Psyche, Science, and Society

Appeal for Redress to be handed to Congress today

Today is the day that 50 active Officers will hand in the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in Virginia:

Several dozen service members joined peace activists today to call for an end to the war in Iraq, part of a nationwide effort that links a growing group of active-duty protesters to the peace movement…

“We served in combat and we’ve seen the futility of this war,” said Sgt. Jabbar Magruder of Los Angeles, a member of the National Guard who served 11 months in Tikrit, a town northwest of Baghdad. “The soldiers want to resist. The soldiers want to come home now. We need the citizens to back us.”

Add comment January 16th, 2007

MLK’s “I have a dream” speech

Add comment January 16th, 2007

Torture and the American public

Daily Kos diarist fbb reminds us of the sad moral state of our country:

To be tortured is almost by definition the worst fate that can befall a person. This view permeates literature: look at Dante’s circles of hell in the Inferno, where spirits are given infinitely creative tortures to suffer. It also permeates the popular imagination in America, where serial killers are looked upon with a mixture of awe and revulsion, and the more disgusting their methods of torture or depravity, the more popular their stories become. The last decade has seen a rise in movies depicting gruesome scenes of torture, from Pulp Fiction to Sin City to Saw. It seems safe to say that America views torture with a mixture of revulsion and fascination….

Yet our government tortures people, and the American public accepts it. Torture has even made its way as an acceptable practice into mainstream television and cinema. Witness the television show 24, in which, in the first season, the hero Jack Bauer threatens to torture a suspect by shoving a towel down his throat. He also handcuffs a double agent to a desk, and while threatening to hurt her, threatens to bring her young son in….

That this worst of all actions, this most Satanic of all deeds, can be official American government policy is, to me, the worst atrocity in our nation’s history. While our country has lived through many dark hours, through many horrible, seemingly endless misdeeds, from the extermination of the Native Americans to slavery to lynching and persecution, at least through the 230 years of our nation’s existence we have held up human rights — the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — as our creed, our motto, our reason for being. The right to habeus corpus, in existence since at least 1215, is now gone. The right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, if that phrase has any meaning, is now gone as well. Our government openly practices torture, and the American public supports it.

Quoting the great American Henry David Thoreau, fbb calls for resistance, including civil disobedience, to the torture regime

Let us act, then, in civil disobedience; let us not fear prison; let us wake our country to the evil it has become.

Add comment January 13th, 2007

Petition: Why we stand for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq

Join Gilbert Achcar, Howard Zinn, Michael Albert, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Ali Abunimah, Anthony Arnove, Kelly Dougherty, Eve Ensler, Eduardo Galeano, Rashid Khalidi, Camilo Mejía and many others in signing the new petition:

Why we stand for immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq

THE U.S. occupation of Iraq has not liberated the Iraqi people, but has made life worse for most Iraqis.

Tens of thousands of U.S. service people have been killed or maimed, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives as a result of the U.S. invasion in 2003, the ongoing occupation, and the violence unleashed by them.

Iraq’s infrastructure has been destroyed, and U.S. plans for reconstruction abandoned. There is less electricity, less clean drinking water, and more unemployment today than before the U.S. invasion.

All of the justifications initially provided by the U.S. for waging war on Iraq have been exposed as lies; the real reasons for the invasion — to control Iraq’s oil reserves and to increase U.S. strategic influence in the region — now stand revealed.

The Bush administration has insisted again and again that stability, democracy, and prosperity are around the next bend in the road. But with each day that the U.S. stays, the violence and lack of security facing Iraqis worsen. The U.S. says that it cannot withdraw its military because Iraq will collapse into civil war if it does. But the U.S. has deliberately stoked sectarian divisions in its ongoing attempt to install a U.S.-friendly regime, thus driving Iraq towards civil war.

The November elections in the United States sent a clear message that voters reject the Iraq war, and opinion polls show that seven in 10 Iraqis want the U.S. to leave sooner rather than later. Even most U.S. military and political leaders agree that staying the course in Iraq is a policy that is bound to fail.

Yet all the various alternative plans for Iraq now being discussed in Washington, including those proposed by House and Senate Democrats, aren’t about withdrawing the U.S. military from Iraq. Rather, these strategies are about continuing the pursuit of U.S. goals in Iraq and the larger Middle East using different means.

Even the proposal to redeploy U.S. troops outside of Iraq, a plan favored by many Democratic Party leaders, envisions continued U.S. intervention inside Iraq.

With former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger insisting that a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible and (Ret.) Lt. Gen. William Odom calling for “complete withdrawal” of all U.S. troops, the antiwar movement should demand no less than the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. military — as well as reparations to the Iraqi people, so they can rebuild their own society and genuinely determine their own future.

Add comment December 19th, 2006

Chomsky on the Pinochet miracle

To complement Greg Palast, here is Noam Chomsky on the “Chilean miracle,” aka, “Chilean catastrophe,” from his book Year 501: The Conquest Continues, now online:

1 comment December 11th, 2006

Greg Palast: Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile

As another former dictator bites the dust, Greg Palast reminds us that, in addition to being a wholesale murderer and torturer, Pinochet destroyed the Chilean econamy, with Milton Friedman’s assistance:

Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile

by Greg Palast

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. (Signed copies available for the holidays at www.palastinvestigativefund.org

Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006

[Chile’s former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.]

All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.

But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.

To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.

For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “Its absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.” Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.

Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”

So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.

But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.

In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.

In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.

But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.

******

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse”. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com

Add comment December 11th, 2006

Vijay Prashad on racism, binge drinking, and boredom

Today’s ZNet Commentary by Vijay Prashad is very interesting, drawing links between racism, binge drinking, and boredom:

Beirut

A series of flaps on campus. Racist incidents abound: the most public is at Texas A & M, home to the new Defense Secretary. Students donned “blackface” and played plantation life. They might be influenced by the sunny depictions of the slave economy from such notables as Eugene Genovese. He has, after all, converted from writing Marxist analyses of enslavement to a celebration of Southern hospitality and tradition. How the mighty fall!

In the midst of the revelations, and some of on my own campus, I, being “out of it,” heard of that my students enjoy a game called “Beirut.” It’s a “drinking game,” one of the legion that allow students to egg each other to get drunk faster and faster. These are the kinds of institutions that lead to the small-scale epidemic of death by binge drinking. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration report (September 2006) found that over seventy percent of under-age binge drinking occurs in Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota. The government analysis is that these areas suffer the most because the youth are bored.

Our college students seem bored too. The NIH’s College Drinking Task Force reports that each year drinking by 18-24 year old college students contributes to an annual estimated 1,700 deaths, 599,000 injuries and 97,000 cases of sexual assault or date rape. Based on this data, and on extensive survey work, the NIH concludes, “Students form their expectations about alcohol from their environment and from each other. As they face the insecurity and stresses of establishing themselves in a new social setting, environmental and peer influences combine to create a culture of drinking. This culture actively or at least passively promotes drinking through tolerance, or even unspoken approval, of college drinking as a rite of passage.” The “when we were young, we got hammered” maxim perpetuates binge drinking, and with alumni pressure, suppresses the ability of college administrations to do what they should do about social life on campuses (including reigning in fraternities and other organizations of mayhem).

Our bored students dress up the weekend (and many week-nights) with games to hasten their entry into oblivion. One such is Beirut. It is an elaboration of “beer pong,” a ping-pong game that requires the players who miss to chug a glass of beer. Beirut is played without paddles. It was created in the early 1980s, during the U. S. fiasco in Lebanon. The students who throw the ping-pong ball imagine that they are bombing Arabs, and the losers have to bomb themselves by drinking the beer. This game was developed either at Bucknell or Lehigh.

Poor Beirut. In modern times, it has suffered gravely: a brutal civil war (1975-1977) attempted to settle unfinished social contradictions that resulted from the Ottoman withdrawal, and with the demise of any truly secular movement (such as the forces that led the 1958 uprising, of whom was the multi-ethnic Lebanese Communist Party); interventions by the great powers, be they the French or the U. S., often on the side of reaction against that of hope; and at least two invasions by the Israelis, once in 1982 and again this summer. So much death, so much mayhem. To play “Beirut” is to mock this history of suffering and hope.

The Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi offered the following paradox: everyone agrees that racism exists, but no-one admits to be a racist. Those who play games like “Beirut” would hasten to say that for them this is a game, and that it has nothing to do with Arabs, that they are not racists. That’s like George “Macaca” Allen saying that the noose in his office has nothing to do with Jim Crow and lynching. The coalition of the swilling is alive and well on college campuses, reproducing anti-Arab racism as beer-drinking patriotism.

Blackface, red-face, Beirut, the criminal use of Rohypnol (”roofies”), and what not: college campuses have become a hive of anti-social, dangerous behavior. On every college that I visit, the antidote to this behavior is either from the religious students or the radical students. These students, whether invested in God or Revolution, have something that defines their lives. They are not bored. The complaint about boredom is now over thirty years old. In an early issue of “New Left Notes,” Steve Golin (who went on to a distinguished teaching career at Bloomfield College in New Jersey) wrote, “By the time we graduate, we have been painstakingly trained in separating facts from their meaning. We wonder that our classes, with few exceptions, seem irrelevant to our lives. No wonder they’re so boring. Boredom is the necessary condition of any education which teaches us to manipulate the facts and suppress the meaning.” Our radical and religious students understand the importance of meaning in the world. The mainstream should learn from them.

Add comment November 26th, 2006

Pete Seeger & the Weavers: Solidarity Forever

What could be better for election than a reminder that true change doesn’t come at the ballot box, but when the mass of people decide to exert our power: Pete Seeger & the Weavers: Solidarity Forever: In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold! Don’t forget it:

1 comment November 7th, 2006

Immanuel Wallerstein on the day after

Immanuel Wallerstein, in the San Francisco Chronicle, is already writing of what happens after the election. The country still has to decide how we are going to adapt to our loosing the second major war in 40 years. Soul-search or scapegoat?

What difference will it make if the Democrats win one or both houses in Congress?

I should say that I will vote the Democratic ticket. But like a lot of people, I will vote for it primarily as a negative vote against George W. Bush and secondarily against the Republican majority in both houses. I shall do this for many reasons, but first of all because I think the invasion of Iraq was immoral, counterproductive and, in general, a fiasco — for the United States, for Iraq and for the entire world.

There are many other complaints I have about the current regime — its attacks on the fundamental liberties of the American people, its retrogressive domestic economic and social policies, and its inept and unwise foreign policy. But Iraq tops them all as a reason. So I shall vote in protest and try to stop things from getting even worse.

But what will a Democratic Congress do that is better?

That is not at all clear. Indeed, one has to doubt that the Democrats collectively have a better foreign policy to offer. The primary problem of the leadership of the Democratic Party is that it believes, at least as much as the Republicans, that the United States is the center of the world, the font of wisdom, the great defender of world freedom — in short, a deeply virtuous nation in a dangerous world.

Worst of all, they seem to believe that, merely by purging the element of exaggerated unilateralism practiced by the current regime, they will be able to restore the United States to a position of centrality in the world system, and regain the support of their erstwhile allies and supporters, first of all in Western Europe and then everywhere else in the world. They seem to believe that it’s a matter of form, not substance, and that the fault of the Bush regime is that it wasn’t good enough at diplomacy.

It’s true that not all Democrats feel that way, and indeed, for that matter, not all Republicans and independents. But at this moment, those who are ready to take a real look at the fallacies of U.S. policies are a minority — furthermore, a minority without a clear agenda themselves and certainly without a major political leader to express an alternate view.

So what will happen? It is probably, not certainly, the case that the United States will be forced to withdraw from Iraq before the presidential election in 2008. It is also almost certainly the case that the Republicans will blame the Democrats for “losing” the war, and the Democrats will say it isn’t so. But beyond the usual political claptrap, the withdrawal will come as a deep shock to the American people, even if a majority will see no alternative.

One has to put such a withdrawal in the context of wars the United States has fought since 1945. The Korean War and the first Gulf War ended at the starting line. Neither side really won. The most important war for the United States — in terms of its geopolitical impact, its economic cost and the emotional involvement of the American people — was Vietnam. And that war, the United States lost. The result has been a deep cleavage in the American people — about “who” lost the war, and whether the war could have been “won,” had other policies prevailed.

The so-called Vietnam syndrome has never been healed. With the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was a patriotic upsurge among the American people, and the country seemed temporarily reunified. But Bush has squandered all that, and no Democratic president can resurrect it. Withdrawal from Iraq, I predict, will be even more traumatic than the flight from Saigon in 1975. Two defeats will be devastating and also persuasive of the real limits of U.S. power.

There are really only two possibilities at that point. One is that a profound soul-searching occurs that would lead the United States to re-evaluate its self-image, its sense of what is possible in the world system now and in the future, and what kind of values it really believes in. If that happens, maybe forces within the Democratic Party will come forward to incarnate this re-evaluation. Or maybe the whole political framework of the United States and its parties will change to reflect such a re-evaluation.

But, of course, there is a second possibility: that the nation is overcome with deep anger about the “loss” of its primacy, will seek scapegoats (and find them) and eventually move in the direction of gutting the U.S. Constitution and the liberties it presumes to defend. Something like that happened in Weimar Germany. And while the situation is different in many respects, and while I am not predicting in any sense the emergence of a Nazi party, nonetheless it will be a grievous disaster for the United States and the world if the United States moves to any significant degree in this direction.

It is what the United States thinks about itself and does about itself that matters, not only for the United States but also for the rest of the world. For a wounded elephant can indeed go on a rampage.

On the other hand, one can think of times when the rude shock of the kind that a defeat in Iraq would inflict could have the salutary effect of reviving the best in the American tradition — that of a libertarian, socially conscious people who would once again welcome, in the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty, “the huddled masses yearning to be free.”

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of “The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World” (New Press). Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Add comment November 7th, 2006

Graphic footage of Mexican uprising

Please watch an amazing video on a popular uprising in Mexico. It provides background on the events, going back to 2002. It also analyzes the media’s role in mobilizing the populace to support brutal police action. The same techniques were used this summer to mobilize support for the governing party’s theft of the election. [This is no brief snippet. all together it's about 48 minutes.]

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Add comment November 1st, 2006