Clarifying Clinton

The lead article in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic magazine is devoted to Bill Clinton and his post-presidential carrier of inducing corporations to fund needed social solutions, e.g. AIDS, energy conservation, etc. (The article plus a slide show and interview can be found at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200710/clinton-foundation.) Reading the article and watching a video presentation by Clinton did much to clarify for me what has happened to the Democratic Party I once knew as a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. As with many Democrats, I have long known that Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council had abandoned the people and their needs as the prerequisite and defining purpose of a democracy. Roosevelt was under no illusions about the need to protect citizens from the aggrandizing power of the corporations. It was one of the functions of government to redistribute a portion of the gross national product to the people in the interests of preserving a democracy, which cannot exist in a nation of the rich and the poor. I asked myself how a Democrat could auction off large segments of the publicly owned communication spectrum with no public benefit required. We should have required ample prime time for public affaires such as elections. We should have created an independent network such as the BBC. Everybody knew the media was the problem, but these “Democrats” sold it to the very corporations that were polluting our airwaves with trivia and worse and with no public interest strings attached. This scenario has been repeated time and again by these people, whether it was a health plan that bent over backwards to accommodate the corporations, but still could not satisfy corporate greed, or a welfare program that forced people on welfare to find a job in an obviously declining job market and when those jobs often did not pay a living wage. This is democratic concern for the people?

The article is appropriately headlined “Let’s Make a Deal” on the cover of the magazine. In the article it becomes clear that Clinton views corporations as fundamental and government’s role is to facilitate them as much as possible while extracting whatever quid pro quo it can from them. In 2005 Clinton established the William J. Clinton Foundation (URL http://www.clintonfoundation.org/index.htm) to carry out his vision called the Clinton Global Initiative. As the author of the Atlantic article notes, “Clinton can and certainly does raise money, but he didn’t have enough to endow a major grant-making foundation. What he did have was an ex- presidential bully pulpit, a deep Rolodex, the power to attract attention and talent, and an inkling that those assets might be used to do for public goods something like what entrepreneurs and investment bankers do in the corporate world: midwife new markets or scale up underdeveloped ones.” The author describes the annual, somewhat frenetic, gathering of corporate executives and their flunkies to negotiate what “commitments’ they will make toward improving the world. There is no question that the Foundation does a type of good. Apparently its AIDS initiative was quite successful, but the instrument for doing this good is corporate charity, not government. This is analogous to the Clinton administration’s doing enormous good for the corporations in the hope that the corporations would, in some measure, reciprocate. Robert Reich, Clinton’s first Secretary of Labor, recounts the cold shoulder he got from multinational corporations when he asked for their support in improving labor laws in return for the enormous benefits that the administration had bestowed on them. I believe this charitable approach to dealing with social issues, which Democrats of the FDR period thought the business of government, was endemic to the Clinton administration. That Clinton’s foundation continues in the same vein accounts, I believe, for the friendship between him and the first Prescient Bush who appealed to a thousand lights of charity to solve social problems. This approach implies that the citizens have no right to a decent standard of living, which FDR declared they did.

The charitable approach to dealing with major social issues is, in my judgment, very dangerous. If and as it becomes the norm we lay the groundwork for fascism, which, as Mussolini pointed out, is a fusion of corporations and government. Presidential candidates in the 2008 election should be scrupulously examined for this same approach to government, most notably, Hillary Clinton who is taking large amounts from media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Robert Newhard

Asymmetrical Warfare Can Easily Segue Into an Asymmetrical Society

It began as an intriguing question. Why, on three occasions, have the world’s superpowers been defeated by small, largely undeveloped, countries? The United States was defeated in Vietnam and has been in its effort to control Iraq. The Russians were defeated in their effort to subdue and control Afghanistan.

I discovered that the United States military has been asking this question ever since the Vietnam defeat. The issue has been studied under the rubric of “asymmetrical warfare.” From what I have been able to discover in an admittedly cursory inquiry the military is relying primarily on technology to address their problems with the kind of guerrilla resistance they have met in Vietnam and Iraq. The consequences of introducing the military and its ever-advancing technology into the environment of the civilian, which is where the terrorist operates, bode ill for mankind. Once the military is introduced into civilian affaires its power can be as easily directed against our own citizens as against any enemy. Unless we are very careful we will wind up letting the military kill democracy under the guise of defending it.

One of the more significant consultants in this area is John Robb who was a mission commander for a counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism. The following are selections from an article he published in the magazine Fast Company titled “Security: Power to the People.” The full article may be found at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/103/essay-security.html

· The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies.

· The terrorists have developed the ability to fight nation-states strategically--without weapons of mass destruction. This new method is called "systems disruption," a simple way of attacking the critical networks (electricity, oil, gas, water, communications, and transportation) that underpin modern life. Such disruptions are designed to erode the target state's legitimacy, to drive it to failure by keeping it from providing the services it must deliver in order to command the allegiance of its citizens.

· Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.

· As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.

These conflicts could be looked at as technology versus people encounters. As such, why have technologically deficient people been able to defeat the most technologically advanced militaries on the planet? There are those who still argue that the United States lost in Vietnam because it did not bring all its technological capability to that war, meaning nuclear weaponry. The same could be said of Russia. Understanding that nations have always expected their militaries to use all available resources to win a war, it is impressive that in both Vietnam and Afghanistan both the United States and Russia chose defeat rather than employ nuclear weaponry. It raises the question of whether mankind is finally learning, in a very brutal fashion, that wars are no longer winnable. It also indicates the fudamentally evil decision of the Bush administration to bridge this gap between the acceptable and the unacceptable by undertaking the development of battlefield nuclear devices known as bunker busters to, in effect, “domesticate” the use of nuclear energy as just one more battlefield weapon of modern warfare.

There is, however, another aspect of the world as Robb and the military see it. It is a world disintegrating under the pressure of terrorism, to be followed, as that deterioration progresses, by gangs and other smaller groups. I suggest this process would virtually duplicate that which followed the fall of the Roman Empire under pressure from the barbarian invasions. As the security provided by the Roman Empire declined people fled to the estates of local nobility for protection and from this arose the feudal system that dominated Europe for a thousand years. This current scenario by Robb differs in one major regard because of the vastly increased level of technology brought to this disintegrative process. This raises the issue, indeed the specter, of mankind being unable to create an ethos based on its commonality and being backed into a world in which conflict, violence and fear, complemented by nuclear and biological weaponry, dominates. As society fragments under the impact of terrorism, as the powers that be increasingly construe protest as terrorism, as the military increasingly intervenes in domestic protest and as technology is increasingly pitted against individual citizens, it will become progressively clear that those who would build fences dividing humanity invite a world of conflict.

Bob Newhard

When Better is Not Good Enough

Bill Clinton and the DLC democrats have made a mantra of making things “better”, which has allowed them great latitude for obfuscation. The question is not whether things can be made better. The issue is can they be made good enough. Reality determines whether policy and action are good enough, not slight improvements that fail to deal with the necessities.

This thought came to mind as I read of Hillary Clinton urging the removal of the puppet president of Iraq who was supposed to bail this country out of the transparently stupid attack on Iraq and now that the situation has devolved into the chaos knowledgeable people predicted, she and other Democrats who voted for this immoral insanity are trying to pin the blame on their chosen Iraqi instead of themselves. Why?: To maintain their electability. This is absolutely disgusting, when the carnage they did not have the courage to resist in the first place is now to be blamed on the Iraqis themselves. If this timid, weasel, mentality is to reside in the White House as of 2009, the great and tough decisions that are needed to direct this country away from the narcissistic self interest that has characterized it over the last forty years, including the whole notion of being a superpower, will not be made. We badly need an administration that can create a new vision for this country and this planet in which we use our resources to solve the massive problems humanity faces instead of exacerbating them. We must think real world when we consider these candidates. Forget accepting electability as the fundamental criterion in evaluating candidates. That criterion leads all too easily to shallowness, irrelevance and the disasters they create in the real world. Create electability by demanding an end to hype and deception. Demand that the real world be the focus of politics, not winning an election when there is no evidence the winner has any grasp of mankind’s dire needs and even less a grasp on what needs to be done to address those needs. We must hold our elected officials accountable, but we must also hold ourselves accountable first by insuring the fundamental importance of our demands. To do this we need to think rigorously and thoroughly about what this world and this nation need most.

Bob Newhard

A Conundrum?

Why is it that at one and the same time our society has had the largest religious revival in over two hundred years and has at the same time the most bellicose, corrupt and ideologically rigid government in its history? It is generally assumed that religion and morality are intimately connected such that, for example, any group given the task of investigating social morality almost always includes a member of the clergy. I suggest this congruity is not coincidental.

The extent of religious enthusiasm is not only greater than the Great Awakening of the 1730’s it is, especially considering the vastly extended range of human knowledge and awareness of other societies, more deliberately ant-intellectual as evidenced by creationism and its efforts to suborn science with politics amply illustrate. It is, like its 18^th century predecessor essentially a fundamentalist movement. As such it:

· is suing the University of California to require that institution to give credit for its courses. The new 25 million dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky recently opened to overflowing crowds.

· is more bellicose in its willingness to unleash the world’s largest military establishment on the citizens of small nations. One of its favorite hymns, Onward Christian Soldiers, expresses the latent militarism in Christianity. It has not shied form the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians and their children.

· has, through its political leaders, for the first time in American history, formally espoused and practiced heinous forms of torture.

· has instigated and tolerated the destruction of our fundamental liberties and rights.

· has engendered the largest per capita prison population of any developed country in the world, largely due to its paranoia about and punishment response to drug use. One wonders per Karl Marx, if religion sees competition from drugs.

· has used millions of taxpayer funds to enrich itself.

· has corrupted the language that our society depends upon for communication with the intent to delude our citizens. Notice how they have conflated the common meaning of the word theory with the rigorous use of that term in science.

· would demolish abortion and birth control in spite of a human population growth that now threatens human survival, not to mention a decent quality of life.

In short they care nothing for mankind, except to dominate it. Note the Christian Dominionism movement, that volatile mix of religion and politics, which can so easily end in Fascism.

To the above charges, and there are many more, some may say that I am myself conflating fundamentalism with other kinds of religion. My reply is that when an institution puts reason first, rather than faith, belief or spiritualism, I shall cease calling it a religion. Faith has no inherent test for relevance and hence can be attached to anything – and that is where the trouble begins.

One of the fundamental reasons religion can have such deleterious consequences is that it deals in certainties when regarding the natural world and absolutes when dealing with morality. Because the natural world is highly variable and less than adequately known, reality defeats religion’s certainty repeatedly, often with disastrous results as exemplified by the refusal to treat AIDS as a disease rather than God’s punishment of evil doers. Similarly, because humans are very complex entities dealing with a complex reality and other complex humans, the rigidity that religion’s absolutes introduce into human value systems not infrequently leads to catastrophic results. People are currently being slaughtered by the thousands because of the inability of Islam’s various factions to accept each other’s humanity, not to mention G. W. Bush’s declared guidance from his god and the slaughter that has entailed.

Thus it is that when mankind feels most certain of its moral bearings it commits its most horrendous crimes. When will we demand of religion that, like science, it realize its own limitations and allow mankind to approach the natural world and each other with the same tentative, evidence searching, posture?

Bob Newhard

Impending American fascism

While I have written on this subject before, the recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch and his intention to establish a new business TV channel in October 2007 lend additional urgency to this issue.

A brief review of the salient facts about the Bush presidency:

Project for a New American Century written by Dick Cheney et alia in 1992 outlines the purpose and road to American empire.

Bush rushes to declare a war in response to a terrorist attack. Terrorism cannot be fought as a war because there is no defined enemy or geographic area of encounter between the supposed forces. The point in declaring a war was to institutionalize this amorphous and endless conflict so that it could be made a military undertaking and so that an indefinite state of emergency could be created. Such a state, as George Orwell so aptly described is necessary to the continuous control of a society by the few “protectors.”

Bush demands and gets the USA Patriot Act giving the presidency many earmarks of fascism, including the ability to declare protest an act of terrorism. John Ashcroft declared that protest against the President in time of “war” is tantamount to treason.

Loss of habeus corpus.

Appointment of a Right Wing Supreme Court majority.

The use of “signings” to countermand legislation he does not like, without the transparency that a veto would provide.

I see Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal and his imminent creation of a business TV channel as the latest steps in the corporate takeover of the United Sates and the institution of fascism. If one applies what Murdoch has done to the news, i.e. turn it into blatant propaganda, to what he will do with the Wall Street Journal and especially his business channel, this nation will be subjected to a continuous barrage of propaganda extolling the virtues of corporate capitalism and denouncing liberals, progressives and anybody arguing for social responsibility in our government and economy. They have already demonized the word liberal such that democrats like Hillary Clinton refuse to be identified as such. Remember Murdoch has held a fund raiser for Hillary. When resistance to this process becomes significant, which will probably occur, if not sooner, when the United States experiences the imminent depression, then the full impact of the USA Patriot Act will become evident. The intimate relationship between corporations and fascism was made explicit in Mussolini’s description of fascism as a corporate state. The potential for fascism in the United States is further shown by a relatively little known attempt to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration by force in the 1930’s by major bankers, financiers and industrialists concerned that he was taking the country to socialism. (A prominent view is that he actually saved the country for capitalism. My view is that he probably saved it from fascism.) Much of this effort was centered in the American Liberty League to which many of these men belonged and which had close connections to the American Legion. See the following web site on the League and the plot http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/all-both.html.

In general the plot was to raise a private army of 500,000 men from the disgruntled veterans of World War I and take over the government by force. They made the mistake of choosing Marine General Smedly Butler to raise this army. Butler is the most decorated Marine General ever. He was popular with the troops because he openly identified with them in preference to the Washington brass. He was believed to be pro-corporation because he fought battles for corporate benefit in China, the Philippines and South and Central America. What they were unaware of was that Butler despised the corporations that generated the wars that killed his men. After his retirement he wrote War is a Racket, a book describing the corporate interests for whose benefit U. S. troops fought. Butler went along with the plot until he was able to identify those involved. He then informed Congress, which held hearings on the matter and condemned the plot, but suppressed the evidence they had gathered. There is still speculation as to why this evidence was suppressed. I have been unable to ascertain whether any of these financial bigwigs ever went to jail.

To sum up: The Bush administration by fiat of an imperial presidency and a Far Right Republican congress has taken this country far down the road toward complete corporate dominance of our society, it has implemented the legal mechanisms for suppressing dissent, it controls the major media, has established surveillance of the citizenry, has, with terrorism, established an interminable enemy and has implemented ingredient after ingredient of the corporate state. This country has seen the corporate elite attempt to stage a fascist coup before. At the beginning of his book When Corporations Rule the World David Korten has a quotation from George Soros as follows; “Perhaps the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today comes from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business. This is not a new phenomenon. it used to be called fascism….The outward appearances of the democratic process are observed, but the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests.”

I do not see progressives addressing this imminent threat of fascism at all. While we get all excited about health care, education, etc., which are important, they and our civil liberties and rights are in grave jeopardy from incipient fascism. Are we afraid to call corporate control of our country by its proper name? Are we unable to see or unwilling to articulate how corporations have taken over this country and are in the process of doing so to the planet? Are we willing to see all human values reduced to monetary values? There was a time when progressives clearly and forcefully pointed out the threat to democracy that the corporations posed. The Progressive Party ran on an anti-corporate platform. William Cullen Bryant, their presidential candidate, portrayed corporations as crucifying the people on a cross of gold. The muckrakers were not afraid to lay out the greed of John D. Rockefeller. Upton Sinclair took the meat packing industry to task in The Jungle and Sinclair Lewis portrayed the insidious influence of the local Chamber of Commerce in his novel Babbit. Even the Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was outraged by corporate greed. To someone of my age it appears that the American populace and its culture have been seduced by the corporate media into believing that owning and enjoying more and more things is a civic virtue. Progressives need to get a grip before it is too late. To do that takes courage and the longer we wait the more courage it will take.

Additional reading on fascism in America, past and present may be found in:

It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis, copyright 1935

This novel can be read today as prescient in its depiction of the rise of fascism from business interests.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
by Bertram Gross, copyright 1980

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
by Chris Hedges, copyright 2006

Bob Newhard

Impeachment: Politics, the Constitution and Personal Integrity

Today, according to Barbara Cummings, Representative Conyers said, "So I'm supposed to risk my reputation for Cindy and this CIA guy?" (reference to Ray McGovern). Those of you who receive Jeeni Criscenzo’s e-mails will recognize this statement by John Conyers as coming from her latest dispatch on the meeting of impeachment supporters with Conyers and his directive to arrest them.

When I read this I asked myself, What is it with politicians that they are so given to causing human suffering and death to “preserve” their reputations? An outstanding example is Lyndon Johnson who continued the Vietnam War because he did not want to be the first U. S. president to lose a war. How many people died and were maimed for life by such an overwrought ego will never be known precisely, but it would be at least in the hundreds of thousands. While it would be next to impossible to create a war crime out of such an action because of the vagaries of proving a state of mind, this kind of behavior should be made a matter of public opprobrium as an epitome of self indulgence.

We know the dimensions of Johnson’s preference for his reputation. What are those of Conyers? Conyers is apparently prepared to reduce the continuing damage to our Constitution and liberties and the continuing carnage of Iraq to his “reputation;” Conyers is Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the body that is responsible for bringing impeachment charges. He was a member of the same committee when it impeached Richard Nixon. In those days the Committee chair was Peter Rodino who was known for his courage and outrage at the unconstitutional behavior of Nixon. Rodino died in 2005. Acting New Jersey Governor Richard Codey said at the time. ''Congressman Rodino spent his whole life fighting for people's rights, This man, throughout his long and storied career, had the occasion to take part in many of the highs and lows of our country's immediate history. He was unafraid to take on the tough battles for citizens of our country." It is appropriate to ask John Conyers why he is afraid to take on the tough battle his predecessor did not shy from. Conyers may say that he does not have the support of the House speaker to do this. He could be removed as the Committee chair by Nancy Pelosi. While I doubt that this would happen, if it did Conyers would at least have given the issue the importance it deserves. Peter Rodino was concerned with the precedents that Nixon’s behavior could set for presidential power and the effect on the constitutionally required balance of powers. Conyers should take this obligation to preserve the Constitution equally seriously. The precedent is there for Conyers and his oath of office requires that he proceed. It is not Conyers nor Pelosi’s right to say this Constitutional issue is off the table. The Constitution provides impeachment as the way to remove a deleterious president from office. But despite the outrage at Conyer’s putting his “reputation” above his Constitutional responsibility, there is another side to this story.

The impeachment of Richard Nixon revealed a problem that the writers of the Constitution may not have foreseen. Carl Levin, the Speaker of the House during Nixon’s impeachment, was very concerned that the impeachment not reflect partisan interests lest the Constitutional issues involved be tainted by partisanship. His fist step toward achieving this goal was to refer the impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee rather than establishing an impeachment panel. The Judiciary Committee members had been appointed a year before impeachment arose, it had a considerable number of members from both parties and hence there could be no accusation that the Committee was hand picked. To further remove the Committee and its proceedings from partisan politics he publicly stated he had no interest in becoming president, which as Speaker, he would become because there was no Vice President. Vice President Spiro Agnew had resigned pleading no contest to charges of tax evasion and money laundering. Third, he expedited the appointment of Gerald Ford to become Vice President so that the impeachment process could begin without the taint of partisan politics. This was high-minded responsible behavior at a time of national crisis. Do we have such leaders now? Not after the travesty of Newt Gingrich’s attempt to use the impeachment process for partisan ends or after the Republicans reduced national politics to black and white and began behaving like a bunch of attack dogs.

However, to continue. The Founders apparently did not see the potential for conflict between the order of presidential succession and the impeachment process. By beginning that process in the House they made the individual third in line to become president the one to undertake the impeachment of the president. That left the vice president as the only defense against self-interested abuse of the impeachment process.

Transferring this information to our current situation, Nancy Pelosi is faced with somewhat the same situation that her predecessor Carl Levin was faced with. Currently there is considerable pressure to impeach both President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Should both these people be successfully impeached Pelosi would, by Constitutional mandate, become president It is possible that her declaration that impeachment is off the table was made out of her concern to keep the process from falling afoul of political motivation. If so, what she and Conyers have to weigh are the consequences of 18 more months of Bush megalomania and leaving unchallenged his actions as precedent for any future president to use or to exercise the impeachment process that the Constitution provides thereby validating the Constitution and assuring a continuance of the balance of powers, which is its foundation.

As a final note I would observe that those Progressives arguing that the attack on Conyers is racially motivated should read Barbara Jordan’s magnificent statement of the purpose of impeachment. Jordan was a member of the same Nixon impeachment committee as Conyers. Her statement along with the focus on preserving the Constitution exhibited by Levin and Rodino exemplified the best in American statesmanship. Jordan’s statement may be found at the web site American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barbarajordanjudiciarystatement.htm.

Robert Newhard

The Dimensions of the Problem

I have been reading Paul Theroux’s Dark Star. As you may know, Theroux is, among other things, a travel writer with a social, political and economic interest. Dark Star is his account of his East Africa trip from Cairo to Cape Town by land. Theroux had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Rift Valley area of Africa in the 1960’s. He was a teacher at both the university level and in public schools. He is appalled at the degradation he sees over the intervening forty years. He has no schedule and takes whatever land transportation is available from where he happens to be. As a result he rides on top of cattle trucks as others do and is shot at by a band of “shifta“ (armed bands of marauders.); he rides in grossly over loaded “chicken” buses; he lives in intimate contact with much of that world, with the filth, vermin, stifling heat and masses of humanity. All this against a backdrop of the most beautiful and geologically impressive natural world one could hope for. In consequence Theroux, who speaks Swahili, the Lingua Franca of East Africa; converses with a wide variety of East Africans, including the highly educated but unemployed young people, the poor living in the massive slums of the large cities, prostitutes, medical missionaries, ministers of state and academics, trying to determine the reason for the massive economic and social dissolution he sees about him.

I commend the book to anyone who is awed by the dimensions of what must be done if we are ever to have a world in which democracy and a fair share of the world’s resources are realized. In my judgment, Africa is a continent unlike any other in that tribalism, as a method of social organization, has remained dominant far longer than on the other continents. There is the lack of a cohesive long-established culture as there is in China or India. When faced with globalization, well founded and extensive shared cultures are in a much better position to “digest” globalization by culturally accommodating it. Tribal societies, having little shared culture, are easily overwhelmed by globalization as it pits tribe against tribe, applies solutions totally inappropriate to the problem as does the World Bank and the IMF and stresses these societies beyond their ability to cohere. As a result social relationships deteriorate into the jungles of defeat, malaise and bare survival in the slums of Nairobi, where Theroux witnesses a mob stoning a presumed thief to death as people laugh at the man’s plight. Significantly, Nairobi is the city in which the last World Social Forum was held. This is the kind of thing we need to contemplate at great length and depth as we struggle for a just world.

Bob Newhard