Family spokesperson Neva Rockefeller Goodwin sanctimoniously recalled the memory of her great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil and originator of the family fortune. “Kerosene was the alternative energy of its day when he realized it could replace whale oil,” she argued. “Part of John D. Rockefeller’s genius was in recognizing early the need and opportunity for a transition to a better, cheaper and cleaner fuel.”

But the indignation of today’s generation of Rockefellers — who inherited their own exorbitant wealth from Standard Oil, Exxon-Mobil’s parent corporation — is aimed more at ensuring the continued financial health of the family’s trust funds than concern for the future of the world’s population. As Peter O’Neill, great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, commented at the press conference, “I have a world of respect for what the company has done well. In fact, if the next 20 years of the energy business were just going to be about oil and gas, we probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Nevertheless, the corporate media obediently described the Rockefellers as concerned environmentalists. The New York Times ran the headline, “Can Rockefeller Heirs Turn Exxon Greener?” News outlets quoted freely from the Rockefellers’ press release, which described John D. Rockefeller as “one of the first major philanthropists in the U.S. and the World” and the family’s Rockefeller Foundation’s mission as “promot[ing] the well-being of mankind throughout the world.”

The family fable concocted above warrants a rebuttal. Standard Oil was the world’s first oil monopoly, and Rockefeller’s greed was insatiable. Indeed, the Rockefeller family legacy is deeply entangled with the U.S.’ current reliance on oil — and automobiles. Moreover, the family’s “philanthropic” pursuits include a peculiar preoccupation with lowering the birth rates of the world’s black and brown populations throughout the twentieth century—highlighting the absurdity of their claim to be promoting the well being of humankind. Mainstream journalists could easily uncover these unsavory aspects of the family history but instead report the Rockefellers’ self-sanitized version, with all its glaring omissions.

Indeed, the family’s selective memory of its patriarch, John D. Rockefeller, as a saintly philanthropist stands in sharp contrast to his role as a nineteenth-century robber baron. “God gave me my money,” he said. “Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.”

Rockefeller’s conscience apparently did not dictate paying his employees more than a starvation wage. His admirers praise him for making gasoline affordable to average Americans, and he did indeed aim to produce large amounts of “cheap and good” gasoline for mass consumption, successfully lowering the price of gas from 58 cents to 8 cents a gallon. But he achieved this goal through ruthless union busting, hiring his own private militias to crush workers who dared to go on strike to demand higher wages.

The private armies of the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company carried out the infamous Ludlow Massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes in U.S. labor history. On the morning of April 20, 1914, Rockefeller’s armies joined forces with state militias, opening fire on thousands of striking miners and their families as they slept in their makeshift tents — where they had been forced to live since they were expelled from company housing at the start of the strike. The militias later drenched the tents with oil and set them on fire. Thirteen women and children were burned to death, and three strikers were executed on the spot. Other charred bodies were discovered in the following days.

Rockefeller was a cutthroat capitalist who built his oil monopoly in the decades after the Civil War using methods more in keeping with the bribery, blackmail and back stabbing of a mafia family than an honest entrepreneur. As he once proclaimed, “I would rather earn 1 percent off a [sic] 100 people’s efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts.” This credo made him the richest man in the world.

As he quietly bought up his smaller oil competitors with these methods, Rockefeller entered into secret—and illegal—agreements with railroad magnates that gave discounts as off-the books rebates to his growing oil monopoly, easily driving smaller refiners out of business. By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the oil refining business in the U.S. When the Supreme Court finally forced Rockefeller to formally disband Standard Oil as a monopoly trust in 1911, the damage was done. Indeed, the breakup doubled the value of his stock and gave birth to oil conglomerates Esso and Mobil (now Exxon-Mobil), Arco and Amoco (now BP), Pennzoil (now Shell), Chevron and Conoco. Rockefeller spent his remaining decades playing golf.

John D. Rockefeller’s descendents have happily carried on in the robber baron’s tradition, alongside a public relations machine that routinely airbrushes the family history. These heirs have never needed to work a day in their lives to afford the best of everything money could buy. The Rockefeller name ensures each generation a ten-figure trust fund and a guaranteed spot at an elite university, enabled by the Rockefeller family’s generous donations. The many chapels, libraries, museums and other buildings bearing the Rockefeller name on private campuses across the U.S. bear testament to the family’s self-serving approach to gift giving. Most recently, David M. Rockefeller, Sr., former chairman, president and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, and former chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Group, donated a record $100 million to Harvard University, citing his fond memories as part of the class of ’36.

By design, the Rockefellers have received no blame for their pivotal role in destroying the vast trolley car system that dominated U.S. cities before the 1940s, thereby increasing city dwellers’ dependency on automobiles and gas-fueled bus lines. Yet the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California joined General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum to form the National City Lines holding company, which bought out and dismantled more than 100 trolley systems in 45 cities (including New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Minneapolis and Los Angeles) between 1936 and 1950.

In 1949, these corporate defendants were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize transportation services. Indeed, the corporations behind National City Lines were each fined just $5,000—while each of their directors paid a mere $1 fine—a small price to pay for the windfall in profits they all enjoyed in the decades that followed. Congress offered up tax dollars to build the enormous highway infrastructure that encouraged automobile travel in the 1950s, while federal investment in mass transit and train systems languished. As Noam Chomsky noted, “By the mid-1960s, one out of six business enterprises was directly dependent on the motor vehicle industry.”

No Rockefeller family history would be complete without highlighting their central role in shaping twentieth century population control policy, aimed explicitly at curbing birth rates among the non-Caucasian poor. Beginning in 1910, Rockefeller money flowed into organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, which spearheaded the eugenics movement — the “science” of “improving heredity.” These organizations, also funded by the upstanding Carnegie, Harriman and Kellogg families, sponsored academics claiming that those at the top of the social ladder had proven their racial superiority, while those at the bottom were biologically incapable of success. The eugenics movement encouraged the “superior” races to marry each other and have lots of children, while promoting forced sterilization, racial segregation and deportation of immigrants of those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.

The “superior” races so admired by the eugenics movement were “Nordic,” with blond hair and blue eyes, and the movement soon gained an admirer in Adolph Hitler. In 1924’s Mein Kampf, Hitler noted, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception (of immigration) are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” By the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation was already providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund eugenics research in Germany; in 1929 alone, $317,000 of Rockefeller money went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, according to Edwin Black, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. Although the Rockefellers had withdrawn all funding to German research by the onset of the Second World War in 1939, Black argued, “[B]y that time, the die had been cast. The talented men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the great institutions they helped found, and the science they helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.”

By the 1930s, the wheels for forced sterilization were also in motion inside the U.S. Laws were enacted in 27 states in 1932, calling for compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and physically defective.” In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America, as historian Dorothy E. Roberts described, “planned a ‘Negro Project’ designed to limit reproduction by blacks ‘who still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.’” In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor black teenagers had been sterilized in that state alone.

After World War Two, population control agencies set their sights overseas. In the 1960s, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, heavily funded by the Rockefellers alongside the U.S. government, played a key role in a coercive sterilization programs targeting Third World populations. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico — still a U.S. colony — had been permanently sterilized, often without their knowledge or consent. Rockefeller-funded programs sterilized 40,000 women in Colombia between 1963 and 1965, according to feminist author Bonnie Mass. These are just two examples among many.

The self-righteous claims of the current generation of Rockefellers must be viewed in this context. They have kept silent since the 1989 Exxon-Valdez Alaskan oil spill, even as Exxon-Mobil has refused to pay court-ordered compensation to the nearly 33,000 Alaskans who won a lawsuit against Exxon in 1994 for the company’s “reckless” behavior. Nor have they uttered a word of protest following news that growing numbers of employed workers across the U.S. are lining up at food pantries due to the skyrocketing price of food and gasoline. As Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank, told CNN, “People are giving up buying groceries so that they can pay rent and put gas in the car.”

Today’s Rockefellers praise Exxon-Mobil for its current status as the most profitable corporation in U.S. history, having raked in a record $40.6 billion in profits in 2007. They are merely watching out for their own parasitical futures.

– Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassim during a just completed May 8, 2008 interview

Outside Beirut’s Closed Airport –

Hezbollah sources concede that they were taken by surprise and some were shocked by the intense, incendiary bombardment of the last few days by pro-government operatives. As Hezbollah studies ‘the situation’ and how to respond this beautiful spring Beirut morning, there is a real danger things may rapidly spiral out of control.

Yesterday started off peacefully enough, with a strike called by the General Federation of Labor Unions (GFLU) in Lebanon represented by the General Labor Union. The strike was supported by Hezbollah to protest the Governments failure to adopt what the Union considers a living wage of $600. Currently the minimum wage in Lebanon is approximately $200 per month. The Strike continues for the second day but tensions are escalating and Beirut’s airport remains closed by anti-Government demonstrators. Beirut’s main roads are intermittently blocked, the streets virtually empty and the town largely locked down as sporadic violence and stone-throwing continue.

The region awaits this evening’s news conference, his first since July 12th 2006, the first day of the last war, during which Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is expected to give an indication of Lebanon’s immediate future.

“Stay inside today, Dr. Lamb! Do not go outside!” this observer’s friend, Hussein Chokr from Nabysheet in the Western Bekaa Valley ordered by telephone at crack of dawn this morning. “Abu Mohammad”, as he prefers to be called (of out respect for his eldest son) was in Montreal, Canada when he lost his wife Khadija, 43, (a full time mother for five children, and loving wife, while he arranged for them to immigrate to Canada. Khadija single handedly raised the children as mother and father in his absence.

Their beautiful sons Mohammad, 22 (who had just become a lawyer graduating first in his class); Bilal, 19 (a first year university accounting student, known in his community for his computer skills); Talal, 17 (a gifted artist who was planning for the first public exhibition of his art in Canada (some of which can be seen at www.majzarat-al-nabysheet.org) and Yassin, 15 (who had just received a full tuition scholarship), were all murdered at 7:10 am on July 19, 2006.

This happened when the Israeli air force “erred” and launched a US MK-83 1000 lb. bomb, guided by a Raytheon JDAM (joint direct attack munition) system and blew up their home. The boys’ sister Bushra miraculously survived as she slept with her mother in the third floor bedroom and was later dug out from the rubble with serious injuries for which she continues to receive intensive care.

No one in the Chokr family, building or immediate neighborhood, according to villagers, had any connection to any element of the Lebanese Resistance. Abu Mohammad’s family, like himself, and many in Lebanon, were non-political.

The Israeli act was quite simply one more war crime.

How Hezbollah Was Ambushed

The continuing and intense anti-Hezbollah barrage started last week in rat-a-tat fashion. It continues to intensify this morning with a significant number of Lebanon’s politicians, religious leaders and other partisans raising a cacophony with new charges. Conspiracy theories, taunts, threats and provocations continue, the stone throwing on some streets, as commentators offer myriad analyses of “the implementation of suspicious schemes” as Beirut’s An Nahar noted.

The hot war prospects not looking so great recently, it is widely believed in Lebanon that the decision was taken following David Welch’s recent visit here for an intense cold war assault against Hezbollah and we are now witnessing its implementation. Some locals are calling it a “hot air cold war” as a barrage of accusations is fired across Dahiyeh from several directions.

Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt, led off against Hezbollah last weekend, followed rapidly by the Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea.

Items:

* Hezbollah is spying on the airport! Jumblatt announces. “They are monitoring runway 1-7 with cameras on top of Jihad al Bina packing crates in order to assassinate or kidnap their opponents along airport road which runs through Shia neighborhoods”.

Swoi habibee! (Easy, sweetheart) Walid. “The containers to hide the cameras,” said Jihad al Bina Director Qassim Allaq, “are owned by the organization (Jihad al Bina construction company) and have been in place for the past 20 years, so why hasn’t anyone asked about them in the past?”

“These containers,” Allaq continued, “are our property and have been in place for more than 20 years. There are cameras everywhere around the place for security. The land on which the containers are placed is the property of the organization (Jihad al Bina)…why hasn’t the media spoken about the containers before? Why haven’t anyone of the officials asked us about them in the past?”

* “The Iranians are spying on my house!”, Geagea announced within hours. Actually three teenage students may indeed have watched Geagea’s mistress leave his house just minutes before Samir’s wife returned. The students said they were following the popular tourist route called “the Jesus Trail” and got off the right road. A definite violation of the redline because Mrs. Geagea, who represents the Phalangist Lebanese Forces in Parliament has a fiery temper! One wag joked that maybe Iran put Geagea, who still may be obliged to answer for the disappearance of the four Iranian diplomats in l983 who it is claimed were kidnapped by his forces, “in the doghouse again!”

* Within minutes, Israel Defense Minister Barak called in reporters to go on the record and repeated David Welch’s comment that the Lebanese will have a ‘hot summer’ and that the local economy will tank again as tourists stay away and that Hezbollah can destroy Israel’s nuclear faculty at Dimona.

* The next day it was announced that the Saudi Government pledges “to spend their whole treasury if that is what it takes to ’save Lebanon’ (and their business interests i.e. solideire, hotels, banks and real estate) as they reportedly increase dramatically aid to all Lebanese Christians who will oppose General Aoun and his entente cordial with Hezbollah.

* A Pro Government Muslim group verbally attacked Hezbollah, without offering any evidence to support its claim saying “What Hezbollah is doing as part of its expansion policy is setting up armed barracks inside residential apartment buildings along the coast of Iqlim (Kharroub) and its entrances for dubious goals – one of which could be to control the international highway that links Beirut with Sidon and the rest of the south,” said a statement issued after a meeting between the two groups at the house of MP Mohammed Hajjar.

* On May 6 pro Siniora MP Atef Majdalani accused Hezbollah of shifting to civil strife with the objective of declaring a breakaway state.

* A couple of hours later, Geagea again: “Hezbollah is another Mahdi Army militia planning on fighting the government in the Beirut alleys.”

* Last night the Phalangist Voice of Lebanon radio said Hezbollah members were dressed up in police uniforms and penetrating districts of Beirut controlled by their rivals of the Mustaqbal movement.

* Within minutes a government source also said Hezbollah was massing gunmen in downtown Beirut, sparking fears of a possible attack against Prime Minister’s Siniora’s private office.

* A statement was issued from Saad Hariri’s office on behalf of the March 14 group which accused Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Mohammad Reza Shibani of becoming a “high commissioner” entrusted with overseeing the creation of the Hizbullah state.

* Geagea again: “Hezbollah is buying up Mt. Lebanon and West Beirut real estate to disperse their security assets and build ‘a state within a state!”

* Jumblatt again: Hezbollah has set up a separate optic cable telephone communication system near Saida to link the Shia communities.

This “telephone system” item did get some significant public attention in Lebanon but not for the reason Jumblatt had hoped. Not many Lebanese are against Hezbollah creating another “resistance tool” against Israel. During the July 2006 war Israel messed with Lebanon’s phone system sending scare messages and jamming the phones in the south, but could not penetrate Hezbollah communications. What fascinated the general public here is the fact that at nearly 49 cents per minute Lebanon’s phones rates may be about the most expensive in the world with terrible reception—plus bugged by Israel and others, tens of thousands across Lebanon mistakenly believing they could sign up with “Hezmobile, Inc” phone service with cheap rates and better reception were at first delighted and then disappointed when they learned the system was only for military communications and in no way will compete with the regular miserable phone system.

“We were hoping we could stop paying off the warlords each time we make or receive a call”, one couple said wistfully.

And so it has been going these past several days.

It has been a “Hezbollah this, Hezbollah that, Hezbollah can do no right” campaign thought by many observers here to have been planned and launched in Washington. “The best defense is an aggressive offense” Feltman and Welch tutored the March 14th Deputy Nayla Moaward according to her report of her recent consultation in Washington as they prepare to receive the Maronite Patriarch Sfeir the 6th of the recent stable to strut into Washington to receive their “briefings”.

Things came to a head on May 5th when the Cabinet decided to move to shut down the Hezbollah communication system and fire Shafiq Shuqeir the Security head at Beirut’s Airport who is believed to be a Hezbollah supporter.

Of all the provocations this past couple of weeks, one of the most bizarre involved a guest of Walid Jumblatt, the arch Zionist French Deputy Karim Pakzad invited to a Conference here by the Druze leader. The Deputy’s claimed “kidnapping” and interrogation caught the attention of journalists and researchers in Lebanon who are familiar with Hezbollah’s highly efficient Media Relations Office and Hezbollah’s security concerns.

It wasn’t just that the Deputy set out to take photos in secure areas without permission, or how he appeared to exaggerate what had actually occurred, as he repeatedly explained, more dramatically with each telling, that he was “kidnapped, blindfolded, held for four hours and interrogated by Hezbollah in a secret location.” Or even the well prepared news conference with no fewer that 22 microphones which Jumblatt laid on to announce “this international crime” to the world which every Zionist and US neocon media and Internet outlet dutifully hyped as the story which grew direr at each retelling.

What was stranger was that everyone Karim was hosted by, just like every researcher and journalist in Lebanon knows the rules and they are simple and reasonable. Because of decades of pervasive Israeli spys metastasizing in Lebanon and especially areas where many in the Lebanese Resistance live and work, visitors are ask to drop by Hezbollah’s Media Relations Office and obtain a permit so the neighborhood watch people will not inquire of them who they are and why they are photographing in security areas.

The same precautions are taken in most sensitive areas these days. Jumblatt’s and Geagea’s area also take security precautions. Try photographing in Hamra near Saad Hariri’s Quiritum offices or around Muerab or near Jumblatt’s Mukhtara area and learn how quickly security personnel will approach.

When the French Deputy is in Washington he might want to test US sensitivity to security and try to walk around the Pentagon, CIA headquarters, inside the M Street Naval Annex, enter the ground on Observatory Road of the Vice Presidents acreage, or dozens of other locations and start snapping photos without permission.

The evidence strongly suggests this and many of the ‘incidents’ recently were staged to provoke Hezbollah into a reaction that has so far failed through various violent incident designed to achieve the same end. That effort continues today in Beirut as event unfold.

Americans who live in and frequent Dahiyeh comment on how peaceful and safe it is. One can walk or jog around these neighborhoods at 3 am without any fear of being accosted. One visiting journalist from Washington explained:

“I live almost exactly half way between the White House and the US Capitol (less than one mile between the two) there are no fewer than 9 police forces, ranging from the Capitol Police to the DC Police to the Executive Protective Brand and others assigned to secure our neighborhood. No chance I would wander around at 3 am on my street out of fear of being mugged or held up by someone high on drugs or looking for cash. There is no comparison between the security in DC where all you see are cops and here when you hardly notice any security”.

Last July, former American Ambassador to Lebanon Robert Dillon, leading a Washington based Council for the National Interest (CNI) delegation met with Hezbollah and later decided to have lunch in their neighborhood of Haret Hreik at the popular Halefee Restaurant, in fact, near where Karim was taking photos.

After dining on Falafel and Shawarma the American Ambassador and a few of his group decided to take a walk and observe some of the hundreds of buildings bombed during the July 2006 war.

As the group meandered toward the Bir Abed area and approached what is known locally as “Security Square”, a young lady in the American group starting taking pictures. The group had not visited the Hezbollah Media Office for a permit or arranged for a guide because their visit was spur of the moment and it was a Sunday afternoon. After a few photos were taken the group made a quick collective decision not to take more photos out of respect for the community and its security concerns. The CNI delegation young lady put away her camera. Within probably 45 seconds of her putting her camera in her purse, as the delegation continued its trek through the devastation, a young man with a walkie talkie appeared on a small “jog” motor scooter from one direction and seconds later another arrived from the opposite direction. It took five minutes of polite conversation to assure all that henceforth the rules would be followed. Sometimes Neighborhood Watch Hezbollah security guys will ask to quickly review recent photos taken. One imagines that if there were suspicious photos of “sensitive buildings” further inquiries would be made. In the present case no request to see the photos were made perhaps because the group were very obviously benign tourists. As the CNI group continued their walk the young lady said “they sure were polite and so apologetic for having to ask us not to take photos without permission. They were sweet. It’s their neighborhood. I am glad that they try to protect it.”

The French Deputy’s ‘kidnapping’ hoax was clearly meant to create an international incident out of something that was commonplace and could have been avoided if the Deputy had kept his cool and not become antagonistic when first approached by Neighborhood Watch.

This observer is not aware what was in the French Deputy’s camera that led to a little more attention from Neighborhood Watch than usual. Perhaps he will share them with us on YouTube.

Franklin Lamb can be reached at: fplamb@gmail.com
Mr. Chokr can be reached at: bekaa_garden@yahoo.com

In Hegelian terms, recognition is accomplished by directing oneself towards non-being, that is, towards another desire, another emptiness, another ‘I’. It is something that can never be fully accomplished. “The man who desires a thing humanly acts not so much to possess the thing as to make another recognise his right. It is only desire of such recognition, it is only the action that flows from such desire, that creates, realizes and reveals a human, non biological I.” (Kojeve A., Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 1947, Cornell Univ. Press, 1993, p. 40). Following this Hegelian line of thinking, we can deduce that in order to develop self-consciousness, one must face the other. While the biological entity will fight for its biological continuity, a human being fights for recognition.

In order to understand the practical implications of this idea, let us turn to the ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’. The Master is called the Master because he strives to prove his superiority over nature and over the slave who is forced to recognize him as a master.

At first glance, it looks as if the master has reached the peak of human existence but as we shall see, this is not the case. As has just been stated, it is recognition that humans fight for. The master is recognised by the slave as a master but the slave’s recognition has little value. The master wants to be recognised by another man, but a slave is not a man. The master wants recognition by a master, but another master cannot allow another superior human being in his world. “In short, the master never succeeds in realising his end, the end for which he risks his very life.” So the master faces a dead-end. But what about the slave? The slave is in the process of transforming himself since, unlike the master who cannot go any further, the slave has everything to aspire to. The slave is at the vanguard of the transformation of the social conditions in which he lives. The slave is the embodiment of history. He is the essence of progress.

A Lesson in Mastery

Let us now try to apply the Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic to the notion of Jewish ‘chosenness’ and exclusivity. While the Hegelian ‘Master’ risks his biological existence to become a master, the newborn Jewish infant risks his foreskin. The chosen infant is born into the realm of mastery and excellence without (yet) excelling at anything. The other awards the chosen baby his prestigious status without the requirement of facing any process of recognition. And in fact, the ‘chosen’ title is given to Jews by themselves (allegedly God) rather than by others.

If, for instance, we try to analyse the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the Hegelian mechanism of recognition, we realise the impossibility of any dialogue between the two parties. While it is more than clear that the Palestinian people are fighting for recognition, which they declare at every possible opportunity, the Israelis avoid the whole recognition issue altogether. They are convinced that they are already fully recognised in the first place. They know who they are — they are born masters who happen to live on their ‘promised land’. Israelis refuse to join the dialectic ‘meaning transformation’ game and instead divert all their intellectual, political and military efforts into demolishing any sense of Palestinian recognition. The battle for Israeli society is to suppress any Palestinian symbol or desire, whether material, spiritual or cultural.

Strangely enough, the Palestinians are managing quite well in their fight for recognition. More and more people out there are now beginning to understand the just nature of the Palestinian cause and the level of inhumanity entangled with the entire concept of Zionism and Jewish politics in general. More and more people out there find the Palestinian people and their spokesmen very easy to empathise with. Even the Hamas who were despised by most Western political institutions are now managing to get their message across. The Israelis, on the other hand, are falling behind in such manoeuvres. The average Western listener finds them almost impossible to sympathise with. While a Palestinian will call you to share his pain and misery, talking straight to your heart, the Israeli spokesman will demand that you to accept his views. He will insist on selling you a ready-made fantastic historical narrative; a repetitive tale that starts somewhere around Biblical Abraham, continues with a series of Holocausts and leads eventually towards more current bloodshed. It seems as if the Israelis, the masters, always present the same faceless story. Can Abraham and the Holocaust justify Israeli inhuman behaviour in Gaza? Not really, and the reason is simple, Abraham and the Holocaust and historical narratives in general do not evoke genuine emotional feelings. And indeed, the Jewish political world is so desperate to maintain its narrative that the last Holocaust has now been transformed into a legal narrative. The message is as follows: “beware, if you doubt my narrative you will end up behind bars.” This is obviously an act of desperation.

Following Hegel, we learn that recognition is a dynamic process; it is a type of understanding that grows in you. While the Palestinians will use all their available, yet limited, resources to make you look at their faces, in their eyes, to carry you into a dynamic process of mutual recognition, the Israelis would expect you to accept their narrative blindly. They would expect you to turn a blind eye to the clear fact that as far as the Middle East is concerned Israel is an aggressor like no other. Israel is an occupying regional super power, a tiny State heavily engaged in exploring different nuclear, biological and chemical arsenals. It is a racially orientated apartheid state that bullies and abuses its minorities on a daily basis. Yes, the Israelis and their supportive Jewish lobbies around the world want you to ignore these facts. They insist upon being the victims, they want you to approve their inhuman policies referring to Jews endless suffering.

How is it that Jewish politics has become aggressive like no other? It is simply the fact that from a Jewish political perspective, there is ‘no other’. The so-called other for them is nothing but a vehicle rather than an equal human subject. Israeli foreign affairs and Jewish political activity should be comprehended in the light of a severe lack of a ‘recognition mechanism’. Israeli and Jewish politics, left right and centre, is grounded on locking and fixing of meaning. They would refuse to regard history as a flux, as a dynamic process, as a journey towards ‘oneself’ or self-realisation. Israel and Israelis view themselves as if they are external to history. They do not progress toward self-realisation because they have a given, fixed identity to maintain. Once they encounter a complex situation with the surrounding world, they would then create a model that adapts the external world into their chauvinist self-loving value system. This is what Neo-conservatism is all about; this is what the fantasmic yet sickening newly emerging Judeo-Christian discourse is all about.

As sad as it may sound, people who are not trained to recognise the other are unable to let them be recognised. The Jewish tribal mindset: left, centre and right, sets Jews aside of humanity. It does not equip the followers of the tribal mindset with the mental mechanism needed to recognise the other. Why should they do it? They have done so well for many years without having to do so. Lacking a notion of an other, indeed transcends one far beyond any recognised form of true humanist thought. It takes one far beyond ethical thinking or moral awareness.

Instead of morality, every debate is reduced into a mere political struggle with some concrete material and practical achievements to aim for.

Hegel may throw some further light on the entire saga. If indeed one becomes aware of oneself via the other, then the ‘Chosen subject’ is self-aware to start with. He is born into mastery. Accordingly, Israelis are not practicing any form of dialogue with the surrounding human environment since they are born masters. In order to be fair to the Israelis, I have to admit that their lack of a recognition mechanism has nothing to do with their anti-Palestinian feelings. As a matter of fact, they cannot even recognise each other — Israel and Israelis have a long history of discrimination against its own people (Jews of non-European descent such as Sephardim Jews are discriminated against by the Jewish elite, those of Western descent). But are progressive Jews any different? Not really. Like the Israelis and similar to any other form of tribal chauvinist ideology, they are continuously withdrawing into self-centred segregated discourse that has very little to engage or grab the interest of anyone besides themselves. Consequently, like the Israelis who surround themselves with walls, the Jewish progressive cells have already set themselves into cyber ghettos that are becoming increasingly hostile to the rest of humanity and those who supposed to be their comrades.

Historic Materialism

If one cannot establish relationships with one’s neighbour based upon recognition of the other, there must be another way of establishing a dialogue. If one cannot form a dialogue based upon empathy with the other and the rights of the other, one must pursue another mode of communication. It seems as if the alternative ‘chosen’ dialogical method reduces any form of communication into a materialistic language. Almost any form of human activity, including love and aesthetic pleasure, can be reduced to a material value. The Chosen political activists are well practised in using this method of communication.

Recently the Israeli ultra-Zionist author A.B. Yehoshua has managed to upset many American Jewish Ethnic leaders at the American Jewish Committee conference by saying: “You [Jews in the Diaspora] are changing jackets . . . you are changing countries like changing jackets.” Indeed, Yehoshua came under a lot of pressure following his remark, he was very quick to regret his statement. However, Yehoshua’s insight, while far from being original, is rather painfully truthful.

It is quite apparent that some politically orientated Diaspora Jews are engaged in an extremely fruitful dialogue with any possible core of hegemony. Yehoshoua’s criticism was fairly spot on. Following Yehoshua, once it is clear that a new country is becoming a leading world super power, it won’t take long before a wave of liberated assimilated Jews would try to infiltrate into its governing elite. “If China ever became the world’s foremost super power,” he warned, “American Jews would migrate there to assimilate rather than in the US.”

A decade ago, at the peak of the legal battle between major Jewish institutions and the Swiss Bank, Norman Finkelstein stood up and said that very little remains of the Jewish Holocaust apart from various industrial forms of financial bargaining for compensation. According to Finkelstein, it was all about profit-making. Without any criticism intended by me about financial compensation, it appears as if some people are quick to translate their pain into gold. (It is important to mention that pain as well as being transformed into gold, can be transformed into other values such as moral or aesthetic ones). However, the possibility of transforming pain and blood into cash stands at the heart of the Israeli false dream - that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially the refugee problem, is resolvable. Now we know where this assumption originates. The Israelis, as well as Jewish leading institutions, are fully convinced that if they were happy to come to a financial settlement with the Germans (or the Swiss for the matter), the Palestinians would be equally happy to sell their lands and dignity. How do the Israelis arrive at such a strange conviction? Because they must know better than the Palestinians what the Palestinians really want. How? Because the Israelis are brilliant, they are the Chosen People. Moreover, the chosen subject doesn’t even try to engage with the human in the other. Sixty years after the Nakba, the mass the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians, the vast majority of Israelis and world Jewry do not even start to acknowledge the Palestinian cause, let alone do they show any form of empathy.

When you talk to Israelis about the conflict, one of their most frequently used arguments is the following: “When we (the Jews) came here (to Palestine), they (the Arabs) had nothing. Now they have electricity, work, cars, health services, etc.” This is obviously a failure to recognise the other. It is typical of the chauvinist colonialist to impose one’s own value system on the other. In other words, the Israelis expect the Palestinians to share the importance they attach to the acquisition of material wealth. “Why should the other share my values? Because I know what is good. Why do I know what is Good? Because I am the best.” This arrogant and completely materialistic approach obviously lies at the heart of the Israeli vision of peace. The Israeli military calls it ‘the stick and the carrot’. Seemingly, when referring to Palestinians they actually have rabbits in their minds. But, as bizarre or even tragic as it may sound, the Israeli born, ultra-left Mazpen movement was not categorically different. They obviously had some revolutionary dreams of secularisation for the Arab world. They obviously knew what was good for the Arabs. Why did they know? Shall I let you guess? Because they were exclusively and chauvinistically clever. They were the Marxists of the chosen type. Hence, I wasn’t overwhelmingly surprised that as time went by, the legendary ‘revolutionary’ Mazpen and the despised neo-conservatism actually united into a single catastrophic message: “We know better what is good for you than you yourselves do.”

Both Zionists and Jewish leftists have a “New Middle East dream”. In Peres’s old fantasy the region turns into a financial paradise in which Israel would stand at the very centre. The Palestinians (as well as other Arab States) would supply Israeli industries (representing the West) with the low cost labour they need. In turn, they, the Arabs, would earn money and spend it buying Israeli (Western) goods. In the Judeo progressive dream the Arabs leaves Islam behind, they become Marxist cosmopolitan progressives (East European Jews) and join the journey towards a world revolution. As much as Peres’s dream is sad, the Judeo Marxist version is almost funny.

As it seems, within the Zionist dream, Israel would establish a dual coexistence in the region where the Palestinian people would be the eternal slaves and the Israelis their masters. Within the Judeo progressive cosmopolitan dream, Red Palestine will establish a dual coexistence in the region where the Palestinian people would be the eternal slaves of a remote Euro-centric ideology. If there is a big categorical difference between the two Judeo centric ideologies, I just fail to see it.

However, according to Hegel, it is the slave that moves history forward. It is the slave that struggles towards his freedom. It is the slave who transforms himself and it is the master who eventually vanishes. Following Hegel, we have good reason to believe that the future of the region belongs to the Palestinians, the Iraqis and nation Islam in general. One way of explaining why Israel ignores this understanding of history relates to the conditional detachment of the exclusive ‘chosen’ state of mind.

Welcome to Cuckoo Land

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian doctor who lives and works in the occupied West Bank, referred to Israel as “trying to be David and Goliath at the same time” (Dr. Barghouti was speaking at a debate at the House of Commons, 22 Nov. 2000). According to Dr. Barghouti, this is impossible. He also claimed that “Israel is probably the only State that bombs a territory it occupies.” He found this very strange and even bizarre. Is it really strange to be David and Goliath simultaneously? Is it really strange to destroy your own property? Not if you are insane. The lack of mirroring (again, seeing oneself through the other) can lead people, as well as nations, into strange dark corners. The lack of a framework which would allow you to discern your own image through the other, the lack of a corrective mechanism, appears to be a very dangerous state of affairs.

The first generation of Israeli leaders (Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Meir, Peres, Begin) grew up in the Diaspora, mainly in Eastern Europe. Being a Jew living in a non-Jewish environment forces one to develop a sharpened self-awareness and imposes a certain kind of mirroring. Moreover, early Zionism is slightly more developed than other forms of Jewish tribal politics for the simple reason that Zionism is there to transform the Jews into ‘people like other people’. Such a realisation involves a certain amount of necessary mirroring. However, this was not enough to restrain Israeli aggressive acts (e.g., Deir-Yassin, Nakba, Kafer Kasem, the ‘67 war, etc.) but it was more than enough to teach them a lesson in diplomacy. Since 1996, young leaders who were born there have led Israel into the state of ‘chosenness’ (Rabin, Netanyahu, Sharon, Barak, Olmert). Whilst in their earlier years they were imbued with an intense traditional Jewish anxiety, as they grew up this was overtaken by the legacy of the 1967 ‘miracle’, an event that turned some of the ‘chosen’ ideologies into a messianic extravaganza. This fixation with absolute power exacerbated by Jewish anxiety coupled with ignorance of the ‘other’ leads to epidemic collective schizophrenia, both of mood and action; a severe loss of contact with reality that gives way to the use of excessive force. The recent “Second Lebanon War” was an obvious example for that matter. Israel retaliates with machine guns in response to children throwing stones, with artillery and missiles against civilian targets following a sporadic uprising, and with a total war to a minor border incident. This behaviour should not be explained by using political, materialist or sociological analytical tools. Much greater understanding could be gained by situating the conflict within a philosophical framework, which allows a better understanding of the origins of paranoia and schizophrenia.

The Israeli Prime Minister, representing both ‘David and Goliath’, can talk about the vulnerability of Israel, Jewish pain and Jewish misery in one breath and about launching a massive military offensive against the whole region in the next. Such behaviour can only be explained by seeing it as a form of mental illness. The funny/sad side of it is that most Israelis do not even realise that something is going terribly wrong. Being a born master leads to the absence of a ‘recognition mechanism’. Inevitably it leads toward blindness. This lack of a recognition mechanism results in a split psyche, being both ‘David and Goliath’ at one and the same time. It seems that neither Israel nor Israelis can any longer be partners in any meaningful dialogue.

Bloch had refused “to enforce anti-discrimination protections for federal workers contradict[ing] Bush Administration policy to uphold former President Clinton’s executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation,” the Washington Blade had reported.

The letter to the president was signed by gay House members Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), along with Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and George Miller (D-Calif.).

On Tuesday, May 6, McClathchy Newspapers reported that “FBI agents … searched the office and [Virginia] home of … Bloch … as part of an investigation into whether he obstructed an inquiry into allegations of his own misconduct.”

Since his appointment the relatively unknown Bloch has been wielding a heavy hand and been the source of a series of controversies.

Who is Scott Bloch and how did he wind up as head of the Office of Special Counsel?

Up from Kansas

After graduating from the Law School at the University of Kansas, Scott Bloch was a partner in a Kansas law firm specializing in civil rights law, employment law and legal ethics.

He came to the special counsel’s office after a stint as deputy director of the Justice Department’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives. The Washington Blade pointed out that he is “a devout Catholic and staunch social conservative” who revealed on a Senate disclosure form that he had been the former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right wing California-based think tank that vigorously opposes the gay rights movement.

Scott Bloch was born in New York City, where his father Walter wrote for Broadway and television programs, the Lawrence Journal-World — the hometown newspaper of the University of Kansas — pointed out in an April 2002 profile.

At age 3, Bloch moved to Los Angeles where his father contributed to such popular television programs as “Gilligan’s Island,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Bonanza,” and “The Flintstones.”

Bloch’s grandfather, Albert, a man of Jewish descent, was a noted abstract expressionist painter. Albert Bloch was “the only American member of ‘Der Blaue Reiter,’ (The Blue Rider), Germany’s most important group of artists in the 20th century,” Dan Hayes wrote in a January 1997 article.

An American Art Review piece by University of Kansas Art Professor David Cateforis pointed out that Albert Bloch’s paintings had religious themes, with striking renderings of biblical figures, including Jesus Christ and showed strong Christian leanings throughout his painting career.

Albert Bloch became head of the department of drawing and painting at KU, where he taught from 1923 to 1947, and worked in Lawrence until his death in 1961.

At some point, Bloch’s father changed his last name to Black for “professional reasons.” The Washington Blade speculated that the change may have “occurred in the 1950s, during the height of the Hollywood ‘red scare.’” By that time Sen. McCarthy’s investigations had spread to Hollywood’s film industry, and “anti-Semitism, as well as prejudice against perceived membership in liberal and ‘leftist’ groups, became a factor that prompted some writers and film industry workers to change their names to hide their Jewish ancestry.”

At age seventeen, Scott changed his name back to Bloch.

Converting Catholics in Kansas?

While at the University of Kansas, Bloch enrolled in the experimental Integrated Humanities Program — a controversial curriculum established in 1971 to counter the anti-war and women’s movements and a growing demand for greater multiculturalism on campus. Organized by three conservative English Department Professors, Dennis Quinn, John Senior, and Franklyn Nelick, the program was geared toward teaching the classics, and had a strong Catholic bent.

In a telephone interview, Professor Quinn insisted that the project “was apolitical,” although he admitted that “we talked about everything under the sun.” Some critics of the program “alleged that we were making Roman Catholics out of everyone,” Prof. Quinn said. “We talked about religions, but we had no specific point of view.”

(Disclosure: Nearly forty years ago, I was enrolled at the University of Kansas in Professor Quinn’s “Seventeenth Century Minor Poets,” a class that was not part of the IHP.)

The IHP ended in 1979 amidst charges of proselytizing and “cult-like” behavior. Professor Quinn, who has kept in contact with Bloch over the years, told me he believed “that sometime during the program he [Bloch] converted [from Judaism] to Catholicism,” a development which “didn’t surprise” him.

Although he hadn’t heard about Bloch’s earliest ttravails in the Special Counsel’s office, Professor Quinn allowed that Bloch is “brash, not in an offensive way, but he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. And, he had strong views. He may,” the professor added, “be just a little imprudent.”

According to the Washington Blade, when assumed the Office, he hired at least two religious conservatives “and offered the No. 2 post at the OSC to a college professor from Wyoming who helped form an anti-gay campus group,” who turned him down.

On Tuesday, May 6, McClatchy Newspapers reported that “Agents are looking into whether Bloch deleted his agency’s computer files to hinder an outside investigation of his treatment of employees, the officials said.”

With a population of 4.7 million, this beautiful land, noted for its dozen or so hot-blooded independent-minded peoples, is surrounded by at best indifferent neighbours Armenia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and of course Russia. Its fiery 40-year-old president does not disappoint, with his penchant for thumbing his nose at Russia and lavishly admiring US President George W Bush.

In his short first term (he called early elections last year and won a disputed second term, though his popularity even officially dropped from 97 to 52 per cent), he combined scorning bluster at Russia with oily praise for Bush and now presidential hopeful Senator John McCain, who even brought him a bullet-proof vest, all the time loudly demanding membership in NATO.

This may just look like pre-election posturing, with less than a month to go before the country’s parliamentary elections, but there’s just too much at stake to think so. It’s as if he is determined to prove to the world that NATO is indeed primarily an alliance to confront Russia.

In fact, Georgia cannot by any stretch of the imagination become a legitimate member of the “Atlantic” alliance, which according to its charter is a North American-European alliance. Georgia, unlike Turkey, has not even a fraction of its territory in Europe. So Saakashvili seems determined to show the world that not only is NATO primarily an anti-Russian alliance, but it is not even a European one. But then we know what often comes out of the mouth of babes. Petulant children are always revealing embarrassing truths which adults try to keep hidden.

While Europe’s “kings” demurred at Saakashvili’s noisy whining at the last NATO meeting in April in Bucharest, the matter is far from settled. Not a day goes by now without claims of the Russians shooting down Georgian spy planes and counter-claims of Georgian troop build-up on the border of the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia.

This is all according to plan for Saakashvili. Georgia was the main topic at an emergency 30 April NATO meeting in Brussels, following Russia’s deployment of extra peacekeeping troops and setting up of observation border posts in Abkhazia, in turn in response to Georgia’s deployment of 1,500 troops in the mountainous Upper Kodori valley — a small but strategic enclave inside the separatist territory. It was “possible to conclude that Georgia is preparing a base for a military operation against Abkhazia”, the Russian Foreign Ministry reported. At the NATO meeting, it was announced that “NATO ambassadors” would be coming to Tbilisi soon as a show of support for this non-European country that just happens to be a vital alternative energy transit route to Russia. Negotiations on Georgia’s eventual membership to NATO are intended to begin in December.
Under a key Soviet-era arms pact, Moscow should notify NATO nations of any troop movements, as it has continued to do despite freezing the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty last December. Despite the claims and denials, the UN mission monitoring Georgia and Abkhazia, UNOMIG, said on 21 April that its monitors “did not observe anything to substantiate reports of a build-up of forces on either side.”

Whatever the details, the Russians are clearly reinforcing the current status quo in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where citizens have Russian citizenship for the asking, while the Georgians — at least the president — are determined to reincorporate the rebel territories. Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia, another breakaway region of Georgia, as legal entities this month, prompting Tbilisi to accuse Russia of “de facto annexation”. Georgia denied that it was planning to recapture Abkhazia, but then Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said many times that Russia is duty-bound to protect Russian-speakers in the breakaway regions and would use military force if Georgia attacked either Abkhazia or South Ossetia.

Abkhazia’s Foreign Ministry said last week that the threat of a Georgian attack was real. “We have a very distinct feeling that Georgia is preparing something,” Maxim Gunjia, Abkhazia’s vice foreign minister said. “We expect an attack from Georgia at any time.”

Russia’s government recently upgraded its trade relations with the breakaway republics, while diplomatic relations with Georgia have chilled and Georgian wines been banned, much to Saakashvili’s chagrin. Or is this precisely what he wants? To provoke the giant and turn Georgian against Russian, while alternately charming and shouting “wolf!” to his new Western friends, drawing them into Georgia’s long, if obscure, history of swashbuckling warfare? As if to make the point, on 29 April, Georgia confirmed that it plans to block Moscow’s accession to the World Trade Organisation.

Saakashvili attempted to smooth things over with the Abkhaz and South Ossetian people during a televised address on 29 April in which he offered to make the vice-president of Georgia an Abkhazian, and described Russia as an “outrageous and irresponsible force” attempting to “involve us in confrontation. The more we speak about peace, the more this third force speaks about war. It is the force that leaves you no right of choice and speaks on your behalf with us and with the rest of the world that needs confrontation.”

The leaders of both unrecognised republics rejected Saakashvili’s offer of peace and friendship out of hand. De facto Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh said, “the existence of Abkhazia and Georgia in a unified state is impossible,” while his South Ossetian counterpart, Eduard Kokoity, accused Georgia of conducting a policy of genocide against the Ossetians and stressed that, “the Ossetian people have made their choice in favour of an independent state.”

There is little likelihood that this brash youngster will revert to realpolitik in the near future. He seems to thrive on controversy. He has even invited the Israeli army to train Georgian commandos. His rash and impetuous style is increasingly alienating not only Russians, but his own Georgians as well. Last November, opposition protests prompted him to impose a state of emergency that included a blackout on all non-state media.

Is NATO the key to a return to glory for this beleaguered nation, or a ticket to further misery and insecurity? As history has shown Georgians time and again, Europe — let alone the US — is far away. Saakashvili, seemingly looking for a doting parent across the Atlantic, might pause to ponder an Arabic proverb: “A close neighbour is better than a far distant mother.” He would also be wise to take a lesson from his country’s often tragic history: while Georgia flourished briefly as an empire in the 13th century, it has fared best when it made peace with its neighbours and made the best use of its rich endowments, both natural and human. This is precisely what it did during its Soviet period, when its film directors, composers, artists, writers, and athletes — not to mention politicians — wowed the world, when its mountains yielded world class wines and served as a playground for countless tourists.

While Eastern Europe and the Baltics managed to jump into NATO’s embrace with little protest from Russia, the attempt to suck Ukraine and Georgia into what is clearly a US military alliance intended to police the world will not be tolerated by Russia. Instead of making peace with its increasingly robust neighbour, Saakashvili is doing everything to provoke it into full scale confrontation, with the intention of drawing the EU and US in to save its bacon.

So far only a few sane voices have been heard from Europe, notably German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. None from the US. Whether NATO dresses up the need to leave Ukraine and Georgia out as a sensible compromise with Russia or lets this squeaky mouse draw it further into a very dangerous confrontation is increasingly an issue that concerns the entire world. It is time for sensible NATO members and non-NATO countries to speak out before shots are fired at more than unmanned drones.

But even if an acceptable comedown is achieved, the damage to NATO’s peace-loving image will have been done. Saakashvili, by pushing the boundaries of this bogus alliance into the realm of the surreal, may just be the catalyst for its well-earned demise.

DLC endorsement is the gold standard of political reliability for Wall Street, Big Energy, Big Pharma, insurance, the airlines and more. Though candidates normally undergo extensive questioning and interviews before DLC endorsement, Obama insisted the blessing of these corporate special interests had been bestowed on him without these formalities and without his advance knowledge, and formally disassociated himself from the DLC. But like Hillary Clinton, and every front running Democrat since Michale Dukakis in 1988, Barack Obama’s campaign has adopted the classic right wing DLC strategy.

In the DLC playbook, the road to winning elections is appealing to Republican-leaning white voters – demographic groups which pollsters and consultants in previous elections called “suburban soccer moms”, NASCAR dads,” and before that “Reagan Democrats.” Candidates do this by decrying excessive partisanship, embracing “free trade” and “conservative” values, and displays of public piety, Though Obama has no formal ties with the DLC he has assiduously followed this prescription. Till a month ago Obama led every candidate among white men, an unprecedented achievement for a Democrat.

But after less than a month of sustained and often racist attacks from the likes of Fox News, CNN, Republican pundits and Hillary Clinton supporters, Obama’s support among Republican-leaning white voters has sharply eroded. Dr. Adolph Reed, a black professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania explained why an April 30 Democracy Now interview,

…Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tactic that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include (Bill) Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.

It worked for a while. Barack Obama followed the DLC script to the letter for the last two years, publicly scolding Democrats for their insufficient piety, liberally borrowing from Republican talking points. He advertised himself as grounded by his personal relationship with Jesus, and by the faith tradition of the Black Church. But after Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, in which he characterized his pastor as a crazy old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties, the Black Church was compelled to speak for itself. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor at Trinity UCC made a series of speeches and appearances in which he likened US Marines to Roman soldiers, described hundreds of US bases around the world as “empire” before the National Press Club, and refused to retreat from the contention that 9-11 was a preventable consequence of US foreign policy.

To preserve his support among whites which Obama won without challenging any of their fundamental beliefs about America, empire, Obama was forced to denounce his pastor’s words as “akin to hate speech” and disavow his church, and with it the prophetic tradition of Christianity and the Black Church in particular. But this, and joining a prosperity-Gospel mega-church will not be enough. From this point on, all Republicans have to do is prove to their base that Obama is not as conservative as he once appeared, which they will do by pointing to his pastor and the prophetic tradition of the Black Church in general. They can, in fact, point to any stirrings of black or grassroots outrage or militancy anywhere, which Obama will want to ignore anyway, and demand a ringing denunciation from Barack Obama. When Obama gets his way, he will be silent, sticking to content-free appeals to “unity”. And when Republicans prevail they will force him to denounce at every turn the grassroots activists he should be supporting.

By contrast, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Rev. Jesse Jackson won white support too, but embraced the burden of challenging white American assumptions about the essential goodness of America, about empire, and race and class. If you were organizing against police brutality or farm foreclosures, organizing a union or protesting the illegal war in Central America, the campaign in many cases came to you and augmented your local efforts. The Obama must campaign avoid this kind of activism like Dracula avoids crosses, because its candidate’s appeal is based on challenging none of the fake history, none of the racism, injustice and unearned privilege at the heart of American life.

The Jackson campaign, at least, was honest about the obstacles to a real politics of transformation in America.

For the 21st century’s first black presidential candidate, “change” is to be accomplished through a content-free sort of “unity”. Again, Dr. Reed helps us understand what is happening.

…the contention that the candidate can bring us all together despite our partisan differences is the same thing that the Democrats have been claiming consistently since at least, you know, Dukakis, to be post-partisan, to be post-political. And frankly, I think it appeals—it’s an appeal that gets greatest traction among people who want to take politics out of politics…

Taking the politics out of politics, and out of black politics in particular is what Barack Obama must do to carry out his DLC strategy and retain his white base without teaching them anything they don’t want to know. When the NYC police officers who pumped 51 bullets into an unarmed man and a hail of bullets into adjacent homes and a transit station were exonerated, Barack Obama could not bring himself to suggest that black life ought to be respected, that police officers should obey the law, that an Obama Justice Department would look carefully at this kind of thing, or even to feign concern for the victims and their families. His only comments where that we were “a nation of laws” and that we should “respect the verdict”. When 25,000 longshoremen on the US West Coast staged a one-day strike on May 1 against the war in Iraq, the Obama campaign said nothing about the power of people standing together to “bring change”. When US warplanes, which fire missiles and drop bombs almost daily over oil-rich Somalia killed 15 civilians last week, Obama was silent, despite having traveled in the region as recently as last year.

When he does speak, it won’t be good news. Republicans are sure tol escalate their demands, insisting that Barack Obama denounce a list of black and progressive organizations, activities, beliefs and individuals to retain his share of their base. And as long as Obama is wedded to the DLC strategy, he will eagerly comply.

If there was an actual mass-based progressive movement in the US, operating on the ground and independent of political parties and campaigns, it might have a prayer of holding Barack Obama accountable. But there isn’t.

That means, most notably, the U.S. Army will remain in Iraq doing what armies do: blowing up buildings, killing scores of people and getting killed themselves-financed by ever more extravagant deficit spending from the treasury.

They will continue to do so whether Senator “120,000 new troops”, Senator “obliterate Iran” or Senator “hundred years war” is installed in January 2009.

What this means for the sixty five percent of the population committed to ending the three trillion dollar genocidal fiasco is that whoever takes office will scale back and end U.S. occupation only under duress. He or she will need to be dragged kicking and screaming-by us.

Given this reality, the question for the movement remains what it has been since the failure of the huge antiwar demonstrations of 2003 and after. How do we communicate that we mean business? That when we say “no war” we mean no war.

The Language of Force

The best answer was delivered appropriately enough, on Mayday by the ILWU which effectively shut down all shipping on the West Coast, not for a fattened paycheck, but in their words, “to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U. S. troops from the Middle East.”

The ILWU understands from its illustrious radical history what the peace movement has yet to learn. Namely what forces power to concede is red ink on the balance sheets of the corporations who effectively own and operate the political system. Accessing this lever of power is talking to the bosses in the only language they understand, and for this reason is the ne plus ultra of protest.

The language which the peace movement needs to learn to speak is the language of economic force.

It needs to begin preparing to do so next Mayday. Friday May 1, 2009 should be a day without work, without shopping, neither producing for the system or consuming what it offers up. Corporate balance sheets, the EKGs of economic health, should go flat.

Those monitoring it for signs of life will be obliged to declare it comatose, reviving only on the next business day.

Can we do it?

We shouldn’t kid ourselves as to what it would require to make this work-which is the participation of a significant fraction of the total workforce, amounting to numbers in the eight figure range. Probably somewhere around 20 million workers need to stay off the job for the message to be conveyed.

And given that it is unlikely that a single day work stoppage no matter how disruptive will be sufficient to send the message, we will need to commit ourselves to systematically upping the ante with additional work stoppages. These could occur on election day 2009, followed by one week strikes beginning on May 1 and Election Day 2010.

Should troops remains in Iraq in 2011, and hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to continuing the occupation be approved, the entire months of May and November 2011 should be targeted for zeroing out.

While it is surely ambitious, it is not unrealistic that the movement can assemble the kinds of numbers necessary to induce a near death experience among the high priced bean counters who manage policy in the interests of the investor class.

It should not be forgotten that while the past five years of antiwar demonstrations are by now largely viewed as futile exercises in feel good boomer nostalgia, this was not due to low participation. Millions marched in demonstrations around the country beginning with the enormous mass action of Feb 15, 2003.

It is not wishful thinking that a Mayday work stoppage could easily involve numbers an order of magnitude higher.

For every person actively involved in a previous demonstration, one or two more will have to commit in doing nothing. No one will have to get on a bus, arrange childcare for your kids, prepare a bag lunch, call your cousin in D.C. to move the books off the living room couch for you to crash on that night. The effectiveness of a strike is a consequence not of action but of inaction, not from showing up, but from sitting it out.

What Will It Take?

Assembling these numbers will require, first and foremost, for the word to get out-repeatedly and from multiple sources- and with the internet, we now have the means to do this.

Top rated left websites such as the Huffington Post receive millions of hits. Uncompromisingly left sites like Counterpunch and Dissident Voice attract substantial and articulate activist bases. Among the traditional media, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! airs on hundreds of stations likely reaching millions. The Nation’s circulation is in the hundreds of thousands, and reaches many more second hand. Even right-wing media have granted access to reliable leftists like Barbara Ehrenreich, published in Time, and Thomas Frank now featured on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

It is not lack of access which has accounted for the failure the peace movement so far but rather what the left has communicated to itself. In particular, the high profile figures who define left discourse need to go beyond their obsession with what have become increasingly garden variety “powerful indictments” or “devastating critiques” of the bipartisan corporate consensus. The history of the past five years should have shown us that the widespread assumption that these will magically bring an effective mass movement into existence is a delusion.

Once the left jettisons its juvenile obsession with critiquing the system and begins discussing seriously the strategy required to combat it, and its most malignant expression in the form of the three trillion dollar war, what the ILWU did last week will begin to be seen for the major step forward which it should represent.

It is the ball which the rest of us need to pick up and run with.

In 2005, newspaper circulation declined over the previous year by 2.6 percent, with the largest declines posted in the major newspapers. Still worse, in 2007, newspaper advertising revenue fell by 9.4 percent. As a result of this shrinkage, in 2007 2,400 journalists lost their jobs, and 15,000 have been canned in the last decade.

The predicament of network TV evening news programs is still more desperate. In 1980, the combined audience for the NBC, CBS and ABC newscasts was 53 million. Just last month, that audience tallied at 21.5 million: about seven percent of the US population. And the median age of that audience is 60.2, which means that the networks are failing to reach the essential younger age cohorts.

The newspaper and broadcast industries cite a number of alleged reasons for these figures: the internet, competition from cable news programs, and declining literacy and political interest among the public.

Missing from this list is “the crud factor”; namely, that the quality and credibility of reporting has deteriorated so spectacularly that the public, fed-up with the insults and lies, has turned to other sources of news and information. As Newsweek’s Tony Dokoupil reports: “less than one person in five believes what he reads in print… and nearly nine of ten Americans believe that journalists are actively biased.”

The good news: at long last, the mainstream media is being punished for its failure to perform its essential service to the public; which is the presentation of accurate and relevant news along with competent, informed and diverse opinion.

The bad news: as the founders of our republic warned us, access to essential public information and the free publication of diverse opinions are indispensable to a free society. And as Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Jay, “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” Fortunately, a sizeable portion of our population, having acquired a healthy contempt for the corporate media, has found more reliable and informed sources of information in the alternative press and in the internet.

This promising development is undermined by the plain fact that the growing use of the internet as a free source of information and opinion is economically unsustainable. Why buy a newspaper or a magazine, when much or most of the content therein can be read for free on a computer monitor? And if so, who then will pay the researchers, writers, investigators, graphic designers, video producers, and publishers who gather, authenticate and then write and publish quality news and opinion?

For as we the “news consumers” too easily forget, quality journalism comes to us at a cost. The all-too-infrequent investigative reports in today’s media often require hundreds of hours of “hidden” labor by reporters and their staffs. The Pulitzer Prize winning disclosures in the Washington Post of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center required months of investigation by Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and Michel du Cille. Likewise, James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s exposure of illegal wiretaps by the Bush administration, and David Barstow’s recent uncovering of the Pentagon’s “hidden hand” inside the sock-puppet media “analyses” by retired military officers, each of which required substantial financial support by the publisher, the New York Times. Exposés such as these are, in turn, the raw material of journalistic scrutiny, and citizen activism and dissent, all of this nourished by the considerable investment of time and money by the publishers. Conversely, the quality of news reporting, in particular foreign reporting, has been severely compromised by the reduction and closing of news bureaus throughout the world.

If independent investigative reporting and responsible journalism are to be restored, how are they to be financed? Not by net surfers like you and me, who enjoy the product of hard journalistic labor for free. And yet, all of the aforementioned “scoops” — about Walter Reed Center, the illegal wiretaps, the retired military “experts” — can be had, gratis, on the internet. Just follow the links.

To be sure, many websites, including those of print publications, are at least partially supported by advertising income. Even so, it is doubtful that advertising alone can support a flourishing alternative independent media. Moreover, if ad revenue is to be the primary support of this new media, then the concerns of the commercial sponsors will all too often trump the public interest — a situation that is today the scourge of “the old media.”

I happen to subscribe to The Nation, the American Prospect and Mother Jones, among other progressive publications, but not because I have to. Most of their content is available on the internet. My subscriptions amount to donations, motivated more by conscience than by necessity. When I download content from publications to which I do not subscribe, I am a parasite gaining free “nourishment” from the labor and costs of others.

So I pose the question anew: with the erosion of paid support of established “mainstream” print and broadcast media, who and what is to pay for information and diverse opinion that is essential to a functioning democracy? If the purveyors of the junk that dominates the mass media today fail to reform themselves and as a result shrivel and die from financial strangulation, we’ll all be the better for it. Good riddance! But the question remains: who or what is to support the indispensable responsible journalism that is the lifeblood of our democracy — in particular, the journalism that appears on the internet, which might well become the next mass media?

It won’t do simply to ignore the question and to go on using the free internet while we have it. Such behavior imitates that of the Grover Norquist “tax reform” crowd, which willingly enjoys the benefits of the common public resources that are sustained by tax revenues — the courts, an educated public, physical infrastructure, regulation of commerce, protected food and drug supply, scientific research and development, etc. — yet steadfastly advocates the abolition of those taxes.

Simple fairness, not to mention economic viability, require that the investigators and reporters of essential public information be compensated, and that the requisite time, energy and expertise required to obtain this information, be financially supported.

But how is this to be accomplished?

I confess that I don’t have a simple answer. If you do, please share it with me, and we will publish the worthier proposals in The Crisis Papers.

But here, at least, is a suggestion, admittedly in need of much elaboration and refinement: adopt a system of financing similar to that of the music and entertainment industry.

As I understand it, most copyrighted music is registered with two agencies: ASCAP and BMI. Radio stations, artists, etc., who perform this music must pay a fee to the appropriate agency but not directly to the composers. The agencies then conduct surveys to determine how often the copyrighted works are performed, and then issue individual payments to the composers in proportion to the number of performances. (In my brief stint as a talk show host, some thirty years ago, I was not allowed to use a BMI tune as a theme, since the station was registered only with ASCAP. If my recollection of the system is incorrect, I am confident that some reader will set me straight). According to this arrangement, neither ASCAP nor BMI exercised any control over the use of titles in their inventories. They were entirely passive; it was up to the performers, station managers, disk jockeys, etc. to decide what was or was not to be performed, and this decision was, in turn, responsive to public preferences.

Might not a similar system be adopted by the internet service providers? A uniform fee might be assessed to each internet user, and the proceeds of that fee might then be put into a general “author/designer/producer/publisher fund.” Content creators might then be compensated according to the number of “hits” recorded for their works. (As any user of Google is well aware, this is a far more accurate system than the surveys conducted by ASCAP and BMI). Since literally millions of individuals post on the internet, there would have to be several “filtering” mechanisms separating the amateurs from the pros. One such filter might be a minimum threshold of “hits” required for compensation. Another would be an annual registration fee to be paid by the authors, with the payment added to the general fund. Suppose that fee were to be one hundred dollars. Since the likely annual payments to the vast majority of amateur bloggers would fall far short of the annual registration fee, most would opt themselves out of the system.

This system, like that of ASCAP and BMI, would be totally passive: no place here for censorship. The public, or if you prefer, “the market,” would rule. Payments would then be proportioned to the individual choices of the millions of users of the internet. And like ASCAP and BMI, the distributing agency would be a private, non-profit association of composers, artists and publishers, regulated by the government.

The cost to each internet user? Negligible, I believe, given the fact that there are now 211 million internet users in the United States, and nearly a billion worldwide, with internet use increasing by about eighteen percent a year. If each US user were to be charged ten dollars a year for payment to the “author/designer/producer/publisher fund,” that would total more than two billion dollars to the fund. An annual fee of one hundred dollars (about eight dollars a month), with revenues of twenty-one billion, would finance a free, independent and diverse media industry that would rival, and perchance supplant through open competition, the rotten-to-the-core corporate media that has betrayed us so spectacularly today.

For one hundred bucks a year, that’s a bargain, any way you look at it.

I spoke with five classroom teachers in California’s capital city. They have a range of opinions about the state forcing all teachers to use standardized curriculum to raise students’ scores on achievement tests.

Bob Priestly, who currently teaches 7th-grade science at Sam Brannan Middle School in the Sacramento City Unified District, has a critique of the standard curriculum and achievement tests. He has been a teacher for 16 years.

“We aren’t drones now, but before standardized tests there was more freedom for teachers to create their own approaches to the subject matter such as life science,” he said. “Such freedom is unwelcome now and teachers can be administratively disciplined for that.

“The traditional middle school before standardized tests was a place where kids explored new things inside and outside the classroom in an ‘exploratory wheel’ of elective classes, such as art, drama, second languages, and shop. That’s been wiped out as a result of penalties for sub-par test scores. If they score under the proficient level on the tests, students can lose their elective classes and have to take up to two language arts and math classes each (per semester) to attain proficiency the next time.”

The test scores of Brian Laird’s students at West Campus High School in the Sacramento City Unified School District rank among the highest in the city and California. He currently teaches advanced placement and college prep economics and U.S. history. His students take the state tests May 1-14, the results of which he uses to find any instructional areas for possible improvement.

“Testing helps students only in as much as it helps me to teach the standardized curriculum,” said Laird, who began teaching in California’s Silicon Valley city of San Jose 12 years ago, arriving at West Campus in 2000. In his view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.”

Rose Penrose currently teaches 6th-grade English at the Natomas Middle School in Sacramento’s Natomas Unified School District. In her sixth year of teaching, she instructs three 88-minute classes of English, with 30 students in each. Penrose and her fellow teachers, by department and grade level, create a “pacing guide” to help them to identify when and how to teach in conformity with state curriculum standards for achievement tests, which her sixth graders began in mid-April.

“Having accountability and standards is good,” Penrose said. “They give everybody a measure of where we want to be. I know that my kids know the material, but the test phrasing can stump them sometime.”

Sheryl Tolson currently teaches second grade at the Anna Kirchgater Elementary School in Sacramento’s Elk Grove Unified School District. The fourth-year teacher’s 20 students took the standardized tests in mid-April. Test scores will be ready in August to help third-grade teachers pinpoint which instructional areas to focus on, she said.

“I will also get an idea for my next year’s class on how to teach students more effectively. If the students’ reading comprehension scores are low, for example, I can work harder on that.”

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which Pres. Bush signed in 2002, mandates that American students score higher each year on the standardized tests. In California grades 2-11, 37 percent of students’ Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program tests scores in math and language arts must reach the proficiency level, up from 24 percent originally, said Pam Slater, spokeswoman for the state Dept. of Ed.

“Every year the standards we teach are ratcheted up,” said Priestly, who teaches between 26 and 35 students in five classes for which he uses the state curriculum. The students in part learn about the processes of sex cell division and single cell division.

“We’re drowning in standards and tests, which are a vice squeezing students,” he added. “I’m driving students at a fast pace towards taking the tests and accomplishing so many standards.” The NCLB sanctions for STAR test scores weigh heavily on Priestly’s mind and those of his fellow administrators and teachers. “We’re all in this thing together,” he said, while lamenting the inadequate means which the NCLB law provides to schools to meet the federal mandates.

Slater of the state Ed. Dept. gave a nod to this aspect of the NCLB. “The federal funding issue has been a criticism,” she said.

Across town from Priestly, Debra Nordyke teaches kindergarten at the Del Paso Heights Elementary School in North Sacramento. Her five- and six-year-old students take tests on math (measurements and shapes) four times a year. Testing on language arts (reading and vocabulary) is three times per year.

“Testing has benefited the kids by improving their language arts and math skills,” she said. Her district and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (a $2.5-billion firm which calls itself “the preeminent educational publisher in the United States”) create the curriculum and tests which Nordyke teaches to. She has been teaching K-4 students for 23 years in the Del Paso Heights School District, one of several others which will join the new Twin Rivers Unified School District on July 1.

According to Nordyke, before the advent of the standardized curriculum and tests, teachers had to create their own. In that pre-testing era, this could be a stiff task for newer teachers. While acknowledging that standardized curriculum and tests have helped primary grade students to gain mastery of literacy and math, she noted that, before then, students and teachers had more time for art, drama, movement, music, and science. “That extra time improved students’ creativity and social skills,” Nordyke said.

California Senate Bill 376 created the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program in 1997. The California State Dept. of Education develops, reviews, and revises STAR testing and the standard curriculum, Slater said.

STAR tests for grades two through 11 have four subject areas: language arts, math, science, and social science. Student test scores are ranked from outstanding to proficient to basic to below basic to far-below basic.

Against this backdrop, a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Educational Policy Analysis Archives by scholars at the Rice University Center for Education raises crucial questions about state-federal policy relating to standardized tests and students who score sub-proficiently on them.

Rice’s multiple-year analysis of more than 270,000 Texas students criticized the use of a single standard to measure a student’s achievement. “The degradation of the curriculum into test drills, which have little relevance beyond the state test, distances students who otherwise wish to persist to graduation, exacerbating the likelihood they will leave school,” the study reported.

In other words, forcing schools, students, and teachers into a box of escalating standards alienates youth and thereby increases the likelihood of their becoming dropouts versus graduates.

Where is this 11-year trend of state standards that marry school curriculum to STAR tests headed? In California and nationally, school districts and county education departments with tests scores below NCLB mandates face penalties pegged to the number of years in which annual progress falls below the measure of proficiency. The penalties for being out of compliance with this NCLB mandate put such under-performers into the “program improvement” category. The NCLB penalties range from replacing school staff in year three to a state takeover in year four. And that’s not all. “Once schools are in [public improvement] for five years they can be forced into privatization,” write Steven Miller and Jack Gerson in their article titled “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools.”

California’s state education board approved a new approach to program improvement crafted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell on March 13. As with students whose scores are sub-proficient, programs are ranked according to their need for improvement: intensive, moderate, light, or other.

Del Paso is in the category of “other,” having narrowly missed federal accountability targets. The district has been placed in year three of program improvement status, said Fred Balcom, director of the accountability and improvement division at the California Education Dept.

Priestly is working with two Sacramento-area schools that are in multi-year program improvement. He declined to name either school.

Below-level STAR test scores are hardly the lot of Laird’s students at West Campus High School. There, 500 students apply for 200 open slots in the 800-member student body. That number is roughly a third of the enrollment at high schools such as Burbank, Hiram Johnson, Kennedy, and McClatchy in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

In Laird’s view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.” However, Laird thinks that some of the textbooks he uses with his students are “incredibly simplistic.” Maybe that helps to explain this response to standardized education.

Students dislike the STAR tests, according to Laird. Such a stance put teachers in a dicey spot. “We ask students to please do their best on the tests. That helps to keep us in the good graces of administrators and politicians.”

There have been 11 years of momentum to unify California’s school standards to improve students’ test scores. This trend of standardizing education comes from the dawn of industrial capitalism, not always easy to see, given the misleading appearances of school accountability that can fog such history. In brief, the capitalist system spawned factories with work forces tied to the time clock to boost productivity, the amount of goods and services workers create per hour. A class of owners sought to remove labor creativity from their hired help and replace that with uniformity for reasons of control and profit.

To be sure, private profit is not a driving force in U.S. public schools. But forcing an industrial regimen of conformity upon the learning process can and does push youth and their teachers away from classroom time for creative discovery, thanks to the NCLB law.

What current learning standards backed up by the force of federal and state laws assume but fail to actually make is the case for one way to best measure youth’s learning and teachers’ instructing. It should be no surprise that the satisfaction of students and teachers in the politically charged regimen of K-12 schools is a mixed bag.

When the Orwellian “Protect America Act” expired in February, Republicans and right-wing Democrats argued that unless the state’s covert alliance with giant telecommunications companies were not shielded from congressional oversight or public scrutiny, “Americans would die.” Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell made this threat explicit last August when he told the El Paso Times:

Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we’re doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they’re using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said… (Chris Roberts, “Transcript: Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” El Paso Times, August 22, 2007)

But as Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists told The New York Times, “If we’re to believe that Americans will die from discussing these things, then he is complicit in that. It’s an unseemly argument. He’s basically saying that democracy is going to kill Americans.”

But with “Blue Dog” Democrats on-board with the Bush administration, its more a case of Americans killing (their own) democracy.

As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports,

Numerous reports — both public and otherwise — suggest that [Steny] Hoyer is negotiating with Jay Rockefeller to write a new FISA bill that would be agreeable to the White House and the Senate. Their strategy is to craft a bill that they can pretend is something short of amnesty for telecoms but which, in every meaningful respect, ensures an end to the telecom lawsuits. It goes without saying that no “compromise” will be acceptable to Rockefeller or the White House unless there is a guaranteed end to those lawsuits, i.e., unless the bill grants amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms. (Glenn Greenwald, “What backroom conniving Are Steny Hoyer and the Chris Carney Blue Dogs up to on FISA?,” Salon, May 2, 2008)

According to Alexander Bolton’s article in The Hill, right-wing and freshman congressional Democrats “are growing skittish,” and that House Speaker Nancy “impeachment is off the table” Pelosi (D-CA), “has stepped back from the FISA talks and let Hoyer spearhead House talks with the Senate and executive branch.” Translation: give the White House what it wants.

And what the White House wants is the ability–and legal cover–to spy at will.

As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in 2006, NSA gained access to “massive amounts” of internet data after the company allowed the spy agency to hook into its network in San Francisco and other cities. The retired technician described how the NSA created a system that vacuumed up internet and phone-call data with AT&T executives as the agency’s willing accomplices.

Despite administration claims that its so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” is aimed solely at overseas terrorists, Klein demonstrated that a vast proportion of the data swept up by AT&T and forwarded to NSA was purely domestic. Klein told The Washington Post,

[T]he NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data — the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text — per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government’s warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005. (Ellen Nakashima, “A Story of Surveillance: Former Technician ‘Turning In’ AT&T Over NSA Program,” The Washington Post, November 7, 2007, Page D01)

Klein’s story of flagrant lawlessness by the Bush regime and the telecoms was seconded by Babak Pasdar, a security consultant and CEO of Bat Blue Corporation, who provided a signed affidavit to the Government Accountability Project describing the FBI’s “Quantico circuit.”

Last month The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators “with the click of a mouse” have the ability to “instantly” transfer data along a computer circuit “to an FBI technology office in Quantico.” Verizon is the company named by the Post in its report as having provided “unfettered access” to its data stream, a charge denied by the company.

Despite these revelations, the Bush administration continues to illegally target the American people. As Ryan Singel reported last week,

2007 might have been a rough year for U.S. home prices, but growth in government wiretaps remained healthy, with the eavesdropping sector posting a 14% increase in court orders compared to 2006. In 2007, judges approved 4,578 state and federal wiretaps, as compared to 4,015 in 2006, according to two new reports on criminal and intelligence wiretaps….

It’s unclear how many people these orders applied to since they can name more than one target, and in January 2007, the Bush Administration began getting so-called basket warrants from the secret court, in order to reduce the political heat over its warrantless wiretapping program.

Those orders, which the administration described as “innovative,” likely covered many individuals or entire geographic regions and required periodic re-authorization from the court. Sometime in spring 2007, one judge on the court ruled that the orders were unconstitutional, prompting a summer fear-mongering campaign to get Congress to expand the government’s warrantless wiretapping powers. (Ryan Singel, “Court-Approved Wiretapping Rose 14% in ‘07,” Wired, May 1, 2008)

We don’t know, and the administration won’t say, how many Americans have been swept up by so-called “basket warrants.”

None of this however, trouble congressional Democrats. As the administration continues to eviscerate the Constitution, it should be clear that like the Republicans, the Democratic party completely accepts the overall framework of Bushist “national security” and the specious argument that it is waging a global “war on terrorism.”

Since taking control of both house of Congress in 2006, the Democrats — like their Republican “adversaries” — have refused to hold hearings on domestic spying nor have they sought to expose the scope of the illegal NSA program. Lost in the shuffle, are the obvious — and growing — dangers posed by these intrusive programs.

In a time of systemic crisis for the capitalist system as a whole, the massive intelligence being gathered by the Bush regime, and by future administrations — Democratic or Republican, take your pick — will be deployed as tools for wholesale repression under conditions of growing class polarization, economic crisis and mass opposition to war.

Telecom immunity? “There’s nothing to see here, move along.”

The last time I was in this pulpit to deliver a guest sermon, I spoke of the need for each of us to take up the role of prophet, to not be afraid of speaking in the prophetic voice, even when doing so involves risk. Today I want to talk about the other kind of profit, the allure of which can so often quiet the prophetic voice within us.

Living in the most powerful and affluent country in the history of the world, this is not mere word play with homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings). Can we resist the seductive nature of the material rewards that come with profit to find within us the spirit of the prophetic? If we cannot, what is the fate of this country? What is the fate of the world that this country seeks to dominate? And my subject today: What is the fate of our souls?

Let’s start with one of the most well-known verses from the gospels, from Mark, where Jesus says: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” [Mark 8:36]

What do we gain when we covet the wealth of the world that can come with accepting the systems and structures of power? When feeling self-righteous, we are tempted to say that we agree with Jesus, that when we place too much value on material rewards we lose something greater. But if we are to be honest, we have to acknowledge that those material rewards in the world can be extremely seductive. If you doubt this, when you leave church go visit a shopping mall. No doubt we all know where to find one nearby. Even when the reward is not “the whole world” but just one little piece of it in a store in the mall, the pull of those rewards can be strong.

That’s perhaps the cruel edge of this truth — the fact that in this culture when we talk about “selling out” or “selling our souls” we realize the selling price is typically quite low. That’s what Robert Bolt was getting at in his play A Man for All Seasons, in which Sir Thomas More is convicted of treason on the perjured testimony of Richard Rich, who in exchange for his capitulation to King Henry VIII is appointed Attorney-General for Wales. In the play, More asks one final question of Rich after noticing that the Attorney-General is wearing the medallion of his new position. The stage directions call for More to look into Rich’s face, “with pain and amusement,” saying, “For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world. But for Wales ?”

I don’t want to take sides in British regional and class conflicts, but his point is well taken. We can find amusement in the crumbs for which some people will sell their souls, but there is also much pain in recognizing ourselves in the mirror that Thomas More holds up for Richard Rich. For what would I sell my soul? For what have I sold my soul? Do I ever dream of Wales?

At some point in our lives, we have all sacrificed a principle or undermined another person to get what we want, though most of us have never lied under oath and helped send someone to the gallows. But the fact that there’s always a Richard Rich to point to, always someone whose soul-selling is more egregious than ours, is of little comfort. As Rev. Jim Rigby reminds us, week after week in his sermons from this pulpit, the job of theology is not to comfort us in our conceits but to challenge us to go deeper.

That means not only reflecting on our own failures in such moments, but going beyond the idea that our souls are at risk only in a single moment in which we might be tempted to sell out. Just as important is the slower process by which that state of our souls can be eroded. I want to frame that challenge in the words of the writer Wendell Berry, using the first stanza of his poem “We Who Prayed and Wept”:

We who prayed and wept
for liberty from kings
and the yoke of liberty
accept the tyranny of things
we do not need.
In plenitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.

Berry trains our attention on the day-to-day reality of the world in which we live, in the most powerful and affluent country in the world, in which many of us hold the freedom to enslave ourselves. So, let’s expand the question beyond the dramatic moments in which we choose whether we will sell our souls at what price and focus on how our souls are shaped by the everyday realities of power and privilege.

My focus today is not on the injustice of this system, not on the suffering that inevitably results in a world structured by empire and capitalism. I’m not going to talk about the cruelty of a world in which half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Of course we should remind ourselves co