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by Paul Cienfuegos
Eugene, OR
May 16, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Paul Cienfuegos deliver this address here.

Paul Cienfuegos lectures and leads workshops on dismantling corporate rule. He co-founded Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County in northern California. He’s based in Portland, Oregon, where he’s working to build a community rights movement..

What I want more than anything else in the world is for we the people of these United States to figure out how to bring authentic participatory democracy to this country. I totally believe that we could create a society where local communities have the right to define what they want to look like in the future, have the right to govern themselves, the right of self-government. If cities and towns had these rights, they could pass laws that would protect their communities in a whole variety of ways: laws which would guarantee the right to defend the safety of their drinking water, laws which would guarantee the right to keep their air and their soil free from poisons, the right to decide what kind of economies they want, the right to a sustainable future with sufficient renewable energy for all, the right to have meaningful work and a livable wage.

By governing authority, I don’t just mean the right to vote for a candidate who just so happened to raise more money than their opponent did. I mean the kind of governing authority that is talked about at the beginning of every state constitution in the country. Here’s the first paragraph of the state constitution of Oregon.

Section 1. Natural rights inherent in people. We declare that all men, when they form a social compact are equal in right: that all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness; and they have at all times the right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.

Imagine if we the people of this state and every state started to take that language to heart and to insist that all power really is inherent in the people. I’m here to speak to you about an extraordinary political development taking place in this country in more than 120 communities in six Northeastern states—Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, Maryland, and Massachusetts. More than 120 communities which have made a truly profound shift in the way they think about themselves. More than 120 communities which have passed historically ground- breaking local ordinances that give the people of those places the right to govern themselves, the right to decide and then to create the kind of community they want to leave to their children and grandchildren and seven generations beyond them and so on. What’s most intriguing to me is that many of these are rural, conservative, Republican communities.

I have been a community organizer for more than three decades, and this is the most exciting and profound shift in American politics I have ever seen. But before I share more details about this, I want to first explore with you the political state, the legal state, but also the emotional state of all of the other communities in this country; to reflect on what hasn’t yet happened in all of those other towns and cities, which are still feeling mostly powerless. I want to start by asking you a few questions to ponder. Why is it such a stretch for we the people of almost every community in this country to actually envision this kind of potential? Why is it such a stretch for you, the people of Eugene and neighboring towns, to not only imagine what sort of community you want to live in but actually to envision the steps you might take to get there? How did it come to pass that we the people of this country, born out of revolution, have become totally locked out of the rooms where pretty much every decision is made that affects all of our lives? And just as important a question that needs to be asked and then grappled with, what steps do we need to take to place ourselves back at the center of power, to create governing structures that offer authentic democratic decision making as the normal way of building sustainable communities together? I don’t believe we have any other choice but to grapple with these huge questions, and quickly, while there is still possibly sufficient time left to respond to the ecological crises, the social crises, and the economic crises that are engulfing us on planet Earth.

To respond boldly to these crises, we are going to have to make a kind of commitment that we’re not used to making. Here are three things we’re going to have to commit to if we want our grandchildren to have a healthy future.

Number one, we are going to have to step out of our comfort zone and get really honest with ourselves about how our economic privilege and our skin-color privilege directly affect those of us who don’t have these privileges and thus struggle every day in ways many of us can scarcely imagine.

Number two, we’re going to have to step out of our comfort zone and start mingling with and building authentic relationships with people who think very differently about the world than we do. Simply networking with like-minded people isn’t going to cut it.

Signing online petitions with thousands of our political allies isn’t going to cut it. Marching in opposition to this issue or that issue and then going back to the comfort of our private lives isn’t going to cut it. Hoping or assuming that other people who have more time than we do will solve these problems for us isn’t going to cut it. Very few liberals and leftists and Greens have ever had a single conversation with a Tea Party activist. It’s way more fun to mock the Tea Party, to make insulting comments about his how stupid or politically naïve they are. The same is generally true in the reverse direction. This kind of behavior is the perfect way to guarantee that majorities can never be built across that supposedly huge political divide.

And who benefits the most when we behave in this way? The very, very small minority of mostly very wealthy white men who make all of the governing decisions in this country. Divide and conquer. It works so well. It always has. And it always will, until we recognize it for what it really is: It’s the most effective method the system has to keep we the people fighting each other instead of realizing how much common ground exists between us.

Here are just two examples of the substantial common ground that exists between so-called left- and right-wing Americans.

Number one, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed to the continuing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. A president who ended these two occupations would be wildly popular. No surprise when you remember that about half of all your tax dollars go to a bloated military budget. Half. The federal government will lie to you and tell you it’s much smaller than that, but it isn’t true. You can view the actual budget numbers by going to the website of the War Resisters League.

Number two, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed to those endless international trade agreements that both Republicans and Democrats love to pass—trade agreements which have destroyed the industrial base of this nation and caused massive environmental harm. They have names like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and GATT, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan ran a very effective campaign years ago on this issue. So did Ralph Nader running as a Green. So did Libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul in the last election. Even candidate Obama ran against so-called free trade agreements in 2008, because he knew that most Americans oppose them.

So here we have two issues of enormous political importance that affect all of us: U.S. policy and spending on war, and trade agreements that wreck our economy and our environment. And on both issues the vast majority of Americans, both left and right, are in full agreement. Given that fact, you would think that active citizens from across the political spectrum would be working closely together to end these ridiculous policies. But you would be wrong. We have been divided and conquered. The left and the right would rather be booing and hissing at each other. It’s way less work and way more fun. And then we can act outraged that those crazy people on the other side of the fence are the cause of the problems. Divide and conquer. It’s such a great strategy. It works so well. It always has.

What would it take to break out of this way of thinking and acting? What would it take to find that common ground between us rather than focusing on the issues which divide us? On these two issues we the people are almost all on the same side. Who cares if a majority of us can’t agree on everything? What matters to me is that we stop losing almost every battle that we’re fighting. I want my democracy back.

Earlier in my speech I said there were three things that we’re going to have to commit to if there’s going to be any hope of solving the great problems that we face. The first one was the urgency of stepping out of our comfort zone and looking squarely at our own economic privilege and skin-color privilege. The second was the urgency of building real relationships with people who think very differently than we do.

Here’s number three. We are going to have to get a lot more honest with each other about whether our existing activism is up to the task. We need to really think about this with our colleagues in whatever issues of concern we are actively working on. Is our existing activism to end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan getting us any closer to ending those occupations? Is our activism to protect the safety of our drinking water actually producing safer drinking water? Is our activism to stop the planting of GMO crops actually stopping the planting of GMO crops? Is our activism to try to ensure this all Americans have comprehensive, affordable health care actually moving us in that direction? Is our activism to end our dependence on fossil fuels before they’re in short supply actually causing our fossil fuel use to start dropping dramatically? Is our activism to get corporate money out of our elections actually succeeding in getting corporate money out of our elections? As far as I can tell, the answers to all of these questions are the same. No. Our activism is not achieving its aims, even though more and more people are battling more and more single-issue crises each and every year.

The central question that everyone here needs to be asking themselves, and soon, is this: How can we the people get a lot more effective, and quickly, in order to tackle the enormous problems we’re facing? What should we be doing differently, and when are we going to start?

Our communities are under assault day in and day out, mostly by large corporations, whose decision makers don’t give a hoot what we want for our communities; and by higher levels of government that seem to be in cahoots with the corporate decision makers. We’ve been taught that we need to respond to each corporate assault one at a time. But the assaults just keep coming. There are assaults on our air, and our water, and our food, and our soil, and our economy, and our elections, and our health, and our climate.

Many of you are experts in responding to assaults one at a time, right? What kind of actions do we almost always try to do to stop the ongoing assaults? We organize rallies and marches and pickets. We organize letter-writing campaigns to government and corporate officials. We organize endless online petitions. In other words, we beg, we plead, we demand of some higher government or corporate power holder. We place ourselves below them. We act powerless. This is the nature of single-issue activism. Remember that line in the very first paragraph in the state constitution, “that all power is inherent in the people”? What if all of these single issues we’re working on are merely symptoms of what happens when we the people forget who we are, symptoms of what happens when we the people fail to exercise our power?

Remember that I told you right at the beginning of my talk that more than 120 communities in this country had made a profound shift in the way they see themselves? Every one of these places had spent years battling corporate assaults on their communities until one day they said, Enough is enough. If our elected officials at the state and federal level won’t pass the laws we need to protect the health and welfare of our communities, we will. One community after another started passing local ordinances that are designed to defend their right of local self-government. They’re working closely with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund based in Pennsylvania, which is helping them to draft these ordinances.

I’m going to spend the rest of my talk focusing on these local democratic uprisings. I want you to listen very carefully to what these communities are doing, because Eugene and Springfield and Cottage Grove and Corvallis and Albany and any other town or city in this country could be following in their footsteps. What they’re doing is fundamentally different from single-issue activism. They have stepped outside of the existing paradigm that tells them that they are powerless to stop these corporate assaults on their communities. They are refusing to abide by the threats being shouted at them by corporate lawyers and state governors and state attorneys general, who are all insisting that they do not have the legal authority to pass these laws. They are committing community-wide acts of civil disobedience. They are breaking existing laws openly and bodily, daring corporate and governmental officials to try to stop them.

It started in Wells Township, a rural conservative community of just 500 people in Pennsylvania, where the townsfolk got sick and tired of pleading with state government to stop corporate hog farm factories from setting up shop in their town. The townsfolk discovered that if they used the regulatory law structures they had always been told were their only option for opposing these operations, that all they could do was testify about the specific harms of the proposal, such as how the inevitable Wal-Mart-sized lakes of manure would be managed. They didn’t want to testify about lakes of manure; they wanted to say, No, we don’t want these massive 15,000-head hog factories in our town. So they abandoned the dead-end regulatory process and stopped begging the state to protect them and instead pass a local anti-corporate farming ordinance in September of 1999 that banned corporate engagement in farm factories.

Five other Pennsylvania townships passed similar ordinances over the next year. Other towns quickly followed their lead, passing ordinances that banned corporations from engaging in other types of activities, such as mining, logging, groundwater extraction for bottling, dumping of urban sewage sludge on farmland, et cetera.

Jumping ahead to today, in order to give you up-to- date details, I am thrilled to report to you that there are now cities and towns in six states—Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Maryland, and Massachusetts—which have thus far passed similar initiatives. As you can imagine, this growing number of local ordinance did not go unnoticed by the state government or the corporations they were trying to exclude, which started making threats against the communities and claiming they didn’t have the legal authority to pass such laws. Which just further irritated the locals and their elected officials, who, let’s not forget, were elected to defend the interests of the local inhabitants. The heavy-handed responses from state government and corporate attorneys just made the local communities more interested than ever in understanding how it could be that they had ended up with so little power to govern themselves at the local level when everyone had been taught in school that all power is inherent in the people.

At this point the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund started offering sessions they called “democracy schools,” which uncovered an extraordinary history that few people knew. I offer similar workshops, and I would be delighted to offer one here or anywhere that there’s sufficient interest. The residents of these communities learned that under the existing paradigm of the U.S. legal system, people have very little power to stop what they don’t want in their communities. Federal law trumps state law. State law trumps local law. The whole system is based on English common law, which was designed to preempt and centralize power in the hands of a few.

We may have been taught that the Constitution is a great and wise document that enshrines all sorts of rights for people, but that’s actually not true at all. What it enshrines is private property rights and protections for the free flow of commerce. None of us should be surprised by this, given that the people who drafted it were some of the richest landholders in the country.

James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, believed that the primary role of government was “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Madison was the main author of the Constitution. When the Constitution was finally completed behind doors that were literally locked and we the people got to read it for the first time, the primary response across the colonies was outrage. And thus began a demand from the citizens of this country to add what became the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, which we now refer to as the Bill of Rights.

Again, most Americans assume that these 10 amendments guarantee us all sorts of rights, like free speech. But that’s not quite true either. These amendments do protect our rights against infringement by our government. But government is no longer the only powerful institution in this country. Corporations can sometimes now eclipse government power. Corporations violate our constitutional rights all the time, and the Constitution says nothing about those violations of our rights. Every day corporations violate our free-speech rights, our rights against unreasonable search and seizure, our contract rights, and our property rights. It’s an absolutely fascinating history that all of us really need to know if we’re going to exercise our right to local self-government.

There are a number of specific legal barriers that are used quite effectively to stifle the rights of we the people. Some of them have been used for almost two centuries.

Here’s a list of some of these legal barriers:

The commerce clause of the Constitution, which enables corporations to sue local and state governments in order to overturn state laws that have been adopted to protect health, safety, and welfare of people and communities. This structure of law prevents people from implementing our visions of environmentally and economically sustainable communities.

There’s the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes it quite difficult for government to prohibit or require various corporate actions.

There’s Dillon’s Rule, which authorizes municipal governments to have decision-making authority only in explicitly specified areas of governance. And there’s the flip side of Dillon’s Rule, known as preemption, which specifically prohibits municipal governments from doing anything that they haven’t explicitly been given permission to do. In addition, a municipal government is prohibited from banning any corporate activity that the state considers legal. The Wells Township hog factory ban is a good example of the use of preemption.

And finally, there’s corporate constitutional so-called rights—the claim that corporations should have the same rights as flesh-and-blood human beings, like free speech. The 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad is the most well-known case and has been credited as the one which first granted personhood to corporations. Yet it’s only one of many important cases granting rights to corporations. The January 2010 Citizens United case is just the latest expansion of corporate free speech rights.

That’s quite a lot to chew on, isn’t it? So as these communities were learning about all of these legal barriers to their right of self-government, each new local ordinance that was drafted became more comprehensive in directly addressing these barriers head-on, and thus the ordinances became less anti-corporate and more pro-rights. They were moving from no, what we don’t want in our communities to, yes, what we do want in our communities.

Here are three recent examples of ordinances around the country. Number one, in Mount Shasta, a town of 3500 residents at the base of Mount Shasta in northern California, the local residents collected enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot in November 2010 which they called the Community Water Rights and Self-Government ordinance. Let me read you the first paragraph of the ordinance.

An Ordinance to assert and secure the right of the people of the City of Mount Shasta to natural water systems and cycles through the exercise of community self-government by enumerating certain rights held by the people and natural community and prohibiting activities that would deny those rights; By protecting the health, safety, and general welfare of the citizens and environment of the City of Mount Shasta; by not allowing corporations to engage in weather manipulation; by establishing strict liability and burden of proof standards for chemical trespass;…

They’re defining chemical trespass as your toxic chemical ended up in my body.

…by not allowing corporations to engage in water withdrawal for export and resale beyond the City of Mount Shasta; by removing claims to legal rights and protections to corporations that would allow a few people hiding behind the corporate shield to subordinate the people and the City of Mount Shasta to them; and by recognizing and enforcing the rights of residents to defend the rights of natural communities and ecosystems.

The county clerk pulled some last-minute shenanigans and removed it from the ballot before voters ever had a chance to cast their ballots. So the organizers are now preparing to place it on the November 2011 ballot instead.

Number two, in Spokane, Washington, local residents collected enough signatures to place on the ballot in November 2009 an amendment to their city’s home rule charter that would have added a comprehensive community bill of rights. The campaign was launched by an impressive group of neighborhood and other community organizations as well as labor unions. It was opposed by every local politician and all of the business associations, which greatly outspent the campaign and lied about what might happen if it passed. In the end, only one quarter of the voters supported it, which you could argue was a serious defeat for the campaign, or you could argue that nothing this boldly democratic had ever been put on a city ballot before, so getting one-fourth of the voters to vote yes was an early victory in a longer campaign.

The group is now preparing to place a scaled-down initiative on the ballot in November 2011, which includes four objectives: first, neighborhood residents shall have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods; second, the Spokane River, its tributaries and aquifers shall possess inalienable rights to exist and flourish; third, employees shall have the right to constitutional protections in the workplace”—how many people know that you don’t have constitutional protections in the workplace?—and, fourth, corporate powers shall be subordinate to people’s rights.” You can learn about it in much more detail at EnvisionSpokane.org.

By the way, Eugene also has a home rule charter, which gives you some added options. You could amend it rather than passing an ordinance.

Number three. Perhaps the most significant victory so far is what happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in November 2010, when the city council, on a unanimous vote of 9 to 0, passed the Pittsburgh Community Protection from Natural Gas Extraction ordinance banning corporations from conducting natural gas drilling, also known as fracking, in the city. Pittsburgh sits atop the Marcellus Shale natural gas deposit. Fracking poses an enormous threat to surface and groundwater and has been blamed for fatal explosions and the contamination of drinking water and local rivers and streams. Other damages include lost property value, ingestion of toxins by livestock, and threatened loss of organic certification for farmers and communities.

In a press release after the vote, Pittsburgh City Councilman Doug Shields stated,

This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights. It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations. With this vote we are asserting the right of the city to make critical decisions to protect our health, safety, and welfare. We are not a colony of the state and will not sit quietly by as our city gets drilled. We encourage communities across the region to take this step and join with us to elevate the rights of communities and people over corporations.

How about that?

Under the ordinance, corporations that violate the ordinance or that seek to drill in the city will not be afforded personhood rights under the U.S. or Pennsylvania constitution, nor will they be afforded protections under the commerce clause or contracts clause under the federal or state constitution. In addition, the ordinance recognizes the legally enforceable rights of nature to exist and flourish. You can read the full text of these and dozens of other ordinances at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website, which is celdf.org. I urge you to check it out.

It’s fascinating to me that no major news media reported the full story on what Pittsburgh did. Not CBS, not NPR, not Fox, not Democracy Now! It was a nationally ground-breaking ordinance. It happened in a major American city. But the media missed the main story. Perhaps because it didn’t fit into any of the existing sound bites about left versus right or workers versus environmentalists. Perhaps because no one is used to reporting on rights-based organizing regarding environment at issues. And because the media missed the story, it’s important that you not miss the story and that you spread it far and wide.

I want to speak for a few minutes about the Supreme Court’s January 2010 Citizens United decision, that further expanded the so-called free-speech right of large corporations to make even huger donations to manipulate our elections than they already legally could. Corporations won First Amendment free-speech rights long ago, contrary to the news reporting from such diverse sources as Fox, NPR, and Democracy Now! The reason I want to talk about this case is that it has generated an enormous amount of citizen response, and I want to the contrast that response with what the more than 120 local communities have already achieved.

The Supreme Court’s decision was opposed by 76% of Republicans, opposed by 81% of independents, opposed by 85% of Democrats. That’s 80% of all of us— once again piercing the myth that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on things that matter. What was the response to the Court’s decision from the two corporate-funded parties? The Republicans praised the ruling as a victory for free speech. And the Democrats put forward some spineless new legislation to blunt its impact and then proceeded to do nothing more to get it passed. You can’t ask for a clearer example of why we the people of these United States, be we Republican or Democrat, Green, Libertarian, independent, need to stand together to end the corporate stranglehold on our elected officials.

In response to this quite logical expansion of free- speech rights that the courts keep granting, two competing Internet-based national campaigns sprang up to urge everyone to get involved in efforts to challenge the Court’s decision. The sponsors of my talk tonight, We the People Eugene, are actively involved with one of these two campaigns, called movetoamend.org. The campaign’s goal is to pass a constitutional amendment that ends corporate personhood. As you can see from the list of laws that corporations use day in and day out to stifle our rights, ending corporate personhood would only tackle a portion of this huge pile of legal powers that corporations wield against us. The other national campaign, known as democracyisforpeople.org. has as its goal the passing of a constitutional amendment that ends free-speech rights for corporations. It doesn’t address any of the other personhood rights, nor does it address any of the other legal powers that corporations wield against us.

Having been a community organizer now for more than three decades, I have a very strong opinion about these two campaigns. Neither of the campaigns tackles the full set of legal powers that corporations now wield. I can’t see the point of trying to pass a constitutional amendment unless you’re tackling all of the ways that corporations violate our rights. And both of the campaigns require a monumental effort across the country to convince an enormous number of elected Democrats and Republicans in both state and federal government to do the right thing by voting yes on the amendment. Let’s not forget that these are the same elected officials who are dependent on donations from large corporations to get themselves reelected. And if, by chance, only 37 states voted yes instead of the necessary 38, three-quarters of the states, the entire campaign collapses under its own weight, which is what happened in the 1970s when the women’s movement tried to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and failed after 10 years, falling short by just one state.

I personally think the strategy is a huge strategic blunder, especially when more than 120 communities in six states have already demonstrated to the rest of us they’ve found a strategy at the local level that appears to be very powerful politically and legally. I do not believe in top-down organizing. I don’t think it has the stamina or the long-term stability to win this kind of battle. What more than 120 communities are reminding us is that bottom-up organizing works.

I know that We the People Eugene is working right now on a resolution asking the city council to support this constitutional amendment. I say, by all means, do some effective grass-roots organizing and get your city council to pass it. And if a majority of them won’t vote against corporate personhood, then it’s time to elect a council that will. But once they’ve voted, get busy figuring out what corporate assaults on your community are most upsetting, and then figure out how to work together to pass a legally binding ordinance, not a resolution, that ends this corporate assault on your community and that puts in place a new set of locally enforceable rights for all residents. I am not claiming this it will be easy, but it’s a way more effective strategy than trying to stop one corporate assault at a time or to beg your state legislature to join 37 other states in passing a constitutional amendment.

Let me share with you a current example of a rural community here in the state that is stuck in the classic single-issue campaign mode that I described earlier and what it could be doing differently. I led one of my weekend workshops a few years ago in the Illinois Valley of Josephine County in the southwest part of this state. Their lands are under constant assault by logging and mining companies. Recently, a single-issue group formed there to try to stop the herbiciding of forests owned by a local logging corporation with the ironic name of Perpetua. The company has been spraying 24D and atrazine on its forests, and the chemicals are ending up in a public lake and in people’s bodies. The community group is reacting the same way every single-issue group reacts: petitions, rallies, letters to elected officials, meetings with the corporation’s representatives, appeals to the Oregon Board of Forestry. All of this activity to try to stop the herbicide spraying. These citizens are running head first into a maze of regulatory rules and agencies which they have to navigate. According to an article in the Register Guard newspaper in Eugene, it’s a dilemma as to how the Oregon Board of Forestry can and should respond. While the Board oversees the rules governing application of herbicides on forest land, it’s the Department of Agriculture that has at regulatory responsibility for making sure the state complies with federal law; while another board, the Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, investigates and responds to complaints like those raised by groups like this one. Whoof! What a perfect system, eh? Perfect if you’re the CEO of Perpetua Corporation and you don’t want those pesky locals interfering in your right to poison them.

Here’s a bit of background history. The regulatory system was created in the late 1800s to protect the interests of the nation’s first giant corporations, the railroads, that were under attack by an absolutely enormous populist social movement. President Cleveland’s attorney general explained to the railroad executives that the new railroad agency was to be

a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people.

It was understood by both government and corporation that what was desired was

something having a good sound but quite harmless, which will impress the popular mind with the idea that a great deal is being done when in reality very little is intended to be done.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? And these regulatory agencies are still working exactly as they were designed, to tie us up in knots. As my colleague Jane Anne Morris says,

The main thing environmental regulations do is regulate environmentalists.

What could the good people of Oregon’s Illinois Valley be doing to stop the herbicide spraying? Instead of pleading with numerous regulatory agencies, they could be passing local ordinances that prohibit corporations from spraying cancer-causing herbicides. Let me repeat that. Instead of pleading with regulators, they could be passing local ordinances that prohibit corporations from spraying cancer-causing herbicides. I’ve met with them in person and by phone. I’ve sent them a lot of information linking them to what other communities are doing in the Northeast states. And yet they aren’t shifting gears yet.

Why not? I can only guess. Perhaps because it’s really scary to try some new strategies that they have absolutely no experience in, or to stop doing what they already know how to do, even if they are very unlikely to succeed. Perhaps because it seems like such an up hill battle that probably isn’t winnable anyway. Perhaps because most of us have become hard-wired to prevalent against the powerful rather than to exercise power ourselves. Perhaps because most of us have already given up any home whatsoever that our actions will make any difference at all. That most of us feel powerless, exhausted, angry, depressed, filled with sorrow, or numb. Perhaps it’s other reasons that haven’t occurred to me yet.

All I know is this: In six states in the Northeast people are actually winning their right to stop corporate assaults on their communities. And more towns are joining this movement all the time. As of today there are active community rights ordinances being considered in Washington, California, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, and Colorado. In fact, just yesterday I received the draft ordinance that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is considering. It’s a sustainable energy ordinance, again the first of its kind. But let me just read you Section 7, titled “People’s Right to Self-Government.”

The foundation for the making and adoption of this law is the people’s fundamental and inalienable right to govern themselves, and thereby secure their rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Any attempts to use other units and levels of government to preempt, amend, alter, or overturn this Ordinance, or parts of this Ordinance, shall require the City Council to hold public meetings that explore the adoption of other measures that expand local control and the ability of residents to protect their fundamental and inalienable right to self- government. Such consideration may include actions to separate the municipality from the other levels of government used to preempt, amend, alter, or overturn the provisions of this Ordinance or other levels of government used to intimidate the people of the City of Pittsburgh or their elected officials.

That’s quite extraordinary. I’m hoping that the people of Eugene will give these ideas serious consideration, and I’m crossing my fingers that the good folks in the Illinois Valley south of here will come on board soon.

Before I conclude my speech, I want to respond to something that I hear a lot from longtime activists, who have become very, very gloomy about the state of the world. I want to speak directly to those of you in the audience who might be saying to yourselves right now, That’s all well and good, but it’s already too late to turn this mess around. The climate is already too destabilized to get it back to normal. Peak oil is behind us. And it’s too late to transition to a sustainable society. I say to you, even if this is true—and it may very well be true— wouldn’t you still rather be living in a society that is collapsing but has worked as hard as it possibly could to put in place truly democratic structures so that as it collapses, its citizens are actively responding with passion and love and empathy, rather than to be living in a society that is collapsing and which is moving towards more and more civil unrest because its people never figured out how to work together to create the kind of community they wanted to live in, so now they’re just fighting each other for a shrinking pie. I am very clear which of these two societies I would prefer to live in.

Regardless of how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the possibility for real structural change in this country, I urge you to start paying attention very closely to the growing movement for community rights. I urge you to discuss what you’ve learned tonight with your friends, your co-workers, and your neighbors. Are you prepared to try something new? Are you prepared to reconsider your role in your community, not just as a private citizen who simply votes for candidates but as a public citizen who joins with others year in and year out to design and create the kind of community you want your children and grandchildren to live in. To be a part of a great, ongoing democratic experiment, rubbing elbows with people who are not like you, people who may not agree with you on many issues but who also want to create a more livable, more participatory, more fair, more sustainable community.

For some of you, getting active in this way may be really scary; for others it may be exciting and exhilarating. Please call on me for support. It’s time for us to put some real meaning back in those sacred words in our state constitution “that all power is inherent in the people.” We may not believe it yet, but it is true. We the people are the most powerful force in this country. Are you with me? I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you. Thank you very much.
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Q&A

The question is, surely these kinds of ordinances are not pleasing to the corporations that are being excluded or to other layers of government. What kind of response has there been?

A small number of the ordinances have been legally challenged. In Pennsylvania, the corporations have been so effective in—how do I say this?—I can’t remember which ordinance it is, but because corporations pretty much play government layers against each other as their pawn pieces, they really just play us off against each other, and they’re used to that, corporations in Pennsylvania have gotten so good at this that their lawyers now basically just pick up a phone and call the governor or the speaker of the house of the state legislature and they demand that the state come down on the township because it violates the commerce clause or the contracts clause or something. Increasingly, the corporations are actually acting as if they’re not that involved. It’s initiated by them.

And what’s happening is, there’s not a lot of backbone. There have been some lawsuits, but 120 ordinances are now law. The day before the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ordinance banning corporate fracking was passed, the Natural Gas Association—I forget what it’s so-called in Pennsylvania—sent a formal letter to all the city council members saying they would sue if it passed. They still passed it 9 to 0. And the association didn’t sue. Because they would have to argue that the natural-gas fracking company has more rights to drill in the city of Pittsburgh than the people in Pittsburgh have the right to say no. And that just generates a whole other level of democratic uprising.
You folks have to decide how serious you are. It’s very easy to pass a resolution compared to an ordinance. You have to do some serious slogging to pass an ordinance. As I said at the beginning of my speech, you have to talk to people who you can’t imagine talking to. But you’re going to actually find some very interesting possible cooperation in those ways. I think it’s pretty obvious what the difference is between the two.

So, again, are we the people or aren’t we? If we are the people, then of course we have the right to abolish, amend, etc., our government documents. But obviously this is a paradigm shift. So it’s not like you read for 2 hours and you learn about nuclear power or you learn about GMOs, and now you understand the basics and now you can be organizing around that issue. This is paradigm- shifting work. This is a whole different way of thinking about who we are in relation to our government and our corporate institutions. So it takes a much higher level of commitment, organizing commitment, intellectual commitment.

For more information, go to paulcienfuegos.com.

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©2011

Merry Christmas everyone. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (KJV Luke 2:14)… wouldn’t that be nice to really give peace a chance? For all you theists: Ben Franklin said that God helps those who help themselves. Take a look and listen at what John and Yoko said: Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

And there’s this: The Christmas Truce of 1914, the interruption of a few days in the casualties (15 million deaths, 20 million wounded), when German and British soldiers sang Christmas carols together, exchanged gifts, and played soccer. But all too soon, the generals and the politicians, the suits, the warmakers back home, put a stop to the “fraternizing with the enemy.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it? Those who make war do not fight them. Those who fight them do not like them. Can all the medals and “honors” be any compensation for what the “universal soldier” goes through? Or the flag-draped coffins? Take a look at and listen to Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Universal Soldier

Somebody benefits, though. The industrialists and other capitalists who supply the armaments–and all of us whose jobs rely on the continuance of war.

Put the temporary truce of 97 years ago into present-day context: Give peace on earth a chance

Give peace a chance.

Merry Christmas.

by Jack Smith
(in Activist Newsletter)

Part 1: Obama’s interpretation of the war

President Obama bid farewell to the Iraq war after nearly 9 years of conflict in a November 14 speech to troops of the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, NC. He virtually damned the war with the faintest of praise.

The problem was that he couldn’t claim victory and had to conceal an historic defeat — but at least it wasn’t his war, as Afghanistan has become.

Meanwhile in Iraq, a perhaps inevitable major political crisis is brewing between the Shi’ite-led government and Sunni ministers in the regime.

The war was a fiasco for the Pentagon and a roadside bomb for America’s international reputation. Obama thus resorted to conveying a deceptively selective history of former President George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure. Deploying the language of omission, ultra-patriotism, and gushing praise for the troops, Obama managed to smother the truth about the war’s origins, conduct, and ending.

Most Americans have long tired of the Iraq occupation, not least because the war hadn’t touched most people. It was a credit-card war that will burden future generations with debt, not them, and the troops were volunteers, not conscripts. People often waved the flag with gusto and participated in pro-forma displays of support for the troops and concern for their families, but not much more. Reporting about the official war-ending, flag-lowering ceremony in Washington December 15, Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service noted that

hardly anyone here seemed to notice, let alone mark the occasion in a special manner.

A majority of Americans opposed the bipartisan war — almost 70% today — and they have done so for years, although a much smaller number took to the streets where it counts. Many millions protested the war even before it began. Some 500,000 went to Washington in the cold of January 2003 to demonstrate against going to war 2 months before Washington’s “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad. The mass antiwar movement remained large and viable for several years, but dissipated, except for the dedicated left and pacifists, when Democrat Obama won the 2008 election. The movement had a much larger impact on public opinion and government policy than has been recognized.

In his speech Obama made no mention of such highlights as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the shame of Abu Ghraib, or the astonishing cost of the war. He couldn’t even point to any concrete military accomplishments. The vaunted 2007-2008 “surge” concocted by Gen. David Petraeus was not evoked, perhaps because its main element consisted of paying the insurgents $30 million a month to stop fighting, which doesn’t say much about the Pentagon’s prowess. At that time some 170,000 U.S. troops maintained over 500 bases in Iraq against up to 20,000 decentralized irregular guerrillas without any of the accoutrements of modern warfare.

Instead of facts the president resorted to embellishing trifles and vacuous tributes to the troops:

The most important lesson that we can take from you is not about military strategy — it’s a lesson about our national character…. As your commander-in-chief I can tell you that [the war] will indeed be a part of history…. Now, we knew this day would come. We’ve known it for some time. But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long.

Obama characterized the withdrawal as a “moment of success.” To the uninformed this may imply some kind of victory, but it simply means the troops were withdrawn without incident.

At the beginning, the Bush Administrated estimated the war would end in victory in 3 months. Bush claimed victory on May 1, 2003, with his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech from an aircraft carrier. It groaned to an ambiguous finale in 105 months. The combined length of America’s participation in World Wars I and II was 64 months.

The best Obama could say about one of Washington’s longest wars was that

American troops… will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high.

He couldn’t call it a victory, but “heads held high” is supposed to rule out the perception of defeat.

But defeat is the only suitable word. Any war between a rich, overwhelmingly powerful state deploying a military juggernaut and a small poor state with a broken army that ends in a stalemate after nearly nine years is a humiliating defeat. It is being covered up, but in time we assume historians will unite around this verdict.

The White House and Pentagon fear that public awareness of a defeat in either Iraq or Afghanistan may generate another “Vietnam Syndrome.” After that ultimately unpopular and vigorously protested war ended in triumph for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and D.R. Vietnam in 1975 — the American people were obviously disinclined to countenance another major war of choice in a foreign venue, especially against a developing country in Asia that doesn’t directly threaten the U.S.

This didn’t prevent the right-wing Reagan Administration from invading and walking over two tiny, weak countries (Grenada and Panama) and from supporting counter-insurgency campaigns in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, South Yemen, and elsewhere, but it took 16 post-Vietnam years (1976-1991) before the Pentagon was politically able to openly engage in a major war involving hundreds of thousands of troops (Iraq War I, otherwise known as the Gulf War).

Washington has been engaged in hot, cold, or surreptitious wars for 70 years, presently spending $1.4 trillion a year on its military and national security budgets, and has provided no evidence it will stop. As such it is essential to maintain the public belief that the U.S. military is the best in the world (a frequent Obama mantra) , and that Vietnam was an inexplicable fluke or largely the fault of civilian leadership.

Obama sought to compensate for being unable to claim victory by referring to the “extraordinary achievement” of the American troops, saying,

today we remember everything that you did to make it possible.

The “it” was not defined. Indeed,

Because of you, because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny.

He went on to call the U.S. military

the most respected institution in our land.

Presidential praise of the Ft. Bragg troops for “serving with honor [and] patriotism” deserves some comment.

There are those who maintain that it is as impossible to serve “with honor” in a dishonorable preemptive war — an unjust, illegal, and immoral war of choice for geopolitical advantage and access to oil — as in any grossly dishonorable enterprise, civilian or military.

They ask, can one participate with honor — even with bravery or at least showing up and following the leader — in a civilian gang attack on innocent people, or for burning down a block of urban housing, or for acts of vandalism in a rural village? Is doing so any different in a criminal war while waving the national colors to advance the interests of what is today termed “the 1%”?

How do conventional criminal deeds differ from the massive criminality of U.S. imperialism in invading a country half-way around the world that was no danger to America or any other country, destroying its civil infrastructure, killing between 600,000 and a million Iraqis and causing 3 to 4 million people to become refugees? (Some estimates of Iraqi dead are 100,000 “or more.” The higher figures, maintained over the years not just from newspaper accounts, derive from the British medical journal The Lancet and other independent sources.)

And what is “patriotic” about taking part in crushing a much smaller and virtually defenseless country already suffering from an earlier war and a dozen years of killer sanctions that were responsible for the deaths of yet another million Iraqis, half of them children, according to the UN?

Government hyper-patriotic propaganda probably did convince many of the military volunteers that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened America and that the Iraqi government played a role in 9/11, but these lies were exposed at least seven years ago. The soldiers, including the large number of men and women who joined primarily to obtain employment, or earn money for college, or escape poverty, or to avoid a dead-end future are daily subject to the Pentagon’s rah-rah version of its rationale for the war.

The U.S. military did have its members who served with honor and patriotism. Alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower PFC Bradley Manning is an outstanding example. He is essentially on trial for exposing war crimes. Others include those who joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) or March Forward, another veteran group, who turned against and condemned the conflict and devoted themselves to working for peace. Also, we assume there were many soldiers who consciously avoided harming civilians and performed acts of kindness as well.

But an undetermined number of U.S. soldiers were involved in reprehensible treatment of civilians in Iraq, or openly displayed contempt for Iraqi customs and beliefs — often with the approval of their officers. The public testimony of IVAW members a couple of years ago was chilling, as well as the many revelations of murder and abuse that have managed to become known to the media, such as the Haditha massacre of dozens of Iraqis in 2005. As U.S. troops were leaving Iraq this month, secret military testimony about the Haditha tragedy was discovered among papers in a junkyard where they were supposed to have been burned.

President Obama’s most bizarre statement at Ft. Bragg occurred when he declared that

what makes us special as Americans [is that] unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices [during the Iraq war] for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.

Being an empire of a new type, the U.S. did not plan to transform Iraq into an old-type colony. Bush’s intention in invading was to convert Iraq into a subservient satellite. Washington already had handpicked a puppet regime of exiles to take over. The next step was to use a swift Pentagon victory as a jumping off point for bringing about regime change in Iran and other countries. This was supposed to be the culmination of America’s geopolitical ambition to rule over the entire petroleum-rich Persian Gulf region and entire Middle East. One byproduct was to enhance the position of U.S. corporations. Another was to denationalize the oil reserves mainly to benefit American oil companies if possible.

The invasion quickly succeeded. Given the imbalance of power how could it not? But much else of Bush’s imperialist adventure turned out to be a huge exploding cigar in Uncle Sam’s unsuspecting face, at a cost at least $5 trillion (when future decades of veterans’ benefits and interest payments are included). Obama knows this, of course, just as he knows it’s ridiculous to depict U.S. foreign policy as selfless. But he has a major defeat to cover up, and the fact that the troops withdrew with heads held high doesn’t entirely do the trick.

It’s true Obama opposed the war as a member of the Illinois state legislature, though he was fairly quiet as a U.S. Senator and voted in favor of funding the incredibly expensive calamity year after year. During the 2008 campaign his critique of the Iraq conflict was a major factor in the defeat of warhawk Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and or his election victory.

Both Democratic superstars now are leading hawks on behalf of keeping Iraq under Washington’s thumb, and for the Afghan war, the drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, NATO’s regime-change war in Libya, threats against Iran, the suppression of the Palestinians, support for pro-U.S. dictatorships, and most recently the dangerous new policy of “containing” China.

(To be continued in Part 2–after the following scare story, “What Bush told us about Iraq”)

What Bush told us about Iraq

[NOTE: The U.S. is getting out of Iraq after nearly nine years, but how did it get in? It was obvious by September 2002 that President George W. Bush was going to attack, and the peace movement, led by ANSWER, started organizing big time. There were demands for peace throughout the U.S. when the House and Senate passed legislation in mid-October giving Bush authority to unilaterally declare war if he thought it necessary. He invaded several months later in March. Part of what induced Congress and millions of Americans to approve a preemptive war was a peculiar speech Bush delivered October 8, 2002, so full of lies and transparent efforts to frighten people that we wrote a brief story in the October 15 *Activist Newsletter that included an introduction and quotes from Bush. It was titled “A Presidential Ghost Story” since the Halloween decorations were already up. Here’s the text*.]

President Bush’s speech October 8 defending his intention to launch a “preemptive” war with Iraq sounded like a Halloween ghost story calculated to scare the daylights out of guileless children.

The term “terror” or “terrorist” was employed 35 times; “weapons” — for use against the United States — 33 times; “threat,” to America, 17 times. Weak and wounded Iraq was virtually portrayed as a military superpower about to conquer the world.

Among the missing words was any mention of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, who have evaded capture [in Afghanistan] along with most leading operatives of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, much to the embarrassment of the White House war room. As a consequence, the two leaders — identified by Bush as enemies number one and two just a few months ago — have evidently been metamorphosed by the White House propaganda apparatus into Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who Bush assured the world was also “a student of Stalin.” Al Qaeda itself was mentioned seven times, but only in reference to the Iraqi leader, not to the former “Evil One,” bin Laden.

Reduced to its simplistic scare-story essentials, the following excerpts from Bush’s speech tell his version of the age-old story of good against evil — the Crusading Avenger Vs. the Bogeyman of Baghdad. It’s a great tale to tell the kids on Halloween in a couple of weeks. Douse the lights, ignite a single candle, sit in the shadows, and begin:

I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace and America’s determination to lead the world in confronting that threat…. [Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people….

We are resolved today to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America…. [The] Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons…. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant…. The same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East…and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States….

Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction…. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons? …. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using [aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States.

Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliances with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints…. Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America and Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.

Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact they would be eager, to use biological or chemical or a nuclear weapons. Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud…. We have every reason to assume the worst and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.

Some have argued we should wait, and that’s an option. In my view it’s the riskiest of all options because the longer we wait, the stronger and bolder Saddam Hussein will become…. There can be no peace if our security depends on the will and whims of a ruthless and aggressive dictator…. Failure to act would embolden other tyrants, allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources, and make blackmail a permanent feature of world events. The situation could hardly get worse….

At this point the kids at your Halloween gathering should be scared stiff. Then put on your Saddam Hussein mask, walk into the light, and shout “Boooooo.” After the children run home in panic, put on your George Bush mask and start shooting.

Part 2: Iraq’s future and U.S. intentions

President Obama emphasizes that he ended the Iraq campaign but he actually fulfilled the withdrawal agreement to pull out by the end of 2011 that was signed in December 2008 by outgoing President Bush and the Baghdad government. The Bush Administration labored long to compel President Nouri al-Maliki to agree that many thousands of U.S. troops could remain in the country after the bulk of forces withdrew, but the Iraqi leader ultimately refused. As a compromise the concord contained a stipulation allowing U.S. troops to remain if requested by Iraq’s government.

The Obama Administration then applied pressure on Maliki to “request” that 20,000 or so American troops remain indefinitely, but its plans fell through in October. Reflecting the views of the Iraqi people, Baghdad politicians insisted that only a small number of troops may remain to train the Iraqi army. They added, however, that the troops would now be subject to the Iraqi legal system if they broke laws. The U.S. does not permit this in the many countries where its military is stationed. Washington thus was obliged to give up on retaining the troops.

The decision was an important setback for the Obama administration but a victory for Iraqi independence and a most agreeable outcome for neighboring Iran, which has considerable influence in Iraq. Washington’s principal concern is that Shi’ite Iran and majority Shi’ite Iraq will in time enter in a close and relatively powerful alliance that would oppose U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf, perhaps backed by China and Russia.

According to IPS news analyst Gareth Porter December 16:

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Prime Minister Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.

Iran, which supported Bush’s overthrow of Ba’athists, is a country against which Washington has held a grudge since 1979 when a popular revolution ousted the Shah of Iran, occupied the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 62 American personnel for 14 months. The Shah was reinstalled on the Peacock Throne in 1953 by the U.S. and UK after they arranged for a monarchist coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, crushing Iranian democracy but denationalizing the country’s petroleum fields to benefit British and American oil companies.

The U.S. and Israel (which had very close relations with the Shah’s regime) have long been seeking the opportunity to replace the anti-imperialist Islamic regime with a pro-American government, lately with threats of war, subversion, support for opposition elements, and ever tightening extreme sanctions in response to unproven allegations that Iran is constructing a nuclear weapon.

Obama told the troops that

Iraq is not a perfect place… but we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people…. This is an extraordinary achievement… and today we remember everything that you [the troops] did to make it possible.

After the first false justifications for the invasion were exposed, and the Pentagon was settling in for a long occupation since notions of quick victory had had gone up in smoke like a bombed out Iraqi home, Bush Administration neoconservatives discovered that the “real” reason for the war was to “democratize” Iraq.

Iraq had been a one-party state run by the secular Ba’ath Party with Saddam Hussein as the president. Hussein crushed the Communists, then the left and other vocal opponents and organizations. The Ba’athists brooked no political opposition. They favored the minority Sunni over the majority Shi’ite Muslims. Hussein led Iraq into an unjust, unnecessary war against Shi’ite Iran throughout the 1980s, with U.S. backing.

Domestically, the Ba’athists embraced a program of social services for the people. Oil reserves and certain enterprises had been nationalized and profits provided a broad array of support for the masses, such as subsidized food. Iraq boasted the best public educational system in the Middle East. It maintained a far-reaching national healthcare system for all citizens. Iraqi women were considered to be the most equal and liberated in the Arab world. Internationally, the Ba’ath Party practiced an anti-imperialist foreign policy. For many years it upheld Pan-Arabism until its decline throughout the region, and was critical of Israel and supported the Palestinian people until the end.

Historically the U.S. supported and continues to back several dictatorships in the Middle East. It’s 30-year tacit alliance the Mubarak regime in Egypt (and current backing for the quasi-military junta now in power) was hardy the worst. What set Iraq apart for Washington was its strategic geopolitical position, opposition to certain U.S. goals in the vicinity, possession of great petroleum resources, anti-Israel focus, and by 2003 its helpless military vulnerability.

Today after 20 years of U.S. wars, Iraq is a ruin. The country was virtually crippled after the destruction caused by Washington’s first Iraq war in 1991 followed by debilitating sanctions and occasional bombings until the second war which started in March 2003.

The education system has been shattered. Healthcare is now poor to nonexistent for much of the population. Many rights for women have been wrenched away. Infrastructure is a wreck. Energy from the battered electrical grid remains sporadic or not available. Businesses and a number of government tasks have now been privatized to the detriment of the people. Oil has been denationalized. Poverty and inequality are widespread. Corruption is endemic. The new “democratic” political system is frequently undemocratic, and great injustices exist throughout society. Torture is a frequent tool of the police.

In addition, Washington’s divide-and-conquer tactics have greatly exacerbated religious tensions, leading to near civil war at one point, and engendered the continual terrorist violence that exists to this day. The war opened the door for al-Qaeda terrorists to enter Iraq for the first time, and they are still there. The Ba’athists in power would not tolerate their presence, but the chaos of the occupation was a virtual invitation. Divide-and conquer also increased national and gender antagonisms.

America’s formal war is now over but it hardly is the last of the U.S. in Iraq. Obama told the troops that

We’re building a new partnership between our nations.

The Bush Administration’s initial “partnership” was based on becoming a virtual behind-the-scenes government in Baghdad — one of its many failures.

But Washington retains considerable power in Iraq — from economic support and credits, to arms sales, military training, trade opportunities, a connection to America’s many allies and dependencies in the Middle East and worldwide, and more.

Part of that partnership is the newly built largest embassy in the world and a staff of nearly 17,000. This includes a security force of over 5,000 personnel, and 150-200 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq as part of a “normal embassy presence.” (By comparison, the capital city of Albany, N.Y., with a population of nearly l00,000, is served by 340 police officers.) It has been reported that much of the diplomatic staff works with Iraqi government departments or is engaged in activities for the U.S. intelligence network.

Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, long a critic of the U.S. occupation and a friend of Iran, argues the embassy contingent and security detachments are far too large, indicative of Washington’s intention to play a major role in Baghdad. He told Al-Arabiya TV Nov. 3 that the

American occupation will stay in Iraq under different names.

The embassy’s main responsibilities seem to be to keep the new Iraqi government in check, to protect American commercial interests, to monitor and diminish Iranian influence, to distance Iraq from present-day Syria, to keep China and Russia at bay, to contact dissidents, to gather intelligence and to discourage Iraqi criticism of Israel.

The Obama Administration is strengthening the U.S. military machine in the wake of events in Iraq. Secretary of State Clinton announced recently:

We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region.

The Associated Press reported that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

expects about 40,000 U.S. troops to be stationed across the Middle East after they are pulled out of Iraq.

The Pentagon wants to station some in Kuwait, next to Iraq, and intends to keep a substantial force in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal, close to Iran and China. In addition the U.S. Navy is expected to increase the number of warships in the region.

The New York Times reports that

the administration is also seeking to expand military ties with the six nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. While the United States has close bilateral military relationships with each, the administration and the military are trying to foster a new “security architecture” for the Persian Gulf that would integrate air and naval patrols and missile defense.

Ironically, these six oil-rich U.S. allies, led by ultra-reactionary Saudi Arabia, offer their people less freedom and rights for women than Iraq under the Ba’athist government, but neither Washington nor the mass media single them out for criticism or demonize their leaders.

Iraq’s future is a great unknown. The Sunni-Shi’ite split is far worse today than before Washington interfered. The immediate crisis is that the political system seems ready to explode. As the New York Times reported December 20:

The Shiite-dominated government ordered the arrest of the Sunni vice president [Tariq al-Hashimi] accusing him of running a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials…. A major Sunni-backed political coalition said its ministers would walk off their jobs.

Speaking later in the day from the safety of the Kurdish north (where he intends to stay for the time being), Hashimi

angrily rebutted charges that he had ordered his security guards to assassinate government officials, saying that Shi’ite-backed security forces had induced the guards into false confessions

.
Three of the guards confessed to the charges and the video was played on nationwide TV.

Even before this latest predicament, Washington’s imposed “democracy” obviously was very fragile. Some quarters have predicted a possible future civil war or an eventual three-way separation of the country into Kurd, Sunni and Shi’ite territories, a situation that would not necessarily displease the Obama Administration if the Iraqi government cannot be brought to heel, particularly in relation to Iran.

The Iraqi military is loyal to the Maliki government, but its deportment in relation to successor regimes or in a serious political crisis hasn’t been tested. It cannot be ignored that it has been trained, equipped and influenced by the Pentagon, which would be derelict had it not developed close ties to elements in the command apparatus. The semi-independent Kurds in the north are protected by the U.S. now. Their goal is complete independence in what they call Kurdistan. America will use them as a wedge, but it has sold out Kurd aspirations before and may do so again if conditions warrant.

The U.S. can still stir up lots of trouble in Baghdad by siding with and financing this or that political faction, religious community or ethnic group — a practice at which it has become adept. It has the entire country under intense air, sea, and land surveillance, with spies and informants in every branch of government, political party, and the military. Key telephones are tapped and computers are hacked. The entire region is encircled with U.S. military might.

The U.S. government does not intend to let Iraq get away, unless it becomes a subordinate ally. Now one knows what comes next.

In many ways — despite one-party rule and a ruthless leader capable of tragically counterproductive decisions (the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, for instance) — the masses of Iraqi people were better off before America’s two decades of pain, destruction and chaos. The Bush and Obama Administrations, echoed by the mass media, have always sought to depict the majority of Iraqis as favorable to the occupation, but this was merely propaganda aimed at domestic public opinion. Most Iraqis are very happy the U.S. is finally gone, but of course they are worried about what the future holds.

They have been living in a hell, and are now closer to emerging, but still have many problems to overcome before they break out.

Our new Secretary of “Defense,” Leon Panetta, insists, while announcing the supposed end to our war in Iraq, while referring to our soldiers who died there, that

those lives were not lost in vain.

Yeah? He regurgitates that cheap clause, used again and again since Lincoln famously used it at Gettysburg, to excuse a continuing slaughter, to justify any continued bloodbath adventure: In other words, were we to stop a war now, the lives already wasted will have been for nothing–so we need to continue the wasting.

I beg to differ. I’m sorry. Those U.S. soldiers died in a war premised and continued on lies. Though we need to honor their sacrifice, we need to admit that, yes, they did die in vain, that their sacrifice was pointless.

This article covers several points, beginning with the casus belli on the eve of the war, and ending with an honest assessment, after Abu Ghraib, after “Collateral Murder,” after countless other atrocities.

• Commentary: Illogical reasoning of a war against Iraq (March 13, 2003), questioning the Mad Hatter-style logic of our going to war in Iraq
• Pillagers strip Iraqi Museum of its treasure (April 13, 2003), after then-Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed: “Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad, are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. We are seeing history unfold, events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people, and potentially the future of the region,” came this article in the New York Times, describing the desecration of ancient Mesopotamian cultural heritage, while petroleum facilities are protected, all the while thousands of twenty-first-century Mesopotamians are slaughtered: “Please remind [President Bush] that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.”
• Cultural catastrophe (April 13, 2003), my reaction to the pillage, distributed as an email rant to many of my friends
• Intellectual catastrophe (April 16, 2003), one (former) friend’s reaction to my email rant, exhorting me, among other things, to apologize to my distribution list once the WMDs are found in Iraq
• Abu Ghraib and “Collateral Murder”–a “few bad apples” or inevitable dehumanization of “sand niggers” and systemic insensitivity to committing atrocities?
• U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s ‘mission accomplished'”: Sami Rasouli, the founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, discusses the results of the war from Najaf
• The costs of war: Tens of thousands dead, billions spent, and a country torn apart: Catherine Lutz, Brown University professor and co-director of the “Costs of War” research project at the Watson Institute for International Studies: “The costs have really been staggering. We know that Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War. But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands.”
• Iraqi women’s activist rebuffs U.S. claims of a freer Iraq: “This is not a democratic country”: Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, discusses the impact of the nearly 9-year U.S. occupation, particularly on Iraqi women. “The women are the biggest loser in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares. We demonstrated. The Arab Spring was there very strongly but got oppressed in ways that were new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there… This is not a democratic country.”

Commentary: Illogical reasoning of a war against Iraq
March 13, 2003

MICHELE NORRIS, host: The deliberations at the UN over possible military action in Iraq have featured thousands of pages of documents and hours and hours of debate, not to mention all the press conferences, Op-Ed articles, and pure speculation that have filled the airwaves in the last few months. But even after all of that evidence and discussion, commentator Peter Freundlich still wants to express the trouble he’s having trying to make sense of the argument to go to war.

PETER FREUNDLICH:
All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war to preserve the UN’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein’s failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don’t misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is a threat to peace,’ but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.

As a collector of laughable arguments, I’d be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

Pillagers strip Iraqi Museum of its treasure
New York Times
April 13, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 12: The National Museum of Iraq recorded a history of civilizations that began to flourish in the fertile plains of Mesopotamia more than 7,000 years ago. But once American troops entered Baghdad in sufficient force to topple Saddam Hussein’s government this week, it took only 48 hours for the museum to be destroyed, with at least 170,000 artifacts carried away by looters.

The full extent of the disaster that befell the museum came to light only today, as the frenzied looting that swept much of the capital over the previous three days began to ebb.

As fires in a dozen government ministries and agencies began to burn out, and as looters tired of pillaging in the 90-degree heat, museum officials reached the hotels where foreign journalists were staying along the eastern bank of the Tigris River. They brought word of what is likely to be reckoned as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history.

A full accounting of what has been lost may take weeks or months. The museum had been closed during much of the 1990’s, and as with many Iraqi institutions, its operations were cloaked in secrecy under Mr. Hussein.

So what officials told journalists today may have to be adjusted as a fuller picture comes to light. It remains unclear whether some of the museum’s priceless gold, silver and copper antiquities, some of its ancient stone and ceramics and perhaps some of its fabled bronzes and gold-overlaid ivory, had been locked away for safekeeping elsewhere before the looting, or seized for private display in one of Mr. Hussein’s myriad palaces.

What was beyond contest today was that the 28 galleries of the museum and vaults with huge steel doors guarding storage chambers that descend floor after floor into unlighted darkness had been completely ransacked.

Officials with crumpled spirits fought back tears and anger at American troops, as they ran down an inventory of the most storied items that they said had been carried away by the thousands of looters who poured into the museum after daybreak on Thursday and remained until dusk on Friday, with only one intervention by American forces, lasting about half an hour, at lunchtime on Thursday.

Nothing remained, museum officials said, at least nothing of real value, from a museum that had been regarded by archaeologists and other specialists as perhaps the richest of all such institutions in the Middle East.

As examples of what was gone, the officials cited a solid gold harp from the Sumerian era, which began about 3360 B.C. and started to crumble about 2000 B.C. Another item on their list of looted antiquities was a sculptured head of a woman from Uruk, one of the great Sumerian cities, dating from about the same era, and a collection of gold necklaces, bracelets and earrings, also from the Sumerian dynasties and also at least 4,000 years old.

But an item-by-item inventory of the most valued pieces carried away by the looters hardly seemed to capture the magnitude of what had occurred. More powerful, in its way, was the action of one museum official in hurrying away through the piles of smashed ceramics and torn books and burned-out torches of rags soaked in gasoline that littered the museum’s corridors to find the glossy catalog of an exhibition of “Silk Road Civilizations” that was held in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara in 1988.

Turning to 50 pages of items lent by the Iraqi museum for the exhibition, he said none of the antiquities pictured remained after the looting. They included ancient stone carvings of bulls and kings and princesses; copper shoes and cuneiform tablets; tapestry fragments and ivory figurines of goddesses and women and Nubian porters; friezes of soldiers and ancient seals and tablets on geometry; and ceramic jars and urns and bowls, all dating back at least 2,000 years, some more than 5,000 years.

“All gone, all gone,” he said. “All gone in two days.”

An Iraqi archaeologist who has taken part in the excavation of some of the country’s 10,000 sites, Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammad, said he went into the street in the Karkh district, a short distance from the eastern bank of the Tigris, about 1 p.m. on Thursday to find American troops to quell the looting. By that time, he and other museum officials said, the several acres of museum grounds were overrun by thousands of men, women and children, many of them armed with rifles, pistols, axes, knives and clubs, as well as pieces of metal torn from the suspensions of wrecked cars. The crowd was storming out of the complex carrying antiquities on hand carts, bicycles and wheelbarrows and in boxes. Looters stuffed their pockets with smaller items.

Mr. Muhammad said that he had found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above the looters’ heads. That drove several thousand of the marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.

“I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds,” he said. “But they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for Saddam Hussein’s intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home.”

Mohsen Hassan, a 56-year-old deputy curator, returned to the museum on Saturday afternoon after visiting military commanders a mile away at the Palestine Hotel, with a request that American troops be placed in the museum to protect the building and items left by the looters in the vaults. Mr. Hassan said the American officers had given him no assurances that they would guard the museum around the clock, but other American commanders announced later in the day that joint patrols with unarmed Iraqi police units would begin as early as Sunday in an attempt to prevent further looting.

Mr. Hassan, who said he had spent 34 years helping to develop the museum’s collection, described watching as men took sledgehammers to locked glass display cases and in some instances fired rifles and pistols to break the locks.

He said that many of the looters appeared to be from the impoverished districts of the city where anger at Mr. Hussein ran at its strongest, but that others were middle-class people who appeared to know exactly what they were looking for.

“Did some of them know the value of what they took?” he said. “Absolutely, they did. They knew what the most valued pieces in our collection were.”

Mr. Muhammad spoke with deep bitterness toward the Americans, as have many Iraqis who have watched looting that began with attacks on government agencies and the palaces and villas of Mr. Hussein, his family and his inner circle broaden into a tidal wave of looting that struck just about every government institution, even ministries dealing with issues like higher education, trade and agriculture, and hospitals.

American troops have intervened only sporadically, as they did on Friday to halt a crowd of men and boys who were raiding an armory at the edge of the Republican Palace presidential compound and taking brand-new Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons.

American commanders have said they lack the troops to curb the looting while their focus remains on the battles across Baghdad that are necessary to mop up pockets of resistance from paramilitary forces loyal to Mr. Hussein.

As reporters returned from the national museum to their hotels beside the Tigris tonight, marines guarding the hotels were caught in a heavy firefight with Iraqis across the river, and the neighborhoods erupted with tank and heavy machine-gun fire. Western television cameramen who went onto the embankment beside the Palestine Hotel to film the battle were pulled from danger by helmeted marines who dragged them down behind concrete parapets and waved to reporters on the hotel’s upper balconies to get down.

Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.”

Cultural catastrophe
My reaction to the pillage
April 13, 2003

Iraq was supposedly a major threat to world peace, a threat so grave that the U.S. and the U.K. had to bypass the UN Security Council and NATO to confront it without approval. Confronting this terrible threat, utterly overwhelming this mighty regime, took about three weeks. What a threat it was! Seems more like a tin-pot third-rate dictatorship to me.

The rationale for this confrontation was to “disarm” Iraq, to force the Iraqi regime to give up its Weapons of Mass Destruction. It somehow occurs to me that if there had been WMDs to be found, the ruthless, irresponsible Iraqi regime would have used them, even at the risk of shocking France and Germany, rather than face utter destruction. Where are these WMDs ??

That the cruel regime of Saddam Hussein is over is a good thing. That the cost in lives to the U.S. and U.K. has been relatively light is a good thing (although that cost would have been zero if this war had not started).

The cost to Iraqi civilians has been staggering, and the news media in the U.S. has largely ignored that cost.

Today, I had another of my fears confirmed– a cultural catastrophe. What would you think if the ancient Egyptian pyramids were blown up? Or the priceless ruins of Athens pulverized? The culture of Mesopotamia is more ancient than that of the Nile or of Greece–it goes back more than 7000 years (including Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylonia, Assyria, and the Persian Emprie), and today I’ve learned that this heritage has been ransacked– thousands of years of culture messed up within just the last week.

I heard an archeologist on the radio this morning, in tears, telling how he had provided the Defense Department with a list of cultural sites to protect, and high on this list was the Baghdad Museum, utterly pillaged by looters within the past few days.

Oil fields were secured. Why wasn’t this museum secured?

Allan

Intellectual catastrophe
Bob W.’s response to my email
April 16, 2003

Allan,

Your inability to understand virtually anything dealing with geopolitics and current events is truly breathtaking. You ought to read something other than the New York Times, listen to something other than NPR and watch something other than CNN. The coverage of the war by these three organizations has been discredited. Every prediction made by these organizations has proven very wrong in spite of their best efforts to slant the news to bolster those predictions.

As to your note…

First, the danger posed by Saddam Hussein was not that he would attack us directly, but rather indirectly through a third party terrorist. His secret service was closely allied with Al Qaeda and provided that organization with the official documents those terrorists needed to move about the world. He also provided training grounds for Al Qaeda terrorists, including a plane fuselage used to train hi-jackers, and very likely several of those who participated in the 9/11 attack trained at this facility. Two of the top Al Qaeda leaders were former Iraqi intelligence officers. Think there might be a connection there?

Second, your concern for the Iraqi people is truly touching, but a bit late. Saddam Hussein started the war against Iran and as a result of his attack, 500,000 Iraqi conscripts were killed – and that’s in a population of 26 million. And then he had at least 10,000 Kurds, mostly helpless women and children, killed with various chemical weapons. Guess you missed that one too.

As for weapons of mass destruction, when they’re found, and they will be, I expect you to send an apology out to your original distribution list.

You ask why weren’t they used. First, our attack was so swift that the Iraqi military was caught flat-footed since their war plans were developed by the Russians who are still fighting the Napoleanic War. Second, our military special ops destroyed much of their delivery capability at the very outset of the war. Third, we destroyed the Iraqi command and control systems that were necessary to initiate such an attack. And finally, our military made it very clear that anyone who participated in such an attack would be tried as a war criminal and since our troops were better prepared to survive such an attack, it was very likely that those who initiated the attack, would bear the brunt of it.

As for the artifacts, are you willing to trade the lives of your sons and daughter to save archeological artifacts? You may be but I am not. As for saving the oil wells, by doing so we prevented an environmental disaster that would have taken decades to recover from. We don’t need Iraqi oil. We have plenty of it in Alaska. (As an aside, what is the mileage you get with your RV?)

Thank God we have a President from Texas and not one from Tennessee or Arkansas. The previous President, an emotional adolescent, left te great President Bush with a terrible mess to clean up and he’s doing it.

Please take me off your copy list as I’ve already read more far left clap-trap disguised as analysis than I care to.

Bob W.

Abu Ghraib and “Collateral Murder”
The pictures tell the story of Abu Ghraib, and this article and this one make a vain effort to explain that particular travesty, which the commanders blamed on a “few bad apples” but which is really a policy-encouraged dehumanization of “sand niggers” and a systemic insensitivity to committing atrocities, all made inevitable by war.

The brutal policy of our warmakers includes strenuous efforts to hush all these nasty side effects up, but whistleblowers leak anyway, and we are indebted to WikiLeaks for revealing some ugly, inconvenient truth about our generous nation building: Here is “Collateral Damage,” and here is that revelation put into perspective.

Alleged U.S. Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning made his first court appearance on Friday, December 16, 2011, after being held for more more than a year and a half by the U.S. military. Manning is suspected of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of classified U.S. documents in history. Supporters of Manning are rallying outside Fort Meade, Maryland. Kevin Zeese, attorney for the Bradley Manning Support Network, had this to say:

The people who should be prosecuted are not Bradley Manning. He’s accused of letting the truth out. He’s not accused of doing any criminal activity. He’s accused of letting the truth out, and he should be given an award for that, not prosecuted. He’s facing the death penalty, potentially. He’s facing the death penalty for exposing war crimes.

Discussing this is perhaps the nation’s most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. Noting that the WikiLeaks revelations helped spark the Arab Spring and in turn the Occupy Wall Street movement, Ellsberg offers this qualified praise, if Manning indeed committed the leak of which he stands accused: “The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as ‘Person of the Year,’ but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of ‘Person of the Year.’ And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning.”

[The Article 32 hearing Manning is being subjected to is] equivalent to a grand jury hearing. It’s kind of symptomatic of the present state of law in the United States, sort of like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: punishment first, trial afterwards, sentence after that. He’s been effectively punished now ten-and-a-half months in Quantico in isolation, a kind of torture, according to the U.N. standards and to our own domestic law, that he couldn’t be sentenced to under our amendment to the Bill of Rights against cruel and unusual punishment. He couldn’t be assigned to that, but he has already. That, in itself, makes a travesty of this continued trial.

I was the first to face the kind of charges that he’s facing, under the Espionage Act, specifically, a civilian charge that he’s facing, 18 U.S.C. 793, back in 1971, the first time that act had been used against someone disclosing information to the American people. In the end, my trial was ended because of gross governmental misconduct against me under President Nixon. This court-martial should be ended now for exactly the same reason. There has been gross, illegal conduct against Bradley Manning in the form of his incarceration for these many months without trial. And that’s one of several reasons why this trial is a travesty….

One of the witnesses [the defense lawyer has not been permitted to call] is Juan Méndez, the U.N. special rapporteur for torture, who has heard credible reports, as he puts it, of inhumane treatment. And under his mandate, under the U.N., he should see, in private, as an official representative of the U.N., Private Manning to see that. He has not been allowed to do that, either in Quantico or Leavenworth. And he has specifically complained about prevarication of the—by the American government in their unwillingness to let him see that. U.N. and Red Cross representatives have seen people in Guantánamo, but they can’t get in, apparently, to Quantico or Leavenworth. Representative Dennis Kucinich, in his official capacity, tried repeatedly to see him in there, for the same reasons, and was again put off, again and again, told that he would be able to see him, but never allowed to see him.

I think that other witnesses, I see from the witness list without their names, are to establish the point that the strictly military charges that he’s facing, that Bradley Manning is facing, things like unauthorized downloading or uploading of software onto military computers, are done by virtually everyone in his department. And this is selective prosecution, obviously intended to get him, even if they can’t prove the charges that they want to get connecting him to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Obviously, the torture to which he was subjected was meant to break him down, to get him to acknowledge links that would enable them to indict Julian Assange. And evidently that pressure has failed against Private Manning….

[About the “Collateral Murder” video], which I’ve seen a number of times, let me speak as a former Marine company commander, and I was a battalion training officer who trained the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines on rules of war. No question in my mind, as I looked at that, that the specific leaked pictures in there of helicopter gunners hunting down and shooting an unarmed man in civilian clothes, clearly wounded, in an area where a squad of American soldiers was about to appear, as the helicopter gunners knew, to take custody of anyone remaining living, that shooting was murder. It was a war crime. Not all killing in war is murder, but a lot of it is. And this was.

The Time magazine cover gives protester, an anonymous protester, as “Person of the Year,” but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of “Person of the Year.” And the American face I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning. The fact is that he is credited by President Obama and the Justice Department, or the Army, actually, with having given WikiLeaks that helicopter picture and other evidence of atrocities and war crimes—and torture, specifically—in Iraq, including in the Obama administration. That, in other words, led to the Tunisian uprising, the occupation in Tunis Square, which has been renamed by—for another face that could go on that picture, Mohamed Bouazizi, who, after the WikiLeaks exposures of corruption, in Tunis, himself, Bouazizi, burned himself alive just one year ago tomorrow, Saturday, December 17th, in protest. And the combination of the WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the protests, the nonviolent protests, that drove Ben Ali out of power, our ally there who we supported up ’til that moment, and in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt, in Tahrir Square occupation, which immediately stimulated the Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. So, “Person of the Year,” one of those persons of the year is now sitting in a courthouse in Leavenworth. He deserves the recognition that he’s just gotten in Time. Julian Assange, who published that, another person of the year, I would say, who’s gotten a number of journalistic awards, very much deserve our gratitude. And I hope they will have the effect in liberating us from the lawlessness that we have seen and the corruption—the corruption—that we have seen in this country in the last 10 years and more, which has been no less than that of Tunis and Egypt.

U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s ‘mission accomplished'”: Sami Rasouli, the founder and director of the Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, discusses the results of the war from Najaf.

Over the past 9 years, the U.S. invasion has left a bloody toll on Iraqi civilians and foreign troops. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops died. Another 32,000 were wounded. An accurate toll of Iraqis killed may never be known. According to Iraq Body Count, at least 104,000 Iraqi civilians have died. In 2006, the British medical journal Lancet estimated 600,000 Iraqis had already been killed. Other studies put the death toll over a million. Hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis died due to the crippling sanctions in the years between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 U.S. invasion. After 20 years of war and sanctions, Iraq’s infrastructure has been devastated….

Well, the war, as President Obama said, is over. But we understood from George Bush back on May 1st, 2003, that major combat operation was over and supposedly mission was accomplished. In terms of destroying Iraq, it’s really “mission accomplished,” as I witnessed through the last, let’s say, eight years, since [the] end of 2003.

But to see what we’ve gotten from this war, after the violence went down dramatically and the dust of war has been settled, now we see the damage clearly everywhere in Iraq, where the electricity high—still the basic public services is almost not there, in terms of the electricity, never has been advanced by the two terms of the Iraqi government or even with the—no intervention by the U.S. efforts to improve these needed public services for an average Iraqi. The healthcare system has been really destroyed. As you mentioned, the infrastructure is a total catastrophe that began not only since 2003, and actually, it’s more than 20 years since 1991.

You know, we should not forget the effect of the sanction before the invasion. The Iraqi people have suffered a lot, and many of them have died. And now, death is not stoppable, because of many unknown diseases that’s caused by poisons that the U.S. military has been—has used against major cities in Iraq. In 2001 and, as well, in 2003, tons—hundred tons of depleted uranium has been—have been thrown on the city of Fallujah, where women today cannot get pregnant due to the deformation of their newborn babies. This is happening here in Najaf, as well. When the U.S. fought the resistance, so-called, the insurgents led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

But to go across the country today and hear the news locally, the Iraqi people are really jubilant and happy that the U.S., if this is true, eventually is pulling out its troops….

[There] is an estimate about 5 million people have been displaced: within the country, about 2 million, and out of the country, 3 million. And those mostly are the middle class, the cream of the crop, the professionals, the engineers, the doctors. Where the country can rely on and get developed and get rebuilt, they are not there, due to the displacement effort through the violent period between 2005, ’06, ’07 and middle of 2008….

The costs of war: Tens of thousands dead, billions spent, and a country torn apart: Catherine Lutz, Brown University professor and co-director of the “Costs of War” research project at the Watson Institute for International Studies, discusses the true costs of the war.

The costs have really been staggering. We know about the number of U.S. servicemembers who have died. Most Americans know that. It’s over 4,500 individuals. We know that the Congress appropriated $800 billion over the years for the Iraq War.

But the true costs, of course, go much farther than that, starting with the people of Iraq, who have lost lives in the hundreds of thousands, the people of that country who have been displaced from their homes…. [Those] numbers are very hard to come by. But the U.N. estimates 3.5 million Iraqis are still displaced from their homes, and again, many widowed, many orphaned, and an environmental damage that has yet to be assessed.

But the idea that the war is over is, I think, what we really need to question, the idea that the war ends the day that the U.S. servicemembers leave that country. We know that many are staying behind in the form of private contractors and State Department employees. We know that the war won’t end for the people who are still, again, struggling to get back home, struggling with missing family members and so on. So I think we need to ask, is the war really over? And the answer is, really, no….

The State Department mission in Iraq, as Amy pointed out, has the largest embassy on the planet, a $6 billion budget. Much of that is going toward the support of 5,500 security contractors. And those people are guarding State Department employees, civilians, who are, again, engaged in a variety of activities there. But in some very important sense, that’s an index of how significantly—how significant the violence remains and the risk remains to the Americans who are there, because of, again, a continuing attempt to evict all of the Americans from Iraq….

How are the Iraqis going to be treated by those contractors? What are the rules of engagement? And what are the ways in which these contractors are permitted to respond when they feel threatened or when they feel that they’re—the people that they’re protecting are threatened? The inspector general for Iraq was not given the kinds of information that Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton suggests is something that they’ve worked out, which is to say, those rules of engagement. So I think there’s really quite a risk to the Iraqi people that these contractors will, again, not be operating with that kind of—you know, operating in an environment in which violence is likely….

[The contractor] companies are … Triple Canopy, the Global Strategies Group, and—and again, some additional contractors—SOC Incorporated are the three main ones….

They do not have immunity in the same way that the troops did, and that’s why the Iraqis were allowing them to stay. But I think, again, if we look forward to what the rest of the country can expect in the next several years, it’s to continue to deal with the kinds of things that Sami talked about—a lack of electricity, the kinds of things that this mission is not going to help solve. And so, I think that the basic human needs to recover from injuries and losses of the nine years of war, that’s what we need to be talking about, is, what is the State Department doing vis-à-vis those issues?

Iraqi women’s activist rebuffs U.S. claims of a freer Iraq: “This is not a democratic country”: Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, discusses the impact of the nearly 9-year U.S. occupation, particularly on Iraqi women.

If I start with the basics, the Iraqi cities are now much more destroyed than they were, I would say, like five years ago. All the major buildings are still destroyed. If you drive in the streets of the capital, your car cannot survive more than one month, because all the streets are still broken. So there was no reconstruction for the buildings, for the cities.

And in the same time, we have turned to a society of 99 percent poor and 1 percent rich, due to the policies that were imposed in Iraq. While Iraq has more than one million widows—some of the counts say one million, some of the counts say two million widows—these widows try to survive on a salary of $150, and most of them cannot get this salary because they don’t have proper ID due to internal displacement. And in the same time, the 1 percent, who lives—of Iraqis, who lives in the Green Zone, they drown in a sea of money. And there was a scandal of losing $40 billion from the annual budget of the country, and nobody is accountable for it. So we have—after nine years, we have the most corrupt government in the world.

We are divided to a society of Shias, who are ruling, and Sunnis, who want to get divided from the country of Iraq. We are now on the verge of the division of country according to religions. And to ethnicities, it has already happened. We know that the Kurdish north is now a Kurdistan, the region of Kurdistan. And the constitution that we have in Iraq allows everybody to get divided or to get their autonomy. So now the Sunni parts of Iraq, they want to be their own agents. They don’t want to be part of the central government anymore. And in the same time, destruction is everywhere. Poverty is for all the people but the 1 percent who are living inside the Green Zone.

And I would like to add one thing. If President Obama wants to make it sound like one unified society, that’s not the true story. We are living in a huge military camp, where one million Iraqi men are recruited in the army. And on top of that, there’s almost 50,000 militia members, of the Sadr group and the other Islamist group, who are not only local militias, like army within the country, but they are now being exported to other countries to oppress the Arab Spring in Syria and maybe later on in other countries. We are not a united country, because the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is another country, has the upper hand in Iraq. And the decisions that were done lately about who stays from the Americans and who doesn’t stay inside Iraq was due to the pressure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They are the decision makers in Iraq.

And the biggest loser out of all of this are the women. Now, by the constitution, there are articles that refer us to the Islamic sharia, when this was not in action in the times of the previous regime. Under Islamic sharia, women are worth half a man legally and one-quarter of a man socially in a marriage. And we still suffer under this. As a women’s organization, we daily meet women who are vulnerable to being bought and sold in the flesh market. We see widows who have no source of income, and nobody to get them IDs for themselves and their children, because they have been internally displaced. So poverty and discrimination against women has become the norm. And the government doesn’t care much about this. They talk about it a lot, but not much is being done about it….

In the last year, we were told that Iraq’s economy is going to be changing, and there’s going to be a new phase of investment. But in reality, those who were invited into the Green Zone were surprised to see that it’s all about privatization, that we have new foreign oil companies. Some of them are already functioning in the south, like British Petroleum, who have an oil field from which they are extracting oil.

They are beginning to—they have brought some foreign workers to work in there, and they have totally discriminatory workplaces where the foreigner is paid much more than the Iraqi. I was told that the foreigners are paid in the thousands of dollars monthly, while an Iraqi employees is paid something like $400. And even the workplaces are very discriminatory and racist, in the sense that the foreigner workers are treated much better than the Iraqi employees.

And the question is, how did they get these foreign oil companies to come into Iraq? Like British Petroleum is one of them. It has many oil fields. It’s functioning. It’s extracting Iraqi oil. On which terms? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know. On which agreement did they come and they are functioning fully in Iraq? We, the Iraqi people, don’t know.

And the question is, why is all the money being shared by the 1 percent who are ruling Iraq and the U.S. administration and all these multinational companies, while the Iraqi widows cannot even have $150 as a salary? Most of the widows we’ve met in our organization do not have one penny coming into their pockets. No government finds themselves accountable for the women of Iraq, who have been turned deprived because of this war.

And I would like to add one thing. There is a new generation of women and men in Iraq who are totally illiterate. You see a woman in her twenties. She might have children, or not, and that’s another story about the widows. But she has witnessed no schooling because of the sectarian war, because of the war on Iraq. It’s a generation of illiteracy in Iraq, while, before this war, you know, we know that Iraq in the 1980s, and even in the following years, it had the highest literacy rate in the Arab world.

And the last point I would like to add, and I would have liked you to ask me about it, is the Arab Spring, when it started in Iraq, specifically on the day of February 25. When the government held a curfew in all the Iraqi cities, especially in Baghdad, we had to walk three hours to reach to the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, and 25,000 people were in that square expressing their political will that this is not the political system that they want to rule them—the Islamist government of the Shia, who is oppressing all the others, the Sunni, who are oppressed in the west, the ethnic divisions on the people.

And mind you, the gender divisions? In the Tahrir Square of Baghdad, many of us women were there, and we were so respected. Nobody told us to put on the veil on, while in these days the prime minister’s office is spreading out policies that all the female workers in the public sector will have to wear decent dress code—decent as in respecting our culture. The prime minister is imposing a mentality of discriminating against women based on Islamic sharia, while the demonstrators of the Arab Spring in Iraq want an egalitarian society.

And one thing that this new democracy, so-called democracy, proved in Iraq is that they were the best in oppressing the Arab Spring in Iraq. They sent us police, army and anti-riot groups to shoot us with live ammunition in the Tahrir Square. They detained and they tortured hundreds and thousands of us demonstrators. And this is because we only led a free demonstration.

And this is not only one demonstration. All the Fridays since the beginning of February have witnessed demonstrations in the main squares of Iraq—Baghdad, Sulaymaniyah, Basra, Samarra, all of Baghdad. People went into the squares, and there were no slogans of asking for a religious government. The U.S. administration came into Iraq: it divided the Iraqi people according to religion, according to their sect, according to their ethnicity. It’s divide and conquer. And now the women are the biggest loser in all of this. We went to the Iraqi squares. We demonstrated. The Arab Spring was there very strongly but got oppressed in ways that were new to Iraqi people. Anti-riot police of the American style was something that we witnessed there. The big vehicles that sprayed us with the hot water, polluted water, pushed us out of these squares. And sound bombs were thrown at us, live ammunition, the full works. This is not a democratic country. And it is not united, because it’s being divided into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions….

[then responding to Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 boast about how Iraq was being “liberated”]

I think that the victims and the parents of the victims of this war, the half-a-million dead of this war, were not invited to the celebration of the U.S. and the military in Baghdad. They should have been invited to give their say about this Iraqi war that left their families hungry and poor and really unable and helpless.

by Richard Wolff
Santa Fe, NM
September 13, 2011

available from Alternative Radio

You can listen to Richard Wolff deliver this address here.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor at the New School in New York. He is the author of numerous books on economics, including Capitalism Hits the Fan.

This is a crisis. I wasn’t so sure back in 2007, and even into 2008, that it would be a serious crisis. Like so many in my profession, I had not seen just how bad things could get. But that’s all better now. I see clearly. And while most of my colleagues in the profession don’t, because of their commitments over a lifetime, I do want to tell you a little bit about how it is as well as how we got here.

First, how it is. This is the worst economic crisis in my lifetime, which means it’s probably the same in yours. This is the fifth year. This crisis really begins in the middle of 2007. We’re now in the second half of 2011. That’s really bad. Our unemployment is extremely high, not the 9% you read in the newspapers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington keeps a whole bunch of unemployment statistics. They have even names, U-some number, to distinguish one from the other.

The most important of those is called U-6. Let me make sure we all know what that means. It counts three groups of people. Those looking for work but not able to find it. That’s the 9% you read in the newspapers about. And then it adds two other groups: people who have a part-time job but want a full-time job but can’t find one— there are millions of those people in the United States, and then it adds a third group. These are the people who have stopped looking. And they get different names, depending on which year you look at the statistics. They’re sometimes called—and you have to appreciate the compassion here—“discouraged workers.” More recently, they’ve been given the name “marginal workers,” which is probably less good to be called. When you put all those three together, you get the U-6 statistic. It’s currently 17 1/2%. Not 9%, 17 1⁄2%. That’s not my adjustment of the unemployment data; that’s the official government data. Seventeen percent is one out of six, better than, which basically means that every single American family has somebody in their extended numbers, if it’s one out of six, who is in that group, who is not earning any kind of money that they can live on.

Therefore, this is not a crisis that is a part of our economic system failure. It is a general crisis. I want to drive that point home. It’s not a financial crisis. That is an adjective designed to suggest that the crisis is limited to a part of the economy—finance. As you will see in a few minutes, this crisis comes out of the entire economic functioning of our society and is not particularly financial. It shows up in finance, but that’s not where its origins are and that’s not where its impact has been felt exclusively.

This is a general crisis of our system. So I want to turn, having said that, and talk a little bit about the system.

But even before I do that, one more point. Let’s keep the human dimension of a crisis of these proportions in our minds. Somewhere between 20 and 30 million people are in this U-6 number. That’s an enormous number of people. They have been out of work, on average, more weeks than in any other crisis for many decades. It’s a long-lasting unemployment. When people are unemployed for a long time, they exhaust their savings, they become burdens on other members of their family or circle of friends. Every statistic we know means that those people suffer mental problems, physical health problems, problems in their relationships with spouses and children and parents, and the damage and the scarring from all of that lasts for decades. The social costs of a crisis of these dimensions are staggering. It is a blot on the reputation of economists that there are very few studies that even try to measure what those costs are.

And if we were to add to it, if we had more time, the costs of the millions of people who have been thrown out of their homes through foreclosure actions, that would only add. The millions of people who have seen the benefits that go with the jobs they still have be cut back and the anxiety that produces, that would have to be added. And for all of you that are wondering whether Medicare and Social Security will be there when you need them—and that’s something you should wonder a lot about—how do you measure the costs of those anxieties and those shattered relationships and those strained family structures that come out of all of this? The costs are incalculable. And we’re not doing much about it, so it sits there. Again, we are in the fifth year of this economic decline.

So what is it that’s having the problems? It is our economic system. Let me be clear. I don’t believe it is valuable or useful to look for a scapegoat. I know that some people want to blame the Federal Reserve system, our monetary system. They want to get really angry at Ben Bernanke, which I encourage you to do, but not as an analysis of our difficulties. Then there are those who think it’s the evil machinations of Wall Street. Once again, please, be angry at Wall Street, but as an analysis of our problem, no.

Our problem is that everyone over the last 30 years has played the game of economics as best they could: workers, businesses, government. They’ve played by the basic rules of how this system works. And by doing so, they brought the system to this disastrous end result. So don’t get angry at any one of them. Don’t decide that the evil culprit were those folks who took out loans that they couldn’t afford, those things we later called subprime loans. They, too, were trying to live the American dream, to follow the encouragements to borrow money, to enjoy that, and to pass on the dream to their children. Everybody was doing what the system calls them to do, what the system rewards them for doing, what the system invites them to do. The problem is the system and not this or that player in it.

What is this system? It has a name. This system is called capitalism. It’s been the dominant economic system for several hundred years, first in Europe and then brought here. I want to talk to you briefly about that system. It is extraordinarily unstable, and it always has been. Capitalism bounces up and down. That’s why we have so many words for that: recession, depression, inflation, upturn, downturn, boom, bust. I could go on all night. Cultures develop many words for something when it’s very important in their lives. And that is.

It is so unstable meaning periodically millions of people are thrown out of work. The resources that people normally work with sit idle, gathering rust and dust. Currently, by the way, the government says we are working at about 70% capacity. That’s what it’s called. That means 30% of the tools, equipment, machines, office space, mall space is empty, is sitting idle. We will live in an economic system in which millions of people want work and don’t have it, in which all the raw materials, equipment, and machines they need to work with are sitting there idle. If we had a system that worked, it would put the people who want to work together with all the stuff that they need to work with to produce the wealth that could all make our situations much better. But our economic system cannot and does not put those together. And what’s worse, it’s a-bouncing up and down.

In my classes in the university, to get this idea across, I tell a joke, which I’m going to impose on you. If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would have moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help. But you live, or most folks do, in an economic system where they make neither of those kinds of demands on it. They live with it. It’s extraordinary.

So we’re in another one, another economic downturn, of which there have been so many. But this one is really bad and lasting a long time, which they sometimes do. The last time we had that in the U.S. was the Great Depression, the 1930s. Let me remind you, it begins in October of 1929, and depending on what historian you like best, it ends 1939, 1940, 1941. My message—it lasted a decade. These things don’t have to be short. And in case you think that only the happened in ancient history, in the 1930s, think about Japan, which settled into a depression in 1989 and is still in it. Still in it 20 years later. That’s why the newspapers are full of the U.S.’s economic position and the great challenge mounted by China. What happened to Japan? Japan is in a terrible economic mess it cannot find its way out of. So is it possible that the one we’re in is going to last a long time? You bet. And could it get worse before it gets better? I used to have to say it could. Now I can tell you that all the current statistics indicate it already is getting worse. It’s extraordinary.

But this one has a particular set of qualities I want now to turn to. This crisis comes after 30 years of an extraordinary economic development of the U.S. Thirty years ago, the U.S. was one of the least unequal societies in terms of the distribution of income and wealth when you looked at the whole collection of advanced industrial economies. Today we are the most unequal. Something happened over the last 30 years that dramatically widened the gap between rich and poor. For reasons you’re going to see in a few minutes as I go through it, we produced enormous wealth for the top, and we wiped out the middle, which probably some of you have already noticed in very intimate and personal ways. So that now we have a small group of rich at the top and a vast group of people struggling to make ends meet.

You might imagine—you would be wrong but you might imagine—that if a crisis happens in a society at the end of 30 years of extraordinary wealth at one end of the society and a hard time for everybody else, that the system would try to fix its dilemma by asking those who have done well over the last 30 years, who are the most able to pay now compared to everybody else, to kick in and do something to help the system get out of its mess. But that’s not what’s happening. This society is trying to solve its economic problems by having debates in Washington on what? On how much to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, helping students go to school. It’s extraordinary. The solution to an economic crisis coming at the end of a tremendous explosion of wealth at one end of the distribution is by taking more away from those who have had a hard time for the 30 years, just to avoid taxing those whose have the most and those who have done the best? How is that possible?

Again, to drive it home, that’s not what happened in the U.S. in the 1930s, which came after a period when much less of an inequality of wealth had been experienced. Let me remind you of what happened the last time the U.S. faced this situation, because the contrast could not be starker. In comes Roosevelt on a program of balanced budgets. A very conservative Democratic leader was our President Roosevelt. But three or four years into the crisis, when it looked as bad as ours now looks, when the unemployment kept getting worse, even worse than it is today, Mr. Roosevelt underwent a transformation. He became a different president. I would like to suggest it was because he saw the light. Clearly, that was not the case.

What he saw was the heat. And the heat was coming from below. The trade union movement of the U.S., just to remind you, had the most explosive growth in the history of the U.S.—we had never had it before, we have never had it since—sweeping across America’s basic industries, steel, auto, rubber, chemical, all of them. The CIO organized millions of workers whose reaction to the Great Depression was to become more militant on the left politically. Beyond that, the Socialist Party had a renaissance of membership and the Communist Party became an important political force, more than it had ever been, more than it has been since, a lot more. Mr. Roosevelt faced a mass of people whose reaction to a protracted depression was to demand fundamental help from the government and fundamental change. So Mr. Roosevelt saw an opportunity and a pressure.

So what did he do? Faced with unemployment, he did something very different from what we see today. He said, If we’re going to solve the problem of unemployment, and if the private sector is either unable or unwilling to do it, well, then I’ll do it. Between 1934 and 1941, Roosevelt and the federal government created and filled 11 million jobs, paid by the federal government, giving those people and their families and their communities a job instead of a dole, a decent income, the ability to maintain their mortgage payments and so keep their homes, etc., etc. In today’s numbers it would be roughly double that number of people, and that would be a major address of unemployment issues. That’s what he did.

In case you’re wondering how that was paid for, he went to the corporations and he went to the rich, and he said to them, My fellow rich Americans, you’re going to pay for it. And you’re going to like it, because you’re not doing anything to get us out of this mess from which you as rich people are endangered and you as corporations are suffering. You’re not able or willing to help yourself, so I’m going to do it for you, but you’re going to pay for it. And they did.

A couple of statistics. You know, I’m an economist. We have to pepper our conversations with statistics because it helps the average person think we really know what we’re talking about. So here’s one. At the end of World War II the federal government relied, as it does to this day, on taxing individuals and taxing corporations— individuals’ incomes, corporations’ profits. In 1945, for every dollar that Washington got from taxing individuals, it got $1.50 from taxing corporations. Corporations paid 50% more in toto than individuals. What’s the relationship today? For every dollar that the government gets by taxing individuals, it gets from corporations—ready?—25 cents. That is a massive shift over the last half century of the burden of taxation off of business and onto all of you. But that’s only half the story.

Here’s the other half. Roosevelt went to the rich people and he said, I’m not just going to tax the corporations to pay for the jobs program, I’m going to tax all you rich people. And he really went after them. First, in the 1930s he said, I’m going to raise the rates of taxation on rich people. You’re going to pay a lot more than middle-class people and low-income people, a lot more. The rates were jacked up into the 90th percentile. What does that mean? For every dollar over, say, $100,000 or whatever the cutoff was then, for every dollar over that that a rich person gets, he or she would have to give the government 90-plus cents, keeping the remaining 10 cents, roughly, for themselves. Wow.

In 1942 Roosevelt makes an even more dramatic proposal as president. He says, I believe we ought to have a maximum income in the U.S. Yup, the president. And what was it? $25,000 a year? His proposal was, every dollar you earn over $25,000, the federal government is going to come and take it away and use it to fix this economic system. Of course, wealthy people, as you might imagine, didn’t like this, and the Republican Party opposed it. The Republican Party threatened not to allow the national debt to be raised back in the 1940s, just like they did a few months ago. Roosevelt made a lot of public speeches and they fought, and they reached a compromise. Okay, said Roosevelt, I won’t insist on a cap, a maximum income, but in exchange I want the maximum tax rate to be 94%. For every dollar over $100,000 that rich people get, 94 cents will go to Washington, you get to keep 6. And the Republicans went along. That became the law.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was 91%. In the 1970s, it was 70%. What is it today? 35%. Are you with me? Over the last half century, the top income bracket, for the richest people, was dropped from the 90s to 35. That’s a tax cut. The last 50 years in this country, if you just look at our tax system, is a sign that the issue in America isn’t: Will there be a class war? We’ve had 50 years of class war, and we lost, because we’re paying those taxes. We are the middle, we’re paying the taxes. It’s so grotesque that we even have in the U.S. rich people, really rich people,—I’m thinking, as you probably can guess, of Warren Buffet, one of the richest, who is making a career these days of explaining that there is something wrong in a system in which he pays a lower rate of taxes, earning hundreds of millions of dollars a year, than any of the people in his office, the secretaries and the clerks. He’s able to see it. This is a society that has relieved the rich in a staggering way while making them richer over the last 30 years. Stunning.

Their plan right now? What are they going to do to help this economic crisis? Nothing. No tax increases. Last December you all watched as Obama tried to see whether we could, for people over $250,000, not give them the tax cut that Bush had gotten through, make them pay a little more. You know what his proposal was, for those of you who don’t watch the numbers? To let it go from the 35% it is now up to the lofty level—ready?—39%. That was defeated, and the President accepted that defeat. Wow. They weren’t even willing to pay another 4% to help the situation. So we don’t have the 1930s, we don’t have Roosevelt, we don’t have a jobs program, we don’t have a tax the rich. We have the opposite of all those things.

A few days ago the president of the U.S., in what is arguably one of the major speeches of his campaign for the presidency next year, had a jobs proposal to make. What was it? Exactly the same as the last time. He’s going to provide incentives to business to solve the problem of hiring more workers, and he’s going to give them big orders to help rebuild our infrastructure. For those of us who watch these things, it’s a little painful. The last time we had a program like this, it was for $800 billion, two and a half years ago. Now the president, when the situation is worse, is proposing a program whose price tag is about $400 billion. The problem is worse and the program is half as big. Hello. Where is this going? Nowhere.

And in that lies a lesson. Here’s what that lesson is: Capitalism has always been highly unstable. And here’s how the downturns of capitalism have always been managed: You wait. You wait for what? You wait for the unemployment to convince more and more people, based on their desperation, to offer to sell their ability to work for less money. Wages go down. As more and more businesses collapse because the economy is in such bad shape, guess what happens? They have to sell their equipment at secondhand, fire-sale prices: their computers, their machines, their fleets of vehicles. The price of the equipment, the inputs to business, collapse, just as the wages collapse.

Let me give you the example that’s so stark in America today. The autoworkers, who used to be among the best-paid workers in the U.S. They were getting up until recently roughly $28 an hour plus benefits. They had to sign a contract. It’s different now. All new employees get half of that—$14 an hour. And they have tens of thousands more people applying for those jobs than they have jobs in Detroit. If you want to see where the future of American capitalism is, go to Detroit. It will terrify you, what you see.

So the system corrects itself by waiting. What are they waiting for? Until the wages get low enough and the costs of inputs from collapsed businesses become low enough that those capitalists who have survived see an opportunity for profit. At such low wages, at such low costs of doing business, now it becomes interesting. So we wait as a society. We wait until it’s profitable again for capitalism to renew the investment process and hire people. Then the economy turns up until the next bounce down.

Then what is all this talk in Washington? What are all these events about policy? A thesis I want to ask you to think about—that it’s all a kind of diversionary political theater. We have the Republicans and the Democrats positioning themselves, arguing: What are we going to do? blah blah blah blah We should do A. No, we should do B. But in reality they’re just waiting. We’re all supposed to get excited in the debate between Republicans and Democrats, not because either of their policies can or will do anything. We’re waiting until the system can once again get going, when enough people have suffered enough to accept $14 instead of $28 an hour. And then the system comes back. Extraordinary.

And from some of your faces, let me drive it home with an example, with some numbers. Another thing we do as economists, numbers. We’re supposed to get you to believe that by talking about numbers it’s all more real than it otherwise would be. It’s a game, but it’s the game we know how to play. So let me do that for you.

The federal government’s budget right now in the U.S. is a peculiar one. Voted by Republicans and Democrats last year, the current budget works as follows: The government of the U.S. is scheduled to spend $3 1/2 trillion. That same budget has the U.S. government bringing in in taxes on individuals and corporations and a few other things, like rubber tires and gasoline and alcohol, about $2 trillion. Are you with me? The difference between what the government is supposed to spend is $1 1/2 trillion, the difference between 3 1/2 and 2. What is $1 1/2 trillion? It’s kind of a hard number to get your head around. It’s $1,500 billion: $1,500,000,000,000. That’s the deficit. If you’re upset about deficits, which every politician in Washington claims to be, you’d have to be upset about the fact that in this year alone we are going to be at deficit, that is, spending more than we earn as an economy, as a government, to the tune of $1,500 billion.

So what was the debate in Washington between Republicans and Democrats all about? The Republicans came in with a dynamic proposal to cut the deficit by the huge number of $100 billion. Hello. How big is the deficit? $1,500 billion. So if the Republicans proposed a draconian program to cut $100 billion, they’re not proposing anything. The Democrats came riding into the debate saying, That’s much too much. We only to want cut it $30 billion. And then they fought for months, threatening to stop the government, and they reached a historic compromise, $38 billion—that was the number— $38 billion out of $1,500 billion. To take this seriously you have to be crazy. You’re watching theater. Bad theater.

But it’s also dangerous theatre. We’re scheduled to have a deficit this year of $1,500 billion. Next year’s deficit is scheduled to be over a trillion dollars. We are borrowing money like it’s going out of style. Our debt now is about $14 1/2 trillion. That’s what we produce in an average year. Our debt is 100% of the output of goods and services. It’s so bad, the level of debt, that the Standard & Poor corporation a few weeks ago made a big splash by reducing the creditworthiness of the U.S., which you always do when someone is borrowing way too much, too fast, which we’re doing, and which neither political party is doing anything about.

Why? The answer is simple. The way to reduce our deficit is to tax the wealth. Since that’s politically impossible in the U.S., we can’t do it. But to appreciate the full irony, we are borrowing ourselves into oblivion. We are reproducing the exact behavior that got that little country of Greece into the mess it’s now in. And the reason is, we don’t tax the rich. So the government, in order to spend $3 1/2 trillion when it only taxes $2 trillion, has to borrow it.

Now, if you get the next point, you will understand modern economics. If the government has to borrow $1,500 billion to perform the activities we want it to perform, and therefore it has to borrow $1,500 billion, who do you think it borrows it from? Here it comes. Why, of course, from the rich people in the corporations who have the money because the government didn’t tax them. From the standpoint of corporations and the rich, follow the logic. Instead of paying taxes, the way they used to, they now have a much better deal. We corporations and rich people don’t pay the taxes, which if we did, the government would take it, end of story. Instead, much better: We lend it to the government, which has to pay it back. And while we wait, it pays us interest.

When I made my criticisms of capitalism as I was learning economics, I remember that the single most powerful critique of what I was saying, given to me by my professors, and later by my colleagues, was, Well, yes, there are these problems. But the bottom line is, Capitalism delivers the goods.

Well, you’ve got to stay with an argument like that through good times and bad, don’t you? Capitalism is not delivering the goods now. It’s delivering the bads, big time. And that’s going to change this country’s history.

Let me turn in the time I have left to offering two things briefly: one, a brief explanation of how we got into this mess over the last 30 years, and then a suggestion of what we need to do to get out of it.

First, how we got into it. Ours is a peculiar country. From 1820, shortly after we became independent, to 1970, the U.S. paid higher wages to its workers year after year. Stunning. No other capitalist country did it. It developed in the U.S. the idea that every generation lives better than the one before, there’s an American dream, if you’re an immigrant, come here, you work hard and you will make more money. And it worked. It was extraordinary. It happened because we had a labor shortage here. Capitalists were successful: they made money, they built their businesses up. But they always ran against the problem—not enough people. We weren’t very nice to those whom we found here—some of you know that story, particularly in this area—so they weren’t available. We had to bring people, and we had to have high wages to bring people here. And when they came here, they wanted to run off and have a farm somewhere in the West, so we had to keep paying higher wages to keep them here even once we got them.

In 1970, all that changed, stopped. We don’t have a labor shortage anymore. Here’s why. We replaced huge numbers of American workers with computers, starting in the 1970s. We moved jobs out of the U.S. because that 150 years of rising wages had made wages higher here. So corporations said, Oh, you see, the wages are higher here. I’m going to China. They’re much lower. So there was less demand for people to work. At the same time in the 1970s, women in America, for a whole host of reasons, demanded jobs, paid jobs, and immigrants, particularly from the South, came into the U.S., the latest wave. Women and immigrants looking at the same time as there were fewer jobs. All businesses in America, Main Street and Wall Street, discovered they didn’t have to raise wages anymore, there was no more labor shortage. So they didn’t. Statistic: The real wage in the U.S. today, the value of an hour’s worth of work for the average worker adjusted for the prices you pay, in 2011 is the same as it was in 1978. Thirty years of no increase of wages.

American families were traumatized. After all, we grew up in a society where you’re supposed to live the American dream, do better each year, give that to your children, etc. So Americans reacted, working people, the way traumatized people often do, particularly when you can’t discuss it. There was no discussion in America in the last 30 years about this sea change. So Americans did two things.

1. They sent everybody in the family out to work. Another statistic, OECD: Americans do more hours of paid labor per year than the working classes in any other country on this Earth. We work ourselves to death.
2. And when that wasn’t enough, the American working class became a pioneer in a new way. It undertook a level of debt no working class had ever undertaken before. We had to develop a whole new instrument, the credit card, and distribute it to everybody. And many of them. So you could really accumulate debt.

By 2007, of course, what? The American working class is exhausted. It can’t work anymore, it is stressed beyond words because with the women entering the labor force, they become exhausted, they can’t hold together the emotional life of American families the way they once had. The stress levels are unbearable. And then that debt which you’re freaked out about because you don’t think you can pay.

So the collapse happens in 2007 just where you would expect it—the inability of an overindebted working class to make the payments. Then the whole house of cards collapses. That’s why we’re still in it now. Corporations are not going to go invest and hire workers. Why should they? Nobody’s buying what they’re producing. And there is no prospect that they will. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains a wonderful article about the Procter & Gamble Company and how it has to reorganize its investment programs. Because they used to direct much of their advertising and their production to the vast middle class of the U.S., and their extensive research shows them it’s not there anymore. So they’re cutting their business into two parts: the part that deals with rich people and the part that deals with—and I won’t use any pejorative terms—the rest. No middle. It’s over.

Now, 30 years later, the American people are coming to a recognition that they postponed for a generation the end of rising wages. They substituted borrowing to keep up the illusion that they were living the American dream. They can’t do that anymore. It’s over. The realization of that is just beginning to sink in to the American people.

The corporations already knew it. Forty years ago they moved production out of the U.S. Fifteen years ago they started moving white-collar jobs out of the U.S. And today they’re realizing that their markets are only outside the U.S. They’re done here. You’re watching that play itself out and the desperate struggles of a society trying to come to terms with it.

What do you do about this situation? Well, you could try to do what some folks suggest: Let’s get a bigger stimulus. What? How are you going to do that? Are you going to borrow even more money when you can hardly stand the level of debt of the government? There are lots of voices saying that. That’s not going to happen. Here’s another thought. Let’s regulate the businesses. They shouldn’t do this. We had the greatest explosion of regulation in American history in the 1930s. What has happened ever since? The business community used the profits they had to systematically evade, avoid, weaken, or overturn every regulation. What in the world makes you think, having learned how to do it over the last 50 years, if we throw them a new bunch of regulations, they won’t do the same. They’ll do it, and they’ll do it faster, because they know better how to do it.

Here’s the conundrum that I want to leave you with. If this is a systemic problem, if everything that has happened comes out of banks doing what they do and corporations doing what they do and workers doing what they do, trying to make a living within the rules of this game, if it’s a systemic problem, then we have to overcome a 50-year taboo in the U.S. We have to talk about the system. We have to ask the question, like mature adults, the way we question our educational system, our transportation system, our health delivery system. Does it work, is it serving our needs? We have to ask that question about the economic system, too. Capitalism. Does it meet our needs? Did it and does it continue, and is it reasonable to go that way?

I would submit to you that it cannot, that the benefits of capitalism have been won. The gains it is capable of have been achieved. It’s no longer working, and we’re not getting anywhere by refusing to face that reality. So what change would I propose? Would it be a return to the examples and experiments of the Soviet Union and China? No. No.

For me, the change has to come at the base of society. We have a problem in the way we organize the production and distribution of goods and services in America. We use an institution called a corporation. Therein lies the problem. Every day in America people come to work from 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday. We help to produce the goods and services that we all depend on. At the end of each day, when our work is done, we go home. We don’t take with us the goods and services we’ve produced.

You might have wondered—and I’m sure you all did—what happens to those goods and services we produce that we must leave there? Well, someone makes a lot of decisions. That someone is a board of directors, 15 to 20 people, who run most of the corporations in this country. And who selects those 15 or 20 people? A group called the major shareholders, another group of 15 or 20 people. Fifteen or 20 people select the 15 or 20 other people. Who make what decisions? What to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

Folks, what they do is understandable in this system. They use the profits to shape politics, they use the profits to shape the society they live in to keep themselves in the wonderful position of being among those who make the decisions and get the profits. They’re the ones who make the decisions that make our economy work the way it does. If you don’t want it to work the way it’s now working to deliver the bads, then you’ve got to deal with this problem.

And what would that mean? It’s an idea as old as the U.S. and older still. You’ve got to change the way organizations like corporations work. You have to make it for the first time the rule that the people who work in the corporation make the decisions. You come to work Monday through Thursday and you do your job. on Friday you come to work dressed down a little bit, relaxed, and you don’t do your regular job. You sit around all day Friday with your fellow workers having meetings to decide democratically, one worker, one vote, what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits.

How do you summarize what I propose? Here’s a thought. Democracy at work. Because, after all in, a society that prides itself on believing in democracy, that the people who have to live with the decision ought to be participants in making it, something we claim as a nation to hold dear, it’s kind of strange, if you think about it, that the most important activity of our adult lives, what we do five out of seven days, the key part of each day—work— should be organized in a way that isn’t democratic at all, where all of us who work have to live with the decisions of a board of directors over whom we exercise no power whatsoever. Why would democracy be good, but not at work? Either it’s good or it isn’t. This is long overdue. This is an alternative way of organizing your economy.

And, boy, would it lead to different results. Let me close by giving you a taste. Let’s go back to the 1970s, when corporations all over America realized the labor shortage was over and we don’t have to pay rising wages. Suppose a decision on wages was not made by the board of directors but by the collective of workers. Do you think they would have stopped the 150-year history of raising wages? Unlikely. Do you think they would have voted to move production to China, thereby depriving themselves of a job? Unlikely. You think they would have paid their executives staggering amounts of money while everybody else’s wage was stagnant? Probably not. In short, we would have had a completely different history as a nation over the last 30 years. If their wages had kept going up, as they had been able to do for 150 years, then they would have had to borrow so much, and we wouldn’t have had the credit explosion, and everything would have been different.

A mature nation that isn’t afraid should, especially now that the Cold War is 20 years behind us, finally be able to look squarely in the face at an economic system that isn’t working and to be able to say, Let’s have a national debate over the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system as it works in the U.S. and as we can compare it to alternative arrangements, one of which I’ve just sketched briefly for you. It is way too dangerous not to have that debate. It is way too costly. Think of the millions of families with which I began tonight’s talk.

In case you think it’s unthinkable or impossible, think about an unusual political party that arose in one of the most powerful capitalist countries over the last few years. I’m speaking of Germany. In Germany, a new political party, brand-new in many ways, formed 10 years ago. To make it clear what it believed in, it called itself Die Linke in German, meaning “the left.” Hint. Here’s one of its basic slogans: Germany can do better than capitalism. In the last national election they got 12% of the vote. Because Germany has a system of proportional representation, if you get 12% of the vote, you get 12% of the deputies in the parliament, which they have.

If it is possible among the German people, given their history, to have a party that makes this part of the national debate, which it is, then there is no reason why a determined American public, aware of the dilemmas it faces economically, cannot rise to the challenge of making a comparable determination.

It is very dangerous, the situation we’re in. To do less than that dishonors whatever we take seriously of the American tradition and is no service to one another or to the rest of the American people, who need once again to see a movement arise like the one, although it will be new and different, that got Mr. Roosevelt to change so dramatically in the 1930s. We can’t ask Mr. Obama to do that for us. As with Roosevelt, he’s going to do it, if he ever does it, because we have independently built the pressure below demanding different kind of responses.

I hope these arguments are of some interest. Thank you for your attention.

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