Leftists Embroiled in Never-Ending War

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

During the Cold War the political left split in spectacular and rancorous fashion and like Humpty Dumpty they’ve never really put themselves back together again.

Back then, one side consisted of those who stayed blind to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, atrocities culminating in the Gulag prison camps and the Moscow Trials. They stayed in the Communist Party (CP) through it all, arguing that Stalinism was preferable to the victory of predatory capitalism, or that all these atrocities were a means to a better end ― that dangerous ideology so beautifully rendered by Arthur Koestler in “Darkness at Noon.” Eric Hobsbawm, the famous Marxist historian, was one case of someone who refused to leave the CP even as the atrocities were coming to light, especially under Leonid Brezhnev.

On the other extreme, leftists and liberals embraced the U.S. and their putative war against communism, even when it was destroying democratically elected governments all over the world. They argued that the Popperian “open society” was in danger and anything went, from Pinochet to Suharto. Here you could find erstwhile lefties like Sidney Hook.

Then there were the Trostkyists who sat somewhere in the middle. They argued against the crimes of Stalin, snidely calling Stalinism “state capitalism,” and holding that it would have all been different if Leon Trotsky had succeeded Lenin instead of that autocratic sadist, Stalin. Near to them were the New Left who boasted minds like E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. They tried to cut a course with a new program which railed against both superpowers.

These debates on the left all crumbled at the same time as the Berlin Wall. There was the “End of History,” the final victory of so-called “liberal” “capitalist” “democracy.” It was a lazy consensus on the left, with only a few thinkers on the marginalized wing still railing against so-called neoliberal economics (traditional liberal economics didn’t argue for a completely unfettered private sphere, so it’s a misnomer), but they were an ever-marginalized faction; on a grand scale we all took a breather.

The general feeling is that this happy leftie consensus ended on 9/11 and when the “war on terror” began, but the rancor started in earnest before then, as the bombing of Yugoslavia commenced in 1999. NATO (which was set up as a bulwark against the Soviet Union) flexed its muscle against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Well, first off, why did NATO still exist after the Cold War ended? If it was meant to solidify the military alliance against the Soviet Union, what was the purpose afterward? Mull over that.

Anyway, with the war on Yugoslavia by NATO came the gleaming centerpiece of a new movement called “humanitarian intervention” led by the poster kids of 1990s liberalism, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In fact, it wasn’t that new: Every war through history has been fought for justice and altruism if you take the leaders of the countries that started them at their word. Anyway, the media went into overdrive with beautiful elegies to Western benevolence, the end of wars for economic or geopolitical objectives. Here we were coming to the aid of oppressed Kosovans against the brutal dictator (he was actually democratically elected) Slobodan Milosevic. Large parts of the left, from Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, to Paul Berman, the New York Renaissance man, cheered on this necessary war of altruism.

If you talk to your average Joe the Plumber on the street, or corporate journalist, they will tell you that we averted a holocaust there. In fact, the International War Crimes Tribunal came to a conclusion that 2,788 had been killed in Kosovo. That’s a serious crime, but compare that to contemporaneous crimes happening inside NATO, like Turkey’s atrocities against the Kurds, and you start to wonder what prompted Clinton and Blair into action.

The averting of genocide became an orthodoxy of the mainstream left and any demurral would be greeted with outbursts of hysteria about holocaust denial, etc. But in 2007 even the International Court of Justice found that the Serbian leadership was not guilty of genocide in Bosnia, where they carried out their most obscene atrocities, murdering 8,000 souls at Srebrenica.

But in the West, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a one-sided conflict as that is the uninterrupted presentation, but the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia have seen atrocities on all sides. In fact, the Kosovo Liberation Army, a violent fundamentalist Islamic group, were agents of the West when they were carrying out atrocities against Kosovan Serbs and Gypsies. Many believe they were used to illicit a response (which would come in the crackdown starting in 1998) that served as a pretext for a NATO intervention. In the Croatian War of Independence in 1995, their Operation Storm offensive to retake Serbian parts of Croatia resulted in pogroms and ethnic cleansing that rivals Serbian crimes for barbarity. Some of those involved have been on trial for war crimes.

Because it was such a small sample of principled individuals that dared to stand up to the propaganda, this split in the left was merely a blip on the radar; it was an orthodoxy with every bad connotation of that word. But this same mind-set didn’t die and was transported wholeheartedly into the new “war on terror” after 9/11. The war in Iraq ― which had nothing to do with 9/11, which had no weapons of mass destruction ― was now framed as a “humanitarian intervention” against the barbarism of Saddam Hussein who gassed his own people (with our support), used chemical warfare against the Iranians (with our support) and committed genocide against the Kurds in the al-Anfal campaign (with our support). But this didn’t matter. Now, Paul Wolfowitz was the new Madeleine Albright, Saddam Hussein was Slobodan Milosevic, the Kurds were now the Kosovan Albanians and on we went, to a war supported by a significant portion of the intellectual “left.” A war by a Christian fundamentalist, far-right oil-industry Republican, to be fought for democracy. Yeah, right.

The “pro-war left” or the “anti-totalitarianism left” ballooned at this stage and took over the blogosphere in a huge way. From Harry’s Place to Nick Cohen to Oliver Kamm to Paul Berman, they were everywhere, talking about the democratic future for Iraq (with the minor detour of a bloody war). Tons of books followed, backing them up, from the compilation, “A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for the War in Iraq,” to “Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy,” “Terror and Liberalism,” blah, blah. When the war turned bad, when the U.S. used chemical weapons on a major Iraqi city, when they sold off all the oil, and built the biggest base in the world, they had to change the subject. So now they attacked the left that had been against the invasion of Iraq as “anti-Semites”, “fascists” and supporters of “Islamofascists.” This also gave birth to a load of books that lit up the media firmament but will soon be forgotten, from Nick Cohen’s dreary “What’s Left?”, to the recent “Left in Dark Times” from the ridiculous French poseur, Bernard-Henri Levi.

Until now, the part of the left that was principled and realistic about the war in Iraq has been reticent to fight back in book form. There was the prolix and dense offering from Scott Lucas early on, “The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century,” which didn’t really land the hefty punch it should have. But in recent weeks, we’ve had “The Liberal Defense of Murder” by blogger Richard Seymour, which charts the historical course of this so-called “humanitarian intervention” up to its current incarnation. And then there is Conor Foley, a former aid worker, who recently released “The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War,” which argues that humanitarian NGOs are becoming so powerful that they are affecting Western governments and pressuring them into military actions for which there is no legal basis in international law.

This is the latest stage in the long, stuttering fight-back of the anti-war left against the louder but cheap warmongering left. Let the battle commence.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

It’ll Still be Politics as Usual Under Obama

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

A black president – it happened. Anyone who didn’t feel a twinge of emotion as Barack and his beautiful family came out to greet the crowds in that Chicago park officially has a heart of stone. In many ways it was a profound moment in history: the end to the centuries of white supremacism that has moved from slavery to Jim Crow to the still-existing economic exploitation – progress within what was all along referred to as “civilization.”

There on stage was the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world, the son of a Kenyan farmer and a single white mother from Kansas, beaming from ear to ear. It was as improbable as it was moving. And we should never forget the slaves who revolted against their masters and the civil rights activists who were shot dead in the 1960s; it was their sacrifices that furrowed the rocky path to this epochal moment. It was imagining their incredulity at such progress that really made the loins quiver on that night.

But Obama’s got a lot on his shoulders now. If you hear his supporters talking about his presidency, you might be forgiven for thinking Obama was the messiah, the untouchable Second Coming of Christ, who will cleanse us from the sulphureous scent of Hades, or George W. Bush, as he is more commonly known around the world.

And it’s a nice change for a world that has become accustomed to being ruled by nutcases. When Bush was elected I was 17, so most of my adult life has been lived with the most powerful man in the world as an unadulterated force for violence and pain. Whatever Obama becomes, at least he’s not mad, or stupid.

But I’m not holding out much hope about the next four years. Not because of Obama. I think he is probably an upright, nice guy. Certainly his writing seems to be sensitive and thoughtful. But what people don’t seem to understand as they undertake the flights of hope-infused rhetoric is that the president, while powerful, is often merely a vector in a vast tapestry of powerful forces that govern government policy. No matter how good, nice or genial he is, he is being pushed by decidedly malicious influences from all sides.

Most crucially, state power is nearly indistinguishable from big-business interest, limiting what a democratically elected leader can do. Essentially they are beholden to what Noam Chomsky has called “private tyrannies”: corporations and big money. They are private tyrannies because they have no democratic input and are driven by one sole motivation: profit.

This was revealed in stark terms with the financial bailout of the world’s biggest investment banks, where money was redistributed upward with no stipulations that the capital be used for loans, resulting in vast amounts going to shareholders, not the attested “stimulus.”

But while this was a particularly egregious case that has admittedly elected anger across the political spectrum, the same thing happens all the time behind closed doors. It’s how state capitalism works. There is a revolving door between big business and government in policy-formation and personnel. Dick Cheney went from the board of Halliburton to the executive branch of government like an oily fish, and will probably go back the other way. And look who benefited in Iraq.

Every superpower through history has sought to dominate lesser powers and make them pliant to their own economic interests. This has happened whether the superpower has been communist, socialist, capitalist, Nazi, whatever. The common denominator to all superpowers is that they have extraordinary amounts of power, and power by its nature will try to dominate. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides expressed this timeless maxim most baldly in his History of the Peloponnesian War. “Since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power,” said the Athenians to the Melians. “While the strong do what they can, the weak must suffer what they will.”

That fundamental dynamic has not altered since his time and probably never will. So essentially in the two-party system the individual leader is irrelevant to the real big picture. Be it Barack Obama, or Tony Blair or George W. Bush, the empire and power structure will continue to run unimpeded, with only variations in style. Political scientist Robert A. Dahl famously called this system polyarchy: a competitive elite ruling the rest of us.

That doesn’t mean that Barack Obama has tweaked his opinions to get into office, it means he couldn’t have gotten there if he believed anything different. As Comment Factory writer Laurence Witherington pointed out, it’s hypocritical of people to say that Obama is going against his principles; in fact, Obama has been consistent in his support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the war in Lebanon in 2006.

And there’s more too. If we can stretch our memories, we should remember that Obama suggested he would bomb the sovereign nation of Pakistan during his primary campaign, he has said he is against Iran enriching uranium even for energy purposes even though Israel is not part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and he has proposed a surge in Afghanistan. He has also most egregiously gone in front of the vile outfit AIPAC and said Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, a position even hardened Likudniks like Ariel Sharon would gasp at.

Real change this election season didn’t begin and end with Obama. The Green Party had the first all-people-of-color ticket in history, as well as the first all-female ticket too. But how many people have heard of presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney or vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente? They were given a complete media blackout because they posed a real threat to the corporatocracy that runs American politics. The change they proposed wasn’t a cosmetic retouching of an imperial system, but the overhaul of a democratic system, which is saturated in private dollars that aren’t given altruistically by lobbyists, but are seen as an investment, like treating the federal government as a hedge fund.

Ralph Nader was another who provided a real alternative, but was ignored. Without the corporate backing he received one percent of the vote.

Maligned by both the “left” and “right” in the U.S. mainstream, he is one of the most principled individuals in politics. Here is his verdict on Obama: “Well, obviously we all congratulate Barack Obama. We wish him well.”

But the precursor to his election has not been very encouraging, and he has repeatedly taken up the positions of the corporate supremacists, not just his latest vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but a whole string of votes and policy positions. He opposes single-payer health insurance. Well, the HMOs and the insurance companies do, too. He wants a bigger military budget. So does the military-industrial complex. His idea of a living wage on his Web site is $9.50 an hour by 2011. That would make it less than it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

He matched McCain in the third debate — belligerency for belligerency — toward Russia, toward Iran, more soldiers in Afghanistan, supporting the Israeli military repression and occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank. And virtually nothing about 100 million poor people in this country. That’s why I really fault him; that he played the Clinton linguistic game by talking constantly about the middle class and not mentioning the word “poor.”

And we expect more of him. And I don’t think he has a public philosophy of where corporations must operate in this country. How? Under what rule of law? Under what regulation? Under what vulnerability to litigation in the courts? He’s proud of tort reform, supports the nuclear industry, supports the coal industry. So we’re really talking about just more of the same, in terms of the corporate domination of Washington.

I detected no concern, no quaking of concern, among the drug industry, oil, gas industry, nuclear, coal industry, Wall Street, over his probable election in the last few weeks. Usually, when they’re really worried about a politician, they will issue warnings. But Barack Obama has raised far more money than John McCain from Wall Street interests, corporate interests and, above all, corporate lawyers. And the question to be asked is, why are they investing so much in Barack Obama? Because they believe he’s their man. So, prepare to be disappointed, but keep your hope up.

Until people like Nader, and Bob Barr on the other side, are able to stretch the narrow political spectrum in the U.S., and likewise around the world, we will never be able to hope for change and not in the back of our minds think that in fact nothing ever changes.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

Veterans’ Health Care Under Bush a Disgrace

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

It’s hard to think of a more nauseating spectacle than George W. Bush – draft dodging, chicken hawk extraordinaire – turning on his lachrymal glands for U.S. veterans. But as the country drew together on Nov. 11 for the annual national holiday to honor their fighting men and women, there was the commander in chief waxing unlyrically about the “inspiration” he has gotten from the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, his wide-eyes and rictus smile belying his solemn tone.

The media reported his words conscientiously but failed to add the apposite context, which as usual is important. Because not only did Bush and his cronies do the obvious and send the young men and women into harm’s way for a completely pointless war that has cost 4,192 American and over a million Iraqi souls to date, this “War President” has also overseen the calculated destruction of the thin safety net that helps veterans as they cope with the health problems brought on by war.

In 2005, only two years into the war in Iraq, Bush was widely condemned for his budget for veterans’ health care that fell well short of maintaining the levels of the years before, bearing in mind the huge numbers of new soldiers that were returning from war. In that year not only did Bush try to double the co-payment that veterans would pay for prescription drugs, he also proposed a flat $250 new fee for some veterans to use the health care. Even Republican Sen. Daniel K. Akaka warned at the time that this could put 192,000 people out of the veterans’ health care system because of the price hike. Later in 2005 it was revealed that the Bush administration had left a $1 billion shortage for veterans’ health care that had to be plugged by emergency supplemental funds voted for by Congress again.

In 2006, with discretionary spending apparently needing to be cut to deal with the massive deficit, the White House predicted a 16 percent cut in veterans’ health care, despite the increasing numbers of veterans needing the services. In that budget year Congress had to add another $2.7 billion to emergency funding to the Veterans Association on top of Bush’s budget.

Under the current Bush plan being touted, even though the number of soldiers needing treatment in veterans’ health care has been rising about 5 percent per year, in 2009 the budget would be cut again and kept at this smaller number until 2012. The hope is Obama will find a way around these disgraceful estimates and reevaluate the priorities of an administration that has lost any bearings they once had.

The effect of turning veterans’ health care from the most important of government responsibilities into an expendable superfluity has had painful consequences for the veterans of the U.S. Vast numbers of soldiers are returning with mental health problems ranging from schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder, but a study in the American Journal of Public Health estimated that in 2004, 1.8 million veterans were without health insurance, constituting 12 percent of all uninsured people in the U.S. The number of uninsured grew by 290,000 from 2000, Bush’s first year, to 2004, two years into his “war on terror.”

This year the Bush administration was even employing lawyers to fight a case that insists that mental health should be included in health care provisions for veterans. You did read that right: The Bush administration somehow doesn’t think mental health qualifies as a health issue.

On Veterans Day, Bush unsurprisingly didn’t mention his squalid record on looking after the veterans of his wars of ideology:

“I am committed to making sure that today’s veterans get all the health care and support they need from the federal government for agreeing to serve in a time of danger,” he said.

And the headlines read: “Bush praises veterans on Veterans Day,” when they should have been, “Bush praises veterans on Veterans Day, while destroying their health care.”

There are many ironies to Bush’s tenure: some, like his IQ, are comical; some, like this one, are just tragic. Despite the Republican Party’s insistence that they are the party of patriotism and strength and “country first,” over the last eight years they have treated the veterans of their wars like every other group that infringes on their ability to stuff cash into the pockets of their rich friends. McCain’s plan was even worse than Bush’s: he wanted to privatize veterans’ health care, turn it into a market-oriented trust. Just imagine what would have happened during the financial crisis if this had happened. It’s time to fight the Republicans on their own turf and say the patent truth: they just really don’t care about vets or anyone else who isn’t rolling in money.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

Nonsensical Hitchens Has Become a Joke

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

I remember the first time I read Christopher Hitchens. I wasn’t that old, maybe 13 or 14, but even at that young age I recall being dazzled by his command of the English language, his razor-sharp mind and the courage he demonstrated in unashamedly taking on society’s sacred cows – those institutions or individuals elevated to sainthood by popular culture for reasons often divorced from reality. Hitchens has dispatched Henry Kissinger and Mother Theresa with righteous ferocity during his career.

I had been bought up on a self-inflicted diet of George Orwell, and, as a kid, I remember wondering what it might be like to have a mind of Orwell’s caliber when talking about current events. Hitchens was not Orwell, but I trusted him in the same way, believed that he had an independent mind; that he would not lie if he knew the truth.

As an ex-pat British journalist now living in the United States, just like Hitchens, I still follow his career and writings with keen interest. He is now a big, bright star in the American media firmament, talking on endless chat shows and lending his writings on politics and literature to a host of august journals.

Back when I first started reading him Hitchens was on the left, but that wasn’t what attracted me to him. He used his journalism to take on the powers that be, whether they were left, right or center. He had a disdain for platitudes, for lazy narratives and baseless hearsay. He had written expertly on the criminal Turkish occupation of Cyprus, the subject of his first book; he penned acerbic polemics on the criminal U.S. war in Indochina; he vented against the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Hitchens was never a bien-pensant on the left, however: he supported the Falklands War, and intermittently came out with shock positions that would offend his comrades. But even if you disagreed with him, you had to concede he was thinking for himself, and his equations had some equilibrium.

Hitchens is a different man now. His facile word skills are still there, his fearless attacks on venerated institutions, his quick mind, but he’s not serious like he was. His pronouncements make no sense and have no inherent logic. Instead of expressing rational thinking in cute phrases, he now, in the words of Norman Finkelstein, dresses up flatulence in bouquets.

I’ve been watching him during the 2008 election and his illogical and strange pronouncements have really been embarrassing to watch. It’s telling that the point when his political bearings went off-kilter was the same point when the establishment started to accept him with open arms. Now he is everywhere; you literally can’t turn on the TV without his brash private-schoolboy schtick in your face.

His position in the 2008 election is that you have to support Obama because, (a) John McCain is senile, for which Hitchens provides no evidence, apart from a few linguistic lapses, which are inevitable as the factor of speeches goes up on the campaign trail. And (b) Sarah Palin is a religious fanatic hostile to reason and science.

On (b) he is undoubtedly correct and any right-thinking person couldn’t disagree (probably she doesn’t even). But, wait. Hitchens himself voted for George W. Bush in 2004. Yes, the same president who doesn’t believe in evolution, wants creationism taught in schools, is against stem-cell research and acted like a zealot in the Terry Schiavo case. Doesn’t that qualify as religious fanaticism? Why does he suddenly care now about religious fanaticism when Bush’s pea-in-a-pod Sarah Palin is the vice presidential candidate?

The only reason I can think of is after supporting the Iraq war, he just doesn’t want to be caught on another sinking ship.

Just think about it. McCain is Hitchens ideological bedfellow:

(1) Hitchens says he used to be a single-issue voter on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to the Western world. Well, McCain is probably even more hawkish than Bush (if possible) and wants to bomb Iran. Surely that would get Hitchens on board, especially as Barack Obama wants to – shock, horror! – talk to the leaders of Iran before bombing them.

(2) McCain, like Hitchens, had a religious fervor when supporting the war in Iraq and the surge. But Obama was against both.

(3) And Hitch, if religion is your problem, McCain is much less fanatical than Bush. Even McCain’s foreign policy is closer to Hitchens than Bush. Bush recently took the slave state North Korea off the terrorist list, against McCain’s wishes, and I’m assuming Hitchens’. Obama has said he would talk to Kim Jong-Il.

So Hitchens’ ideas are nowhere; he is scrambling to patch together his disintegrating platform and it shows. He has used Palin’s fanaticism – nothing worse than his previous favorite for top office, Bush – as an excuse to go against a presidential candidate who is actually in agreement with all his ideas. It’s cheap and see-through, but hey, this is Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens nowadays is even too dense to have an opinion on domestic policy. Nowhere does he comment on taxes, or health care; he just doesn’t care. Why? Well, foreign policy gives his ego full license to wander off on macho rants about murdering scum fascists, but you don’t get any of those primal screams on domestic policy because it’s not some abstract fantasy about Good and Evil, about democracy and fascism or any other puerile oppositions.

The descent of Hitchens into some fat joke, the risible and edgy plaything of the American right wing, has really been solidified by his weird performance in the 2008 election. Conservatives in the U.S. have expressed surprise at his about-face, and this is a perfectly legitimate emotion. Hitchens disgraced himself by backing Bush in 2004, but perhaps, worse now, he has now shown himself to have no spine, his faculties of clear thought and logic have been jettisoned in clear daylight by not backing McCain.

It’s not tragic though. Hitchens is good for a laugh. Watch him on a show and he will be arrogant and rude, he will make funny one-liners, he will give you all the good branding he has worked on so assiduously. But that’s what he is: a stand-up comic, not a political thinker.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

U.S. Policy on Latin America Changing for Better

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

It may sound grandiose, but I think it’s true. Right now we are seeing the biggest political shift in the Western Hemisphere since the genocidal thief Christopher Columbus thought he had arrived in the Indian subcontinent, but had actually “discovered” the (already discovered) Americas.

The idea came to me most powerfully when I was watching the latest presidential debate and the topic turned to the last remaining outpost of the U.S. Empire in Latin America, Colombia. McCain did his usual bluster: “So Sen. Obama, who has never traveled south of our border, opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement,” said McCain. “The same country that’s helping us try to stop the flow of drugs into our country that’s killing young Americans.”

Now, in a heavily doctrinaire public discourse in the U.S., criticizing the Colombian government is like criticizing Israel, you don’t do it, despite the despicable human rights records of both countries. You just don’t go there.

Knowing Obama’s acquiescence to the Israel lobby, I was expecting the usual formulaic response about Marxist guerillas, etc. But he came out with this: “Actually, I understand it pretty well. The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions.”

Now, this is all true, but truth has never been a prerequisite for this election season, so to see Obama come out with it without being jumped on indicates a genuine shift in how the U.S. has been made to see Latin America. No longer, it seems, under a President Obama, will the country support any regime that subjugates its people and represents U.S. business interests. A brief history lesson is required to show how astonishing this really is.

Since 1823 and the so-called Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere has been designated by American planners as “our backyard,” a vast resource-rich expanse open for pillage and exploitation for the gain of the elite class in the U.S. and a handsomely rewarded quisling elite in the raped countries.

This dynamic has been constant and unbroken for two centuries.

President James Monroe obviously didn’t put it in these bald terms when he made his address to Congress on December 2, 1823, which forms the basis of this so-called doctrine. Monroe said that day that countries in the Western Hemisphere “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power,” which sounds like a good idea for the subjected peoples – until you realize Monroe instead gives his own country the right to take over from the European powers. “We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers,” he continues, “to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

He was telling the European powers simply, “It’s ours now!” Under this naked imperialism dressed up in fusty diplomatic language, the U.S. took Cuba from the Spanish in 1852 (the U.S. still illegally occupies Guantanamo Bay today), and then Puerto Rico from them in 1898 (which the U.S. still owns today).

As the European empires broke down completely after WWII, the idea of imperialism became increasingly untenable as indigenous movements removed their oppressors at a rapid rate. But as Europe lay in ruins, the U.S. was rising to its superpower status, and the elites weren’t going to lose control of their “backyard” during the ensuing Cold War with the Soviet Union. Occupations were frowned upon now, not least by an American population culturally averse to empires and imperialism. So instead the intelligence services turned to subverting any Latin American government that did not support American business interests away from the attention of the American people.

First went Guatemala in 1954, a coup against the center-left President Jacobo Arbenz who had the gall to redistribute land to landless peasants from the United Fruit Company. The CIA stepped in and installed a military junta and started one of the most horrendous civil wars in history that left 200,000 people dead.

Any country that elected any sort of left politician would incur a terrorist war of anti-democratic aggression. Brazil went down in 1961, Dominican Republic in 1963, Chile through the ’60s and eventually culminating in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1970s, and on and on. All the governments I mention were democratic, and many times they were replaced with a collection of open neo-Nazis, fascists and other dregs of humanity. It was all cloaked under the guise of the war against the “Evil Empire:” Soviet Russia. Much like today where Islamic fundamentalism gives the U.S. an excuse to do whatever it wants.

Millions upon millions of peoples were slaughtered across Latin America with the support of many U.S. household names: John Foster Dulles starting the Guatemalan bloodbath, Henry Kissinger backed the dictatorship in Chile, Ronald Reagan supporting the fascist Contras against the democratically elected Sandinistas in Nicaragua. These figures are all hailed as great heroes to this day in mainstream American culture, although not by the rest of the hemisphere, for obvious reasons.

John Perkins, who worked as an “Economic Hit Man” for a U.S. corporation for decades, has written a book exposing the type of work he did. He puts it succinctly: “Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.”

But even with this tragic history of exploitation and mass murder, I want to now sound an optimistic note. The Western Hemisphere — especially Latin America — is finally taking off the shackles of the imperial bully, and this time they will win.

No longer will democratically elected leaders from Chile to Bolivia to Brazil to Venezuela allow their sovereign nations to balk under the giant upstairs. When they propose economic plans to actually give the wealth of their lands to the people that live in it rather than rich corporations and exiles in Miami, they no longer take the U.S. trying to overthrow them with a shrug, they are ready.

In Bolivia recently, when the fascist paramilitary groups in eastern provinces like Pando massacred indigenous peasants and the pale-skinned traditional elite tried to start an uprising against the democratically elected president, Evo Morales, he didn’t stand for the encouragement the U.S. was giving. He kicked out the ambassador. And he also brought the governor who had incited the massacre to justice. On top of this stern action, all the newly independent center-left leaders of the Latin American bloc came to Morales’ aid at the U.N. They knew together they were a powerful force that couldn’t be crushed under the boot of the American government.

Hugo Chavez in Venezuela even followed suit and kicked out the ambassador there. And who can blame him? In 2002 when he himself was ousted temporarily by a U.S.-backed coup that put a billionaire businessman into power and suspended the constitution and democracy, the people of the Venezuelan barrios fought back; marching in their hundreds of thousands for the first leader that had ever considered them worthy of their own minerals. He had to be reinstated because the people of Venezuela were too powerful and alive to their plight to be raped again by another lackey of the U.S.
On top of this, the new independence is being entrenched through the new Bank of the South, which will gradually bring Latin American countries away from their reliance on the agents of Western governments, the IMF and World Bank. And then there is Telesur, a Latin American analogue to Al Jazeera, a continent-wide news network that undercuts the corporate media bias of the U.S. and their supporters in Latin America. These are important developments that will outlast any individuals, which is the kind of change that is truly needed for this new independence to be resilient.

There are a number of reasons for the U.S. losing grip of its backyard. First, this generation of left-wing leaders have learned from the past. They know about the dirty tricks of the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy and other agents of the U.S. government. They are aware that they have a constant battle against reactionary elements supported by the U.S. But in Bolivia, for example, the indigenous communities are equipping themselves to fight back; there will be none of Salvador Allende’s erroneous belief in pacifism. “If the right-wing tries to liquidate democracy we will fight you to defend civility,” is now the message.

The second important factor is that because the Cold War has ended it is harder for the U.S. government and their conduits in the corporate media to paint any politician who is vaguely left of center as an agent of Soviet Russia. Admittedly the New York Post, without shame, does describe Chavez – one of the most frequently elected leaders in the world – as a dictator. The childish invective against him comes from all over the narrow media spectrum in the U.S. But when they try to destroy democracy, like in 2002, the old Cold War lie doesn’t work. The left in Latin America are using this to their advantage by accentuating their independence from anyone and building alliances all over the world from Iran to China.

The third reason is that the U.S. imperial project is so bogged down in the Middle East — where support for dictators has been equally obscene — so they have in many ways taken their eye off the ball. It’s arguable that without September 11, Chavez would be history by now, as well as Morales.

The fourth reason is that when the U.S. helped set up Operation Condor — a continent-wide terror network — with their surrogate General Pinochet, they could count on the compliance of the security states they had helped set up. Now the tables have turned. With Fernando Lugo’s election in Paraguay, the whole continent is a left-wing independent bloc, so they can’t be subverted as easily and a strong alliance has been built between all the leaders, who now come to each other’s defense against subversion.

For the first time in centuries, down in Latin America things are looking up. Democracy, economic justice and dignity are returning to the continent that has been crushed under the U.S.’ boot for so long. This time they will win.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

Is Graffiti Really a Crime?

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

Most “moral issues” out there produce two virulently partisan sides that find it impossible to find a common ground to engage in any kind of progressive discourse. Take, for instance, abortion: one side claims right-to-choose advocates are worse than Hitler, having supported the abortion of more babies than people killed in all wars throughout history. The other side thinks pro-lifers are fundamental religious misogynists who want power over someone else’s body and offspring. The same intractable dynamic works with gay marriage, gun laws and so on.

Here, I’d like to introduce a “moral issue” that gets much less of an airing in mainstream society these days and, increasingly, doesn’t have magnetically repellent sides in the same way as abortion or any of the other issues do. I talk of graffiti. In the eyes of the law, graffiti is and always has been a sin; vandalism and criminal damage it’s called. There has been no Roe v. Wade equivalent for graffiti, no finessing of old laws. Daubing your name on private property is illegal without any caveat and always has been.

But is this right? In theory, the law has to protect the property rights of private individuals and corporations. In fact, “the Peelers,” as they were called in 19th century Britain, were the first formalized police force there. Basically they were set up to ensure the safety of private property. It is therefore reasonable for people to believe that they will be protected from bandits who use spray cans to put up their “tag.”

But as Proudhon reminded us a century ago, property is theft, and using private property as a canvas to express yourself is in many ways one of the only tangible tools of reclaiming privatized wealth and rendering it public. In that critical moment, the canvas of some bank building or shop front becomes yours, or ours. Ours because graffiti is one of the most altruistic art forms – colorful and complex pieces are put up for our benefit while we stroll the streets, at considerable financial and sometimes legal costs to the artist.

Take, for example, advertising, which is everywhere – all over buildings, walls, transportation, schools, etc. This stuff is there purely to manipulate and make money out of us, but when advertising sneaks its way into every nook and cranny of our public and private spaces and engulfs everyone, there isn’t a law enforcement agency to be seen. If there’s a law against citizen graffiti there also should be places spared from the tentacles of advertisers. Fat chance of that though.

It becomes even more interesting in terms of law and morality when you consider public property like railway stations and schools, because essentially these assets belong to all of us. So how is it wrong to do what we want with it? The argument goes that people – remember Berlin’s “positive freedoms” – don’t want to “put up” with graffiti when they walk around, arguing that it blights the aesthetics and cheapens the area. But personally I would find the subways much more interesting here in New York if they had big colorful creations all over the cars. And it costs the city nothing –they don’t have to commission artists. These people will do it for free. Yet, as it stands the forces scrub it off and send you to jail if they catch you.

In the age of Banksy, the mega-successful UK graffiti artist, whose new show opened in New York this week, this issue still hasn’t been broached on a big scale. There are tons of campaigns to legalize cannabis and anything else you can think of that they let you do with impunity in the oasis of Holland, but there is no graffiti equivalent. This is strange as Banksy is now the most popular and richest artist in the world, and yet this highly revered character is technically a criminal. The last time that happened, Oscar Wilde was found languishing in Reading Gaol.

Graffiti artists are the cracks in the shiny, fake sheen that advertising and closed-off private edifices have foisted upon us. The style of quick, ready-made art, adapted to the dilemma of always being watched by cops, is unique and often innovative and stylish. But I need to draw a distinction between tagging, which is hastily sprayed, one-dimensional monochrome names, and the more artistic pieces. Somewhere in between are throw-ups, which are more detailed than a tag but not as extensive as a piece.

There are also two different types of graffiti artists, with two very difficult goals. One is the “bombers,” who just tag relentlessly to get their name up. Usually these people are making up for a lack of artistic talent. Then there’s the real artists who spend more time doing pieces that have artistic merit and are discerning to the eye. Rarely is there a confluence of the two, although that is respected.

The law, however, treats both types of graffiti as the same thing, calling both vandalism. But the latter is not vandalism, but art with the street as a canvas. It is often beautiful, complex and complemented by characters and vistas in the great tradition of muralists like Diego Rivera. The idea that art is purely for the gallery and that when it doesn’t have that imprimatur it should be illegal is nuts.

I went on a couple of missions with graffiti artists recently. The thing they kept saying was how insanely militant the transpo (subway police) were in New York City. We went down to the Freedom Tunnel which is just down by Columbia University off Riverside Drive. You have to climb down a tree-lined hill and run stealthily across a motorway then down on to the rail track, but when you get into the tunnel and dodge the trains, it’s a near-religious experience as iridescent color (think stain-glass windows) is plastered all over the walls and the pitch black is only punctuated by beams of light coming through holes in the roof which give it all illumination. Add to this the hush and it feels like church. There is a whole homeless community living down there as well, some even have TVs as they get the electricity from the train lines.

It reminded me of the caves at Lascaux in France, which contain beautiful renditions of wild animals and are the first pictorial expression that we know were composed by our species. In today’s world they would be termed “graffiti” because a cave would be privatized property, owned by McDonald’s or, if it was in Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida franchise.

There are, of course, legal parks where pieces can be put up, but the point of graffiti is reclaiming spaces that have been closed off. So having little corners for creation is against the whole philosophy.

If you have to have a Vandal Squad at least complement it with an Aesthetics Squad, a team of highly trained art historians and curators who judge whether the artistic content is sufficient for them to escape prosecution. This way you get a graffiti gallery cleansed of the bad artists and you get your city decorated – for free. It makes perfect capitalist sense.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

The Turbanless Taliban

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

I don’t want to get too much into the whole debate around Sarah Palin because it gives her credit she doesn’t deserve. She is the American Taliban: evolution is a myth, abortion is wrong even in cases of rape and incest, climate change is not man-made. She’s Alaska’s answer to Osama bin Laden, except maybe her kids are more fecund.

She is depressingly doltish, and speaks with a squawk that riles my innards, its inflections acting like a knife to my cerebral cortex.

She is a nonentity and is aware of the fact, as are the puppet masters in the Republican Party. She was chosen to get Hillary voters on their side, so the Republicans could con America into another eight years of corporate rule. It is a cynical ploy and certainly is not “country first,” but why is anyone surprised? It’s not like the Democrats aren’t playing the same game, although they are mini-me to the Republican Satan, it is true.

But the anatomy of the whole propaganda effort after her appointment is interesting. The Republicans must have decided to get a ‘Hockey Mom’ – a euphemism for narrow-minded provincialism – but realized that because she is completely unqualified and startling stupid, they would have to shield her from criticism by inventing a storm of outrage about liberal elitism and misogyny if anyone questioned her slim record.

It was all over the news channels straight away: everywhere there was this outrage at these liberal sexist elites who were dumping so much shit on this poor defenseless woman. But I searched in vain for it. I listened to all this stuff on Fox News and CNN and then turned to the newspapers like The New York Times and tried to find this mocking misogyny, and it wasn’t there. There was literally nothing aside from a few – literally one or two – remarks about having five kids and being VP might be difficult.

The whole thing was made up, and it worked; it put the Democrats on the back foot and they ceded a lot of ground to the Republicans. If you look at all the hours of invective wasted on this topic, no one who is accusing brings up any examples; that’s because it was a completely made-up episode that had been planned before she was even appointed.

Appoint the dumbo, then make everyone feel sorry for her, was the modus vivendi. And even though this is see-through, you never hear it from the Democrats because the Republicans control the debate so much that even drawing attention to this is not permissible.

And how disgusting it is that the Republicans will assume the vernacular of feminism and equality when they have dedicated so many decades to destroying both. But in the mixed-up, shook-up world of American politics, where truth gets buried beneath the semiotics devised by the powerful to keep the rest of us shielded from the truth, when will liberals just stand up and say, “You’re dirty scum!” when the Republicans turn the political arena into a sewer and get by through acting like rats?

Sarah Palin is within ‘a heartbeat’ of the American presidency. There is a good chance McCain will win in November, and owing to the fact he is 73 and not of great health, there is a considerable chance Palin will be the most powerful person in the world within the next eight years. After eight years of George W. Bush maybe that isn’t as scary as it should be, but it is still scary.

The fact that the Republicans have sacrificed the security of America by making this buffoon the VP-elect, is a naked display that they will do anything to get elected. McCain, I suspect, laughs about this idiot in private and Cindy is thought not to like her, which is no surprise.

While Obama’s advance is also a great leap forward for black people in this country, Palin does nothing of the same for women. In fact, by electing a medieval barbarian, who happens to be a woman, to the VP position, this is really a stab in the heart for the feminist movement. If after two waves of the feminist movement and a hell of a lot of struggling, the first woman to get her hands on executive power is Palin, then what does it say about us?

Palin fulfills all the stereotypes of the misogynists; she is a supplicant to an older man, she is as thick as pig shit, she is a backward Taliban and she married another dumb bastard too. The only thing that isn’t a misogynist’s dream is that she’s ambitious. I’m being unfair though.

It’s not her fault she is a misogynist’s dream—she’s just a puppet. But it is the fault of the Republican Party that they chose a woman like this as the first VP candidate – it shows what they really think of women. Far from the Democrats being the sexists, the Republicans are sexist for giving this creature up to the rest of the world as an example of womanhood in the U.S.

Because this has been a cynical public relations ploy, it is likely to die out any second. Palin’s star will wane and she will go back to Kabul – sorry, I mean Juneau – and read her picture books with her grandchild – sorry, I mean child – and fizzle out in the vortex of nothingness from which she emerged so unceremoniously.

Americans should be up in arms that she has been carried by the media for so long, however. She should be laughed out of the shop. How does anyone ask her a serious question without cracking up laughing? I am not exaggerating when I say I would rather trouble the brain of my 12-year-old next-door neighbor about foreign policy than Palin. At least he hadn’t been taught by rote what to say, and might understand a bit of what he was saying.

When the Republic of Rome fell and gave way to the dictatorship of Caesar, there were signals; the Republic of America could fall too if the Republicans are allowed to claim another victory and install the turbanless Taliban. Fascism won’t wear jackboots when it comes to the U.S., it never looks the same, but it could hunt moose and have stupid glasses.

Matt Kennard can be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.

Barack Obama Is Not A Black Man

By MATT KENNARD, Columnist

The whole of the U.S. is congratulating itself about the possibility that – after centuries of oppression – a black person might finally become president of the nation. This pervasive sentiment is often well-meaning and a genuine expression of hope for the future of race relations in this country.

Except there is one factual inaccuracy in the first sentence: Barack Obama is not a black man – he is of mixed race; biologically, he is as much white – 50% – as he is black. This truth has been passed by in the orgy of self-congratulation by the liberal establishment. Does anyone think that Obama would have had a chance in the primaries or be within grasp of the presidency if both his parents were black?

You can get a clue to the answer by looking at how other African-American candidates have faired in recent history. Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988. Both his parents are black. So what happened? In 1984 he got 8% of the delegates in a race short on talent that he should have won. In 1988 Michael Dukakis defeated him even after Jackson had seemed on course for a historic victory – what stopped him?

Jackson is a heavyweight politician, a good orator and intelligent by all accounts – the problem for him was he was ‘too black’ for mainstream America. There is no doubt Obama’s campaign is historic and a great leap forward for the country, but if he had been as black as Martin Luther King Jr. it’s unlikely he would have won anything.

This is witnessed most blatantly by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the primary season. It was alleged that Clinton’s staff had darkened Obama’s face and widened the image to make him look more African. They were obviously cognizant of the fact that being only half-black was not scary enough for voters. It is a disgusting and pitiful ploy, but very instructive for the whole race debate.

In many ways Obama is the establishment’s perfect black man, a baton to beat the rest of us with the message “Racism is dead!” when it most definitely is not.

Educated at Columbia and Harvard and willing to talk down to black people, Obama has ushered in what has been called a “post-racial” era. What that means is that Obama is “post-racial” because he doesn’t know all that much and definitely doesn’t talk about the black experience in the U.S., and doesn’t care to publicize what it involves, often poverty and racism.

Compare this with Jackson, who talks consciously about black issues and the cancer of racism in this country, and you start to see why Obama has been so rapturously welcomed by the Democratic Party. He brings none of the embarrassment they accord to “Angry Black Men” like Jackson, and, aside from one completely anodyne and ambiguous statement on race, he ignores the issue like the plague.

So now the liberal elites, and the conservative ones too, can crow about how everyone is so civilized now because they will elect this Ivy-League educated half-black man. But when will the time come when someone from the ghetto, someone who went to a normal university or none at all, someone who is fully African-American, and someone who doesn’t tow the establishment line on all matters of race, will become president?

It’s understandable why black America has taken Obama so close to their hearts. In a society still pervaded with the fetid stench of racism, Obama’s success deals some long needed hygiene to so many of the stereotypes and racist tropes we all know so well. But this success should be seen for what it is; one small step on the long road to full emancipation for African-Americans.

There is a danger, expressed by activists, that the wheels of the movements for racial equality will just be taken off if Obama wins. This shouldn’t happen because Obama is indicative of how our system operates. Since the times of slavery the white barbarians would turn black slave on black slave, by promoting some to the position of what Malcolm X called ‘house niggers.’ We live in a different time now, but co-opting real forms of legitimate anger and dissent has been one of the best control methods in our society. Obama has been showered with all the trappings of power, and he obviously loves it. We need to remember this is NOT the experience of a majority of black people in this country, and that the movement for equality and justice doesn’t stop here. This is just the start.

A Case of Censorship by Omission

BY MATT KENNARD, Columnist

Over the months of December 2007 and January 2008 the London Sunday Times published some of the most revelatory and important stories to have graced the British newspapers for decades. Their investigative team dug deep into claims by a former FBI translator that Marc Grossman, a top State Department official, “was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the [nuclear] information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.” It emerged last week, through an interview with one of the journalists on the story, that the FBI was complaining to the Sunday Times about its propensity to take journalism seriously and interview a few of their formers. A quick digest of what the case involves and how it has been inexplicably blacked out by the U.S. media is a shocking tale of political corruption and media venality.

Thirty-eight-year-old Sibel Edmonds is the whistleblower, and her claims are stunning. Grossman, who was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997, and later Under Secretary of State, is accused by Edmonds of “aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

The nuclear secrets that he is alleged to have let seep out for his own personal aggrandizement were dribbled to agents from Pakistan and Turkey. It is assumed that they have since fallen into the hands of infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist and trader A.Q. Khan, who is known to have sold secret nuclear information to a host of rogue regimes from North Korea to Iran.

The FBI hired Edmonds nine days after 9/11. They fired her six months later. She has claimed that she was fired because she highlighted the criminality of her seniors and her principled stand was not to be tolerated. She took her claim to the courts and filed suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI and several high-level officials in July 2002. In October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege—a politicized and often misused legal doctrine—to block the release of any of the material that Edmonds had in her possession because it endangered national security.

But in the Sunday Times she has rehashed these claims with more damning furnishings. The latest revelation is that Grossman “tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.” She came into possession of all this information as she translated hundred of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI investigation focused on an international nuclear smuggling ring.

And it is not only Grossman who is implicated. On Edmonds’ website she also fingers Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of State for Policy from July 2001 to August 2005, and Richard N. Perle, Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, among a dozen others. And the FBI has been accused by the Sunday Times of lying blatantly when they denied the existence of a key case file detailing corruption in the FBI after a Freedom of Information Act request from a human rights group. The Sunday Times claims it knows the file exists.

But these earth-shattering revelations have, astonishingly, not appeared in one mainstream newspaper in the United States. A whistleblower highlighting criminality at the highest echelons of government, the FBI blatantly lying about a report in its possession: these scoops have been plastered across one of the most august journals in Britain, yet not one outlet deigns to print it here in the U.S. What is going on?

The reticence is worse than weird. It is genuinely conspiratorial. Why on earth would titles like the New York Times and the Washington Post deem this story not important enough to get even a few column inches in their newspapers? Why is there this sordid silence?

Harry Shearer, one of the voices behind the Simpsons, asks these same questions on his Huffington Post blog. “The theft of U.S. nuclear secrets, the diverting of them to Pakistan (and, according to Edmonds, Saudi Arabia), the involvement of Israel in the scheme,” he writes, “all of these would justify as jaw-droppingly newsworthy in a rational journalistic universe. Clearly, that’s not where we live.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the great CIA whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers (an internal CIA evaluation of the Vietnam War decision-making) in 1971 goes further. The release of the Pentagon Papers caused a national political storm and changed the trajectory of the war in Indochina. He says Edmonds’ revelations are potentially even more explosive, but laments the mute media. “It’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971,” he writes. “They printed them then. Would they today?” he asks.

“For the last two weeks—one could say, for years—the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds…. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.”

Various rumors and theories are ricocheting around the blogosphere. Various commentators are saying there is evidence that the powerful individuals being targeted by Edmonds are contacting media outlets and beseeching them not to print, and that the newspapers are being craven and supine under this duress. Others are cleaving towards the more prosaic explanation that the story ‘lacks legs’ and adds nothing new to Edmonds’ previous utterances since she was fired. I know which of the theories I believe.

Reams of comments have appeared under the Sunday Times articles, many coming from despairing American citizens railing against their impotent media. The latest installment—the third in the series—has Michael Monk, from Raleigh N.C. lamenting in the comments section: “You can be the free press we don’t have in the states.” Ron Curtis, of Cleburne, T.X., writes more pugnaciously, “The American ‘news’ media is a disgrace and nothing more than a modern-day Izvestia or Pravda of the Soviet era, spewing propaganda and brainwashing Joe Sixpack with images of Britney and nothing-else-matters-wall-to-wall election coverage.”

Is Mr. Curtis right? One of the most potent tools of thought control in an ostensibly democratic society is censorship by omission: it does not involve overt manipulation of reality, but the more insidious shielding of germane information from the populace. The American media need to show us, and show us soon, that they haven’t consciously imbibed this technique to keep the corrupt politicians happy and the people in the dark. Otherwise this transatlantic blockade of information is going to get more embarrassing and the silence increasingly hard to uphold.

Let’s Focus on Real Issues, People!

BY MATT KENNARD, COLUMNIST

It’s a cliché that gets a generous airing every election season. This vote, some dunce burbles, this one more than all the others, is the most important American election since sometime in the prehistory of the republic.

In 1996, Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler warned gravely that the vote was “the most important election since 1932,” continuing that it was “not just the next four years, but literally the next four decades” at stake.

In 2000, Charlton Heston cautioned his loyal following at the NRA that, “This election is the most important election since” – this time – “the Civil War.” He continued in his apocalyptic register thusly: “Freedom has never seen greater peril or needed you more to come to her defense.”

Fast-forward a highly eventful four years to 2004, and Washington Times columnist Harlan Ullman is found opining, “I also believe this may be the most important election since 1860.” He continued: “We face new and radically different threats and challenges to our safety and prosperity.”

So I feel it’s good form that I make the not-so-bold pronouncement that the 2008 election is the most important in the history of the U.S. since … well, ever.

The American people, after eight years of an administration that has botched two wars, ripped up large parts of the Constitution, legalized torture and destroyed alliances all over the world, have a massive choice to make. Yet the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be able to raise itself to the occasion and cover the contest with anything approaching the seriousness it deserves.

It’s striking and strange that a country that boasts the majestic wording of the First Amendment in its Constitution, and takes press freedom so seriously, should have a media so uniform in its asinine coverage of democracy’s most important rite of passage.

The choices in 2008 remain stark, the issues massive, yet we are plagued with extraneous conversations that belong in the National Enquirer on a slow news week rather than any self-respecting journal or television news program.

So we got weeks of CNN coverage about Hillary’s stage-managed lachrymose breakdown in New Hampshire when, news in brief if at all, we hear more than 80% of Americans want an overhaul of the health-care system.

Then there’s the three-hour symposium on Fox News about whether Obama is too skinny to be president while we wait forever for a mention of a poll showing that a majority of Americans say Congress should pass a resolution that outlines a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

The regression of the U.S. media has gone so far in this direction now that it resembles a howling baby, crying interminably about trivialities that have no impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.

The intuitive reasoning for this sorry state is that media outlets just have so much airtime or so many columns to fill that any minuscule speck of news has to be parsed so thoroughly that it disintegrates into even smaller motes of nothingness. That’s the intuitive reasoning. But it’s obviously deeper than that. The reluctance of mainstream media to stray from their self-imposed exile in the intellectual backwaters of triviality and banality has roots in prosaic structural problems: these institutions are owned by interests that just don’t want serious issues discussed.

The average person made to watch Fox News and CNN for the last six months probably would be able to tell you what the significance of Barack Obama’s new haircut is for the Iraqi people, but they couldn’t tell you what the difference between the actual policies of the two nominees vis-à-vis withdrawal.

They could tell you that McCain was more solid on “national security” than Obama, but they couldn’t tell you why. And that’s because these narratives are built on shaky edifices and tumble as soon as they are scrutinized.

McCain’s foreign policy experience is being a prisoner of war during Vietnam, supporting a catastrophic war in Iraq which increased Islamic fundamentalism there, singing ‘Bomb Iran’ to the Beach Boys classic “Barbara Ann” and saying that Al-Qaeda is Shia.

He’s a tool and ignoramus when it comes to foreign policy and his campaign team surely asks him to avoid the topic for fear of a senile mix-up. But no one knows the reality, no one is allowed to know. There may be coverage of individual mess-ups, but it will never put a dent in the assiduously devised meta-narratives that govern how we think or are manipulated to think about these people.

Regardless, this is how it seems election campaigns are run in the U.S., and over the rest of the Western world (in a slightly more attenuated variety). Once a meme is put out in the open and affirmed by some talking head and repeated enough it becomes, inexorably, The Truth. Obama’s vacuous allusions to “hope” and “change,” which when pulled down from the reaches of outer space where they reside mean absolutely nothing. Or McCain’s self-avowed status as an “outsider” and “maverick” which are so opposite to reality that Orwell would not know whether to laugh or cry.

But this branding of candidates and its parroting by the media has been understood by the public relations industry for a long time as the most effective way of selling a product. And Obama and McCain are products, like Coca-Cola or Citibank, that must be sold through sedulous attention to good branding. Walter Lippmann is seen as the father of today’s PR monstrosity and his 1922 opus, “Public Opinion,” contains countless juicy nuggets of insight into methods for controlling the public mind that still hold for today’s campaign strategists. “Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality,” he wrote back then. “Royal personages are, of course, constructed personalities. Whether they themselves believe in their public character, or whether they merely permit the chamberlain to stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.”  Lippmann welcomed the generation of this fantasy world as the only way to run a society, a class of opinion-formers guiding the dullard masses by the hand through the complexities they could never understand. Obviously this comes up hard against what we think of as democratic theory, but his conception is essentially how we exist now.

A random tourist upon touching down in New York could be forgiven for thinking that the The Onion was a respectable mainstream publication. The satire it contains is so wickedly mordant that its subtleties, in the context of today’s idiotic election coverage, could easily, and probably have been, lost on the uninitiated. Witness: “Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign.” Or: “McCain To Send Self Back To Vietnamese POW Camp To Revitalize Campaign.” Or even: “Kaine You Fit on a Bumper Sticker?” – an article about whether the VP should be chosen with the length of their name in mind for bumper stickers. They seem like they could be totally legitimate stories nowadays, and the last one was, carried on Fox News on July 31st.

The problem is trying to understand which way the currents are moving. Are the PR hucksters running both the campaigns creating this infantile climate by making sure serious issues aren’t mentioned because of their corporate backers? Or are the media omitting the serious stories that are out there and covering the trash? The scary truth is that it’s a medley of the two. The campaigns are bankrolled by private interests, which include, in heavy dollars, the energy, pharmaceutical and arms industries. Therefore a campaign that moves away from an addiction to oil, moves toward a comprehensive health-care system and away from war with Iran and anyone else – policies most Americans support – just will not be at the top of any campaign’s talking points.

Instead the vacuum will be filled with imbecilic words that are meant to strike an emotional chord with people hoping for some change for the better, but no commitment to specifics of how to deliver it. This chasm between airy semantics and real, political resolutions is often and tragically filled with jingoism, sexism or any other atavistic impulse that people fall back on when they get desperate and see no way of attenuating their pains and worries through ‘mainstream’ politics.

The unfortunate thing about American democracy is that both parties are equally to blame. Award-winning journalist Naomi Klein writes that the spectrum in the States runs from far-right to center-right, and in terms of global standards she is undoubtedly correct. So the constant partisan bickering between Democrats and Republicans is good sport, i.e., we all have a team and back them loyally, but essentially they both agree on the fundamentals. In fact, in U.S. history the Democrats have tended to be the most warmongering and violent. It’s often forgotten that JFK was the first president to send troops to South Vietnam and so launch the ‘hot war’ that over the next fifteen years would destroy that nation and poison it forever - with the help of LBJ after Kennedy’s assassination.

All the atrocities since then – perpetrated by Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II – have all been supported by a large number of Democrats. The great lie of American democracy is that there is a diversity of ideology; it’s a two-party state that worships one ideology. The rancorous debate between the two sides is very effective in convincing the American populace that they live in a vibrant democracy, but in fact the choices are so circumscribed as to be merely cosmetic.

The abiding wisdom is that journalists can’t question this; they must remain steadfastly neutral and cover the world “as it is.” We must be impartial and follow the agenda, covering it fairly and accurately.

This theory of journalism holds sway over the whole establishment and their breeding ground in the Ivy League. I have just been through nine months of imbibing this at Columbia University. The trouble is that there exists no such thing as “neutrality” and the world is too multifarious to capture it in its full richness, which is what the term “as it is” must demand. Choosing what to put in and what to keep out is a function of bias in itself.

Even our everyday rhetoric is imbued with connotations and substratum meaning that we have no hope of comprehending because we are so far steeped in it. If you use the wording of the mainstream media you are instantly taking a position without even realizing: you used the “war on terror” instead of “war of terror,” you used the phrase “humanitarian intervention” instead of “military assault,” you used the word “neoliberalism” instead of “economic imperialism.” None of these antinodes have a rational claim to supremacy, but the fact that we reflexively use the former instead of the latter reveals the hidden presuppositions that are so deeply embedded as to be invisible to your standard career-minded dupe journalist. Not using these terms make you the radical, while the people who conceive of it are the self-avowed “moderates.”

At some point it becomes hard to fathom whether the dire state of the media is because journalists are on the whole dumb or, more insidiously, they refuse to critically analyze these currents because they know that their careers will suffer if they do. Maybe it’s a combination of retardation and egoism that is eroding the edifice.

Take say, the furor around Rev. Jeremiah Wright (who was a rare moment of clear-sightedness in the election campaign). He was tarnished as a radical and racist and every other standard epithet dished out to someone who doesn’t sit snugly in the one-dial ideological consensus. What was left out of the filthy coverage was that when Martin Luther King was alive (and hated by mainstream society) he was saying things like, “My country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” which resonates jarringly with Wright’s pronouncements. Of course, the canonization of radicals is only allowed after their power has been blunted, but the inability of the media to even fathom the links between the rhetoric of the two men is either a collective moment of amnesia or a shocking dereliction of duty so as not to rock the boat.

Essentially the problem isn’t that the media covers silly infantile stories, it’s that they don’t cover the serious ones. Politicos are playing a game, an important game because they govern us; the media’s job must be to breakdown the gloss of government and the patina of PR.

Matt Kenanrd may be reached at MattKennard@gmail.com.