Ode on American Earnings
A Poem for Campaign 2012
Goldman Sachs ($367,200)
Credit Suisse Group ($203,750)
Morgan Stanley ($199,800)
HIG Capital ($186,500)
Barclays ($157,750)
Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100)
Bank of America ($126,500)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250)
EMC Corp ($117,300)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250)
The Villages ($97,500)
Vivint Inc ($80,750)
Marriott International ($79,837)
Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250)
Bain Capital ($74,500)
UBS AG ($73,750)
Wells Fargo ($61,500)
Blackstone Group ($59,800)
Citigroup Inc ($57,050)
Bain & Co ($52,500).
Now, if that isn’t a poem that sings the (corporate) body electric, I don’t know what is. According to the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, it’s also the list of the top 20 contributors to presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign. It’s his “people,” so to speak. And if he weren’t to get the nomination, those involved (or their PACs, employees, owners, and top execs) would be someone else’s people because places like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase -- four of whose officials recently held a $2,500-a-person fundraiser for Romney in New York City -- just love presidential candidates. They are simply so much more civic-minded than the rest of us.
As it happens, another must-read ode to our screwy moment has entered our world. Just out from Thomas Frank (author of the bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas?) is a riveting new book on the Tea Party and the country. It’s focus: how for almost two post-economic meltdown years -- until, that is, Occupy Wall Street came along -- we were left in a land of activists (and Republican operatives and billionaires) promoting a set of positions so wild that, under normal conditions, they might send you to an asylum, not the White House. It is a movement, Frank writes, “in favor of the very conditions that had allowed Wall Street to loot the world.”
It’s as if, having had your city ravaged by Attila the Hun, you formed a movement in total outrage that essentially begged Attila to take another whistle-stop hop through your wrecked community. The book, with a title to die for, is Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, and Frank has a little advice for the Tea Party whose life he’s chronicled and whose rank-and-file activists could still help put a quarter-billionaire in the White House to defend his financial betters. Tom
Pity the Quarter-Billionaire
Take a Ride on the RINO in 2012
By Thomas FrankDear Tea Party Movement,
For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich -- buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.
It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney -- and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.
Grievous offenses all, I have no doubt. Still, my advice to you idealists of the right is this: get over it. Not for sell-out reasons like: Romney has the best chance of beating Obama. No. You should get behind the charging Massachusetts RINO (your favorite term for a Republican-In-Name-Only sellout type) because, in a certain paradoxical way, he may turn out to be the truest of all the candidates to the spirit of your movement.
Startling numbers of Americans are “underwater” -- homeowners and students alike -- and so, for that matter, is Congress, even if in quite a different way. In these last years, it’s been flooded with money. Millionaires, including at least 10 centimillionaires, now make up nearly half of our representatives there, and as a group, they have been growing ever richer as Americans grow ever poorer. Bad times? Never heard of them. Congress’s median net worth rose by 15% between 2004 and 2010 -- and this news, in a recent front-page New York Times piece, hardly caused a stir.
Of course, everything is relative. Compared to the giant energy companies, ours is a Congress of paupers. After all, the Big Five oil outfits (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell) announced a combined $36 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2011. Exxon alone pulled in $10.7 billion (and spent more than half of those profits simply to buy back its own stock). In the third quarter, the same five companies returned for an encore. They made another $32.6 billion in profits, with Exxon at $10.3 billion (about half of which it again spent on stock buybacks).
Out of a deep sense of civic-mindedness, they and other oil and gas companies have, in turn, showered Congress with their pocket change. From 1989 through 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, oil and gas companies gave Republicans in Congress $126 million and Democrats $42 million. Throw in a few hundred thousand dollars for the odd “independent,” and you’ve got $169 million dollars of pure oil and gas generosity over that period, which for them, as Jackie Gleason might once have said, is a “mere bag of shells.”
In case you’re interested, you, the American taxpayer, through Congressional subsidies for the oil and gas industry, reach deep into your own pockets and pony up billions every year to support those poor dears. And they turn around and pour what is, in essence, your money into the American electoral process to achieve the usual noble oil-and-gas ends. And just how well does all of that work? Here’s a little surprise: oil company political action committees (PACs) handed out $1.2 million to members of the House of Representatives in the first six months of 2011 and let’s not say “in return,” but -- consider it an unrelated fact -- 94% of the House members who received such funds voted to keep those industry subsidies flowing.
Then, of course, there’s the presidential race where, thus far, Rick Perry has raised $1.2 million from the energy sector, Mitt Romney $532,000, and Barack Obama $395,000. (If you’re talking just oil and gas, the figures are: Perry $648,000, Romney $274,000, and Obama $83,000.) And that’s just the beginning. After all, we’re officially only five days into presidential campaign 2012! And here’s the thing: you can’t always tell just where oil and gas money is likely to pop up. It might even, for instance, turn out to be behind the energy questions people have been asking in Iowa recently.
This is political (and corporate) life as we now know it, and most Americans are remarkably resigned to it. Not Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. As he showed with the ongoing dispute over the Keystone XL pipeline, when he sets his mind to it, he has a way of making us take another look at the previously accepted and acceptable. (To listen to Timothy MacBain’s first Tomcast audio interview of the new year in which McKibben discusses how the rest of us can compete with a system in which money talks, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Armed With Naïvete
Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry
By Bill McKibbenMy resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.
I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for. It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.
Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings. We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation. Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’re back, ready to do our best to keep up with what’s certain to be a tumultuous 2012, starting with an assessment of America’s lost wars in the Greater Middle East. By the way, I made an appearance on Marwan Bishara’s show “Empire” on Al-Jazeera as last year ended. If you’re interested, you can check it out by clicking here.
Finally, let me thank all of you who sent in a contribution to TomDispatch in 2011. Your generosity was startling and deeply appreciated. Of course, it’s now a new year, which means the contribution cycle begins all over again for us. Anyone who meant to donate but didn’t last year can still do so and get a signed copy of my new book, The United States of Fear, by visiting our donation page and making a contribution of $75 or more. Again, many thanks to you all! Tom]
Debacle!
How Two Wars in the Greater Middle East Revealed the Weakness of the Global Superpower
By Tom Engelhardt
It was to be the war that would establish empire as an American fact. It would result in a thousand-year Pax Americana. It was to be “mission accomplished” all the way. And then, of course, it wasn’t. And then, almost nine dismal years later, it was over (sorta).
It was the Iraq War, and we were the uninvited guests who didn’t want to go home. To the last second, despite President Obama’s repeated promise that all American troops were leaving, despite an agreement the Iraqi government had signed with George W. Bush’s administration in 2008, America’s military commanders continued to lobby and Washington continued to negotiate for 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops to remain in-country as advisors and trainers.
Only when the Iraqis simply refused to guarantee those troops immunity from local law did the last Americans begin to cross the border into Kuwait. It was only then that our top officials began to hail the thing they had never wanted, the end of the American military presence in Iraq, as marking an era of “accomplishment.” They also began praising their own “decision” to leave as a triumph, and proclaimed that the troops were departing with -- as the president put it -- “their heads held high.”
In a final flag-lowering ceremony in Baghdad, clearly meant for U.S. domestic consumption and well attended by the American press corps but not by Iraqi officials or the local media, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke glowingly of having achieved “ultimate success.” He assured the departing troops that they had been a “driving force for remarkable progress” and that they could proudly leave the country “secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history, free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace.” Later on his trip to the Middle East, speaking of the human cost of the war, he added, “I think the price has been worth it.”
And then the last of those troops really did “come home” -- if you define “home” broadly enough to include not just bases in the U.S. but also garrisons in Kuwait, elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and sooner or later in Afghanistan.
On December 14th at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the president and his wife gave returning war veterans from the 82nd Airborne Division and other units a rousing welcome. With some in picturesque maroon berets, they picturesquely hooahed the man who had once called their war "dumb." Undoubtedly looking toward his 2012 campaign, President Obama, too, now spoke stirringly of “success” in Iraq, of “gains,” of his pride in the troops, of the country’s “gratitude” to them, of the spectacular accomplishments achieved as well as the hard times endured by “the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” and of the sacrifices made by our “wounded warriors” and “fallen heroes.”
He praised “an extraordinary achievement nine years in the making,” framing their departure this way: “Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq -- all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering -- all of it has led to this moment of success... [W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”
And these themes -- including the “gains” and the “successes,” as well as the pride and gratitude, which Americans were assumed to feel for the troops -- were picked up by the media and various pundits. At the same time, other news reports were highlighting the possibility that Iraq was descending into a new sectarian hell, fueled by an American-built but largely Shiite military, in a land in which oil revenues barely exceeded the levels of the Saddam Hussein era, in a capital city which still had only a few hours of electricity a day, and that was promptly hit by a string of bombings and suicide attacks from an al-Qaeda affiliated group (nonexistent before the invasion of 2003), even as the influence of Iran grew and Washington quietly fretted.
[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.
