Empire Burlesque
Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium
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Written by Chris Floyd   
Thursday, 25 February 2010 15:43

To borrow the deathless phraseology of Professor AbuKhalil: for those who care and do not care, my interview with Scott Horton at Antiwar Radio can be heard here.

As usual, Scott led the conversation in several interesting directions, to which I made the usual rambling, semi-coherent contributions.  But one thing I did try to put forth was the idea of a "united front" across the political spectrum, dedicated to a single, overarching goal: dismantling the empire. Much evil would cease, and many good things would flow from such a development.

I worked up some notes on the matter before the talk, and added some more thoughts afterward; these are appended below. Much of this is an expansion and refinement of some ideas mentioned in a recent post, so I hope you'll forgive any repetition. But that original piece dealt with other topics as well, and I thought this idea merited a spotlight of its own. So here it is.

Dissidents and critics of the powers that be are often accused of being negative – tearing things down, undermining, never offering a positive alternative vision. Now, I happen to disagree with this. I believe that people who work in waste management – clearing away the garbage, the poisons, the crap – are just as important to the life and health of a community as, say, an architect who makes the community beautiful, or a teacher who educates the young, or doctors who heal the sick and so on.

But – it so happens that I do have a positive program to offer, a viable, workable, practical approach to many of our problems. This is what my program offers:

Lower  taxes
Stronger national security
More jobs
Greater prosperity
Higher wages
Better schools, roads, and health care
Less government
Safer streets

What's more, this program requires no social upheaval, no political turmoil, no violence – no revolution from either Left or Right. It can be accomplished entirely within the existing political and economic system. It needs no new government powers, no new bureaucracies, no new taxes.

All it requires is simply this: Bring America Home. End our worldwide military empire.

As I noted the other day, ending America's imperial wars and dismantling America's global military empire – and its global gulag -- would save trillions of dollars in the coming years. Not only from cuts in direct military spending, but also from the vastly reduced need for "Homeland security" funding in a world where the United States was no longer invading foreign lands, killing their people, supporting their tyrants -- and inciting revenge and resistance.

This would release a flood of money for any number of new domestic initiatives, while also giving scope for deep tax cuts across the board. Working people would thrive, the poor, the sick and the vulnerable would be better off, businesses would grow, opportunity would expand, the care and education of our children would be greatly enhanced, our infrastructure could be repaired and strengthened, our environment better cleansed and cared for. The end of empire would also mean an end to the horrendous economic distortion wrought by our war-profiteering industries. Other businesses would inevitably come to the fore, economic activity would be spread more evenly across more sectors.

In short, people could keep more of their own money while government spending could be directed toward improving the quality of life of all the nation's citizens.

Now, this is not some pie-in-the-sky dream. We all have our own ideas and beliefs about what consitutes the good life, or the best kind of society. And in a post-empire America, there would be plenty of scope for heated debate on all kinds of issues; ideological conflicts, 'culture wars,' partisan wrangling, would go on. And of course there would still be injustice, corruption, and much suffering in society. So we're not talking about a utopia.

But – it would be a better society than it is now. It would be more humane, more just, more secure, more peaceful, more sustainable, more prosperous than it is now. And all our culture wars and political conflicts would take place in a healthier context, in a freer land, where the focus is on "the pursuit of happiness," not the "projection of dominance" around the world.

This alternative is entirely achievable, by ordinary human beings. It requires no miracles, no god-like heroes or messianic leaders to bring it about. We could easily dismantle the empire – carefully, safely, with proper planning and deliberation – over the next 10 years.

So that's my blueprint for a better future: Bring America Home. It's not revolution, it's not rocket science, it's not dogmatic or doctrinaire. You could support this and still be a Democrat or a Republican, a Baptist or a Marxist, a Muslim or a Jew, a Libertarian or a Green, an environmentalist or an industrialist, a physicist or an alchemist, a soldier or a pacificist – because it's not about trying to build the perfect society, it's not about promulgating, promoting -- or imposing -- a wide-ranging agenda or particular set of policies. It's about taking a single, simple step that will automatically make life better than it is today – for Americans, and for the rest of the world.

Of course, as I noted to Scott, although this vision is itself very reasonable, practicable, doable -- heck, downright serious, moderate and bipartisan, even, as we are told we must be in order to "get things done" -- what is perhaps utopian is the idea that our political and media elites would allow this message to be heard. As I put it in that earlier piece (with a few additions here):

But [a post-imperial] society is precisely what our elites cannot -- or, to be more accurate, will not -- imagine. Because, yes, it would "erode" their "influence" around the world -- to some extent, at least. Although they would still be comfortable, coddled and privileged far beyond the dreams of ordinary people, they could no longer merge their individual psyches with the larger entity of a globe-spanning, death-dealing empire -- a connection which, although itself a projection of their own brains, gives them a forever-inflated sense of worth and importance.


So they will fight tooth and nail, with every weapon they have -- and they've got 'em all -- to resist any message that threatens their "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined" minds. They will, as they have always done, trivialize, marginalize, mock, dismiss and demonize anyone who even questions the wisdom of maintaining a global empire of up to 1,000 military installations in more than 100 countries -- and the bloated, belligerent war machine required to support and expand this global military dominance.

They will also, as they have always done, use the ancient imperial tactic of "divide and conquer," setting the opponents of empire against each other: "Ooh, you're a liberal, how can you cozy up to a reactionary like Ron Paul?" "Oh come on, you're a conservative; you want to jump in bed with a commie America-hater like Noam Chomsky?" And so on and so forth.

But that is one thing in favor of a single-minded approach. No one has to "marry" anyone else politically; no one has to embrace every tenet or belief that an anti-imperialist ally might hold. You simply have to say: "All of us, regardless of our other views, believe this truth to be self-evident: dismantling the empire will bring immediate and enormous benefits to our nation and to the world."

And the plain fact is that America's military empire is unsustainable. It is going to be diminished, degraded and finally lost, one way or another, at some point or another. The only question is whether Americans want to control that process themselves -- to dismantle their empire carefully, responsibly, and beneficially, on their own terms, in a way that would renew the nation's prosperity and opportunity -- or if they want to see it collapse around their ears, in blood and ruin, blighting their lives and the lives of their children for generations.

And speaking in strictly political terms, a one-plank program that guaranteed lower taxes, more jobs, more security and all the other benefits enumerated above sounds to me like a winning hand. It's certainly one worth laying on the table

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Much Darkness, Many Candles: What I Can Do
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Written by Chris Floyd   
Thursday, 25 February 2010 00:49

 

I put together this piece -- more like a fragment perhaps -- a few months ago, but I thought it might have some relevance, at some points at least, to current events in Haiti.

As for what you can do, I would suggest continuing to support Partners in Health, which had more than 5,000 people working at the grassroots level in Haiti before the quake. No fair weather friend -- or foul weather tourist -- there. As Ashley Smith notes in a devastating report on the militarist-corporatist--NGO symbiosis that has devastated Haiti for years and is serving it extremely ill in the aftermath of the earthquake:

While some NGOs like Partners in Health have done and are doing amazing work to provide services for quake victims, overall, the catastrophe in Haiti revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry.

As many analysts have noted, the U.S. in fact used its "relief" operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to prevent a flood of refugees reaching the U.S., impose even greater sweatshop development on Haiti, and signal to the rest of Latin America, the Caribbean and the world's most powerful governments that U.S. aims to reassert its power in the region.

As a result, relief aid from the U.S. has played second fiddle to its imperial ambitions--and the NGO-centered aspect of its response is an important part of its strategy.


Smith goes on to relate, in grim detail, a long, sad history of how many NGOs (but by no means all) have long played handmaiden to the domination agenda of the Potomac Imperium -- a record that has been particularly destructive in Haiti. For example:

[Mike] Davis argues that NGOs are, in fact, a form of "soft imperialism." They play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide moral cover -- a civilizing mission of helping the hapless heathens -- for the powers that are plundering the society. And just as religious institutions justified imperial war, many NGOs, abandoning their traditional standpoint of neutrality in conflicts, have become advocates of military intervention.

Nowhere is this pattern more clear than in Haiti. The U.S. convinced the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier in the 1980s to implement a neoliberal development plan which Haitians call "the plan of death," which dropped tariffs on American agriculture, encouraged sweatshop development in Port-au-Prince and opened tourist resorts for the international elite.

Predictably, the plan produced a social catastrophe; it increased absolute poverty by 60 percent. But the Haitian poor, workers and peasants rose up to build a mass movement, Lavalas, that eventually elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of anti-neoliberal reform.

The U.S. saw Aristide's mild reformism as a threat, backed a coup in 1991 and used the coup regime's reign of terror to crush the Lavalas social movement. It also convinced Aristide to implement the "plan of death" as the condition of his restoration in 1994. Under threat from the U.S., Aristide and his successor, René Préval implemented much of the plan.

The U.S. used yet another coup against Aristide in 2004 and another coup regime to force through the rest of the plan. Now, Haiti has the most neoliberal economy in Latin American and the Caribbean.


And let us not forget that Barack Obama -- the progressive, Peace Prize-winning humanitarian in the White House -- appointed the man whose administration orchestrated that 2004 coup (and whose father orchestrated the 1991 coup) as the public face of America's "humanitarian mission" to Haiti ... along with the man who, in 1994, re-imposed the "Plan of Death" on the Haitian people. Yes, it's hard to beat your progressive humanitarians when it comes to brutal, blatant cynicism.

Smith goes on to note:

While some NGOs like Partners in Health have been set up to develop Haitian grassroots self-organization and control, most major NGOs have been accomplices in the neoliberal catastrophe the U.S. wrought in Haiti. ...

Anthropologist Timothy Schwartz documents the disastrous impact of the NGOs in his book Travesty in Haiti. In particular, he shows how CARE International -- which claimed its mission in Haiti was to provide food aid to the "poorest of the poor" -- not only failed in its mission, but also actually exacerbated the food crisis.

When the U.S. implemented its "plan of death" in Haiti, which undercut peasant agriculture and flooded the market with subsidized U.S. products, it caused a food crisis. Peasants were no longer able to find a market for their produce, and were therefore thrust into poverty, often unable to meet their own food needs because of their collapsed standard of living. They then became dependent on food aid.

USAID, in turn, funded CARE International to feed the impoverished peasants. The NGO began to distribute U.S. crops as food aid, during both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants ability to compete for the market. Often, the food aid was taken by local elites and sold on the market, with the CARE brand still affixed to the packaging. CARE seemed to care so little that it never really followed up on the consequences of its food aid program.

Meanwhile, it put on conferences in fancy hotels inside and outside Haiti for its U.S. government and corporate backers. Schwartz writes that this amounted to "a perversion of American charitable ideals, with its false claims to be aiding 'the poorest of the poor' when what it was really doing was throwing exquisite banquets at plush hotels, while carrying out U.S. political policy in the interests of international venture capitalist and industrialists."These NGOs are non-governmental only in name. Peter Hallward documents inDamming the Flood that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other similar government bureaucracies from other countries provide 70 percent of the funding for NGOs. The other 30 percent comes from corporate formations and individual contributors.

Unsurprisingly, as Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on."

... The Marine Gen. Smedley Butler from the early decades of the 20th century said he served as a "racketeer for capitalism." The same could just as easily be applied to the NGOs and humanitarian aid today--it is a racket for empire.


But again, there are many people and organizations fighting the good fight in Haiti, with Haitians, and they are in desperate need of support as the vast tragedy there deepens, away from the obscene trivialities ("Tiger Repents!") that dominate the American media.

So if you want to share that dreadful burden, support groups like Partners in Health and the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

(For more on Haiti, see here, here and here.)

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Many Thousand Gone
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Written by Chris Floyd   
Monday, 22 February 2010 17:51

The humanitarian march of civilization goes on, and on, and on, and on .....

A NATO helicopter airstrike on Sunday against what international troops believed to be a group of insurgents ended up killing as many as 27 civilians in the worst such case since at least September, Afghan officials said Monday. ...

The attack was carried out by United States Special Forces helicopters that were patrolling the area hunting for insurgents who had escaped the NATO offensive in the Marja area, about 150 miles away, according to Gen. Abdul Hameed, an Afghan National Army commander in Dehrawood, which is part of Oruzgan Province. General Hameed, interviewed by telephone, said there had been no request from any ground forces to carry out an attack. ....

Zemarai Bashary, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the victims were all civilians who were attacked by air while traveling in two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck, which carried 42 people in all ...


How dare these people go about in motor vehicles in their own land! Don't they know there's a war on?

Fortunately, the ever-apologetic commander of the Humanitarian Expeditionary League of Love (HELL), General Stanley "Black Ops" McChrystal, was quickly wheeled out once again to apologize profusely for "the tragic loss of innocent lives." Well, as long as you're sorry, that's OK.

But really, Barack Obama's vaunted "Nobel Peace Surge" in Afghanistan is churning out collateral damage at such a clip that Stan should probably just go ahead and schedule a regular "Oops" conference on, say, every Friday, so he can dole out a one-stop dollop of crocodile tears for all the week's atrocities. He's a busy man, after all; it takes a lot of time and energy to lead the forces of HELL.

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Supporting Arthur Silber
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Written by Chris Floyd   
Wednesday, 24 February 2010 11:06

Arthur Silber has surfaced briefly, to bring word that he is still with us -- which is great news -- but also that he is still suffering horribly from very serious health issues. As we've often noted here before, Arthur's blog is his sole means of support, and thus his long, illness-induced silences inevitably cut deeply into his traffic, and his contributions -- and precisely when support is most urgently needed. It's a vicious cycle, so if you have any cash to spare to help break it, head on over to Arthur's place and lay some coinage on him.

While you are there, do yourself the favor of browing the archives and the highlighted posts and series, where you will find yourself engaged with one of the toughest, most trenchant minds of our time.

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Teach Your Children Well: There Is No Law but Might and Murder
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Written by Chris Floyd   
Saturday, 20 February 2010 01:22

This is the lesson that the United States government -- the government of the historic progressive, Barack Obama -- taught the children of America today:

"Children, the law is nothing but a rag smeared with blood and shit.

"It is only for suckers, rubes and losers.

"Claw your way to the top -- by any means necessary -- and the law can never touch you.

"This is the American way."


Yes, as the Washington Post reports, the United States government announced today that there will be no penalties whatsoever for the lawyers who were ordered by their superiors, George Bush and Dick Cheney, to write memos "justifying" the tortures that Bush and Cheney wanted to unleash upon captives held indefinitely without charges, without evidence, without trial, without rights.

Dick Cheney has openly confessed to instructing his pathetic little minions, his nasty little modern-day Vyshinksys, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to write the scraps of paper of twisted legalese meant to pre-emptively exonerate the top officials of the United States government for the unambiguously criminal actions they were to inflict upon their uncharged, untried prisoners -- some of whom had actually been purchased, like slaves, from traffickers in human bodies -- around the world. Cheney boasts openly of supporting and facilitating torture techniques -- such as waterboarding -- which have historically been prosecuted as high crimes by American authorities, and are, in fact, capital crimes under the laws of the United States today.

But on Friday, February 19, 2010, the administration of President Barack Obama declared that not only will it not prosecute the avowed and boastful perpetrators and accomplices of the capital crime of torture, it will not impose even the mildest of administrative or professional reprimands upon them. For the foulest of tortures, reaching even to murder, the government of the United States will do nothing: no investigation, no prosecution, no penalty.

I have run out of words to describe how vile this is. The mind recoils against fully comprehending the moral depravity of our leaders -- and the reeking stench of their pious hypocrisy.

"The kinge is in this worlde without lawe and maye at his own lust doo right and wronge and shall geve acomptes but to God only." Thus William Tyndale, in his 1528 work, Obedience of a Christian Man, helped usher in the doctrine of the "divine right of kings," overthrowing centuries of political, religious and philosophical thought and practice which had insisted that rulers too were fully subject to the law, as A.D. Nuttall points out. In support of the latter, he quotes Richard Hooker -- no radical, but a "profoundly traditional" churchman: "Where the lawe doth give dominion, who doubteth that the King who receiveth it is under the lawe?" (Shakespeare the Thinker, p. 140.)

But in our degenerate day, Hooker's reasonable formulation has been waterboarded into oblivion, and we are back to Tyndale's cringing doctrine. Our bipartisan kinges are indeed without lawe: no penalty, no punishment for these vile malefactors, these barbaric abusers and corrupters of our children.

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