Obama and Trust

Update: What Are We Fighting For? (Rick Reyes)

It really would not take much for President Obama to renounce and halt torture and two American wars of aggression while he's at it.

That's actually why a lot of people put him into office.

Obama is breaking a trust right now for what he stands for, for what we stand for. Will he continue?

From Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans:

Occasionally the conflict between ‘what we stand for’ and ‘what we do’ has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task at hand was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the U.S. has a ‘transcendent purpose’: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since ‘the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.’ But as a scrupulous scholar, he also recognized that the historical record was radically inconsistent with that ‘transcendent purpose.’

We should not be misled by that discrepancy, advised Morgenthau; we should not ‘confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.’ Reality is the unachieved ‘national purpose’ revealed by ‘the evidence of history as our minds reflect it.’ What actually happened was merely the ‘abuse of reality.’

The release of the torture memos led others to recognize the problem. In the New York Times, columnist Roger Cohen reviewed a new book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, by British journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who concludes that the U.S. is ‘just one great, but imperfect, country among others.’ Cohen agrees that the evidence supports Hodgson's judgment, but nonetheless regards as fundamentally mistaken Hodgson's failure to understand that ‘America was born as an idea, and so it has to carry that idea forward.’ The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as a ‘city on a hill,’ an ‘inspirational notion’ that resides ‘deep in the American psyche,’ and by ‘the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise’ demonstrated in the Western expansion. Hodgson's error, it seems, is that he is keeping to ‘the distortions of the American idea,’ ‘the abuse of reality.’ ...

‘Come Over and Help Us’

The inspirational phrase ‘city on a hill’ was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation ‘ordained by God.’ One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words ‘Come over and help us.’ The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of ‘the idea of America,’ from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a ‘shining city on the hill,’ while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the ‘humanitarian intervention’ led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described ‘the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union’ by means ‘more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru.’

Hyper Power Corrupts

In December 2000, the Clinton administration announced projections that “the United States is on course to eliminate its public debt within the next decade.”

Then George W. Bush took over.

Discussion ensued over the next two years about the consequences of paying off the public debt in toto. It was stirring to hear the Federal Reserve Chair talk about the ramifications of this scenario before Senate committees.

Attending a critical meeting in the Bush administration in November 2002, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill warned of impending fiscal crises as he objected to a new round of regressive tax cuts that O’Neill saw as locking in fiscal debt were Bush to tack in the same fiscal direction. O’Neill was fired one month later.

Vice President Dick Cheney cut O’Neill off in the meeting, saying "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due" (Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty; Simon and Schuster, 2004).

But Reagan had proved no such thing.

As Reagan presided over the catastrophic October 1987 stock market crash, Walter Isaacson noted:

What crashed was more than just the market. It was the Reagan Illusion: the Idea that there could be a defense buildup and tax cuts without a price, that the country could live beyond its means indefinitely. ... As he shouted Hooverisms over the roar of his helicopter ... or doddered precariously through his press conference, Reagan appeared embarrassingly irrelevant to a reality that he could scarcely comprehend. Stripped of his ability to create economic illusions ... he elicited the unnerving suspicion that he was the emperor with no clothes. [Time Magazine, November 2, 1987
pp. 20-21. Quoted in Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Though History, pp. 385-386; W.W. Norton, 1991] (It's worth noting that assertions that Reagan was a deregulator of markets is a myth, though he did share with George W. Bush a profound ignorance of policy, and though Reagan had neocon aspirations, they were knocked down after Iran-Contra blew. His true heir is George W. Bush who took the first term of Reagan's and streched it to its absurd and destructive conclusion.)

Now, eight years after the Clinton announcement projecting the end of public debt, we have a $10 trillion national debt and $500 billion projected annual fiscal deficit.

Many wonder whether foreign investors might decide to find greener pastures than twenty-first century America, resulting in dire consequences to the American way of life should this occur.

As “old Europe” and Latin America and indeed most of the world engage in schadenfreude, many mainstream intellectuals in America now openly wonder if America is "A Power That May Not Stay So Super."

Greed-and-crony finance, deregulation, corruption, and eight years of nihilistic politics may spell the beginning of the end of America as a hyper power and the launching of something new, something better.

As American citizens something new is our due.

We should have listened to warnings issued before. We can listen now.

From September 26, 2005 in CounterPunch, an excerpt from a piece by Paul Craig Roberts:

George W. Bush will go down in history as the president who fiddled while America lost its superpower status. Bush used deceit and hysteria to lead America into a war that is bleeding the US economically, militarily, and diplomatically. ... Once China completes its acquisition of US capabilities, it will no longer have a reason to support the dollar. ... When the dollar goes, it will affect costs, profits, interest rates and living standards in dramatic ways. Costs and interest rates will soar, and profits, living standards, equity values, bond prices and real estate will plummet. ...
These unpleasant events await only Asia's decision to curtail its support for US red ink. That will happen when this support no longer serves Asia's interest. ...
Time is running out for Republicans and Democrats to escape from the distraction of a pointless war and to focus on the real threats that endanger the United States of America.

Chomsky on Foreign Fighters in Iraq

Noam Chomsky's appearance on C-Span 2 yesterday provides another entertaining and edifying discussion on the arrogance of American foreign policy.

Among the topics is the American political culture's inability to conceive of and describe the powerful "foreign fighters" in Iraq, and the dangers they pose to regional stability.

There are over 150,000 foreign fighters in Iraq; the fighters are American troops.

But the corporate media and the political culture generally is ideologically unable or disinclined to discuss our intervention in Iraq in such terms as "foreign fighters," invaders, aggressors or terror; no matter that America has invaded, aggressed and terrorized a sovereign country.

See Chomsky.info for more information.

On a related note, I would add that the same Neocons who are so hell-bent on war are ideologically opposed to giving the veterans the care and respect that they deserve when the troops rotate home.

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Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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UK Archbishop: U.S. ‘Worst’ Imperialist; Scorns God's-Chosen-Country Notion

Update: It’s the Oil, Stupid

What's obvious in other western countries would bring forth a storm of ridicule were simple truisms repeated by the major American presidential candidates or the major newspapers and television networks.
The obvious example is our illegal and imperialistic enterprise to establish a client oil state in Iraq, under the cover of well-crafted propaganda about democracy and deterring terrorism—aka lies.

In reaction, the Archbishop of Canterbury (England) said in a wide-ranging interview with the London Times published this morning that America is the single worst imperialist power, surpassing even Britain during its imperial apex.

From the (UK) Times online, Abul Taher reports:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

Rowan Williams claimed that America’s attempt to intervene overseas by “clearing the decks” with a “quick burst of violent action” had led to “the worst of all worlds”.

In a wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim magazine, the Anglican leader linked criticism of the United States to one of his most pessimistic declarations about the state of western civilisation.

He said the crisis was caused not just by America’s actions but also by its misguided sense of its own mission. He poured scorn on the “chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”. ...


He went on to suggest that the West was fundamentally adrift: “Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.”

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

Read more at (UK) Times online.

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