The big war news on the front page of the New York Times last weekend was headlined: “U.S. Is Planning Buildup in Gulf After Iraq Exit.” Its first sentence: “The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats.” Of course, for those reading TomDispatch.com, this news was undoubtedly less than startling, given that Nick Turse nailed down the same long-term buildup almost two years ago in a post presciently entitled “Out of Iraq, Into the Gulf.”
Nonetheless, that Times piece has a little gem buried in it, one that should get Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the Onion Orwellian-geopolitical-statement-of-the-week award. The newspaper of record quotes her as saying, “We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.” Yes, it’s a fact: the United States is, on principle, against outside interference everywhere on Earth, and if you don’t believe us, we’re happy to garrison your country to prove it.
It’s evidently not, by the way, the season to write for TomDispatch.com. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose firsthand book about the debacle of “nation-building” in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, has gotten so much attention lately, and who wrote at this site about his (mis)treatment by his employer, has now been stripped of his security clearance and suspended from his job. He’s at home facing future punishment for being an honest man -- and so, evidently, not up to diplomatic snuff -- in his continuing blunt comments on the State Department’s path to madness in Iraq. Here’s how the official departmental letter put the matter: “[Y]ou have shown an unwillingness to comply with Department rules and regulations regarding writing and speaking on matters of official concern, including by publishing articles and blog posts on such matters without submitting them to the Department for review, and that your judgment in the handling of protected information is questionable.” Mind you, this is in an American world of security overkill in which, according to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of the Washington Post, 854,000 people hold top security clearances, while "some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States."
In the meantime, Ann Jones, who has regularly reported for this site from grim global battle zones, finally left them for -- one bloody massacre aside -- a land so peaceable you can practically hear a pin drop. I’m talking about Norway. But as with Van Buren, no matter how far you go, the U.S. government still gets its man (... er, woman). What that’s meant for her is that, even in peaceable Norway, Jones found herself embroiled in some small corner of post-9/11 American national security madness. We’ve all heard about what happens when you find yourself trapped on a no-fly list, but how about a no-pay list (and worse yet, it’s your own money)? Tom
Me and OFAC and Ahmed the Egyptian
One Citizen’s Misadventure in Securityland
By Ann JonesWhere did I go wrong? Was it playing percussion with an Occupy Wall Street band in Times Square when I was in New York recently? Or was it when I returned to my peaceful new home in Oslo and deleted an email invitation to hear Newt Gingrich lecture Norwegians on the American election? (Yes, even here.)
I don’t know how it happened. Or even, really, what happened. Or what it means. So I’ve got no point -- only a lot of anxiety. I usually write about the problems of the world, but now I’ve got one of my own. They evidently think I’m a terrorist.
That is, someone in the U.S. government who specializes in finding terrorists seems to have found me and laid a heavy hand on my bank account. I think this is wrong, of course, but try to tell that to a faceless, acronymic government agency.
It all started with a series of messages from my bank: Citibank. Yeah, I know, I should have moved my money long ago, but in the distant past before Citibank became Citigroup, it was my friendly little neighborhood bank, and I guess I’m in a rut. Besides, I learned when I made plans to move to Norway that if your money is in a small bank, it has to be sent to a big bank like Citibank or Chase to wire it to you when you need it, which meant I was trapped anyway.
In the U.S., corruption is seldom “corruption.” Take as an example our president, who has been utterly clear: he will not take money for his electoral campaign from lobbyists. Only problem: according to the New York Times, 15 of his top “bundlers,” who give their own money and solicit that of others -- none registered as federal lobbyists -- are “involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies,” and they are raising millions for him. They also have access to the White House on policy matters. According to a June report from the Center for Public Integrity, “President Obama granted plum jobs and appointments to almost 200 people who raised large sums for his [2008] presidential campaign, and his top fundraisers have won millions of dollars in federal contracts.”
The president’s spokespeople insist, of course, that he’s kept to his promise, as defined by the labyrinthine lobbying legislation written by a Congress filled with future lobbyists. And keep in mind that Obama looks like Little Mary Sunshine compared to the field of Republican presidential candidates who seem determined to campaign cheek to jowl with as many lobbyists as they can corral. More than 100 federal lobbyists have already contributed to Mitt Romney’s campaign, while Rick Perry has evidently risen to candidate status on the shoulders of Mike Toomey, a former gubernatorial chief of staff, friend, and money-raising lobbyist whose clients “have won $2 billion in [Texas] state government contracts since 2008.” And that’s just the tip of the top of the iceberg.
None of this is “corruption,” of course, just a pay-to-play way of life, which extends to the military-industrial complex and a Pentagon that has spent a mere $1 trillion in the last decade purchasing new weapons to “modernize” its arsenal. In the meantime, every top civilian official, general, or admiral there knows that some weapons company awaits him with (so to speak) open arms, whenever he decides to spin through the revolving door into "retirement" and the private sector. The results are stunning. Arms giant Lockheed Martin paid out $12.7 million in lobbying fees in 2010. Its CEO took home $21.89 million that year. And the company just reported third-quarter net earnings of $700 million, beating the expectations of analysts, and predicts more of the same for 2012. Advantage Lockheed.
Similarly, the government's top economic advisors regularly come from (and/or end up in/return to) the arms of banks and giant financial outfits, the very firms which pour money into political campaigns. It’s but another version of the same cozy, well-organized world in which, for example, Robert Rubin spun from Goldman Sachs into the government as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury in the 1990s, then out again to Citigroup, which he then helped run into the ground until it was bailed out on such generous terms in November 2008. In those years, he made an estimated $126 million. Advantage Rubin.
Just remember though, it’s not corruption. It’s just the way our world works. Get used to it. As it happens, the Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t been willing to adjust to that reality, and as a result, corruption is suddenly on American minds, as it has been, for a while, on Lawrence Weschler’s. He happens to be one of our most skilled essayists, with a dazzling writing career behind him. His latest book, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint), just published, covers a typically unsettling array of topics ranging from why digital animators can’t create a credible human face to how a film editor comes to grips with his war films in the context of war. Here’s Weschler’s version of an American corruption story. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Weschler discusses his new book click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Art of the Shakedown, from the Nile to the Potomac
How Corruption in the U.S. Puts Everyday Corruption in Africa to Shame
By Lawrence WeschlerA bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it. If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.
Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.
On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.
“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window. “We saw you.”
OWS at Valley Forge
A (Self-)Graduation Speech for the Occupiers of Zuccotti Park
By Tom Engelhardt
Once the Arab Spring broke loose, people began asking me why this country was still so quiet. I would always point out that no one ever expects or predicts such events. Nothing like this, I would say, happens until it happens, and only then do you try to make sense of it retrospectively.
Sounds smart enough, but here’s the truth of it: whatever I said, I wasn’t expecting you. After this endless grim decade of war and debacle in America, I had no idea you were coming, not even after Madison.
You took me by surprise. For all I know, you took yourself by surprise, the first of you who arrived at Zuccotti Park and, inspired by a bunch of Egyptian students, didn’t go home again. And when the news of you penetrated my world, I didn’t pay much attention. So I wasn’t among the best and brightest when it came to you. But one thing’s for sure: you’ve had my attention these last weeks. I already feel years younger thanks to you (even if my legs don’t).
Decades ago in the Neolithic age we now call “the Sixties,” I was, like you: outraged. I was out in the streets (and in the library). I was part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. I turned in my draft card, joined a group called the Resistance, took part in the radical politics of the moment, researched the war, became a draft counselor, helped organize an anti-war Asian scholars group -- I was at the time preparing to be a China scholar, before being swept away -- began writing about (and against) the war, worked as an “underground” printer (there was nothing underground about us, but it sounded wonderful), and finally became an editor and journalist at an antiwar news service in San Francisco.
In that time of turmoil, I doubt I spent a moment pondering this irony: despite all those years in college and graduate school, the most crucial part of my education -- learning about the nature of American power and how it was wielded -- was largely self-taught in my off-hours. And I wasn’t alone. In those days, most of us found ourselves in a frenzy of teaching (each other), reading, writing -- and acting. That was how I first became an editor (without even knowing what an editor was): simply by having friends shove their essays at me and ask for help.
Those were heady years, as heady, I have no doubt, as this moment is for you. But that doesn’t mean our moments were the same. Not by a long shot. Here’s one major difference: like so many of the young of that distant era, I was surfing the crest of a wave of American wealth and wellbeing. We never thought about, but also never doubted, that if this moment ended, there would be perfectly normal jobs -- good ones -- awaiting us, should we want them. It never crossed our minds that we couldn’t land on our feet in America, if we cared to.
In that sense, while we certainly talked about putting everything on the line, we didn’t; in truth, economically speaking, we couldn’t. Although you, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other encampments around the country, are a heterogeneous crew, many of you, I know, graduated from college in recent years.
Most of you were ushered off those leafy campuses (or their urban equivalents) with due pomp and ceremony, and plenty of what passes for inspiration. I’m ready to bet, though, that in those ceremonies no one bothered to mention that you (and your parents) had essentially been conned, snookered out of tens of thousands of dollars on the implicit promise that such an “education” would usher you into a profession or at least a world of decent jobs.
As you know better than I, you got soaked by the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage. As a result, many of you were sent out of those gates and directly -- as they say of houses that are worth less than what’s owed on their mortgages -- underwater.
You essentially mortgaged your lives for an education and left college weighed down with so much debt -- a veritable trillion-dollar bubble of it -- that you may never straighten up, not if the 1% have their way. Worse yet, you were sent into a world just then being stripped of its finery, where decent jobs were going the way of TVs with antennas and rotary telephones.
If your child has asthma and it’s getting worse, then news about the White House’s recent retreat on ozone (that is, smog) standards for the air over your city wasn’t exactly cause for cheering. Thank our environmental president for that, but mainly of course the Republicans, who have been out to kneecap the Environmental Protection Agency since the 2010 election results came in. We may be heading for an anything-blows environmental future, even though it couldn’t be more logical to assume that whatever is allowed into the air will sooner or later end up in us.
With a helping hand from that invaluable website Environmental Health News, here’s a little ladleful of examples from the chemical soup that could be not just your air, soil, or water, but you. It's only a few days' worth of news reports on what’s in our environment and so, for better or mostly worse, in us: In Dallas-Ft. Worth, there’s lead in the blood of children, thanks to leaded gasoline, banned decades ago, but still in the soil. In New York’s Hudson River, “one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history” (for PCBs in river sediments) is ongoing. Researchers now suspect that those chemicals, already linked to low birth weight, thyroid disease, and learning, memory, and immune system disorders,” are also associated with to high blood pressure. Then there’s mercury, that “potent neurotoxin that is especially dangerous to the developing brains of fetuses and children.” If allowed, it will enter the environment via a proposed open-pit gold and copper mine to be built in Alaska near “one of the world's premier salmon fisheries.”
And speaking of fish, there is ancient DDT, plus more modern PCBs and spilled oil in ocean sediments off California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, a toxic superfund site, whose cleanup is now being planned. And don’t forget that uranium mill near Cañon City, Colorado, which “has the state's backing to permanently dispose of radioactive waste in its tailings ponds, despite state and independent reports over a 30-year period showing the ponds' liners leak.” Or consider bisphenol-A, a chemical most of us now carry around in our bodies. It is used in the making of some plastic containers and “may cause behavior and emotional problems in young girls” according to a new study (as older studies indicated that it might affect “the brain development of fetuses and small children”). Or think about the drinking water tested recently by the University of Tennessee Center for Environmental Biotechnology from six of 11 Tennessee utilities statewide that “contained traces of 17 chemicals found in insect repellent, ibuprofen, detergents, a herbicide, hormones, and chemical compounds found in plastics.” And that's just to dip a toe in polluted waters.
Increasingly, with the environment a chemical soup of our industrial processes, so are our bodies. No wonder TomDispatch regular and environmentalist Chip Ward suggests that activists occupying Wall Street should think even bigger. Tom
Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick
Nature Is the 99%, Too
By Chip WardWhat if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
What if, last Friday, President Obama had stepped to the podium at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and begun his remarks this way: “Good afternoon, everybody. As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end -- for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world. After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011. Today, I’m here to tell you that I’m breaking that pledge. It will not happen. Instead, I’m leaving 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in that country indefinitely.”
Of course, the president made no such claim (nor, if things had turned out differently in Iraq, would he have done so). Nonetheless, according to news reports, such an outcome -- thousands of American troops in Iraq, possibly for years -- was the administration’s first choice, while military commanders were evidently eager to leave tens of thousands of troops behind. It was the outcome that Washington had been negotiating for and lobbying Iraqi politicians about all year. Because the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki refused to give U.S. troops legal immunity, full withdrawal (with the possibility of reinsertion later) became the administration's default position, and President Obama was left to take unreserved credit for fulfilling an election campaign pledge to bring all U.S. troops home by the end of 2011, the outcome he hadn’t wanted. (“Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year...”) Keep this in mind as well: given the State Department’s militarization there -- it plans to run a mercenary “army” of perhaps 5,000 hired guns from its monster Baghdad embassy in 2012 -- and a recent, little-noted statement by Iraqi cleric and American opponent Muqtada al-Sadr, the American war will not necessarily end next year either.
Mainstream papers reported all this, including the preferred plans for staying in Iraq, even while hailing the president’s decision to leave and keep his pledge, with no hint of the striking hypocrisy involved. (The New York Times front-page headline read: “Last U.S. Soldiers to Exit From Iraq in 2011, Obama Says, Fulfilling Vow to End Eight-Year War -- Dispute With Baghdad Is Cited.”) Whether anyone outside the mainstream media is impressed with this sort of presidential maneuver anymore is an open question. Certainly, Glenn Greenwald wasn’t and that shouldn't surprise anyone. With his scathingly on-target regular columns at Salon.com, it would be no exaggeration to say that Greenwald has had a hand in making many of us immune to American political and financial hypocrisy of every sort.
Now, he’s written a new book, just out today, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, that -- again, who could be surprised? -- is surely the book for the Occupy Wall Street moment in this country. Riveting to read, it’s a must for understanding how immunity and impunity became, economically and legally, a way of life for the Washington and Wall Street elite. Tom
Immunity and Impunity in Elite America
How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land
By Glenn GreenwaldAs intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.
Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression. This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades. As journalist Tim Noah described the process:
“During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth -- the ‘seven fat years’ and the ‘long boom.’ Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20%. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.”
