George Will Suffers Apoplexy

P.M. Carpenter

I'll give co-populists John Edwards and Mike Huckabee credit for at least one jolly-good thing in this election cycle: They have upset the normally unflappable George Will, and by extension, I presume, all like him, as they sit in their gilded cages and contemplate the destruction of privilege -- oh, the unfairness of it all.

Actually, to say George is upset is to understate things. He is beside himself, foaming with seasonal rabidity; the poor man is right on the edge of the hysterical precipice -- the populists are coming, the populists are coming, and one would think they have George's personal number.

Yesterday he unleashed a fusillade in print that scorched the paper. Having pondered the existential threat that Edwards and Huckabee seem to represent to the steady-as-you-goers, Will fumed that "each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them, and who therefore think opponents are enemies."

Sounds more like George Bush and Dick Cheney to me.

Will must be reading his Hegel again. I too am guilty of thinking of opponents as enemies, rather than would-be friends in the whole thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, but only because the enemies of progressivism have been screaming "UnAmerican!" at us for so long that I came to believe they didn't really like us. But I stand corrected, and I accept George's guileless friendship.

What does continue to puzzle, however, is why George became so exercised over Edwards and Huckabee's populist strategies, which only seem par for any political course that follows the likes of many an agonizing year of corporate-Republican rule. Here, Will emphasizes the North Carolinian's complicity in populistic shallowness:

"Edwards seems unaware that the world market sets the price of oil. He says a $100-a-barrel price is evidence of -- surging demand in India and China? unrest in Nigeria's oil fields? No, 'corporate greed.' That is Edwards' explanation of every unpleasantness."

True on both counts. But what I can't understand is why it upsets Will so much. No pol can rally the masses without easily digested, readily understandable bumper-sticker sloganeering. And that's mostly what the bloody shirt of Edwards' "corporate greed" is. Obama's is "change." Clinton's is, was, and is again "experience," or "experience for change," or "change through experience," or some such thing. I'm not sure, but neither is Hillary, and that's Hillary's problem.

Mr. Will does indeed explain why it upsets, but I thought him a trifle more sophisticated. Writes George in a phobic, Cato-institutional froth: "Populists want to sharply increase [government] by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth."

Ah, the socialist bogeyman. But give me one of those famous breaks for which kids plead. This is a conservative nation, George, and no one is going to appropriate your second summer home. All Edwards has advocated is banning lobbyists -- one assumes only corporate lobbyists; there are, after all, others -- from White House conclaves. But he's also gone out of his way to note that he would, of course, work and play well with the legislative children on Capitol Hill.

Now, George, stop and think. The legislation that trickles up to the president's desk will continue to be filtered through the influence, demands and outright graft of corporate lobbyists. Edwards could, I suppose, sit there in the Oval Office and veto corporate-friendly bill after bill, only to encounter congressional overrides or executive-legislative gridlock. What either would accomplish is largely in the eye of the beholder; but one thing it most decidedly would not accomplish is the equitable "[re]distribution of wealth."

That, I'm sorry to say, awaits a fundamental reworking of human nature; a vastly consensual, democratic socialism that is centuries or millennia down the road, if ever, of this historically conservative country.

So George, chill out, to borrow yet another cliche from our youth. Even should Edwards somehow miraculously make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- which I happen to think he will, but as vice president -- the sky won't fall; the unprivileged villagers won't march on your affluent digs; and the lobbyists, as you correctly point out, will merely redouble their efforts.

If the next president and the elected officials on the Hill don't rise out of the D.C. bubble long enough to realize that the peasants are wising up to corporate written policy and what it is doing to them and their country George Will and his ilk may find themselves surrounded by pitchforks and torches and their second homes in ashes. Does old George really believe that those angry peasants are waiting for a populist president to lead them? It is a populist president and a fearful congress that will save him and his ilk. One more corporatist president and one more arrogant congress and all hell may well break loose.

Populism is just politics, George. That's all it is. Edwards sells his crackerjack brand, Huckabee sells another, and Ron Paul sells yet something else. But in the end, each surprise in the box comes out looking pretty much like the others. Because money hires the pols and writes the rules. And until that system is reduced to rubble, ain't hardly nothin' gonna change.

Reducing it to rubble will be the beginning of the change. Only the beginning!

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

United Corporations of America

If you think this isn't everyones' worst nightmare. you haven't been paying attention.

Bizarre State of Amused Horror: Corporations Taking Over for Government

A. Alexander, September 14th, 2007

One bears witness in a bizarre state of amused horror. A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the former CEO of Citigroup had proudly insisted that corporations were taking over for the government. Sadly, he is correct. However, if he or anyone believes that corporations can deliver comparable services more efficiently and at less cost, they're delusional.

The belief that CEOs are geniuses and that corporations are the epitome of democratic values and fiscal prowess is as absurd as it is false. The myth, of course, is produced and propagated by corporations themselves. The illusion is reinforced by the likes of EXXON.

EXXON and big oil control the vast majority of the world's oil supply. Understanding that and realizing that neither the Bush administration, nor a bought-n-paid-for Congress would stand in their way, EXXON et al. tripled the price of gasoline -- blaming it on so-called global insecurity -- and started raking in annual profits that exceed $30 billion. That's business genius, right? That's oh-so efficient, right? Wrong!

What EXXON and its friends in big oil have done is nothing short of robbery and extortion. They control the market; they know they control the market; they know the consumer is helpless; they know the consumer needs gasoline just to get to work -- in order to access their very livelihood -- so EXXON uses that leverage to take money from the helpless and the hopeless.

How exactly, is what EXXON and big oil are doing to be considered genius, democratic, or a model of fiscal efficiency?

What about the "genius" CEO who, misjudging the value and demand for his or her product, builds new plants and hires thousands of new workers ... then, when the product fails miserably, "fixes" his or her incompetence by closing plants and firing workers? Sure, the closing and cutting maintains profit margins, but how much talent does that sort of behavior require and how is that "efficient"?

Wouldn't it be nice, if real life was that easy? Say a father loses his job. He and the wife can no longer afford to keep the nice new house and the kid too, so they decide to cut costs by getting rid of the kid. Wow! Isn't that genius? How efficient is that?

Let's not forget, too, that few country's corporations are more heavily subsidized by the government, than are America's corporations. If profits shrink, corporations pour money into Washington and basically rewrite the tax-code to their greater advantage...which is a slick way of funneling working Americans' tax dollars into corporate coffers.

Nobody is saying corporations are evil, but people shouldn't buy into the myth that corporations are efficient, fiscally responsible, democratic, and populated with geniuses. What's more ... for the few thousand dollars that the average person pays in taxes, they get a great return.

In return for the tax-dollar paid by citizens, they receive an education for their kids; they get roads; the taxpayer receives police and fire protection; they get military security; they get national parks; the taxpaying citizens receive safe drinking water; they get clean air, they get retirement security ... and a host of other services. If anyone believes corporations either would or could deliver those services at a lower cost and more efficiently, they're sadly delusional.

Besides, when was the last time your company's CEO asked for your opinion? Corporations are not democratic. Corporations aren't necessarily efficient. Corporations are often fiscally irresponsible -- think sub-prime crisis. And, corporations are rarely the home to genius. Government isn't perfect, but it certainly outperforms most corporations. Still, one watches in a bizarre state of amused horror as more and more people buy into the myth that is being sold by the likes of Citigroup's former CEO.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

No Wonder The NeoCons Lost Iraq....

...and they will lose America for many of the same reasons.

That is, unless America is already lost and AmeriCo has taken it's place.

God, this makes me sick!

Published on Thursday, September 13, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Testimony of The Tortured

by Jeremy Scahill

When President Bush dispatched the neoconservative “terror expert” Paul Bremer to Baghdad in the summer of 2003, it took the former staffer to Henry Kissinger just two weeks to boldly declare that Iraq was “open for business.” Naomi Klein, who traveled to Iraq during Bremer’s one year stint in the country, writes in The Shock Doctrine: “Overnight, Iraq went from being one of the most isolated countries in the world, sealed off from the most basic trade by strict UN sanctions, to becoming the widest-open market anywhere.”

Bremer swiftly set about wiping Iraq clean and applying Milton Friedman’s radical economic formula in the Arab world, a region Klein calls “the last holdout for this neoliberal crusade.” This, Klein writes, would come in the form of “mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax and a dramatically downsized government.” As Klein says, it was an anti-Marshall Plan. And while it appeared early on in Bremer’s tenure that the neoconservatives were winning, it didn’t take long for the temporary euphoria of life without Saddam to be overcome by a collective Iraqi rage at the US agenda.

Even US allies like the interim trade minister, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, declared Iraqis were “sick and tired of being the subjects of experiments. There have been enough shocks to the system, so we don’t need this shock therapy in the economy.” This radical economic agenda, combined with the disastrous de-Baathification policy, which not only resulted in tens of thousands of state workers losing their jobs overnight, but also some 250,000 Iraqi soldiers, meant that the “Bremer agenda” would just as radically give rise to a widespread Iraqi resistance to the occupation, the likes of which the “cake walk” theory promoters could never have envisioned.

As the situation on the ground rapidly deteriorated, the job of keeping alive Bremer, the most hated man in Iraq, was not given to the US military, but rather was “awarded” - through a no-bid $27m contract - to the politically-connected mercenary firm, Blackwater USA, whose owner, Erik Prince, is a major donor to the political campaigns of President Bush and his allies, as well as to the core groups that make up the radical religious right in America. As Bremer opened Iraq up for business, his own life would be placed in the all-powerful hands of the free market. “If Blackwater loses a principal [like Bremer], they’re out of business, aren’t they?” asked Colonel Thomas Hammes, the US military official in charge of building a “new” Iraqi military after Bremer disbanded the old one. “Can you imagine being Blackwater, trying to sell your next contract, saying, ‘Well, we did pretty well in Iraq for about four months, and then he got killed.’” Hammes, who said he himself was run off the road by Blackwater mercenaries, said Blackwater “made enemies everywhere,” but added, “they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it.”

It was this period, as Bremer ran around Iraq with his Blackwater mercenaries destroying the economy, that began the epic conflict that would unfold with a stunning degree of bloodshed and loss of life - overwhelmingly Iraqi. But you wouldn’t get that from watching CNN or Fox News. Iraq has become one long series of car bombs and “sectarian violence.” There is no context and almost no mention of the on-the-ground policies of Bremer in that first year when the pundits discuss Iraq. Iraqis are simply people who want to blow each other up and murder their liberators. More importantly, the destruction of Iraq’s economy and civil society - which began a full decade before the 2003 invasion with the 1991 Gulf War and a decade of devastating economic sanctions - and the ensuing carnage are almost never viewed through the lens of more than 40 years of US global policy that preceded the Iraq occupation and indeed laid the groundwork for the present reality.

This is where the brilliance of Klein’s analysis shines through. She thoroughly exposes the historical roots of the first year of the occupation and provides the most comprehensive analysis to date on how we got to where we are today. The Shock Doctrine is equal parts meticulously documented scholarship and old-fashioned reporting. Klein is indeed an embedded journalist, but never with the occupying armies - she has embedded with the poor and suffering, the victims of economic and literal shock. John Loyd charges Klein with promoting the “conspiratorial version of history.” No. What Klein has done is to take the testimony of the tortured and destroyed, mix it with a scathing confrontation of their oppressors (often using their own words) and produce a 576-page expose that breaks a decades-long silence on the consistency of this mass economic and military violence.

In Iraq, Klein charges: “When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical.” Her explanation of the creation of the CIA’s 1963 Kubark torture manual, the product of years of covert research and human experimentation, applied throughout Vietnam in the 1960s and Latin America in the 1970s and beyond, is chilling, particularly when you see it all over the bodies of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2003.

Only because of her extensive time spent among the people of Latin America, Asia, New Orleans and the Middle East is Klein able to draw the kinds of connections left off the pages of the New York Times and which seem so “conspiratorial” to those who cherry-pick sections of her book. Klein’s book is not the product of a conspiracy theory. Following the money, asking who benefits and then answering the question isn’t conspiracy peddling, it is called good reporting.

Is it mere coincidence that the same corporate vultures and think tank warriors (as Klein calls them, “the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks”) descended literally and ideologically on Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans and the Tsunami-ravaged countries to emerge as the beneficiaries of these disasters? “I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance,” Klein writes. “It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine.”

I recently talked with Klein about Iraq and asked her what victory the Bush administration was gaining there. “I think that they rigged the war so that it couldn’t lose,” Klein told me. “There were two forms of privatization that were happening simultaneously. One was the Bremer agenda, of going in and privatizing Iraq’s economy and then hoping for that model to spread throughout the region, and I think we can safely say that that was a failure.” As many corporations fled Iraq in the midst of escalating violence in 2004, Klein thought she “was seeing the first failure of this economic crusade because corporations that had taken small steps towards investing in Iraq and being part of this privatization frenzy were all pulling out because they were afraid for their lives.”

Klein says she “really reconsidered that assessment the more I looked at the other privatization agenda, which is the way in which the war itself was a laboratory for the US state to privatize itself. Either way this is sort of like an unprecedented phenomenon - the idea of going to war not just to loot your enemy, but to loot yourself.”

She points out that “the worse things have gotten in Iraq, the more privatized the war becomes. When it wasn’t the cakewalk that they were claiming it would be, the gaps had to be filled somewhere, and how they were filled was by these private contractors. So was this experiment a failure? I think it has taken this project of neoliberalism, of corporatism to an entirely new, more sophisticated and terrifying phase where, really, Iraq isn’t occupied by the United States government, it is a hollow occupation where you have military officials and government officials fronting it, but behind them everything is run by contractors.”

Indeed, in Iraq right now, there is no coalition of willing nations, but rather a coalition of billing corporations. Today, it is the contractors and mercenaries who outnumber US forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 contracting companies working in Iraq for the US. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official US military presence of 160,000 troops. Last year, a US government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. “We are certainly seeing the emergence of a true corporate state,” Klein says. “Iraq has just catapulted the project forward, and then we see it reverberate around the world.”

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

© Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.