v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Obama's demise

Chris Hedges writes at  TruthDig:

I suspect that from the get-go he had an inferiority complex with respect to the military,” Gravel, who was a first lieutenant in the Army, said of the president. “It is the same problem [Bill] Clinton had by not serving in the military, by not having an actual experience. You don’t have to go into combat, you just have to get into the military and recognize at the lower reaches how incompetent the military can be. So not having that experience, and only dealing with generals, who of course learn to be charming—it’s the sergeants who inflict the pain—he has this aura about the military. We have acculturated the nation to a military culture. This is the sadness of it all because that sustains the military-industrial complex.”

“Obama comes on the scene,” he added. “He is endorsed in the course of the campaign by some 19 generals and admirals. These people had no confidence in [George W.] Bush. They recognized that Bush’s unilateralism and cavalier approach to torture was injurious to the American military. They gravitated towards Obama. It turned his head. He thought he could be commander in chief and he could, he has the intelligence, but he does not have fortitude. He lacks courage.”

Time is rapidly running out. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the country struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt by 2010. This will require the United States to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which is inevitable, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as 2 trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. A backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will tear apart the social fabric, unleash chaos and violence, and strengthen the calls for more draconian measures by our security apparatus and military.

Pentagon profligacy

From In These Times, David Sirrota writes:

—The 2010 Pentagon budget means “every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year,” reports the Cato Institute. “By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.”

—”(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike,” reports Hearst Newspapers.

—”President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II,” reports National Journal’s Government Executive magazine.

—In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost—yes, lost—$2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Death Panels

From In These Times:

Cameron Willingham was put to death in February 2004, 12 years after being convicted of killing his three infant children in a fire at their Corsicana, Texas, home.

In August, the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) released a report that concluded none of the evidence from the fire indicated it was set intentionally and that the state fire marshal who testified the fire was arson lacked “any realistic understanding of fires.”

The IAFSS was asked to investigate the case by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which was created in 2005 to re-examine questionable forensic evidence. The TFSC plans to continue its examination of the fire, but admits the report is a “major step” toward exonerating all that is left of Willingham: his name.

As in any jury trial in the United States, Willingham, who maintained his innocence to the end, was convicted by a group of his peers—12 men and women who supposedly represented the community in which he lived. However, the prosecution in his case sought the death penalty, and that automatically changed the pool of people allowed to serve on his jury.

For capital cases in which the jury will debate whether or not to sentence a convicted defendant to death, the Supreme Court mandates that jurors be “death-qualified”—that is, they must pledge during the jury selection process that they morally support capital punishment and that they would have no problem signing a sentence that will result in the death of another human being.

Social science research indicates that this selection process seriously limits juries in capital cases to people who share similar moral viewpoints. During the last four decades, U.S. researchers have found that in capital cases the people most likely to be chosen during the jury selection process are those with “authoritarian” personality types—people who believe that strict enforcement of laws is needed to maintain social stability. Authoritarians follow convention. They think the function of disciplinary action is to control criminals. They predictably tend to convict anyone (both the guilty and the innocent) who is unfortunate enough to be indicted and brought to trial before a jury. In other words, they believe one is guilty until proven innocent, and are thus more likely to accept the prosecution’s case rather than the defendant’s.

Psychologist and litigation consultant Brooke Butler’s research has shown that those on death-qualified juries tend to believe in a fundamentally just world—people get what they deserve and that everything that happens in a person’s life is a direct result of things they control. She found that such jurors are more likely to make decisions based on aggravating circumstances (the morbid facts surrounding a victim’s death, etc.) rather than mitigating ones. They are more racist, sexist and homophobic than their unselected counterparts, and less likely to accept mental illness or age as a defense. Death-qualified jurors are typically “male, Caucasian, moderately well-educated, politically conservative, Catholic or Protestant, and middle-class,” she says.

Victoria Springer, social science researcher and sentencing expert, argues that the people with authoritarian personality types who are typically selected to serve on death-qualified juries will face a serious mental conflict. These pro-crime-control jurors are required to “adopt the attitude that the individual to be tried before them is innocent until proven guilty—which stands in direct opposition to their attitudes, orientation, and personality that has been specifically selected for.”

Obama Nobel

Juan Cole writes:

The Right in the US objected to Obama getting the peace prize on the alleged grounds that he had not yet done anything to deserve it. But the Right in the United States is to peace as velociraptors were to vegetarianism. They don't believe in the ideal for which the award stands in the first place. And they find President Obama laughable, so they can't imagine him getting any awards. They have underestimated him badly and will probably pay a price for that. They misunderstand the Nobel Peace Prize and its history, and the Rupert Murdoch Right (he pays for a lot of this pollution of our airwaves) would not have agreed with any of the past awards.

Alfred Nobel outlined in his will the grounds on which the Peace Prize was to be given, saying it should go annually to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses." The modern committee considers work toward the reduction of nuclear arsenals in the same light as the reduction of standing armies, hence its award to Linus Pauling.

The American Rightwing would not have approved of Woodrow Wilson getting the prize for helping found the League of Nations. They do not believe in international cooperation or multilateralism in the first place. They think America should cowboy it. They are the tribe of 'bring'em on' and 'wanted dead or alive.' They are about trapping the country in quagmires so as to throw cash to their cronies in the military-industrial complex. They like wars, not peace. They don't care how many people they kill in the global south. A million Iraqis dead? They deny it or justify it or blame it on someone else. They are bottom feeders.

They would have considered Frederic Passy, the first peace Nobelist, as woolly-headed dreamer and laughed at a Universal Peace Conference organized just a little over a decade before the mass slaughter of World War I. They would have dismissed Jane Addams as a "socialist." And what would have provoked them to more gales of laughter than the 1935 award to the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky. How'd that work out, they'd snicker as they elbowed each other (with any luck breaking some of each other's ribs). If there is anyone they find more laughable than Barack Obama, it is Jimmy Carter (the greatest ex-president in American history), the 2002 awardee. Mohammad Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly got in the way of the American Right's war plans, so presumably they didn't rejoice at his 2005 prize. They don't believe in climate change or global warming and want us to switch to the dirtiest coal possible, so Al Gore's 2007 prize set them giggling, as well.

Berlusconi gets closer to being declared a “Predator”

From Reporters Sans Fronteieres:

Berlusconi has been stepping up his harassment of the media and his attacks on press freedom in recent weeks. He has brought a 1-million-euro libel action against the newspaper La Repubblica because it has been pressing him for two months to respond to questions about his private life, in particular his relationships with a teenage girl and female escorts who say they have attended parties at his villas in Rome and Sardinia.

At the same time, the daily L’Unità is being sued for 3 million euros over its coverage of alleged corruption in connection with receptions organised for the prime minister.

Not content with trying to impose a positive and upbeat coverage of his activities on the state-owned media and the media owned by his Mediaset press empire, Berlusconi is now trying to dictate the coverage of the independent Italian media and international media. Lawsuits have been brought against the Spanish daily El País over photos of one of his parties and against the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur over a report headlined “Sex, power and lies” about the Russian mafia’s alleged infiltration into the leadership of the Italian government.

Berlusconi is also considering suits against Rupert Murdoch’s English-language newspapers, which could add to the conflict of interests arising from the fact that he is Italy’s premier and a media magnate at the same time.

“The European Union must clearly repudiate the abuses currently taking place in Italy and in other member countries,” Julliard said today. “We hope that the next EU summit on 29-30 October will be used to issue a reminder to everyone that Europe must be a space that is free of all press freedom violations.”

At the initiative of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and Niccolò Rinaldi, an Italian MEP affiliated to this group, the European Parliament has scheduled a debate about freedom of the press and information in Italy for its 7 October plenary session. The European Parliament’s leading political groups intend to use the debate to make it clear that the situation in Italy is of concern to the entire Union. It could result in a draft resolution that would be put to a vote at the plenary session in Strasbourg on 19-22 October.

Time to rumble

Thomas Frank at The Wall Street Journal:

Now that their summer of bluster is over, conservatives may congratulate themselves on a job well done. The stout-hearted defenders of freedom declared that government could never work, sometimes citing examples of misgovernment drawn from periods of conservative rule to make their case.

They deplored the prospect of government intrusion into the economy, ignoring the fact that our current troubles are the consequence of government's withdrawal from the economy. They insisted that every government action, due to some mysterious law of freedom physics, produces an equal and opposite diminution of personal liberty.

Although these accusations were often crudely posed, conservatives deserve credit for showing up to the debate. The same cannot be said of the Democrats.

In truth, there has been no better time for a vindication of activist, Rooseveltian government since the 1930s. The laissez-faire faith lies in pieces around us. Conservative dogmatism lay behind many of the Bush administration's worst blunders, including some of the monumental screw-ups to which conservative pundits point when denouncing government generally.

But that is not how the Democrats have chosen to respond. Instead, they pine for civility, pretending that the argument comes down to the scary rhetoric issuing from the right. "I have concerns about some of the language that is being used, because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it created a climate in which violence took place."

I have concerns about the rhetoric being used as well, and about the louts and the bullies who use it. But it seems clear that Mrs. Pelosi's aim is to avoid debate when she ought to be wading into the thick of it. Her team has the arguments; it has the facts; it has gale-force historical winds at its back: Why not give back as good as you get? Why not simply beat the other side instead of complaining tearfully that they play too rough?

Besides, retreating into some imagined genteel tradition offers little safety. For one thing, it goes against the old rough-and-tumble image of the Democratic Party and confirms instead the effete latte-and-sushi stereotype of recent years. For another, thanks to the 1960s and the Clinton presidency, morality and civility are concepts the right believes it owns. Republican legislators can heckle the president during a speech to a joint session of Congress and this will not change. No contradiction is stark enough to budge conservatives from the point: In fact, during the nation's last civility panic, even Ann Coulter was able to get in on the deploring.

President Obama, talking about his own civility concerns in an interview with CBS's Bob Schieffer on Sunday, said he understands that the health-care debate is a "proxy for a broader set of issues about how much government should be involved in our economy." What's strange is that he apparently doesn't believe he needs to take a side on those broader issues. Instead, he used his many interviews on Sunday to dodge those issues altogether, to insist that he isn't really proposing a grand scheme of government involvement at all, that those who worry about such things needn't be concerned.

Mr. Obama is probably the greatest orator my generation has produced; he swept into office last year with more of a mandate than any president since Ronald Reagan. Mrs. Pelosi commands a large majority in the House of Representatives. Both are talented politicians at the zenith of their careers. Facts and stories that make the liberal case are conveniently at hand-in every paper's headlines, in every voter's personal experiences.

Their opponents, meanwhile, have responded to the economic crisis by doubling down on the bad ideas that got us here in the first place. Their most prominent representative is the conspiracy-minded TV weeper Glenn Beck.

The health-care showdown should have been a one-sided blowout. And yet it is the Democrats who are running to the playground monitor and watching their support drain away.

Why? Because from the beginning they have understood the problem primarily as a technical consumer issue, not a bid for social justice in a manifestly unjust time. In their criticism of the insurance industry they have largely avoided terms like "profiteering" in favor of dry talk about lower costs and more competition-hardly an ideal platform from which to launch a crusade.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have been crusading nonstop since the days of Barry Goldwater. Every economic issue is a grand moral issue for them-this particular one, even in its lukewarm Senate Finance Committee version, is "a stunning assault on liberty," according to Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.)-and until liberals are prepared to contest those terms, they will have to live with a little incivility.

Sustainable democracy

An editorial at The Seattle Times by Elvia Valle, a member of the Honduran Congress:

Like many fellow Hondurans, I suffered the repression of the 1970s dictatorships firsthand. In 1975, I had to flee into exile for seven years with my husband after the regime targeted him for his involvement with labor and peasant movements. The coup d'etat and the repression that has followed have brought back terrible memories of a time that we hoped was buried in the past. The coup has also been the moral downfall of Micheletti, who through his actions destroyed the democratic credentials he had built over his career. Our Constitution does not allow Congress to remove a president from office, as it did under Micheletti's direction on June 28. The judicial actions invoked to justify the detention of the president also go against our Constitution. Micheletti's regime deported President Zelaya from the country without even trying him for an alleged crime, something to which even the worst criminal has a right.

Moreover, on top of being unconstitutional, the vote to approve the destitution of Zelaya was not transparent. I am a member of our Congress' Executive Committee, yet I was not summoned to participate in the vote to approve the president's removal, nor were another 20 fellow Liberal Party members of Congress. The regime then tried to fool the world by claiming there was a unanimous congressional decision supporting the coup, even though some 27 congress members publicly voiced their opposition.

The international community has rejected the de facto regime's belated legal, moral and political justifications for the coup. This was not only a coup d'etat against President Zelaya, but a coup against all the leaders and institutions of the Americas. It could have a destabilizing effect on the region, and act as a distraction from grave problems such as terrorism, poverty and climate change.

The question remains: How far is the Obama administration willing to go to pressure the de facto government? If it stands by and allows the consolidation of the coup, Latin American leaders will have serious doubts about the administration's intentions to rebuild diplomatic and political relations with other countries, and to its commitment to democracy.

Clearly, what is needed from the United States are targeted sanctions, designed in a way that will avoid hurting the poor, but will pressure the coup plotters to accept the proposal of Costa Rican president and mediator Oscar Arias, which President Zelaya has already endorsed. The U.S. should freeze the de facto regime leaders' U.S.-based assets, and revoke their visas, as the U.S. State Department has already started to do.

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A Peaceful Affair

From the Mercury News, in an "opinion" piece by Dana Frank:

A myth has already taken root about the June 28 military coup in which Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was carted off to Costa Rica: that it's been a quiet, peaceful affair and hardly anyone's been hurt. Despite enormous evidence to the contrary, many commentators are now even referring to a "bloodless coup," or, worse, suggesting that Honduras is already such a violent country that any further violence is just normal.

But human rights groups and numerous other outside observers report that at least a dozen people have been killed for their political activities since the coup, more than 3,500 detained for peacefully demonstrating, and hundreds beaten while in custody. There's plenty of blood flowing, just one indication of the massive wave of repression ripping through Honduras.

In the face of these crimes, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton need to stop equivocating and not just withdraw aid but also immediately withdraw the U.S. ambassador, freeze the bank accounts of the oligarchs running the coup and immediately restore President Manuel Zelaya to his full powers.

Most Americans are not aware that when the coup began, the military immediately occupied all major government buildings, took over hospitals, the immigration service and border enforcement, and, most ominously, superseded police and elected authorities.

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Nepotism to the core

From Andrew Sullivan, some honest to goodness truth:

Late empires are known for several things: a self-obsessed, self-serving governing class, small over-reaching wars that bankrupt the Treasury, debt that balloons until retreat from global power becomes not a choice but a necessity, and a polity unable to address reasonably any of these questions - or how the increasing corruption of the media enables them all.

Obama is, in some ways, a test-case.

He was elected on a clear platform of reform and change; and yet the only real achievement Washington has allowed him so far is a massive stimulus package to prevent a Second Great Depression (and even on that emergency measure, no Republicans would support him). On that he succeeded. But that wasn't reform; it was a crash landing after one of the worst administrations in America's history.

Real reform - tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it - except to their own families and cronies. 

Nepotism is part of the problem; media corruption is also part; the total uselessness of the Democratic party and the nihilism of the Republicans doesn't help. But something is rotten in America at this moment in time; and those of us who supported Obama to try and change this decay and decline should use this fall to get off our butts and fight for change.

Interview with John Gray

From Politico's Bookshop:

Q-Why is your new book called Black Mass?

Gray-There are two main reasons. I wanted a title that expressed the central theme of the book, which is also a key theme of modern history - the political perversion of religion. A black mass is the Christian Mass performed backwards, and the most destructive movements of the last few centuries have been political religions that exploit a Christian myth of Apocalypse to promote a utopian vision of heaven on earth. From the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, Russian anarchists to American neo-conservatives, radical Islamists to neo-liberal evangelists for a global free market - modern politics has been ruled by repressed or inverted versions of apocalyptic religion.

The other reason is a piece of music. I am a great fan of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose Ninth Piano Sonata (opus 68) "Black Mass" must be one of the most unnerving musical compositions ever. It has a dark, demonic energy of a kind I imagine animated Lenin, Hitler and Mao. The idea of calling the book after it came from conversations with Simon Winder, my Editor at Penguin, who is also an admirer of Scriabin.

Q-Do you see this book as building directly on your previous, highly successful books or is it a new departure?

Gray-There are continuities with my earlier books, but Black Mass moves into new territory. In False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, I presented a view of globalisation that was radically different from the rosy picture presented by most politicians and many business-oriented writers, arguing that while it made the world more interconnected it did not make it any freer or safer: we had to be prepared for high levels of conflict. In Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern I suggested that, far from being a throwback to medieval times, Al Qaeda was actually a by-product of globalisation — and thereby uniquely modern.

In Black Mass I take this analysis much further, suggesting that the shift from mythical thinking to a rational world-view, which most people think occurred in modern times with the triumph of the Enlightenment, never actually happened. In its most radical forms, Enlightenment thinking embodies myths that go back to the origins of Christianity and beyond. Though they claim to be based in science, the belief in Utopia and the ideas of human progress that fuel modern politics are secular versions of religious faith - for example, the current belief in unlimited growth is a by-product of a monotheist conception of humans as masters of the planet. At the start of the twenty-first century these secular myths are dead or dying, and in many parts of the world people are turning to fundamentalist versions of religion. In this connection the war in Iraq has been a crossover point, since while it began as a secular project — partly a crusade for democracy, partly an oil grab — it has turned into an intractable sectarian conflict.

Q-If there was one thing which you would like Black Mass's readers to have lodged permanently in their brain, what would that be?

Gray-Perhaps I can answer by mentioning a story I tell in the second chapter. In the mid-1920s Stalin commissioned a Russian scientist — actually he was not much of a scientist; he was a horse-breeder by trade — to develop a new type of human being through experiments in crossbreeding humans and apes. Stalin wanted a new type of soldier that needed less food and sleep than any human and lacked normal human feelings. Once this new type of human had been created, Stalin believed, it could be used to entrench and extend his power.

Of course the experiments failed, but they illustrate the most important idea in Black Mass: with the advance of knowledge humanity does not become more reasonable, or more benevolent. The growth of knowledge simply enables humans to pursue their goals — good and bad — more effectively. The growth of knowledge is at the back of our current prosperity and increased lifespan, but growing knowledge is also the ultimate source of climate change and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This duality will always be with us, for it reflects a conflict in ourselves.