[Holiday Note for TomDispatch Readers: Call it a tradition by now. Rebecca Solnit has had the last word at this website for years, looking forward, looking back, and in 2010, before our year of protest even began, considering “alternatives” to what is. This year, those alternatives have been manifesting themselves everywhere and so she considers the moment we’re in. With her latest post, we at TomDispatch proudly end 2011, but we’ll be back the first week of 2012 with more unexpected thoughts, reports on subjects others ignore, and surprises of all sorts.
In the meantime, thanks go to the stalwart crew that keeps TD going: Associate Editor Nick Turse, who will return in 2012 with more of his changing-face-of-empire series; Associate Editor Andy Kroll, who will again be on the economic beat for us; Timothy MacBain, gearing up for another fantastic year of TD audio interviews; Joe Duax and Dimitri Siavelis making sure that the site is always shipshape and ready to roll; Christopher Holmes, whose eagle eye keeps error in our dispatches to a miraculous minimum; and Erica Eichelberger, who will be expanding TD social networking in the new year. I thank them all. With them around, life couldn’t be better.
Last but hardly least, thanks to all of you who read this site, write in with thoughts, encouragement, and criticism, contribute the $$$ that help keep us going, pass TD material on to others, and generally spread the word. What more could we ask? Have a good holiday. (Final, completely subliminal message: buy a copy of my new book, The United States of Fear, before the year ends.) See you in 2012! Tom]
The other evening, I took the subway to the very bottom of Broadway, reputedly the longest street in the world, for a rally of New York’s transit workers. Their contract expires in mid-January and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is reportedly calling on them for draconian givebacks the next time around. It’s a tough moment for unions in negotiations everywhere. (Only executives never seem to be asked to give back anything of significance.) Still, it was a vigorous rally of perhaps 500 members of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union, other supporters, and some Occupy Wall Street types. A string of union officials and local politicians addressed the crowd, penned in as usual by the police, before a representative of the Occupy movement, a young Verizon worker, rose to speak energetically about direct democracy and the union movement to shouts, cheers, and the shrill treble of whistles blown by the assembled transit workers who had offered early support to Occupy Wall Street.
That a labor rally even wanted the imprimatur of the Occupy movement was evidence that our world is in the process of rapid change, but what came next was more striking. As the last speaker put down the mic, the crowd, whistles blowing, signs bobbing, headed for Zuccotti Park, the former campground of the OWS movement, where, having filed into the now fenced in, well guarded “park”-cum-prison, they conducted another, more spontaneous rally. And this was just one night in New York.
Four months ago, when it came to rallies, protests, demonstrations, in any given week next to nothing was happening. Today, in my hometown, you would have to devote your life to nothing else simply to keep up with what’s going on just about every day. And New York is hardly unique. Something has distinctly come to life across the country, around the world. In mid-December, Muscovites took to the streets of the Russian capital, and now in southern China, thousands of villagers have been occupying their own village in the face of police and troops to protest a land grab by local officials.
Those villagers may or may not have heard of Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring or the European summer, but face it, something is in the air and it’s spreading. It’s the zeitgeist of this moment. If you want to avoid it, try the moon. Chinese villagers can feel it, and so can rattled Chinese officials, who gave in to key demands of those angry villagers. So, too, has TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Long before the rest of us, she sensed that something was indeed coming and, in that spirit, has been the voice of hope at this website. Now, she ends TomDispatch’s 2011 by considering what may be arising on this disaster planet. Tom
Compassion Is Our New Currency
Notes on 2011’s Preoccupied Hearts and Minds
By Rebecca SolnitUsually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.
The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”
The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: ‘Tis the season, of course, and it’s clear that some of you feel in an end-of-the-year giving mood, which is wonderful for TomDispatch and our future operations. If others among you are suddenly gripped by the giving spirit, do visit our donation page where, for $75 or more, you can get a signed copy of my new book, The United States of Fear. By the way, for those of you who have written in and asked, it’s now available in e-book form. Just click here to check it out.]
It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your drone is?
Oh, the confusion of it all! The U.S. military now insists it was deeply befuddled when it claimed that a super-secret advanced RQ-170 Sentinel drone (aka "the beast of Kandahar") which fell into Iranian hands on December 4th -- evidently while surveying suspected nuclear sites -- was lost patrolling the Afghan border. The military, said a spokesman, "did not have a good understanding of what was going on because it was a CIA mission."
Whatever happened, that lost drone story hit the headlines in a way that allowed everyone their Warholian 15 minutes of fame. Dick Cheney went on the air to insist that President Obama should have sent Air Force planes into Iran to blow the grounded Sentinel to bits. (Who cares about sparking off hostilities or sending global oil prices skyrocketing?) President Obama formally asked for the plane’s return, but somehow didn’t have high hopes that the Iranians would comply. (Check out Gary Powers and the downing of his U-2 spy plane over Russia in 1960 for a precedent.) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta swore we would never stop our Afghan-based drone surveillance of Iran. Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked that his country be kept out of any “adversarial relations between Iran and the United States.” (Fat chance!) The Iranians, who displayed the plane, insisted proudly that they had hacked into it, “spoofed” its navigational controls, and brought it in for a relatively soft landing. And Kim Kardashian... oops, wrong story.
All in all, it was a little robotic circus. All three rings’ worth. Meanwhile, drones weren’t having such a good time of it elsewhere either, even if no one was paying much attention. The half-hidden drone story of the week wasn’t on the Iranian side of the Afghan border, but on the Pakistani side. There, in that country’s tribal borderlands, the CIA had for years been conducting an escalating drone air campaign, hundreds of strikes, often several a week, against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. In the wake of an “incident” in which U.S. air strikes killed 24 Pakistani troops at two border posts, however, the Pakistanis closed the border to U.S. supplies for the Afghan war (significantly increasing the cost of that conflict), kicked the U.S. out of Shamsi air base, the CIA’s main drone facility in the country, and threatened to shoot down any U.S. drones over its territory. In the process, they seem to have forced the Obama administration to shut down its covert drone air campaign. At this point, there have been no drone attacks for almost a month.
When he was still CIA Director, Leon Panetta termed the Agency's drone campaign the “only game in town.” Now it’s “on hold.” ("There is concern that another hit [by the drones] will push US-Pakistan relations past the point of no return," one official told The Long War Journal. "We don't know how far we can push them [Pakistan], how much more they are willing to tolerate.") After those hundreds of strikes and significant civilian casualties, which have helped turn the Pakistani public against the U.S. -- according to a recent poll, a staggering 97% of Pakistanis oppose the attacks -- it’s a stunning reversal, however temporary and little noted.
In other words, we’ve come a long way, baby, since the moment in 2001 when Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage reportedly stormed into the office of Pakistan’s intelligence director and told him to either ally with Washington in the fight against al-Qaeda or prepare to be bombed “back to the Stone Age.” As the U.S. leaves Iraq with its tail between its legs, the setback in Pakistan (as in Iran) should be considered a gauge of just how little Washington’s massive high-tech military edge, drones and otherwise, has been able to alter the shifting power equation on the planet.
In the latest piece in his new changing-face-of-empire series, TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse explores why, despite its advocates' claims, America’s newest wonder weapon will never prove a game changer. Tom
The Drone That Fell From the Sky
What a Busted Robot Airplane Tells Us About the American Empire in 2012 and Beyond
By Nick TurseThe drone had been in the air for close to five hours before its mission crew realized that something was wrong. The oil temperature in the plane’s turbocharger, they noticed, had risen into the “cautionary” range. An hour later, it was worse, and it just kept rising as the minutes wore on. While the crew desperately ran through its “engine overheat” checklist trying to figure out the problem, the engine oil temperature, too, began skyrocketing.
By now, they had a full-blown in-flight emergency on their hands. “We still have control of the engine, but engine failure is imminent,” the pilot announced over the radio.
Almost two hours after the first signs of distress, the engine indeed failed. Traveling at 712 feet per minute, the drone clipped a fence before crashing.
[Note to TomDispatch Readers: As the holiday season approaches, remember that TomDispatch has championed a number of wonderful books in the last months. In fact, I think it says something about this site that it’s associated with such a set of books. Among them: Adam Hochschild’s bestselling history of World War I, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (front page rave by the late Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review and one book I’m definitely buying as a gift this year); State Department official Peter Van Buren’s widely praised, devastating account of the Iraq War up close and personal, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, a book far too honest for the government for which he works; the 10th anniversary reissue of Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic and all-too-up-to-date Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; Ariel Dorfman’s moving memoir Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile; Glenn Greenwald’s latest, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, the book for our Occupy Wall Street American world (and speaking of Wall Street, don't miss Steve Fraser's now classic history of The Street, Every Man a Speculator); anything by Rebecca Solnit, but why not start with A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; Andrew Bacevich’s all-too-on-target Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War; the latest from Frances Fox Piven -- the woman Glenn Beck loves to hate -- Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?; the incomparable Noam Chomsky’s updated 9-11: Was There an Alternative?; and one prophetic older book whose time -- with our new age of protest -- has finally come, Jonathan Schell’s must-read volume, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.
And that’s just to scratch the surface of TD-associated books this year. Finally, of course, there’s my new book, The United States of Fear (a signed copy of which can be had for a contribution to this site of $75 or more). If you are an Amazon buyer, click on any of the above book links, let it take you to Amazon.com, and pick up some of these books (or anything else, book or otherwise) and not only will you have a wonderful holiday gift to give, but you’ll have given a gift to TomDispatch. We get a small cut of your purchase at no cost to you. Tom]
The Four Occupations of Planet Earth
How the Occupied Became the Occupiers
By Tom Engelhardt
On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian demonstrators.
“We exist!” Think of it as a simple statement of fact, an implicit demand to be taken seriously (or else), and undoubtedly an expression of wonder, verging on a question: “We exist?”
And who could blame them for shouting it? Or for the wonder? How miraculous it was. Yet another country long immersed in a kind of popular silence suddenly finds voice, and the demonstrators promptly declare themselves not about to leave the stage when the day -- and the demonstration -- ends. Who guessed beforehand that perhaps 50,000 Muscovites would turn out to protest a rigged electoral process in a suddenly restive country, along with crowds in St. Petersburg, Tomsk, and elsewhere from the south to Siberia?
In Tahrir Square in Cairo, they swore: “This time we’re here to stay!” Everywhere this year, it seemed that they -- “we” -- were here to stay. In New York City, when forced out of Zuccotti Park by the police, protesters returned carrying signs that said, “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”
And so it seems, globally speaking. Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Madison, New York, Santiago, Homs. So many cities, towns, places. London, Sana’a, Athens, Oakland, Berlin, Rabat, Boston, Vancouver... it could take your breath away. And as for the places that aren’t yet bubbling -- Japan, China, and elsewhere -- watch out in 2012 because, let’s face it, “we exist.”
Everywhere, the “we” couldn’t be broader, often remarkably, even strategically, ill defined: 99% of humanity containing so many potentially conflicting strains of thought and being: liberals and fundamentalists, left-wing radicals and right-wing nationalists, the middle class and the dismally poor, pensioners and high-school students. But the “we” couldn’t be more real.
You might almost think the news was good. The Europeans, so headlines tell us, have at least a “partial solution” to the Euro-zone crisis (until, of course, the next round of panic is upon us); the stock market has sort of rebounded (until the next precipitous plunge); the unemployment rate “dropped sharply” to 8.6% in November, the lowest it’s been in more than two years (thanks in part to the strangest category around -- the 315,000 people who grew too discouraged last month to look for work and so were no longer considered unemployed but out of the labor force); and talk of a double-dip recession seems on holiday. So why pay attention to the modest-sized Associated Press story you were likely to find, if at all, deep inside your newspaper (as on page 21 of last Friday's Washington Post)? It was headlined “Household wealth down in 3rd quarter,” with the telling subhead, “Corporate cash continues to grow, Fed report says.”
Still, if you wanted to sum up the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%, you couldn’t ask for better. In fact, household wealth wasn’t just “down” 4%, it was the “biggest loss of wealth” for Americans “in more than two years,” and those corporate cash stockpiles didn’t simply continue to grow, they reached “record levels” at $2.1 trillion. Since American wealth is deeply linked to homeownership, the fact that “most economists expect home prices to keep falling” wasn’t exactly good news, nor when it came to pensions and retirement was the July-to-September 12% drop in “the average balance in 401(k) plans managed by Fidelity Investments, the largest workplace savings plan provider.” In sum, the average American household managed to lose $21,000 dollars in those three months, a total loss in household wealth of $2.4 trillion.
You might think that would make front pages nationwide, but we’re evidently too busy dealing with complex subjects like whether the $10,000 bet offered by Mitt Romney, the $202 million man, during Saturday’s Republican debate meant he was “out of touch” with normal Americans. In the meantime, TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich unerringly home in on a fast-changing American reality first brought to national attention by Occupy Wall Street: that, as the middle class goes down the chute, we're left in a world in which 99% "R" Us. This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and will appear in print in the latest issue of that magazine. Tom
The Making of the American 99%
And the Collapse of the Middle Class
By Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich“Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”
-- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the wealth distribution -- the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich,” in recent years.
Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.
Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the affluent.
[For TomDispatch Readers: Thanks to all of you who are sending in end-of-the-year contributions. For $75 (or more), you can still get my new book, The United States of Fear, autographed to you -- or to a friend for a holiday gift. (Both my recent books, signed, are available for $140.) Just go to the TD donation page to learn more. It’s a great way to help keep this site going in 2012! Or if you’re already planning for the holidays, follow any TD book link to Amazon.com, buy The United States of Fear (or anything else) for a friend, relative, colleague, child, parent, spouse, and we get a small cut of the purchase price at no cost to you. Tom]
Of all American military training programs around the world, the most publicized in recent years has been the one building up a local security force to replace U.S. (and NATO) troops as they ever so slowly withdraw from Afghanistan. By 2014, that country is supposed to possess an army and police force of at least 350,000. At staggering expense, their recruitment and training has been a Washington priority for years. But here’s the twist: just about every year the training program has been operating, reports have appeared on its striking lack of success. These almost always mention the same problems: massive desertion rates (with “ghost soldiers” still being paid), heavy drug use, illiteracy, an unwillingness to fight, corruption, an inability of Afghan units to act independently of the U.S. military, and so on. Year after year, Washington’s response to such problems has been no less repetitive. It has decided to pour yet more money into the program (over $29 billion through 2010). Again repetitively, with each new infusion of money come claims of “progress” and “improvement” -- until, of course, the next dismal report arrives.
In 2011, the U.S. will spend almost $12 billion on the further training and upgrading of those security forces, with approximately $11 billion more promised for 2012. So here’s a shock: the latest reports on the program are now appearing and the news is not exactly upbeat. A recent summary of them described the situation this way: “According to U.S. government sources, only one of the Afghan National Army’s 161 units is capable of operating independently; this represents a regression from the four units that were rated as independent in June. No units of the police are capable of functioning without direct coalition assistance, and no sections of the ministries of Interior and Defense (which will soon be charged with managing the security situation) are capable of autonomous action... One in seven soldiers and police desert each month, and for every 10 soldiers trained another 13 trainees drop out.”
According to Steve Coll of the New Yorker magazine, the U.S. intelligence community is just completing a new national intelligence estimate on Afghanistan which reaches gloomy conclusions about the post-2014 fate of a force that impoverished country couldn't possibly afford and that will cost the U.S. $10 billion or more a year to maintain into the distant future. It is, by the way, nothing short of remarkable that the U.S. military trainers have proven quite so unsuccessful in a country famed for its martial tradition where, over more than three decades, war has become a way of life and the Taliban seems to have little trouble motivating its fighters to operate independently, despite lacking billions of dollars and foreign trainers.
Of course, Afghanistan is just a single pitstop (quagmire?) for globe-spanning, if little noted, Pentagon programs in which the U.S. military performs training missions with scads of other militaries. As he has recently with U.S. special operations forces deployments and the locations of drone bases worldwide, TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse turns his attention to an aspect of the U.S. military's global operations that Americans know next to nothing about, this time highlighting previously shadowy Pentagon training exercises in the Greater Middle East. These pieces are part of a new “Changing Face of Empire” series he's writing, which will be an ongoing focus for this website in 2012. Tom
Making Repression Our Business
The Pentagon’s Secret Training Missions in the Middle East
By Nick TurseAs the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.
As state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there. During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings.
These recurrent joint-training exercises, seldom reported in the media and rarely mentioned outside the military, constitute the core of an elaborate, longstanding system that binds the Pentagon to the militaries of repressive regimes across the Middle East. Although the Pentagon shrouds these exercises in secrecy, refusing to answer basic questions about their scale, scope, or cost, an investigation by TomDispatch reveals the outlines of a region-wide training program whose ambitions are large and wholly at odds with Washington’s professed aims of supporting democratic reforms in the Greater Middle East.
