CHALMERS JOHNSON, 1931–2010: A Depression boy; a lieutenant junior grade assigned to a Navy “rust bucket” without a name at the end of the Korean War; a student of the radicalization of Chinese peasants under the Japanese “loot-all, kill-all, burn-all” campaigns of the late 1930s; a staunch anticommunist nonetheless capable, in one of his many books, of slipping, in a deeply empathic way, into the mindset of a World War II Japanese communist spy; a supporter of the US war in Vietnam and the rescuer of the State Department China hand John Service after anticommunist witch hunts had destroyed his livelihood; a valued consultant to the CIA and an eminent scholar of Japanese state capitalism. When the cold war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States refused to demobilize and come in from the cold, he did.
He could have lived comfortably with his eminence, but in the face of a new reality, he refused. His was a remarkable tale. In 1995 he visited the Japanese island of Okinawa for the first time and was shocked by the thirty-odd US bases there (“the American Raj,” he called it), and from that moment he turned his back on our “unacknowledged empire.” He recanted former positions— “In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the [Vietnam] antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong”—and labeled himself sardonically a “spear-carrier for empire.” He turned his razor-sharp mind and accumulated experience against US militarism while mapping out our global “empire of bases,” a situation strangely unnoticed by Americans but painfully obvious to others.
He had the creds to do so. The title of his first book of this era, Blowback, published in 2000, picked up a CIA term, “tradecraft” (“the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people”), and put it into our vocabulary. In that book, he all but predicted a 9/11-like fate for us (“acts committed in service to an empire but never acknowledged as such have a tendency to haunt the future”) and, like a classic Cassandra, found his book largely ignored until events drove it to prominence and bestsellerdom. From then on, he never stopped warning the rest of us that if we didn’t choose to dismantle our empire ourselves, far worse would be in store for us.
His was an all-American odyssey, and in his final decades he was a man on a mission. A sparrow of a figure, ever more crippled in his losing battle with rheumatoid arthritis, he was in every other way a giant. To those who knew him, it seemed a reasonable bet that he would beat death at its own game.
No such luck. He died on November 20. This country, lost at sea and incapable of downsizing its global mission, still needs him. If only we could bring him back for one more round. TOM ENGELHARDT
GOP BLOCKS FAIR PAY: Women fell two votes short on November 17 in their efforts to get paid the same as men for the same work. Senate Republicans, deciding that equal pay for women should not even be considered, blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act from moving to the floor. The House had passed the bill in January 2009, and President Obama had pledged to sign it. The cloture vote was fifty-eight “yes,” forty-one “no,” with Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski not voting. All other Republicans voted no, along with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the lone dissenting Democrat.
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The measure would have updated the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by closing loopholes, strengthening incentives to prevent pay discrimination and prohibiting retaliation against workers who inquire about employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages, according to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which has been pushing for its passage for ten years. It also would have required employers to show that wage gaps are a result of factors other than gender, to collect better data on wages and develop training for women on salary negotiations.
The vote was decried by AAUW, the ACLU, the National Women’s Law Center and other civic and labor organizations that had been pushing for passage. “This was a missed opportunity to make history and jump-start real economic change for American women and their families,” said AAUW executive director Linda Hallman. “While the Senate’s action is difficult to comprehend given the stark reality that most families depend on the paychecks of women, our effort to close the pay gap is far from over.”
Opponents, including Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce, have said that they’re concerned the bill would lead to more employees filing suits, which would be costly for employers to fight. That argument has been used in every civil rights issue regarding discrimination, said Deborah Vagins, legislative counsel to the ACLU. “There has been other civil rights legislation to fight discrimination that business has supported. This bill really has nothing for businesses to worry about, especially if they’re already complying with the Equal Pay Act,” Vagins said. Paycheck Fairness, she explained, is for women working for employers who aren’t in compliance.
According to the AAUW, on average, women still make only seventy-seven cents for every dollar men earn. By some estimates, the group says, a woman could lose $500,000 to $1 million over a forty-year career. DENISE DI STEPHAN
KUDOS TO CREATIVE CITIZENS: Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and author, educator and environmentalist Bill McKibben have been chosen to receive the annual $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. This is the first year the prize has been awarded to two winners. Richards and McKibben will be honored on December 6 at The Nation Institute‘s Annual Dinner Gala in New York City.
The Puffin Foundation and The Nation Institute are co-sponsors of the award, which is given to individuals who have challenged the status quo through distinctive, courageous, imaginative and socially responsible works of significance.
Perry Rosenstein, president of The Puffin Foundation Ltd., said, “Bill McKibben and Cecile Richards are leaders, pure and simple. In thought and in action, their work—whether it’s protecting our precious natural world or our precious right of self-determination— inspires and emboldens us. They are exemplary lifelong public citizens: creative and tough, dedicated and ardent.”
