Obama on Leno's Tonight Show

Thank God that the U.S. finally have a president that is articulate in his own right. Welcome back to the civilised world!

As a civilian (?) government is about to take office, it is worth remembering just how far the Bush administration has taken the U.S. in militarizing its institutions. As even Washington Post talks about "the silent military coup d'etat that has been steadily gaining ground below the radar screen of most Americans and the media", it is about time that Americans, again, prove themselves to be living in a vital democratic republic...

... not in a decaying empire.

On the day initiating (?) transition

In The New York Review of Books we find David Bromwich surveying the recent literature on the master puppeteer, Dick Cheney.

Among the findings:

"Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006.

With the peculiar tightness of its loyalties and the convenience of its immunities, neoconservatism in the United States now has something of the consistency of an alternative culture. Its success in penetrating the mainstream culture is evident in the pundit shows on most of the networks and cable TV, and in the columns of The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the years between 1983 and 1986, and again, more potently, in 2001–2006, the neoconservatives went far to dislocate the boundaries of respectable opinion in America. [...]

The man who held decisive authority in the White House during the Bush years has so far remained unaccountable for the aggrandizement and abuse of executive power; for the imposition of repressive laws whose contents were barely known by the legislature that passed them; for the instigation of domestic spying without disclosure or oversight; for the dissemination of false evidence to take the country into war; for the design and conduct of what the constitutional framers would have called an imperium in imperio, a government within the government."

Let's hope that the power of the neocons will begin to unfold, or the State is indeed in trouble.

True Patriotism

As a nice little war has just ended in Georgia, and the vistas open up yet more for the weaponsmongers, always benefiting from Bush' policies - perhaps the only consistent winners - it is worth remembering and repeating the words of warning from Dwight D. Eisenhower more extensively:

"[W]e have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."


Thus spake a true patriot. Where do we find such today, when the weapons industry has its representatives inside the White House, where the administration is delivering yet more money from the public purse to the weapons manufacturers? Where do we find such clarity of vision when, in reality, the weapons industry is dictating policies?

Left is Right

Finding myself, as so often, trying to formulate succinctly what really, at the core, differentiates the political Left from the political Right, I came across the following in Berhard-Henri Lévy's new book, Left in dark times: A stand against the new barbarism, as he quotes Françoise Sagan:

"In the case of any given injustice, the man, or woman, of the Right will say it’s inevitable; the man or woman of the Left will say that it’s intolerable."

I rest my case; the rest is silence!

The Master Hypocrites

As anyone could have guessed when the U.S. under G W Bush invaded Iraq and recognized Kosovo, any other power with ambitions is now at liberty to bypass international law. We see the consequences most obviously these days in Georgia.

Bush' legacy is a destabilized world, to the detriment of the U.S' own security interests. No loudmouthing from the Bush administration can conceal this. Other governments, e.g. the Swedish, that follow suit are merely showing that they have not understood the implications of U.S. policies in recent years. Add to that, in the Swedish case, a foreign minister who has investments in the oil business - crucially important in the case of Georgia - and we find a conflict of interest that is so blatantly embarrasing that it is miraculous that he is still in office.

Psychologically the stance of the governments aligning themselves with the U.S. is easy to understand, as they are embarrassingly eager to perform the role of Bush' lapdogs.

A Little Egoism is a Dangerous Thing

Ownership isn't always a blessing; it might even be a curse. A new book by Michael Heller (The gridlock economy) highlights the caveats.

Phrased differently: The sum of many small egoisms might cause a great standstill in the economy.

Obfuscation as Propaganda Technique

Isn't it fascinating, btw, how these right wing think tanks dress up as academic institutions (names of the organizations, titles of the propaganda staff, publishing patterns and formats etc), when in reality all they are into is ideology production. That way they appear as gravediggers in a double sense.
- Of democracy, due to the content/'subtance' of their propaganda and agenda.
- Of the quest for truth, and the quality of public debate, as far as the format of their activities goes.

Further - such a blurring of missions and boundaries is fully consonant with their general manner of operation. Like Bolsheviks in the 20th century they advance their cause not by open debate and democratic efforts but by action, preferably covert, in the darkness of crisises. Afterwards the act of cleansing their hands ensues.

That is were the apologists staffing these institutions, again analogous with the history of Bolshevism, enter as useful idiots.

The defense of freedom and justice demands... the abuse of freedom and justice

Jane Mayer from The New Yorker, and Physicians for Human Rights, have released books/reports on the abuse against human rights, performed by the U.S. in their 'war against terrorism'.

This coincides, more or less, with G W Bush ’speaking out’ against China. Which only proves, again, that he has no intellectual honesty and most definitely no sense of shame.

Someone who has is Naomi Wolf (also in one of the large Swedish dailies), who asks the world for assistance in stopping the U.S. in its abuse. Let's!

A Vision of Tomorrow - from one Inside the Bush Loop

From John Robb, a security consultant closely associated with the neofeudalistic nexus that the Bush years in the White House have seen the growth of.

’Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks--evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett's NetJets--will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next. Members of the middle class will follow, taking matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security--as they do now with education--and shore up delivery of critical services. These "armored suburbs" will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled by civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency-response systems. As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.

Until, that is, the next wave of adaptive innovation takes hold. For all of these changes may prove to be exactly the kind of creative destruction we need to move beyond the current, failed state of affairs. By 2016 and beyond, real long-term solutions will emerge.’
(from Fast Company, December 19, 2007)

This is neofeudalism at its most brutal, after the state has withered away, sold out by the likes of the Bush administration.

’Crush the infamous one’

’[W]hen the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) said, “Écrasez l'infâme” (“Crush the infamous one”), he may have meant superstition, ignorance, and tyranny, but what they added up to concretely in the minds of the revolutionaries was the supposed alliance of the monarchy with the Roman Catholic Church.’
(from Encyclopædia Britannica, on ’Roman Catholicism’)

This is fully analogous to what we witness today, and what must be fought back: the alliance of corporate interests – guided by a narrow set of dogmas, advanced by a self-appointed clergy of Friedmanite economists – and the government, forming in effect a ’corporatist’ or ’corporativist’ state, out of democratic control.

The Friedmanites Feeble Fight Back

After decades of persistent efforts – unfortunately successful – in conquering the high ground of economic policy throughout the world, after hijacking vital national and international organizations for its narrow agenda, after aligning itself with dictators and anti-democratic forces in numerous countries, the Church of Friedman has finally come under legitimate fire and is exposed for its real track record. I am talking of course about Klein’s ”The Shock Doctrine”.

One of the junior choir boys of the Church – though he is indeed advertised as ’senior fellow’ (pleez... I'm fully aware that it's merely a pseudo-academic badge of honor) – has been assigned the ungrateful task of defending the righteousness of the crusade. Seldom has a rescue operation failed so miserably. In an article published by the Cato Institute (one of the high profile branches of the sprawling Church), Johan Norberg is making a lame attempt at exonerating the Prophet from the results of his doctrines. We all owe him gratitude for this failure.

The damage Norberg does to his own cause comes not from what he writes in the article, but from what he does not write. The Klein exposure of the modus operandi of the Chicago Boys is not countered in any way. Either he is to lazy to make the effort or he has no arguments. As anyone, save Norberg, is aware of, the central rescue mission ought not to be Friedman the person, but Friedmans’s ideology – dressed up as ’science’ – and its implementation. This does not happen in the article.

It is obvious, from the limited scope of Norberg’s capabilities and efforts, that his argument relies upon that no one reads the original indictment against the Chicago Boys. Rather than taking on Kleins’s damaging account of Friedmanism, Norberg merely tries to dissociate Friedman from his Church and from its clergy of libertarians.

If this is what the Church and its officiants can muster in its defense it is obvious to anyone that the Prophet is naked. The clerics should, in shame, turn their faces away from the spectacle; the rest among us find ample reason to rejoice.

Bush on Human Rights

Bush the Brave is criticising China on their human rights record.

I have no quarrel with someone with credibility doing that, but Bush!?!? Is he the man to express anything but the most self-abnegating apologies on such matters, he with his record of creating an archipelago of detention camps, spanning the globe. He who started a war, based upon lies and false premises. Does he expect us to give him a standing ovation, or what?

This merely proves, as if necessary, that words and their relation to reality count for nought in the world of fantasy that Bush and his band of neocons have created for themselves.