Tuesday, January 14, 2025

THEY STILL ARE CALLED "DEPORTEES" (originally posted December 16, 2011)

 Harry Targ : The United States Violates The Universal Declaration of Human Rights



Eleanor Roosevelt viewed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as her greatest achievement. Image from Creative Commons.

Numerous international human rights documents firmly estab­lish the principle that no human being can be “illegal” or outside the protection of the law. Yet despite the clearly established principle that discrimination and abuse based on immigration status are violations of human rights, U.S. government policies continue to sanction human rights violations against migrants and im­migrants.

Federal immigration enforcement policies, including border enforcement measures by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), have led to an increase in racial profiling, border killings, and denial of due process rights. Immigrant workers are often abused, exploited, and have become scapegoats and ictims of racism and stereotyping. (See The American Civil Liberties Union, “Human Rights and Immigration,” aclu.org).

Nameless People

The world is observing a massive violation of human rights being perpetrated at the United States/Mexican border today. And the human tragedy has many historical parallels.

Over sixty years ago Woody Guthrie wrote his famous song “Deportees” in 1948 decrying that “All they will call you will be ‘deportees.’” And “they chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”  He wrote at a time when the US political economy depended upon temporary immigrant labor.

Since the 1940s particularly, the globalization of the economy, increased violence and repression within countries (largely involving United States interference),  growing income and wealth inequality and poverty, and the rise of repressive regimes everywhere,  emigration has increased. Some estimates indicate that 37 million people left their home countries (some 45 countries) between 2010 and 2015 for humanitarian reasons. Many more people were forced to flee their homes and communities to other locations within their own countries.

One of the ironies of world history is that capital in the form of investments, trade, the purchase of natural resources, the globalization of production, and military interventions have been common and necessary features of capitalism since its emergence in the sixteenth century. But, paradoxically, and except for the global slave trade, the movement of people has often been defined as “illegal.” The idea of national sovereignty is been used to justify branding some human migrants as “illegal,” while others receive legal status. If capital is and has been global, the movement of people should be respected as well. It makes no sense, nor is it humane, to brand any human beings as, Guthrie’s term,  “deportees.”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The horrific atrocities of World War II led nations to commit themselves permanently to the protection of basic rights for all human beings. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the wartime President, Franklin Roosevelt, worked diligently with leaders from around the world to develop a document, to articulate a set of principles, which would bind humankind to never carry out acts of mass murder again.

In addition, the document also committed nations to work to end most forms of pain and suffering.

In December, 1948, the year Guthrie wrote his song,  delegates from the United Nations General Assembly signed the document which they called “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” It consisted of a preamble proclaiming that all signatories recognized "the inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as the "foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world."

The preamble declared the commitment of the signatories to the creation of a world “in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want...”

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights consisted of 30 articles, with varying degrees of elaboration. The first 21 articles referred primarily to civil and political rights. They prohibited discrimination, persecution for the holding of various political beliefs, slavery, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention.

Persons had the right to speak their mind, travel, reside anywhere, have a fair trial if charged with crimes, own property, form a family, and in the main to hold the rights of citizenship including universal and equal suffrage in their country.

The remaining nine articles addressed what may be called social and economic rights. These included rights to basic social security in accordance with the resources of the state in which the persons reside; rights to adequate leisure and holidays with pay; an adequate standard of living so that individuals and families had sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medical care; and education, free at least at the primary levels.

In addition, these nine articles guaranteed a vibrant cultural life in the community, the right to enjoy and participate in the arts, and to benefit from scientific achievements.

While each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided a rich and vivid portrait of what must be achieved for all humankind, no article speaks to our time more than Article 23. It is one of the longer articles, identifying four basic principles:

 

·       Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work, and to protection against unemployment.   

 

.    Everyone, without discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

 

·       Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself (or herself) and his (her) family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

 

·       Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his (her) interests.


Using the language of our day, the principles embedded in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constituted a bedrock vision inspiring the global 99 percent to rise up against their exploiters from Cairo to Madison, to Wall Street, to cities and towns all over the world.

The global political economy is broken. The dominant mode of production, capitalism, increasingly cannot provide work, fair remuneration, rights of workers to speak their mind and organize their own associations, and the provision of a comfortable way of life all because the value of what they produce is expropriated by the top 1 percent of global society.

Data about the world, data about the United States, and right now the experience of emigres from Central America seeking their human rights, make it clear that there has been a 30-year trajectory in the direction opposite to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Global inequality is growing. The rights and abilities of workers to form unions are shrinking. Standards of living of most of humankind are declining. The ability of most workers everywhere to acquire secure jobs is declining. And, in the case of people fleeing their own countries in desperation, they experience incarceration in brutally inhumane camps.

Fundamentally, the world is witnessing a denigration of the vision articulated after World War II that “never again” would sectors of humanity be victimized by economic injustice, political repression, and state violence.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights must now become the standard by which national policies are judged. Anything short of the principles embedded in the Declaration constitute a crime that must be opposed.

Saturday, January 11, 2025

HOW THE WORLD CONTINUES TO BE FRAMED: SPOKESPERSONS FROM THE HEGEMONIC POWER AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Harry Targ

The Council on Foreign Relations, formed in the 1920s, represents the pinnacle of finance and manufacturing capital. Its members often include Secretaries of State and Defense and others who serve in government foreign policy areas. Many leading politicians publish their views in “Foreign Affairs,” the leading establishment journal in the field.

For these reasons I subscribe to the CFR electronic newsletter to get a clue about what much of the ruling class is thinking about US foreign policy. I found the essay below particularly enlightening, about Russia and China, the Ukraine War, Israel, Iran and NATO. One cannot find a better document illustrating the view of the world believed and/or articulated by the foreign policy elite. This is what we must challenge.

For instance, the newsletter illustrates that the CFR is fearful that a Trump prsidency would not give as much support to NATO, Ukraine, Israel, military/technological research and development that this sector of the ruling class desires. It seems like the CFR is wedded to escalating the wars on the “authoritarians,” and advocates killing and unlimited wasteful spending for such escalation. No wonder the world is rising up angry.

On the CFR see:

https://monthlyreview.org/author/laurencehshoup/

****************************************************************


By Michael Froman
President, Council on Foreign Relations

The World This Week

 

January 10, 2025

 

The world President-elect Donald Trump will inherit in ten days is far less placid in many ways than the one he inherited eight years ago.

 Across the world, a coalition of aggressors led by China and Russia is determined to undermine the leadership of the United States and the international system it built. Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine will soon mark its third anniversary. An unprecedented competition with China is playing out across the political, military, economic, and technological domains. Conflict is raging between Israel and Iran’s proxies, and Iran is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon. A humanitarian crisis in Sudan has displaced more people than the wars in Ukraine and Gaza combined.

And here at home, we face serious weaknesses in our defense industrial base and our capacity to incorporate cutting-edge innovation into our warfighting capabilities.

But in other ways, the world Trump will inherit is better off than it was during his last inauguration. It is a world where the level of operational cooperation in the Middle East among the United States, Israel, Europe, and Arab partners is closer than ever. It is a world where the security architecture of the Indo-Pacific is more impressive than ever, with the building out of the Quad, the launch of AUKUS, the strengthening of trilateral cooperation between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and the tightening of the alliance between the United States and the Philippines. And it is a world where NATO is larger, more unified, and better-resourced than ever before.

Notwithstanding the challenges here at home, it is also a world in which the U.S. economy is the strongest and most dynamic in the world, the envy of other industrialized countries. America’s unique innovation ecosystem remains a magnet for entrepreneurs from across the world who want to start something new.

Trump campaigned on a policy of “peace through strength.” How he builds on these strengths to deal with the challenges we face remains to be seen.

What should his priorities be? This week, CFR’s Center for Preventive Action released its annual Preventive Priorities Survey, in which hundreds of foreign policy experts make predictions about which new conflicts might break out and which existing ones might escalate. The survey makes for a sobering read, especially since never in the seventeen years since the survey began have respondents rated so many contingencies as both high-impact and high-likelihood. (Interestingly, neither Greenland nor Panama nor Canada made the list.)

What worried respondents most this year was the possibility that the conflicts Israel is now engaged in—in Gaza, in the West Bank, and with Iran—could escalate. All were rated as having a high likelihood and high impact.

Beyond the Middle East, the experts were concerned about Russian military gains in Ukraine, potential conflict on our southern border over migration and other issues, and Chinese aggression over Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

What’s striking about the Middle East risks at the top of the Preventive Priorities Survey is that so far, they have mainly remained just that—risks. At several points over the course of 2024, there was deep concern about one or more of the specific conflicts escalating into a regional conflagration. But now, with Israel having destroyed Hamas and significantly degraded Hezbollah as military threats, the Assad regime in Syria having disintegrated faster than virtually anyone expected, and Iran’s capacity to strike Israel significantly limited, conventional escalation scenarios seem unlikely.

But that is no reason for complacency. Every day, U.S. forces in the region are shooting down multiple anti-ship ballistic missiles fired at them and at other countries’ ships by the Houthis. The attacks have become almost normalized as unnewsworthy, in part because the U.S. military has been so successful at intercepting them, but we should remind ourselves that for the first time since World War II, the U.S. Navy is experiencing daily incoming fire.

Then there is the nuclear question. Iran has lost its second-strike capability against Israel through the degradation of Hezbollah, its missiles have proved relatively powerless in the face of Israel’s air defenses (supported by the United States and others), and most of its own air defenses have been destroyed by Israeli strikes. As a result, factions in Iran might well feel that their country has no choice but to cross the nuclear threshold.

Israel and the United States have declared that this would be unacceptable. The question is what the two are willing to do about it. Trump has pledged to restore his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is looking forward to working with a U.S. president he expects to support Israel’s plans unconditionally.

On Wednesday at CFR, I had the privilege of interviewing General H. R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for thirteen months. He predicted that Trump will further constrain the cash flow to the Iranian regime and more aggressively interdict its material support for its network of proxies across the region, especially advanced components for anti-ship missiles used by the Houthis.

McMaster also thought it was nearly certain that Israel would carry out a strike on Iran’s nuclear program in the coming years. That would raise a crucial question for Trump: join the attack or sit it out? And if he chose to join the attack, that would pose the risk of an all-out war between the United States and Iran.

The last three administrations tried to pivot away from the Middle East. Those around Trump are considering whether to do so once again, either to focus on China or as part of a broader strategy of retrenchment. President Barack Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq and pursued a “rebalance” to Asia, Trump ordered a partial withdrawal of troops from Syria and negotiated an agreement with the Taliban for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and President Joe Biden carried out that withdrawal. But to paraphrase Michael Corleone in The Godfather, the Middle East has a way of pulling the United States back in, just when it thought it was out.

Trump will re-enter office in ten days with significant assets at his disposal, at home and abroad. He has majorities in both houses of Congress, and he is appointing a team committed to implementing his vision faithfully. Leaders across the world are all asking the same question: What do I need to do to cut a deal with him?

The agenda is now his to manage. How he uses the assets America has to deal with the risks it faces will leave a lasting impact on the country’s position in the world—and on his own legacy.

************************************************************

Insights from Social Science

(This essay was written in 2022 just after President Gustavo Petro spoke at the United Nations. In 2023 he spoke again. He later was interviewed by Amy Goodman and elaborated on the perspective of the Global South about peace, justice, and the threat to human survival. https://youtu.be/6-6Ni7jbi3U?si=CdPsWUWWOTFFUsDw)

 

                                 


A long time ago the eminent political scientist Murray Edelman wrote a book entitled The Symbolic Uses of Politics. In it he postulated that most people experience the political world not through concrete reality but through emotional symbols. For example, the classic way in which people relate to their political institutions is through the flag of their nation. Americans viewing the flag see images of men in combat fighting for freedom or men and women standing in line waiting to vote for their preferred political candidates. A colorful cloth with stars and stripes gets transformed in our consciousness into a rich, glamorized history even when the emotive images are in direct contradiction with people’s lives.

In addition, Edelman suggests the ways in which the emotional symbols get embedded and reinforced in the consciousness of peoples by borrowing from anthropological writings on myth and ritual. Myths are networks of emotional symbols that collectively tell a story that explains “reality.” Rituals reinforce in behavior the mythology of public life. We need only reflect on the pledge to the flag that opens elementary and secondary school class sessions in rich and poor communities alike or regular meetings of AFL-CIO labor councils.

Edelman pointed out that emotional symbols (he called them “condensational”) provide the primary way people connect with the world beyond immediate experience. The extraordinary complexity of the modern world is reduced to a series of powerful symbols such as the threats of “international communism” or “terrorism.”

Media analyst Todd Gitlin, wrote about “media frames;” that is the ways in which media construct the symbols and myths that shape information about the world. Print media shapes what we read, who are regarded as authoritative spokespersons, and what visual images shape our thinking about countries, issues such as war and peace, trade, investment, and the global climate. Television emphasizes visual images rather than words. Whatever the media form, points of view are embedded in the words and images communicated.



Writers such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, and Robert McChesney accept implicitly Edelman’s counsel that people experience the world indirectly and usually in emotional form. They also assume, as does Gitlin, that what we read, see, and hear about the world is framed for us. They go further to suggest that what Marx called the “false conceptions about ourselves” in symbols, myths, rituals, and frames are usually the product of ruling class interests.

How the Washington Post Sees the World


Charles Lane, “Migration’s ‘Root Cause” is Latin American Socialist Dictatorship, Washington Post, September 21, 2022 wrote  about the migration this year of 200,000 Cubans from the island. He also pointed out that such migrations over the years have involved thousands of fleeing Venezuelans: “The exodus is thus a tremendous compliment to the United States and other democratic capitalist countries. We should appreciate it.”

For Lane, the “root cause” of such migrations, of course, is communist dictatorship, a pattern of people fleeing their home countries because of dictatorship and failed economies.  Lane may have been aware of the declassified State Department document, The Decline and Fall of Castro,” quoted in a speech by Senator Patrick Leahy, February 7, 2022 that US policy’s “purpose was “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”  Cuba became the model for applying economic sanctions against governments who the US tried to bring down.

Today US sanctions have been levied against 39 countries. And in most cases, while citizens of these countries suffer, most remained committed to their governments and/or reject United States intervention. And Cuba, despite Lane’s dismissal of Cuba as a dictatorship, has remained a beacon of hope, a model of economic and political development for the global south. Health care is free, Education is free. Cubans in their communities discuss and debate issues and vote on key constitutional changes. Most recently this is illustrated by the national vote on a proposed new Family Code to give legitimacy and rights to all kinds of families and children. And paradoxically virtually every country in the world (except for the US and Israel) condemns the US economic blockade.

And in another editorial statement on the Chinese “challenge” to the United States the author writes: “In just over 40 years, the People’s Republic of China has arisen from the political chaos and poverty of the Mao Zedong era to become a powerhouse on the world stage. Its unmistakable clout is intensifying its rivalry with the United States over which country will dominate the global order and, crucially, which system will stand as the world’s political and economic model: the authoritarianism and state capitalism of China, or the liberal democracy and market-oriented economy of the United States.”  Thus, the media frame is global competition between authoritarianism and “state capitalism” versus markets and democracy (Dexter Roberts, “At Stake in the U.S.-China rivalry: The Shape of the Global Political Order,” Washington Post, September, 22, 2022).

And the Washington Post and other corporate media usually reflect a common agenda. For example, from a Washington Post editorial, May 21, 2016:


“HARDLY A day goes by without evidence that the liberal international order of the past seven decades is being erodedChina and Russia are attempting to fashion a world in their own illiberal image…This poses an enormous trial for the next U.S. president. We say trial because no matter who takes the Oval Office, it will demand courage and difficult decisions to save the liberal international order. As a new report from the Center for a New American Security points out, this order is worth saving…”

But How Others See the United States: The Powerful Voice of the New President of Colombia Gustavo Petro

 

Recently elected president of Colombia Gustavo Petro made a powerful presentation at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on the plunder of the Global South by the Global North, a portrait markedly different from the view of the “liberal international order” repeated over and over again by the corporate media and foreign policy spokespersons of the United States.  Petro’s major points concluded the following:

 

THE WORLD IS DIVERSE IN ITS LANDS, LIVING THINGS, AND PEOPLE

“I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.

There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down, but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.”

BUT THE WORLD ALSO IS A VIOLENT PLACE

“The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.”


AND THE CAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE? THE GREED OF THE GLOBAL NORTH

“For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.”


AND THE VICTIMS? LAND AND PEOPLE

“Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”


AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER IS TO MAKE UP FOR THE EMPTINESS OF CONSUMER SOCIETY

“These are the things of world power, things of injustice, things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.

According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful of the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries.”

THE CULPRIT? MONEY AND UNBRIDLED CONSUMPTION

“The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.

The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America.”.

THE EXCUSE FOR DESPOILING NATURE AND MAKING PERSONS EXPENDABLE

“They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served them as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.

If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.”


LATIN AMERICA (AND THE WORLD) MUST UNITE AGAINST THIS SYSTEM OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC AND MILITARY POWER

“If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.

It is time for PEACE.”

“Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.”

What Does All This Mean for Peace and Justice Activists

There are lessons to be learned by analyzing significant narratives of the contemporary world order. First, narratives are inextricably connected to the position from which the narrative comes. Is the narrative one disseminated by spokespersons of the wealthiest country in the world or from a spokesperson from a poor and marginalized country, for example? Second, narratives often reflect the interests of the powerful, economically, politically, and militarily or the interests of most nations and peoples. Third, these narratives have consequences. They justify policies that may or may not be in the interests of humanity. They may justify violence, plunder of resources, the exploitation of workers or they may envision a future of greater equality and the satisfaction of human needs. Finally, as Edelman, Gitlin, Chomsky and Herman, and others suggest our understanding of the world is often controlled and manipulated by those in power. Today the dominant symbols, myths, and media frames from the Global North must be challenged. And President Gustavo Petro has contributed eloquently to this task.


Thursday, January 2, 2025

UNDERSTANDING THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD ORDER AND WHY WE MUST WORK TO CHANGE IT: 2025

 Harry Targ


https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/palestine-gaza-2025/

Vijay Prashad above dramatically describes the immediacy of global catastrophes and the centrality of our tasks in 2025.

And earlier (2024) he posted an important statement ( see below) that addresses not only  the wasteful military system but its links to the IMF and global debt, and the growing gap between the Global North and South. He also addresses the role that “intellectuals” can play in alerting the world to the realities of the connections between war, mis- and under-education, starvation, and global inequality and the international institutions that have been established to address these issues. Prashad’s portrait also implies why those who rise up against the imperial and war system may do so in ways we find uncomfortable.

While we mobilize to influence policy on these issues, we should bring this richer understanding of “why” to activists and politicians and act on our knowledge remembering the old adage: Educate, Agitate, and Organize.

(the link is in two formats)

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/education-peoples-science-movement/?output=pdf

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/education-peoples-science-movement/

 

Some more of the history:

https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2017/12/book-challenging-late-capitalism-by.html

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

EVALUATING THE CARTER PRESIDENCY: Presidential and Post-Presidential Careers-Imperialism and Redemption

 Harry Targ



 I remember the Carter presidency as launching the Democratic Party’s version of the neoliberal model, support of the Shah of Iran, covertly supporting the Afghan rebels and stimulating the Begin/Sadat accords which perpetuated US/Israeli/Egyptian military aid. He also supported the status quo in Central America. All bad.

 But also, I remember Carter’s dramatic speech criticizing consumerism and the ravages of the climate. And of course, his post-presidential persona is unique for presidents in US history. It included the publication of a book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," addressing the illegal occupation and settlements in the West Bank. All this to the point of addressing behavior within the context of economic and political institutions versus acting as a private citizen.

As President, Carter was an instrumentality of US capitalism and imperialism. He was one person embedded in an institution controlled by multiple economic and political forces. In this light, reading the political history of the time one discovers that the ruling classes and their politicians of both parties were attempting to save capitalism and imperialism in the early “post Golden Age” of Cold War capitalism.

Below from: https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2014/08/even-ruling-class-has-disagreements-on.html

The conflict between foreign policy elite factions over the last decade is reminiscent of similar conflicts in the Carter administration, 1976-1980. As historian Laurence Shoup wrote years ago, The Carter Presidency, and beyond: power and politics in the 1980s, Ramparts Books, 1980)  Carter, a modestly “anti-establishment” candidate for president, ran on a campaign promising no more Vietnams. He promised that United States foreign policy would be governed by human rights. He also promised to respect the sovereignty of countries of the Global South. Some of the key foreign policy advisors he assembled lobbied for a less interventionist, more human rights oriented foreign policy.

During the first two years of Carter’s term, he tilted in their direction. But, largely as a result of the shocking revolution overthrowing the impregnable ally the Shah of Iran in January, 1979, Carter was convinced by other advisers, global militarists, to return to Cold War. The issue for them, of course, was not an alleged escalated Soviet threat but rather the loss of U.S. control of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.

President Carter, tilting toward the militarist wing of his administration, reintroduced draft registration, increased military aid to Egypt and Israel, increased funding for NATO, launched a research program to create a “neutron bomb,” and perhaps most significantly, began a covert funding program for rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan before the Soviets sent troops to that country. This funding of what would become the predecessors of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS planted the seeds of the spreading global resistance to the West today.

In both the Carter and Obama administrations, the presidents sought to establish a set of policies that were a little less militaristic, more supportive of diplomacy, and modestly respectful of nations and peoples of the Global South. Both these presidents won the presidency because they positioned themselves against the more militaristic aspects of traditional U.S. imperialism. Peace movements influenced these two presidents to be more “realist” than many of their advisors.

However, both of these presidents encountered sectors of the foreign policy elite who, despite modest differences, favored war. Both these presidents had at least a vague sense that United States hegemony could not be reinstituted militarily. 

The recognition that foreign policy factions exist does not negate the basic assumption that imperialism is the priority goal of foreign policy elites, including presidents. But factions differ as to tactics. They differ as to the amount of pain and suffering U.S. militarism causes in the world. And they differ as to the impacts such policies have on the working people of the United States itself. Therefore, whether United States foreign policy is defined and administered by neo-cons (the Reagan/Bush/Cheney group), liberal institutionalists (Clinton/Biden/ Council on Foreign Relations group), or realists (such as John Mearsheimer and the Quincy Institute in our own day) like Presidents Carter and Obama at the outset of their presidency, matter. If the realist presidents move away from their initial positions, they should be challenged and they should be defended when they do oppose neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists.

 

 


                                            Habitat for Humanity

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.