Has anyone considered the possibility that labor has been doing it all wrong? That rather than going after the Democrats all this time, they should have been going after the Republicans? The argument can be made that organized labor should have used that $400 million to buy off their enemies instead of using it to grease the palms of their nominal friends—friends who, alas, can’t (or won’t) get the job done.

This electoral shift in the suburbs, of course, mirrors even more fundamental changes in the American voting universe. In 1976 when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, the active electorate was 90 per cent white non-Hispanic. Last November, the white share was down to 74 per cent; a transition toward voter diversity whose future is assured by demographic momentum. Nearly half the babies, for instance, born in the United States during the last few years had Spanish surnames, and American ‘minorities’ separately counted would constitute the twelfth most populous nation on earth (100.7 million). [35] Over the course of the Bush administration, the Latino voting-age population in Virginia increased 5 times faster than the population as a whole, 11 times faster in Ohio, and almost 15 times faster in Pennsylvania. [36] As Karl Rove and other nervous Republican strategists well understand, the gop has probably already harvested its maximum crop of white evangelical votes and will be culturally and politically marginalized unless it sinks new roots amongst immigrants and the coming ‘minority-majority’.

lecture 7, "the kansas-nebraska act and the birth of the republican party"
david blight

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the urgency of political tumult motivated by the discovery of gold in California. California was ready for statehood--and already people realized how big/rich it was. would it be a free state, or slave state?

the South's greatest leader delivered what became known as "The Southern Address", and in it John C. Calhoun said many things: that the North threatens to reduce the question to "resistance or submission." he makes California the litmus test.

one of the oldest ideas in US political culture is that great conflict comes when one side cannot accept the result--that they cannot accept a political outcome. this is the question in the 1850s--can some kind of compromise be reached?

Clay invites Daniel Webster, Northern Whig, who was anti-slavery (though never a card-carrying abolitionist), had been in Congress since 1823. seen as the voice of New England. "Liberty and Union," was his phrase--he always seemed to be the union man, even as he was an anti-slavery man. Henry Clay, slaveholder from Kentucky, founder of the Whig Party, its organizational genius, original founder of the American Colonization Society, was someone with great influence in Congress. He pulls in Clay and says we've got to save the union.

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what were the issues in 1850?

(1) California is ready for statehood, overnight almost. miners flock there.

(2) DC was a huge center of the slave-trade. there was a massive slave jail 2.5 blocks from Congress. foreign visitors would stand in awe of the Capitol, and they would ask, "where's the slave jail?" so there were a lot of Northerners who were saying lets deal with this question as part of the larger compromise.

(3) Fugitive Slaves, in the so-called underground railroad. and the term "underground railroad" emerges in debates on the floor of the House and Senate. Southerners wanted a federally-enforced Fugitive Slaves Act.

(4) and then there was the issue of Texas--the boundaries had never been determined. and the question was how would you divide up Texas (there was no New Mexico or Arizona, yet). the idea was that if you moved the border back 300 or 400 miles, you might free up space for new states (and they would, in the Southern imagination, be slave states, further tipping the national balance in their favor).

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Daniel Webster's support for the five measures of the Compromise of 1850

(1) California would be admitted as a Free State (Clay said that if you were to hold a referendum there there's no question that it would be a Free State; they're all little people that are flocking there)

(2) in return, the South is going to get a whole new, much stronger, federally-enforced Fugitive Slave Act.

(3) abolish the slave trade in DC--Northerners will like that.

(4) let's move the boundary back 350 miles back, and let southerners dream of 2-3 more states in that open space. let's let them feel secure that California may come in as a Free State, but there's potential for new Southern states in the future.

(5) how would slavery be determined in the SW? popular sovereignty--let the people have a referendum, and vote. (except for California, remember--this is the stuff of compromise).

(NB: Daniel Webster says I can't take the Fugitive Slave Act back to MA; Henry Clay says you must).

how was the Compromise finally passed? there was no certainty it would work--after Clay initiated the debate, with an emotional speech. Daniel Webster held forward, in the 7th March speech--"I speak today for the preservation of the Union." he was asking, remember, Northerners to vote to be complicit in the slave trade. people call it the greatest speech in the history of the US Senate--it also ruined Webster's political career.

Calhoun was unable to deliver a speech. he was too sick (he'll be dead by the Fall). delivered, instead, by his colleague Mason. Calhoun's speech actually frightened many Northerners into voting for the Compromise, despite their disdain for it. and so it passed, in early August, 1850.

Henry Clay was terminally ill, had gone home to Kentucky. he'd be out of the picture by the end of that very year. Webster was to be denounced, forever, in his own political party and constituency.

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but it passed. and, in some ways, saved the union. BUT: "it was far more an armistice than it really was a compromise. it began to collapse almost as soon as it passed." people were certainly relieved in the North, and there were rally celebrating its passing.

at the same time, the State of Georgia legislature passed its conditional approval of the Compromise, saying that it depends on the North's good faith. North replied in kind.

there were vehement protests against the Fugitive Slave Act. above all else, it was this Act that led to further conflict. it led to as many as 20,000 free blacks and freed slaves leaving the Northern states for Canada, between 1850 and 1857/8.

this will lead to the establishment of special federal magistrates, whose sole job it was to set up a police apparatus to retrieve fugitive slaves and identified (there was a monetary incentive to convict vs. acquit!). this led to famous fugitive slave rescues--abolitionists carted a slave from Syracuse off to Canada, a slave broken out of jail in Boston taken to Concord, MA and then to Montreal.

there were many other slave rescues, as well.

resistance to slavery was direct, sometimes violent--the underground railroad had become overground.

one could argue that the most important thing that happened in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. she made everyone complicit in the slave story (the most despicable character in the book is Miss Ophelia, a thoroughly racist anti-slavery character). the whole world was suddenly reading a work of fiction about slavery (it sold 300,000 copies in its first year; re-printed into 20 languages in its first 5 years of existence). brought an awareness of the slavery problem, as never before.

in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, now, though--the country had to face this question, by 1853/1854 was what was going to happen with Kansas and Nebraska territories. the parts left over from the Louisiana Purchase (1803).

but the Kansas-Nebraska Act was at the front of the agenda of the US Congress at the end of 1853, in the environment of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act (which was enforced fairly effectively in the North, despite this well-known resistance to the Act). the Anthony Burns rendition case: after the earlier freeing, his trial became a litmus test. there was an all-night vigil held by abolitionists, in protest. eventually they bought him back from a farm in SC.

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what was firing the American imagination at this time was not just the West, but the Railroad West. would the eastern terminus of the West-going railroad be in Chicago, or further south in a slave state? stephen douglass, the man who negotiated the Compromise of 1850, wanted the terminus in Chicago. (though, prof is saying, his approach to slavery is critical: Stephen Douglas believes that climate will solve the problem of slavery--if the soil is good, temperatures are right, slavery will exist--climate will solve the problems!).

back to Kansas-Nebraska--what principle will you apply? had the Compromise of 1850 superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820? so which rule is in play? do you apply, even the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which said it will never exist in the early Northwest)?

in other words, this is the great question of the 1850s--would the American pragmatic tradition "continue" to solve this?

Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. he wrote three different versions, in fact. went from vaguest to most specific, because Southerners put his feet to the fire.

version 1: January 4, 1854--"as their constitution may prescribe." (leave it to time, climate, and good sense--Southerners said not enough).

version 2: January 10, 1854--a direct statement of popular sovereignty. "decision to be left to the people residing therein." (but, Dixon tells him that he must rid the bill of geographic shackless--repudiate Missouri Compromise, etc.

version 3 (which passed): two measures--(1) explicit repeal of Missouri Compromise line; (2) popular sovereignty. (note: this opens up the whole of the West to the possibility of slavery).

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the Kansas-Nebraska Act is arguably the seminal event of American politics in the 1850s: (1) it will sectionalize American politics; (2) break apart what's left of the Whig party; (3) give birth to the first successful third party coalition movement (the Republican party)

note the vote count: Northern Democrats were split right in half, Southern Democrats voted 57-2 in favor; Northern Whigs voted 45-0 against, and Southern Whigs 12-7. and the four Free Soilers voted against, of course. (113-10 passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but it breaks apart the system, and brings about an anti-slavery coalition that will elect a President within six years).

President Obama and His People

From anti-politics, to politics.

The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so... in the name of the people that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.
--Jacques Rancière¹

As we approach the end of the inaugural month of Barack Obama's reign as president-elect, one can't help but recall the feel-good eulogizing that greeted the news of his election. The Kenyan president, for example, declared November 6th a public holiday in Obama's honor,² Magic Johnson told us he wept through the night,³ and Nicholas Kristof, that titan of the mainstream “Left,”⁴ relayed the widespread impression that America had “powerfully revitalized” the “idea[s] of equality and opportunity.” Even for those whose man lost, the historic consequences of Obama's victory were impossible to ignore: the “greatest democracy in the world,” it seemed, had proven the glory of its foundation by demonstrating the resilience of its ideals. As a black family arrived to claim an office once built by black slaves, America expiated its Original Sin.

To leftists, the colossal partiality of these and accompanying narratives, I think, has always been evident. Never was it true, for example, that only America could crown a son from the sea of those it systematically oppresses; after all, Evo Morales—who has told stories of, many years ago, savoring orange peels flung from the speeding cars of rich Bolivians—became his country's first indigenous president three years ago this month. Nor was Obama carried into the presidency by a tide of revolutionary agitation (as Morales was). Instead, as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently celebrated, he was produced, by astute campaign-managers and sedulous staffers, as an ideological “place-holder” onto which millions of consumers projected their radical aspirations.⁵

It is a dynamic evident in these myriad forms of myth-making, I think, that speaks to the heart of what the Obama era threatens to represent. As Simon Critchley argued recently, “Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, to put aside our differences and achieve union.... It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life.”⁶ Though, of course, this tactic hardly has its origins in Obama's campaign, the fact of his election as an oppressed black man in particular, I think, threatens to re-brand the iniquities of an entire political system (and, particularly, the history of its formation) with this fantasy of perpetual union. This, again, is the negative significance of his blackness: his ascent to power, through the electoral system, has vindicated American democracy—when allied to the “anti-politics” at the heart of his campaign, then, it threatens a terminal form of forgetfulness. Far from encouraging us to reproduce the spirit of those masses who have struggled against the State that now readies itself to crown him, Obama instead comes to embody the cosmic judiciousness of that very State apparatus.

Against this, it is the Left's duty to, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “articulate what was past...” in the knowledge that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”⁷ Much as we must, as Critchley argues, foreground the “agonism and power relations constitutive of political life” in the present, we must also, against Obama, decry the fatuous re-making of the history of American government into a celebration of the foresight of its forefathers. These days who takes time to remember, for example, that the contours of the American Constitution were determined by fifty-five white men anxious to establish a Federal Government strong enough to safeguard their fortunes?⁸ Or that throughout the history of bourgeois democracy, only pitched battles have forced the gradual extension of the franchise⁹—and this, too, as ruling elites adjusted to the arrival of the lower classes by concentrating instead on purchasing their hearts and minds?

Of course, in the heady bliss following Obama's victory, few wanted to be the grouchy dogmatists insisting that the arrival of this black man was far too contrived, aside from being too little, too late. Yet this is the price of responsible participation in today's political life: to re-introduce, partly by remembering, the fact of “agonisms.” When, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed that the President and Senate be appointed for life based on his estimation that “the people are turbulent and changing... they seldom judge or determine right,”¹⁰ his callous elitism expressed the timelessness of the wealthy man's desire, however sublimated, to sustain the class cleavages that make privilege possible. (Indeed, in James Madison's famous words, this brand of “peace” was to be the primary responsibility of government: “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”)¹¹

Similarly, when today, in Obama-land, the doctrine of “anti-politics” moves many an eager liberal to obviate past struggle in the name of “all-the-progress-we've-made,” it falls to the Left to recover histories of mass movements battling against State obstinacy. Indeed, the fantasy of agonism-free politics depends quite squarely on this notion that America has “arrived”—on the idea that the need for protracted struggle against entrenched interests is obsolete. Indeed, much like corollary talk of politicians' expertise serves to secure the distance between assemblies and the demos they discipline, the doctrine of anti-politics works to obscure the very immediate inequalities at the heart of modern American society.

In this sense, I suggest, the question on which many thoughtful Leftists have hung their hopes for Obama's presidency—namely, the dim prospects of the enraged electorate which voted for him transcending his candidacy and becoming a progressive social movement—really depends on the possibility of shattering the myths that furbished the “anti-political” pulse of his campaign. In other words, this distinction between anti-politics and politics really marks the difference between Obama's voters, as an electorate mobilizing around him as an empty signifier, and Obama's voters, as a mass movement prepared to stand, against power, for principles.

Only once America can be convinced, against Obama's best efforts, that the world we carry in our hearts will not be engineered by the men and women assembling on Capitol Hill, but won by the world-historical agitation of those these representatives exclude from politics proper, will the dream of the “Obama Left” be possible. It scarcely needs to be said that, for those establishment hacks invested in the permanence of anti-politics, the new First Man's baby steps have been win-win: not only did the success of his candidacy “restore” the reputation of a democratic system tarred by the iniquities of the Bush cabal, but his politicking has banished worries that he himself may have carried “Change” into the White House. For those of us, on the other hand, hoping for the restoration of a movement ethic to a civic life neutered by corporate electioneering, much seems to rest on the possibility that, in a time of crisis, Obama's unapologetic pragmatism will prove intolerable to the electorate he promised to empower.

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1Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, pg. 53

2http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7710394.stm

3http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/27565680/

4Nicholas Kristof, “The Obama Dividend”

5 http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131810

6Simon Critchley, “What's Left After Obama?”

7Thesis VI, http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html

8Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 90-91

9Chris Harman, A People's History of the World, pg. 390

10Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 96

11Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent,” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ConsentPOP_Chom.html

Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan, "alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal," and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.

It is the increasing gap between rich and poor that constitutes the inequality, and rearranging the race and gender of those who succeed leaves that gap untouched. In actually existing neoliberalism, blacks and women are still disproportionately represented both in the bottom quintile—too many—and in the top quintile—too few—of American incomes. In the neoliberal utopia that the Obama campaign embodies, blacks would be 13.2 per cent of the (numerous) poor and 13.2 per cent of the (far fewer) rich; women would be 50.3 per cent of both. For neoliberals, what makes this a utopia is that discrimination would play no role in administering the inequality; what makes the utopia neoliberal is that the inequality would remain intact.

lebanon intrusion:
The uprising took place during a general strike to protest the Siniora cabinet's refusal to raise the minimum wage and increase fuel subsidies in the face of rising prices in food and other basic commodities. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated by the politicized firing of a popular brigadier general in charge of security at the Beirut Airport and efforts to close down Hezbollah's telecommunication network, which had played an important role in mobilizing defenses and relief operations during the massive Israeli bombing campaign against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration had been strongly encouraging the prime minister to enact such policies.
(...) Lebanon's "duly elected government," a legacy of a complex system of confessional representation imposed by French colonialists as a means of divide-and-rule, consists of a slim majority made up by the May 14th Alliance, a broad coalition consisting of 17 parties dominated by center-right parties led by Sunni Muslims, a center-left party led by Druze, and far-right parties led by Christian Maronites. The opposition March 8th Alliance consists of 41 parties, led by the radical Shia Hezbollah, the more moderate Shia Amal, the centrist Maronite-led Free Patriotic Movement, as well as a various leftist and Arab nationalist parties.
(...) The resolution also over-simplifies the complicated dimensions of the conflict by putting the onus for the violence exclusively on Hezbollah. For example, the resolution accuses Hezbollah of sacking and burning the buildings housing the television studios and newspaper of a pro-government party, when it fact it was SSNP partisans that did so. Similarly, the resolution also blames Hezbollah for "fomenting riots" and "blocking roads," when in fact these were actions by trade unionists and others as part of a general strike pressing demands for greater economic justice, an agenda supported by those from across the political and sectarian divide.
(...) Though the military actions by the militias of Hezbollah and its allies were clearly illegitimate, the hyperbolic language of the resolution went to rather absurd extremes. For example, the resolution referred to Hezbollah's armed mobilization, in which its forces briefly controlled key neighborhoods in West Beirut, as an "illegal occupation of territory under the sovereignty of the Government of Lebanon." By contrast, not once in Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, which took place in defiance of no less than 10 UN Security Council resolutions, did Congress ever go on record condemning Israel's actions or even referring to it as the illegal occupation that it was.
(...) In reality, there is little evidence to suggest that Syrian and Iranian influence on this populist Shia party and its allies is any greater than U.S. influence on some of Lebanon's other political factions. Indeed, many Lebanese blame the United States for much of the political crisis which has paralyzed the government during the past year and which culminated in last month's violence as a result of the Bush administration's pressure on Siniora and his allies to resist any compromise with the opposition on economic, political or security issues.
(...) The resolution went as far as calling upon the United Nations Security Council to "prohibit all air traffic between Iran and Lebanon and between Iran and Syria" on the grounds that it might be used to bring in arms to the Hezbollah militia, thereby placing a large bipartisan majority in Congress on record calling for the disruption of legitimate commercial activities between foreign countries due to the possibility that a few of the thousands of annual flights may include contraband armaments. This demand is particularly ironic given that the U.S. government transports tens of billions of dollars worth of armaments to repressive governments in the greater Middle East region every year, as well as arming private militias in Iraq and separatist guerrillas in Iran.
(...) Other observers, including Paul, warned of the consequences of further U.S. meddling in Lebanon's internal conflicts. "This resolution leads us closer to a wider war in the Middle East," Paul said. "It involves the United States unnecessarily in an internal conflict between competing Lebanese political factions and will increase rather than decrease the chance for an increase in violence. The Lebanese should work out political disputes on their own or with the assistance of regional organizations like the Arab League."
(...) The resolution correctly observes how "United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1559, 1680, and 1701 call for the disbanding and disarming of all militias in Lebanon" but that "Hezbollah has contemptuously dismissed the requirements of the United Nations Security Council by refusing to disarm." However, there is nothing in the resolution regarding militias allied with the U.S.-backed prime minister, which are also required to disarm. Siniora's Future Movement militia, which Hezbollah fighters battled on the streets of West Beirut, has emerged since these UN resolutions passed without any apparent disapproval from Washington.
(...) Yet, for the Democratic-controlled Congress, as with the Bush administration, the complex cleavages of the contemporary Middle East can be simply understood as a matter of good versus evil. "We have a situation here where a democratic, freedom-loving, sovereign people are insisting on the results of their own self-determined election that they came to through democratic processes and are doing that in the face of outside interference in the form of armed opposition, murders, assassinations that are being sponsored by Hezbollah, financed by the Iranian and Syrian regimes," Ackerman said.
(...) Hezbollah's provocative military action in May, which violated its pledge to use its armed militia only in defense of the country from Israel and not against its fellow Lebanese, has hurt its standing among the country's non-Shia majority, who now see them more as advancing their own parochial interests than serving the role they had previously embraced as a national resistance movement against foreign occupation forces. Washington's support for Israel's military attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon and this latest resolution backing rival armed factions, however, does little to encourage Hezbollah to disarm or promote efforts to advance nonviolent conflict resolution and national reconciliation.

obama is a truly democratic expansionist:
The nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, "marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history", is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullsh*t on a grand scale. Race, gender, appearance, body language, rictal spouses and offspring, even bursts of tragic grandeur, are all subsumed by marketing and "image-making", now magnified by "virtual" technology. Thanks to an undemocratic electoral college system (or, in Bush's case, tampered voting machines) only those who both control and obey the system can win.
(...) His second statement, largely ignored, was made in Miami on 23 May. Speaking to the expatriate Cuban community – which over the years has faithfully produced terrorists, assassins and drug runners for US administrations – Obama promised to continue a 47-year crippling embargo on Cuba that has been declared illegal by the UN year after year.
(...) Again, Obama went further than Bush. He said the United States had "lost Latin America". He described the democratically elected governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua as a "vacuum" to be filled. He raised the nonsense of Iranian influence in Latin America, and he endorsed Colombia's "right to strike terrorists who seek safe-havens across its borders". Translated, this means the "right" of a regime, whose president and leading politicians are linked to death squads, to invade its neighbours on behalf of Washington. He also endorsed the so-called Merida Initiative, which Amnesty International and others have condemned as the US bringing the "Colombian solution" to Mexico. He did not stop there. "We must press further south as well," he said. Not even Bush has said that.

obama's insults:
(...) During his Brown Chapel address, Obama praised the “Moses [King and Selma] Generation” of Civil Rights leaders for bringing black America “90 percent” of the way to social equality in America. It’s up to Obama and his fellow “Joshua Generation” blacks to get past “that [final] 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side,” Obama said. This formulation was consistent with his 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope’s claim that most black Americans have been “pulled into the economic mainstream.”
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Or that whites in the United States, considered separately, enjoy the highest quality of life in the world while black Americans, viewed separately, live at the level of a “Third World” nation (Elaine Brown, The Condemnation of Little B [Boston, MA: Beacon, 2002], pp. 78-79).
(...) Too bad Obama’s relatively privileged background has little to do with American Horatio Alger (rags to riches) mythology. And too bad that Obama’s paean to the American Dream was plagued by a different sort of empirical challenge: the relatively stationary and harshly unbalanced structure of American inequality.
(...) Not only does the social class into which you are born matter a very great deal when it comes to where you stand on the American socioeconomic ladder. It matters more in the U.S. than it does in most if not all the rest of the industrialized world. As reporter David Wessel noted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2005, the best scholarship on the subject simply does not support "the notion that the US is a meritocracy where smarts and ambition matter more than parenthood and class." In reality, the odds that a child born into poverty will climb into the middle or upper class are slighter in the U.S. than they are in "class bound Europe." The U.S. and its junior partner England are "the least mobile societies" among the world's "rich countries." France and Germany "are somewhat more mobile than the U.S.; Canada and the Nordic countries are much more so."
(...) As Obama waxed eloquent about “generous America’s” status as the global beacon of ascendant opportunity, the best current research determined at least 45 to 60 percent of "parents' [class] advantage" is "passed on to their children." Using the 60 percent estimate, Wessel reported that rich Americans’ inherited edge and poor Americans’ inherited disadvantage goes five generations deep in the U.S., extending back to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. According to Chicago Federal Reserve economist Bhashkar Mazumdor, who matched government survey data with the Social Security records of thousands of men burn during the 1960s, just 14% of American men born to fathers in the bottom tenth of the wage structure have risen to the top 30%. Conversely, just 17% of men born to fathers in the top tenth have fallen into the bottom 30th.
(...) It gets worse, Wessel noted, when you factor in race: fully 42% of blacks born into the bottom tenth of families for income fail to escape the lowest ten percent. By contrast, just 17% of whites born into the bottom tenth stay there as adults.
(...) “The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for,” Obama told labor union members in Chicago’s Soldier Field last August. “The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate.” At the same time, “Obama, Inc.” proceeds to set campaign fundraising records with considerable help from gigantic corporations and investment capital behemoths like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and Exelon. These and other stupendous concentrations of wealth exercise quiet but powerful control over Obama’s campaign rhetoric and policy proposals. Especially insulting to our intelligence and sensibilities is Obama’s determination to retain close and lucrative funding relationships with leading Washington-based lobbyists and lobbying firms he claims to repudiate. Obama talks a big game of not taking lobbyist money but he works regularly with influential lobbyist players who (as Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Moran noted last August) “skirt disclosure requirements by merely advising clients and associates who do actual lobbying, and avoiding regular contact with policymakers.”
(...) In an interview last year with Time’s Joe Klein, Obama expressed interesting misgivings even about Massachusetts’ (non-single payer)plan for universal health insurance. He insulted American intelligence and moral sensibilities when he told Klein that “voluntary” solutions are “more consonant” with “the American character” than “government mandates.” Never mind that, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2006 (Chomsky Failed States [2006], p. 225): “A large majority of the [U.S.] population supports extensive government intervention [in the health care market], it appears. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee “everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply;”’ a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that 67% of Americans think it is a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27 5 dissenting; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’” Obama, it is worth noting, received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006. His wife Michelle, a fellow Harvard Law graduate, was a Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $273, 618 in 2006.
(...) These were maddeningly meager reflections on the wonders of American democracy. Obama’s ode to the absence of fascist dictatorship in the U.S. deleted the absence or weakness of substantive positive popular governance there. It evaded the unpleasant fact that much of ordinary U.S. citizens’ freedom to “say,” “write,” and “think” whatever they wish generally amounts to the liberty to whisper to one's immediate neighbor in the front row of a crowded movie theater with a blaring sound track since it is generally drowned out by giant, concentrated corporate media and the special megaphones possessed by private and state power. In a similar vein, Joe Six Pack et al.’s votes - when actually counted - are mere political half-pennies compared to the structurally empowered super-citizenship bestowed upon the great monied interests and corporations that exercise such well known disproportionate influence on American “market democracy.”
(...) It gets worse and more insulting and authoritarian with Obama. After referring to Americans as "one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes,” Obama’s Keynote Address praised "a young man" named Seamus who "told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week." Seamus' most endearing quality, Obama told the 2004 Convention, was "absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service." Reflecting on Seamus’ supposed blind and unquestioning devotion to the American fatherland, Obama "thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child." So much for the venerable democratic tradition of encouraging critical thinking and questioning authority!
(...) "We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photographs," Hedges and Al-Arian report, "that some soldiers had so lost their moral compasses that they mocked or desecrated Iraqi civilian corpses." Twenty four veterans "said they had witnessed or heard stories from those in their unit of unarmed civilians being shot or run over by convoys. These incidents were so numerous that many were never reported." The killing of "unarmed Iraqis" is "so common many of the troops said it became an accepted part of the daily landscape." Several interviewees told Hedges and Al-Arian of cases where U.S. soldiers would "plant AK-47s" next to the bodies of unarmed Iraqis they had butchered "to make it seems as if the civilian dead were combatants" (Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," The Nation, July 30, 2007).

questions that might determine history:
Since the war began in 2003 (actually, for a long time before that, but for the sake of maintaining focus), there has been an element in the antiwar movement that understands the fundamentally imperialist nature of the US war and occupation. In response, this element has organized its opposition to the debacle in anti-imperialist terms. The anti-imperialists’ politics range from libertarian to anarchist with most of them considering themselves leftists. I have had a running conversation with Ashley Smith — one of those organizers with the International Socialist Organization — since well before March 2003. Recently, we decided to exchange thoughts regarding the need for a re-energized antiwar movement whose fundamental understanding is that the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is imperialist and that opposition to that war should be anti-imperialist.
(...) For most people opposed to the war on Iraq, the problem is the Bush Administration or this or that wing of corporate America, say the oil companies. This administration or the oil industry has corrupted what is essentially, whatever its pock marks, a fine system. The aim of the movement therefore should be to pressure the government, isolate a regressive wing of corporate America, elect a liberal Democrat, and then implement a sane foreign policy through the existing government. Imperialism is therefore a problem of policy, not the of the system itself. In 2004, this led the mainstream anti-war movement to entirely subordinate grassroots struggle to the project of electing John Kerry, who was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War and merely claimed that he would more effectively run the war. The anti-war movement thus collapsed. Understanding the actual roots and nature of imperialism is therefore pivotal for building an effective movement that can end this occupation and develop a radical movement for overthrowing imperialism.
(...) The US has thus far more at stake in Iraq than it had in Vietnam and will take an ever more powerful movement to drive it out of Iraq and the region. During the Vietnam War, which was a brainchild of Cold War Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, it took a mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion of US troops in Vietnam, and a heroic resistance by the Vietnamese people to defeat the US. Congress never lifted a finger. We should learn that lesson well and organize an independent mass movement of mass protests and sit-ins, help build a new Vet and GI resistance through Iraq Veterans against the War, and also support the legitimate resistance of the Iraqi people against occupation. Only the combination of all those forces has the social power to drive the US out of Iraq.
(...) The New York Times had a piece on the Democratic candidates’ true Iraq/Afghan war stances and none of the three major candidates’ plans include anything even approaching an immediate and unconditional withdrawal. This isn’t a surprise to us, but you gotta’ wonder how many antiwar citizens think that Edwards, Obama or Clinton are going to end the war. Just like the 2006 Congressional elections, the Democrats are lying about their true intentions, yet you can bet that there will be some of their supporters at every antiwar rally between now and the 2008 elections. This is our biggest task: get the movement past these liars.
(...) The Democrats are really a challenge for social movements and the Left. Just a glance at the main funders of the party reveals the problem; they get the bulk of their money from corporate America. As a result, however much they appeal to the movements of workers and the oppressed, they are tied to a class that does not share our interests and as a result betray their promises to us. Nowhere is that more clear than the war in Iraq. Save for a handful of exceptions, they voted for the war; they refuse to cut the funding; they oppose immediate withdrawal; and won’t even impeach the war criminals in the White House. Some of them are actually more hawkish on Iran than Bush is!
(...) The key historical precedent we have to turn to is how we, not the Democrats, ended the Vietnam War. We ended it through the dynamic interaction between a truly mass domestic anti-war movement, a rebellion among the US troops and Veterans documented in David Cortright’s brilliant book Soldiers in Revolt, and the national liberation struggle of the Vietnamese people.

the forgotten vietnam-iraq parallel:
The Republicans are showing an uncanny ability to control the public debate. Remember just a couple of months ago, when it was Democratic Party gospel that this was indeed a war we couldn’t win? Somehow the gospel is being rewritten. As the Washington Post reports, the Dem party line now says that we are indeed “making progress” on the military front. Our troops are doing a superb job. It’s just those incompetent Iraqi politicians — looking for “power, revenge, and personal advantage,” Hillary Clinton says — who are blocking the path to a glorious victory.
(...) Long ago, historians of the Vietnam war noted that the intense debate about the war that gripped America rarely made much reference to the suffering of the Vietnamese people. Only “peaceniks” on the far left paid much attention to the two million or more Vietnamese who died, to the corpses and torched villages and napalmed children that were the living — and dying — reality of the war. In the mainstream, where the “serious” discussion unfolded, the only question that mattered was: What is this war doing to the USA? Is it to our benefit to keep on fighting, or are we better off withdrawing?
(...) Is it Bush and Cheney or their antiwar critics who are wearing the white hats? That’s for you to decide. In either case, political leaders and the mainstream media make it clear that you are deciding for a particular vision of what America is all about, what makes America great, and what direction America should take in the future. What happens to the people of Iraq is mentioned only in passing, if at all.
(...) Sad to say, this is probably a fairly accurate reflection of U.S. public opinion. Most people here don’t care too much what happened to the people of Vietnam or what is happening to the people of Iraq. A recent poll showed that the average American thinks under 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died in this war — a vast underestimate. More importantly, the number of Iraqi dead scarcely figures into the public debate. As with the Vietnam war, it’s all about what is happening to us.
(...) That is why Bush’s speechwriters could take the gamble of raising the specter of Vietnam, and why they may very well win. Since the war was turned into a fictional drama, few people know, or care, what really happened in Vietnam. Therefore, it’s easy to change the story around. Few can refute Bush’s absurd version, in which the forecast “bloodbath” supposedly actually happened, and the U.S. withdrawal triggered the Khmer Rouge outrages in Cambodia.
(...) On all those counts, the yarn Bush is spinning could easily prove a winner. It says that we were close to winning in Vietnam. But then the antiwar “cut and run” crowd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. That let loose a bloody tide of chaos that engulfed southeast Asia, humiliated the U.S., and emboldened the terrorists, who now want to make Iraq a home base from which to launch their next attack upon us. But we have a chance to right all those wrongs — to stem the tide of chaos, regain our pride, crush the terrorists, keep our children safe, and show what America is really made of — if only we have the courage to fight for God’s truth.

the ongoing tragedy of afghanistan:
But to understand why Afghanistan was and remains so important to US strategic interests is to understand the role it has played throughout its history in the global struggle for empire and hegemony waged by the great powers. This mystical land, occupying a strategic location along the ancient Silk Route between the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, has been the subject of fierce rivalry between global empires since the 19th century, when the then British and Russian Empires vied for control of the lucrative spoils to be found in the subcontinent of India and in Central Asia in what came to be known as the 'Great Game.' The British desired to control Afghanistan as a buffer against Russian influence in Persia (Iran) in order protect its own interests in India, which at that time was the jewel in the crown of an empire that covered a full third of the globe. Two Anglo-Afghan wars were fought during this period. The first saw the complete annihilation of a 16,000-strong British army in 1842, the second resulted in the withdrawal of British forces in 1880, though the British retained nominal control over Afghanistan's foreign affairs. This control lasted through to 1919, when after a third Anglo-Afghan war the British signed the Treaty of Rawalpindi, heralding the beginning of complete Afghan independence from Britain.
(...) [for counterpoint, see eqbal ahmed] That said, there was a point in Afghanistan's tortured history when the future looked bright, when a determined effort to lift the country and its people out of backward agrarian feudalism almost succeeded. It began with the formation of the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) back in the sixties, which opposed the autocratic rule of King Zahir Shar. The growth in popularity of the PDPA eventually led to them taking control of the country in 1978, after a coup removed the former Kings' cousin, Mohammed Daud, from power.
(...) By the late 1980s half of all university students in Afghanistan were women, and women made up 40 percent of the country's doctors, 70 percent of its teachers, and 30 percent of its civil servants. In John Pilger's 'New Rulers Of The World' (Verso, 2002), he relates the memory of the period through the eyes of an Afghan woman, Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who escaped the Taliban in 2001. She said: "Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian movies. I tall started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. It was sad to think that these were the people the West had supported."
(...) Under the pretext that the Afghan government was a Soviet puppet, which was false, the then Carter Administration authorised the covert funding of opposition tribal groups, whose traditional feudal existence had come under attack with these reforms. An initial $500 million was allocated, money used to arm and train the rebels in the art in secret camps set up specifically for the task across the border in Pakistan. This opposition came to be known as the mujaheddin, and so began a campaign of murder and terror which, six months later, resulted in the Afghan government in Kabul requesting the help of the Soviet Union, resulting in an ill-fated military intervention which ended ten years later in an ignominious retreat of Soviet military forces and the descent of Afghanistan into the abyss of religious intolerance, abject poverty, warlordism and violence that has plagued the country ever since.
(...) Despite ruling a country in which women were stoned to death for adultery, in which men were tortured and had their limbs amputated for misdemeanour crimes, in which music and television was banned, in which it was illegal for girls to attend school, these high-ranking representatives of the Taliban were given the red-carpet treatment ­ put up in a five-star hotel and even accorded a VIP visit to Disneyworld in Florida. However, after they left it was felt that they could not be trusted and the plan for the pipeline was shelved.

the "gift" that keeps on bleeding:
And how have the Democrats treated their gift now that they control Congress? The Democratic House and Senate have continued to fund the war while posturing against it. For example Hillary Clinton, who pollsters regard as the Democratic frontrunner for her party's presidential nomination, told the New York Times that when she is elected she would keep troops in Iraq but run a smarter operation. The public's opinion of Congress has plummeted with no end in sight to the bloody occupation.

how the democrats blew it in only 8 months:
Led by Democrats since the start of this year, Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower than Republicans scored last year.
(...) The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted the money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement was to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wiretapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd wanted to. But she didn't. The Democrats' game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base to their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.
(...) It didn't take an antiwar movement to make the people antiwar. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion that the war is a bust. Their attention is already shifting to the economic crisis: housing meltdown, car sales meltdown, credit crisis, threats from the Chinese to destroy the dollar. What war? The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months? Pursue them for war crimes after they've stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign.

media coverage of john edwards:
Elite media seem more comfortable with millionaire politicians who identify with their class – and half of all U.S. senators are millionaires.
(...) Of course I don’t know many presidential candidates either (except my friend Dennis Kucinich, whose net worth in 2004 was reported to be below $32,000.)

street on post-WW2 imperial imperative:
The Bible is loaded with such material. Some of the worst is found in the Book of Revelation, which portrays a final and bloody battle between the forces of Good – led by a Warrior Christ that would make George the Crusader Bush II proud – and the forces of evil. Concluding with great birds of prey feasting on the flesh of vanquished non-Christians, it is “a story of God’s ruthless, terrifying and violent power unleashed on nonbelievers” (p. 5).
(...) Edwards is angry at George W. Bush and the neoconservatives for weakening America’s power by perverting the basic goodness of U.S. foreign policy once epitomized and advanced by Cold War leaders like “the great Dean Acheson,” “President Harry Truman,” “General George Marshall,” and George Kennan. Edwards is upset because Bush II’s toxic combination of corruption, arrogance, and crass, incompetent imperialism has “risk[ed] squandering our [U.S.] prestige” and “strained our military to the breaking point.” Edwards told the CFR that Bush’s Iraq policy has compromised the United States’ global “force structure,” and “distracted” the nation from the broader tasks of global management, which require the direction that only America can provide.
(...) Edwards is hardly alone among the Democrats in heaping praise on U.S. Cold War foreign policy makers and in framing Bush’s foreign policy negatively against the noble background of the “Greatest Generation.” You could find similar phrases and formulations in the phrases in the foreign policy speeches of Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama. They all read from the same doctrinal bible when it comes to post-WWII America’s glorious and benevolent role in the world.
(...) In his ponderous, power-worshipping campaign book The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s obedient reverence for the great white masters of the past peaks with the rise of the glorious Cold War. He “ponders” with a sense of awe “the work” of Cold War architect George Kennan, which he contrasts with what he sees as the repulsive nihilism of the 1960s New Left. He applauds the wonderful (for him) “post-[World War Two] leadership of president Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall and George Kennan” for “craft[ing] …a…new…order that married [Woodrow] Wilsonian idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of American power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world.” He praises the architects of the Cold War for checking the Soviet Union’s nefarious designs “to spread [in Obama’s words] its totalitarian brand of communism.”
(...) The problem with this mainstream Democratic take on post-WWII U.S. foreign policy is the same problem that Hedges finds with many Christians’ take on the Bible. It’s a whitewash. It leaves out the full and ugly truth. It’s Orwellian. It airbrushes out terrible facts that don’t fit the happy, nationally narcissistic story line.
(...) There’s a lot to delete. The post-World War II era and the Cold War began, after all, with Truman’s perpetration of one of the greatest war crimes in history. He ordered the monumentally mass-murderous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki well after U.S. authorities knew that Japan was decisively defeated and looking to surrender. He did so with full knowledge that the Japanese only required assurances that the institution of the Emperor could remain intact in postwar Japan – a condition Truman met after but not before dropping the bombs. His decision to use the atom bomb (which he called the “greatest thing in the world” after radioactively murdering tens of thousands of “Jap” civilians) was about advancing U.S. global power vis-à-vis Russia and the rest of the world in the post-WWII era. It was not about saving American or Japanese lives.
(...) “Greatest Generation” U.S. planners and policymakers restored fascist power structures in “liberated” Italy and intervened for elite class rule and against popular social revolution in the Balkans. In proclaiming the militantly U.S.-globalist Truman Doctrine, Washington smeared democratic struggles in Greece as a Soviet “Communist” export. It did this to “Scare the Hell out of the American people” (in the wonderful terminology of US Senator Arthur Vandenburg) so they would accept the permanent imperial re-militarization of U.S. society and policy – helping thereby to sustain and expand the powerful “military-industrial complex” that Dwight Eisenhower left the White House warning Americans about.”
(...) Consistent with that goal, Truman and two key members of his cabinet, including Edwards’ hero Marshall, “systematically deceived Congress and the public into thinking that the USSR was about to launch World Wear III with an invasion of Europe in 1948.” They did this, Frank Kofsky has shown, in order “to push through their foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military buildup and bail out the near bankrupt airline industry” (Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 [New York, NY: St. Martin’s, 1993]. It was another early example of the well-known Washington game of “threat inflation.”
(...) From the Truman Doctrine on, the basic Cold War pattern was set for the U.S. subversion of democracy and national independence across the planet. Some of the most egregious subsequent examples came in Iran (CIA coup 1953), Guatemala (U.S.-sponsored and directed coup and military takeover 1954), Chile (U.S.-sponsored coup and military takeover, 1973), Indonesia (U.S. sponsored military takeover 1965) are just some of the more spectacular examples in a long list. Hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers, leftists and intellectuals paid with their lives for the brutal U.S. covert war against independent development and social justice in the Third World. The Bushcons did not invent U.S.-imposed “regime change.”
(...) In making the case for a bloody U.S. invasion of Haiti, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing argued that the effective meaning of the Monroe Doctrine was simply that “the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end”
(...) The illusory specter of the Soviet quest for “world domination” and the related “domino theory” were always covers for the real specter haunting “Greatest Generation” planners: the danger that peripheral states would follow their own road of development, outside and against the selfish “needs’ of the inherently noble industrial-democratic (state-capitalist) core, run by and for the United States.
(...) we can consult an interesting formulation from Obama’s wise “Wilsonian” hero Kennan. As Kennan explained in Policy Planning Study 23, crafted for the State Department planning staff in 1948: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…to do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives...We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better...We should not hesitate before police repression by the local government” (Quoted in Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, pp. 9-11).
(...) The Marshall Plan, the U.S. reconstruction project for the war-ravaged European core, was loaded with selfish imperial content. U.S. assistance was predicated on investment and purchasing rules that favored U.S.-based corporations and on the political marginalization of Left parties that had gained prestige leading the fight against fascist forces the U.S. had initially appeased and even welcomed as counters to the European Left. U.S. forces stood ready to intervene directly in the event of Left electoral victories in Western Europe. Throughout the war against fascism – a war won primarily by the workers, soldiers and peasants of the Soviet Union – U.S. planners worked behind the scenes to make sure that the U.S. would emerge as the unchallenged hegemon in the world investment and trading system.
(...) Expressing Washington’s timeworn determination to “choose military solutions when diplomatic ones were possible,” it led to masses of unnecessary deaths. Thousands of ethnic Albanians paid a severe price when the U.S.-ordered bombing escalated the pace of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Prior to the air attack, the U.S. and NATO and presented flatly impossible “peace” terms at Rambouillet. Clinton’s proposal to Serbia included NATO control of all of Kosovo and NATO military occupation of all the rest of Yugoslavia. The Serbian National Assembly’s counterproposal for negotiations leading to wide-ranging Kosovo autonomy was ignored by U.S. policymakers and dominant U.S. war media. The bombing of Yugoslavia, including the Serbian capital Belgrade, produced untold civilian casualties. Weapons containing depleted uranium were used to terrible effect against the Serbian people.
(...) Beneath claims of humanitarian and anti-terrorist concern, Edwards does not call for full withdrawal from the occupied nation or the region. He proposes to adjust, not reject Washington’s imperial presence in the super-strategic because fabulously oil-rich Middle East. The U.S., he feels, must stand ready to strike in and against a region we claim the special right to police and colonize for a reason neither he nor any of the Democratic candidates except Kucinch and Gravel can acknowledge given dominant Washington and media “taboos.”
(...) Smith’s analysis also provides some context for Edwards’ comment that “the worst thing about [Bush’s] Global War on Terror approach is that it has backfired – our military has been strained to the breaking point and the threat from terrorism grows.” That is an unfortunate formulation. The worst thing about Bush’s foreign policy is that it has killed more than 700,000 Iraqis, a not-so-little detail that helps explain why millions around the world and especially in the Middle East will not mourn when the United States is hit by its next 9/11 – an eventuality that the Clintons are now saying will “probably” happen shortly “after the next president is sworn in” (Karen Tumulty and James Carney, “Hillary Pushes Back,” Time, May 7, 2007, p. 43).

explaining iraq:
...most Iraqis agree with the tens of thousands of Shia who marched in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of its fall. They chanted: "Death to America" and "Leave, Occupier! Leave!" They know that the original motivations for the invasion no longer matter. Well over a million Iraqi citizens are dead or wounded. Between half and three quarters of the population is unemployed. More than a hundred thousand have been driven from their homes. The national infrastructure is in ruins; security is non-existent; the dinar has no value; crime is rife; oil production has sunk below pre-war levels; one third of the population lacks decent drinking water; and one quarter of Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition. No one suggests any longer that the sacrifices were "worth it": Iraq has been labeled among the top five "failed states" and "the most dangerous place on earth" by the United Nations.
(...) Consensual support existed for the invasion of Iraq that derived from consensual assumptions. Unless these assumptions are brought to light, most likely, "pragmatic" liberals will again endorse pulling the trigger once the next set of nitwits come up with their next plan to export democracy and human rights through the barrel of a gun. That is what makes it necessary to consider the mainstream arguments for why the debacle took place. Four positions have been articulated in terms acceptable to the political mainstream –- the same mainstream that brought us the war and greeted it with such acclaim in the first place. Each of them will be discussed in turn.
[argument #1]
(...) The most widely held view for the failure in Iraq concerns the incompetence of those running the military enterprise. That this interpretation should be so popular only makes sense since it simply recapitulates arguments already made familiar toward the close of the preceding debacle: the Vietnam War. The refrains echo: not enough troops were employed, equipment was shoddy, and too much emphasis was placed upon air power.
(...) This kind of argument is content to suggest that the plan was good and that, merely, the execution poor. It assumes that the great bulk of the Iraqi public was just waiting for an introduction to American "values" and ready to embrace the invaders as well as their puppet regime. None of this, of course, was the case. For all the talk of "integrating" former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and the Sunni chieftains that gave it support, this view of events gives little attention to the long-standing ethnic divisions and religious tensions among the masses of Iraqis. It also essentially ignores what might be termed the "sociocide" -- the complete destruction of the social infrastructure and its norms -- that the invaders perpetrated in Iraq. Or, to put it a different way, this interpretation is content to concentrate upon the United States and its ability (or inability) "to get the job done" while the price paid by the Iraqis fades from view.
[argument #2]
(...) The second mainstream interpretation of the debacle in Iraq is based upon the failure of the American intelligence apparatus or, better, the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush administration. The now famous "Downing Street Memo" of 1 May 2005, minutes of a meeting taken by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft -- whose veracity is now generally acknowledged -- makes clear that Rumsfeld and his friends understood the difficulty in presenting "a good case" for war.
(...) Yet information contrary to that offered by the mainstream media and the bulk of the official intelligence community was all over the web in the months preceding the war. Democrats fearful of bucking the nationalist trend simply did not listen to experts like Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, and Mohamed El Baradei. In reality, whatever the degree to which official and mainstream intelligence was manipulated, critical information was easily available for those willing to seek it.
(...) Opposing the war was not very difficult: it demanded courage and a willingness to see clearly rather than "more information." No one asked what interest a secular regime headed by Saddam Hussein would have in making cause with Islamic fundamentalists. No one wondered how it was that a nation spending $4 billion dollars a year on the military would pose a threat to another nation spending more than $400 billion dollars a year. No one questioned how 30,000 bombs could be dropped on Baghdad in the first week of the war with only a few hundred casualties as a consequence.
[argument #3]
(...) Interpretation number three rests on the claim that the debacle ultimately derived from the refusal of the United States to turn over power to the Iraqis –- or, better, the "right" Iraqis -- quickly enough. But then the idea that "if only we had trusted the right people" -- is also an old refrain in imperialist circles. It highlights the arrogance of those "insiders" who substituted arbitrarily selected personal testimony –- or, better, simple gossip -- for knowledge of real conditions. This argument has been forwarded in various venues by neo-conservatives like Richard Perle. It is also the position now taken by his friend Ahmed Chalabi, a completely corrupt businessman later accused of acting as a double agent for Iran, who was virtually anointed by the Bush Administration to lead the new Iraqi government. Had friendly politicians like Chalabi been given power quickly, so the argument runs, Iraqi and American interests could both have been served.
(...) Unfortunately, however, this seemingly noble interpretation veils the desire by American imperialist policymakers to identify the interests expressed by their Iraqi friends in the political and economic elite with those of the Iraqi people. As it happened, Chalabi turned out to be a fraud: he had no support whatsoever among the Iraqi people and his party received 0.5% of the vote in the December 2005 elections. Left hanging is also a basic fact of political life in Iraq following the fall of Saddam: any set of leaders, friendly or not, would have had to face the lack of an army, a police force, a functioning bureaucracy, and a dilapidated infrastructure.
[argument #4]
(...) The fourth, and final, interpretation of why the war was lost is the exact opposite of the interpretation above. It suggests that the basic mistake lay in giving the Iraqis too much power too soon. This position also becomes a testament to the good intentions of the Bush Administration and its lack of ulterior motives in pursuing its course in Iraq. Of course, again, there is nothing new about this kind of claim when it comes to American foreign policy. Rumblings of this sort were heard as various puppet regimes of the United States fell during the Cold War and, again, especially when it came to the collapse of the South Vietnamese "republic." Ingratitude with respect to the "gift of freedom" that was bestowed upon the Iraqis by the United States, mixed with a kind of patronizing bigotry regarding the incompetence of the subaltern people in question, merge in this particular view of American interaction with the once colonized world. The classic line supporting this interpretation of what took place in Iraq was provided by the columnist Charles Krauthammer who wrote: "We have given the Iraqis a republic and they do not appear able to keep it."
(...) there is something profoundly misleading about claiming that the United States somehow gave too much autonomy to its puppet-regime in Iraq. Every meaningful strategic military decision since the fall of Saddam was made by the United States. Paul Bremer and his team of advisors attempted to introduce a free market by fiat. But this decision would help only the thousands of American contractors and the few huge corporations close to the Bush Administration, like Bechtel and Halliburton, whose "reconstruction" projects were mostly marked by incompetence and staggering levels of corruption. More than three thousand American soldiers have been killed and roughly ten times that many have been wounded, and the defense budget for 2008 will be close to $650 billion dollars. The war is now costing $2 billion per week and total costs will exceed what was wasted on the debacle in Vietnam. It beggars reality to claim that the United States would spend what will ultimately amount to $2 trillion without controlling the allocation of resources and the most important political and military decisions of the war.
(...) It would seem that the mainstream media has a great deal of trouble dealing with the American exercise of power and the world's view of American hegemony. What remains unexplored is the presupposition not only that the United States had the "right" to engage in a "pre-emptive strike," and lie to the entire world about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and supposed threats to the national interest in order to justify its policy, but that the rest of the world was -- or, at least, should have been -- grateful for the decision of the American government to pursue such an action. Or to put it another way, taken singly or together, the reigning explanations of how Iraq was lost leave untouched questions concerning the arrogance of power and the implications of understanding the United States as an "empire."
(...) The supposedly singular tragedy of 9/11 -- as if no other country had ever experienced anything as horrible -- also served to justify a demand for vengeance against "the Arabs" and the exercise of military might to extinguish what remained of the "Vietnam trauma." Such celebratory nationalism and provincial paranoia inspired a belief that the new "enemy" -- a convenient replacement for the communists -- was motivated more by hatred for the "American way of life" and its "freedoms" than by the policies pursued by the United States in the Middle East. This, in turn, helped generate a climate of contempt for all critics of American policy and inhibited a serious assessment of the looming dangers attendant upon the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.
(...) No less than during the build-up to and the aftermath of the invasion, once again, the American mainstream media is abdicating its responsibilities. Its explanations of what happened in Iraq have raised no meaningful issues and yielded nothing of value for reflecting upon future events. The pity is that such a discussion is all the more necessary given that American diplomacy -- if that word still has any meaning -- is basically attuned toward three options: threats, sanctions, and military force. Bombing along the borders of Syria and Iran has already taken place and "warnings" of possibly "drastic" action have been extended to the Sudan. The propaganda machine is ready to be revved up at a moment's notice and it is only due to the weariness of the American public induced by failure in Iraq, and the over-extension of American troops, that yet another military conflagration has not broken out.
(...) There remains the naïve underestimation of self-serving economic and geo-political interests influencing the formation of American foreign policy. There remains the inability to grapple with the celebratory nationalism and paranoia that have played such a strong role in the history of the United States. All of this, which is so steadfastly ignored by mainstream interpretations of events, provides the backdrop for what took place in Iraq. The failure of American policy is not a function of what transpired following the "occupation." The road to ruin began with the first lie, the first bombing, and the first steps that led to the invasion of Iraq.

hillary clinton in october 2002:
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program," Clinton said in October of 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

hilary and corporate america:
"Wages are flat." Nods of agreement. "This economy is not working!" Applause. She's not quite the rhetorical populist her husband was on the campaign trail, but she can still feel your pain. "Everything has been skewed," Clinton says, jabbing her index finger for emphasis, "to help the privileged and the powerful at the expense of everybody else!"
(...) "She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.
(...) But her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion. She is "running to help and restore the great middle class in our country," Wolfson says. So was Bill in 1992. He was for "putting people first." Then he entered the White House and pushed for NAFTA, signed welfare reform, consolidated the airwaves through the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (leading to Clear Channel's takeover) and cleared the mergers of mega-banks.

democrats and israel:
During the five weeks of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians were killed. It was the Lebanese who suffered the most, however. Massive Israeli bombardments took the lives of more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians, and caused more than $3.5 billion in damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and widespread environmental damage.
(...) Yet Congress continues to justify last summer’s widespread attacks on civilian targets by the U.S.-supplied Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) by claiming that Hezbollah used the Lebanese civilian population as “human shields,” thereby seeking to protect America’s closest Middle East ally from its moral and legal responsibility for its war crimes. For example, on April 25, the House of Representatives passed by a near-unanimous voice vote a resolution (H. Res. 125) claiming that “throughout the summer of 2006 conflict with the State of Israel, Hezbollah forces utilized human shields to protect themselves from counterattacks by Israeli forces.” In defense of the Bush administration’s controversial backing of Israel’s 35-day assault on Lebanon, the Democratic-led House cited President George W. Bush’s claim that “Hezbollah terrorists used Lebanese civilians as human shields, sacrificing the innocent in an effort to protect themselves from Israeli response” and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that “`Hezbollah and its sponsors have brought devastation upon the people of Lebanon, … exploiting them as human shields.”
(...) Investigations by independent human rights groups during last summer’s fighting did not find clear evidence that Hezbollah deliberately used civilians to shield their personnel or equipment from Israeli strikes. For example, a detailed study published at the end of the fighting in August by Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that they had found “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” Similarly, Amnesty International, in a well-documented report published in November observed, “While the presence of Hizbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as ‘human shields’, any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.”
(...) In any case, the vast majority of Israeli strikes in civilian areas were nowhere near Hezbollah military activity. As Human Rights Watch noted, “In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.” Similarly, Amnesty International reported that Israeli forces “carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale,” including “those on civilian infrastructure” and “direct attacks on civilian objects.” Furthermore, they reported that “These attacks seem to have been aimed at inflicting a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people” and that “based on the available evidence and the absence of an adequate or any explanation from the Israeli authorities for so many attacks by their forces causing civilian deaths and destruction, when no evidence of Hizbullah military activities was apparent, it seems clear that Israeli forces consistently failed to adopt necessary precautionary measures.”
(...) My efforts to ascertain where members of Congress get information to back up their defense of Israeli war crimes have revealed a rather startling inclination to rely on rather dubious right-wing sources for information. For example, following a speech in March, in which Senator Barack Obama repeated the myth that Hezbollah had used “innocent people as shields,” I contacted his spokesman as to what evidence the presidential hopeful had to make such charges. He referred me to a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank headed by the former chief of the Mossad which maintains close ties to the Israeli government. Despite repeated requests, Obama’s office was unable to provide any other source supporting the senator’s charge. This underscores serious concerns among human rights activists that Obama and other leading Democrats, like President Bush, have the same propensity to believe the findings of ideologically-driven right-wing think tanks above those of objective scholarship, reputable journalists, or principled human rights groups and other nonpartisan organizations.
(...) A recent HRW report notes how “Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields.” Similarly, Amnesty International has reported how Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank “have often used Palestinians effectively as human shields, endangering their lives in violation of international humanitarian law. There have been no Congressional resolutions condemning Israel’s use of human shields, however. Congressional Democrats essentially share the Bush administration’s practice that if you are perceived as an adversary, your crimes will be exaggerated or even manufactured, while it you are perceived as an ally, your crimes will be covered up.
(...) Perhaps the ultimate reason is that the Democrats’ agenda is essentially the same as the Republican administration and their Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill: to cover up for abuses of international humanitarian law by the United States and its allies and discredit human rights organizations that challenge these practices as a means of enhancing the hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere.