Harry Targ
“Get on the Bus.”
That was the conclusion sixteen activists from Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky came to after a day-long meeting assessing the needs of progressive forces between now and the fall elections, and after. The occasion was the semi-annual meeting of the Midwest Region of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS).The small but spirited gathering of activists addressed the significance of the fall, 2010 elections, the economic crisis, and how to incorporate Jack O’Dell’s recently proposed Democracy Charter into the project of building a progressive majority.
Elections 2010
Ted Pearson, Chicago peace and justice activist, opened with a discussion of elections 2010 called “Saving the Progressive Majority.” He quoted from a recent article in The Nation by Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bharvava, “Eighteen months into the Obama era, the progressive movement is experiencing malaise, based on disappointment about what has been accomplished so far and confusion about the path forward.”
Pearson noted that while the Obama administration has achieved modest gains in public policy—health care reform, some financial regulation, expansion of poverty programs, student loan reform, and the selection of two moderate Supreme Court justices—people are angered and frustrated by the continuing economic crisis, particularly high unemployment and under employment, two wars, threats to civil liberties, and lack of progress on immigration reform, and climate change legislation.
Polling data about where people stand on issues and candidates, Pearson said, suggests much anger and confusion. Progressives must use the next six weeks to reverse the dangerous tilt toward reaction. Pearson quoted from a recent speech by Van Jones, environmental activist and green jobs advocate, targeted by the rightwing for dismissal from the Obama administration, who argued that after eight years of despair activists in 2008 felt a sudden surge of hope. Now there is the danger of returning to despair. Nothing, Jones suggested, can be more destructive of the prospects for a people’s agenda than to withdraw. It must be made clear that the 2008 election only got progressives “to the starting line;” that the projects initiated have not been completed; and that the struggle in the electoral arena and elsewhere must continue.
Drawing from these comments and history, Pearson concluded that achieving change requires the building of a mass movement. It was the mass movement that led to Obama’s victory and it will take a mass movement to force him and all the institutions of national, state, and local government to move in a progressive direction.
For right now, Pearson argued, progressive forces need to support the massive rally, “One Nation Working Together” to be held on October 2. This rally will be historic, bringing together the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and hundreds of peace, justice, and environmental groups. http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org/
The October 2 movement will not only bring hundreds of thousands to Washington D.C. to take back the public image from the rightwing, but it will galvanize local progressive groups to speak and work together, whether they are able to go to Washington D. C. or not. Most importantly, October 2 promises to bring a broad coalition to “the starting line” so that they can work together in the months and years ahead to achieve economic and social justice and peace.
Most attendees endorsed Pearson’s analysis and Jones’ call to fight despair. They endorsed a campaign to mobilize those who worked so hard to get to the starting line in 2008 to organize at the grassroots for October 2. The campaign for “One Nation Working Together” must build on analyses of the interconnections between class, race, and gender. White privilege, so much a part of the Tea Party agenda, has to be directly challenged.
The Jobs Crisis
Ira Grupper, labor activist and chair of the CCDS Labor Committee, opened the second panel with a discussion of the crisis of jobs described in the new CCDS booklet, “It’s Time to Fight for Full Employment.” http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2010/06/09/randy-shannon-the-case-for-full-employment/
Rich with data and commentary, the document points to the long term structural character of unemployment in the United States. Recessions, periods of limited or no economic growth, have been followed by longer and longer periods of high unemployment. Over the last decade recoveries from economic stagnation have occurred without reductions in unemployment; so-called “jobless recoveries.” Grupper pointed out that in recent years corporate announcements of job layoffs have usually been followed by increases in stock market prices. Since the dawn of the new century, profit making by huge corporations and banks has been coupled with declining economic security for American working people.
Grupper referred to the booklet’s description of deindustrialization, financialization, and increasing marginalization of workers by race as well as class. Discussants added that the particular impact of the recession on women needs to be highlighted.
In addition, participants identified a web of interconnections between cuts in education, lack of training for youth, the rise in marginalization, the shift to the so-called “informal sector,” often criminal activity, and incarceration with no resources for programs of rehabilitation. As Grupper pointed out, the youngest cohort of workers, ages 16 to the mid- 20s experience the highest rates of unemployment, some never having experienced a job.
Grupper pointed out that the CCDS booklet summarizes a number of proposals for change, including the United States Steel Workers proposals for a green jobs agenda, support for workers cooperatives, and demands for a new industrial policy that emphasizes public sector employment including infrastructure construction.
The Democracy Charter
The final panel introduced by Janet Tucker, National Organizer, CCDS, and Mildred Williamson, member of the National Executive Committee, CCDS, described the 2009 Democracy Charter crafted by 87-year-old civil rights activist Jack O’Dell. (http://www.democracycharter.org/) O’Dell, once an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King and editor of the distinguished journal, Freedomways, has called on 21st century activists to work for a program called the Democracy Charter. The idea of the Democracy Charter was inspired by the Freedom Charter adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1950s as it organized to defeat racial apartheid in that country.
In addition, O’Dell was inspired by the so-called “Five Principles” of peace and justice embraced by the newly formed Non-Aligned movement of nations in Bandung, Indonesia, also in the 1950s. Both documents proclaimed that freedom and justice both within countries and between them were indivisible. By adopting a Democracy Charter now, O’Dell has argued, progressives in the United States and around the world can articulate a vision for a better world; one that connects class, race, and gender, peace, environmental justice, and the uplift of humankind.
Tucker and Williamson pointed out that the Charter, as currently written consists of thirteen main points:
-an end to homelessness
-full employment
-a commitment to human rights
-free education from early childhood through college
-a non-aggressive foreign policy
-universal healthcare
-a secure and solvent social security system
-a farm economy resting on family and cooperative enterprises
-a prison system committed to rehabilitation
-restoration and protection of the environment
-expanded public management of natural resources
-the right to have every vote counted
-airwaves maintained as public property.
During the day, attendees grappled with the difficulty of communicating progressive ideas in a politically charged and hostile environment. Several commentators agreed that the Democracy Charter, like the Freedom Charter of the 1950s, may have the appeal to move beyond premature rejection.
By seriously reflecting on the election just 50 days away and carefully assessing the structural crisis of the U.S. economy, the attendees at this regional meeting recognized the tasks that progressives must complete. And by reflecting on the Democracy Charter they saw a way to clarify the meaning of their work to organize with others to push beyond “the starting line.” Metaphorically, all agreed to “get on the bus.”
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
THE WORKING CLASS BUILT THIS COUNTRY: IN 2010 WE MUST MOBILIZE TO TRANSFORM IT
Harry Targ
From Labor Day to Election Day
I want to add my voice to the thousands of essayists and bloggers who have been contemplating the 2010 elections, the media “framing” of Tea Party influence, the role of progressives in the elections, and mobilizing for the last 54 days before the elections.
First, I think elections still matter. Since most people see politics and elections as equivalent and some of them actively participate in the electoral process, progressives need to be there as well. In addition, in states and communities decisions will be made about how federal government money for local school corporations is to be allocated, about workers compensation for victims of asbestos related workplace injuries, so-called Right to Work laws, and how congressional and state legislative districts will be redesigned. At the national level, policy decisions about such critical issues as jobs, climate change, education, military spending, and judicial appointments will be affected by election outcomes.
Second, most of these issues have not been the main narrative. The media have framed the fall elections around the big losses of Democrats, the rise of the Tea Party, and how the Obama administration has not fixed eight years of economic mismanagement and war (let alone thirty years of ill-conceived policies).
Third the “liberal” media, while more sophisticated and entertaining in its coverage of election year stories over-emphasize “making fun” of some of the outlandish Tea Party candidates for public office. And they, and their right wing media colleagues at Fox, have made the obscure former governor of Alaska a million dollar media star.
In response, Tea Party candidates, and their corporate sponsors, have decided to do two things: forget about trying to put together logical, coherent plans for an alternative set of policies and when challenged by enterprising reporters just walk away. Since the media they tell us is the enemy and most people are fearful of public speaking, incoherence and evasiveness will resonate well with a disillusioned public.
Fourth, part of the context for the unstable politics of the fall, 2010, is the continued economic crisis that grips working people. Unemployment, declining real wages, indebtedness, crumbling public services remains all too real for the majority of Americans. In addition, until his exciting Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, the Obama administration has failed to propose an economic stimulus program that could bring millions of un- and underemployed workers back to work and until yesterday, backed off his commitment to a massive program for creating green jobs. For reasons of political exigency, he has postponed advocacy for immigration reform, climate change legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, and an end to the blockade of Cuba. Perhaps most troubling for the long run, Obama appointed to positions of power, many of the neoliberal financiers who were responsible for the current phase of capitalist crisis.
Having said all this, the administration has forestalled return to depression with a modest economic recovery program, created some public sector jobs, “saved” the U.S. auto industry, and has secured the passage of an inadequate health care reform bill but one which may stimulate more movement toward a single payer system in the future.
A Little History
A high level of distrust of government, low regard for politicians, and periodic active anger at our public institutions is a characteristic feature of American history often reflected in voting against political incumbents and supporting candidates who are most vocal against government programs. For example, the American National Election Studies (ANES) prepared an index of Trust in Government made up of several questions reflecting the points just raised. Looking over time the level of trust in government was at a score of 49 in 1958, 52 in 1964, 27 in 1980, 29 in 1992, 36 in 2000, and declined to 26 by 2008. Only twice in the Johnson years, did the Trust Index reach a score over 60 and six times since 1958 the index score was below 30.
In addition, a constant feature of political life has been active and extremist politics. For example, the American party of the 1850s, or “Know Nothing Party,” got its name from members being instructed when asked about the party to say “I know nothing.” While short-lived they elected several national and state office holders before the civil war.
Throughout U.S. history so-called “nativist” groups formed and mobilized against waves of immigrants: Catholics, Germans, the Irish, Chinese, Jews, and Latinos. Armed Klan organizations terrorized the South and the Midwest in the 1880s and 1920s and 1930s and dominated the political life in many states in these eras.
Of course, extremist movements, often organized and funded by corporations and wealthy individuals, scared the American people during the dark days of anti-Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. Red Channels, a small but well-funded political organization, published lists of suspected Communists in the entertainment industry and pressured the new television corporations and advertisers to purge actors and actresses, with views supportive of labor, racial integration, and peace, from the airwaves. Their activism paralleled and reinforced Congressional reactionaries who used investigative committees to hound individuals and groups.
Alternatively, for all of Labor’s flaws, the history of the American labor movement has been central to social progress in the United States: from the demands for an eight hour day, skilled trades controls of the pace of work, health and safety at the work place, a fair wage, programs of health and retirement benefits, and, after much internal conflict, support for the struggles against racism and sexism. There is no question that organized labor, although weakened and embattled, represents the most powerful force in today’s society resisting the privatization of social security, deregulation of the economy and environment, and the total marginalization of working people everywhere.
A Progressive Campaign Program
So what to do now? History and context suggests that given the importance of elections, the enormous distrust of government, the existence of media and corporate capital support for the historic undercurrents of anti-government and anti-worker political traditions, often coupled with racism and fear of foreigners, progressives have only one choice for the next two months: work to elect political candidates from the city council to the Congress of the United States who support a “working people’s agenda.”
American political history tells us that movements like the Tea Party are not new. While the concern and anger reflected among those grassroots activists who participate in rallies and marches is usually sincere and motivated by fears of strange times and economic crises with no seeming resolution, its leaders offer no program, no vision, and no coherent agenda. If Tea Party spokespersons and candidates are queried about their goals, they evade or refuse to respond. Some of their television heroes draw lines and circles and arrows on blackboards to illustrate the connections between people living down the street, working in a union job, teaching at a college, running for office, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
No, progressives cannot argue with the Tea Party movement. But, what we must do is to campaign, not just for individual candidates or just for a party but for a “working people’s agenda.” That constitutes the only future for the vast majority of Americans. This agenda must include a fight for full employment. As the AFL-CIO put it in 2009 action must be taken to extend unemployment benefits; rebuild America’s schools, roads, and energy systems; expand support for the maintenance of state and local public services; put all people who want to work on jobs that need to be done; and regulate banks more effectively so that they are required to support local projects that create businesses which will create jobs.
Laura Jackson, a member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) noted recently: “We definitely need to make sure that the people making the decisions make jobs their top priority. I’m going to do all I can to make sure that happens including getting the message out to my family, union members, and anyone who will listen.”
Therefore, progressives, both in the labor movement and supportive of it must welcome and support the new AFL-CIO campaign to mobilize voters in 26 states and 400 races to support candidates who endorse a working peoples’ agenda. This includes making sure that the “new Obama” proposals reflected in the President’s speech of September 6, 2010, carrying the message of green jobs and justice, become part of the agenda of every candidate we support this fall.
Also progressives must spread the word about the historic mobilization October 2 for “One Nation Working Together” organized by the AFL-CIO, the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). Already many peace and justice groups such as United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) have signed on as supporters.
Most importantly, progressives must work in their communities and in solidarity with workers, people of color, and youth to elect progressive candidates to public office and to monitor their conduct once they are elected. It must be made clear to all that the progressive majority is not engaged in politics to support candidates or parties but to transform America.
From Labor Day to Election Day
I want to add my voice to the thousands of essayists and bloggers who have been contemplating the 2010 elections, the media “framing” of Tea Party influence, the role of progressives in the elections, and mobilizing for the last 54 days before the elections.
First, I think elections still matter. Since most people see politics and elections as equivalent and some of them actively participate in the electoral process, progressives need to be there as well. In addition, in states and communities decisions will be made about how federal government money for local school corporations is to be allocated, about workers compensation for victims of asbestos related workplace injuries, so-called Right to Work laws, and how congressional and state legislative districts will be redesigned. At the national level, policy decisions about such critical issues as jobs, climate change, education, military spending, and judicial appointments will be affected by election outcomes.
Second, most of these issues have not been the main narrative. The media have framed the fall elections around the big losses of Democrats, the rise of the Tea Party, and how the Obama administration has not fixed eight years of economic mismanagement and war (let alone thirty years of ill-conceived policies).
Third the “liberal” media, while more sophisticated and entertaining in its coverage of election year stories over-emphasize “making fun” of some of the outlandish Tea Party candidates for public office. And they, and their right wing media colleagues at Fox, have made the obscure former governor of Alaska a million dollar media star.
In response, Tea Party candidates, and their corporate sponsors, have decided to do two things: forget about trying to put together logical, coherent plans for an alternative set of policies and when challenged by enterprising reporters just walk away. Since the media they tell us is the enemy and most people are fearful of public speaking, incoherence and evasiveness will resonate well with a disillusioned public.
Fourth, part of the context for the unstable politics of the fall, 2010, is the continued economic crisis that grips working people. Unemployment, declining real wages, indebtedness, crumbling public services remains all too real for the majority of Americans. In addition, until his exciting Labor Day speech in Milwaukee, the Obama administration has failed to propose an economic stimulus program that could bring millions of un- and underemployed workers back to work and until yesterday, backed off his commitment to a massive program for creating green jobs. For reasons of political exigency, he has postponed advocacy for immigration reform, climate change legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, and an end to the blockade of Cuba. Perhaps most troubling for the long run, Obama appointed to positions of power, many of the neoliberal financiers who were responsible for the current phase of capitalist crisis.
Having said all this, the administration has forestalled return to depression with a modest economic recovery program, created some public sector jobs, “saved” the U.S. auto industry, and has secured the passage of an inadequate health care reform bill but one which may stimulate more movement toward a single payer system in the future.
A Little History
A high level of distrust of government, low regard for politicians, and periodic active anger at our public institutions is a characteristic feature of American history often reflected in voting against political incumbents and supporting candidates who are most vocal against government programs. For example, the American National Election Studies (ANES) prepared an index of Trust in Government made up of several questions reflecting the points just raised. Looking over time the level of trust in government was at a score of 49 in 1958, 52 in 1964, 27 in 1980, 29 in 1992, 36 in 2000, and declined to 26 by 2008. Only twice in the Johnson years, did the Trust Index reach a score over 60 and six times since 1958 the index score was below 30.
In addition, a constant feature of political life has been active and extremist politics. For example, the American party of the 1850s, or “Know Nothing Party,” got its name from members being instructed when asked about the party to say “I know nothing.” While short-lived they elected several national and state office holders before the civil war.
Throughout U.S. history so-called “nativist” groups formed and mobilized against waves of immigrants: Catholics, Germans, the Irish, Chinese, Jews, and Latinos. Armed Klan organizations terrorized the South and the Midwest in the 1880s and 1920s and 1930s and dominated the political life in many states in these eras.
Of course, extremist movements, often organized and funded by corporations and wealthy individuals, scared the American people during the dark days of anti-Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. Red Channels, a small but well-funded political organization, published lists of suspected Communists in the entertainment industry and pressured the new television corporations and advertisers to purge actors and actresses, with views supportive of labor, racial integration, and peace, from the airwaves. Their activism paralleled and reinforced Congressional reactionaries who used investigative committees to hound individuals and groups.
Alternatively, for all of Labor’s flaws, the history of the American labor movement has been central to social progress in the United States: from the demands for an eight hour day, skilled trades controls of the pace of work, health and safety at the work place, a fair wage, programs of health and retirement benefits, and, after much internal conflict, support for the struggles against racism and sexism. There is no question that organized labor, although weakened and embattled, represents the most powerful force in today’s society resisting the privatization of social security, deregulation of the economy and environment, and the total marginalization of working people everywhere.
A Progressive Campaign Program
So what to do now? History and context suggests that given the importance of elections, the enormous distrust of government, the existence of media and corporate capital support for the historic undercurrents of anti-government and anti-worker political traditions, often coupled with racism and fear of foreigners, progressives have only one choice for the next two months: work to elect political candidates from the city council to the Congress of the United States who support a “working people’s agenda.”
American political history tells us that movements like the Tea Party are not new. While the concern and anger reflected among those grassroots activists who participate in rallies and marches is usually sincere and motivated by fears of strange times and economic crises with no seeming resolution, its leaders offer no program, no vision, and no coherent agenda. If Tea Party spokespersons and candidates are queried about their goals, they evade or refuse to respond. Some of their television heroes draw lines and circles and arrows on blackboards to illustrate the connections between people living down the street, working in a union job, teaching at a college, running for office, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
No, progressives cannot argue with the Tea Party movement. But, what we must do is to campaign, not just for individual candidates or just for a party but for a “working people’s agenda.” That constitutes the only future for the vast majority of Americans. This agenda must include a fight for full employment. As the AFL-CIO put it in 2009 action must be taken to extend unemployment benefits; rebuild America’s schools, roads, and energy systems; expand support for the maintenance of state and local public services; put all people who want to work on jobs that need to be done; and regulate banks more effectively so that they are required to support local projects that create businesses which will create jobs.
Laura Jackson, a member of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) noted recently: “We definitely need to make sure that the people making the decisions make jobs their top priority. I’m going to do all I can to make sure that happens including getting the message out to my family, union members, and anyone who will listen.”
Therefore, progressives, both in the labor movement and supportive of it must welcome and support the new AFL-CIO campaign to mobilize voters in 26 states and 400 races to support candidates who endorse a working peoples’ agenda. This includes making sure that the “new Obama” proposals reflected in the President’s speech of September 6, 2010, carrying the message of green jobs and justice, become part of the agenda of every candidate we support this fall.
Also progressives must spread the word about the historic mobilization October 2 for “One Nation Working Together” organized by the AFL-CIO, the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). Already many peace and justice groups such as United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) have signed on as supporters.
Most importantly, progressives must work in their communities and in solidarity with workers, people of color, and youth to elect progressive candidates to public office and to monitor their conduct once they are elected. It must be made clear to all that the progressive majority is not engaged in politics to support candidates or parties but to transform America.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
TECHNIQUES OF EMPIRE:WHAT IS NEW AND WHAT IS THE SAME OLD STUFF?
Harry Targ
Empires Past
Nations, tribes, armed members of messianic religions from time to time have engaged in conquest of others. Peoples have been slaughtered for their land, their natural resources, their mistaken beliefs. The techniques used to be simple: killing, imprisonment or enslavement, and occupation.
With the rise of capitalism as a global economic system, accumulated resources were used to create modern instruments of war--guns, ships, pollutants, and poisons. As Marx claimed long ago, capitalism was of necessity a global system so nation-states created in the era of economic modernity were compelled to pursue exploitable labor (particularly slaves), natural resources, market opportunities, and investment sites everywhere. Mercenary armies were created to conquer people and land and fight against the mercenary armies of other capitalist countries.
The British empire (“the sun never sets on the British Empire”) was caused by and facilitated the industrial revolution. In the 1880s European imperial powers came together to divide up the African continent. After the first of two world wars in the twentieth century, wars which cost 60 million deaths, the Middle East was divided up among declining powers, Great Britain and France.
The United States joined the imperial fray in the 1890s. It took the Hawaiian Islands, fought Spain to conquer Cuba, occupied other Caribbean Islands, and crushed the independence struggle in the Philippines. Over the next 30 years the United States invaded countries in the Western Hemisphere some 25 times, often leaving US Marines in place for years.
The United States and the Cold War
A variety of imperial techniques became common as the United States fought the Communist enemy during the Cold War. With the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the first of many “intelligence agencies” were launched to interfere with the political life of countries the U.S. regarded as strategic. CIA money was used to shape elections in democracies such as France and Italy. Money flowed to Christian Democratic Parties created to oppose Socialist campaigns. Also money found its way into anti-Communist trade union federations. This pattern of interference was replicated in Latin America as well and later in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The United States engaged in visible campaigns to create and support military coups; the most critical being in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Brazil and Indonesia in the 1960s, and Chile in the 1970s. And of course U.S. policymakers launched long and brutal wars in Korea and Vietnam leading to four million Asian deaths and 100,000 American soldiers killed.
The pursuit of U.S. empire included some modern strategies as well as conquest and subversion. President Truman, through the Marshall Plan, instituted an expensive campaign of economic and military assistance which would become a staple of U.S. Cold War policy. From the initiation of the Marshall Plan in 1948 with a modest $14 billion aid program to anti-Communist regimes in Europe through the Carter years, $235 billion was provided to selected and strategic imperial partners: first in Europe, then Asia and the Middle East.
President Kennedy contributed to the imperial tool kit; the provision of military advisors, funding for local militaries in countries threatened by revolution (such as in Central America), and training programs for military officers such as in the old School of the Americas. Economic assistance came with strings, the promotion of market-based economies, and opposition to indigenous and Communist political forces, at least as much as local political contexts would allow.
President Reagan was an imperial innovator as well. Constrained by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” public opposition to further Vietnam-style military quagmires, he established policies based upon “low intensity conflict.” Creating and funding local counter-revolutionary armies in places as varied as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, the U.S. role in conflicts could be kept off the front pages of newspapers. Civil war violence stimulated by U.S. resources would not be “low intensity” in countries where it occurred but it might be considered so in the U.S. Citizens would not learn of the critical U.S. support given to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, including Osama Bin Laden, fighting a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s until quite recently.
To insure the limited visibility of U.S. global operations, and to reward political allies with government contracts, the Reagan administration dramatically expanded programs privatizing U.S. military operations. Support for the Contra war against the Nicaraguan people involved transferring public funds to private armies and using key foreign policy advisers, such as Colonel Oliver North, as conduits and organizers of networks of private sources of funding for war. Thus began public programs to encourage and stimulate the creation of private companies that would fight America’s wars. The American people had little way of knowing how deeply involved they were in violence around the world and the danger of sinking into new Vietnams.
21st Century Techniques of Empire
The world has come a long way from the days of Roman Legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule--clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers--has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.
For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people. Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than any other comparable period of human history.
Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions).
Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.
Global Presence. Pilisuk, Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) and others have estimated that the United States has over 700, perhaps 800 U.S. military installations in more than 40 countries. Some years ago the Pentagon determined that huge Cold War era military bases needed to be replaced with smaller, strategically located bases for rapid mobilization to attend to “trouble-spots” in the Global South. While forward basing in South Asia and in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union has received some attention seven new U.S. bases being established in Colombia (within striking distance of hostile Venezuela) and increased naval operations in the Caribbean have not. In addition, there are some 6,000 domestic military bases, many that anchor the economies of small towns.
Privatization of the U.S. Military. David Isenberg (“Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy,” PRIO, Oslo, 2009) refers to “…the U.S. government’s huge and growing reliance on private contractors” which “…constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public skepticism about the United States’ self-appointed role as global policemen.” While PMCs provide many services, such as combat, consulting, training armies, and military support, their combat presence in the two major wars of the 21st century, Afghanistan and Iraq, has generated the most, if limited, public attention. Isenberg says that between 1950 and 1989 PMCs participated in 15 conflicts in other countries and from 1990 to 2000 another 80. PMCs were employed in civil wars such as in Angola, Sierre Leone, and the Balkans.
A recent Washington Post investigation compiled a data base, “Top Secret America,” “that found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms” doing top secret work “for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites.” TSA indicates that 90 percent of the intelligence work is done by 110 contractors. Defense department spokespersons and legislators claim that the United States needs to continue allocating billions of dollars to private contractors to maintain military performance levels that are minimally acceptable.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives describes the introduction of unmanned aerial weapons in the 1990s and their current weaponry of choice for the White House and others who prefer antiseptic and bloodless (on our side) technologies to eliminate enemies. New predator drones can be programmed to fly over distant lands and target enemies for unstoppable air strikes. Drones have been increasingly popular as weapons in fighting enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Connecting drone strikes to assassination teams and other war-making techniques, Shane, Mazzetti, and Worth, (“Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents,” The New York Times, August 16) refer to shadow wars against terrorist targets. “In roughly a dozen countries--from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife--the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”
Assassinations. The United States has initiated campaigns to identify and assassinate presumed enemies. CIA operatives and private contractors join teams of army specialists under the Joint Special Operations Command (13,000 assassination commandoes around the world) to kill foreigners alleged to be affiliated with terrorists groups. These targets can include U.S. citizens living abroad who have been deemed to be terrorist collaborators. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, through Latin American military personnel trained at the School of the Americas, has long supported assassination programs that now seem to be “globalized,” that is administered everywhere.
Fred Branfman (Alternet, August 24, 2010) starkly describes the assassination policy: “The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people.”
Missionary Humanitarian Interventions. While most techniques of empire involve the direct use of violence, public and private organizations expand the presence of empire through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” While the work of the missionary has often followed the flag, never has such activism impacted so heavily on global politics as today.
For example, The New York Times (July 6, 2010) reported that Christian evangelical groups have transferred substantial amounts of funds to Jewish settlements in occupied territories of the West Bank. Furthermore, fund raising for settlements that stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state receive tax exemptions. The newspaper reports on “…at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.”
The newspaper correctly points out that so-called “humanitarian” and tax deductible donations to entities in other countries tied to U.S. foreign policy are not new. But, the article suggests that donations to the settler movement are special “because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government.”
What is New About Imperial Policies
While the general character of imperial policies remains the same, whether the empire is Rome, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, or the United States, changes in technology, the state system, ideology, and tactical thinking have had their effects.
First, imperial rule has become truly global. From bases in far-off places, to unmanned drones flying over literally millions of targets everywhere, empires operate with no constraints based on geography.
Second, the military has become big business. Private corporations assume a greater share of Department of Defense budgets. Private companies now clean up and cook for the troops, train foreign soldiers, assassinate assumed terrorist enemies, and fight small wars with almost no visibility to publics.
Third, the United States is moving toward fighting wars without soldiers on the ground. Enemies can be identified by computer and military technologists can then push the right buttons to kill the unfortunate targets. Killing has become antiseptic. Killers can say goodbye to the kids in the morning, drive to work, push some buttons, drive home and spend the evening with the family. Meanwhile thousands of miles away there are mourners crying over those just assassinated.
Fourth, empires, at least the U.S. empire, can kill with impunity. Targets labeled terrorist can be eliminated by unmanned space weapons, specially trained assassination teams, or average foot soldiers.
Finally, empires can expand and change the destiny of peoples through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” Local goals, good or bad, are furthered by the large financial resources that special interests can bring to other countries.
Empires have had a long and ugly history. Because of technology, economics, and ideology new techniques of empire have been added to the old. The struggle against all empires must continue.
Empires Past
Nations, tribes, armed members of messianic religions from time to time have engaged in conquest of others. Peoples have been slaughtered for their land, their natural resources, their mistaken beliefs. The techniques used to be simple: killing, imprisonment or enslavement, and occupation.
With the rise of capitalism as a global economic system, accumulated resources were used to create modern instruments of war--guns, ships, pollutants, and poisons. As Marx claimed long ago, capitalism was of necessity a global system so nation-states created in the era of economic modernity were compelled to pursue exploitable labor (particularly slaves), natural resources, market opportunities, and investment sites everywhere. Mercenary armies were created to conquer people and land and fight against the mercenary armies of other capitalist countries.
The British empire (“the sun never sets on the British Empire”) was caused by and facilitated the industrial revolution. In the 1880s European imperial powers came together to divide up the African continent. After the first of two world wars in the twentieth century, wars which cost 60 million deaths, the Middle East was divided up among declining powers, Great Britain and France.
The United States joined the imperial fray in the 1890s. It took the Hawaiian Islands, fought Spain to conquer Cuba, occupied other Caribbean Islands, and crushed the independence struggle in the Philippines. Over the next 30 years the United States invaded countries in the Western Hemisphere some 25 times, often leaving US Marines in place for years.
The United States and the Cold War
A variety of imperial techniques became common as the United States fought the Communist enemy during the Cold War. With the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the first of many “intelligence agencies” were launched to interfere with the political life of countries the U.S. regarded as strategic. CIA money was used to shape elections in democracies such as France and Italy. Money flowed to Christian Democratic Parties created to oppose Socialist campaigns. Also money found its way into anti-Communist trade union federations. This pattern of interference was replicated in Latin America as well and later in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The United States engaged in visible campaigns to create and support military coups; the most critical being in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Brazil and Indonesia in the 1960s, and Chile in the 1970s. And of course U.S. policymakers launched long and brutal wars in Korea and Vietnam leading to four million Asian deaths and 100,000 American soldiers killed.
The pursuit of U.S. empire included some modern strategies as well as conquest and subversion. President Truman, through the Marshall Plan, instituted an expensive campaign of economic and military assistance which would become a staple of U.S. Cold War policy. From the initiation of the Marshall Plan in 1948 with a modest $14 billion aid program to anti-Communist regimes in Europe through the Carter years, $235 billion was provided to selected and strategic imperial partners: first in Europe, then Asia and the Middle East.
President Kennedy contributed to the imperial tool kit; the provision of military advisors, funding for local militaries in countries threatened by revolution (such as in Central America), and training programs for military officers such as in the old School of the Americas. Economic assistance came with strings, the promotion of market-based economies, and opposition to indigenous and Communist political forces, at least as much as local political contexts would allow.
President Reagan was an imperial innovator as well. Constrained by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” public opposition to further Vietnam-style military quagmires, he established policies based upon “low intensity conflict.” Creating and funding local counter-revolutionary armies in places as varied as Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Afghanistan, the U.S. role in conflicts could be kept off the front pages of newspapers. Civil war violence stimulated by U.S. resources would not be “low intensity” in countries where it occurred but it might be considered so in the U.S. Citizens would not learn of the critical U.S. support given to Islamic fundamentalist rebels, including Osama Bin Laden, fighting a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s until quite recently.
To insure the limited visibility of U.S. global operations, and to reward political allies with government contracts, the Reagan administration dramatically expanded programs privatizing U.S. military operations. Support for the Contra war against the Nicaraguan people involved transferring public funds to private armies and using key foreign policy advisers, such as Colonel Oliver North, as conduits and organizers of networks of private sources of funding for war. Thus began public programs to encourage and stimulate the creation of private companies that would fight America’s wars. The American people had little way of knowing how deeply involved they were in violence around the world and the danger of sinking into new Vietnams.
21st Century Techniques of Empire
The world has come a long way from the days of Roman Legions slogging across land pillaging and killing. The days of nineteenth century colonial rule--clumsy and arrogant with foreign occupants of land lording over exploited local workers--has changed. However, it is important to reflect on the new or more developed techniques of empire, while never forgetting that there are centuries long continuities of techniques of imperial rule.
For starters, Marc Pilisuk reports in Who Benefits From Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System that the character of war has changed over the years and centuries. Wars today are not usually between nations. Casualties of wars are overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers. The weapons used in wars today are more likely than in the past to temporarily or permanently damage the natural habitat as well as kill people. Wars in recent years have been likely to be fought over natural resources. Nations and groups now are more likely to be supplied with weapons produced by a handful of corporations that specialize in the production of military supplies. These weapons are provided by a small number of nations. Finally, wars fought in modern times, the last 100 years, have caused more deaths than any other comparable period of human history.
Pilisuk reports that since World War II 250 wars have occurred causing 50 million deaths and millions homeless. (The United States participated significantly in 75 military interventions).
Recently a number of journalistic and scholarly accounts have added to our understanding of newer techniques of empire, particularly U.S. empire.
Global Presence. Pilisuk, Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) and others have estimated that the United States has over 700, perhaps 800 U.S. military installations in more than 40 countries. Some years ago the Pentagon determined that huge Cold War era military bases needed to be replaced with smaller, strategically located bases for rapid mobilization to attend to “trouble-spots” in the Global South. While forward basing in South Asia and in nations formerly part of the Soviet Union has received some attention seven new U.S. bases being established in Colombia (within striking distance of hostile Venezuela) and increased naval operations in the Caribbean have not. In addition, there are some 6,000 domestic military bases, many that anchor the economies of small towns.
Privatization of the U.S. Military. David Isenberg (“Private Military Contractors and U.S. Grand Strategy,” PRIO, Oslo, 2009) refers to “…the U.S. government’s huge and growing reliance on private contractors” which “…constitutes an attempt to circumvent or evade public skepticism about the United States’ self-appointed role as global policemen.” While PMCs provide many services, such as combat, consulting, training armies, and military support, their combat presence in the two major wars of the 21st century, Afghanistan and Iraq, has generated the most, if limited, public attention. Isenberg says that between 1950 and 1989 PMCs participated in 15 conflicts in other countries and from 1990 to 2000 another 80. PMCs were employed in civil wars such as in Angola, Sierre Leone, and the Balkans.
A recent Washington Post investigation compiled a data base, “Top Secret America,” “that found 1,931 intelligence contracting firms” doing top secret work “for 1,271 government organizations at over 10,000 sites.” TSA indicates that 90 percent of the intelligence work is done by 110 contractors. Defense department spokespersons and legislators claim that the United States needs to continue allocating billions of dollars to private contractors to maintain military performance levels that are minimally acceptable.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives describes the introduction of unmanned aerial weapons in the 1990s and their current weaponry of choice for the White House and others who prefer antiseptic and bloodless (on our side) technologies to eliminate enemies. New predator drones can be programmed to fly over distant lands and target enemies for unstoppable air strikes. Drones have been increasingly popular as weapons in fighting enemies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
Connecting drone strikes to assassination teams and other war-making techniques, Shane, Mazzetti, and Worth, (“Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents,” The New York Times, August 16) refer to shadow wars against terrorist targets. “In roughly a dozen countries--from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife--the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.”
Assassinations. The United States has initiated campaigns to identify and assassinate presumed enemies. CIA operatives and private contractors join teams of army specialists under the Joint Special Operations Command (13,000 assassination commandoes around the world) to kill foreigners alleged to be affiliated with terrorists groups. These targets can include U.S. citizens living abroad who have been deemed to be terrorist collaborators. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States, through Latin American military personnel trained at the School of the Americas, has long supported assassination programs that now seem to be “globalized,” that is administered everywhere.
Fred Branfman (Alternet, August 24, 2010) starkly describes the assassination policy: “The truth that many Americans find hard to take is that mass U.S. assassination on a scale unequaled in world history lies at the heart of America’s military strategy in the Muslim world, a policy both illegal and never seriously debated by Congress or the American people.”
Missionary Humanitarian Interventions. While most techniques of empire involve the direct use of violence, public and private organizations expand the presence of empire through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” While the work of the missionary has often followed the flag, never has such activism impacted so heavily on global politics as today.
For example, The New York Times (July 6, 2010) reported that Christian evangelical groups have transferred substantial amounts of funds to Jewish settlements in occupied territories of the West Bank. Furthermore, fund raising for settlements that stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state receive tax exemptions. The newspaper reports on “…at least 40 American groups that have collected more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem over the last decade.”
The newspaper correctly points out that so-called “humanitarian” and tax deductible donations to entities in other countries tied to U.S. foreign policy are not new. But, the article suggests that donations to the settler movement are special “because of the centrality of the settlement issue in the current talks and the fact that Washington has consistently refused to allow Israel to spend American government aid in the settlements. Tax breaks for the donations remain largely unchallenged, and unexamined by the American government.”
What is New About Imperial Policies
While the general character of imperial policies remains the same, whether the empire is Rome, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, or the United States, changes in technology, the state system, ideology, and tactical thinking have had their effects.
First, imperial rule has become truly global. From bases in far-off places, to unmanned drones flying over literally millions of targets everywhere, empires operate with no constraints based on geography.
Second, the military has become big business. Private corporations assume a greater share of Department of Defense budgets. Private companies now clean up and cook for the troops, train foreign soldiers, assassinate assumed terrorist enemies, and fight small wars with almost no visibility to publics.
Third, the United States is moving toward fighting wars without soldiers on the ground. Enemies can be identified by computer and military technologists can then push the right buttons to kill the unfortunate targets. Killing has become antiseptic. Killers can say goodbye to the kids in the morning, drive to work, push some buttons, drive home and spend the evening with the family. Meanwhile thousands of miles away there are mourners crying over those just assassinated.
Fourth, empires, at least the U.S. empire, can kill with impunity. Targets labeled terrorist can be eliminated by unmanned space weapons, specially trained assassination teams, or average foot soldiers.
Finally, empires can expand and change the destiny of peoples through so-called “humanitarian assistance.” Local goals, good or bad, are furthered by the large financial resources that special interests can bring to other countries.
Empires have had a long and ugly history. Because of technology, economics, and ideology new techniques of empire have been added to the old. The struggle against all empires must continue.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
VIEWING THE "PROFESSIONAL LEFT" DIALECTICALLY
Harry Targ
I view as despicable the Obama administration strategy, expressed through Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, of ostracizing members of the “left” which criticizes shortcomings of administration policies.
Progressives have appropriately condemned economic policies that limited job stimuli, bailed out banks without nationalizing them, assumed away the very popular single payer option in health care reform, escalated war in Afghanistan, stalled the end of the blockade on Cuba, and maintained an imperial military presence in Latin America, East Asia, and just about everyplace else. The administration has not pursued immigration reform, climate change legislation, and the Employee Free Choice Act.
However, the reality of the first 19 months of this administration includes some health care reform, modest symbolic gestures to reduce hostilities toward other countries and the reintroduction of diplomacy as a tool of international relations, negotiations on the reduction of nuclear weapons, reestablishment of funding to international agencies that promote family planning, and a set of economic policies that bailed out banks and the auto industry that reduced somewhat the horrific consequences of the current recession. The Obama administration still has on the table a progressive agenda as to the environment, labor, job creation, and foreign policy. This is a public agenda for which he can and will be held accountable while electoral and tea party opponents are committed to the destruction of public institutions, fairness, and access to basic human needs.
As I read the Gibbs comments, however, a small part of me, I confess, was reminded of those who are inalterably opposed to every policy and practice of this administration. Some analysts on the left have articulated views that seem to me to ignore the historical context, the constellation of political forces today, the consciousness of people at the grassroots, and the almost omnipresence of an electronic media that frames virtually everything in terms of markets, the terrorist threat, unions as “special interests,” and government as an unmitigated evil.
I was ruminating about this discomfort I have with some of our left discourse as I sat through the August meeting of the Northwest Central Labor Council, Indiana, AFL-CIO meeting. We were listening to a presentation by a labor lawyer who works for a firm that specializes in cases of worker injuries and deaths on the job. This firm, for years, has worked with liberal state legislators, mostly Democrats, to get legislation passed that might guarantee the right of families of deceased workers to sue for deaths of loved ones at workplaces and to provide access to workers compensation. It seems that Indiana law limits legal and compensation claims for victims of mesothelioma and other asbestos exposure diseases to cases occurring within ten years. Scientific evidence indicates that victims of workplace asbestos exposure may not appear for 20 or 30 years. In effect, most claims for survivors and victims of asbestos related diseases would be ineligible for compensation.
Then the Council heard from State Representative Dennis Tyler (D-Muncie) who has been working with the law firm, George and Sipes, to change the law. Tyler described the procedural roadblocks to proposed legislative reform in 2009; Republican opposition in both the State House and Senate to legislative reform, and lobbying efforts by the Indiana Manufacturers Association, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, Associated Builders and Contractors, the National Federation of Independent Business, Indiana Energy Association, the Indiana Petroleum Council and the Insurance Institute of Indiana.
The Tyler Bill was reintroduced in 2010. As George and Sipes describes the outcome: “The bill was assigned to the House Labor and Employment Committee and was heard in late January. With the bill about to pass the Committee and move to the House floor for a vote, the Republicans on the Committee, doing the bidding of the manufacturer and insurance lobbyists, walked out, which left too few members to hold a vote, effectively killing the bill.”
In Council discussion State Representative Tyler admitted that Indiana working people, including union members, are disillusioned with both parties and the electoral process generally. However, as expected from a state politician, he pointed out that the only hope workers and families have for some assistance when mesothelioma hits a family is to elect a pro-worker, largely Democratic, State House. Traditionally, in the Indiana legislature, Democrats have a narrow lead in the House and rarely control the Senate.
This fall, the Democrats could lose the House which will not only bury any prospects of reform on asbestos compensation legislation but a Republican victory in the House and Senate would lead almost immediately to passage of legislation making Indiana a so-called “Right-to-Work” state. “Right-to-Work states allow workers in unionized workplaces to not join the unions that represent their interests. Wage rates and union membership in Right-to-Work states are uniformly less than in states that have not embraced such anti-union legislation.
So what do we on the “left” do? We surely do not want to be fodder for the White House strategy to convince voters that they are not “left.” We surely do not want to support more off shore drilling, more war in Afghanistan, allocation of fewer resources for public employment and green jobs etc. But, at the same time, we need to work to protect workers stricken with mesothelioma. We need to work to create real regulation of mines, of oil drilling, of global warming. We need push for single-payer health care. And we need to mobilize around a real job creation agenda. And we need to demand that with tight resources our needs must be paid for by a dramatic draw-down of military spending.
In the end, I come to the conclusion that we on the “left” must continue to perform to Robert Gibb’s characterization. But, I believe we must also continue to work in our communities, our states and nationally, electorally and in the streets, to improve the lives of all who suffer today as we organize to build a better world tomorrow.
I view as despicable the Obama administration strategy, expressed through Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, of ostracizing members of the “left” which criticizes shortcomings of administration policies.
Progressives have appropriately condemned economic policies that limited job stimuli, bailed out banks without nationalizing them, assumed away the very popular single payer option in health care reform, escalated war in Afghanistan, stalled the end of the blockade on Cuba, and maintained an imperial military presence in Latin America, East Asia, and just about everyplace else. The administration has not pursued immigration reform, climate change legislation, and the Employee Free Choice Act.
However, the reality of the first 19 months of this administration includes some health care reform, modest symbolic gestures to reduce hostilities toward other countries and the reintroduction of diplomacy as a tool of international relations, negotiations on the reduction of nuclear weapons, reestablishment of funding to international agencies that promote family planning, and a set of economic policies that bailed out banks and the auto industry that reduced somewhat the horrific consequences of the current recession. The Obama administration still has on the table a progressive agenda as to the environment, labor, job creation, and foreign policy. This is a public agenda for which he can and will be held accountable while electoral and tea party opponents are committed to the destruction of public institutions, fairness, and access to basic human needs.
As I read the Gibbs comments, however, a small part of me, I confess, was reminded of those who are inalterably opposed to every policy and practice of this administration. Some analysts on the left have articulated views that seem to me to ignore the historical context, the constellation of political forces today, the consciousness of people at the grassroots, and the almost omnipresence of an electronic media that frames virtually everything in terms of markets, the terrorist threat, unions as “special interests,” and government as an unmitigated evil.
I was ruminating about this discomfort I have with some of our left discourse as I sat through the August meeting of the Northwest Central Labor Council, Indiana, AFL-CIO meeting. We were listening to a presentation by a labor lawyer who works for a firm that specializes in cases of worker injuries and deaths on the job. This firm, for years, has worked with liberal state legislators, mostly Democrats, to get legislation passed that might guarantee the right of families of deceased workers to sue for deaths of loved ones at workplaces and to provide access to workers compensation. It seems that Indiana law limits legal and compensation claims for victims of mesothelioma and other asbestos exposure diseases to cases occurring within ten years. Scientific evidence indicates that victims of workplace asbestos exposure may not appear for 20 or 30 years. In effect, most claims for survivors and victims of asbestos related diseases would be ineligible for compensation.
Then the Council heard from State Representative Dennis Tyler (D-Muncie) who has been working with the law firm, George and Sipes, to change the law. Tyler described the procedural roadblocks to proposed legislative reform in 2009; Republican opposition in both the State House and Senate to legislative reform, and lobbying efforts by the Indiana Manufacturers Association, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, Associated Builders and Contractors, the National Federation of Independent Business, Indiana Energy Association, the Indiana Petroleum Council and the Insurance Institute of Indiana.
The Tyler Bill was reintroduced in 2010. As George and Sipes describes the outcome: “The bill was assigned to the House Labor and Employment Committee and was heard in late January. With the bill about to pass the Committee and move to the House floor for a vote, the Republicans on the Committee, doing the bidding of the manufacturer and insurance lobbyists, walked out, which left too few members to hold a vote, effectively killing the bill.”
In Council discussion State Representative Tyler admitted that Indiana working people, including union members, are disillusioned with both parties and the electoral process generally. However, as expected from a state politician, he pointed out that the only hope workers and families have for some assistance when mesothelioma hits a family is to elect a pro-worker, largely Democratic, State House. Traditionally, in the Indiana legislature, Democrats have a narrow lead in the House and rarely control the Senate.
This fall, the Democrats could lose the House which will not only bury any prospects of reform on asbestos compensation legislation but a Republican victory in the House and Senate would lead almost immediately to passage of legislation making Indiana a so-called “Right-to-Work” state. “Right-to-Work states allow workers in unionized workplaces to not join the unions that represent their interests. Wage rates and union membership in Right-to-Work states are uniformly less than in states that have not embraced such anti-union legislation.
So what do we on the “left” do? We surely do not want to be fodder for the White House strategy to convince voters that they are not “left.” We surely do not want to support more off shore drilling, more war in Afghanistan, allocation of fewer resources for public employment and green jobs etc. But, at the same time, we need to work to protect workers stricken with mesothelioma. We need to work to create real regulation of mines, of oil drilling, of global warming. We need push for single-payer health care. And we need to mobilize around a real job creation agenda. And we need to demand that with tight resources our needs must be paid for by a dramatic draw-down of military spending.
In the end, I come to the conclusion that we on the “left” must continue to perform to Robert Gibb’s characterization. But, I believe we must also continue to work in our communities, our states and nationally, electorally and in the streets, to improve the lives of all who suffer today as we organize to build a better world tomorrow.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
ATTACK ON PROGRESSIVE AFRICAN-AMERICANS ESCALATES
Harry Targ
Ethics Charges: The Natural Order of Things
The stories about ethics violations by Congressman Charles Rangel (NY) have been making the rounds of the media for a week or so. Last Friday, wire service reports indicated that the House Ethics Committee will be charging Congresswoman Maxine Waters (California’s 35th Congressional District) with financial and influence improprieties as well. Of course, the leaked information in both cases is complicated and presumes guilt while the targets’ denials seem like desperate gestures to save themselves.
These stories have been contextualized in two ways. First, the charges against Rangel and Waters have been framed as part of concern about the seeming rise in corruption in public life and reminders that candidate Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised greater political transparency. So the upcoming Rangel/Waters hearings seem a natural byproduct of a changing political atmosphere in Washington and the country.
Second, virtually all the analyses of the announcement of the charges, the responses from those charged, and estimates of when panel hearings will take place, highlight the impacts of these cases on the November 2010 elections. Pundits speculate on what effect these political troubles will have for Democrats and reinforce media conclusions that the Democrats will be even more hurt from these revelations than everyone already expects.
What Are These Charges Really About
I have not read all the stories on Rangel or Waters but none I have seen have mentioned three other variables that just might relate to the attacks on the Congresspersons in question. First, both, but particularly Maxine Waters, have been visible progressives on war/peace and economic issues. Second, both Congresspersons are African-American and have been articulate spokespersons for the Congressional Black Caucus. Third, and not unconnected to the other two, these charges follow a two-year trajectory of assaults on progressive African-Americans, including the grassroots organization ACORN, green jobs activist Van Jones, and most recently, agricultural specialist, Shirley Sherrod.
On Waters and Harman
On Tuesday August 3, 2010, The New York Times published a front-page story titled “A Capital Abuzz With Ethics,” reflecting the standard frame suggested above. “The charges reflect, in part, a heightened sensitivity in Washington to indiscretions by members of Congress.”
On page one of the business section in the same issue of the paper a story appears with the title “An Audio Pioneer Buys Beleaguered Newsweek.” It describes Sidney Harman’s purchase of the faltering but still visible news magazine, Newsweek. Curiously, paragraph seventeen, on page 2 of the section opens with the following: “He is married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents Southern California. Asked whether being married to a Congresswoman might represent a conflict of interest, he replied: ‘We’ve been married for over 30 years. I’ve never told her how to run the government and she’s never told me how to run the business. That’s absolutely fundamental to us.’”
(Last fall, in the midst of the health care debate it was disclosed in Indiana that the wife of retiring Senator Evan Bayh was a board member of the health insurance giant Wellpoint and that she made over $200,000 in fees and stock options for her work. Bayh’s legislative aide said that the Senator and Susan Bayh never spoke about the health care issue at home).
Just a superficial comparison of the political agendas of the two Southern California legislators, Maxine Waters and Jane Harman, indicate that the former has been a leader in opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Harman has been more tied to homeland security advocacy and support for Israel. On economic issues, Waters has been an advocate for expanding economic stimulus policies, increasing housing and community development support, empowering women and youth, and promoting green jobs and other policies of relevance to the poor and minorities. Harman has identified with the “Blue Dog Blueprint for Fiscal Reform” a plan that prioritizes budget balancing and deficit reduction over human needs. She also identifies with the New Democrats call for “a robust market-based approach to address our nation’s energy needs.”
We Must Respond
The right-wing and their allies in both political parties are engaging in a campaign at all levels of society to destroy the prospects of building a progressive agenda. Most of the media-print, electronic, and internet-for whatever reasons, are co-conspirators. AND this campaign clearly is targeting the interests of workers, African-Americans, people of color in general, and women. Progressives must join the struggle to save the progressive agenda wherever political activity takes place.
Ethics Charges: The Natural Order of Things
The stories about ethics violations by Congressman Charles Rangel (NY) have been making the rounds of the media for a week or so. Last Friday, wire service reports indicated that the House Ethics Committee will be charging Congresswoman Maxine Waters (California’s 35th Congressional District) with financial and influence improprieties as well. Of course, the leaked information in both cases is complicated and presumes guilt while the targets’ denials seem like desperate gestures to save themselves.
These stories have been contextualized in two ways. First, the charges against Rangel and Waters have been framed as part of concern about the seeming rise in corruption in public life and reminders that candidate Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised greater political transparency. So the upcoming Rangel/Waters hearings seem a natural byproduct of a changing political atmosphere in Washington and the country.
Second, virtually all the analyses of the announcement of the charges, the responses from those charged, and estimates of when panel hearings will take place, highlight the impacts of these cases on the November 2010 elections. Pundits speculate on what effect these political troubles will have for Democrats and reinforce media conclusions that the Democrats will be even more hurt from these revelations than everyone already expects.
What Are These Charges Really About
I have not read all the stories on Rangel or Waters but none I have seen have mentioned three other variables that just might relate to the attacks on the Congresspersons in question. First, both, but particularly Maxine Waters, have been visible progressives on war/peace and economic issues. Second, both Congresspersons are African-American and have been articulate spokespersons for the Congressional Black Caucus. Third, and not unconnected to the other two, these charges follow a two-year trajectory of assaults on progressive African-Americans, including the grassroots organization ACORN, green jobs activist Van Jones, and most recently, agricultural specialist, Shirley Sherrod.
On Waters and Harman
On Tuesday August 3, 2010, The New York Times published a front-page story titled “A Capital Abuzz With Ethics,” reflecting the standard frame suggested above. “The charges reflect, in part, a heightened sensitivity in Washington to indiscretions by members of Congress.”
On page one of the business section in the same issue of the paper a story appears with the title “An Audio Pioneer Buys Beleaguered Newsweek.” It describes Sidney Harman’s purchase of the faltering but still visible news magazine, Newsweek. Curiously, paragraph seventeen, on page 2 of the section opens with the following: “He is married to Jane Harman, a Democratic Congresswoman who represents Southern California. Asked whether being married to a Congresswoman might represent a conflict of interest, he replied: ‘We’ve been married for over 30 years. I’ve never told her how to run the government and she’s never told me how to run the business. That’s absolutely fundamental to us.’”
(Last fall, in the midst of the health care debate it was disclosed in Indiana that the wife of retiring Senator Evan Bayh was a board member of the health insurance giant Wellpoint and that she made over $200,000 in fees and stock options for her work. Bayh’s legislative aide said that the Senator and Susan Bayh never spoke about the health care issue at home).
Just a superficial comparison of the political agendas of the two Southern California legislators, Maxine Waters and Jane Harman, indicate that the former has been a leader in opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Harman has been more tied to homeland security advocacy and support for Israel. On economic issues, Waters has been an advocate for expanding economic stimulus policies, increasing housing and community development support, empowering women and youth, and promoting green jobs and other policies of relevance to the poor and minorities. Harman has identified with the “Blue Dog Blueprint for Fiscal Reform” a plan that prioritizes budget balancing and deficit reduction over human needs. She also identifies with the New Democrats call for “a robust market-based approach to address our nation’s energy needs.”
We Must Respond
The right-wing and their allies in both political parties are engaging in a campaign at all levels of society to destroy the prospects of building a progressive agenda. Most of the media-print, electronic, and internet-for whatever reasons, are co-conspirators. AND this campaign clearly is targeting the interests of workers, African-Americans, people of color in general, and women. Progressives must join the struggle to save the progressive agenda wherever political activity takes place.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
21ST CENTURY HIGHER EDUCATION HEADING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
Harry Targ
The Modern University
At my home university, only Coca-Cola products can be distributed on campus as a result of contractual agreements. Agriculture specialists train military personnel to teach agribusiness to farmers in Afghanistan. Students struggle against university contractors who have purchase agreements with companies such as Nike, which produce t-shirts and hats with university logos made with sweatshop labor. Research and teaching programs are established to highlight the significance of unregulated markets, electoral democracy, religions, and other ideas celebrated in the United States.
The president of the university, the director of athletic programs, and some athletic coaches earn ten times more than experienced clerical staff and 7 or 8 times more than new assistant professors. In addition to corporate style salary differentials, members of the administrative staff, like those in corporations, work on logos, “branding,” and lobbying state and national legislators. Human relations bureaucracies, again like those in corporations, make personnel decisions that bear on substantive policy; in this case relating to education.
Shifting Finances, Academic Workers, and Access to Higher Education
The enduring economic crisis has begun to open up debate on the direction of modern higher education. For example, The Delta Project supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education has recently issued a report, “Trends in College Spending: 1998-2008: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?” that deserves study and reflection. Inside Higher Education (July 9, 2010) summarized some of the project’s major findings:
Between 1998 and 2008 public research universities (such as Big Ten institutions) increased rates of expenditure on top administrators, lawyers, and accountants twice that of spending on faculty and instructional materials.
Students at what the Project calls, “Public Research Universities” are now subsidized over three times as much per student as those attending community colleges.
Resources channeled to instructional purposes have modestly declined while slight increases in moneys find their way to computers, libraries, and administrative expenses.
The 51 page Delta Project report concluded that if the trends identified between 1998 and 2008 (with data that does not include the 2008-2010 recession) continue significant aspects of higher education in the United States will decline, particularly in comparison with other developed countries. The trends increasingly affect access to higher education, job security among educators, and the quality of education. In the project’s words:
“Revenue shortfalls in both public and private institutions have become the occasion, once again, for steep increases in student tuition, cutbacks in enrollments, and reductions in course offerings. Employee furloughs are becoming common, along with layoffs and program closures.”
Higher education administrators and government officials, the Report asserts, have adopted “the dominant model to manage revenue shortfalls,” including tuition increases, expanding class size, and reducing staff and faculty wages and benefits.
And changes in institutions of higher education, as in virtually all institutions, involve questions of class and inequality. “Turning this trajectory around will require huge attention to the deep issues of educational inequality, and the leaky pipeline that persistently disadvantages first-generation and low-income students.”
Some Proposals for Change
In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus make a series of proposals to address some of the crises of higher education today. They begin by noting that tuition for public and private colleges has doubled compared with a generation ago. Rising educational costs require parents to commit large financial outlays, second only to house mortgages, to their children’s education. Alternatively students have to take out loans that will burden them for their entire lives.
Among the proposals these authors make are the following:
-Institute free higher education for all who seek it.
-Maintain course requirements that lead to knowledge in history, the arts, sciences, and reasoned discourse.
-Provide secure full-time teaching jobs for every classroom. Eliminate the system of staffing classrooms with graduate students and temporary adjuncts who receive one-sixth the pay of the regular faculty.
-Pay presidents and other administrators salaries commensurate with public employees, not CEOs of Wall Street banks and corporations.
I would add that the connections between systems of higher education and sports, the military, and the corporate sector must be examined as well.
While our wealthiest and most powerful institutions-- corporations and banks, the military, and the health care system-- have come under some scrutiny in the new century, until recently higher education has remained hidden behind a wall of mystery even though everyone pays lip service to it as the hope for the future.
With enduring economic stagnation coupled with rising gaps in the distribution of income and wealth, education is offered as an escape route from poverty. We need to broaden public discussion about our assumptions concerning higher education, assessing its costs, accessibility, educational quality, and workplace security.
The Modern University
At my home university, only Coca-Cola products can be distributed on campus as a result of contractual agreements. Agriculture specialists train military personnel to teach agribusiness to farmers in Afghanistan. Students struggle against university contractors who have purchase agreements with companies such as Nike, which produce t-shirts and hats with university logos made with sweatshop labor. Research and teaching programs are established to highlight the significance of unregulated markets, electoral democracy, religions, and other ideas celebrated in the United States.
The president of the university, the director of athletic programs, and some athletic coaches earn ten times more than experienced clerical staff and 7 or 8 times more than new assistant professors. In addition to corporate style salary differentials, members of the administrative staff, like those in corporations, work on logos, “branding,” and lobbying state and national legislators. Human relations bureaucracies, again like those in corporations, make personnel decisions that bear on substantive policy; in this case relating to education.
Shifting Finances, Academic Workers, and Access to Higher Education
The enduring economic crisis has begun to open up debate on the direction of modern higher education. For example, The Delta Project supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education has recently issued a report, “Trends in College Spending: 1998-2008: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?” that deserves study and reflection. Inside Higher Education (July 9, 2010) summarized some of the project’s major findings:
Between 1998 and 2008 public research universities (such as Big Ten institutions) increased rates of expenditure on top administrators, lawyers, and accountants twice that of spending on faculty and instructional materials.
Students at what the Project calls, “Public Research Universities” are now subsidized over three times as much per student as those attending community colleges.
Resources channeled to instructional purposes have modestly declined while slight increases in moneys find their way to computers, libraries, and administrative expenses.
The 51 page Delta Project report concluded that if the trends identified between 1998 and 2008 (with data that does not include the 2008-2010 recession) continue significant aspects of higher education in the United States will decline, particularly in comparison with other developed countries. The trends increasingly affect access to higher education, job security among educators, and the quality of education. In the project’s words:
“Revenue shortfalls in both public and private institutions have become the occasion, once again, for steep increases in student tuition, cutbacks in enrollments, and reductions in course offerings. Employee furloughs are becoming common, along with layoffs and program closures.”
Higher education administrators and government officials, the Report asserts, have adopted “the dominant model to manage revenue shortfalls,” including tuition increases, expanding class size, and reducing staff and faculty wages and benefits.
And changes in institutions of higher education, as in virtually all institutions, involve questions of class and inequality. “Turning this trajectory around will require huge attention to the deep issues of educational inequality, and the leaky pipeline that persistently disadvantages first-generation and low-income students.”
Some Proposals for Change
In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus make a series of proposals to address some of the crises of higher education today. They begin by noting that tuition for public and private colleges has doubled compared with a generation ago. Rising educational costs require parents to commit large financial outlays, second only to house mortgages, to their children’s education. Alternatively students have to take out loans that will burden them for their entire lives.
Among the proposals these authors make are the following:
-Institute free higher education for all who seek it.
-Maintain course requirements that lead to knowledge in history, the arts, sciences, and reasoned discourse.
-Provide secure full-time teaching jobs for every classroom. Eliminate the system of staffing classrooms with graduate students and temporary adjuncts who receive one-sixth the pay of the regular faculty.
-Pay presidents and other administrators salaries commensurate with public employees, not CEOs of Wall Street banks and corporations.
I would add that the connections between systems of higher education and sports, the military, and the corporate sector must be examined as well.
While our wealthiest and most powerful institutions-- corporations and banks, the military, and the health care system-- have come under some scrutiny in the new century, until recently higher education has remained hidden behind a wall of mystery even though everyone pays lip service to it as the hope for the future.
With enduring economic stagnation coupled with rising gaps in the distribution of income and wealth, education is offered as an escape route from poverty. We need to broaden public discussion about our assumptions concerning higher education, assessing its costs, accessibility, educational quality, and workplace security.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
THE KOREAN WAR NEVER ENDS: A 60 YEAR COVERUP
Harry Targ
"We continue to send a message to the North. There is another way. There is a way that can benefit the people of the North," Mrs. Clinton said alongside Mr. Gates on Wednesday, as they stood just feet away from leering North Korean soldiers stationed across the North-South border. "But until they change direction, the United States stands firmly on behalf of the people and government of the Republic of Korea." (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2010).
In a political about-face, a South Korean commission investigating a century of human rights abuses has ruled that the U.S. military's large-scale killing of refugees during the Korean War, in case after case, arose out of military necessity.
Shutting down the inquiry into South Korea's hidden history, the commission also will leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their own government early in the 1950-53 war, sometimes as U.S. officers watched.
The four-year-old Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea probed more deeply than any previous inquiry into the country's bloody past. But a shift to conservative national leadership changed the panel's political makeup this year and dampened its investigative zeal.
The families of 1950's victims wanted the work continued. (Charles J. Hanley and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press, July 11, 2010).
Back to Korea
I keep coming back to the Korean War. Maybe it is an occupational hazard of those who teach foreign policy. Perhaps it is because virtually every administration since World War II has made their narrative of the events on the Korean peninsula a centerpiece for justifying United States foreign policy. And, from the standpoint of those of us who view United States foreign policy from a critical perspective, the Korean War represents a model of what that policy continued to be ever since the 1940s.
I wrote recently about “our forgotten war,” the Korean war, arguing that the U.S. commitment to “defend” the Korean regime south of the 38th parallel militarily opened the door to massive increases in military spending, the unquestioned commitment of the United States to a global anti-Communist agenda, defense of the reactionary Chinese on the Formosa Islands, the total funding of the French effort to crush Vietnamese anti-colonial forces, and the rapid expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also, with the Korean War, domestic repression of dissent was broadened and deepened, unleashing the FBI, Congressional and state legislative investigative committees, and moves to standardize American popular culture.
I thought I had written enough on Korea for a while until I read a July 11 wire service story announcing that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established five years ago in South Korea was terminated. The Commission was created to investigate charges that the U.S. puppet government in South Korea before and during the war was responsible for the rounding up and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of anti-government dissidents in the South (with U.S. military support). Also the Commission was to examine claims by historians that South Korean president Syngman Rhee may have slaughtered 100,000 or more of his own citizens in the early stages of the Korean War because they were deemed unsympathetic to the anti-Communist regime in Seoul.
Then on July 21, Secretaries of State and Defense Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates visited the 38th parallel which has divided the Korean peninsula for over 60 years. Photo images of Clinton peering North with binoculars underscored the definition of North Korea as mysterious and demonic. To support the imagery she announced that sanctions against the “Stalinist dictatorship” would be escalated. The North, she claimed, was responsible for the destruction of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, on March 26, killing 46 sailors. She accepted this interpretation from official South Korean government sources.
The Hidden History
I had read many books over the years on the Korea War but just recently took I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War off my shelf. As one of the first definitive studies of the onset of the Korean War, published by Monthly Review, in 1952, it tells a story of how that war started that is radically different from the official story: “the evil communists in the North invaded the democratic South on orders from the Soviet Union and China.” Even for me, the I.F. Stone narrative was shocking about Korea then (and now). Most troubling were the suggestions about how lies, deceit, messianic ideology, and personality disorders along with imperial structures and processes may have affected United States foreign policy in general. Reflecting on these foreign policies led me to realize that their impacts have included the deaths of millions of people, mostly people outside the Anglo-Saxon world.
Stone’s narrative highlights the interests, behavior, ideologies, and personalities of a handful of players who had most to do with creating and prosecuting the Korean War. Most central was General Douglas MacArthur, commanding officer of the U.S. occupation of Japan, headquartered in Tokyo. MacArthur saw himself as the future leader of all of Asia, bringing Christianity, capitalism, authoritarian democracy and his own historic destiny to the region.
His partners including John Foster Dulles, key Republican spokesperson on foreign policy, former representative to the United Nations and U.S. negotiator of the Japanese Peace Treaty which welcomed back that country into the “family of democratic nations.” Dulles had a long legal career, working with corporations and banks that did business with Nazi Germany. He regarded the rise of Communism as a manifestation of the anti-Christ.
Other partners in the Korean War drama were Syngman Rhee, dictatorial president of the South Korean regime who was on the verge of being ousted from power after his party lost parliamentary elections and Chiang Kai Shek, leader of the anti-Communist forces who were defeated by the Chinese Communists in a thirty-year civil war. Chiang’s Koumintang was forced to retreat from the mainland of China to the Formosan islands and he was desperately seeking a commitment from the United States to defend his beleaguered armies on the islands.
The narrative, of course, includes defense department officials and military contractors who remained, even in 1950, under the yoke of fiscally conservative legislators. They wanted a justification for massive increases in military spending such as those recommended in the secret document National Security Council Document 68.
In addition, Republican politicians were looking for an issue to finally end the twenty year domination of the Democratic Party in national political life. Issues such as the “fall of China,” “the spread of Communism,” the “lack of attention to Asia,” and “subversion inside the State Department” became part of their public agenda. And President Truman, his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and other key advisers saw the need to expand U.S. military reach to Asia as well. With “the fall of China” Japan and the Korean peninsula were central to the geo-political expansion of US empire and the institutionalization of vibrant capitalist systems in Asia to challenge Communism.
Everybody Has an Interest in War
After describing the central characters in the Korean War drama, it becomes clear that they all would benefit from a massive and irrevocable U. S. military commitment to the anti-Communist regime in South Korea. Such a war would cap the distinguished military career of MacArthur, bring Christianity to Asia, shift foreign policy influence to missionary Republicans such as Dulles and others who wanted to expand U.S. domination to all of Asia, and would save the faltering political fortunes of the dictators in South Korea and Formosa who lacked support among their own people. Last, and not least, a Korean War would institutionalize, militarize, and globalize a United States foreign policy that would bring capitalism and democracy to the world.
The story Stone then tells is of lies and deceit designed to threaten and entice the North Koreans into making war on the South, changing the United States/United Nations response from defending the territory below the 38th parallel to expanding the war to the North, and doing whatever could be done to scare the Chinese into entering the war in full combat. Stone’s narrative shows how desperately the Chinese resisted all-out military response and how MacArthur’s headquarters at every turn resisted peace overtures.
The Stone narrative is long and complicated. Of course many have written about the Korean War since. But what so impacted me reading the book almost 60 years after its publication was the plausibility of the descriptions about how broad economic and political forces shaped and encouraged key decision-makers to act in despicable ways to serve their own interests, as well as United States empire. I am afraid that the United States approach to the Korean peninsula and foreign policy in general has not changed much since.
Any Way Out?
The best alternative to current U.S. foreign policy toward Korea and the world was recently expressed by the Veterans for Peace President Mike Ferner in a press release remembering the 60 year anniversary of the Korean War:
The recent unfortunate sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, should not be used as an excuse by any parties to renew the armed conflict that the armistice was supposed to address on July 27, 1953. Rivers of blood, mountains of pain and a permanent war economy in the U.S. are the true costs of this conflict. This sad anniversary renews VFP's commitment to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
The press release concluded:
As we observe the 60th anniversary of the Korean War of 1950-1953 today, it is time to end this tragic war, not re-ignite it. We urge all concerned parties in the Korean War--both Koreas, the United States, and China--to begin negotiations for a peace treaty and an official end to the war.
"We continue to send a message to the North. There is another way. There is a way that can benefit the people of the North," Mrs. Clinton said alongside Mr. Gates on Wednesday, as they stood just feet away from leering North Korean soldiers stationed across the North-South border. "But until they change direction, the United States stands firmly on behalf of the people and government of the Republic of Korea." (Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2010).
In a political about-face, a South Korean commission investigating a century of human rights abuses has ruled that the U.S. military's large-scale killing of refugees during the Korean War, in case after case, arose out of military necessity.
Shutting down the inquiry into South Korea's hidden history, the commission also will leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their own government early in the 1950-53 war, sometimes as U.S. officers watched.
The four-year-old Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea probed more deeply than any previous inquiry into the country's bloody past. But a shift to conservative national leadership changed the panel's political makeup this year and dampened its investigative zeal.
The families of 1950's victims wanted the work continued. (Charles J. Hanley and Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press, July 11, 2010).
Back to Korea
I keep coming back to the Korean War. Maybe it is an occupational hazard of those who teach foreign policy. Perhaps it is because virtually every administration since World War II has made their narrative of the events on the Korean peninsula a centerpiece for justifying United States foreign policy. And, from the standpoint of those of us who view United States foreign policy from a critical perspective, the Korean War represents a model of what that policy continued to be ever since the 1940s.
I wrote recently about “our forgotten war,” the Korean war, arguing that the U.S. commitment to “defend” the Korean regime south of the 38th parallel militarily opened the door to massive increases in military spending, the unquestioned commitment of the United States to a global anti-Communist agenda, defense of the reactionary Chinese on the Formosa Islands, the total funding of the French effort to crush Vietnamese anti-colonial forces, and the rapid expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Also, with the Korean War, domestic repression of dissent was broadened and deepened, unleashing the FBI, Congressional and state legislative investigative committees, and moves to standardize American popular culture.
I thought I had written enough on Korea for a while until I read a July 11 wire service story announcing that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established five years ago in South Korea was terminated. The Commission was created to investigate charges that the U.S. puppet government in South Korea before and during the war was responsible for the rounding up and incarceration of hundreds of thousands of anti-government dissidents in the South (with U.S. military support). Also the Commission was to examine claims by historians that South Korean president Syngman Rhee may have slaughtered 100,000 or more of his own citizens in the early stages of the Korean War because they were deemed unsympathetic to the anti-Communist regime in Seoul.
Then on July 21, Secretaries of State and Defense Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates visited the 38th parallel which has divided the Korean peninsula for over 60 years. Photo images of Clinton peering North with binoculars underscored the definition of North Korea as mysterious and demonic. To support the imagery she announced that sanctions against the “Stalinist dictatorship” would be escalated. The North, she claimed, was responsible for the destruction of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, on March 26, killing 46 sailors. She accepted this interpretation from official South Korean government sources.
The Hidden History
I had read many books over the years on the Korea War but just recently took I.F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War off my shelf. As one of the first definitive studies of the onset of the Korean War, published by Monthly Review, in 1952, it tells a story of how that war started that is radically different from the official story: “the evil communists in the North invaded the democratic South on orders from the Soviet Union and China.” Even for me, the I.F. Stone narrative was shocking about Korea then (and now). Most troubling were the suggestions about how lies, deceit, messianic ideology, and personality disorders along with imperial structures and processes may have affected United States foreign policy in general. Reflecting on these foreign policies led me to realize that their impacts have included the deaths of millions of people, mostly people outside the Anglo-Saxon world.
Stone’s narrative highlights the interests, behavior, ideologies, and personalities of a handful of players who had most to do with creating and prosecuting the Korean War. Most central was General Douglas MacArthur, commanding officer of the U.S. occupation of Japan, headquartered in Tokyo. MacArthur saw himself as the future leader of all of Asia, bringing Christianity, capitalism, authoritarian democracy and his own historic destiny to the region.
His partners including John Foster Dulles, key Republican spokesperson on foreign policy, former representative to the United Nations and U.S. negotiator of the Japanese Peace Treaty which welcomed back that country into the “family of democratic nations.” Dulles had a long legal career, working with corporations and banks that did business with Nazi Germany. He regarded the rise of Communism as a manifestation of the anti-Christ.
Other partners in the Korean War drama were Syngman Rhee, dictatorial president of the South Korean regime who was on the verge of being ousted from power after his party lost parliamentary elections and Chiang Kai Shek, leader of the anti-Communist forces who were defeated by the Chinese Communists in a thirty-year civil war. Chiang’s Koumintang was forced to retreat from the mainland of China to the Formosan islands and he was desperately seeking a commitment from the United States to defend his beleaguered armies on the islands.
The narrative, of course, includes defense department officials and military contractors who remained, even in 1950, under the yoke of fiscally conservative legislators. They wanted a justification for massive increases in military spending such as those recommended in the secret document National Security Council Document 68.
In addition, Republican politicians were looking for an issue to finally end the twenty year domination of the Democratic Party in national political life. Issues such as the “fall of China,” “the spread of Communism,” the “lack of attention to Asia,” and “subversion inside the State Department” became part of their public agenda. And President Truman, his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and other key advisers saw the need to expand U.S. military reach to Asia as well. With “the fall of China” Japan and the Korean peninsula were central to the geo-political expansion of US empire and the institutionalization of vibrant capitalist systems in Asia to challenge Communism.
Everybody Has an Interest in War
After describing the central characters in the Korean War drama, it becomes clear that they all would benefit from a massive and irrevocable U. S. military commitment to the anti-Communist regime in South Korea. Such a war would cap the distinguished military career of MacArthur, bring Christianity to Asia, shift foreign policy influence to missionary Republicans such as Dulles and others who wanted to expand U.S. domination to all of Asia, and would save the faltering political fortunes of the dictators in South Korea and Formosa who lacked support among their own people. Last, and not least, a Korean War would institutionalize, militarize, and globalize a United States foreign policy that would bring capitalism and democracy to the world.
The story Stone then tells is of lies and deceit designed to threaten and entice the North Koreans into making war on the South, changing the United States/United Nations response from defending the territory below the 38th parallel to expanding the war to the North, and doing whatever could be done to scare the Chinese into entering the war in full combat. Stone’s narrative shows how desperately the Chinese resisted all-out military response and how MacArthur’s headquarters at every turn resisted peace overtures.
The Stone narrative is long and complicated. Of course many have written about the Korean War since. But what so impacted me reading the book almost 60 years after its publication was the plausibility of the descriptions about how broad economic and political forces shaped and encouraged key decision-makers to act in despicable ways to serve their own interests, as well as United States empire. I am afraid that the United States approach to the Korean peninsula and foreign policy in general has not changed much since.
Any Way Out?
The best alternative to current U.S. foreign policy toward Korea and the world was recently expressed by the Veterans for Peace President Mike Ferner in a press release remembering the 60 year anniversary of the Korean War:
The recent unfortunate sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan, should not be used as an excuse by any parties to renew the armed conflict that the armistice was supposed to address on July 27, 1953. Rivers of blood, mountains of pain and a permanent war economy in the U.S. are the true costs of this conflict. This sad anniversary renews VFP's commitment to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.
The press release concluded:
As we observe the 60th anniversary of the Korean War of 1950-1953 today, it is time to end this tragic war, not re-ignite it. We urge all concerned parties in the Korean War--both Koreas, the United States, and China--to begin negotiations for a peace treaty and an official end to the war.
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