, which is scarcely a reason for reproof since it only really got going in September. “The most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depres­sion?” Scarcely.

The early 60s Civil Rights Movement prompted the Civil Rights Act, and Medicare, the latter being effec­tively socialized health insurance for the senior crowd. Pushed by the popular movements, President John­son and a Democratic Congress passed a flood of laws.

As historian Alan Nasser pointed out last week, “In less than four years, Congress enacted the Truth In Lending Act, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the National Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the Fed­eral Hazardous Substances Act, the Flammable Fab­rics Act, the federal Meat Inspection Act and the Child Protection Act.

“Business-government relations had never before seen such an avalanche of legislation limiting the free­dom of capital in the interests of working people. Between 1964 and 1968 Congress passed 226 of 252 worker-friendly bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 bil­lion in 1968. One million workers received job train­ing from these bills and 2 million children were enrolled in pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.”

Resistance to the war in Indochina was fierce. In Viet­nam the troops mutinied. Units shot their officers in the back or threw grenades into their tents. In 1971 the Pentagon counted 503,926 ‘incidents of desertion’ since 1966 and reckoned that more than half of US ground forces in Vietnam openly opposed the war. At Christmas 1971, Vietnam Vets Against the War seized the Statue of Liberty for 48 hours and draped it with a banner demand­ing ‘Bring our Brothers Home.’

On the home front, people fought the draft or simply fled it. Major US cities were torn by riots. The anti-war movement, coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, transformed a generation. Finally, Congress simply denied Nixon the war money in Indochina.

To evoke those stormy times is to underline that America was at the peak of its economic power in the late 1960s, whereas today Moody’s warns the world that US T-bills are a risky investment, American corporate capitalism is infinitely better protected in its perquisites than it was 45 years ago when those worker-friendly laws shot through Congress.

These days corporate lobbies own the President and the US Congress and the regulatory agencies. National economic policy is laid down by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, an errand boy of the banks. He took over from Hank Paulson, also an errand boy for the banks. If Obama is not re-elected in 2012, another errand boy will be waiting in the wings.

In the 1930s Roosevelt developed his New Deal pro­gram in part to head off mass movements to his left. In the 1960s Kennedy and Johnson similarly responded to the challenge of mass movements. Today, the OWSers have registered a presence and won considerable public support, which should not be surprising because America is in poor shape, the rich unpopular and politicians despised. But, as yet, there is no sign of any material political consequence deriving from this popularity.

Four years ago a candidacy was gathering momen­tum, declaring that the time had come in America for a moral awakening, for a change in national conscious­ness, a rising above self-interest and partisanship. Young people rallied to the call. Obama swept into the White House and promptly stuck a ‘Business As Usual’ sign on the door of the Oval Office.

Suppose the OWS movement had begun in the early fall of ’08, just as the economy was imploding, amid widespread public fury at Wall St.’s corruption, notably the banks and big investment houses? Would candidate Obama have felt quite so blithe in lobbying his fellow senators to support Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s TARP bailout of the 9 biggest banks? Obama had been in close touch with top-tier Wall St. men all year long and was their point man rallying his fellow senators — and of course the recipient of their campaign contributions, far outstripping what Wall St. gave McCain.

On October 1, 2008, the US senate voted 74 to 25 for the unconditional bank bailout, with eight Democrats vot­ing No, among them Dorgan, Feingold, Wyden, and Landrieu. Sanders also voted No. (Dorgan always had a healthy mistrust of Obama. In his recent book Confidence Men , Ron Suskind writes that at a December 2008 meeting during the transition, after Obama had announced his appointments of Geithner and Summers — thus making absolutely clear where his priorities would lie — Dorgan told him bluntly, “You’ve picked the wrong people. I don’t understand how you could do this. You’ve picked the wrong people!”)

Imagine an OWS movement spreading across the country through September and October of 2008, pierc­ing through Obama’s vapid rhetoric about change, excori­ating the bipartisan congressional support for de facto financial dictatorship by Wall Street. There would have been a thousand opportunities for dramatic actions. Birgeneau’s Freedom Rides could this time have been “Freedom from Debt” rides with OWS trucks collecting maxed out credit cards from every voting district in the country and driving them to Washington to dump in front of the White House and Congress.

Okay, so you’re a realist and you can’t imagine it, and you’d be right, because in the late summer and fall of 2008, it was All Aboard for Obama and the Change Express. The pressure to conform to this ecstatic, albeit totally irrational call was intense. One of my friends — a left militant from way back — told me he didn’t dare voice his doubts publicly in front of his wife and chil­dren. All he could do was mumble to the family dog out in the garden.

So now, four years later, we have OWS, in part a re-run of the idealistic hopes of those Obama zealots of 2008, minus illusions about crusading candidacies. There’s lots of talk about What Next. Somebody will think of something, no doubt. A friend from Portland recently wrote privately, apropos OWS:

“It doesn’t seem to me that the OWS is ready to be fully political. Didn’t it take the new left years to build to 1968? Was part of its less-than-fully ‘successful’ push because it was premature or exhausted? Was it because it never had full enough backing from social forces to be overwhelming? The new left didn’t spring ready formed into mass collective action in 1960 but built up powerful oppositions through solidarities only formed through prac­tical common struggles. We see this happening now but we can’t expect it to happen overnight. On the con­trary, OWS has shaky grounds to build on, but a more propitious moment. The early sixties were a period of ris­ing affluence with a strong labor movement, albeit with a corrupt and conservative bureaucracy, a strong potential for working-class solidarity and powerful social movements demanding change. OWS faces a largely anomic society after decades of economic erosion and declining political power at every level, with the excep­tion of anti-globalization movements that were the older brother and sisters of OWS. Our folks in Portland are still being arrested and still occupying and re-occupying. They have it pretty easy for now because they have tre­mendous support from the public. Let us hope that in one way there is rounding of the circle. Where the unin­tended consequences of parts of new left agitation became identity politics, the OWS might bring us back to class politics. From there, we can join the Greeks.”

On Counterpunch last weekend Michael Hudson lays out a minimal economic program on how to clean out the Augean stables. He calls for a financial Clean Slate:

“To restore the kind of normalcy that made America rich, the most important long-term policy would be to rec­ognize what is going to be inevitable for every econ­omy. Debts need to be written down — and the politi­cally easiest way to cut through the tangle is to write them off altogether. That would free the bottom 99% from their debt bondage to the top 1%. It would be a Clean Slate, starting over — and trying to do things right this time around. The creditors have not used the bank­ing system to make America more productive and richer. They have used it as a vehicle to reduce the population to debt serfdom.

“A debt write-down sounds radical and unworkable, but it’s been done since World War II with great success. It is the program the Allies carried out in the German economy in that country’s 1947 currency reform. This was the policy that created Germany’s Economic Mira­cle. And America could experience a similar miracle.”

Hudson is a fascinating scholar of the history of debt cancellations. He just sent me his pamphlet, The Lost Tra­dition of Biblical Debt Cancellations. It has a drawing of the cuneiform transcription of a debt cancellation (amargi law) by Enmetena, ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, c. 2400 BC, the first known legal proclamation. The original is in the Louvre.

Let’s hoist our Babylonian banner!

Cain protester in Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

As he prepares to follow Gov. Rick Perry into the oubliette of campaign history Herman Cain can at least console himself that as an alleged harasser of women, his was certainly a classier act than that of a man who not only got elected president in 1992 but was triumphantly reelected in 1996, each time by about 45 million Americans armed with the knowledge that if you left your wife at the next table to Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas in Macdonald’s, by the time you got back from ordering more fries Bill would  be ensconced in your seat, his hand already hovering above your wife’s thigh.

Sharon Bialek, one of the women accusing Cain of seeking to take advantage when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in 1997, says that her apprehensions were aroused when in his car, having offered to drive her home,  Cain told her he’d  already called Washington’s  Capital Hilton and upgraded her accommodations to a luxury suite. It was only after this material demonstration of his high regard that Cain put his hand up her skirt and then sought to guide her head towards his lower regions. Ms Bialek says the minute she said No, Cain abandoned his advances and drove her home.

A luxury suite!  One of Bill’s targets, when he was governor of Arkansas, would have been lucky to get a ride home in the troop car, after a brisk session in the governor’s office, with bruises on her arms when she resisted the guiding hand.  Who says this isn’t the land of progress? Seventy years ago a  black man making the sort of advances of which Cain is accused tended to end up swinging from the branch of  a tree, not running for president with a hefty quotient of Americans saying they don’t give a toss about the harassment charges.

Actually Cain has never had a prayer of getting the Republican nomination. He doesn’t have the money, or the big backers, just a handful of staffers and the 9-9-9 thing. His star began to rise when the Tea Party crowd figured Gov Rick Perry of Texas  as a hypocrite and also a moron, as he conclusively demonstrated in the debate in Michigan Wednesday night. Him a conservative Republican and he couldn’t remember all three of the federal agencies he’s pledged to wipe out. “Commerce, Education,…” Then, 53 seconds later, “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” He forgot Energy. It’s like an Anglican parson only able to get through two thirds of the Trinity: “God, the father, God the son and… and… “ Duh!  And this is the man Texans elected as their governor three times?

Cain’s final bit of bad luck has been  to have his harassment charges sitting cheek to cheek on the front pages and in the newscasts with gross details of the gay sex scandal at Penn State.  Wednesday Nov 9  saw the god of college football,  84-year old coach Joe Paterno, fired for effectively covering up the locker-room and shower-stall rampages of  assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with Pennsylvania youth.

So Obama’s opponent in 2012 will surely be Mitt Romney, a Mormon millionaire reminiscent in style and utter lack of any fixed political conviction beyond knee-jerk conservatism to George Bush Sr. Romney is the former governor of Massachusetts and son of George Romney , head of American Motors,  who futilely  sought the Republican presidential nomination back in 1968, and was famous for saying on the campaign trail  that  he’d been “brainwashed” by the US military into declaring his support for the war in  Vietnam.

There’s no point in trying to sketch in “the real Mitt Romney”, because there isn’t one. He’s been campaigning for the Republican nomination for eight solid years, and his brain has been washed clean years ago of anything approaching an original or useful thought about America’s condition.  It would be exciting to think that the fears of the Christian right are true and that Romney, his lower regions swathed in Mormon underwear, is the agent of a master plan to deliver America into grip of the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, but no such luck.

In today’s political topography Romney is classed as a man of the Republican center. Only a couple of months ago it looked as though he’d be sunk by the Tea Party ultras, but they’re a wan bunch these days. Their star is sinking fast. On Tuesday Ohio’s voters issued a crushing defeat – 62 per cent  to 38 per cent on a provisional count –  to proposed Tea Party legislation drafted by Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, designed to curb the power of public sector unions to organize and strike. Other right-wing initiatives across the US got similar black eyes on Tuesday. A couple of respectable polls show Romney beating Obama a year from now, though they’re currently outnumbered by a larger number of polls calling it for Obama. These are early days.

Lest readers think I’m being unkind about Gov. Bill Clinton, let me evoke the man in his youthful prime. Clinton said this week on a talk show promoting his new book Back to Work that he can’t see why an ex-president couldn’t return to the job after previously serving two terms.

Back in 1979 our friend Tim Hermach, now fearless leader of the Native Forest Council and breathing the righteous air of Eugene, Oregon, was a businessman seeking commercial advantage. In 1979 this search took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where an associate said the swiftest way of getting a certificate of origin necessary for a rebar (reinforcing steel for construction) deal was by conferring personally with the new governor of the state.

In short order a dinner was arranged with young Governor Bill at the Little Rock Hilton. Tim recalls that they were scarcely seated before Bill was greeting a pretty young waitress in friendly fashion, putting his hand up her dress while announcing genially to the assembled company, “This woman has the sweetest cunt in Little Rock.”

Tim, an Oregon boy by origin, tells us he listened with burning ears and mouth agape as Bill talked of womanhood in terms of astounding crudity. Badinage notwithstanding, some business was transacted. Hermach tells us that Governor Bill “very openly, nothing shy about it, said words to the effect that our end use certificate would cost about $10,000″, said transaction being of a personal, informal nature.  “Since ours was a $2 million deal, we didn’t care,” Tim recalls.

These tractations concluded, Governor Bill repaired to the Hilton’s nightclub with boon companions, where they cavorted lewdly with sundry flowers of Little Rock before repairing to bedrooms in the upper regions of the hotel.

Back to work indeed.

Why was Tillikum spared? Big whale, big money. There’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away, giving as many as eight performances per a day, 365 days a year, as the star attractions in each of the Shamu stadiums. Tilli­kum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas, and has fathered 13 orcas.

The Occupy Wall Street movement should raise plac­ards in support of Tillikum and his fellow orca slaves: Sea­World got its start in the mid-1960s, and after various ups and downs, in the late 1980s the three SeaWorlds, in San Diego and Orlando, passed into the hands of the vast brew­ing conglomerate Annheuser-Busch which pumped mil­lions into upgrades, finally selling the theme parks for $2.7 billion in 2009 to the Blackstone Group, a merger and acqui­sitions group cofounded by the odious Pete Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, formerly of Lehman and Kuhn-Loeb. Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity investment firms is at the crossroads of crony capitalism, where the political and financial elites engorge and devour. It has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyout transactions over the last decade, with huge operations in commercial real estate.

Last week People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld for “enslaving” five orcas. Tillikum is one of the plaintiffs. PETA’s suit invokes the 13th Amendment, abolishing and prohibiting slavery, and demands the orcas’ release under the Amend­ment’s terms. “All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies,” says PETA’s president Ingrid Newkirk, echoed by PETA’s lawyer, Jeff Kerr who told AP, “By any definition, these orcas are slaves — kidnapped from their homes, kept con­fined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.” Kerr added that the 13th amendment does not refer to a specific species.

SeaWorld, denies the charges.

For those who think the references to slavery and use of the 13th Amendment are excessive, remember the words of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave. Douglass often made direct comparisons between the treat­ment and use of other animals and that of himself. “When purchased, my old master probably thought as little of my advent, as he would have thought of the addition of a single pig to his stock! Like a wild young working animal, I am to be broken to the yoke of a bitter and life-long bondage. Indeed, I now saw, in my situation, several points of similar­ity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I; Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken — such is life.”

Will the orcas get legal standing?

Animals currently have no rights recognized in US law, but many groups of lawyers are working to strengthen laws that protect animals and many individuals have successfully brought suit to protect the welfare of animals. Three years ago the DC Law Journal ran a very useful survey by Kathryn Alfisi. Alfisi points out that it was the Michael Vick case “that allowed for just the right atmosphere to push for state and federal legislation that would strengthen dogfighting and animal cruelty laws.” The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback pulled a 23-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy for running a dogfighting ring on his property in Surry County, Virginia.

Some animal lawyers flee the term “animal rights” as too extreme, while others question the whole concept of legal boundaries between animals and humans. Several state bars and the District of Columbia Bar have animal law sections or committees. In 2005 the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section created its Animal Law Committee. Over 100 animal law courses are being taught at law schools across the country.

The legal system, Alfisi reckons, is beginning “to reflect the increasingly complex relationship between people and their pets in our society.”

The phrase “increasingly complex” does the Middle Ages a grave injustice. Just read my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s marvelous introduction to Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance , published last year by CounterPunch Books.

As St. Clair writes, “In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.”

Humans and animals often ended up in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases of bestiality. The animals were given their own lawyers at public expense. “Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs,” St. Clair writes, “the animal defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at executions.”

“In the province of Savoy, France, in 1575, the weevils of Saint Julien, a tiny hamlet in the Rhone Alps, were indicted for the crime of destroying the famous vineyards on the flanks of Mount Cenis. A lawyer, Pierre Rembaud, was appointed as defense counsel for the accused. Rembaud wasted no time in filing a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the weevils had every right to consume the grape leaves. Indeed, Rembaud asserted, the weevils enjoyed a prior claim to the vegetation on Mount Cenis, since, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, the Supreme Deity had created animals before he fashioned humans and God had promised animals all of the grasses, leaves and green herbs for their sustenance. Rembaud’s argument stumped the court.

“As the judges deliberated, the villagers of Saint Julien seemed swayed by the lawyer’s legal reasoning. Perhaps the bugs had legitimate grievances. The townsfolk scrambled to set aside a patch of open land away from the vineyards as a foraging ground for the weevils. The land was surveyed. Deeds were drawn up and the property was shown to counselor Rembaud for his inspection and approval. They called the weevil reserve La Grand Feisse. Rembaud walked the site, investigating the plant communities with the eyes of a seasoned botanist. Finally, he shook his head. No deal. The land was rocky and had obviously been overgrazed for decades. La Grand Feisse was wholly unsuitable for the discriminating palates of his clients.

“The Perry Mason of animal defense lawyers was an acclaimed French jurist named Bartholomew Chassene, who later became a chief justice in the French provincial courts and a preeminent legal theorist. He argued that local animals, both wild and domesticated, should be considered lay members of the parish community. In other words, the rights of animals were similar in kind to the rights of the people at large.

“In 1642 a teenage boy named Thomas Graunger stood accused of committing, in the unforgettable phrase of Cotton Mather, “infandous Buggeries” with farm animals in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Young master Graunger was hauled before an austere tribunal of Puritans headed by Gov. William Bradford. There he stood trial beside his co-defendants, a mare, a cow, two goats, four sheep, two calves and a turkey. All were found guilty. They were publicly tortured and executed. Their bodies were burned on a pyre, their ashes buried in a mass grave. Graunger was the first juvenile to be executed in colonial America…

“In 1750, a French farmer named Jacques Ferron was espied sodomizing a female donkey in a field. Ferron was convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the donkey’s lawyers argued that their client was innocent. The donkey, the defense pleaded, was a victim of rape and not a willing participant in carnal congress with Ferron. Character witnesses were called to testify on the donkey’s behalf. The donkey was acquitted and duly released back to its pasture.”

The people of the Middle Ages, dismissed as primitives in many modernist quarters, were actually open to a truly radical idea: animal consciousness.

The animal trials peaked in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, then faded away, done in by the Enlightenment and by Rene Descartes who argued that animals were mere physical automatons. They were biological machines whose actions were driven solely by bio-physical instincts. Animals lacked the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. At Port-Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the words of one of Descartes’ biographers, “kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.” Across the Channel Francis Bacon declared in the “Novum Organum” that the proper aim of science was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man and so to endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a diligent vivisector of living animals.

Thus in the dawn of capitalism, the materialistic view of history, and the fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, entertainment and food.

My friend and neighbor in Petrolia, Joe Paff, wrote a response to a dreadful story about Qaddafi’s killing on Yahoo’s site, commenting “This kind of gloating is bound to come back and bite your butt. Imagine how many people in the world would like to see Netanyahu or Obama dragged from their hiding holes and tortured. It will take about six months for everyone to regret the ‘new’ Libyan ‘democrats’.”

Yahoo’s initial electronic response was to write to Joe, “Oops! Try again.” So he checked “post” a second time. Yahoo then rewrote his comment, complete with misspellings, stripped of any mention of Netanyahu or Obama, and “posted” it, as “This is the kind of gloating that comes back and bites you on the butt. Just imagine how many peopel in the world would like to see Ameri­cans dragged through the streets and tortured to death.” As Joe wrote me, “Just another small episode in artificial intelligence and the present taboos.”

I suppose the first triumphalist imperial post mortem photo of such an execution in my lifetime I can recall is that of Che Guevara, killed on the CIA’s orders at La Higuera in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. Perhaps Che’s fin­est hour came with his leadership of the Cuban anti-imperial forces deployed in Africa, defeating South Afri­can and white mercenary forces in one of the greatest acts of revolutionary solidarity the world has ever seen.

Qaddafi, even in his latterday accomodationist phase, was always a bitter affront to Empire — a “devil” figure in a tradition stretching back to the Mahdi, whose men killed General Gordon in the Sudan in 1885. I remember fondly the leftists and Republicans who trekked to Trip­oli in the 1960s to appeal to Qaddafi for funds for their causes, some of them returning amply supplied with money and detailed counsel.

Dollar for dollar I doubt Qaddafi has a rival in any assessment of the amount of oil revenues in his domain actually distributed for benign social purposes. Derision is heaped on his Green Book, but in intention it can surely stand favorable comparison with kindred Western texts. Anyone labeled by Ronald Reagan “This mad dog of the Middle East” has an honored place in my personal pantheon.

Since we’re on the topic of imperial executions, let us not forget October 17, 1961. Last week saw the fifti­eth anniversary of the massacre in Paris of hundreds of Algerians by the French riot police. Called by the FLN, the Algerians had mustered from their neighborhoods and bidonvilles to central Paris in support of the Algerian war of liberation, then six years old. Algeria, remember, was, in formal terms, a French department.

Centering on the Charonne metro station, the French riot police attacked with lethal savagery, battering and shooting peaceful demonstrators to death and throwing their bodies into the Seine. Corpses were later dragged from the river as far downstream as Le Havre. These days the death count is reckoned as at least 300, some of the victims murdered in detention centers around Paris. The French Interior Minister of the time in De Gaulle’s government was Maurice Papon. In 1981 , the French weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné published an arti­cle accusing Papon of having collaborated with the Germans during World War II. Papon was officially charged with crimes against humanity in 1983. His trial for overseeing the deportation of 1,690 Jews to a deten­tion camp in the Paris suburb of Drancy did not take place until 1997. Papon’s role in the massacre of October 17, 1961, and indeed details of the massacre itself — long suppressed in French public memory — surfaced during his trial.

In February 1962 there was a huge protest demonstra­tion about the October 17 massacre in Paris. Joe Paff and his wife Karen were recently in Paris, stay­ing in the 20th at a hotel owned by French Algerians. The owner pointed to a photo of himself in the vanguard of the demo, remembering how he was astonished at the number of photographers eager to take his picture. Only years later did he realize that the man with whom he had linked arms was Jean-Paul Sartre.

The massacre has now been reconstructed in a docu­mentary by Yasmina Adi, Ici on noie les Algériens, “Here one drowns Algerians,” words painted in red on the parapet of one of the bridges over the Seine.

The headlines will initially proclaim “Doubts on Chi­nese Rat Threat Widespread. Many scoff.” The lead para­graphs in news stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal will quote the scoffers, but then “balance” will mandate respectful quo­tation from “intelligence sources,” faculty professors, think tank “experts” and the like, all eager to dance to the government’s tune: “Many say ‘rat scenario ‘plausi­ble’” etc., etc. Lo and behold, by the end of a couple of days of such news stories, the Chinese rat plot is firmly ensconced as a credible proposition. News reports then turn to respectful discussion of the US government’s options in confronting and routing the Chinese rat threat: “Vice President says ‘all options are on the table,” etc. For verification, merely study the news stories about the Iranian “plot” in the major papers across the past 3 days.

Even by the forgiving standards of American credu­lity, the supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US is spectacularly ludicrous. Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi envoy — the mild-man­nered functionary, Adel al-Jubeir? I could under­stand an inclination to dispose of the irksome Prince Ban­dar who held the job for 22 years, from 1983 to 2005 — simply in the spirit of “change.” But to kill any ambas­sador — particularly a Saudi ambassador — is to invite lethal retaliation, even war. Iran doesn’t want war with the US.

Manssor J. Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, has been indicted as the chief conspirator working for Iranian intelligence. He is charged with promising to pay $1.5 million to Los Zetas — one of the Mexican drug cartels — to kill the Saudi ambassador at a restaurant in Washington.

The FBI claims that Arbabsiar told the Drug Enforce­ment Agency’s informant — posing as a high-ranking member of Los Zetas — that it would be “no big deal” if many others died at the restaurant, possibly including United States senators. He also proposed bombing the Israeli embassy.

If even one US senator died in a terrorist bombing in Washington, if anything larger than a firecracker deto­nated outside the Israeli embassy, US bombers would be raining high explosive on Iranian targets within 24 hours. Why would Iran want to invite such a response?

Gareth Porter points out on our Counterpunch.org website this weekend that the whole “plot” has the famil­iar aroma of an FBI sting in which the most outlandish propositions are actually voiced by the DEA informant to Arbabsiar. The supposed plot is certainly wreathed in inci­dental grandiose absurdities: a side deal between the Quds Force, part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and Los Zetas to smuggle vast shipments of opium from the Middle East to Mexico, and plans to bomb the Saudi and Israeli Embassies in Argentina.

To repeat: Iran doesn’t want war with the US. Quite the reverse. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently tried to refloat the Tehran Research Reactor nuclear fuel swap. He proposed that Iran suspend production of some uranium-enrichment activities in exchange for fuel sup­plies from the United States. On September 29 the Inter­national Herald Tribune ran an op-ed piece saying the pro­posal was well worth consideration by the US govern­ment. All such hopes of a warming in relations have now been snuffed out, most vigorously by Obama on Thursday, endorsing Attorney General Holder’s wild allegations and threatening ferocious new sanctions against Iran.

There are two powers in the Middle East that most certainly do want war, or a deepening rift between the US and Iran — namely Saudi Arabia and Israel. And we should not forget the cultish Iranian MEK, beloved by many on Capitol Hill.

Iranian intelligence is famously efficient at hiding its tracks. Though many believe that it was the Iranians who blew up PanAm flight 103 in 1988 — in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US Navy ship, the Vincennes — no convincing trail has ever come to light. Yet it is supposedly Iranian intelligence that wired $100,000 to the used car salesman, using a known Quds bank account. If the bid was a false flag operation mounted by the Saudis or Israelis, an open transfer of money would be one obvious tactic.

The US has made swift use of dubious “plots” in the not-so-distant past. In 1981 it flourished charges of a Lib­yan “hit squad” entering the US through the border tunnel between the Canadian town of Windsor to Detroit, with a plan to assassinate newly elected President Ronald Reagan. No evidence was ever offered for this accusation but it kindled animosities that culminated five years later with the US raid on Tripoli, aiming to assassi­nate Col. Gaddafi in his compound.

In April 1993 former president G.H.W. Bush was vis­iting Kuwait to commemorate the victory over Saddam in the Gulf War. Detection by the Kuwaitis of a plot to kill him with a car bomb was announced. The FBI duly declared that the wiring of the bomb indicated that the bomb-makers belonged to Iraqi intelligence.

In June 1993 Madeleine Albright, US ambassador to the UN, denounced the plot in the Security Council and a day later President Clinton ordered the firing of 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the HQ of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad. One missile landed in a Baghdad sub­urb and killed Layla al-Attar, one of Iraq’s leading artists. This set the tone for relations during the Clinton years.

There have also been some spectacular cases of gulli­bility on the part of supposedly seasoned US intelligence operatives and high military commanders.

A year ago General Petraeus and the US high com­mand in Afghanistan placed great confidence in Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, allegedly a senior Taliban commander empowered to make peace proposals. The US negotiators and Afghan officials were initially suspi­cious of Mansour’s credentials but their doubts soon melted. According to a New York Times report, “Several steps were taken to establish the man’s real identity; after the first meeting, photos of him were shown to Tali­ban detainees who were believed to know Mr. Mansour. They signed off, the Afghan leader said.”

It turned out that Mansour, given quite large sums of money by the Americans, was a freelance impostor. Note that in the case of the Iranian plot, the FBI says that Mans­sor J. Arbabsiar correctly identified a known Quds Force officer from a photo array.

The question is why the US government should nail its colors so firmly to the mast of this purported Iranian assassination plot. On two other occasions the US made passionate commitments at the UN to concocted evi­dence — with both used as levers to launch wars.

The first was US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s unveiling to the UN in February of 2003 of the infamous dossier of entirely bogus evidence that Iraq had a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. The second was the allegation by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, in February of this year, that Gaddafi was committing crimes against humanity up to and including genocide against his own people — charges decisively refuted by Amnesty Interna­tional and Human Rights Watch.

Absurdity, as noted above, is not a decisive factor. Once the DOJ launches its Complaint, the accusations are official and immune to reasoned demolition. Iran doesn’t want war with the US. But how far will the US go in its response, led as it is by a weak president entirely committed to using the “war on terror” to but­tress his bid for reelection?

* * *

Let me give you some opening paragraphs from one of the greatest descriptions of farm work ever committed to paper:

Farm work is hard not only in the sense of being skilled but it also requires toil, exertion, and extended physical effort. When arriving in the early morning to begin work, Pablo Camacho would often say, “Ya llegamos al campo de la batalla” — “Now we arrive at the field of battle.” Although intending to pro­voke a smile, Camacho was not being ironic. Most peo­ple who have worked in the fields say that it is the hard­est work they have ever done. It is hard to put up with the inevitable pain and physical exhaustion, to last until the end of the row, the end of the day, the week, the sea­son. “To last” is not quite the right word. The right word is a Spanish one, aguantar: to endure, to bear, to put up with.

Pablo Camacho was proud of his ability to aguantar, even arrogant about it, often claiming that he never felt pain while he was working. That is a pose that a lot of farmworkers assume, even among themselves. At work, no one complains about pain. Camacho believed that the ability to put up with pain was part of the Mexican national character, especially evident in sports. Like many farmworkers, he was an avid boxing fan. He could name all the boxing champions in the lighter divisions from the 1930s to the 1970s, as well as recount the ways Mexican fighters had been denied championship opportu­nities. Mexicans were the best boxers in the world, he argued, especially in their ability to withstand punishment. They were also good marathon runners and long-distance bicycle racers, he said, sports in which endurance and patience are the essential virtues.

But Mexicans do not have an exclusive franchise on the ability to tolerate hard work. Endurance is a trait of slaves and the oppressed in general, and also characteris­tic of peasants and other agricultural people — whether free or unfree. Agriculture by its very nature requires patience. Farmworkers have to wait for nature to do her work. They must plant, water, and wait. Weed and wait. And, finally, after enduring the wait, they may harvest.

Physical labor has received bad reviews since people began to write. It is Adam’s curse in the Old Testament. Aristotle contended that “occupations are … the most ser­vile in which there is greatest use of the body.” The dynamic relationship between the brain and the hand was ripped asunder by early philosophers, leaving two sepa­rate activities: valued intellectual labor (suitable for free men) and devalued manual labor (suitable for women and slaves). This philosophical predisposition against the work of the body had its greatest worldly triumph in the development of capitalism and the factory system. As Marx so passionately chronicled, English factories destroyed English handicrafts. What he called “modern industry” — machines built by other machines strung together in a continuous process of production, where laborers are “mere appendages” to the machinery — replaced the earlier system of production that “owed its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of the hand.”

The cunning of the hand, what farmworkers call maña, remains the basis of California farm work as surely as it is the basis of a major league pitcher’s job, or a skilled craftsman’s. Many farmworker jobs are not only hard to do but hard to learn, often requiring years to master, and skills typically are passed from one genera­tion to the next. Farmworkers use hand tools: knives, hoes, clippers, pruners. They do not tend machines or have to keep up with an assembly line.

I’m quoting from Frank Bardacke’s brilliant, long-awaited Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers to be published by Verso this month. I read an earlier draft of Frank’s book in manuscript and the chapter, “The Work Itself” bowled me over with its marvelous descriptions and observation. Frank himself worked for three years in the fields of the Pajaro Valley around Watsonville.

When Frank asked me for an endorsement of the book, I wrote “There’s so much marvelous stuff in Frank Bardacke’s book that’s simply not been done before. At the book’s core are the men and women who pick the crops in California’s fields and orchards. Bardacke gives those people, mostly seen only in distant fields, a huge presence, one crackling with political vitality: those surges the UFW had no idea were coming; those moments when a strike spread like wildfire across the fields. Here are the farm workers, their skill and endur­ance, the world they built among themselves, the ways they shaped UFW history. It is their story—refreshingly, sympathetically, and beautifully told — that makes this book stand apart and will make it stand for­ever.”

In our current newsletter we run most of the chapter “The Work Itself.” I hope you get the book. If you want a taste of its qualities, read our exclusive excerpt.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

In 1945 the chief of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, wrote in a memo that the oil resources of Saudi Arabia are a “stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” The man who steered the Saudi sheikhs towards America and away from Britain, was St. John Philby, Kim’s father, and with that one great stroke Philby Sr. wrought far more devastation on the British Empire than his son ever did. The fall of America’s ally, the Shah of Iran in 1979 only magnified the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia.

These days the US consumes about 19 million bar­rels of oil every 24 hours, about half of them imported. At 25% Canada is the lead supplier. Second comes Saudi Arabia with 12%. But supply of crude oil to the US is only half the story. Saudi Arabia controls OPEC’s oil price and adjusts it carefully with US priorities in the front of their minds.

The traffic is not one-way. In the half-century after 1945, the United States sold the Saudis about $100 bil­lion in military goods and services. A year ago the Obama administration announced the biggest weapons deal in US history — a $60 billion program with Saudi Arabia to sell it military equipment across the next 20 to 30 years.

The US trains and supplies all Saudi Arabia’s secu­rity forces. US corporations have huge investments in the Kingdom.

Say the words “Saudi Arabia” to President Obama or to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the high-minded prattle about the “Arab spring” stops abruptly. When the Saudis rushed security forces across the Cause­way and into Bahrein, counselling the Khalifa dynasty to smash down hard on the Shi’a demonstrators in the homeport of the US Fifth Fleet, the public noises of reproof from Washington were mouse-like in their reti­cence and modesty.

Could the uprisings in Saudi Arabia spiral out of con­trol? We’re talking here about two different challenges. The first are the long-oppressed Shi’a, making up ten per cent of the population. The second is from the younger generation — youth under 30 account for two-thirds of the Saudi population — in the Sunni majority, living in one of the most thorough-going tyrannies in the world.

In February of this year, perturbed by the trend of events in Egypt and elsewhere, the 87-year King Abdul­lah announced his plan to dispense about $36 billion in welfare handouts — about $2,000 for every Saudi. He correctly identified one of the Kingdom’s big problems, which is that nearly half those between 18 and 40 don’t have a job.

A few days ago Abdullah offered Saudi women a privilege — to participate in certain entirely meaningless municipal elections (if approved by their husbands). What municipal elections can be meaningful amid reso­lute repression under an absolutist monarchy?

As the international rights lawyer Paul Wolf remarked on PressTV, “In Saudi Arabia, cellphones with cameras are illegal. All telephone conversations are monitored. The government controls the TV and the print media. In 2009 an election was cancelled…. So I mean it is great if they are taking action to try to include women in the political process but really, no one is included in the political process.”

The American Empire has lost Iran and Iraq. What of Saudi Arabia? Suppose, fissures continue to open up in the Kingdom itself? I doubt, at such a juncture, that we would hear too much talk from Washington about “democracy” or orderly transitions. Aside from anything else, the downfall of the Saudi regime would have terri­ble consequences in Washington, since hundreds of heavy-hitters there are on the Saudi payroll, starting with virtually all the ex-ambassadors, with the exception of James Akins who once told a friend of mine he was the only one who wasn’t. No way will Washington let the money flow from Riyadh to K street be endangered. Send in the 101st Airborne!

One cherished British imperial rule, handed down to the Empire that displaced it, is: When in doubt, break it up. There have been recent western advocates of break-up of Saudi Arabia, Two well-known neo-cons, Richard Perle and David Frum wrote in their 2005 book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror that the US should mobilize the Shi’ites living in eastern Saudi Ara­bia, where most of the Saudi oil is: “Independence for the Eastern Province would obviously be a catastrophic outcome for the Saudi state. But it might be a very good outcome for the United States. Certainly it’s an outcome to ponder. Even more certainly, we would want the Saudis to know we are pondering it.”

Perle was once head of the Defense Policy Board, advising the Defense Department. As Robert Dreyfus reports in Devil’s Game, In 2002, a Defense Policy Board briefing argued that the US should work to split Saudi Arabia apart so the US could effectively control its oil. Other neoconservatives like Michael Ledeen expressed similar views. In early 2003, Akins, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, mentioned the possibil­ity that Osama bin Laden could take over Saudi Arabia if the US invaded Iraq. “I’m now convinced that that’s exactly what [the neoconservatives] want to happen. And then we take it over.”

I guess the current model is the Kurdish sector of Iraq.

Straight from the Shoulder

Here’s Ernest Hemingway, on James Jones’ From Here to Eternity , Jones’ first novel and winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 1952. Hemingway was writing to his and Jones’ mutual publisher Charles Scribner. Maxwell Perkins had edited Jones, as he had Hemingway, but by the time this acrid communication reached Scribner, Perkins was dead.

“About the James Jones book … It is not great no matter what they tell. To me it is an enormously skillful fuck-up and his book will do great damage to our coun­try. Probably I should re-read it again and give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs; nor suck a boil to know it is a boil; nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot. I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not dam­age your sales. If you give him a literary tea you might ask him to drain a bucket of snot and then suck the puss out of a dead-nigger’s ear… How did they ever get a pic­ture of a wide-eyed jerk (un-damaged ears) to look that screaming tough. I am glad he makes you money and I would never laugh him off. I would just give him a big­ger bucket of the snot detail. He has the psycho’s urge to kill himself and he will do it. Make all the money you can out of him as quickly as you can and hold out enough for Christian Burial. Wouldn’t have brought him up if you hadn’t asked me. Now I feel as unclean as when I read his fuck-off book. It has all the charm and trueness of the real and imitation fuck-off. Mary sends her love to you and to Vera. Best always, Papa.”

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

Contrary to the lurid predictions of declining US oil production, disastrous dependence on foreign oil and the need for new offshore drilling, not to mention the gloom-sodden predictions of the “peak oil” crowd, the big crisis for the US oil companies can be summed up in a single word that drives an oil executive to panic like a lightning bolt striking a herd of snoozing Longhorns: glut.

Here let me wheel on a very useful report, “Export­ing -Energy Security: Keystone XL Exposed,” recently issued by Oil Change International (OCI), a “clean energy” advocate. The explosive sentences (underpinned by the latest figures from the government’s Energy Infor­mation Administration) come on pages 3 and 4: “For the last two years, and for the foreseeable future (my italics)…demand [for oil in the United States] is in decline, while domestic supply is rising… Gasoline demand is declining due to increasing vehicle efficiency and slow economic growth”; meanwhile, “as a result of stagnant demand and the rise in both domestic [notably North Dakota] and Canadian oil production, there is a glut of oil in the US market. Refiners have therefore iden­tified the export market as their primary hope for growth and maximum profits.”

There’s no need to buy into Oil Change Interna­tional’s piously trendy “clean energy” platform. In these two pages the authors of the report have brought out enough useful facts on the actual domestic oil situation to devastate a decade’s worth of propagandizing by Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the NYT, the Wash­ington Post, the TV networks, the environmental mega-foundations and, of course, the entire spectrum of estab­lishment thinktanks from across the political spectrum.

The current focus of debate on whether America is oil-rich or oil starved is the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipe­line extension — a $7 billion project to bring heavy, “sour” crude oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Can­ada, down through Montana and the Plains states to refin­eries on the Gulf Coast, notably in Port Arthur, Texas. There were fierce protests outside the White House last month about the proposed pipeline as an envi­ronmental nightmare. The protesters have now furled their banners and headed home, or maybe just up the New Jersey turnpike, to occupy Wall Street.

Now the Obama administration is deciding whether to issue a presidential permit for the object of last month’s protests. Secretary of State Clinton told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco a year ago that “we’ve not yet signed off on it. But we are inclined to do so.” Even as protesters outside the White House savaged the scheme as a fearsome environmental disaster the State Department issued its final environmental impact statement on August 25. Unsurprisingly it was favorable to the project, furnishing such nuggets of encouragement as “Department of State’s analysis of previous large pipe­line oil spills suggests that the depth and distance that the oil would migrate would likely be limited unless it reaches an active river, stream, a steeply sloped area, or another migration pathway such as a drainage ditch.”

We’re in the midst of a 90-day review period. If fed­eral agencies aren’t unanimous, then the final say-so is up to Obama. It’s a political hot potato and a “Yes” from Obama will cost him a bit among the greens, but where are they going to go? It’s a sound bet that Obama will issue approval. Already, up in Montana work camps are being established for the pipe-laying crews. Would the ductile president risk a thrashing from Republicans for putting birds ahead of jobs? Undoubtedly the prime ration­ale put forward by the president will be security of supply and energy “independence,” meaning in this instance supply from the fine, upstanding Calgary-based Trans-Canada Corporation, as opposed to “not secure and reliable sources of crude oil, including the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, and South America.”

We saw this bait-and-switch game a generation ago amid the battles over oil in Alaska, where the North Slope drilling and pipeline were approved by Congress only because the oil was intended to buttress America’s energy independence. Congress required the oil compa­nies operating on the North Slope to refine the crude in the United States, with no exports permitted.

In fact the oil companies had as their long-term strat­egy the aim of exporting Alaska’s crude to Asia, thus ensuring that home heating fuel prices in the Midwest in winter would stay high.

In 1996 President Bill Clinton, extending Lincoln Bedroom sleeping privileges and a Rose Garden birthday party to Arco’s former CEO Lodwrick Cook in exchange for campaign cash, signed an executive order okaying for­eign sales of Alaskan crude. This time there will be no 25-year pause. From day one of the Keystone XL scheme the oil companies’ plan has been to take the heavy crude from Alberta, refine it in Texas and then ship it out in the form of “middle distillates” — diesel, jet fuel, heating oil — primarily to Europe and Latin America.

Enter San Antonio–based Valero Energy, the largest exporter of refined oil products in the United States and a big-time retailer of gasoline in this country through its Valero, Diamond Shamrock and Beacon stations. As OCI’s report emphasizes, the Keystone XL pipeline would “probably not have gotten off the drawing board” if it hadn’t been for Valero. The company has the biggest commitment to the pipeline, guaranteeing a TransCanada purchase of at least 100,000 barrels a day, 20% of Key­stone XL’s capacity, until 2030.

Valero’s CEO and chairman, Bill Klesse, doesn’t keep his firm’s business plan a secret. The big overseas market is diesel because Europeans, Latin Americans and others like the more fuel-efficient diesel engine. Valero’s Port Arthur refinery can process cheap heavy crude from Canadian tar sands into high-value, ultra-low-sulfur diesel. Better still, since the refinery operates as a “foreign trade zone,” it won’t pay tax and custom duties on exports or on any gasoline imports from its Welsh refinery.

In fact, there’s no national need for the Keystone XL extension. It spares TransCanada the task of trying to send the tar sands oil to Canadian terminals through frac­tious First Nations north of the border. It feeds Big Oil’s bottom line. It’s a nightmare in terms of extraction, a threat to aquifers and the overall environment because of the certainty of corporate penny-pinching in mainte­nance and the equally appalling (and deliberate) lack of government safety enforcement.

Money talks, of course. Obama received $884,000 from the oil and gas industry during the 2008 campaign, more than any other lawmaker except John McCain. Valero throws the money around. Across 2008, 2010 and thus far in the 2012 campaign, it ranks in the top six con­tributors from the oil and gas industry — favoring Repub­licans by 80% or more. Between 1998 and 2010 Valero gave $147,895 to Rick Perry, outstripped only by Exxon. Surely, one way or the other, Bill Klesse can hope for a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

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

September 17: Lead paragraph of the New York Times story:

“President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same per­centage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials…

“Mr. Obama’s proposal is certain to draw opposition from Republicans, who have staunchly opposed raising taxes on the affluent because, they say, it would discour­age investment.”

It only took 24 hours for President Blinker to re-shuf­fle the pack.

A day later, the New York Times lead, after Boehner has emphasized that meeting the deficit-reduction target should come largely from overhauling benefit programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security:

“President Obama will unveil a plan on Monday that uses entitlement cuts, tax increases and war savings to reduce the federal deficit by more than $3 trillion over the next 10 years, administration officials said.”

Suddenly we have “entitlement cuts” leading the charge.

The following day’s NYT lead:

“Faced with falling poll numbers for his leadership and an anxious party base, Mr. Obama did not just pro­pose but insisted that any long-term debt-reduction plan must not shave future Medicare benefits without also raising taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers and corpora­tions.

“He uncharacteristically backed up that stand with a veto threat, setting up a politically charged choice for anti-tax Republicans — protect the most affluent or com­promise to attack deficits. Confident in the answers most voters would make, Mr. Obama plans to hammer on that choice through 2012…

‘The president laid down a marker today that is true to his beliefs,” said Jacob J. Lew, director of Mr. Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.’”

In other words it’s now promoted by the White House that cuts in Medicare and Social Security are axio­matic, while Obama plans to make hay on the tax-the-rich campaign plank until the time comes to hunker down with Boehner and face the Republicans in all their righteous fury, just as he did with a winning hand on the debt ceiling fight at the start of August, and… blink. He always does, seemingly drawing perverse strength from polling data insistently disclosing that support for “enti­tlement” cuts commands a scrawny base of support of about 15% among the voters Obama needs.

Meanwhile the liberals, doing their best to put a posi­tive spin on the Jobs bill proposed by Obama in his speech to a joint session of Congress on September 8, are slow to appreciate — protectively reluctant to point out — the fact that his proposed tax break for the masses and the employers, lowering the 6.2% tax on Social Secu­rity — welcomed rapturously by the Republicans — is a carefully planted depth charge. It lowers revenues into the Social Security fund, thus giving ammo to the saboteurs across the spectrum from Obama to Perry who say Social Security is in crisis.

Dean Baker described the bait-and-switch very well on our CounterPunch.org website last week:

“Under President Obama’s proposal, the Social Secu­rity trust fund would be credited with the same amount of revenue as if the tax cut were not in place, just as is happening in 2011.

“While there is nothing in principle wrong with financing Social Security in part out of general revenue for two or three years in the middle of a severe economic downturn, the question is what will happen when the economy recovers enough that we no longer need this tax cut as stimulus. In principle the [Social Security] tax should simply revert to its normal level.

“As the Congressional Budget Office recently pro­jected, this would be sufficient to keep the program fully funded through the year 2038 and more than 80% funded through the rest of the century. Those familiar with arith­metic know that the program as currently structured is essentially fine long into the future.

“However, it is not clear that Congress will allow the tax to revert to its normal level of 6.2% on both the employer and employee. Democrats in Congress have already been railing against Republicans who appear reluctant to extend the payroll tax cut. They have com­plained that Republicans, who support tax cuts for billion­aires, are willing to raise taxes on ordinary work­ers.

“Of course Republicans are much better at this anti-tax rhetoric. And they will be able to remember what the Democrats said this fall when it’s time to restore the tax to its normal level in 2012, 2013, or 2015. They will not be shy to attack the Democrats for wanting to raise taxes on Joe the Plumber and friends. Would anyone bet on the Democrats standing up to these attacks?

“Since its inception, Social Security has been financed from the designated payroll tax. This tax has been used to sustain the trust fund, which is in principle separate from the rest of the budget. This arrangement is not written in stone. However, without a clear commit­ment to support Social Security from general revenue, there is little reason to expect that Republicans, and even many Democrats who are openly hostile to Social Secu­rity, will suddenly turn around and agree to establish a whole new funding source for Social Security. More likely they will note the worsened financing of the pro­gram and insist on the urgent need for cuts in benefits.

“There is a very simple way around this potential problem. If we want to give a tax cut to workers equal to 3.1% of wages, as President Obama has proposed, along with a similar cut to some employers, we can just write that into the law without any reference to Social Secu­rity.”

Amid these shenanigans, Obama travelled to the UN General Assembly and blinked so hard on the Israel/Palestine issue that surgeons had use surgery to get his eyes open again.

Was there ever a more preposterous spectacle than the US president solemnly admonishing the Palestinians that “There is no shortcut to the end of a conflict that has endured for decades…Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations.” To which of course every Palestinian crushed under the piled up wreckage of the “peace process,” and the “bilateral” diplomacy with Israel urged by the United States across the past 20 years — can tell Obama the num­bers, as cited by Esam al-Amin on this weekend’s CounterPunch website:

“Almost 6500 Palestinian civilians have been killed since September 2000, including over 1500 children. Of that figure, two-thirds (over 4400) have been killed since the Roadmap in 2003. During the same period, over 45,000 Palestinians were injured, some maimed for life, 24,000 since 2003.

“There are over 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including over 250 females and children under the age of 16. Half of them were arrested after 2003, many with no charges and held under administrative detention. (Since 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained and imprisoned — a staggering 20% of the total population or about 1 out of every 2 men has been detained at one point in his life under the occupation.)”

Back in 1991, Israelis and Palestinians met for the first time in Madrid to negotiate a peace agreement. United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israel’s withdrawal from the land it occupied during the 1967 War in exchange for peace, served as the basis for the Madrid Conference.

At the end of 1991, there were 132,000 Jewish set­tlers in East Jerusalem and 89,800 settlers in the West Bank. Two decades later, the numbers of settlers in East Jerusalem has increased by about 40%, while the settlers in the West Bank, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, have increased by over 300%. Currently, there are about half a million Jewish settlers.

During periods in which the Israeli Labor Party formed the governing coalition, the numbers have been just as high, if not higher, than periods during which Likud or Kadima have been in power. As Neve Gordon and Yinon Cohen wrote on our webiste: “This, in turn, underscores the fact that all Israeli governments have uni­laterally populated the contested West Bank with more Jewish settlers while simultaneously carrying out negotiations based on land for peace.”

Twenty years of Israeli intransigence, 20 years of the Israel lobby’s arm-lock on US Mideast policy, and here are Obama and his Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, tell­ing the Palestinians to chain themselves once more to “bilateral diplomacy,” the treadmill of doom to all Pales­tinian hopes.

Obama’s UN speech in the fall of 2010 laid out a somewhat different agenda: a Palestinian declaration of statehood, along the pre-1967 Mideast War borders with no more Israeli settlements. But if we make the dubious assumption that there is ever any window for sanity in the insane architecture of “peace process” politics in the US, this window gets nailed shut with the onset of every presidential electoral cycle, such as the 2012 Campaign now underway.

Obama and the Democratic National Committee are still shuddering from the loss of the Brooklyn district of the dick-twittering Rep. Wiener whose seat, held by the Democrats for 80 years until Wiener’s resignation, was captured by Bob Turner, a Republican campaigning in the heavily Jewish district on the theme that Obama was selling out Israel.

Earlier this week Republican Rick Perry, not noted hitherto for his interest in foreign affairs, disclosed a sound grasp of the essentials — at least so far as any Republican politician courting Jewish votes and money is concerned. The Texas governor announced at a New York press conference, newly elected Turner at his side, that,

“We would not be here today at the precipice of such a dangerous move if the Obama policy in the Mid­dle East wasn’t naive and arrogant, misguided and danger­ous.”

Perry flayed the White House for supposedly arm-twisting Israel: “Bolstered by the Obama administra­tion’s policies and apologists at the UN, the Palestinians are exploiting the instability in the Middle East, hoping to achieve their objective without concessions and direct negotiations with Israel,” The Texas governor pledged there will be no shilly-shallying if he’s elected president. “We are going to be there to support you. And we are going to be unwavering in that. So I hope you will tell the people of Israel: Help is on the way.”

The Palestinians can see perfectly well that the Jew­ish settlers, with the backing of every Israeli government and complaisance of every US government, are under­mining any future two-state solution, so they have decided not to wait any longer and are asking the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. As a matter of political survival it’s Abbas’s last throw to retrieve any credibility.

At the start of this year al-Jazeera published docu­ments prepared by Abbas’s negotiators with Israel. Abbas was prepared to cede to Israel nearly all of the ille­gal colonies that the Zionist state has built east of the 1967 armistice line in and around occupied East Jerusa­lem. Palestinian Authority officials also agreed to deprive the vast majority of Palestinian refugees of the right — backed by the UN — to return to their homes in what is now Israel. They agreed in principle to accept the repatriation of 100,000 refugees over 10 years, and no more. Israeli contemptuously rejected these astounding concessions.

So Obama strides to the podium at the UN. Does he make even the most fleeting pretense of even-handed­ness? Does he even gesture at to the afflictions of the Pal­estinians? In Ramallah, in Gaza they strain to hear an echo of the Cairo speech, of last year’s prposals. But no, this speech was dictated by AIPAC, and Dennis Ross:

“Let us be honest with ourselves: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s chil­dren come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, look out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the bur­den of centuries of exile and persecution, and fresh memories of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they are. Those are facts. They cannot be denied.

“The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two-state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine.

“That is the truth — each side has legitimate aspira­tions — and that’s part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other’s shoes; each side can see the world through the other’s eyes. That’s what we should be encouraging. That’s what we should be promoting.”

Could he not, for longer than that furtive final men­tion of the “two-state solution,” actually stand in a Pales­tinian’s shoes? No.

If it ever comes to one, a UN resolution won’t give the Palestinians a viable state, nor solve the problems of refugees, nor the separation between the West Bank and Gaza, nor discrimination within Israel which is now emphasizing its legal identity as a Jewish state.

Maria Khoury, tireless promoter of the Taybeh Okto­berfest writes from Jerusalem on this weekend Counter­Punch.org website:

“Going to East Jerusalem which has been predomi­nately a Palestinian majority was the saddest day of my life. Small businesses that I use to deliver invitations too simply shut down and new Israeli Jewish owners have taken over their locations. I could not believe my eyes how fast in the last few years Palestinians have been squeezed out of Jerusalem.

“Actually, whether the United Nations recognizes Pal­estine as a country will not change much for us on the ground who suffer day-to-day under strict Israeli occupa­tion. And the half million illegal Israel settlers who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank already take up more than the 50% of this little 22% that the president of Palestine is making an appeal to be recognized for inde­pendence . While we are struggling to maintain our pres­ence here, it’s not easy with the water being shut off twelve straight days in a row while you know the illegal Israeli settlements have water twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. It’s heartbreaking when parishion­ers of St. George Church could not get permits to celebrate the holy days for the Mother of God in Jeru­salem in August but illegal Israeli settlers move around and use bypass roads to get into and out of Jerusalem as often as they wish.

“The injustice and prejudice here run so deep; I am a bit surprised that President Obama does not know about it. Please make a difference and know that Palestinian people seek a just peace and basic human dignity. Blind support with hard working American tax payers’ money to Israel should stop.”

Abbas’s critics make strong points. But surely, isn’t the bottom line that after 20 years, the Palestinians have nowhere to go but up, and already the UN bid has had an inspiriting effect. The Palestinian initiative with the UN underscores the US’s weakening status in the region, whose political geography has been changing before our eyes, as well described by Israel Shamir here on this site last week, and by Patrick Cockburn this weekend.

Turkish prime minister Erdogan has kicked out the Israeli ambassador for negotiating in bad faith over the lethal attack on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara; he has stopped military cooperation with and military pur­chases from Israel. He promised to come in person to Gaza on board of his navy’s protective fleet. As the Egyp­tian crowd tore down down the wall of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, they hailed Erdogan as “a new Sala­din.”

Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al Faisal wrote in the NY Times on September 11, of all days, that “the United States must support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations this month or risk losing the little credibility it has in the Arab world… Saudi leaders would be forced by domestic and regional pressures to adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy: Saudi Arabia will part with the US if it vetoes the Palestinian bid.”

The prince was being polite. The US has no credibil­ity in the Arab world.

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

That’s enough to hire good investigators, lawyers and expert witnesses who can spend many years on the case — first the trial and then the penalty phase and then the appeals process, which can go on for decades. Califor­nia currently has 648 prisoners on death row in San Quentin, and since 1976, it has managed to execute only 13, just enough to keep people on their toes.

An indigent person charged with murder in the state of Texas, however, can count on maybe $500 for a court-appointed attorney to pay for special expenses. Yet the cost of importing an expert witness, who will be charg­ing transportation, hotel and a fat fee, easily can exceed $10,000.

Business is correspondingly brisk in the lethal injec­tion chamber in Huntsville, Texas. There are currently 413 on death row, and at the time of writing, 475 have been executed since 1976, 235 of them during Rick Perry’s decade-long stint as governor.

It turned out Thursday we won’t have to adjust the numbers yet. On Sept. 15, the scheduled execution day for Duane Edward Buck, the US Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Buck (who on Sept. 12 had his clemency request turned down by the Texas Board of Par­dons and Paroles,) while it reviews the case.

No one claims that Buck, 48, didn’t shoot to death his former girlfriend and her male companion and wound a third in Houston in 1995. He himself admits his crimes. At issue is what an expert witness told the court during the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides whether the convicted murderer should go to prison for a life term or get lodgings on death row.

To get Buck lined up for the lethal needle, his prose­cutors needed to prove “future dangerousness.” How might Buck behave in the event he ever got out of prison?

Dr. Walter Quijano, a psychologist practicing in Conroe, a town just south of Huntsville (and no doubt filled with employees for the big prison in Huntsville, some of whom may well have to resort to Quijano’s min­istrations), had actually been called by the defense, who hoped that he would testify that Buck’s killing spree was an act of rage unlikely to be repeated.

Under cross-examination, however, the prosecutors asked Quijano: “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?”

“Yes,” Quijano answered, probably out of sheer force of habit, because usually he was the prosecution’s expert, and he had testified in similar fashion for the prosecution in six other cases, racially profiling the defen­dants into the Huntsville death house.

His “yes” was enough for the jury, which cut smartly through all uncertainty about Buck’s future decisions by saying he should die, thus rendering speculation unneces­sary.

In 2000, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a Republican US senator), recognizing the constitu­tional abuse for what it was, called for Buck and the other six to receive a retrial. Buck is the only con­demned man who hasn’t gotten one. On Sept. 13, Linda Geffin, one of Buck’s prosecutors in 1995, joined the chorus of voices calling on Gov. Perry to stay his execu­tion.

What mostly has people marveling is Quijano’s career stint in the 1990s as an “expert witness.” Buck’s was the only case for which he was called by the defense. Expert witnessing is a trade — often a very prof­itable one — in which by far the most desirable char­acteristic is predictability. A truly expert witness for the defense would have regarded it as his first duty to reas­sure the jury of Buck’s lamblike character, utterly inconsistent with possibly lethal recidivism.

Juries like a well-spoken expert witness, gravely deploying forensic data. The popularity of shows like “CSI” has enhanced the reputation of forensic “experts,” even though much forensic testimony, up to and includ­ing fingerprints, is disfigured by inherently faulty sci­ence, mishandled materials and unending mendacity.

Our view is that taken as a whole, forensic evidence as used by prosecutors is inherently untrustworthy. For example, for years many people went to prison on the basis of the claims of a North Carolina anthropologist, Louise Robbins. She helped send people to prison or to Death Row with her self-proclaimed power to identify criminals through shoe prints. As an excellent Chicago Tribune series a decade ago on forensic humbug recalled, on occasion she even said she could use the method to determine a person’s height, sex and race, just like Sherlock Holmes. Robbins died in 1987, her mem­ory compromised by the conclusion of many Appeals Courts that her methodology was bosh. There have been similarly hollow claims for lip prints and ear prints, all of them invoked by their supporters as “100% reliable” and believed by juries too easily impressed by passionate invocations to 100% reliable scientific data.

Of course the apex forensic hero of prosecutors, long promoted as the bottom line in reliability — at least until the arrival of DNA matching — has been the fingerprint, whose career was once the subject of a fine, derisive piece here by myself and my CounterPunch co-editor, Jeffrey St. Clair.

Of course, it doesn’t help anyone on Death Row, headed for the injection chamber and amid last-ditch appeals, that we’re in campaign mode and right after Perry issued a fervent endorsement of the death penalty, earning him hearty cheers in the auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library when he stressed that imposing it has never lost him a moment’s sleep.

The most notorious example of presidential ambition trumping any humane considerations came on Jan. 24, 1992, when Bill Clinton — beset by the Gennifer Flow­ers sex scandal amid his vital primary race in New Hamp­shire — hastened back to Little Rock, Ark., to pre­side over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man who had managed to botch a suicide bid after his murders and had no idea why they were strapping him down.

As they hunted for 45 minutes for a vein into which to shoot the sodium thiopental, Bill was having dinner with Mary Steenburgen. But that was Bill. Maybe Perry has been on his knees asking for guidance from the Lord or — the functioning modern equivalent — seeking reas­surance from his pollsters.

Gay Perry?

Here’s an item we ran in February, 2004, in our CounterPunch newsletter, under the headline

“‘The Gay Adulterer?’ Bush’s Successor as Defender of Straight Marriage in Texas In Eye of Storm.”

“At the very moment, late in February, that President George W. Bush let the world be known that if he were governor of Texas, he would insist that the sacred vows of holy matrimony could be exchanged only by a man and a woman, that he would press for a constitutional amendment insisting on this, at that very moment Austin, the state capital of Texas, was convulsed with charges that the current Republican governor’s wife Anita Perry has been on the verge of suing her husband Rick Perry for divorce on the grounds of infidelity, said infidelity pos­sibly being with someone of the same sex as Rick. On one account Anita Perry has engaged the services of Becky Beaver, ‘the most notorious ballbreaker divorce attorney in Austin.’

“On Tuesday, February 24, so we learn from our friend Michael King, city editor of the weekly Austin Chronicle, a small group of protesters (almost outnum­bered by reporters and photographers) gathered at the Governor’s Mansion for what was disingenuously billed as a “support rally” under the theme, ‘It’s OK to Be Gay.’

“In a tolerant and forgiving world what Rick might or might not have done behind Anita’s back, would be for him and Anita and maybe the other party to discuss, but our world is neither tolerant nor forgiving and there may be a hypocrisy issue here.

“Last spring Perry endorsed and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a statement by the Texas legislature that it believes gay and lesbian Texans deserve fewer rights than other citizens. The Texas GOP’s platform declares that ‘The party opposes the decriminalization of sod­omy.’ Further diminishing the possibility of any ambigu­ity on this issue, the platform also declares that ‘The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fab­ric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the fam­ily unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, commu­nicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is con­trary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s foun­ders, and shared by the majority of Texans.’ Perry approved the statement, and all candidates who run as Republicans in Texas have to sign it, or forfeit financial support by the party.”

* * *

Not long after Rick Perry became Governor of Texas, according to an Associated Press release on May 12, 2001 he signed the James Byrd Hate Crimes Act (HB 587) named for a black man in Jasper, Texas, who was dragged to death behind a pickup in 1998. James’ mother Stella, who died last year, was present for the signing.

In the bill-signing ceremony on May 11, 2001 Perry said:

“As the Governor of our diverse state, in all matters it is my desire to seek common ground for the common good. In the end, we are all Texans and we must be united as we walk together into the future. That’s why today I have signed House Bill 587 into law. Texas has always been a tough-on-crime state. With my signature today, Texas now has stronger criminal penalties against crime motivated by hate.”

President Obama signed a similar law, and the Texas statute signed by Perry does effectively establish a spe­cial “protected class” status including enhanced sentenc­ing for crimes allegedly motivated by bias against that class. I’ve always agreed with the libertarians that hate crimes laws are profoundly misguided. I agree with Steve Baldwin, a conservative author, who wrote in World Net Daily  (WND) on August 14, 2011:

“Such a law gives harsher sentences to certain crimes based upon a person’s perceived bias to some class or group. But juries really can’t determine what’s in a per­son’s heart and, besides, all crime should be punished equally, regard[less] of the race, gender, sexual orienta­tion, etc. of the victim. In other words, under hate-crimes law, if someone beats up a white person and then beats up a gay person, they receive a heavier sentence for the latter crime. This makes a travesty of the concept of equal application of the law and is likely unconstitu­tional.

“Indeed, the idea of hate crime requires that the prose­cutors know the thoughts and motivation of a perpe­trator, therefore effectively making such designated crimes into thought crimes. And among many conserva­tive Republicans, that concept is at odds with the constitu­tional precept that all Americans are equal under the law.”

I should add that our 2004 story concluded thus: “Michael King spends much of his story prudently insist­ing that he couldn’t find a shred of evidence to substanti­ate the rumors about Perry.”

At last! The Fascist Threat

“Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, we are now confronted by well-funded conservative evangelicals pro­moting a sinister vision of America as a corporate autocracy, with Dominionists as Gauleiters of a totalitar­ian state religion.”

So Lawrence Swaim, Executive Director of the Inter­faith Freedom Foundation wrote on our Counter­punch.org website last week. Swaim concluded with a familiar quote: “This recalls the prescient words of novel­ist Sinclair Lewis: ‘When fascism comes to Amer­ica,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘it will come wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross’.”

Not in my opinion. As a rule, the field of battle between secularism and our Christian ultras ends up stained with the blood of the latter, as Satan counter-attacks. Just glance at the career of the original Know-Nothings or the history of prohibition. Indeed, looking across the American landscape, I’d say the Dark One has scant cause for lament amid quavering pieces about the Dominionist threat which so delight fundraisers for non­profits touting the menace of Christian evangelism. Back in the god-sodden Fifties, who could presage that a half century later tots could go online to view fornication in every guise and combination?

In my view fascism mostly crosses the threshold these days wrapped in Green clothing, with a thousand summary edicts, which people gloomily strain to read by the pallid glimmer of the new, mercury-filled light bulbs promoted by greens, the General Electric Corp., and signed into law by George Bush Jr. whose own timid effort to promote the fusion of church and state — allow­ing religious non-profits to run some government pro­grams — didn’t fare too well.

The main purpose of invoking the fascist threat is to scare people into voting Democrat, as Frank Bardacke has often remarked to me. In 1964 it was the Goldwater threat, in 2011 — for now — the Perry threat. Obama will save us from fascism. Alas, fascism is currently wrapped in the decorous clothing of this self-same for­mer constitutional professor.

Back on September 13, 2001, I wrote in a Los Ange­les Times op-ed that “The lust for retaliation traditionally outstrips precision in identifying the actual assailant. The targets abroad will be all the usual suspects — the Tali­ban or Saddam Hussein, who started off as creatures of US intelligence. The target at home will be the Bill of Rights.”

It was maybe an hour after the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed that I heard the first of a thousand pundits that day saying that America might soon have to sacrifice “some of those freedoms we have taken for granted.” They said this with grave relish, as though the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution — was somehow responsible for the onslaught, and should join the rubble of the towers, carted off to New Jersey and exported to China for recy­cling into abutments for the Three Gorges Dam, with a special packet of “nano-thermite” (aka paint dust) reserved for Paul Craig Roberts to sprinkle on his por­ridge.

Of course it didn’t take 9/11 to give the Bill of Rights a battering. It is always under duress and erosion. Where there’s emergency, there’s opportunity for the enemies of freedom. The Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 (the bits that Bill Clinton’s DOJ forgot to put into the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) and peri­odically renewed in most of its essentials in the Bush and Obama years, kicked new holes in at least six of our Bill of Rights protections.

The government can search and seize citizens’ papers and effects without probable cause, spy on their electronic communications, and has, amid ongoing court battles on the issue, eavesdropped on their conversations without a warrant.

Goodbye to the right to a speedy public trial with assistance of counsel. Welcome indefinite incarceration without charges, denial of the assistance of legal counsel and of the right to confront witnesses or even have a trial. Until beaten back by the courts, the Patriot Act gave a sound whack at the 1st Amendment, too, since the government could now prosecute librarians or keepers of any records if they told anyone the government had sub­poenaed information related to a terror investigation.

Let’s not forget that a suspect may be in no position to do any confronting or waiting for trial since American citizens deemed a threat to their country can be extrajudi­cially and summarily executed by order of the president, with the reasons for the order shielded from the light of day as “state secrets.” That takes us back to the bills of attainder the Framers expressly banned in Arti­cle One of the US Constitution, about as far from the Bill of Rights as you can get.

There’s a difference between fascism and an effi­ciently functioning modern police state. America well into to the latter, instrumented by laws shoved through on a federal bipartisan basis and through state legisla­tures. Check out the DUI laws and penalties, state by state. A friend here in California was just telling me about a friend up on his second DUI, among whose penal­ties for his offense has been 45 days house arrest, with a camera installed to observe every move. No visi­tors allowed. He can go out for two hours a day to do his shopping. The supervising officer in semi-SWAT rig enters his house without knocking or permission at any time. Let’s not even talk about the treatment of sex offenders.

Praying for Rain

Progressives touting the Perry threat howl with merri­ment at the three-day prayer session pleading with the Almighty to send rain to Texas, which He’s so far failed to do, having His work cut out dispensing fire and brimstone. When I was at my Episcopalian school in Scotland we prayed for good weather a fair amount in our twice-daily sessions in chapel. (As I often say, a childish soul not inoculated with compulsory religion is open to any infection.) Our Book of Common Prayer included under “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon several occasions” prayers for Rain, (“Send we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rains and showers that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort”), for fair weather (“although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters”), and in the time of dearth and famine for “cheapness and plenty.” Praying for seasonable weather is a lot less bane­ful in practical terms, infinitely cheaper and far less deleterious to landscape and natural life than lobbying the earthly powers — successfully alas — for wind power.

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

Version one came in the Republican presidential can­didates’ debate at the Reagan Library in California on Wednesday evening. This was Texan governor Rick Perry’s first joust with the other contenders. As is custom­ary, feather-puff punches and leaden sarcasms were inflated by the press into Swiftian repartee.

There were some disappointments. I’d been hoping for fire and brimstone from Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party’s Passionaria. Her performance was pallid, her vibrant persona dulled down. Even her natural hair resem­bled a wig.

Hardly had I raised a cheer for her denunciation of the Libyan adventure – delivered with a clarity appar­ently beyond the powers of America’s left leaders– before she was doing some Cheney-esque tub-humping about the Iranian threat and groveling to the Israel lobby.

Ron Paul, who attracts passionate and well-deserved adherents for the clarity of his denunciations of Empire, came over as principled but a bit daffy, in the mode of a nutty professor, like a character in one of Thomas Love Peacock’s splendid satires. His fans swiftly claimed he was aced out of the debate, which I don’t think is true. He just didn’t use the openings he was given to best advantage.

Paul hates every manifestation of government. I don’t think he cares much for immigrants from south of the border either. I didn’t hear a cry of outrage from him when most of his fellow debaters were calling for a heav­ier federal presence – “boots on the ground,” drones, a continuous fence – along the US-Mexican bor­der. And he seems to favor the Keystone XL pipeline, even though – as my Counterpunch.org coeditor Jeffrey St. Clair points out to me, it will require one of the larg­est and most aggressive eminent domain actions since the construction of the Interstate highways. Opposition to eminent domain is bedrock for any libertarian.

The most rational sounding Republican was Utah’s former governor and Obama’s ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman Jr., probably because he’s languishing in the low single digits and has nothing to lose by occasionally extending a friendly hand towards the world of reason, excepting his predictable servility to the AGW (anthropo­morphic global warming) lobby. He called for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan and refused to make absolutist pledges about no new taxes. He doesn’t stand a prayer.

Former governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney had the task of trying to cut Governor Perry of Texas down to size. They bickered back and forth, but without any deci­sive knockdowns.

Perry had some simple assignments – mainly to show that he could speak in coherent sentences and hold his own without hauling out his laser gun. (Perry says he packs heat even in jogging rig because he’s frightened of snakes. I guess if you grow up in a semi-dried up water­course in northwest Texas you can get that way.) Simply as something of a Reagan look-alike, in decent physical shape and with a strong voice, he did okay. He and his advisors are sticking to the gameplan which is presently aimed at capturing the right-wing core votes in the early caucuses and primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Two Perry plusses: he really hates Karl Rove and Kinky Friedman likes him.

Perry’s headliners were an accusation that Social Security is a vast Ponzi scheme, that Obama is most likely a brazen liar, and, amid wild cheers in the Reagan library auditorium, that he hasn’t lost a wink of sleep after signing execution warrants for convicted murderers – 234  at time of writing, more than any other governor in US history.

It seems hard to imagine that an onslaught on Social Security won’t cost him among the vital elderly independ­ents, assuming he gets the Republican nomina­tion and goes head-to-head with Obama just under a year from now.

But then, having followed Reagan through his early primary battles back in 1979 and early 1980, I remember all the demented campaign statements of the Californian, his reiterated belief that ‘Apocalypse’ would come in our lifetimes, his amazing fictions, like liberating Auschwitz, his folksy imbecilities. If Reagan could win in 1980 and 1984, Perry certainly has a fighting chance in 2012. Many a polished politician, Bobby Kennedy for exam­ple, learned that it could be fatal to underestimate the Gip­per in debate.

No Republican offered a Plan, except the African-American Herman Cain. They all contented themselves with brickbats for government and a call for the release of supposedly pent-up market forces hog-tied by govern­ment red tape and onerous taxation.

America’s problems are huge: 14 million Americans officially looking for jobs—about four job seekers for every job vacancy; 8.8 million part-time workers since the recession began; roughly 2.6 million people too dis­couraged even to look for a job: total – about 25 million people needing work or more work and an economy that is creating no new jobs.

This brings us to Thursday night, and Obama’s address to Congress. He flourished a $447 billion plan involving tax cuts, public works, extensions of unem­ployment relief, credits to business hiring people who’d been out of work for more than six months.

It’ll do something. Economists raced to their calcula­tors and said that the proposal might add about a million jobs.

But as the economists Randall Wrey and Stephanie Kelton point out, “Business will not hire more workers until it has more sales. Consumers will not spend more until they’ve got more jobs.

“A private-sector recovery requires 300,000 new jobs every month. But the private sector doesn’t need 300,000 new workers per month to meet prospective sales. The new jobs can only come from the federal government — the only economic entity that can afford to hire. Obama’s 1 million infrastructure jobs is a nice down-payment, but it is only three month’s worth.”

They call for a real New Deal program like Roose­velt’s Works Progress Administration. The program would offer a job to any American who was ready and willing to work at the federal minimum wage, plus legis­lated benefits. No time limits. No means testing. No mini­mum education or skill requirements.

There’s a problem, aside from the fact that Obama has displayed zero appetite for big liberal ideas, crucially at the very start of his term when he was at the apex of public goodwill. He has to get any plan, let alone a really bold new plan, past Republicans in Congress who, with his eager co-operation, ate him for breakfast in the show­down over raising the debt ceiling and who will sabotage even his present modest proposals.

“Stop the political circus,” he cried to Congress Thurs­day night. Why should the Republicans listen to him after he himself stopped the circus at the start of August by mumbling, “You win.”

You can find America’s future in blueprints minted in business-funded thinktanks 30 to 40 years ago at the dawn of the neo-liberal age: destruction of organized labor; attrition of the social safety net; attrition of govern­ment regulation; a war on the poor, fought with­out mercy at every level. Last year the New York police stopped and questioned 601,055 people, predominantly blacks and Hispanics, and the numbers were up 13% for the first six months of this year.

Texas, near the bottom in so many social indicators, is the model: Rick Perry is its latest salesman. But who­ever the Republican candidate may be, they face in Obama an opponent who agrees with at least half of what they say. In 40 years I’ve not seen a gloomier politi­cal landscape.

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

Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the 55th minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95% of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.

As America plummets into phase 2 of the double-dip recession, Obama’s deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defenses: no jobs program, no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country. It’s as bad as the Republicans’ onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt’s programs seeking to prise America out of the great Depression — a Republican onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.

Why did Obama do it? Like all first-term presidents he thinks first and foremost about reelection in 2012, and the thinking in the White House is that the all-important independent voters, are eager for deficit reduction, how­ever ruinous it may be for the economy.

Polls show that Obama had a winning hand. His approval ratings are in the mid-40s in percentile terms, more or less where they’ve been for months. But Con­gress is now down at 18 — the lowest since records began. So he could have called the Republicans’ bluff at any time. Sure, Americans will always say that deficits should be reduced. That’s like asking if you support an end to gassing badgers. But when you ask them some­thing serious, like, Do you want a job? They say Aye — by any means necessary, including increased federal spending.

But beyond coarse political calculation, and eager­ness to satisfy his Wall Street backers, it’s plain enough that Obama is a quitter by nature. As someone joked bitterly last week, he turns up for a strip poker session already down to his shorts. In the crunch, the weapon he snatches from its scabbard is the white flag, which he flourishes brazenly at the bankers, the Pentagon, and America’s billionaires.

It was plain in 2006 — the first time I looked at his record — that Obama was gutless and devoid of princi­ple. By 2008, before his victory, he was already reas­suring the Establishment he was set to “reform” Social Security and Medicare — i.e., to hand these entitlement programs over to Wall Street and the insurance industry.

Indeed, the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent. McCain! But, you wail, he would have plunged America into new wars, kept Guantanamo open, launched an onslaught on entitlements, surrendered to Wall Street and the banks…

McCain would have tried all these things, but maybe he would have quailed amid a storm of public protest. Under W. Bush’s two terms the spirit of opposition throve; the antiwar movement flourished; the labor movement was active; blacks militant. Amid a brilliant campaign mounted by the AFL-CIO, Bush’s hopes to gut social programs were dead within months of the start of his second term in 2004. But since 2008 a Democratic president has neutralized all these constituencies.

In 2010, in the midterm elections, the American peo­ple spoke, and their message was confused. When exit pollsters questioned 17,000 voters across the nation as to who should take the blame for the country’s economic problems, 35% said Wall Street, 29% said Bush and 24% said Obama. Just over half of the respondents (57%) said that their votes in House races had nothing to do with the Tea Party. The other half was split on the Tea Party, pro (22%) or con (17%). More than 60% said the all-important issue is the economy; 86% said they are worried about economic conditions. On whether gov­ernment should lay out money to create jobs or slash expenditures to reduce the deficit, there’s also a near-even split.

The American people wanted a government that wouldn’t govern, a budget that would simultaneously balance budgets and create jobs, and spending cuts across the board that would leave the defense budget intact. Collectively, the election made plain, they hadn’t a clear notion of which way to march.

Obama carried substantial part of the blame for this. He delivered no clear message, no clarion call. For two years he gave labor nothing; he gave his most loyal con­stituency — black America — nothing. When the “One Nation” rally mustered in Washington on October 2, 2010 there was no stentorian message of support from Obama for the event, sponsored by the NAACP and the AFL-CIO. Among the vast throngs who gathered for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s politically inconsequen­tial “sanity rally” on October 30, how many were young people who had voted for Obama in 2008, their passion­ate expectations now mutilated on the battlefields of Obamian realpolitik?

As Obama reviewed his options after the mid-term elections, which way would he head? He’d already sup­plied the answer. He’d try to broker deals to reach “common ground” with the Republicans, the strategy that destroyed those first two years of opportunity.

But even after last week’s frightful betrayals, there’s been barely a fretful bleat from Democrats about running a challenger to Obama in the primaries such as the late Ted Kennedy mounted against Carter, another Obamian sell-out, in 1979. A serious challenge to Obama from inside the ranks of the Democratic Party has always been a non-starter. The time to launch a third party, left chal­lenge to Obama was back in January of 2010 when the writing was on the wall. In this very page I implored  the ousted U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold to do just that. Now it’s all far too late.

In 2013 we could be faced with Republican majori­ties in both houses and the prospect of Obama spending four years catering obediently to their requirements, defusing all liberal and left opposition. We need a Republican in the White House to dispel narcosis which will otherwise neutralize left activity till 2016. Who? Michele Bachmann is popular mostly with Tea Party ultras, Jon Huntsman with the Washington elites. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has yet to enter the race and is loathed by the Bush clan. At present the only candidate within reach of Obama is Mitt Romney, the Mormon millionaire businessman whose nomination bid fizzled in 2008.

I acknowledge the obvious: the clothes, the grin, the unrelenting fakery that so blatantly imbues every atom of his being. Mitt is a hard sell and his drive to be the first Mormon president is surely not helped by this summer’s Mormon-in-the-headlines — Warren Jeffs , now con­victed of child rape.

Romney kept quiet through most of the recent brou­haha about raising the deficit ceiling, aside from a pro forma nod to the Tea Party ultras near the end, designed to placate the ultras in early primary states like Iowa. In the briefest of inspections, he is not marked for great­ness, but greatness is not required of him — just the tenacity to win the White House and drive Obama out of national politics and destroy his appalling vision of bipartisanship as the way forward for America.

Anybody but Obama, even if it’s Mitt Romney!

Mind you, a politician with some guts would be pref­erable, but we’re talking about politics and the art of the possible. Check out this truly terrific outburst from the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, attacking the “ignorance” of attacks on his successful nomination of Suhail Mohammed as a Superior Court judge.

“He represented people who were inappropriately detained by FBI the after 9/11,” Christie says. “The fact of the matter is there were lots of people inappropriately detained by the FBI post-9/11.”

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

Yet, here the Guide still is, addressing rallies in Trip­oli surrounded by a sixth of Libya’s entire population, while in the other end of the country, it seems that one faction in Benghazi, that of Mustapha Abdul Jalil, head of the rebel Transitional National Council, has just mur­dered Abdel Fatah Younis, commander of the Libyan rebel forces. There are various accounts, none of them attaching the slightest credence to Jalil’s faltering initial suggestions that it was Ghadafi’s guys who did it. One has Younis being taken prisoner on grounds of opening secret negotiations with Tripoli (very conceivably true), then taken to the desert and shot, along with his body­guard of two colonels; another that he was tortured to death in Tripoli. Either way this renders moot Sen. John McCain’s letter last week to Jalil warning that credible accounts of serious human violations by the rebels were undercutting whatever support the NATO onslaught retained in Congress.

We are beginning to see some very graphic accounts and videos of the actual conduct of the rebels in torturing and executing prisoners and suspected Ghadafi loyalists in Benghazi, not to mention compulsory reimposition of the burka for women and kindred evidence of rabid fun­damentalism among NATO’s clients.

The same day this news of Younis’s killing came, Britain recognized the rebels as the legitimate govern­ment of Libya and gave them the okay to take over Lib­yan government facilities in London. There seems to be civil war in London, since foreign secretary William Hague had come off his hardline stance against negotia­tions with Tripoli. By way of thank you, as his men pumped bullets into Younis, Jalil swiftly requested the $25 billion in Libyan government funds, held by NATO powers, which if turned over — which I strongly doubt — will no doubt enter many a private rebel account, not to mention private NATO accounts — which aim was evident from the start, when Benghazi opened a “central Libyan bank.”

This is one of the greatest humiliations of NATO in its history (also, to be petty, a terrific smack in the eye for the analytic and political acumen of a prime propa­gandist in progressive circles for the rebels, Prof. Juan Cole, whose blogs on Libya have been getting steadily more demented.) Incidentally, they keep calling for Ghadafi to “step down.” In constitutional terms, which is what NATO must keep in mind, I believe he did some time ago.

Does DA Vance have the steel to go after Strauss-Kahn?

Did a man ever look jauntier than Dominique Strauss-Kahn a month ago, any woman more efferves­cent than the loyal wife at his side, Anne Sinclair?

The sex assault charges that had doomed the IMF chieftain’s prospective run for the French presidency were in tatters, shot down by a brutal story in the New York Times (by Jim Dwyer, William Rashbaum and John Eligon) in which two anonymous law enforcement officials, pre­sumably speaking separately, given the three bylines, said the alleged victim, housekeeper Nafissato Diallo, was a demonstrable liar and that phone taps to a drug dealer friend of hers in prison showed she was chasing a big money settlement. The leakers carefully went to the Times on June 30, with the story published on July 1, although already circulating on Thursday evening. This meant that Operation Destroy Diallo dominated the headlines with only a very weak comment by Diallo’s lawyer, Ken Thompson, the following Tuesday, July 5.

Hot on the heels of this came a story in the New York Post claming, on the basis of another anonymous source, that Diallo was a seasoned hooker.

From the office of District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. trickled predictions that soon the charges against DSK would melt away, reduced at most to a misdemeanor. From France came tidings that a renewed DSK presi­dential challenge might not be far off, once the New York case had been tidied away.

But here we are a month later and, if such a thing were possible, DSK looks even worse than at the moment he was dragged off by the New York cops to Riker’s Island, charged with rape.

First, the French writer Tristane Banon reaffirmed her accusations that eight years ago in Paris DSK had locked the door and jumped her in the course of an inter­view, that she’d barely fought off a frightening physical assault and that he was like “a rutting chimp.”

A brisk war of similes soon followed, when Tris­tane’s mother, Anne Mansouret, was quoted as saying to French police that in 2000, in a voluntary but “clearly brutal” physical engagement with DSK in an OECD office, he’d comported himself like a filthy drunk, heed­less of all needs but his own, among which the need to “dominate” was paramount.

This was a Wendi Deng-style right hook to DSK’s defenders who had claimed the former IMF director couldn’t keep his pants zipped but that he wasn’t the violent type.

The overall impression that DSK might merit an entry in any update of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sex­ualis was heightened by news stories saying that Diallo was his third sexual engagement — his lawyers claim the sex with Diallo was “consensual” — in the hours before he quit the New York Sofitel.

Now Diallo has given interviews to Newsweek and ABC, giving what Newsweek’s experienced Paris bureau chief Chris Dickey has described on ABC as a “con­vincing” account of going into DSK’s suite, being attacked by a naked man with white hair coming out of the shower, forced to her knees with his penis shoved into her mouth, then spitting out the ejaculate on her uniform, and on the carpet where it was later collected along with her saliva by the cops establishing the DNA traces.

I’ve always thought Diallo’s lawyers had done her no favors by keeping her under wraps. Diallo is a homely looking, vigorous 32-year old West African woman with an ample bust, which is probably what caught DSK’s eye. If they’d introduced her to the public back at the start of the case, it would have been harder to trash her in the New York Times interview.

By July 7 the NYT conceded that the timeline on Diallo’s use of her computer key destroyed the line that alleged violent sexual assault was followed by an odd return to cleaning work next door. Not so. Here’s the timeline.

At 12:06 p.m. she used her card on Strauss-Kahn’s room, 2806.

At 12:26 p.m. she used her card on room 2820 again, and then in the same minute used it again on room 2806 [the adjacent suite].

By 12:28 p.m. Strauss-Kahn had gone to the front desk and checked out.

But Kenneth Thompson, the maid’s attorney, offers this scenario to the Law Blog cited with comment in the Wall Street Journal:

The maid cleaned room 2820 for an hour and a half. She was going back and forth to the linen closet during that time, which explains the three key card uses to that room.

The VIP rooms are large, and take a while to clean. “Those rooms have to sparkle,” Thompson told the Law Blog.

She finished and was waiting for her supervisor to come inspect the room when she saw the room service attendant coming out of 2806.

She asked if that room was empty and was told it was. She entered the room, which explains the key card entry at 12:06 p.m. The attack allegedly occurred.

She came out of the room and went down the hall­way because she didn’t know what to do, according to Thompson.

While she was waiting for her supervisor (who still had yet to arrive), Strauss-Kahn allegedly dressed quickly and she saw him leave the room and get on the elevator, Thompson said.

Apparently unsure what to do, she went back into room 2820 for one minute, came out, went back to room 2806 and put her card in the door and opened it.

Her supervisor arrived soon after to find her in the hallway, near the elevator, according to Thompson. They went back into room 2806 together and the accuser allegedly asked the supervisor, “Can a guest do anything they want to in this hotel?”’

The charges by Murdoch’s New York Post about Diallo being a hooker seem tendentious, doled out by DSK’s defense team, with zero substantiating evidence.

DA Vance is now in a tricky position. Propelled into his post by big liberal money, he raced to throw the book at the alleged rapist DSK, imposing savage demands for bail conditions. Then, when Diallo was caught telling a few fibs to US asylum officials, to boost her chances of legal status in the US, one of two things happened.

Either Vance panicked and gave the green light for the leaks to the New York Times, or enemies in his office or in the New York police (“law enforcement officials” is a pretty catchall) — perhaps found by DSK’s US defense team including ex CIA officers in the pr firm TD International used by DSK, decided to cut the ground from under him and leaked a highly prejudicial story against Diallo to the Times. So far as the DA green-lighting the story, if the phone call between Diallo and her Ivoirian friend in prison did have damaging informa­tion in it, why is there no peep about that in the DA’s letter to the prosecutors citing flaws in Diallo’s record of truthfulness. If the DA knew this information about the prison call was being splashed all over the press across the holiday weekend was wrong and harmful to his case, why didn’t he call an emergency press conference and refute it? Same thing for the prostitution story: why didn’t the DA call a press conference and refute it? By saying nothing, it looks like the DA was willfully par­ticipating in smearing his own witness.

Thompson may have been the person who turned over Diallo’s tax and bank records to the defense and then they turned them over to the DA without saying they got them from Thompson. Typically, the IRS and bank would require the individual to sign a release. Since the victim wasn’t arrested by the DA, how could he have got those records under subpoena?

There are some signs that the Times feels burned a bit by its relaying of the June 30 hit job since its story last week goes into detail about the entirely misleading account of Diallo’s phone conversations in the Fulani language with her friend in prison which was aimed at consigning Diallo to sink into discredited obscurity as a liar and potential blackmailer. Incidentally, it’s now confirmed what Pam Martens wrote on our Counter­Punch site on June 17. Per the NYT, Diallo’s lawyer Thomson, as Alan Dershowitz was suggesting, had met with DSK’s lawyer(s) while the prosecution was building its case. The Times said Thompson and the defense for DSK had agreed to share information or words to that effect. That doesn’t look good at all for the civil suit. Why should Thompson be sharing anything when he hasn’t even filed a civil suit and has no discovery orders from a judge?

After a hammering in the press for three weeks in July her only hand left to play was to go public, and thus far the strategy has been devastating to DSK. Now it’s all up to Vance. If he allows DSK to escape with a misde­meanor charge or no charge at all he’ll be discredited among not only the big liberal backers who paid for his run to be DA, but also popular constituencies in New York who will be important for his future political career, whether as DA or beyond.

On the other hand, if he presses a full-down attempted rape case against DSK he’ll go into the court­room with a witness whose record of truth-telling is — however understandable — less than 100%.

DSK’s wife, the enormously rich Anne Sinclair, drew a parallel between her husband’s travails and the Dreyfus affair — DSK is Jewish — which is silly. Is a case that convulsed France for years to be compared to DSK’s? Are there intimations of anti-semitism? The answer is no.

The Diallo-DSK case is still alive. The next hearing is three weeks away, on August 23. Then we’ll see what sort of steel is in Vance’s spine.

The Norsemen, Breivik & Lind

Everyone talks about Norway’s peaceful traditions, now destroyed by Anders Breivik’s day of mass murder. Tell that to the Irish Christians on Lambay Island, or the monks of Iona, victims of the first Viking raids in 795 AD, not so long ago when you take the long view. Breivik worried about Muslim immigration, with an alien faith. The Vikings had their furious Gods, certainly not Christian. Truth be told, the monasteries in Ireland had been attacking each other before the Norsemen ever set foot in the Emerald Isle. In 807 the monasteries of Cork and Clonfert went at each other with, as the chori­cle put it, “an innumerable slaughter of the ecclesiastical men and superiors of Cork.”

Norway has also sent its modest contingents to assist in recent US Coalition onslaughts in Iraq and Afghani­stan.

Incidentally, on the topic of Breivik, we have had an enquiry from a reader noting that Breivik’s “Manifesto” has plagiarized material from William Lind, erstwhile Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation, and asking that since Coun­terPunch published material by Lind, what is our precise relationship to this contributor. The inference seems to be that we published racist neo-Nazi propaganda which helped inflame Breivik. God knows what he would say about our contributor William Blum, considering the late Osama bin Laden famously cited Bill as one of his favorite writers.

As any CounterPuncher can quickly establish by reviewing Lind’s contributions through our “Search” function at the top of our home page, we published columns on the conduct of America’s wars by Lind between 2003 and 2007, in the Bush years because, from a conservative position, he was a trenchant and knowl­edgeable military analyst and critic of the US onslaughts on Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. Lind had been a participant of the military reform group, trenchant critics of the Pentagon.

His column was distributed by the Center and we would pick it up if it was on themes we cared for, which did not include Lind’s commentaries on many other matters, the cultural downslide of America and so forth.

CounterPunchers should know that its editors stand responsible for pieces CounterPunch publishes — though we obviously don’t agree with every word in the roughly 3,000 pieces we put up on our site every year. We publish and where necessary edit articles for the edification of a large and intelligent regular readership. We don’t publish anti-Semitic or Nazi propaganda, as assessed by any rational person. I add this because many people eager to throw these terms around are irrational and usually malevolent. If you read our website with any frequency you will know where we’re at, as a left, radi­cal enterprise. We’ve always held it as part of our brief — stemming from political appreciation of the actual prospects here in the USA — that we should acknowl­edge positive political work and insights on the libertar­ian front and the right and from original viewpoints. Every once in a while some Trotskyite purist like Louis Proyect will hoist his skirts and jump up on the kitchen table, aghast at the sight of an “incorrect” thought or assault by CounterPunch, often specifically me, on the canons of political and cultural PC as sedulously observed by this politically and intellectually demure old Trot. Then, when I say something he likes he’ll dispense a grateful bouquet.

We don’t hold ourselves responsible for articles our contributors publish elsewhere. We have neither the time nor inclination to dredge through their lifetime archive on the internet to scrutinize articles they may have writ­ten one, five, ten or twenty years ago. These days we get regular requests from contributors to purge our archives of their seditious thoughts because they are up for a job, or are in a tenure battle. A new search site has just been launched to enable the internet bloodhounds to pursue their blacklisting tasks more efficiently. That’s not our world.

Who First Looked at Chapman’s Odyssey?

In her stimulating piece on this CounterPunch last week Caroline Rooney quotes Shakespeare lines in Hamlet, suggesting that Ophelia’s name derived from a conflation of two characters in Homer’s Odyssey.

My co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair points out that “Chap­man’s translation of the Odyssey didn’t appear until 1616 (i.e., 16 years after Hamlet). Was there an earlier English version of Homer? Maybe my boy Marlowe wrote Hamlet after all … There was an earlier translation (1581) of the Iliad by Arthur Hall, a member of parlia­ment, but it was dreadful doggerel and Hall was prose­cuted (I seem to remember) for the equivalent of pub­lishing porn — the Gershon Legman of his time. In any event, most of the story of Troy that the English read had been passed down through Virgil’s pro-Hittite version or through the French lays and romances. But the Odyssey was almost unknown among the non-Greek-readers until Chapman.”

Rooney writes, “I have tried to find out from Shake­speare scholars on my campus. I don’t think there was an earlier English version, and it has generally been assumed that Shakespeare would not have read Homer. But drafts of Chapman or other language versions may have been in circulation. A mystery for the experts to unravel.”