paul street on the mainstream media:The coverage and commentary is full of detailed descriptions and discussion of various aspects of different legislative proposals and how politicians, policymakers and advocacy groups line up regarding each clause and proposal. But the relevant overall context for understanding the issue is largely missing. That context is the spatially and socially unequal structure and operation and class basis of the world capitalist system, which creates both the “push” and the “pull” behind mass “illegal” (and legal) immigration to the U.S. and the fear so many working Americans feel about the presence of immigrants in the U.S. There’s no serious discussion of the critical roles that U.S. global trade, investment and foreign policy play in generating and sustaining poverty and repression in the “developing” nations that export so much cheap labor to the U.S. Also beyond the range of serious focus: the U.S. business community’s desire to exploit stateless – politically and institutionally disenfranchised – labor and the pivotal, profit-enhancing contradiction between (a) global capital’s freedom to roam the planet with “race-to-the-bottom” impunity and (b) global labor’s comparatively constricted movement across national borders..
(...) Growing economic inequality in the U.S. is another example. This topic is receiving welcome and increasing media attention after thirty five years in which the share of U.S. “earnings” appropriated by the richest 1 percent of American has tripled while incomes have stagnated and fallen for the nation’s working class majority. The most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation in the industrialized world by far, the U.S. is now at pre-New Deal levels of economic disparity. The top 1 percent owns more than a third of the nation’s wealth.
(...) Sadly, however, the relevant coverage and commentary generally comes with a key part of the story – the basic nature of the nation’s business-ruled (state-capitalist) political-economy – all but left out. You hear and read about various policy debates relating to whether growing inequality is about “technology” and/or globalization and/or deindustrialization and/or education and skills and/or about the erosion of union power and/or “free trade” and/or immigration and/or tax policy and/or culture and behavior (always meaning the culture and behavior of the poor, not the rich) and so on. Some of this discussion is useful and intelligent but there’s a giant taboo against honest discussion of the fact that the business-ruled state-capitalist system of socioeconomic management tends by its very nature to generate massive inequality combining opulence for the privileged few and relative poverty for the many. As the liberal economist Lester Thurow (no stark raving “Marxist” like yours truly) noted in the mid 1990s, “democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power. One believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man [sic] one vote,’ while the other believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. ‘Survival of the fittest’ and inequalities in purchasing power are what capitalist efficiency is all about. Individual profit comes first and firms become efficient to be rich. To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.”
(...) Never mind that the preponderant majority of Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave their nation from the start. Never mind that just 1 percent of Iraqis think the U.S. invaded to export democracy or that the great majority of Iraqis think Uncle Sam came to (imagine) grab their oil. Or that a recent poll conducted by “our own” State Department reports that almost three-fourths of Baghdad’s residents would “feel safer” if U.S. forces left their country. Or that one of the first actions of the U.S. occupation authorities was to open up much of Iraq ’s economy to multinational corporate ownership – an action that would never have been supported by the Iraqi majority and which violated core principles of national independence.
(...) As James M. Lindsay, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations proclaimed last year, “it was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq , it's a very different issue. It's a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil."
(...) Even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline addiction and became fully energy- self-reliant (it currently receives just 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum: the ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America's onetime supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor. As the noted Left geographer and world-systems analyst David Harvey argues, the United States' long decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure gives special urgency for the U.S to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power. That core objective would hardly be attained helping Iraq act in accord with the principles of democracy and national independence.
(...) Dominant (“mainstream”) U.S. media coverage and commentary on Iraq continues to be hopelessly crippled by doctrinal observance of taboos against discussing five basic and intimately interrelated aspects of so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”:
1. The monumentally criminal nature of the invasion, which involved (in the words of the 2005 Istanbul Declaration) “planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.”
2. The brazenly imperialist and colonial nature of the occupation, which is richly continuous with earlier U.S. behavior within the beyond the Middle East and provides critical context for understanding why U.S. soldiers die on a regular basis in Iraq (where Americans are understandably seen as unlawful invaders).
3. The racist nature of the occupation, expressed in the false conflation between al Qaeda and a small group of predominantly Saudi hijackers on one hand and the broad Arab and Muslim worlds on the other hand. This racism has found expression also in U.S. ground forces’ recurrent description of Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters as “hajis” and “towel heads”(among other terrible designations) and in many Americans’ insistence on describing the entire Middle East as a den of primitive, barbarian and enemies of modern “civilization.”
4. The full and overwhelming extent of Iraqi civilian casualties, including more than 700,000 dead by now. The Iraqi body count dwarfs the U.S. death toll in Iraq , but dominant U.S. media remains primarily and narcissistically obsessed with U.S. fatalities in Mesopotamia . The mostly civilian Arab victims of U.S. imperial violence (a lovely expression of America ’s noble commitment to “civilization”) are unworthy victims of the Iraq War as far as dominant U.S. media is concerned.
5. The critical role of the American Empire Project’s longstanding core concern with the control of Middle Eastern oil in shaping the decision to invade Iraq and in ensuring that the U.S. will not completely or truly withdraw from that illegally occupied nation or indeed the region anytime soon, whichever corporate-imperial party happens to hold power in Washington.
(...) At the “left” margin of dominant U.S. media’s narrow parameters of acceptable discourse (defined by the likes of the New York Times and militant centrists Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), the war is at worst a terrible “mistake” – a “strategic blunder” driven by a sincere but naïve drive to advance noble and democratic ideals and institutions.
(...) The assumption of benevolent intention, the denial of criminal and imperial intent, the inability to grasp the role of petroleum, and the denial of racist and mass-murderous realities makes taking in “mainstream” war/occupation coverage and commentary like hearing a baseball game being called by a blind man.
(...) According to a Washington Post “news” story (not an editorial) in January 2005, “spreading democracy around the world” was “one of [the Bush administration’s] top foreign policy goals for the new term."