Last year it was Pinochet. This year, Suharto meets his maker, though what demon fashioned him I shudder to speculate on. More than mass murder and dictatorship united them; they also share the posthumous praise of pundits and political leaders the world over, some of whom have every reason to know better. One can only assume these apologists hold a cynical appreciate of the blood-soaked Indonesian general’s ability to provide wealthy westerners with favorable investment opportunities in what was once seen as the super-domino of U.S. southeast Asia policy. Whatever the truth may be, news articles about Suharto’s passing referred to him as a “modernizer” who brought his country into the global market, though with some level of brutality. His rule was “controversial” due in part to his having eliminated as many as 1 million “alleged communists” during his 35-year rule (not to mention the perhaps 200,000 killed in East Timor). This, according to new Australian Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, amid “a period of significant growth and expansion,” though Rudd admits, “many have disagreed with his approach.” Including, presumably, the 1.2 million dead and their families. Can you imagine Pol Pot being so eulogized? (At least the syndicated article in my hometown newspaper compared Indonesia’s mass killings with those of Cambodia – a comparison that once drew howls of derision.)

Pinochet enjoyed similar courtesies upon his departure – praise for the firm (if somewhat larcenous) hand on the tiller of the good ship Neoliberalism. One might almost forget that these creatures were cut from the same murderous cloth as Saddam Hussein (and quite frankly, Suharto made Hussein look like a choir boy). The trajectory of Saddam’s career was similar to those of Suharto and Pinochet: a timely assist early on with military coups (Suharto and Pinochet) and botched assassination attempts (Saddam), culminating in full U.S. support through the worst of their atrocities. (In Suharto’s case, this included CIA-supplied lists of names to be eliminated.) This is why, as reported on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Saddam apparently remembered Reagan quite fondly. 1981-89 was Saddam’s bloodiest period cumulatively, and he got nothing but help from us the whole way through.

A simple twist of fate would have had the corporate media and world leaders praising “Saddam the modernizer” at his graveside as well, were it not for his fateful transgression in 1990 (i.e. invading a country we’re friendly with). Instead, he alone of the three is condemned unconditionally as a mass murderer, though perhaps his worst crimes – deadly attacks against the Iranians, whose county he invaded – typically go unmentioned, despite the extensive use of chemical weapons. Clearly, neither mass murder, nor unprovoked invasion, nor the use of non-conventional weapons, is a problem for our leaders, since they have committed (in our names) crimes just as serious over the past few decades. Not surprisingly, British researchers have completed a study that estimates the number of dead in Iraq at around 1 million. That more or less comports with Les Roberts’ study of 18 months ago. The Bush administration and its supporters on both sides of the mainstream political divide are definitely in Suharto-Rwanda land, having long since moved past Pinochet and Saddam.

What’s next? John McCain, who sounds like he’s undergoing anger management training every time he reads a speech? More bodies to come, looks like.

luv u,

jp

It’s an election year and who’s back to visit but Pappy Tax Cut? That’s right – with the financial markets reeling from imploding mortgage-based securities and record high energy prices, the duopoly of federal office holders has decided to cut some checks and pass them out to us proles. Guess they figure we’re pissed off enough to warrant bribery at this point. In any case, a recession during an election year is bad news for either party in a divided government, so you are seeing the kind of “bipartisanship” that in another might be considered a mild form of totalitarianism. Sure, we’re blowing billions of dollars a month (to say nothing of lives lost) trying to hold on to our imperial stake in Iraq and perpetuating astounding economic inequality through a tax system heavily skewed in favor of the hyper-rich, but we’ll borrow even more money now for a one-shot payoff to the American people in hopes they’ll go out and shop and forget about how fucked up everything is.

This is a bit like having a boss that never gives raises but passes out the occasional bonus when he’s feeling magnanimous (trust me, I’ve been there). It doesn’t raise your standard of living… or even maintain it in an environment of rising costs. It just buys temporary quiescence and gives the master a good end-of-year write-off. It keeps our mind off the fact that, for many of us, this “job” doesn’t include health coverage and that the minimal retirement plan is under threat of being dismantled and sold off, Pinochet-style. Even worse, the money they’re sending us is being borrowed from… us. Future us, that is. It’s like they’re Citibank or someone, offering us an extension on our credit line. Write yourself a check and take a much needed vacation! Pay nothing until next April! Kind of freakish. I suppose perhaps the most remarkable thing about the “stimulus” package, as currently proposed, is the fact that it extends something to low and middle income people at all. Sure, they boned the poor and the unemployed on extended benefits, but for this crew of Halliburton Republicans and Eisenhower Democrats, this plan is practically socialism.

Doing this must gall Bush no end. He’s been going around for years repeating the same hackneyed talking points about the U.S. economy, about its “strong fundamentals” and its “resilience”, and never was heard a discouraging word. As recently as this week, his drone Condi “Supertanker” Rice was praising our economic strength at Davos. Lord knows, Bush despises having to reverse himself, like the Custer character in Little Big Man. (I wonder if his father and the old man’s somewhat embarrassing friend had to shame Dubya into it? Hmmmmm….) Whatever its genesis, this half-measure Keynesianism can be seen as the ownership class’s bulwark against much more meaningful adjustments, like restoring some measure of taxation to the extremely rich (i.e. those few who have benefited tremendously from the economic order of the past 25 years), or slapping an excess profits tax on the oil companies, or re-regulating the financial/banking sector, or dismantling the so-called “free trade” investors’ rights agreements. Not that any leading candidates from the nominal left are advocating this, but there’s always a chance someone will if people get mad enough.

For right now, we’ll be expected to subsist on the bone they throw us… and on the cheap spectacle of Bill and Hillary Clinton ripping up what’s left of the Democratic party to advance their careers (all they’ve ever done, really).

luv u,

jp

As of this writing, there have been 3 “major” primary contests on the Republican side – Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan – and just as many winners. Good grief. One might only hope that it would continue along these lines, right up to their caveman convention. Still, I’m certain they’ll congeal around one of those disgusting blisters and proceed with their usual (and often successful) attempt to race-bait, terror-scam, and otherwise bluster their way into the White House for another term. Hardly matters who the actual candidate will be – whichever one takes his party’s grisly mantle, he will no doubt benefit enormously from television ads that open with an ominous low note and a blurry photograph of their opponent. Just hold out for a few more weeks, folks, then it’ll be open season. (They’re loading up the slime cannons right now.) And whoever emerges from the fray with the most votes this November… well, their savaged remains will take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Okay, so what are the Democrats doing? Well, they’re busily generating ammunition for the Republicans to use in their Fall campaign. Expect to hear familiar themes being sounded across the airwaves this fall, to say nothing of what will arrive in your mailbox (and inbox). During the 2006 congressional race – a hotly contested one up in my neck of the woods – the national Republican party was airing T.V. ads and sending out glossy fliers depicting pole dancers that they inferred had some tenuous connection with Democratic candidate (now congressman) Michael Arcuri. That was just plain low, sure, but what impressed me most was the sheer volume of advertising. If nothing else, it gives you a sense of what it’s like to live in a contested state – something New York has not been since maybe 1984, with respect to the general election. So pretty much any negative campaigning during primary season will be recycled and amplified by the opposition come September.

In one sense, this is the dynamic that drove Democratic support for the Iraq war authorization resolution back in 2002. Many war supporters wanted to inoculate themselves from being attacked as “soft on Saddam” and, more generally, “soft on terror”. I don’t believe for a moment that it was any great moral leap for Hillary Clinton to vote with the president on that. She practically out-Cheneyed Cheney on the Senate floor as they debated that ridiculous resolution. And my feeling is that she will take ownership of that vote again if circumstances allow her (and the administration) to act as though there’s something to celebrate in our Iraq policy. That’s why John McCain is strutting around like a turkey… because he feels like his brick-brained support for the invasion of Iraq is finally paying off. Hillary may end up playing that card as well. Never mind that their support for the war has led to the deaths of probably 750,000 to 1 million people and created 4 million refugees. That’s Rwanda territory, far outstripping Saddam’s record… and they can stack that atop the probably 500,000 who died as a result of U.S./U.K. -driven sanctions during the 1990s. And I don’t hear any convincing talk of withdrawal from either side, so it’s likely to add up to even more.

Bottom line: whoever wins, Iraq loses. You can take that to the bank.

luv u,

jp

Has George W. Bush finally decided he needs some kind of positive legacy, if only to strengthen his “brand” as a defense / oil industry consultant in the near future? Perhaps. Though one could hardly imagine a more flaccid and lackluster initiative than the one he has set in motion with the Annapolis conference. It took some real effort to sustain the delusion that the United States was some kind of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton; with the current administration, the suggestion is merely laughable. For almost seven years, Bush has aligned himself with some of the most reactionary political forces in Israel. He called Sharon a “man of peace” even as he was smashing the life out of hundreds of Palestinians during the dark days of Spring 2002 (I recall a Newsday article by Ed Gargan from that time describing how IDF soldiers even vandalized a girl’s school, smashing windows, stealing musical instruments, and scrawling obscenities on blackboards). He backed that killer whale with arms, diplomatic support, and cash as settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expanded and multiplied and the infrastructure of apartheid broke the Palestinian nation into a hundred pieces.

Now Dubya has taken it into his tiny head to visit some of the rubble that he so gleefully helped to generate over his two grisly terms. I’m sure he would be glad to see a peace agreement signed before next January. The fact is, they may well push Abbas to sign some piece of paper in the next year, but it’s not likely to address even the most minimal concerns of the suffering populations in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. As weak and unpopular a leader as Olmert is, he at least has the resources of a functioning state with well established institutions and a military that rivals those of the most powerful of our NATO allies. Abbas is a Palestinian leader chosen by Israel, elected under occupation with no meaningful opposition allowed, and “presiding” over a divided rump state effectively controlled by an invader and superimposed by the ever-expanding footprint of colonialism. Is the world supposed to view this as a negotiation between equals?

In any case, since when is an occupied people expected to negotiate their liberty from the power that illegally invaded and colonized them? Would this have been expected of Poland in the 1940s? Of Hungary in 1956? Shouldn’t we find the very idea morally repugnant, in addition to being a grave breach of international law? For chrissake, even if you could argue with any justice that the Israelis needed to occupy the territories beyond their pre-June 1967 borders for these forty years (a dubious notion), how can anybody… anybody justify the official policy of incentivizing Jewish-only settlements on those lands – a practice that has been in effect from the very beginning of the occupation? If Israelis feel that the very presence of Palestinians poses a danger to them, why do they insist on building colonial outposts in their midst? Palestinians would have to be utter morons to think that the state of Israel had no designs on their land… or that they had any serious intention of giving it back at some point. They would have to be insane to think that the U.S. – and particularly this president – which has financed, at least indirectly, the expansion of Israeli settlements and related infrastructure, will ever act as an honest broker.

If Bush wants “peace” on his resume, he should face facts. Real peace will only come when Israel packs up its settlements and returns to its internationally recognized borders. That’s where negotiations should begin.

luv u,

jp

I heard a Washington Post columnist on NPR (yes, I listen from time to time, gnashing my teeth) talking about his latest book – an extended satirical essay on how our national political leaders in Washington D.C. are a kind of species unto themselves, with their own language, culture, and value systems completely distinct from those of the rest of the country. I know he’s playing this for laughs, but this is the sort of fable that nourishes the very manner of political beast he parodies. I ask you – who runs for national office without attacking some aspect of Washington D.C.? Isn’t that the horse that Dubya rode into town on, as well as nearly all of his predecessors for the past 30 years? They all embark on this mission to clean up the mess in our nation’s capital. Even after seven years in the White House, junior is still reading from that same tired “outsider” script. The reason is simple – people don’t see their desires or priorities reflected in federal policies, so Washington itself is painted as the problem… and a damned convenient one at that.

Well, there is a problem, but it’s not just in Washington. Fact is, it’s in us. We all drink the Kool-Aid that these folks serve up every two years. They tell us we can have roads, bridges, schools, retirement, and a bottomless military budget without paying higher taxes, and many of us believe. They tell us we invaded Iraq to help the Iraqi people (by giving them a one-way ticket to perdition, it turns out), and many of us believe. They tell us our nation can do practically anything it wants in the world and never be wrong, and that sounds good to us, too. We believe because we want to believe… we want to feel good about who and what we are, and not feel guilty about what we’ve done to other people around the world (to say nothing of our fellow citizens, including those unfortunate enough to be stuck in Iraq or Afghanistan). So we give politicians our votes. And if there’s a problem, it’s Washington’s fault.

I know you already know this, but I’ll say it anyway just to remind myself. Those people in Washington D.C. we so revile were sent there by us. They do what they do because they feel confident that between election days we’ll be too busy, too distracted, and too disengaged to have anything to do with the actual process of national governance. They assume (based on experience) that we can be bought off with a few pleasing tales (or by slinging a guitar and talking folksy), while they almost unfailingly serve the interests of those centers of concentrated wealth that own this country. And to a large extent, they are correct. The only way we can stand against those powerful institutions is by building our own popular institutions, by organizing and acting in our own common interests. Corporate America has nothing but money, and we have nothing but numbers – we can prevail if we are willing to abandon the notion that progress comes in a glossy package.

The bought and paid-for politicians will try to convince you that Washington is the enemy. Don’t buy it. Washington will change when we change ourselves and not before.

luv u,

jp