This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

Excerpted from the May 21, 1988 Issue

There has been a commotion over the disclosure by former White House chief of staff Don Regan that important White House decisions have been consequent upon the analysis of Joan Quigley, a soothsayer in San Francisco, and that Nancy Reagan would never permit her husband to leave home without one or even two time-and-motion studies by this same soothsayer.

Much of the clucking is being done by people who themselves turn zealously to their favored horoscope. The United States retains, unusually for an advanced industrial society, about the same level of religious superstition as Bangladesh. It is scarcely news that the President is in the mainstream of popular American credulity. He has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens. Nor has Reagan been shy in disclosing that he believes that Armageddon may occur “in our lifetime,” at which point the elect will defy elementary principles of thermodynamics and rise to heaven in a kind of celestial waterspout, leaving the sinners to burn below.

Regan, at one time the Secretary of the Treasury, reveals that in his four years at that post he never once enjoyed a one-on-one colloquy with the chief executive and that in the devising of economic policy, “I was flying by the seat of my pants.” In fact his pants were under strict orders from Mission Control, in the form of the Federal Reserve’s Paul Volcker, who was the effective president for most of Reagan’s tenure. Even so, there is no reason to suppose that Quigley’s counsel was inferior to that of analysts following more orthodox routes of economic prediction. As Regan himself well knows, the investment strategies of many Wall Street players follow what is called “random walk” patterns of speculation, which concede the superiority of chance, within a finite range of alternatives, to human intellection.

The image of two women, one of them peering into a crystal ball, guiding the policies of the United States, is irresistible in prompting coarse calumnies both on the termagant Nancy and her pliant husband’s abdication of executive responsibility. But reflection should excite a more kindly analysis. She apparently had Quigley draw up Mikhail Gorbachev’s chart, the better to understand the prophet of glasnost. To judge by such examples of their work as were released at the time of Watergate, it was probably superior in penetration to the profile of the Soviet leader prepared by the C.I.A.’s team of psychiatrists. It certainly seems to have persuaded Ron that here at last was a man he could do business with.

Astrology is entirely consonant with Reaganism, representing negation of the moral sense, abdication of initiative to the motions of the planets as parsed by the precise time and whereabouts of Ronald Reagan’s birth. So astrology is therefore the twinkling penumbra of Reagan’s incandescent belief in the motions of the “free market.” Submission to the “laws” of this same utterly imaginary free market permits him and his fellow believers (a fair slice of the ruling class) to argue that intervention in the market’s mysterious workings, to subsidize the needy or house the homeless, is to tinker with an inspired mechanism and court disaster.

Alexander Cockburn (1941–2012) was the “Beat the Devil” columnist from 1984 until his death.

A new film, Kill the Messenger, tells the story of Gary Webb, who as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury-News in the mid-1990s wrote a widely read series on the CIA’s relationships with Los Angeles crack dealers and the Nicaraguan Contras. Webb’s investigation earned him the wrath of the US government and its mainstream media abetters, who sicced vengeful journalists on Webb’s trail—devoting far greater resources to poking holes in Webb’s story than they ever had or have since to investigating the actual thrust of his claims. As The Nation’s Greg Grandin writes, “Webb was open to attack because the Los Angeles Times alone assigned seventeen reporters to leverage the inherent mysteries of the national security state to cast doubt on Webb.” Hounded out of journalism and into a deep depression, Webb committed suicide in December 2004. The following month, Alexander Cockburn—co-author, with Jeffrey St. Clair, of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (1999), partially about Webb—published this column:

* * *

Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them with careerlong ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News, for besmirching the agency’s fine name by charging it, in his 1996 “Dark Alliance” series, with complicity in the importing of cocaine into the United States.

There are certain things you aren’t supposed to mention in public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the United States used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year (even though Seymour Hersh treated the CIA with undue kindness in The Road to Abu Ghraib). A prime no-no is that the US government has used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also that the CIA’s complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the agency was founded, in 1947. That last one is the line Webb stepped over. He paid for his presumption by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press. His own paper turned on him.

Friday, December 10, Webb died in his Sacramento apartment from what seems to have been a self-inflicted gunshot blast to the head. The notices of his passing in many newspapers were as nasty as ever. The Los Angeles Times took care to note that even after the “Dark Alliance” uproar Webb’s career had been “troubled,” offering as evidence the following: “While working for another legislative committee in Sacramento, Webb wrote a report accusing the California Highway Patrol of unofficially condoning and even encouraging racial profiling in its drug interdiction program.” The effrontery of the man! “Legislative officials released the report in 1999,” the story piously continued, “but cautioned that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes,” no doubt meaning that Webb didn’t have dozens of CHP officers stating under oath, on the record, that they were picking on blacks and Hispanics. There were similar fountains of outrage in 1996 that the CIA hadn’t been given enough space in Webb’s series to solemnly swear that never a gram of cocaine had passed under its nose but that it had been seized and turned over to the DEA or US Customs.

In 1998 Jeffrey St. Clair and I published Whiteout, a book about the relationships among the CIA, drugs and the press since the agency’s founding. We also examined the Webb affair in detail. On a lesser scale and at lower volume, Whiteout elicited the same sort of abuse Webb drew. It was a long book stuffed with well-documented facts, over which the critics vaulted to charge us, as they did Webb, with “conspiracy-mongering,” even as they accused us of recycling “old news.” (The oddest was a multipage screed in The Nation flaying us for giving aid and comfort to the war on drugs and not addressing the truly important question, Why do people take drugs? As I said at the time, To get high, stupid!)

One of the CIA’s favored modes of self-protection is the “uncover-up.” The agency first denies with passion, then later concedes, in muffled tones, the charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the agency’s recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officers; experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile; the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the training of murderous police and soldiers in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the United States.

True to form, after Webb’s series raised a storm, particularly in the black community, the CIA issued categorical denials. Then came the noisy pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz. On December 19, 1997, stories in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus and the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously, both saying the same thing: Hitz had finished his investigation. He had found no link, “directly or indirectly,” between the CIA and the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories, neither of the two journalists had seen the report itself.

The actual report, so loudly heralded, received almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page document—the first of two volumes—found Hitz making one damning admission after another, including an account of a meeting between a pilot who was making drug/arms runs between San Francisco and Costa Rica with two contra leaders who were also partners with the San Francisco-based contra/drug smuggler Norwin Meneses. Present at this encounter in Costa Rica was a man who said his name was Ivan Gomez, identified by one of the contras as the CIA’s “man in Costa Rica.” The pilot told Hitz that Gomez said he was there “ensuring that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone’s pocket.” The second volume of Inspector General Hitz’s investigation, released in the fall of 1998, buttressed Webb’s case even more tightly, as James Risen conceded in a story in the New York Times on October 10 of that year.

So why did the top-tier press savage Webb and parrot the CIA’s denials? Another New York Times reporter, Keith Schneider, was asked by In These Times back in 1987 why he had devoted a three-part series in the Times to attacks on the Iran/contra hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry. Schneider said such a story could “shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass.” Kerry did uncover mountains of evidence. So did Webb. But neither of them got the only thing that would have satisfied Schneider, Pincus and all the other critics: a signed confession of CIA complicity by the Director of Central Intelligence himself. Short of that, I’m afraid we’re left with “innuendo,” “conspiracy-mongering” and “old news.” We’re also left with the memory of some great work by a very fine journalist who deserved a lot better than he got.

* * *

Curious about how we covered something? E-mail me at rkreitner@thenation.com. Subscribers to The Nation can access our fully searchable digital archive, which contains thousands of historic articles, essays and reviews, letters to the editor and editorials dating back to July 6, 1865.

This Beat the Devil column was originally published in the July 2, 1990, issue of The Nation.
 
Chico Mendes in the First World

Rejoicing at the Tuesday morning news that Ireland held England to a draw in the World Cup, I felt benign enough to give a lift to a couple of young persons heading north up Route 1 from Monterey. They were aiming for Samoa. The Samoa they had in mind was the little port town just west of Eureka, in Humboldt County. Here, scheduled for June 20, will be the first major action in the campaign known as Mississippi Summer in the CaliforniRa edwoods, or, as it is more succinctly termed, Redwood Summer.

From Samoa, Louisiana Pacific ships out rough-cut wood stripped from private and public lands. This summer the timber giants plan to cut at an even more insanely rapacious rate than ever, but this summer they will also face a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience. A couple of weeks ago California honored thee merging oppositional politics of the1990s. The honor came in a traditionally American fashion. Someone tried to assassinate Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney.

Bari is one of the Earth First! activists who dreamed up Redwood Summer. She, like others, has seen that one of the crucial coaIitions to be built in the coming decade is between environmentalists and labor. Unlike many others, she has matched action to analysis. She talked to workers in the lumber mills, sought to make common cause with loggers who have families to feed but who know well enough that over-cutting will soon put them out of work.

In the case of Chico Mendes, assassins tried to annul the equation he made between the concerns of Brazilian labor and the environment by the simple expedient of ambushing him by his back door andb lowing a hole in his chest. In the case of Bari and her fellow Earth Firster Darryl Cherney, the would-be killer put a pipe bomb in her car, which exploded as they drove through Oakland. The blast broke her pelvis. Just a tiny shift in the blast of the bomb anwdo uslhde have been as dead as Mendes.

In the days after the murder of Mendes the First World press was derisive about Brazilian police and Brazilian justice. Mendes had identified those plotting his murder to Romeu rima, the federal police chief, who did nothing. Only now, a year and a half after thek illing, does it look as though the assassins will eventually come to trial. In the days after the attempted murder of Bari and Cherney most of thper ess did not deride the Oaklapnodl ice, who arrested the victims, Bari and Cherney, as prime suspects.

Pose a political threat to Business As Usual and sooner or later, mostly sooner, someone will try to kill you. Twenty years after, it usually turns out that the cops knew who the “someone” was, followed the conspiracy, stood by as bomb was planted or rifle cocked, failed to alert the victim, let the perpetrator slip free. I told my hitchhiker friends heading up to Redwood Summer to watch out for undercover cops and provocateurs being drafted into the Redwood Empire on the usual missions of surveillance and entrapment. There’s mounting evidence that local police departments and the FBI have decided to get much rougher with environmental activists, who can look forward to traditional all-American enforcement procedures as endured by the Central American solidarity movement in the 1980s, and by antiwar groups, student organizations, black and labor militants, socialist groups and Native Americans in the relevant seasons of their struggle.

Wear the badge of environmental radicalism and you’re a citizen automatically under suspicion. On June 10 the San Francisco Examiner’s environmental writer, Jane Kay, reviewed some recent cases of harsh tactics by enforcement agencies. In Mobile, Arizona, three Greenpeace organizers were among dozens dragged from a May 7 hearing on a toxic waste incinerator. Deputies stunned five with electric guns and then held them in handcuffs at an airfield until the hearing was over. Eighteen people face misdemeanor and felony charges. Also in Arizona, Earth First! founder Dave Foreman and four others await trial in Phoenix in September on charges of planning to disable a pumping station. Centrtal to the case is an FBI undercover agent who, on a tape unearthed by the defense from the FBI’s own files, discusses a plan to “pop” Foreman, to “send a message.”

Of some major environmental groups reached on June 14, a Sierra Club spokesperson said that the club didn’t “have a position on the Earth First! bombing” and, as regards Redwood Summer, proclaimed that “we have always deplored and denounced violence and call upon California law enforcement to act vigorously and impartially to maintain peace,” and said it would not participate in illegal events “including civil disobedience.” Take that. Mahatma. Neither the Environmental Defense Fund nor World Wildlife Fund had any reaction to the bombing or to Redwood Summer, and the word from the National Wildlife Federation was that “I don’t think we’ve issued a statement on the bombing and nor do we endorse Redwood Summer.” In refreshing contrast to this spineless pack is Greenpeace, which issued a vigorous statement denouncing the charges against Bari and Cherney and said that it was “assisting in every way we can” with Redwood Summer.

The Fate of the Panthers

 
Before I left them off on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, I reminder the hitchhikers, who were young enough not to know the history in anything but the haziest if outlines, of what happened to the Black Panthers. These days people lament the the despairing drug culture of the ghetto without adding the all-important corollary that the promise of vigorous political leadership there was literally exterminated by the police a generation ago. Armed black leftists were unacceptable to the system.

By 1967 J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security. In an August 25 memorandum to the FBI's Albany office, the director confided his counter-intelligence program (Cointelpro), whose purpose was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spoken, membership and supporters."

It would be interesting to get the reaction of Eastern European dissidents, now in positions of power and lauding the American Way, to what happened after Hoover announced those plans. Mark Albert, in his fine book, The Sixties Papers, explains how "FBI special agents sought to divide the Panther organization by spreading false rumors and misinformation. They composed letters to Party members implicating Panther leaders in stealing from the Party treasury, taking money from the police, maintaining secret Swiss bank accounts and having liaisons with white women. Local police forces were encouraged to launch raids against panther headquarters." One of the most dissolute efforts to divide the black community involved the FBI's manipulation of a feud between the Black panthers and Ron Karenga's US Organization, which advocated cultural nationalism as against the Panthers' revolutionary internationalism. The FBI printed and distributed cartoons and caricatures purporting to be from US to the Panthers or vice versa. After US members killed Sylvester Bell, a Panther, in San Diego in 1967, an FBI memo stated, "In view of the recent killing of BPP member Sylvester Bell, a new cartoon is being considered in hopes that it will assist in the continuance of the rift between the BPP and US." Among the crude depictions the cartoons showed US members congratulating themselves over the corpses of John  Huggins and Bunchy Crater (two Panthers killed in LA un 1969 by US militants), and Panthers referring to US members as "pork chop niggers." in 1971, according to Kenneth O'Reilly in his book Racial Matters, Karenga wrote of the FBI's strategems, " We knew it wasn't going to be a tea party, but we didn't anticipate how violent the US government would get."

Standard Cointelpro techniques included telephone interception, monitoring shipments of The Black Panther and close surveillance of meetings, rallies, headquarters and individuals. During 1969 alone the FBI and police conducted thirty-one raids in Panther offices in eleven states. They also arranged assassinations. According to Frank Donner in The Age of Surveillance, twenty-eight Panthers were killed during an eight-teen period in the late 1960s, "some direct victims of aggressive intelligence action and others traceable to Bureau-assisted feuds." The most notorious liquidation was the death squad killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Chicago Panther leaders. In a predawn raid on December 4, 1969, directed by the Illinois State State’s Attorney’s office but instigated by the FBI, Chicago police fired multiple rounds of ammunition into the apartment of Fred Hampton, killing him and Clark in their sleep and wounding four others. John Kifner, then in the Chicago bureau of The New York Times, was the first reporter on the scene. He examined the bullet holes and soon determined that what had been described as a fierce exchange of fire had in fact been a unilateral police barrage, with just one shot attributable to a Panther inside.

Most of the police gunfire went to the inside corners of the apartment, where the beds were located. Hampton’s personal personal bodyguard, William O’Neal, was an F.B.I. infiltrator and had given his contact, Roy Mitchell, a floor plan of the apartment. Mitchell passed the floor plant o theS tate’s Attorney’s office before the attack. From the autopsy it was disclosed years later that O’Neal had also given Hampton a sleeping drug the night before the raid. For his services, the FBI paid O’Neal more than $10,000 from January 1969 through July 1970.

In its attempt to crush the Black Panthers the FBI engineered frequent arrests on the flimsiest of pretexts. Recall the case of Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt. Pratt, a Vietnam War hero, joined the Panthers aftehri s discharge. In 1970 he was indicted by an LA County grand jury for murder, assault and robbery. He was convicted of murder and robbery, primarily on the evidence of an FBI informant named Julius Butler. Pratt, who drew a life sentence, said he’d been framed. Gradually revelations surfaced supporting him: that the FBI had sent Cointelpro agents to infiltratthee defense; that the bureau had “lost” a wiretap log that could have confirmed Pratt’s alibi. Nevertheless, Pratt is still incarcerated. Amnesty International studied the Pratt case and concluded that justice demands a new trial. Noam Chomsky summed up the entire history well in his introduction to Nelson Blackstock’s COINTELPRO:

A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the motivation for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther party. The report describes the party as “the most active and dangerous black extremist group m the United States.” Its “hard-core members’’ were estimated at about 800, but “a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 per cent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, lncluding 43 per cent of blacks under 21 years of age.” On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive agencies of the state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial soclal or polltical force. We may add that in this case, government repression proved quite successful.

Julia Cade of the ACLU National Prison Project tells my colleague Peter Rothberg, who has been delving into the history of the extermination of the Black Panthers and who prepared this column, that at least fifteen former party members are still in prison. She is emphatic that these are political prisoners, often serving life terms. Perhaps President Havel might care to mention them and victims of the FBI’s war against the American Indian Movement the next time he addresses Congress and receives dutiful praise from E.L. Doctorow for his “morally beautiful” sentiments about the virtues of the American political system. Meanwhile, Judi Bari, nearly killed at the onset of Redwood Summer, lies in her hospital bed as an advertisement of just how quickly this system gets nasty when the chips are down. (For information about ongoing events of Redwood Summer, call 707-468-1660.)

Alexander Cockburn, one of America’s best-known radical journalists, died unexpectedly over the weekend, at age 71. A champion of and frequent contributor to alternative and independent media, Cockburn penned The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” column from 1984 to 2012. Our favorites of his columns are collected below.

The Right’s Chicago Trial  August 1, 1987
Oliver North’s “fascism with a human face” and the mysterious case of Ralph the Lobster.

From Smoking Gun to Smoking Dog: A “Beat The Devil” Investigation  October 3, 1987
Why were two dogs gunned down right before the arrival of Air Force One?

The Rebellion in Israel and the Territories  January 16, 1988
The usual regulatory mechanisms of the mainstream US media processed the turmoil in the occupied territories and in Israel itself with some initial difficulty.

Why Say No?  October 4, 1994
Rabin and Arafat’s pathetic handshake.

ADK   November 21, 1999
A tribute to Andrew Kopkind.

Message in a Bottle  May 2, 2005
In India, Coca-Cola’s plants bring foul water and toxic sludge.

Levee Town  October 3, 2005
There are decades of memos from engineers and contractors setting forth budgets to build up the Gulf Coast’s levees, but Bush wouldn’t let them be.

The 9/11 Conspiracy Nuts  September 7, 2006
August Bebel once called anti-Semitism the socialism of fools. These days, the 9/11 conspiracy fever is fast becoming the “socialism” of the left.

From Flying Saucers to 9/11  September 21, 2006
The world is in tumult, but in the heart of Empire, the level of creative political energy runs flat along the bottom of the graph.

Support Their Troops?  July 12, 2007
If the American people are largely against the war, what’s the matter with the antiwar movement? The answer lies with what has happened over the years to the American left.

“A Giant Ponzi Scheme”  December 17, 2008
What separates Madoff’s Ponzi scheme from the follies of the bailed-out banks, and how is Blagojevich’s pay-to-play any different from standard political fundraising?

The Parable of the Shopping Mall  February 18, 2009
From the wreckage of capitalism an opportunity for change springs forth.

Dead Souls  April 15, 2009
Life sentences without possibility of parole contribute to the ever-expanding gulag of our criminal justice system.

Rupert Murdoch’s Watergate May 2, 2011
An invasion of privacy scandal threatens the careers to two of Murdoch’s top executives and the apparent heir the News Corp. empire.

Russian Hero  July 27, 2011
A bet on a horse in the 1949 Grand National resulted in the largest collective transfer of wealth ever to communism’s stalwarts in Britain.

Why We Must Raise the Minimum Wage  April 23, 2012
Instead of making vague promises to create high-paying jobs, the government should increase wages for the jobs that actually exist.

Hardly had the boyish visage of JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon quit CNN screens than it was succeeded by that of Bob Diamond, former chief executive of Barclays, accused of masterminding the greatest financial scandal in the history of Britain. Columnists shook with rage at the “reeking cesspool” being disclosed—disclosed, mind you, four long years after the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the Libor was being fixed. Libor, which stands for “London interbank offered rate,” is supposed to be based on the average rate of interest banks charge to borrow from one another. The rate is set every morning by a panel of banks. Each bank “submits” the rates at which it believes it can borrow from the collective money pool, from overnight to twelve months.

Libor is the benchmark for investments all over the world—the Financial Times estimates that $350 trillion worth of contracts have been pegged to it. It is also considered a barometer of a bank’s health. Just as customers with bad credit records have to pay higher interest rates, banks deemed in financial distress have to pay more to borrow. In October 2008, a doomsday month for the world banking industry, it looked like Barclays was next in line for a rescue after taxpayers bailed out the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds/HBOS on October 13. One big warning flare was that beleaguered Barclays could borrow from the common money pool only at a very high rate of interest. The answer was to fix the rate, with Barclays traders secretly winching it down. It was all completely illegal.

Next thing we knew, there was Diamond being reprimanded by a select committee of the House of Commons for being nothing better than a common thief. But then into the hurly-burly suddenly intruded a new actor, actually one in the form of a savior: Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England. It turned out that Diamond and Tucker had had a conversation of considerable moment, one prudently recorded by Barclays, on October 29, 2008.

Diamond said Tucker had relayed concerns from “senior Whitehall figures” that Barclays’s Libor was consistently higher than that of other banks. Tucker is alleged to have conveyed the view from Westminster that the bank’s rate did not “always need to appear as high as it had recently.” In other words, Westminster wanted Barclays to massage its rate to a lower level.

But all with full deniability. According to Barclays, “Bob Diamond did not believe he received an instruction from Paul Tucker or that he gave an instruction to [former top Barclays deputy] Jerry del Missier. However, Jerry del Missier concluded that an instruction had been passed down from the Bank of England not to keep Libors so high and he therefore passed down a direction to that effect to the submitters.”

Barclays said there was no allegation by the authorities that this instruction was intended to manipulate the Libor. And when he was questioned by Tory MP David Ruffley on July 9, Tucker testified that “a bell did not go off in my head” that banks were lowering their Libor submissions.

Marvelous: the join between civil society and state was tactfully seamless, with deniability all round.

So first there are the “senior Whitehall figures” (one turned out to be Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood)—i.e., the permanent government running Britain. When a senior Whitehall figure urges the commission of a serious crime, he merely murmurs that the bank’s Libor did not “always need to appear as high as it had recently.” There then follows a flurry of talk about misunderstandings but, Lord save us, certainly not an order to fix the Libor. Then, unmistakably, there is a huge plunge in Barclays’s rate. The government’s concern—that Barclays might appear to be on the brink—is averted.

But we live in a capitalist world, duly furnished with its rewards and penalties. Barclays has agreed to a $450 million settlement, and Diamond and del Missier have resigned. On his way out the door, Diamond said he’d been promised £18 million ($28 million) as a golden handshake. The standing committee had a good jeer, but Diamond stuck to his guns, and there the matter rested until July 10, when Barclays announced that Diamond will forfeit up to £20 million ($30 million) in bonuses and incentives but will retain one year’s salary, pension and other benefits worth £2 million ($3 million).

Of course, there have been furious calls for further punishment and reform. Labour leader Ed Miliband says “we should break the dominance of the big five banks…and strike off those whose conduct lets this country down and prosecute those who break the law.” He also wants to increase competition by forcing the big banks to sell off up to 1,000 of their branches. In the current culture of rabid criminality in the banking system, that would surely be unwise, unleashing 1,000 small-time banksters.

People calling for banking reform on either side of the 
Atlantic are underestimating the problems of enforcement. A writer on the financial news blog Zero Hedge recently 
remarked that “the Libor scandal seems to be waking people up to manipulation and fraud by the big banks.” Of course, there are tools at the ready: sanctions, tribunals, a ban for life for crooked traders. But Libor was meant to be the prime glittering advertisement for the free market. Now it turns out that the whole thing is a fix—a grimy hand all too visible. It’s like the spy in Conrad’s Secret Agent vowing to destroy the first meridian.

Is it possible to reform the banking system? There are the usual nostrums—tighter regulations, savage penalties for misbehavior, a ban from financial markets for life. But I have to say I’m dubious. I think the system will collapse, but not through our agency.

A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in the letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Barack Obama and his top legal aides seemed to the eager ears of marijuana legalizers on the West Coast and around the country to be opening the door to a new, more sensible era. Here was the basic line as dispensed by Attorney General Eric Holder on March 18, 2009: “The policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law, to the extent that people do that and try to use medical marijuana laws [such as California’s Prop. 215] as a shield for activity that is not designed to comport with what the intention was of the state law. Those are the organizations, the people, that we will target. And that is consistent with what the president said during the campaign.”

Drug activists exulted in a big win. “Today’s comments clearly represent a change in policy out of Washington,” Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance said to the Los Angeles Times. Holder, Nadelmann added in the New York Times, had sent a clear message to the DEA that the feds now recognize state medical marijuana laws as “kosher.”

Striking a different sort of exultant note, Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the US Attorney in LA, told the LA Times: “In every single case we have prosecuted, the defendants violated state as well as federal law.”

On January 22 (two days after Obama’s inauguration), DEA agents raided a South Lake Tahoe dispensary run by Ken Estes, a wheelchair-bound entrepreneur. In a typical “rip-and-run,” they seized about five pounds of cannabis and a few thousand dollars but made no arrests.

Less than two weeks later, the DEA raided four dispensaries in the LA area. Eight days after that came a bust on the Mendo-Healing Cooperative farm in Fort Bragg, California.

The love-lost Obamians had forgotten how to read political declarations with a close and cynical eye, and to bear in mind the eternal power struggle between federal prosecutors and enforcers—e.g., the DEA and equivalent state bodies. The feds wanted to make it completely clear that, whatever Obama might hint at, they weren’t going to be hogtied by wussy state laws. Bust a guy in a wheelchair, bust a dispensary, make your point: I’m the man.

Meanwhile, what has been happening out in the fields, dells, plastic greenhouses and indoor grows in the counties of Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity? The timeless rhythms of agriculture: overproduction, plummeting prices, the remorseless toll of costly inputs like soil and fertilizers. Back in the early 1990s, the price to grower per pound was around $5,000. A couple of years ago, the average had dropped to about $2,000—more for really skilled growers who “black box” their greenhouses, darkening them earlier each day to trick the plants into putting out an early crop. Right now, it’s down to maybe $1,000 a pound in the fall, $600 in the Christmas rush. Do these prices bear any relation to the prices in the fancy dispensaries in Southern California? Guess.

Bruce Anderson, editor of the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser (AVA), says that in recent weeks, “raids were conducted on two homes—one in Eureka, one in Redwood Valley—where better than $400,000 cash was confiscated by the forces of law and order. Every time the cops make big cash hauls, more people are convinced that they, too, should get into the pot business. Looked at objectively, and all things considered, the nebulous legal status of marijuana is perfect for Mendocino County’s financial well-being: every year the cops take off just enough dope to keep pot prices at at least $1,000 a pound. Legalization would further depress the Mendocino County economy, and depress it big-time. Short of legalization, nothing is going to stop any kind of grow, indoors or outdoors.”

But legalization is not a realistic prospect, and so the status of the herb will inevitably remain cloudy. For its part, the DEA is announcing big impending raids in Mendocino County, some targeting the vast stretches of the (federally controlled) Mendocino National Forest and the growers drawing on the waters of the Middle Eel.

There are serious environmental and criminal issues here. Obama recently told Rolling Stone, “I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, ‘Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.’ What I can say is, ‘Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.’” As the AVA’s Mark Scaramella explains, there are growers—many of them violent—using these public lands. Who wants to go hiking and run into a criminal operation? These same growers are also responsible for illegal water diversions and serious environmental degradation. In one recent raid, the feds took a mile of black plastic irrigation pipe out of the Mendocino National Forest.

It’s fine for the feds to go into action here. What’s not fine is a far-reaching national campaign against medical growers. All the usual arsenal of harassments have been brought into play by multiple agencies—starting with the IRS, which has been bankrupting dispensaries simply by denying deductions for elementary business expenses. Has the drug war—as a war on the poor—slowed down? In 2010, some 850,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana-related offenses, the vast majority for possession. It is likely that well over 2.5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana since Obama took office.

This is all happening under the aegis of a president who cozily disclosed his marijuana habit as a young man. One bust and Obama would still be organizing communities on the South Side of Chicago. But his sense of self-righteousness is too distended to be deflated by any sense of hypocrisy. The war on marijuana has nothing to do with medical properties and so forth. US drug policy is about social control. That’s the name of the game.

Marine Le Pen. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

American discussions of Europe swivel between rationality and hysteria. A discussion of Europe’s awful unemployment figures and swelling mutiny against austerity suddenly mutates into tremulous wails about the menace of fascism in France, rancid racism in the Netherlands, the anti-Semitic beast unchained in Germany (in the terrifying form of Günter Grass’s new poem).

A lot of this has to do with Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front. Now and again I’ll mention her in something I’ve written without the obligatory insults about her family heritage and presumed totalitarian agenda. Furious letters pour in, particularly since she made a strong showing in the first round of the French presidential elections.

Marine Le Pen is a nationalist politician, quite reasonably exploiting the intense social discontent in France amid the imposition of the bankers’ austerity programs. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard put it in the Daily Telegraph recently, she “presents herself as a latterday Jeanne d’Arc, openly comparing France’s pro-EU camp with the Burgundians who plotted ‘English Annexation’ in the 1430s—or indeed ‘Les Collabos’ who bought peace after 1940. ‘Let us break the chains of the French people. Bring on the French Spring,’ she tells Front National rallies.”

Anti-Semitism? Diana Johnstone, an excellent journalist who has been reporting from France for years, writes to me, “There is absolutely nothing attesting to anti-Semitism on the part of Marine Le Pen. She has actually tried to woo the powerful Jewish organizations, and her anti-Islam stance is also a way to woo such groups. The simple fact is that the best way to destroy someone in this country is to call him or her ‘anti-Semitic.’ ”

Marine Le Pen certainly has made some unsavory comments about immigrants and Islamization. But she has gone to the heart of the matter, asserting that monetary union cannot be fudged, that it is incompatible with the French nation-state. She has won 18 percent of the vote by campaigning to pull France out of the euro and smash the whole project. As Johnstone explains, a new poll shows only 3 percent of French voters consider immigration the main issue. So logically, Le Pen cannot owe her 18 percent to that issue. The number-one issue is employment.

It’s true, things could get ugly. Europe’s politics are being refashioned before our eyes. Greece has 21 percent unemployment, and the socialist PASOK party could face near-extinction in the upcoming elections. In Spain one in four is out of work, and the right-wing prime minister insists on maintaining austerity. As Evans-Pritchard points out, “We forget now, but Germany was heavily indebted to foreigners in 1930, like Spain today. It was the refusal of the creditor powers (US and France) to reliquify the system and slow monetary contraction that pushed Germany over a cliff. The parallels are haunting.”

But there’s another aspect to this habit of flinging the charge of fascism at Europe, and that’s the simple matter of national hypocrisy. The mobs who flooded into the streets to revel in the execution of Osama bin Laden were not exulting in America, land of the free and of constitutional propriety. They were lauding brute, lawless, lethal force. In this year of political conventions we’ll be hearing a lot of tub-thumping about American freedoms, but if there’s any nation in the world that is well on the way to meriting the admittedly vague label of “fascist,” surely it’s the United States.

Fascism, among other things, is a system of extreme, methodical state repression, violent in contour and threat, buttressed by ultra-nationalist mythology, a militarist culture and imperial ambition. In the 1980s America started locking up its poor people. Seven million adults were under correctional supervision in 2009. A fascist system uses constant harassment. Last year there were more than 600,000 stop-and-frisks in New York City, overwhelmingly of blacks and Hispanics. Historically, fascist regimes have been particularly cruel toward what is deemed to be sexual deviancy. US sex offender registries doom three-quarters of a million people—many of them convicted on trumpery charges—to pale simulacra of real life. Others endure castration and open-ended incarceration.

Fascist regimes, ultimately the expression of corporate power, repress labor in all efforts to organize. The onslaught here began with Taft-Hartley in 1947 and continued with methodical ferocity during the Reagan and Clinton years. Obama reneged on pledges to make organizing easier, froze the wages of federal workers and advanced free trade across the globe. Attacks on collective bargaining are pervasive. Big money’s grip on both parties ensures corporate control no matter who’s nominally in charge. Fascist regimes show open contempt for democracy while deifying a leader who embodies the national spirit. We salute democracy while suppressing it.

A fascist regime is the sworn foe of the right to assembly, “unauthorized” marches and encampments. We’re sure to see more signs of this around the NATO summit and the national conventions. America is a network of SWAT teams and kindred state-employed thugs on permanent red alert.

A fascist regime spies obsessively on its citizens. Study US laws on secret surveillance since the Patriot Act and you will find procedures that would have been the envy of the East Germans. Ultimately a fascist state claims the right to imprison its victims without term or hope of redress or legal representation. As the executive power, in the form of the president, it claims the right to kill its enemies, whether citizens (Awlaki) or others (Guantánamo), without judicial review. In other words, rule by decree—which is what Hitler’s Enabling Act won him in March 1933.

We live in a fascist country—“proto-fascist” if you want to allay public disquiet, though there’s scant sign that most Americans are disturbed by the trends. So quit beating up on Europe.

REUTERS/Mark Blinch
 
Everyone knows the story of Henry Ford more than doubling his production line workers’ pay to $5 a day in January 1914. Ford explained to aghast fellow capitalists that he would be creating customers for his cheap cars, building a new American middle class.


Nearly a century later, in 2005, Walmart CEO Lee Scott called on Congress to raise the minimum wage, since “our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.” Walmart haters whacked away at Scott for hypocrisy, but he was being perfectly reasonable in identifying what was then and is now America’s number-one problem: a huge chunk of the population barely survives on starvation wages. If you adjust for inflation, median personal income hasn’t moved for almost half a century. Nearly a quarter of US households have zero to negative net worth. It just takes one unlucky turn of the cards—an illness, an accident, a brush with the law—to put them under.


President Obama invokes “the knowledge economy,” putatively replete with well-paying jobs demanding advanced skills in all the high-tech arts that can make America great again. But what is the real economy of tomorrow for most Americans? The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reckons that by 2020 the overwhelming majority of jobs will still require only a high school diploma or less, and that nearly three-fourths of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next decade will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30 percent paying a median of about $20,000 (in 2010 dollars). 


Right now about 50 million Americans are working in: office and administrative support occupations (median wage of $31,250), sales and related occupations ($24,840), food preparation and serving occupations ($18,900). Not too much knowledge required. The growth jobs of tomorrow, according to the BLS: Childcare workers ($19,430), personal care aides ($19,730), home health aides ($20,610), janitors and cleaners ($22,210), teacher assistants ($23,220), nonconstruction laborers ($23,460), security guards ($23,900) and construction laborers ($29,730).


So what is the best anti-poverty program? Higher wages for the jobs that are out there. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Work a forty-hour week for $7.25 and you end up with $15,080 a year. This is just above the federal poverty line for an individual ($11,000) but well below the line for a family of four ($22,000). And it’s just a bit more than the manufacturer’s recommended retail price for the Ford Fiesta ($13,200), Ford’s cheapest car this year. In 1914 an assembly line worker could buy a Model T with four months’ pay.


Even though the cost of living has gone up, the federal minimum wage hasn’t moved since 2009, when the last of a series of increases signed into law by George W. Bush kicked in. In 2011 dollars, the minimum wage was more than $10 in 1968, when jobs and pay were peaking for America’s workers.


In November 2008 President-elect Obama promised to “raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011 and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing.”


It was a pledge to low-paid workers to give them a 30 percent pay hike. Of all Obama’s betrayals, this was one of the bitterest. He never really tried, skittish with fear that he’d be nailed as an inflationeer by the Big Business lobbies and their creatures in Congress. In this cowardice he stands shoulder to shoulder with Mitt Romney, who in January said at a campaign event in New Hampshire that he favored raising the minimum wage automatically each year to keep pace with inflation. A couple of whacks from the Wall Street Journal saw Romney flop on the issue at the start of March. 


A smart coalition stretching from American Con­servative publisher Ron Unz to James K. Galbraith says a $12 minimum wage makes good sense as long-term stimulus. As Unz points out, “The minimum wage in Ontario, Canada, is currently well over $10 per hour, while in France it now stands at nearly $13. Even more remarkably, Australia recently raised its minimum wage to over $16 per hour, and nonetheless has an unemployment rate of just 5 percent.” Properly enforced, a $12 minimum wage would slow illegal immigration, which is powered by a low-wage economy.


As Galbraith, seizing on Unz’s proposal, wrote, “What would workers do with the raise? They’d spend it, creating jobs for other workers. They’d pay down their mortgages and car loans, getting themselves out of debt.… Women in particular would benefit because they tend to work for lower wages.”


Who’s fighting for the most vital economic issue in American politics today? Senator Tom Harkin’s Rebuild America Act, which he introduced on March 29, calls for raising the minimum wage to $9.80—a 35 percent hike—and pegging the wage to inflation. A day earlier, Ralph Nader flayed Richard Trumka in an open letter to the AFL-CIO president, charging him with giving Obama an “early blanket endorsement,” then, among other failures, running a feeble, low-energy campaign for an inflation-adjusted $10 minimum wage law, even though keeping up with inflation for the federal minimum wage “is historically supported by 70 percent of the people…. What is the AFL-CIO waiting for?… No wonder [Obama] can get away with giving the trade union movement and unorganized workers the back of his hand.”


Most progressives watch with complacency the suicidal Republicans heading over the cliff. Let them step back and look at the desperation of millions of Americans today. Will they, like Trumka, stay loyal and inert right through to November?

Take Action: Tell Your Senators to Pass the Rebuild America Act

The lessons of the Fukushima catastrophe, now a year old, are simple enough. Some of them affirm what we’ve learned from kindred disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

In the first hours and days, contrary to soothing press releases and news conferences, the authorities have no idea what is happening. So they lie; and the more they learn, the more they lie.

Amid the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, the worst nuclear accident in US history, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) chair Joseph Hendrie admitted, “We are operating almost totally in the blind…. It’s like a couple of blind men staggering around making decisions.” In the wake of the fire and explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, the Soviet government said and did nothing for two days. In the first days of the Fukushima catastrophe last March, chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano reassured Japan and the world that there was “no immediate health risk.” It turns out that behind closed doors, panic-stricken leaders were worrying about “a demonic chain reaction” of meltdowns. “If that happened,” Edano disclosed later, “it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”

So the Japanese government set a twelve-mile exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. The US military, presumably with high-grade radiation detectors, increased the exclusion zone for its personnel around the Fukushima plant to fifty miles. The USS Ronald Reagan steamed rapidly far out to sea.

By March 13 the reactors were melting down and exploding, the high-level radioactive waste threatening to catch fire. The NRC offered public assurances that no harmful levels of radioactive fallout would reach US territories. Behind closed doors, officials were already worrying about potentially hazardous levels of radioactive iodine-131 reaching Alaska.

Lesson number one, my father Claud’s old rule: never believe anything till it is officially denied. Lesson number two: no matter how obviously appalling the catastrophe, the nuclear industry will insist on the safety of nuclear power. This chorus has been uninterrupted since the 1950s, when it urged that building materials be impregnated with uranium to make snow removal unnecessary.

After a few months the industry regroups: out of disaster, affirmation. Nuclear power really is safe, because we didn’t lose Pennsylvania or Tokyo. Stratospheric levels of cesium, strontium-90 and tritium? No problem. “Even if you eat contaminated vegetables several times, it will not harm your health at all,” the BBC reported Edano as advising. From the point of view of the nuclear industry, the great thing about nuclear fallout, provided it doesn’t fry you on the spot or within a day or two, is that cancer takes time to show up, during which more nuclear plants can be built and more money coaxed out of dangerous existing ones.

In January the NRC put out a new report called “State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequences Analyses,” or SOARCA, revising downward the agency’s risk-assessment models. Flourishing this document, the NRC declared that the “risks of public health consequences from severe accidents” at nuclear plants “are very small.” The “long-term risk” of a person dying from cancer from such an accident is less than one in a billion. This is because—read this carefully—“successful implementation of existing mitigation measures can prevent reactor core damage or delay or reduce offsite releases of radioactive material.”

Let’s move now from “successful implementation” at the theoretical level to the realities of post-Fukushima Japan. The Japanese don’t relish the prospect of losing Tokyo—or Japan. Seventy percent of them want to end nuclear power now. At the moment, only two out of fifty-four reactors in Japan are operating. There have been no blackouts because of power shortage. If the antinuclear forces manage to stop the restart of the remaining reactors—which has to be locally approved in each prefecture—all reactors will be shut down by May. The nuclear industry and its creatures in government are well aware of the threat. The government and Tepco, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors, brazenly lie and say that “cold shutdown” has been achieved at Fukushima Daiichi and everything is safe. The 60,000 refugees from Fukushima prefecture, living in wretched conditions, will no doubt be urged to return with their children to fallout-sodden homes and schools and playgrounds, now heralded as “safe.”

Last July, then–Prime Minister Naoto Kan proposed revising the policy of promoting nuclear power and exports of nuclear technology. Kan didn’t last long. Now the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is “insisting that a stable electric power supply utilizing nuclear power plants is essential for economic growth.” Noda conceded that the “biggest precondition” is winning the understanding of prefectures where nuclear plants are located and confirming the safety of the plants.

Meanwhile, the March 16 edition of Weekly Asahi reports a conversation between scientific writer Hirose Takashi and US nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen. They agreed that one major danger is the spent fuel pool at Fukushima’s Reactor No. 4. This, they say, contains enough radioactive material to blow the Japanese islands apart. It is being cooled by water, but if the concrete tank (badly damaged by last year’s earthquake) were to spring a leak and the water level to go down, this could result in “an explosion never before experienced by human beings.”

Leave the last word to the ad hoc antinuclear coalition All Japan 3/11 Action Committee: “We cannot afford to miss this opportunity which is made possible by the immense damage suffered by people in Fukushima due to the Fukushima Daiichi accident. If we managed to realize zero nuclear power in Japan now, it will certainly speed up the process of putting an end to nuclear power not only in Japan but also the world.”

A policeman looks out from a balcony as the crowd is dispersed from the front of an Apple store in the Beijing district of Sanlitun January 13, 2012. REUTERS/David Gray

Why do American jobs end up in China? The supposed answer in an anecdote: the late Steve Jobs summons his senior lieutenants and holds up the iPhone prototype. It’s due to be shipped to stores in not much more than a month. He points out that the plastic screen has been scratched by his keys. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he says, according to a recent New York Times story. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

“After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China,” the Times reports. “If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.” The next sequence reads like a montage in some 1920s film about industrial production. Within days, a Corning Glass plant in China is turning out big sheets of toughened glass, which are shipped to a nearby Chinese plant to be cut into iPhone panes. The small panes are trucked to a Foxconn factory complex eight hours away.

The first truckloads arrived in the dead of night, according to a former Apple executive. Managers rousted thousands of workers out of their beds, lined them up, gave each of them a biscuit and a cup of tea and launched them on a twelve-hour shift. In ninety-six hours, the plant was producing more than 10,000 iPhones a day. Within three months, Apple had sold 1 million of them; since then Foxconn has assembled more than 200 million. The suicide rate among its workers was, Jobs insisted, below the overall Chinese rate.

Of course, typical Times readers nod their heads. No, cohorts of American workers aren’t available to be kicked out of bed in their communal dorms and put to work in half an hour. There’s no China-subsidized factory space. And pulsing just below the surface of the text: no tiny, skillful Oriental fingers (“flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers”), not to mention tiny Oriental wages, for the uniformed assemblers.

When President Obama dined with the kings of Silicon Valley last year and asked, “Why can’t that work come home?” Jobs’s reply was “unambiguous”: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

In loyalties, Apple is spiritually offshore. “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” an Apple executive told the Times. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

It was the phrase about having no obligation that riled up Clyde Prestowitz, one of the US government’s top trade negotiators in the Reagan years. In an acrid posting on the Foreign Policy website and in a chat over the phone with me from his winter quarters in Maui, Prestowitz efficiently dismembered Apple’s “no obligation” pretensions and its rationale for why it and kindred companies had no alternative to offshoring.

In the 1981–86 period, Prestowitz says, Jobs and his executives “had the funny notion that the US government had an obligation to help them…. We did all we could, and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by US government money…. The heart of the computer is the microprocessor, and Apple’s derived from Motorola’s 680X0, which was developed with much assistance, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department, as were the DRAM memory chips. The pointer mouse came from Xerox’s PARC center near Stanford (which also enjoyed government funding). In addition, most computer software at that time derived from work with government backing.”

Prestowitz points out that Apple also assumes the US government is obligated to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and, should supply chains in the Far East be disrupted, to offer the comforting support of the Seventh Fleet. “And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism, or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment’s notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies of most Asian economies?”

What about those jobs that “aren’t coming back”? We’re not talking about simple assembly that costs a bundle per unit in America and mere cents in China. In the mid-’90s, at the Apple plant in Elk Grove, California, the cost of building a computer was $22 a machine, compared with as little as $5 at a factory in Taiwan. This is not a dominant factor when the machine sells for $1,500 and you have costs like transport to figure in. Furthermore, stricken America is actually becoming a low-wage magnet.

The high-wage, more complicated manufacturing jobs are in microprocessors, memory chips, displays, circuitry, chip sets and so forth. This is where America is supposed to have a comparative advantage. So why are Asian countries supplying the memory chips and microprocessors and displays instead of the United States? Prestowitz points to government subsidies and protection for Asian producers, currency manipulation and bureaucratic pressure on US corporations by Beijing to make the product in China.

So there’s nothing irrevocable about the job loss. US workers, taught the necessary skills, can put things together properly. But if the jobs keep going away, why would any American lay out the money to learn those skills? Obama’s recent State of the Union speech was a step in the right direction: calling on business leaders to “ask what you can do to bring the jobs back.” Specifically, he proposed ending tax breaks for US corporations operating overseas, rewarding US-based production and turning the unemployment sinkhole into a re-employment system. “These jobs could and would come back to America,” says Prestowitz, “if Washington were to begin to respond tit for tat to the mercantilist game…. It wouldn’t be difficult to make a lot more of the iPhone in America and to make it competitively if either Apple or the US government really wanted that to happen.”

America changed as the New Year stumbled across the threshold, but the big shift didn’t get much press, which is easy to understand. Can there be a deader news day than a New Year’s Eve that falls on a weekend? Besides, alive or dead, habeas corpus has never been a topic to set news editors on fire.

The change came with the whisper of Barack Obama’s pen, as he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual ratification of military Keynesianism—$662 billion this time—which has been our national policy since World War II bailed out the New Deal.

Sacrificial offerings to the Pentagon aren’t news. But this time, snugly ensconced in the NDAA came ratification by legal statute of the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die. Goodbye, habeas corpus.

We’re talking here about citizens within the borders of the United States, not sitting in a hotel or out driving in some foreign land. In the latter case, as the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s incineration in Yemen bore witness a few months ago, the well-being or summary demise of a US citizen is contingent upon a secret determination of the president as to whether the aforementioned citizen is waging a war of terror on the United States. If the answer is in the affirmative, the citizen can be killed on the president’s say-so without further ado.

We’re also most emphatically not talking about non-US citizens or possibly even legal residents (though I’d urge green card holders to file for citizenship ASAP). Noncitizens get thrown in the Supermax without a prayer of having a lawyer. Under the terms of the NDAA a suspect’s seizure by the military is a “requirement” if the suspect is deemed to have been “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.”

By the military? Until December 31 the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. No longer. The NDAA renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Connoisseurs of subversion and anti-terror laws well know that “associated forces” can mean anything. See, for example, one of the definitions of “enemy combatants” minted after 2001: “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.” Like those “memory pillows” I saw on discount in Macy’s on New Year’s Day, the phrase “directly supported” will adjust itself to the whim of any ingenious prosecutor.

Obama issued a signing statement simultaneous with passing the act into law. Theoretically, he’s against signing statements. In 2008 he said, “I taught the Constitution for ten years, I believe in the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.”

Actually, whatever Obama may have taught, a signing statement, whether issued by Bush or Obama, doesn’t have the force of law. Obama’s December 31 signing statement was designed to soothe the liberal vote, as the president expressed “serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists” and insisted that, by golly, he will never “authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”

This pious language was part of a diligent White House campaign to suggest that (a) there is nothing in the act to perturb citizens, but (b) anything perturbing is entirely the fault of Congress, and (c) Obama solemnly swears that so long as he is president he’ll never OK anything bad, whatever the NDAA might be construed as authorizing, and anyway (d) there’s nothing new about the detention provisions because they merely reiterate those of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, signed by Bush in 2001.

To take the last point first, the NDAA expands the 2001 law and codifies ample new powers, plus new prohibitions regarding any possible removal of prisoners in Guantánamo. As for Congress, its performance was lamentable, but as Senator Carl Levin, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, has convincingly inferred, the real reason the White House threatened a veto was because the bill as then drafted might have limited what the executive branch deems its present powers of indefinite detention without trial.

Amid the mutual buck-passing, what Congress and the White House connived at, beating back all obstructive amendments, was the framing of cunningly vague language about the dirty work afoot. Jonathan Turley, a great champion of constitutional rights and civil liberties, puts the trickery in a nutshell: “The exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement…is the screening language for the next section…which offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial” (emphasis in the original).

That’s the heart of the matter. And in ambiguity we can see certainty: the writ of habeas corpus can now be voided at the whim of a president, whether it be Obama reversing himself on the personal pledges in his signing statement or any successor, as can the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel.

One day, perhaps soon, the Supreme Court will rule on the act’s constitutionality. For now, as ACLU director Anthony Romero said after the signing, Obama “will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law.” America is an empire on which the sun never sets, and so, appropriately, the statute applies across the planetary “battlefield” that constitutes the Great War on Terror.

It looks as though the eurozone may be in decisive meltdown, which is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better in the long run. It used to be as much a part of going to France as choking on Gauloises smoke to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu, instead of the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Eurobankers—their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s School of the Americas—have the power to act as the bullyboys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now, the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They’re different. There are seventeen nations in the former, twenty-seven in the latter. Britain, for example, has never been in the eurozone, which is why the currency exchange in London will, in return for your worthless dollars, hand you bank notes with the Queen’s portrait on them.

At the moment the European Union has virtually no tax-collecting powers. Its annual haul is about 1 percent of the EU’s gross domestic product. By comparison, the US government collects about 20–24 percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what’s needed is a lot more centralizing—in the words of Wolfgang Münchau in the November 27 Financial Times, “a fiscal union”: “This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well.”

I’ve read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre—that what the whole European enterprise needs is an impregnable fortress of Eurocrats dispatching its disciplinary legions, first technocrats and then, if necessary, NATO’s shock troops to crush all resistance.

Two generations ago, when Britain shook with acrid debates about the pros and cons of joining the EU, a big chunk of the left was in favor of joining, the notion basically being that in terms of potential for socialist advance, EU membership would at least offer a shot at liberating the sceptered isle from the suffocating, reactionary constrictions of postimperial infarction. (Also, Gaullism—meaning in this case defiance of the United States—was translated into a hope that the EU would be a left counterbalance to the American Empire.) Here we are forty years on, with social democrats across Europe toiling even more diligently than their nominally more right-wing rivals to bail out the rich and grind down the poor at the behest of the bankers and panic-stricken bondholders.

Crisis is often invoked as the midwife of revolutionary change, and here are Greece, Italy, Spain and even France at various levels of crisis, with political orthodoxy and the normal order of things increasingly discredited. Yet perhaps only in Greece and possibly Portugal—both with active communist parties—is there any organizational vigor on the left, and a sense that one could see some emulation of the glorious path taken by Argentina in 2003 and 2004, with factory occupations and immense popular outrage, combined with decisive leadership by the late President Néstor Kirchner. The international debt collectors were successfully defied. Maybe in Italy there are some flickers of resistance, but France?

As Serge Halimi, the editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique, put it recently, “There is no reason to believe that François Hollande in France, Sigmar Gabriel in Germany or Ed Miliband in the UK will succeed where Obama, José Luis Zapatero and Papandreou have failed…. In the current political and social situation, a federal Europe would strengthen the already stifling neoliberal mechanisms and reduce the sovereign power of the people by handing it over to shadowy technocratic bodies.”

The EU “project,” a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with “iconic,” “meme,” “parse” and “narrative,” is in potential outline a totalitarian nightmare. Down with federalism! Remember Simone Weil’s hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to Europe’s cultural richness and diversity: “If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the barbarian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Mediterranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State.” As Weil’s biographer, Simone Pétrement, comments, “The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspiration that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn.”

But as Halimi concludes, “When the people cease to believe in a political game in which the dice are loaded, when they see that governments are stripped of their sovereignty, when they demand that banks be brought into line, when they mobilize without knowing where their anger will lead, then the left is still very much alive.”

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” the left nationalist asks in Monty Python’s imperishable Life of Brian. “Roads,” says the federalist, tentatively. My native country of Ireland has been covered with vast roads, courtesy of the EU. We’ve got enough of them. Europe’s got enough of them. Enough of the eurozone, enough of the “European project.” Onward down the broad highway to a totalitarian EU? Europe is approaching the fateful crossroads.

I have to admit, writing these lines at the start of November, that after digesting the daily reports from our national battlefield (Zuccotti Park, Oscar Grant Plaza, Austin, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Portland…), my eyes flicker across the world map to Greece, and my heart beats a lot faster. Now there, surely we can savor the whiff of a pre-revolutionary situation!

It must be the dratted Leninist in me, even after years of therapy. Surfeited with somewhat turgid paeans to the democratic gentility of the OWSers, I clamber up to the dusty top shelf, furtively haul down Vladimir Ilich’s “April Theses” of 1917 and dip in: end the war, confiscate the big estates, immediately merge all the banks into one general national bank… The blood flows back into my cheeks, my eyes sparkle. Then, hearing my daughter’s footfall outside the library, I shove Lenin back into place, scuttle back down the ladder and pluck a copy of E.F. Schumacher, even though I’m not at all sure what is on the OWSers’ reading lists or Twitter menus.

Now take an arc of Greek history, as evoked in a photo that landed in my inbox at the end of October, featuring a group of Greek demonstrators in front of the Parthenon holding a white banner with “OXI 1940–2011” written on it in red and black letters. In Greek “OXI” means “no.” The e-mail reminded me that the “no” of 1940 was the answer, given on October 28, to the Italian ambassador relaying Mussolini’s demand that Greece open its borders to the Italian army. The “no” thus marked Greece’s entry into World War II. Annual ceremonies have officially commemorated this response to Fascism.

But this year, the e-mail reported, “the official parades were taken over by the people,” who chased away the government representatives and in most cities organized their own parades.

In Salonika, “the President of the Republic left in protest,” and for the first time in the postwar history of Greece the military parade was abandoned. A 5-year-old child sat in the president’s chair, “and the schools and people paraded before him!” In Athens, “where nobody was able to approach the Education Ministress and the parade went on ‘as usual’ under Draconian police measures,” some schoolchildren “paraded waving black handkerchiefs before her, while others turned their faces away as soon as they approached her.”

On the morning of October 28, a group of artists, authors and academics smuggled a big OXI sign onto the Acropolis, “wrapped up around the body of an excellent theater actress under a very large coat. And we managed to demonstrate for more than half-an-hour on the Acropolis itself!” The group could do this because “all policemen were at the parades’ battlegrounds at Syntagma and everywhere in Attiki [district] and none managed to climb Acropolis in time.”

OXI in 1940 to Mussolini. OXI in 2011 to the bankers seeking to plant their neoliberal jackboots on the neck of the Greek people; OXI to the bankers’ local collaborators.

Toward the end of World War II, an enterprise of Western capitalist intervention (a new chapter of which the NATO coup recently closed with great destruction and bloodshed in Libya) undertook its maiden voyage in Greece, in the British and American onslaughts beginning in 1943, with Stalin’s tacit OK. By 1949, at the end of a fearsome civil war, the left had been decimated, slaughtered, imprisoned, forced into exile. Ahead lay dictatorship by the right, mirrored in Spain and Portugal.

I don’t doubt that if by chance the left in Greece today evicts the local political agents of the international banks, it will not be long before a NATO intervention, covert and then overt, is under way, using the usual arsenal of assassination, drone attacks and armed support for whatever security forces do not defect to the left.

Sixty-six years after the defeat of Hitler, forty years on from the neoliberal capitalist counterattack that ratcheted up its tempo in the early ’70s, the premises of the system are under fearsome pressure, powerfully evoked by demonstrations from Athens to Oakland. Greece is essentially bankrupt, but so is the United States, conjuring up worthless dollars in volumes far beyond the wildest dreams of medieval alchemy.

The strength of the OWS movement lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: the few are rich, the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions the capitalist system has failed. Nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African-Americans have endured what has been described as the greatest loss of collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitchforked into penury and desperation.

But for all its simplicity and truth, how much staying power does the OWS message have as presently deployed? In terms of its powers of repression, the system has not failed. To date, the OWS movement has not even confronted the moneyed elite with a threat on the scale of the 1999 protests in Seattle. There are many options lying ahead for the OWSers to ponder, though they should remember Lenin: there is never a final collapse of capitalism unless there is an alternative.

Having briefly tasted batons and pepper spray, OWSers should know that when capital feels it is being pushed to the wall, it will stop at nothing to crush any serious challenge. The cop puts away his smile. The indulgent mayor imposes a curfew. “Exemplary” sentences are handed down. The prisons fill up. Organized repression can be defeated only by organized resistance, nationwide. How to mount this is the OWSers’ urgent, immediate challenge.

The day I became a citizen of these United States, June 17, 2009, in the old Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, I raised my right hand and swore that I “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

To my immediate left in that vast and splendid Deco theater was a Moroccan; to my right, a Salvadoran; and around us 956 others from ninety-eight countries, each holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn earlier that day that since our final, successful interviews with immigration officials we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party. (When asked some years earlier, also in Oakland, whether she planned to overthrow the government by force, Jessica Mitford answered, “What other choices do I have?”)

The sovereignty I was abjuring was the Republic of Ireland, itself not so far from shifting its allegiance from the Irish Constitution to the dictates of European bankers. Since questions about the Bill of Rights were likely to come up in those final interviews, many people in the theater had a pretty clear notion that along with allegiance came certain important protections, such as guarantees of due process and the right to a public trial by jury. There’s no doubt that for many, with vivid memories of summary seizure and arbitrary imprisonment in their biographies, these guarantees had great significance.

But it turns out it was all a fraud. The Uzbek down the row from me who had fled Karimov’s regime probably had no need to anticipate being boiled alive—a spécialité de la maison in Tashkent. But being roasted alive by Hellfire missile, doomed by executive order of President Obama, without due process in any court of law, for reasons of state forever secret, could theoretically lie in his future. If presidential death warrants beyond the reach of scrutiny and review by courts or juries are the mark of a banana republic, then we were all waving the flag of just such an entity.

On May 21, less than a month before that June morning in 2009, Obama had abandoned his commitments to restore the rule of law after the abuses of his predecessor. In a speech at the National Archives he announced that he was reviving the military commission trial system, and disclosed that his advisers had told him that some prisoners at Guantánamo may be too dangerous to release. Though there was insufficient evidence to build a case, they would be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Then, in February 2010, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair blithely told a House committee that “being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans.” Blair added helpfully that if “we think direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

On September 30 a CIA drone unit based in Yemen incinerated two US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric, and Samir Khan, associated with Inspire magazine. With zero credible evidence, the administration is portraying Awlaki as a senior Al Qaeda commander and Khan as a “belligerent”; news reports present Khan as a sophisticated pamphleteer whose skills had supposedly rendered him the Tom Paine of Muslim extremism. Tremendous emphasis is placed on the murdered men’s fluent command of English, a facility that seems to have sealed their death warrants.

The administration claims it canvassed legal opinion within the government but refuses to disclose what this opinion was, except that it supported the assassination as legal—a claim parroted by the establishment press, along with opinions from rather carefully selected authorities. My favorite is from Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times. She spared her readers the views of Ron Paul, a well-known member of Congress and presidential candidate who denounced the killing, preferring to cite an obviously unbiased authority: “‘This attack appears to have met the criteria of proportionality, military necessity and the absence of alternatives to be in full accordance with a state’s right to aggressive self-defense,’ said [Amos] Guiora, a former Israel Defense Forces legal advisor involved in targeted killing decisions in the Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s.”

Al Qaeda is a puny force whose prime function today is to justify the war in Afghanistan and the overall “war on terror,” and to boost Obama’s re-election campaign. Whatever Awlaki may have done, aside from earn martyr status, is irrelevant to the basic issue—which is that he should not have been punished until convicted in a court of law.

There is no reason to suppose that Obama’s successor will rescind the authority assumed by the former lecturer in constitutional law. Increases in executive power are rarely forfeited. We have thus embarked on a new era: after decades of passionately denying its forays into assassination, the CIA now preens over them, having trumped the military by seizing the role of chief executioner with a rapidly expanding drone empire, mostly tasked with killing foreigners but not shirking elimination of US citizens.

For years Jeremy Bentham tried to sell the British government on the idea of a Panopticon: a prison designed so that a single guard could monitor and control a thousand convicts. We now have a global Panopticon, serviced by CIA spy planes that can survey every square foot of Google Earth, enforced by drones and pedestrian assassins, all acting at the behest of one man beyond the reach of constitutional restraint. We are back with the lettres de cachet, themselves the descendants of Roman imperial dictatorship: Rex solutus est a legibus, the king is released from the laws.

The protesters outside the White House have furled their banners and headed home. Now the Obama administration will decide whether to issue a presidential permit for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline extension—a $7 billion project to bring heavy, “sour” crude oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, down through Montana and the Plains states to refineries on the Gulf Coast, notably in Port Arthur, Texas.

Even as the protesters savaged the scheme as a fearsome environmental disaster, the State Department issued its final environmental impact statement on August 26. Not surprisingly, it was favorable to the project, furnishing such nuggets of encouragement as “analysis of previous large pipeline oil spills suggests that the depth and distance that the oil would migrate would likely be limited unless it reaches an active river, stream, a steeply sloped area, or another migration pathway such as a drainage ditch.”

There will now be a ninety-day review period. If federal agencies aren’t unanimous, then the final say-so is up to Obama. It’s a sound bet that Obama will issue approval. Would the ductile president risk a thrashing from Republicans for putting birds ahead of jobs? Right before Labor Day he gave the business lobby what it sought on postponement of new air quality standards.

But undoubtedly the prime rationale put forward by the president will be security of supply and energy “independence,” meaning supply from the fine, upstanding Calgary-based TransCanada Corporation, as opposed to “not secure and reliable sources of crude oil, including the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, and South America.”

We saw this bait-and-switch game a generation ago amid the battles over oil in Alaska, where the North Slope drilling and pipeline were approved by Congress only because the oil was intended to buttress America’s energy independence. Congress required the oil companies operating on the North Slope to refine the crude in the United States, with no exports permitted.

In fact, the companies had a long-term strategy to export Alaska’s crude to Asia. In 1996 President Bill Clinton, extending Lincoln Bedroom sleeping privileges and a Rose Garden birthday party to Arco’s former CEO Lodwrick Cook in exchange for campaign cash, signed an executive order OK’ing foreign sales of Alaskan crude.

This time there will be no twenty-five-year pause. From day one of the Keystone XL scheme the oil companies’ plan has been to take the heavy crude from Alberta, refine it in Texas and then ship it out in the form of middle distillates—diesel, jet fuel, heating oil—primarily to Europe and Latin America.

Contrary to the lurid predictions of declining US oil production, disastrous dependence on foreign oil and the need for new offshore drilling, not to mention the gloom-sodden predictions of the “peak oil” crowd, the big crisis for the US oil companies can be summed up in a single word: glut.

Here let me wheel on a very useful report, “Exporting Energy Security: Keystone XL Exposed,” just issued by Oil Change International (OCI), a “clean energy” advocate. The explosive sentences (buttressed by figures from the government’s Energy Information Administration) come on pages 3 and 4: “For the last two years, and for the foreseeable future…demand [for oil in the United States] is in decline, while domestic supply is rising…. Gasoline demand is declining due to increasing vehicle efficiency and slow economic growth”; meanwhile, “as a result of stagnant demand and the rise in both domestic [notably North Dakota] and Canadian oil production, there is a glut of oil in the US market. Refiners have therefore identified the export market as their primary hope for growth and maximum profits.”

Enter San Antonio–based Valero Energy, the largest exporter of refined oil products in the United States and a big-time retailer of gasoline in this country through its Valero, Diamond Shamrock and Beacon stations. As OCI’s report emphasizes, the Keystone XL pipeline would “probably not have gotten off the drawing board” if it hadn’t been for Valero. The company has the biggest commitment to the pipeline, guaranteeing a TransCanada purchase of at least 100,000 barrels a day, 20 percent of Keystone XL’s capacity, until 2030.

Valero’s CEO and chairman, Bill Klesse, doesn’t keep his firm’s business plan a secret. The big overseas market is diesel because Europeans, Latin Americans and others like the more fuel-efficient diesel engine. Valero’s Port Arthur refinery can process cheap heavy crude from Canadian tar sands into high-value, ultra-low-sulfur diesel. Better still, since the refinery operates as a “foreign trade zone,” it won’t pay tax and custom duties on exports or on any gasoline imports from its Welsh refinery.

There’s no national need for the Keystone XL extension. It spares TransCanada the task of trying to send the tar sands oil to Canadian terminals through fractious First Nations north of the border. It feeds Big Oil’s bottom line. It’s an environmental nightmare—mainly because of the certainty of corporate penny-pinching in maintenance and the equally appalling (and deliberate) lack of government safety enforcement.

Money talks, of course. Obama received $884,000 from the oil and gas industry during the 2008 campaign, more than any other lawmaker except John McCain. Valero throws the money around. Across 2008, 2010 and thus far in the 2012 campaign, it ranks in the top six contributors from the oil and gas industry—favoring Republicans by 80 percent or more. Between 1998 and 2010 Valero gave $147,895 to Rick Perry, outstripped only by Exxon. Surely, one way or the other, Bill Klesse can hope for a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

My father was edging his way tactfully out of the Communist Party, though he was still spending time at the Daily Worker. He was under constant surveillance by the Special Branch, whose officers followed him and tapped his phone from 1934 to 1954. Logs available in nineteen boxes in the public archives in the British Library disclose my first entry into the shadow of state surveillance in 1948 when, at age 7, I called my father at the Worker and asked him to hurry home to read to me about Christopher Robin.

No one had any money. Fun for millions was the weekly flutter on racehorses or football teams. “Is the Middle Class Doomed?” asked Picture Post in 1949, and answered its question in the affirmative. Labor’s National Health Service opened for business on July 5, 1948, and the great race for drugs, false teeth and spectacles was under way. Spending on prescriptions went from £13 million to £41 million in two years, prompting Representative Paul Ryan’s ideological predecessors to howl that the NHS was on the edge of collapse. More than my father’s articles in the Worker, the NHS helped the masses see clearly. Hundreds of thousands of poor people previously had recourse only to prescriptionless specs from the tray in Woolworths. Now they perched on their noses prescription lenses in the 422 Panto Oval frame, as did I, though it took John Lennon, fifteen years down the road, to endow it with retro-chic.

At the Worker, with or without prescription spectacles, there wasn’t much sign of the fabled millions in Moscow gold supposedly sent by Stalin to foment revolution. In practical terms the most important fellow in the office was a scholarly looking Burmese man who toiled away behind a vast pile of books and manuals. My father reckoned he was set to turn in a particularly meaty series on Burma’s prospects after independence, won in 1948 from British colonial rule. In fact he was the Worker’s racing correspondent, working up form for the coming season.

The Burman was red-hot as a tipster and soon had a wide following. Once my father found the Worker’s manager half-dead from apprehension. He’d put the entire office’s Friday wage packet on a pick by the Burman, in the hope of getting the comrades something decent to take home to their wives. “Should that animal fail,” he said, trembling, “the lads’ll about kill me.” But the tipster came through, and that week everyone got full pay and even some arrears.

The biggest day in the National Hunt Steeplechase in England is the Grand National, run at Aintree, outside Liverpool, typically in April; four miles, 856 yards, thirty fences, often lethal to horses and devastating to jockeys. In 1928 the winner, Tipperary Tim, ridden by Billy Dutton and carrying odds of 100 to one, was the only horse out of a starting field of forty-two that didn’t fall.

Later, in Ireland, my mother bred horses. My father never cared for them, but he was pretty good at studying form and picking the odd winner, which was just as well because freelance earnings were scrawny, particularly if you were a well-known red. But when it came to Grand National day, March 26, 1949, no laborious toil over the form sheets was necessary. Among the scheduled starters that year was a horse called Russian Hero. Although the cold war was limbering up, Russians were still heroes to many. Not just members of the CPGB but a wider swath of punters in the union movement would be likely to plump for a horse carrying that name, if only as a side bet in honor of Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad, the Kursk salient.

One of the jockeys riding that day was young Dick Francis, later the immensely popular author of a long string of racing thrillers. Francis was on a great but temperamental horse called Roimond. In the last mile he took the lead. With only eleven horses still in the race, he was set for victory. Then, just short of the finishing line, Roimond got passed by a horse going so fast Francis knew he had no chance to catch up. It was Russian Hero, ridden by Leo McMorrow, carrying starting odds of sixty-six to one. Russian Hero beat Roimond by eight lengths.

As the BBC man calling the race screamed out the finale, my father—who was no longer a party member but who’d staked his well-frayed shirt on Russian Hero—loosed a triumphant roar. So, across Britain, did all readers of the Daily Worker following the advice of the Burmese tipster, who’d picked Russian Hero, no doubt partly through rigorous assessment of the horse’s genetic profile—contrary though this Mendelian posture was to the doctrines of Lysenko, riding high in Stalin’s esteem.

It was by far the largest collective transfer of wealth ever to communism’s stalwarts in Britain. Around that time the party probably had about 50,000 members, and even a wagered half crown looked pretty good when multiplied by sixty-six.

Dick Francis took second in 1949. Seven years later, a champion jockey in his eighth Grand National, he rode Devon Loch, owned by Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Francis was ten lengths clear, less than fifty yards from winning, when Devon Loch suddenly went down on his belly, tearing muscles in the process. It’s one of horse racing’s great mysteries, though Francis thinks it was a sudden wave of noise from the crowd that spooked his horse. “That’s racing,” the Queen Mother said stoically to Francis.

The event got Francis a contract to write a memoir. He retired from the track and took up a hugely successful life of crime writing. But “given the choice,” he says, “I’d take winning the National every time. I was a jockey first, writer second. It’s good having a book well received, but it doesn’t compare to winning a race.”

What’s this, Cockburn? You’re saying that after all the endless disclosures of NATO’s lies concerning its onslaughts on the former Yugoslavia in the late ’90s, and the hundreds of postmortems and official inquiries into the propaganda blitz before the attack on Iraq in 2003, the press is more gullible regarding Libya, less inclined to question official claims than in those earlier failures?

That’s exactly what I’m saying. The bar was already low, but now that those supposed lessons have been acknowledged and ignored, it has been lowered even further.

Who can argue with a straight face that UN Resolution 1973, passed on March 17, permits efforts to assassinate Qaddafi by bombs and missiles or escalations in the arsenal of regime change, such as the deployment of British Apache helicopters? A hundred years from now this UN/NATO intervention will be seen as an old-fashioned colonial smash-and-grab affair, tricked out with trumpery nonsense about a mission “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas” as hollow as the old imperialists’ claims that the conquest of India was primarily about saving widows from suttee.

In the past few weeks we have had amply documented records of ferocious repression across the Middle East. There are body counts and vivid reports out of Syria. The violence that finally prompted President Saleh’s flight from Yemen to Saudi Arabia was relayed in graphic reportage.

Admittedly, the US press has been less energetic in relaying the savageries being inflicted on erstwhile democracy seekers in Bahrain, thus reflecting the desire of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton that the topic not be mentioned. Whereas “Libya” appears at least fourteen times in the three major declarations issued at the recent G-8 summit in Deauville, France, and “Syria” twelve times, “Bahrain” appears not at all.

Contrast these detailed reports with the amazing vagueness of news stories coming out of Libya. Here, remember, we have a regime accused in Resolution 1973 of “widespread and systematic attacks…against the civilian population [that] may amount to crimes against humanity.” We have a press corps and insurgents ready and eager to report anything discreditable to the Qaddafi regime.

Yet since mid-February the reporting out of Libya has had a striking lack of persuasive documentation of butcheries or abuses commensurate with the language lavished on the regime’s presumptive conduct. Though human rights groups have furnished some detailed accounts of specific repressions, time and again one reads vague phrases like “thousands reportedly killed by Qaddafi’s mercenaries” or Qaddafi “massacring his own people,” delivered without the slightest effort to furnish supporting evidence. This is not said out of any singular respect for Qaddafi. But it was the secondhand allegation of massacres that drove both news coverage and UN activities—particularly in the early stage, when UN Resolution 1970 was adopted, calling for sanctions and the referral of Qaddafi’s closest circle to the International Criminal Court.

News reports in mid-March, such as those by McClatchy reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Shashank Bengali, contain no claims of anything approaching a “crime against humanity,” the allegation in Resolution 1973. Yet by February 23 the propaganda blitz was in full spate, with Clinton denouncing Qaddafi and Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle East” exhumed as the preferred way of describing the Libyan leader.

The UN commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, started denouncing the Libyan government as early as February 18; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon joined Pillay on February 21. The UN News Center reported that Ban was “outraged at press reports that the Libyan authorities have been firing at demonstrators from war planes and helicopters” (my italics). On this kind of basis the Security Council’s February 22 session, devoted to “Peace and Security in Africa,” became instead devoted to denouncing Libya. In these early days, no one who represented the Libyan government was permitted to address the council. Only defectors speaking on behalf of Libya were given the floor.

Now remember that on March 10, French President Sarkozy, a major player in NATO’s coalition of the willing against Libya, declared the Libyan National Transition Council the only legitimate representative of the Libyan people. So Qaddafi was facing a formal armed insurrection—not a protest movement demanding “democracy”—led by a shadowy entity based in Benghazi, one of whose more diligent enterprises appears to have been the establishment of a “central bank.” Seven days later, Resolution 1973 made clear that attempts to suppress this insurrection would elicit armed intervention by NATO.

NATO says it has flown more than 3,000 missions, and it is clear that despite the Benghazi rebels’ pretensions and effusive coverage in the NATO powers’ homelands, the rebels have been unable to make any effective military showing. In other words, the only serious challenge to Qaddafi is a pirate coalition of NATO forces operating without the slightest mandate in international law, currently engaged in bombing a major city—Tripoli—filled with civilians. The indifference of the Western press, not to mention the liberal/left in the United States, to these obvious facts has emboldened the coalition to ever more brazen affronts to law, with bluff calls from British generals amid the embarrassing stalemate to cut the cackle and send in the troops.

America’s clients in Bahrain and Riyadh can watch the undignified pantomime with a tranquil heart, welcoming this splendid demonstration that they have nothing to fear from Obama’s fine speeches or Clinton’s references to democratic aspirations, well aware that NATO’s warplanes and helicopters are operating under the usual double standard—with the Western press furnishing all appropriate services.

Has there ever been such a chilling launch to a re-election campaign? I take the kickoff to be April 27, when Obama produces his long birth certificate at a White House press conference. He says it’s time to abandon such idle distractions and face the big, serious issues. He knows something we don’t—that serious issue number one is a killing.

The Navy SEALs are on standby, primed with Obama’s orders for the summary assassination of Osama bin Laden. There’s cloud cover over Abbottabad, so bin Laden gets an extra couple of days puttering around the house listening to his old speeches. William and Kate won’t have to share Saturday’s headlines with the head of Osama.

Had all gone well, Sunday’s newspapers would have been freighted with the news that Muammar el-Qaddafi had been killed in the course of a NATO bombing strike on a “command and control” site in Tripoli. It had been in the cards from day one; indeed, on April 29 the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service leaked an accurate forecast to Rex, a Russian online news agency, whose Kirill Svetitsky quoted an anonymous source within the intelligence service: “There will be an attempt to kill Muammar Qaddafi on or before May 2. The governments of France, Britain and the US decided on it, for the warfare in Libya does not proceed well for the anti-Libyan alliance.”

When Ronald Reagan ordered nine F-111s on a bombing run over Qaddafi’s compound on April 15, 1986, he prepared some pro forma public remarks to the effect that Qaddafi had not been the intended target. Since the 1986 raid would clearly have been illegal had the United States invoked a principle of retaliation, Reagan cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, claiming the right of self-defense against future attack, evidence for such an attack being a bomb detonated under murky circumstances in a West Berlin cafe frequented by US servicemen. In fact, Article 51 was in no way applicable. Its function is to give the right of self-defense to any UN member state actually sustaining attack, until the Security Council can take appropriate action.

The April 30, 2011, bombing attack, made in the direct aftermath of Qaddafi’s call for a cease-fire, was not burdened with fancy talk about Article 51. UN Resolution 1973, which simply established a no-fly zone, was the sole legal pretext for targeted assassination.

Obama would certainly have been briefed on the attack and likely signed off on the assassination bid, in the same way that he had already given the green light for attempts to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric believed to be in Yemen. Legal underpinning? All it takes is “specific permission” for an American citizen to be placed on the hit list for extra-judicial killing. This “specific permission” is given by the president, or someone else under his authority in the executive branch, the entire process being emphatically not subject to outside review. It’s the position of the Obama administration, led by a former professor of constitutional law, that a president can unilaterally decide to have a fellow American done to death, along with whatever non-Americans—like Osama—he deems similarly deserving of that fate.

The Pentagon says a bid on Awlaki’s life was made on May 5. Success would have crowned Obama’s carefully planned “We nailed him” schedule, starting with the revolting late-night speech from the White House not long after Osama’s corpse had been dumped in the North Arabian Sea; the even more revolting interview with Steve Kroft of CBS, in which the president declared several times that justice had been done; and the excursion to Ground Zero. If Obama’s efforts to prove that he’s no wimp continue, we can expect as many bodies on the hustings as decorate the final scenes of Titus Andronicus.

Obama is certainly not the first US president to have taken a keen interest in assassinations. We could start with the bid on Zhou Enlai’s life just before the Bandung Conference in 1955. Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba.

The Kennedy years saw the first of many well-attested CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. In his Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Bill Blum—one of Osama’s favorite authors—has an interesting list of US targets, starting in 1949 with Korean opposition leader Kim Koo and going on to Indonesian President Sukarno, Kim Il-sung of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Philippines opposition leader Claro Recto, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres Ferrer, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, prominent Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aidid, Slobodan Milosevic…

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, like the ’60s, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true on either side of the executive order President Gerald Ford issued in 1976 banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” stated Executive Order 11905, now inoperative.

Line up Obama with his fellow assassins, from Eisenhower through Bush, and I believe he’s the most repellent of the bunch, down there with Woodrow Wilson. None of his rivals quite match the instinctive egotism that allows Obama effortlessly to affect the earnestness of a man taking the moral high road while executing a cynical program of electioneering-by-assassination.

What began in Britain in 2005 as “a third-rate burglary” of voicemails, supposedly limited to a criminal invasion of privacy by a News of the World reporter and a private investigator, has flowered beautifully into a Level 7 scandal that threatens the careers of two of Rupert Murdoch’s top executives, not to mention the heir apparent to the News Corp. empire, James Murdoch. It even laps at the ankles of the 80-year-old magnate, threatening the final financial triumph that was scheduled to usher him into Valhalla.

In late April Jeremy Hunt, culture secretary in the coalition government led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, will rule on whether News Corp.’s bid for full control of the enormously profitable BSkyB network (News Corp. holds about 40 percent) merits a full inquiry by the Competition Commission.

In years gone by Murdoch used his newspaper empire as a bludgeon to crush regulatory obstructions. He has forged strategic alliances with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Republican administrations on this side of the Atlantic. Rebekah Brooks, editor of News of the World between 2000 and 2003 and now chief executive of News Corp. subsidiary News International, is a regular informal visitor to Cameron at Chequers, the official country residence of Britain’s prime ministers.

But these days their private colloquies may be marred by a certain apprehension. Cameron was scarcely installed in 10 Downing Street before he summoned Andy Coulson as his media adviser. It was a flagrant declaration of interest, since Coulson was a notably grimy character in the Murdoch archipelago, having served as editor of News of the World—a job akin to supervising the efficient distribution of raw sewage into the prurient hands of about 3 million Britons every Sunday.

Amid the first stages of the phone-hacking scandal, Coulson resigned as editor when NoW reporter Clive Goodman, who ran the royal beat, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were convicted of hacking into the phone messages of members of the royal family. With Goodman and Mulcaire sent to jail and Coulson stepping down, Murdoch’s senior executives no doubt hoped that a lid had been clamped down on the scandal.

But it was already too late. News of the World, like Murdoch’s Sun, has always been in the business of peddling sex scandals and true confessions. Just as the FBI and big-city police departments teamed up with gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons here, Scotland Yard and the scandal sheets worked together in harmonious relations greased by payoffs. The papers would get the stories and the cops would get favorable publicity, plus some cash. Peter Burden, a British journalist who has written extensively about News of the World, remarked to me recently that somewhere in the mid-’90s Murdoch realized that celebrity gossip had become an important and profitable international commodity. Meanwhile the snooping industry burgeoned.

The first line of defense—that Goodman and Mulcaire were unlicensed freebooters operating outside decorous guidelines—swiftly fell apart under the weight of palpable absurdity. As Nigel Horne, executive editor of the UK-based online daily The First Post, emphasizes, “The idea of rogue reporters blowing money without the knowledge of their bosses is a joke.” The paper paid Mulcaire £2,000 a week.

Scandals reach critical mass when containment breaks down and the various players begin to ponder charges of criminal conspiracy and perjury, not to mention the prospect of jail time. This is what has been transpiring in Murdochland, aided by pertinacious reporting by the Guardian and the New York Times, which was happy to remind the world at huge length in September that its rival, the Wall Street Journal, is part of an empire stained by criminal conduct.

Last Christmas Hugh Grant broke down while motoring in Kent. A man stopped, photographed him and then came over, offering to help. He was a former News of the World reporter, Paul McMullan, who now runs a pub in Dover. He invited the actor to drop by. Grant duly honored the invitation, armed with a hidden mike. He recently published his chat with McMullan in The New Statesman, guest-edited by his former girlfriend Jemima Khan. In the transcript, McMullan says Brooks knew about phone hacking at the paper. He also claims that Prime Minister Cameron probably knew as well.

As Burden speculates on his blog, “If Ian Edmondson [a former NoW editor] was involved, so was Andy Coulson. If Andy Coulson was involved, so was Rebekah Brooks. If Rebekah Brooks was involved, so was Master James [Murdoch]. And if they were, it’s very likely that Les Hinton, CEO of [Dow Jones and Company] (the brightest bird in Rupert Murdoch’s bush), was involved, too, because he was Executive Chairman of News International at the time.”

On April 10 Guardian columnist Steven Barnett expressed sentiments widely shared in Britain, writing in favor of a full review of the BSkyB deal: “The issue is that every aspect of Sky’s output will be driven by the same uncompromising corporate culture which has given us the News of the World’s criminality.” On April 8, in an effort to keep incriminating documents from being disclosed, News International said it would settle with a select number of victims, out of a £20 million fund. This supposedly last and final offer will crumble too in the face of hundreds of other claimants.

Will Rupert himself be enmeshed? Bruce Page, author of a fine book on Murdoch, suggests to me that what could drag the dirty digger into the swamp would be the disclosure of any deal he may have made to stem the scandal when Gordon Brown was still PM. Brown won’t confirm or deny that Murdoch approached him.

These are stressful times for the nuclear power industry, but we’re far from seeing any white flag of surrender. A White House spokesman tells reporters that nuclear power “remains a part of the president’s overall energy plan.” Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists emphasizes that “the situation in Japan is dire…. They are engaged in desperate measures to try to prevent the cores of three reactors from completely melting down.” Then he adds lamely, “There will need to be additional safeguards if we plan to have safe nuclear power in this country.”

Safeguards? We have two nuclear plants here in California, San Onofre and Diablo Canyon, built near major fault lines, and geologists agree we’re on schedule for an 8-plus quake on the Richter scale. Nature bats last. At the other end of the country, the Shearon Harris nuclear power station in North Carolina is a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants. It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately ingenious terrorist, to breach Shearon Harris’s puny defenses and sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and contaminate thousands of square miles of land.

The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. Oddly enough, the nuclear apologists—witting or witless—aren’t abashed by Chernobyl. They simply misrepresent or brazenly lie about its consequences in terms of death, illness and environmental poisoning. A notably shameful cover-up came in 2006, with a three-volume report issued just after the twentieth anniversary of the explosion, shaped by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the World Health Organization, plus many interested pronuclear parties such as the World Bank.

This report was a tremendous coup for the nuclear industrial/academic/political complex. True, it concluded that 9,000 victims had died or developed radiogenic cancers (some 4,000 children had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer), “but it will be difficult to determine the exact cause of the deaths.” The overall tenor was that the health consequences of Chernobyl were not as bad as had been supposed. The report has had a malignant half-life. Even as Europe’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, termed Japan’s nuclear disaster an “apocalypse,” Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical correspondent, comforted his audience with his précis of the 2006 report, explaining that by the time it came out Chernobyl had prompted only sixty deaths from cancer!

In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by three scientists, Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko, the definitive study to date. Chernobyl stresses that the cover-up began immediately. Official secrecy imposed by the Soviet government lasted three years, during which time an unknown number of people died from early leukosis. There were 830,000 “liquidators,” as the cleanup workers were somewhat bizarrely termed, and for three years “it was officially forbidden to associate the diseases they were suffering from with radiation.”

In the summary of his chapter “Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe,” Yablokov says flatly, “A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe…. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout.”

Much of the report is devoted to the jump in incidence after Chernobyl of a huge range of diseases induced by radiation: diseases of the endocrine, blood, respiratory, nervous and lymphatic systems; compromised immune systems; chromosomal aberrations; congenital malformations in children; Down syndrome; urogenital tract diseases; reproductive disorders.

Some of the statistical graphs in Chernobyl-related diseases only recently began to rise, and will continue to do so. One 2007 study by M.V. Malko predicts an incidence of cancer caused by Chernobyl in Europe, including Belarus, Ukraine and European Russia, from 1986 to 2056, at 130,405 and fatalities at 89,851.

Set the desperate efforts to avoid apocalypse at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima plant next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Compare the hundreds of square miles of abandoned land in Ukraine next to the evacuated zone, already twenty kilometers in radius on Japan’s northeast coast. Think of southern California or North Carolina or… The United States has 104 nuclear plants. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez writes that a single spent fuel rod pool—as in Fukushima or Shearon Harris—holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast “perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster.”

Significant sections of the environmental movement here, impelled by monomaniacal concern over the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, have made their shameful pact with the nuclear industry. It’s over. Look at Chernobyl, look at Fukushima. There’s no middle ground.

It’s not a hard task, indeed it’s an agreeable one, to dishonor Ronald Reagan by listing his infamies on the centenary of his birth. But such simple iteration misses the weirdness of his malign vacuity, so inbuilt that today his sons cannot agree on whether he had Alzheimer’s in his second term. How could they tell?

Start with the 1981 onslaught on organized labor by his firing of the striking air-traffic controllers, whose union had endorsed him; continue with the onslaughts on welfare and the insistence that government was at all times a malign force. The attack on government took many concrete forms—including deregulation of the savings and loan industry, with subsequent meltdown of same in an orgy of pillage.

Reagan’s initial executives, James Watt at Interior and Anne Gorsuch at the EPA, assigned to ravish America’s landscapes and distribute public lands to mining conglomerates, timber companies and corporate concessionaires in the national parks, overplayed their hands, proposing giveaways so outrageous that environmentalists, led by the arch druid, David Brower, were able to beat them back. But long term, Reagan’s environmental appointees were able to set an agenda of destruction smoothly consummated by later presidents.

There wasn’t a torturer in Latin America who didn’t raise a cheer when Reagan was elected, even though Carter hadn’t particularly cramped their style. They were right to exult. In Guatemala, Ríos Montt plunged into the darkest butcheries, with Reagan’s green light for the frightful bloodletting in which perhaps 200,000 Guatemalans died, most particularly Mayan campesinos. RENAMO perpetrated ghastly massacres in Mozambique, spurred on and backed by Reagan’s men, working in league with South Africa’s apartheid regime, much admired by Reagan. Fresh from honoring the SS men buried in Bitburg, Germany, he went two days later to Spain, where he declared that the Lincoln Brigade and the defenders of the Republic had fought on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War.

Reagan presided over a carnival of corruption and greed at the Pentagon, especially the billion-dollar feeding trough of SDI. Today, hundreds of billions of dollars in R&D and procurement later, the scheme remains as absurd as ever. There was no border in Reagan’s mind between fantasy and fact. He told Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel, that he had helped to liberate Auschwitz and returned to Hollywood with film footage of the awful scenes he had witnessed. It was all a lie.

The elite press institutions diligently fostered the cold war fantasies that powered Reagan’s 1980 campaign, such as Clare Sterling, Shirley Christian and Robert Moss’s imaginary Soviet “terror networks.” They lauded his leaden and childish oratory. Though the Tower Commission showed that Reagan was thoroughly apprised of the illegal activities in the “Contragate” conspiracy and had authorized them, commentators like Mark Shields made haste to affirm that the president had been the “victim of a bloodless coup in the White House,” which “he didn’t know about.”

Night after night, news anchors such as John Chancellor of NBC maintained that Reagan was guilty only of the crime of inattention, that “nobody wants him to fail.” Millions wanted him to fail. On March 9, 1987, in the aftermath of Contragate, Newsweek published a poll showing that more than half of Americans disapproved of the way he was doing his job, and less than half had confidence he would “do the right thing.” Another poll showed a majority deeming him a liar.

He was a vicious, ignorant man, snoozing over TV dinners with “Mommy” by his side, with a breezy indifference to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. He was surrounded by scoundrels large and small. Probably the worst was CIA chief William Casey. The people who did trust Reagan were mostly white men, the petit bourgeois, small-business owners, some (sometimes many) construction workers, many ordinary folk up and down the map who wanted a world much as it had been in the 1950s. Them, he betrayed. Reagan’s rhetoric was anti-government, but in fact he was pressing programmatically for a different use of government power, in which the major corporations would occupy a much stronger position. The Tea Party is a later chapter in this saga. The essence of Reaganism and its malign and enduring impact on our culture was anticipated by Daniel Boorstin in The Genius of American Politics (1953). “The character of our national heroes,” he wrote, “bears witness to our belief in ‘givenness,’ our preference for the man who seizes his God-given opportunities…. Perhaps never before has there been such a thorough identification of normality and virtue. A ‘red-blooded’ American must be a virtuous American…Paul Bunyan, the giant woodsman of the forest frontier (as James Stevens describes him), felt amazed beyond words that the simple fact of entering Real America and becoming a Real American could make him feel so exalted, so pure, so noble, so good…. He now felt that he could whip his weight in wildcats, that he could pull the clouds out of the sky, or chew up stones, or tell the whole world anything.”

This is the language acolytes like Peggy Noonan use constantly about Reagan—his directness, his manliness, his innate grace and a hundred other pieties. Reagan and his publicists tapped into the Bunyan myth, never forgetting that “a real American” would always be the sworn foe of treachery to “Real America,” whether it was nourished by communists in Hollywood or air-traffic controllers. He launched his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign by vowing to send “the welfare bums back to work” and “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” How he would have savored Glenn Beck’s demonization of Frances Fox Piven! He perfected the genre, just as he shaped a goodly slice of the fantasies destroying America.

Richard Holbrooke died at age 69 on December 13, thus spared the annoyance of seeing one of his best-known political creations accused of supervising the killing of captives in order to slice out their organs for transplant purposes and financial gain.

In the wake of Holbrooke’s sudden death, his memory was swiftly burnished with testimonials to his masterly diplomacy as the creator of a new Balkans freed from the Serbian yoke and as Kosovo’s midwife. It was Holbrooke who stood shoulder to shoulder with Albanian secessionists in the summer of 1998 and months later prompted NATO’s bombing of Serbia until these applications of high explosives to civilian targets caused Milosevic to order the withdrawal of security forces from Kosovo.

The "freedom fighters" of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—Albanian gangsters, most notably Hashim Thaci, hand-picked by Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright at the Rambouillet talks (her closest aide, James Rubin, acted as talent scout)—took over. Since unilaterally declaring independence in February 2008, the failed statelet, run in large part by heroin traffickers and white slavers and host to the vast US Camp Bondsteel, has been recognized by only seventy-three out of 192 UN members, including twenty-two of the European Union’s twenty-seven members.

In April 2008 Carla Del Ponte—former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and no friend of the Serbs—published a memoir on her time at the tribunal. In it she charged that in 1999 there had been trafficking in human organs taken from Serb prisoners, reportedly carried out by top KLA commanders, and that her efforts to investigate had been blocked. Del Ponte’s charges were buttressed by information that Western investigative journalists working for a US-based documentary producer, American RadioWorks, gave to the UN Mission in Kosovo in 2003.

Following Del Ponte’s accusations, the Council of Europe assigned a liberal Swiss senator, Dick Marty, to investigate. The Marty report, two years in the making, was published on December 16. The report names Thaci, now Kosovo’s prime minister, as having exercised "violent control" over the heroin trade in Kosovo during the past decade, and accuses him of overseeing an organized crime ring in the late ’90s involved in assassinations, beatings, human organ trafficking and other major crimes.

The report is being reviewed by the EU’s Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, which is already probing a human body parts rip-and-ship facility—the Medicus Clinic in Pristina. Seven people have been charged with international organ trafficking for allegedly luring poor people from slums and promising payment of up to $20,000 for their organs, which were apparently sent to patients in Israel and Canada.

Marty is grimly detailed, supplying plenty of names, particularly concerning Thaci and his associates in the Drenica Group, "consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organized crime."

Some Serb captives were taken into central Albania "to be murdered immediately before having their kidneys removed in a makeshift operating clinic…. The captives…were initially kept alive, fed well and allowed to sleep, and treated with relative restraint by KLA guards…. When their blood was drawn by syringe for testing…the captives must have been put on notice that they were being treated as some form of medical commodities…. When the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic." The kidneys were then taken to the nearby Tirana airport and shipped out to the paying customers.

Marty’s report made big headlines in Britain and across Europe, not least because Kosovo had an election on December 12, won by Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo, with the results swiftly denounced as fraudulent. According to a Guardian source, at three polling stations in an area loyal to Thaci, the number of ballots cast was higher than the number of people registered to vote. The British Daily Mail was particularly rough on Tony Blair, who traveled to Kosovo last year to pick up a Golden Medal of Freedom from Thaci, perhaps with the outlines of a kidney on the obverse.

The New York Times and the Washington Post have carried a few modest stories about Marty—this in marked contrast to the copious coverage of Belarus and Lukashenko, current Monster of the Moment, though no one has yet accused him of slicing open prisoners and making money off their kidneys or of being a white slaver and heroin trafficker. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley declared in the wake of Marty’s charges that the United States will continue to work with Thaci, since "any individual anywhere in the world is innocent until proven otherwise." Last year Joe Biden hailed Thaci as the George Washington of Kosovo.

After World War II the US government, in the Paperclip program, made haste to protect Nazi scientists like Sigmund Rascher who had killed and cut open Jews, Russians and Poles in Dachau for medical research. Then as now, the United States stands by its war criminals. Georg Richkey, imported as part of Wernher von Braun’s rocket team, had worked prisoners to death in the Dora camp and the Mittelwerk complex. Drew Pearson’s columns ultimately earned Richkey a secret war crimes trial, which the US Army sabotaged by withholding records. Thaci has nothing to fear, as Holbrooke would have assured him. Thaci would doubtless have been ready to ship him a new Serbian heart as a thank-you, relabeled "Kosovar," naturally.

You can take the ruling class by surprise every few decades, and the ruling class duly spends the next few decades making sure it doesn’t happen again. Then, from an unexpected quarter, it gets another punch on the nose. There have been the really big surprises, like the ones in St. Petersburg in 1917 and Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and there have been the smaller ones, like May/June 1968 in Paris and the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999.

This year Julian Assange and his comrades at WikiLeaks managed to take the ruling class by surprise no less than three times—with the two big data files on Iraq and Afghanistan and the diplomatic traffic from late November on. The surprise in the last instance was not so much the specific content of the cables—carefully filtered by WikiLeaks and the five collaborating news organizations—but the overall realization, prompted by the sheer volume of the material, that this is an awful lot of mildly dirty laundry to have hanging in the front yard. Granted, the diplomatic files were legally accessible to maybe 2.5 million licensed viewers—but this was still the ruling class and its employees chatting among themselves. Suddenly the entire world could see how people really talk and think when they’re running an empire, as opposed to making grand speeches about freedom at the UN General Assembly or while accepting a Pulitzer Prize.

And so the world has been getting a fine education in just how carefully diplomats and news organizations and journalists and academics connive at this secrecy. The New York Times cherry-picks Wiki-originating cables to exaggerate the supposed Arab eagerness for Israel to bomb Iran. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer implores the government to bury its secrets even deeper.

One of the biggest lessons for us comes in the form of a wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown.

Forty-three years ago Ramparts magazine published its disclosures of the CIA’s capture of the National Student Association as a front organization. The magazine became the target of furious denunciation by the Liebermans and McConnells of the day. Even before publication the CIA’s Desmond FitzGerald authorized a dirty-tricks operation against Ramparts. But at no time did the government muster the nerve to flout the First Amendment and try to shut the magazine down on grounds that it was compromising "national security" and guilty of espionage. A courtroom challenge by Ramparts‘s lawyers would have been inevitable.

While visiting Britain in the early 1970s, former CIA case officer Philip Agee had a brief meeting with Tony Godwin, editor in chief of Penguin Books. Godwin agreed to publish Agee’s tell-all exposé, including the names of active CIA officers and details of their operations. Agee managed to write the book in Paris, though I warned him that the CIA certainly knew of his plans and would probably try to kill him. They bugged his typewriter and later floated disobliging rumors about his sex life and drinking habits, but no one tried to shove him into the Seine or even put him in a French prison.

Today? At the least, all of Ramparts‘s electronic business operations would be closed down. Pressured by the US government, Amazon would deny Penguin all access or ability to sell books. Just look at what has happened to WikiLeaks. Its sites have vanished—though more than 1,400 mirror sites still carry the disclosures. Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and the organization’s Swiss bank have shut it down, either on their own initiative or after a threat from the US government or its poodles in London and Geneva. Assange is in a British prison, facing a hearing on trumped-up Swedish allegations zealously posted by Interpol. The US government is warning potential employees not to read the Wiki materials anywhere on the web, and Attorney General Eric Holder is cooking up a stew of new gag stipulations and fierce statutory penalties against any site carrying material the government deems compromising to state security. Commercial outfits like Amazon are falling over themselves to connive at the shutdowns, actual or threatened.

So far as the Internet is concerned, First Amendment protections appear to have no purchase or even acknowledged standing. Even before the WikiLeaks hysteria took hold, the situation was very serious. As Davey D recently reported on his Hip Hop Corner website, over the Thanksgiving holiday Homeland Security, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Justice Department and the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordinating Center, seized more than eighty websites, including popular hip-hop sites RapGodfathers.com, dajaz1.com and Onsmash.com. These sites were accused of copyright violations. No hearing. Alive one minute, dead the next.

So here we have a public "commons"—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections. The situation is getting worse. The net itself is going private. As I write, Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s Internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads they may want to run are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.

We need a big push on First Amendment protections for the Internet: one more battlefield where the left and the libertarians can join forces. But we must do more than buttress the First Amendment. We must also challenge the corporations’ power to determine the structure of the Internet and decide who is permitted to use it.

As the dust clears from the electoral battlefield, the corporate press is unanimous: the people have spoken, and their verdict is that President Obama must "move to the center." Onto the butcher block must go entitlements—Medicare, Social Security. The sky darkens with vultures eager to pick the people’s bones.

In fact, election day delivered no such verdict. The American people spoke, and their message was confused. When exit pollsters questioned 17,000 voters across the nation as to who should take the blame for the country’s economic problems, 35 percent said Wall Street, 29 percent said Bush and 24 percent said Obama. Just over half of the respondents (57 percent) said that their votes in House races had nothing to do with the Tea Party. The other half was split on the Tea Party, pro (22 percent) or con (17 percent). More than 60 percent said the all-important issue is the economy; 86 percent said they are worried about economic conditions. On whether government should lay out money to create jobs or slash expenditures to reduce the deficit, there’s also a near-even split.

The American people want a government that doesn’t govern, a budget that will simultaneously balance and create jobs, and spending cuts across the board that leave the defense budget intact. Collectively, the election made plain, they haven’t a clear notion of which way to march.

Obama must carry a substantial part of the blame for this. He delivered no clear message, no clarion call. For two years he gave labor nothing; he gave his most loyal constituency—black America—nothing. When the "One Nation" rally mustered in Washington on October 2, there was no stentorian message of support from Obama for the event, sponsored by the NAACP and the AFL-CIO. Among the vast throngs who gathered for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s politically inconsequential "sanity rally" on October 30, how many were young people who had voted for Obama in 2008, their passionate expectations now mutilated on the battlefields of Obamian realpolitik?

As Obama reviews his options, which way will he head? He’s already supplied the answer. He’ll try to broker deals to reach "common ground" with the Republicans, the strategy that destroyed those first two years of opportunity.

What do the next two years hold? Already there are desperate urgings from progressives for Obama to hold the line. Already there are the omens of a steady stream of concessions by Obama to the right. There’s hardly any countervailing pressure for him to do otherwise. The president has no fixed principles of political economy, and who is at his elbow in the White House? Not the labor secretary, Hilda Solis. Not that splendid radical Elizabeth Warren, whose Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the Republicans are already scheduling for destruction. Next to Obama is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the bankers’ lapdog, whom the president holds in high esteem.

In the months ahead, as Obama parleys amiably with the right on budgetary discipline and deficit reduction, the anger of the progressive left will mount. At some point a champion of the left will step forward to challenge him in the primaries. This futile charade will expire at the 2012 Democratic National Convention amid the rallying cry of "unity."

The White House deserves the menace of a convincing threat now, not some desperate intra–Democratic Party challenge late next year by Michael Moore or, yet again, Dennis Kucinich.

There is a champion of the left with sound appeal to the sane populist right. He was felled on November 2, and he should rise again before his reputation fades. His name is Russ Feingold, currently a Democrat and the junior senator from Wisconsin. I urge him to decline any job proffered by the Obama administration and not to consider running as a challenger inside the Democratic Party. I urge him, not too long after he leaves the Senate, to bruit the possibility of a presidential run as an independent; then, not too far into 2011, to embark on such a course.

Why would he be running? Unlike Teddy Kennedy challenging Jimmy Carter in 1979, Feingold would have a swift answer. To fight against the Republicans and the White House in defense of the causes he has publicly supported across a lifetime. He has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His was the single Senate vote against the Patriot Act; his was a consistent vote against the constitutional abuses of both the Bush and Obama administrations. He opposed NAFTA and the bank bailouts. He is for economic justice and full employment. He is the implacable foe of corporate control of the electoral process. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in January was aimed in part at his landmark campaign finance reform bill.

A Wisconsin voter wrote me in the wake of the election, "Feingold likely lost because his opponent’s ads, including billboards with pictures of him and Obama, as well as TV and radio ads, and last-minute phone bursts, convinced many voters that he has been a party-line Democratic insider all these years." What an irony! Feingold has always been of an independent cast of mind, and it surely would not be a trauma for him to bolt the party. Ralph Nader, having rendered his remarkable service to the country, having endured torrents of undeserved abuse from progressives, should hand the torch to Feingold as a worthy heir to that great hero of Wisconsin, Robert La Follette.

The left must abandon the doomed ritual of squeaking timid reproaches to Obama, only to have the counselors at Obama’s elbow contemptuously dismiss them, as did Rahm Emanuel, who correctly divined their near-zero capacity for effective challenge. Two more years, then four more years, of the same downward slide, courtesy of bipartisanship and "working together"? No way. Run, Russ, Run!

The first time I laid eyes on Jerry Brown was in College Park, Maryland. The newly elected governor of California had belatedly plunged into the race for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, in which Jimmy Carter was marked as the favorite. With the help of the Baltimore political machine built up by Nancy Pelosi’s family, Brown stormed across Maryland. He was a good stump speaker, a refreshing contrast to Carter, with his earnest pledges about honesty and zero-based budgeting. Brown won the primary and went on to victories in California and Nevada.

Amid this bracing challenge to the peanut broker, I wended my way to Sacramento to view the governor in his local habitat. Whale song burst from loudspeakers in the street outside his office, in front of which was parked his demure official vehicle—a Plymouth Satellite. Stewart Brand, editor of the New Agers’ bible CoEvolution Quarterly, was at his elbow as an adviser. Tom Hayden was on the line.

By the time of my late spring visit, California had already peaked as the Golden State. Ahead lay accelerating destruction or misuse of the state’s natural assets, starting with water; the ruin of a marvelous system of public education; creation of a vast gulag (twenty-three prisons built since 1984); phalanxes of absurdly overpaid public employees; and paralysis of the legislature in Sacramento.

You can hang some of the blame around Brown’s neck, though not the seeds of legislative paralysis. Finger Earl Warren for that one. It was Warren’s Supreme Court that issued two decisions in the early 1960s—Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims—ruling that legislators should be apportioned on a "one-person, one-vote" basis. This required state legislatures to reconstitute themselves entirely by the measure of population. Rural counties lost their state senators. Los Angeles and San Francisco swelled in power. The reconstituted California Senate of forty—coupled with the two-thirds-majority requirement to pass the budget—permits a faction of fourteen senators to shut down the state once a year, and that is precisely what happens.

Nor can you blame Brown, who served as governor from 1975 to 1983, for the economic earthquakes that began in the late ’70s, when defense and aerospace contracts started to slow (California had been getting one in every five Pentagon dollars during the cold war boom); by the late ’80s as many as 2 million well-paid blue-collar workers and their families had quit Southern California.

The gulag is a different matter. Governor Brown didn’t start the "lock ’em up forever" boom—but he hopped on to the moving train nimbly enough. In 1977 the legislature passed a new sentencing law, which Brown swiftly signed. It amended the state’s penal code to declare that punishment, not rehabilitation, was now the goal. The law ended "indeterminate sentencing"—whereby convicts could win significantly shorter sentences by dint of good behavior, self-improvement as assessed by boards including guards and prisoners. Liberals thought this somewhat ad hoc procedure was inherently unfair. Enter, across ensuing years, mandatory completion of prison terms; shriveling of opportunities for convicts to improve themselves; virtual extinction of parole; and open-ended "civil commitment," with endless extensions of prison time. The result was a swelling population of cons, many of them now entering senility and the Alzheimer years, many of them nonviolent offenders, crammed into tiny cells or using beds stacked three tiers high in prison gyms, all maintained decade after decade at staggering public expense.

Among them are those incarcerated for life under the state’s "three strikes" law, passed in 1994. In 2004 a state initiative to soften three strikes was set to pass handily until Brown, along with several other former California governors, did a last-minute ad blitz that reversed the poll numbers and defeated the proposition. Brown appears to have been the most enthusiastic participant; he flew to LA to do a series of ads with members of heavy metal groups, including Orgy.

Brown failed to fight the Prop 13 initiative effectively, though this prototypical Tea Party rebellion was probably unstoppable. When Prop 13 passed in 1978, the local governments that had already lost all power in the State Senate also lost any ability to raise money by increasing property taxes. Since then the only way to get dollars for education has been to go to Sacramento and beg or dream up another bond issue to place on the ballot. These bond issues can pass only with support from public employees—especially police, prison guards and firemen, uniting with teachers, nurses, etc.—and so the never-ending upward spiral of public employee salaries and pensions has no discernible limits.

By that time Brown had the damaging Governor Moonbeam label stuck on him by Mike Royko, though uncharacteristically this meanspirited Chicago columnist later apologized, just like Green Party punk rocker Jello Biafra later said he was wrong to call Brown a Nazi. It’s hard to be absolute about Jerry, though his stint as mayor of Oakland was very unattractive. His tilt at Clinton in ’92 was most enjoyable, not least for the fun I had with Andrew Kopkind interviewing Brown for The Nation and with Robert Pollin when we jointly defended Brown’s flat-tax proposal in the Wall Street Journal, bringing down the wrath of the liberal nonprofit tax reform groups, which ardently defended the so-called "progressivity" of our existing tax code!

California’s problems are well beyond the curative powers of any one governor. Brown’s slogan in the mid-’70s was "We are entering an era of limits" (always excepting the prison population and the share of the very rich in the national income). So if he wins in November, there’s no need to nourish foolish hopes. I guess it’s Jerry’s last hurrah. I give him a decorous cheer, if only as homage to the ’70s, when politics were a lot more fun and more optimistic than they are now.

George Soros is giving $100 million to Human Rights Watch—with a challenge for the organization to find a matching $100 million from other donors. He’s been rewarded with ringing cheers for his disinterested munificence.

Soros told NPR that with the expansion of HRW prompted by his big new grant, "the people doing the investigations won’t necessarily be Americans…. The United States has lost the moral high ground…. And that has sort of endangered the credibility, the legitimacy of Americans being in the forefront of advocating human rights."

Soros the financier made his billions as a currency speculator; he could destroy a country’s reserves, hastening its social disintegration. Then Soros the philanthropist could finance HRW’s investigations into the abuses his operations might have helped to induce. He offers an arresting profile of liberal interventionism in our era, in which economic and political destabilization (mostly calibrated in concert with the US government) has easy recourse to the moral and political bludgeon of a human rights report, which is then used to ratchet up pressure for an imperial onslaught—whether by economic sanctions, covert sabotage, aerial bombing or a blend of all three. The role of human rights NGOs in legitimating NATO’s attack on the former Yugoslavia is a prime example.

Or take a look at Soros’s meddling in Georgia. His millions and the NGOs under his control played an active role in installing the unstable and decidedly authoritarian Mikheil Saakashvili. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies quoted a former Georgian parliamentarian as saying that in the three months before the 2003 Rose Revolution, "Soros spent $42 million ramping up for the overthrow of Shevardnadze." Former Georgian Foreign Minister Salomé Zourabichvili was also quoted in the French journal Hérodote explaining, "The NGOs which gravitate around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. However, one cannot end one’s analysis with the revolution and one clearly sees that, afterwards, the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power." Consult Human Rights Watch’s rather muffled report on Georgia three years later, and you’ll find the statement that "U.S. backing of President Saakashvili’s government has led to a less critical attitude toward human rights abuses in the country."

With Soros’s extra money, HRW will be dangling big funds at its non-American recruits. Regarding the hefty salaries that will surely follow, it’s worth raising the experience of Eritrea, which immediately got into trouble with the NGO system after independence in 1991. Eritrea-based journalist Tom Mountain tells me, "For one, Eritrea won’t allow the NGOs to pay above civil service salaries. Why? NGOs come into a country and find the best and brightest and give them salaries ten or twenty times the local rate, buying their allegiance and often turning them against their country. Two, Eritrea has implemented a 10 percent overhead policy, and all the NGOs that couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with the documentation were kicked out, about the same time Eritrea kicked out the UN ‘peacekeepers’ here."

In other words, foundations, nonprofits, NGOs—call them what you will—can on occasion perform nobly, but overall their increasing power moves in step with the temper of our times: privatization of political action, overseen and manipulated by the rich and their executives. The tradition of voluntarism is extinguished by the professional, very well-paid do-good bureaucracy.

NGOs endowed by the rich are instinctively hostile to radical social change, at least in any terms a left-winger of the 1950s or ’60s would understand. The US environmental movement is now strategically supervised by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a top dispenser—which has neutralized the movement as a radical force. As for the role of Western NGOs in the third world, I recommend a glance at the great Indian journalist P. Sainath’s classic book Everybody Loves a Good Drought: "The majority of NGOs are, alas, deeply integrated with the establishment, with government and with the agenda of their funding bodies…. They also provide white collar employment. Nepal, next door, has over 10,000 NGOs—one for every 2,000 inhabitants."

The amazing career of "microcredit" as a strategy for "development" is also very instructive. Western NGOs and their rich donors ecstatically seized on the term, now vying with "sustainability" as their most cherished noun. For one thing, microloans have something bracingly austere about them: they are by definition small, and therefore eschew large ambitions, like organizing to force the government into serious action or, if necessary, overthrowing the government and enforcing macro-actions like land reform and economic redistribution.

The NGOs, many of them intertwined with corporate sponsors, have pretty much destroyed what began as a legitimate tool for poor village women to make their lives marginally better. Now giant multinational banks and corporate finance outfits have moved steadily toward capturing the microcredit sector. In 2006, Sainath reports, "the government of Andhra Pradesh passed a law, enthusiastically supported in the legislature, to curb the interest-gouging activities of some NGO/non-profits and other groups…. They were charging interest rates that effectively turned out to be between 24 and 36 per cent and even higher."

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Lenin and Martov were organizing their international Congresses and looking for grant money to this end. Martov, the Menshevik, told Lenin he must stop paying for the hotels and halls with money hijacked by Stalin from Georgian banks in Tblisi. Lenin reassured Martov, and then asked Stalin to knock over another bank, which he did—Europe’s record bank heist up till that time. It was one way, perhaps the only way, past the grip of cautious millionaires. Then as now.

"The US isn’t withdrawing from Iraq at all—it’s rebranding the occupation…. What is abundantly clear is that the US…has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon." So declared Seumas Milne of the Guardian on August 4.
 
Milne is not alone among writers on the left arguing that even though most Americans think it’s all over, Uncle Sam still rules the roost in Iraq. They point to 50,000 US troops in ninety-four military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counterterrorism" missions. Outside US government forces there is what Jeremy Scahill calls the "coming surge" of contractors in Iraq, swelling up from the present 100,000. "The advantage of an outsourced occupation," Milne writes, "is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq."

"Can Iraq now be regarded as a tolerably secure outpost of the American system in the Middle East?" Tariq Ali asked in New Left Review earlier this year. He answered himself judiciously: "[Iraqis] have reason to exult, and reason to doubt." But the thrust of his analysis depicts Iraq as still the pawn of the US empire, with a "predominantly Shia army—some 250,000 strong…trained and armed to the teeth to deal with any resurgence of the resistance."

The bottom line, as drawn by Milne and Ali, is oil. Milne gestures to the "dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq’s biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies."

Is it really true that, though the US troop presence has dropped by almost 100,000 in eighteen months, Iraq is as much under Uncle Sam’s imperial jackboot as it was in, say, 2004, even though US troops no longer patrol the streets? If Iraq’s political affairs are under US control, how come the US Embassy—deployed in its Vatican City–size compound, mostly as vacant as a foreclosed subdivision in Riverside, California—cannot knock Iraqi heads together and bid them form a government? Those 50,000 troops broiling in their costly bases are scarcely a decisive factor in Iraq’s internal affairs. Neither are the private contractors, whose military role should not be oversold, unless the Shiites are supposed to quail before ill-paid Peruvians, Ugandan cops and the like.

Is a Shiite-dominated government really to America’s taste and nothing more than its pawn? It was Sistani, denounced by Ali as America’s creature, who called Bush on his pledge of free elections in 2005, thus downsizing the excessive representation of the Sunnis, who chose to boycott the elections anyway. And if all this was a devious ploy to break "the Iraqi resistance," by which Ali means the Sunnis, why does the United States constantly invoke the menace of Shiite Iran and decry its influence in Iraq?

If the Sunni "resistance," honored without qualification by Ali, ever had a strategy beyond a sectarian agenda, it wasn’t advanced by blowing up Shiite pilgrims and setting off bombs in marketplaces. Muqtada al-Sadr, lamented by Ali as sidelined by the United States and Sistani, has been described as the "kingmaker" since his success in the parliamentary election this past March.

If this really was a "war for oil," it scarcely went well for the United States. Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion–barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. Only two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion–barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60-40.

Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: "Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh…. Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’"

So either the all-powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking or the all-powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, the "war for oil" isn’t in very good shape.

Ali and Milne are being credulous in taking at face value declarations by US officials that the United States is not wholly withdrawing and will stay in business in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those officials don’t want to see their influence go to zilch, so they have to maintain that their power in Iraq is only a little affected by the steady reduction of troops.

The left—or a substantial slice of it—snatches defeat from the jaws of a decisive victory over US plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has established what Milne calls "a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region." Yes, Iraq is in ruins—always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should hammer home the message that the US onslaught on Iraq, in terms of its proclaimed objectives, was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.

On June 11 Obama linked the BP oil blowout to the attacks of September 11, 2001. He made the parallel in terms of impact on the American psyche and of the spur to chart new policies. There are less flattering ways—to Obama personally—to compare the events. Few performances in George W. Bush’s wretched tenure aroused more derision than his conduct when he was alerted to the first attack on the Twin Towers, continuing to confer with the children in that Florida classroom.

Bush didn’t want to scare the children, a laudable instinct. Obama, less laudably, didn’t want to upset the grown-ups. Within hours of the explosion, NOAA scientists and federal officials were preparing for "the spill of the decade," with worst-case assessments of 110,000 barrels a day. But the White House, in collusion with BP, successfully capped the outflow of disturbingly high estimates, lowballing it at 1,000 barrels a day, then crawling reluctantly up to 5,000.

In his nerveless speech from the Oval Office on June 15, where he made the extraordinary claim that "in the coming weeks and days, [BP’s] efforts should capture up to 90 percent of the oil leaking out of the well," Obama reached for the traditional buck-pass of a blue-ribbon commission to assess the circumstances leading up to the April 20 explosion. It will be interesting to see just how diligently this commission excavates the incredible government indulgence toward the oil companies on ocean drilling. It could take off from the Clinton administration’s Deep Water Royalty Relief Act of 1995, a bill encouraging oil companies like BP to start drilling for oil 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. When Ken Salazar was still a Colorado senator, he berated the Bush administration for its slothfulness in pushing forward with deep-sea drilling in the gulf.

In the first year of the Obama administration, Salazar’s Interior Department put 53 million acres of offshore oil reserves up for lease, far eclipsing the records set by the Bush administration. As Jeffrey St. Clair describes in our CounterPunch newsletter, Salazar was adamant in retaining Chris Oynes as associate director of offshore drilling at the Minerals Management Service. As St. Clair explains, an outraged inspector general of the Interior Department discovered that on Oynes’s watch "the repeat offenders in the oil industry were allowed to police themselves, writing their own environmental analyses, safety inspections and compliance reports, often in pencil for MMS regulators to trace over in ink."

By the time Obama declared on March 31 that "we’ve still got to make some tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development in ways that protect communities and protect coastlines," his administration had given the green light to BP’s Deepwater Horizon well, giving this notoriously criminal company—a big contributor to the Obama 2008 campaign—a pat on the back for its safety record.

Struggling to recover from a Gallup poll conducted June 11–13 showing that 71 percent of Americans believe he had not been "tough enough" in dealing with BP, Obama announced on June 16 that under White House pressure BP is putting $20 billion in an independently run escrow fund to compensate individuals and businesses injured by the oil spill. Any satisfaction at this should be qualified by recalling that powerful international corporations like BP have armies of lawyers, lobbyists and politicians toiling to extinguish or diminish all financial sanctions imposed on them for criminal negligence.

We can set the benchmark here with the terrible 1984 disaster at Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant in India. In 1989 an Indian Supreme Court–assisted settlement set compensation at $470 million. At that time, the government still claimed that the release of a toxic gas cloud had killed merely 3,000 and injured 102,000. Over the years the casualty list swelled to 574,367 victims, including (according to independent, authoritative counts) more than 20,000 dead. In other words, the compensation now worked out, on average, to around $800 per victim. After a quarter of a century, on June 7 of this year, seven former officials of Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary were convicted in a Bhopal court and sentenced to two years in prison for what was the world’s greatest industrial disaster—and fined $2,100 each. All seven were out on bail within an hour. Punishment for the far more responsible officials in the US-based parent company? None.

Exxon Valdez? In 1994 a jury imposed damages of $5 billion on the company. In 2006 an appeals court halved this to $2.5 billion. And in June 2008 the Supreme Court cut this by 80 percent, to roughly $500 million—an average of $15,000 per plaintiff, of whom there were about 32,000. Lee Raymond’s compensation package for his last year as Exxon CEO was $400 million.

We do not yet have the barest outline of the ultimate consequences of BP’s blowout. There are serious scenarios by experts on the Oil Drum website suggesting that the outflow may not be halted until the entire reserve (which BP estimates at 2.1 billion gallons) has discharged into the gulf. That could be a grimly transformative moment in American political life, Judgment Day for decades of increasing submission of government to corporate rule, with vassals in every successive Oval Office. Few of them have been more compliant than the present incumbent, on whose oil spill crisis team is Lawrence Summers. This is the man who, as chief economist at the World Bank, declared in a notorious memo that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." Follow the money—which BP, like the other big oil companies, has been sluicing into the political system for decades—and the requisite logic is always available. Our task: to ensure that the April 20 explosion and the aftermath make a dent in it.

Here’s some really smart thinking on the part of the government of Israel. You’ve just had a slap across the face from Elvis Costello, who has decided to join musicians like Carlos Santana, Snoop Dogg and Gil Scott-Heron in declining to play in Israel. "There are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung," Costello wrote on his website, and "it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent."

Now you have the most famous Jewish intellectual on the planet on your doorstep, trying to enter the West Bank across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. Noam Chomsky, who is critical of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, is scheduled to give a series of lectures at Birzeit University near Ramallah in mid-May. He’s the guest of Mustafa Barghouthi, a Palestinian leader who espouses nonviolence and human rights, and he’s scheduled to meet with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, with whom Benjamin Netanyahu wants to have direct peace negotiations.

So what do you do? If you’re Israel’s Interior Ministry, you tell your border official to stamp "Denied Entry" in Chomsky’s US passport and to read out the view of the Interior Ministry, that "Israel does not like what you say"—thus ensuring a worldwide clamor while simultaneously driving a stake through the heart of the argument against the boycott that it inhibits free speech.

The interrogation at the border focused on two issues, Chomsky wrote to me later. "First and clearly most important, why am I going to Bir Zeit but not to an Israeli university (as I’ve done often before, with side trips to Bir Zeit, with no questions asked)? That amounts to their demanding that they have the right to determine who Bir Zeit is permitted to invite.

"The other issue, in the background, is that they don’t like what I write. That needs no comment, except for one significant fact. The issue never arose when I was invited to speak at Israeli universities [in 1997 and 1998], though what I was writing then is no different from now…. This reflects the way Israel has changed, radically in the past few years, particularly since the Gaza attack. It’s become far more paranoid, defensive, irrational, and ultranationalist. That’s emphasized by the press coverage in Israel on this. Some of it makes the Dershowitz-Horowitz types look like reasonable human beings. All inconceivable a few years ago…. The series of contradictory excuses the Israeli government started concocting when they saw the international reaction are ridiculous, and when they sank to blaming the official at the border for a ‘misunderstanding,’ cowardly as well. They know perfectly well that he had nothing to do with it. He was in direct contact throughout the several hours of interrogation with the Ministry of Interior, and was simply relaying their statements, queries, and finally decision."

An important aspect of this episode was muddied over by some inaccurate reports right after the event. AP, for example: "An Israeli official says academic and polemicist Noam Chomsky, who is a fierce critic of Israel, has been denied entry to the country." ABC News ran the headline "Noam Chomsky Denied Entry to Israel." In Ha’aretz: "Noam Chomsky Denied Entry Into Israel." Entirely untrue. Chomsky was denied entry to Ramallah, not Israel. This distinction highlights, among other things, that Israel controls the borders into occupied Palestinian areas.

As the veteran Israeli journalist Uri Avnery says, "What Chutzpa is it to prevent Palestinian students from hearing a lecturer of their choosing? And what does it tell us about Netanyahu’s perorations about ‘Two States for Two Peoples’? What kind of a Palestinian state is this supposed to be, if Israel can decide who is allowed to enter, and who not?"

Border control is a constant fact for foreign human rights activists, peace activists and political leaders. And it is a daily, humiliating reality for Palestinians and their relatives. Gaza is a vast prison camp, with rigorous border control by land and sea, with Palestinians and vital supplies interdicted. "I’ve had relatives who are U.S. citizens marry Palestinians in the West Bank—they had to leave every three months because that was the duration of the visa Israel gives them." So writes Sam Husseini of the San Francisco–based Institute for Public Accuracy. "I’ve seen Israeli forces take little girls into a room to be strip searched at the border from Jordan into the occupied West Bank. Israel in many respects is trying to make life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza difficult so they will simply leave."

In February the Tel Aviv–based Reut Institute presented a big report to the Israeli cabinet, long in the making, called "The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall." It has sinister recommendations for a strategy of "offense." Israel’s government is embarking on a methodical assault on human rights groups and kindred NGOs seen as delegitimizers. It’s not paranoid to expect COINTELPRO-type black-bag jobs sponsored by Israel on solidarity groups here and around the world.

Israel is plunging into deeper darkness. As Gideon Levy recently told one interviewer: "In the last year there have been real cracks in the democratic system of Israel…. It’s systematic—it’s not here and there. Things are becoming much harder." And Levy also wrote in Ha’aretz, "When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North Korea. When right-wing parties increase their number of anti-democratic bills, and from all sides there are calls to make certain groups illegal, we must worry, of course. But when all this is engulfed in silence, and when even academia is increasingly falling in line with dangerous and dark views…the situation is apparently far beyond desperate."

Looking back on it, could there ever have been a glimmer of hope that the United States would adopt a "no first use" policy on nuclear weapons; concede that there is zero reason to maintain a full arsenal of strategic missiles and a fleet of bombers, on full alert to repel a Russian invasion of Europe; and start winding down the nuclear-industrial-scientific complex? Not really. It would be like expecting the single-payer approach to healthcare reform or strenuous regulation of the banking industry.

But for those who cheered President Obama’s commitment, made in Prague a year ago and at the UN in September, that "we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy," the Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review, released on April 6, was a savage disappointment. The administration did not merely reassert the essential premises of US nuclear strategy but used the publication of the review and the subsequent Nuclear Security Summit in Washington as occasions to intensify the threats against North Korea and Iran. In the case of North Korea, Obama doomed any positive advances and reminded its leaders that America’s preferred method of negotiation takes the form of eight nuclear submarines in the North Pacific within a twelve-minute range of Pyongyang. The crucial sentence in the review, insistently repeated by Obama, states that "the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations." This is great news for the Holy See, Venezuela and Yemen, which along with 180-plus other nations have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And no, the president was not threatening to attack Israel, which has nuclear weapons but has not signed the NPT.

The US position is that the biggest nuclear threat in the world today comes from those who do not have nuclear weapons, or whose nuclear armory is diminutive to the point of invisibility, and that global security is properly vested in the hands of those who have substantial nuclear arsenals, starting with the only country that has actually dropped nuclear bombs—and indeed lost them (eleven in the case of the United States since 1945).

Here’s how the ongoing commitment to "first use" is expressed in the review: "In the case of countries not covered by this assurance—states that possess nuclear weapons and states not in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations—there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners. The United States is therefore not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons."

The US strategic nuclear triad will remain on action stations, ready to destroy the planet. The review concluded that "the current alert posture of U.S. strategic forces—with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert, and a significant number of SSBNs at sea at any given time—should be maintained for the present." Forward-deployed US nuclear weapons in Europe will remain. Though Article VI of the NPT famously commits its signatories to "negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament," heading toward a "Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control," the United States remains dedicated to "NATO’s unique nuclear sharing arrangements under which non-nuclear members participate in nuclear planning and possess specially configured aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons."

As of 2005, the United States was providing about 180 tactical B61 nuclear bombs for use by Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey under these NATO agreements. Articles I and II of the NPT prohibit the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. So why should countries under threat be asked to surrender the nuclear option when states under no such risk are supplied with nuclear bombs or missiles?

The deals extorted by the nuclear-industrial-scientific complex are starkly on display: "The U.S. nuclear stockpile must be supported by a modern physical infrastructure—comprised of the national security laboratories and a complex of supporting facilities…. Increased funding is needed for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory to replace the existing 50-year old facility, and to develop a new Uranium Processing Facility…in Oak Ridge, Tennessee."

What does this bode for START negotiations? The Russians, who are being asked to reduce their nuclear-force levels, can point not only to NATO’s ongoing aggressive moves to establish bases surrounding their country but to the fact that this rehabbing of the US processing facilities is enhancing its capacity to produce plutonium and thus swiftly multiply its nuclear arsenal with a change in regime and hence of nuclear posture.

The cause of nuclear disarmament has sustained a very serious, albeit predictable, defeat. The news will only get worse. Ahead lies the impending redraft of NATO’s strategic concept, last reformulated in 1999: "The fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political…to fulfill an essential role by ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor…. The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance."

Ironic, is it not, to read these invocations of "security" amid the impending bankruptcies of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and the destruction of the euro, and as the unemployment lines grow steadily across the United States and Europe, oh-so-safe beneath the nuclear umbrella?

Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five hours’ drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom, which crested in the 1950s when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles.

In the early 1970s new settlers–fugitives from the 1960s and city life–would tell visiting friends, "Bring marijuana," and then disconsolately try to get high from the male leaves. Growers here would spend nine months coaxing their plants, only to watch, amid the mists and rains of fall, hated mold destroy the flowers.

By the end of the decade the cultivators were learning how to grow. There was an enormous variety of seeds–Afghan, Thai, Burmese. The price crept up to $400 a pound, and the grateful settlers, mostly dirt poor, rushed out to buy a washing machine, a propane fridge, a used VW, a solar panel, a 12-volt battery. Even a three-pound sale was a relatively big deal.

The 1980s brought further advances in productivity through the old Hispanic/Mexican technique of ensuring that female buds are not pollinated, hence the name sin semilla–without seeds. By 1981 the price for the grower was up around $1,600 a pound. The $100 bill was becoming a familiar local unit of cash transactions. In 1982 a celebrated grow in the Mattole Valley yielded its organizer, an Ivy League grad, a harvest of a thousand pounds of processed marijuana, an amazing logistical triumph. Fifteen miles up the valley from where I write, tiny Honeydew became fabled as the marijuana capital of California, if not America.

That same year, the "war on drugs" rolled into action, executed in Humboldt County by platoons of sheriff’s deputies, DEA agents, roadblocks by the California Highway Patrol. The National Guard combed the King Range. Schoolchildren gazed up at helicopters hovering over the valley scanning for gardens. War in this case brought relatively few casualties and many beneficiaries into the local economy: federal and state assistance for local law enforcement; more prosecutors in the DA’s office; a commensurately expanding phalanx of defense lawyers; a buoyant housing market for growers washing their money into legality; $200 a day and more for women trimming the dried plants. A bust meant at least a year of angst for the defendant and at least $25,000 in legal fees, though rarely any significant jail time. It did produce a felony conviction, several years of probation and all the restrictions of being an ex-felon. There are thirty-two people serving life sentences in California on a third-strike marijuana conviction. In 2008, 1,499 were in prison on marijuana convictions; in 2007, 4,925 in county jails.

By now the cattle ranchers were growing too. Where once you’d see a battered old pickup, now late-model stretch-cab Fords, Chevys and Dodges would thunder by. Ranch yards sported new dump trucks and backhoes. Dealerships were selling big trucks and Toyota 4Runners, purchased with cash. By the mid-1990s the price of bud was up around $2,400 a pound.

Best of all, the war was a sturdy price support in our thinly populated, remote Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Marijuana remained an outlaw crop. Then in 1996 came California’s Compassionate Use Act, the brainchild of Dennis Peron, who returned from Vietnam in 1969 with two pounds of marijuana in his duffel bag and became a dealer in San Francisco. In 1990, when his companion was dying of AIDS, Peron began his drive for legal medical use of marijuana.

It was the launch point for greenhouses big enough to spot on Google Earth, plus diesel generators in the hills cycling 24/7 and lists of customers in the clubs down south. By 2005, with increasingly skilled production, the price was cresting between $2,500 and even $3,000 a pound for the grower. These days, in San Francisco and LA (the latter still fractious legal terrain), perfectly grown and nicely packaged indoor pot–four grams for $60, i.e., $6,700 a pound–can be inspected with magnifying glasses in tastefully appointed salesrooms.

The age of Obama saw Attorney General Eric Holder tell the DEA to give low priority to harassment of valid medical marijuana clubs in states–fourteen so far, plus Washington, DC–that give marijuana some form of legality. On March 25, California officials announced that 523,531 signatures–almost 100,000 more than required–had been validated in support of an initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed, no small fiscal allurement in this budget-stricken state. The initiative will be on the November ballot. Various polls last year indicated such a measure enjoyed a 55 percent approval rating.

People reckon legalization is not far off and spells the end of the thirty-year marijuana boom. The local weekly, the North Coast Journal, has made a somewhat comic effort to construct a silver lining for the county. It talks hopefully of branding the Humboldt "terroir," of tours of "marijuanaries." Dream on. Down south there’s more sun, more water and very capable Mexicans ready to tend and trim for $15 an hour. The smarter growers reckon they have two years at most. Here on the North Coast the price of marijuana will drop, the price of land will drop, the trucks will stop being late-model. There’ll be less money floating around.

The New Deal began with an end to prohibition of the sale of alcohol across the United States. The individual small producers of bourbon–some good, a lot awful or downright poison–shut down, and the big liquor producers took over, successfully pushing for illegalization of marijuana in 1937. How long will the small producers of gourmet marijuana last before the big companies run them off, pushing through the sort of regulatory "standards" that are now punishing small organic farmers?

Welcome, "Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged." This was the title of a hysterical column, vibrant with class hatred, by Frank Rich in the February 28 New York Times. Rich shrieked that "the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air." The militias are on the rampage. The sky is dark with the threat of Piper Cherokees being flown by populists into government buildings. To match the virulence of Rich’s language you’d have to go back to the tirades flung at David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, some eighty of whom were burned alive outside Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, on orders from Attorney General Janet Reno. It was this crime that Timothy McVeigh said he was avenging when he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exactly two years later.

As one might expect, Rich had a handy citation to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which plumps up its $170 million-plus asset portfolio with regular alarums about the rise of "hate groups," defined as those "with beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people," which pretty much covers the whole ballpark. That’s the same SPLC whose Mark Potok sensitively said after the incineration of the Branch Davidians and children, "The antigovernment movement, the militia, hate groups are absolutely going to get a boost out of this, and I think it’s really a tragedy for that reason."

This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on permanent retainer "is the very essence of richness." That’s the upper class. Those in the upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel they need one to handle wills, contracts and so forth. Middle-class people know they ought to employ lawyers but can’t quite afford them. Members of the lower middle class believe they can defend themselves better than any lawyer, and can’t afford one anyway. To lower-class folk, public defender and prosecutor look identical.

The lower middle class is what we’re focusing on here, the people who own auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners, fish stores and all the other small businesses across America–in sum, the "petite bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions. The left always hated the petite bourgeoisie because it wasn’t the urban proletariat and thus the designated agent of revolutionary change. Today’s left no longer believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie out of inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five percent of all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There’s your petite bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite indispensable.

And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever backwash they got from the stimulus often wasn’t readily apparent. They can’t afford health plans for themselves or their employees. They’re three or four payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits, blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business, what they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same cliff.

The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains them. But here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught by David Barstow, the Times reporter whose long piece on February 16 prompted Rich’s mad column. Rich refers to Barstow’s "chilling, months-long investigation of the tea party movement," as though the reporter had gone undercover, watching Klan rituals through binoculars somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly mischaracterization of Barstow’s perceptive and rather sympathetic account of tea partydom, in which he significantly doesn’t quote the SPLC but pops in, right at the end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who sued the Hayden Lake Aryans into extinction.

Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts and opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some of its ideology back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical platform of which, in 1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to twenty-one years, restricting public office to the native-born (there’s your birther movement), keeping the Bible in schools and resisting "the encroachment of a foreign civil and spiritual power upon the institutions of our country." Back then this meant the Vatican; today it’s Davos, Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.

At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put aside that snotty essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under the leadership of Obama–cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the left–and a Democratic Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar movement of any heft; a bailout for Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by both parties; the prospect of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy plants; a huge hike in defense spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at least at the rhetorical level, an impending onslaught on Social Security. Constitutional abuses endorsed or instigated by the White House continue in a straight sequence from the Bush years.

Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was bought off from resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its Cadillac health plans. Because of alleged anthropologically prompted global warming, the green movement has sat on its hands, hopelessly split on nuclear power, whose real, baneful effects have been irrefutably demonstrated, starting with nuclear waste. There’s been near total silence on the huge nuclear weapons budget boost (the largest for Los Alamos since 1944). Total silence on the Patriot Act, reauthorized February 27. What to do? Rally round the flag and scaremonger about the right, where’s there’s actual political ferment.

Editor’s Note: Nation columnist Katha Pollitt took issue with Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn’s recent assertion that Ron Unz had published groundbreaking research on Hispanic crime rates. Cockburn’s response to Pollitt’s criticisms can be read here; Pollitt’s initial response to Cockburn is reposted below and can also be found on her blog, And Another Thing.

***

writes:

Petrolia

A couple of weeks ago I did a Nation column on Hispanic crime rates, citing a big piece by Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative, going through the statistical data and concluding on the basis of age-weighting and other considerations that contrary to popular belief, Hispanic crimes rates are at least the same as whites and–given the unknown number of illegal Hispanic immigrants in the country–could be considerably lower.

Probably naívely, I thought it encouraging that a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan should devote its March cover and a substantial number of pages to a persuasive assault on right-wing hysteria about the supposedly astronomic crime rates of Hispanics in America. At the end of this column I had a couple of paragraphs in which I recorded Unz’s surprise that liberal foundations had not exerted themselves more energetically in this area to refute ignorant prejudice, with a couple of thoughts of my own on liberal racism.

This little coda is what sent Katha Pollitt scurrying to her laptop. It’s “annoying,” she snapped, “when conservatives take credit for work liberals have been doing for much longer and far more seriously. It’s even more irritating when a leftist [that’s AC] is so eager to bash liberals, he joins the parade.”

Then she listed a number of papers from the liberal end of the spectrum on the topic of Hispanics and crime, plus some testy comments from academics working in this field, claiming that Unz was reinventing the wheel and that what the American Conservative was trumpeting on its cover was old news, known to all, or at least to liberal communicators such as Pollitt, though not Cockburn, all too eager to take yet another whack at the pwogs.

The trouble is that Katha–to judge from this piece at least–doesn’t actually know anything about the topic of Hispanic crime, therefore doesn’t know what’s widely known, what’s not widely known and what’s completely mistaken. Even the very limited research she references is on the topic of “immigrant Hispanic crime,” not “overall Hispanic crime,” and these studies are sometimes are highly misleading for that reason.

For example Katha quotes Reuben Rumbaut at UC Irvine as saying patronizingly on the phone to her that “I’m amused by [Unz’s] ‘discovery’ of something I’ve been writing about since the last millennium.” She encourages Nation readers to peruse a 2007 paper by Rumbaut. Actually, this paper claims–wrongly–that Mexican crime rates skyrocket 700 per cent in the generation after immigration. According to a Rumbaut chart, American-born Hispanics are 250 percent more likely to be imprisoned than American-born whites–a result which would be grim news for America’s future if it were correct. Here’s a link. Scroll down a bit to Figure 3, and Nation readers can discover where Tom Tancredo may have got his ideas about Latino crime rates.

But Katha seems to have been in too much of a hurry even to look at the studies she cited as proof that “everyone already knew” exactly the opposite of what the studies actually claimed. Similarly, she cites Harvard’s Robert J. Sampson as having had an op-ed in the New York Times a few years back, arguing that immigrant Hispanics had low crime rates. But this column didn’t say anything about the much larger number of native-born Hispanics, a very different question.

Her derision–buttressed by a couple of academics (not a breed renowned for intellectual generosity) about the supposed lack of originality of Unz’s piece–is misplaced. As Unz points out, no one previously explored the age-adjustment or cross-correlation methods, even in the academic literature. Let’s go to the all important general point: just how well known are the facts about Hispanics and crime? Anecdotally, I should say that my column, scrutinized by a few Nation editors–all well-informed on social issues at The Nation–did not elicit the swift rebuke that I was flogging a dead horse.

It’s true that some academic specialists have generally been aware that Latinos didn’t have especially high crime rates (though as far as I know nobody’s previously used Unz’s particular methodologies to make the point directly and quantitatively). Even the volume of academic literature seems extremely scant, relative to the magnitude of the subject involved. Over the last decade, there have been a couple of books by Ramiro Martinez dealing with the subject, and a relatively small number of journal articles, few of which are very direct or explicit. But there’s a huge difference between academic specialists being generally aware of this, and perhaps occasionally communicating their results to other academic specialists via turgid journal articles and books, and this information getting out to a wider public audience.

“As far as I can tell,” Unz says, “there’s been virtually none of the latter effort. I’m pretty sure I’ve almost never seen anything mentioned in any of the six newspapers I’ve read daily for the last 15 years, or in any of the numerous opinion magazines to which I subscribe. If you go on the websites of the major liberal pro-immigrant/pro-Hispanic public advocacy organizations ranging from the National Immigration Forum to La Raza you’ll find almost no mention of this claim anywhere, let alone any study or report highlighting it. If you try using Google, you’ll find very, very little that suggests otherwise. In fact, one of the very few individuals who’s directly specialized in this field is Ramiro Martinez, cited by Ms. Pollitt, who’s written almost the only books directly on the topic of Hispanic crime. I sent him a copy of my article, which he said he liked, and we traded several notes. He actually agreed with me how unfortunate it was that so little of the public had been informed of these important facts. My claim is certainly not that the academic specialists have been deluded, but simply that they, and the organizations sponsoring them, have done an extremely poor job of communicating their findings to the general public.”

Katha cites Sampson’s op-ed in the NYT, addressing crime rates of immigrant Hispanics. Meanwhile, there have been a large number of major NYT news stories focusing on murderous Latino gangs, Latino prison inmates and Latino social pathologies that have provided exactly the opposite impression, let alone what’s daily on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and similar media outlets. Given how much money Ford, Soros, et al., spend, maybe during all these years they could have issued one study or report entitled “Hispanic Crime Rates” arguing that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites, and sent it out with a big press release.

There are at least about 50 million Hispanics in America, and they’re projected to become 25 percent of the total national population. Whether they have high crime rates or low crime rates is a huge issue for the future of America, and a very large fraction of the public wrongly believes they have high crime rates. As Unz wrote to me yesterday,”All my article really does is prove that rocks fall downward–but that may still be a huge revelation to lots of people. I’d be very curious if Ms. Pollitt can find any sentence in any article which she’s ever written or which The Nation has ever published by someone else saying something like ‘Hispanics seem to have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.’ ”

Incidentally, Katha says she resigned as a Nation “associate editor” out of anger that The Nation had published a piece by Unz in support of his backing for a California referendum on bilingual education. Perhaps this is really what set her off when she saw Unz’s name in my column. But she gets this wrong too. What she’s actually misremembering is that about a year after Prop 227 passed, a Nation editor noticed a piece Unz had written criticizing vouchers, and asked Unz to modify it to run in The Nation, which it duly did.

writes:

Berlin

Unlike my colleague Alexander Cockburn, I was not surprised by “HisPANIC: the Myth of Immigrant Crime,” Ron Unz’s article in The American Conservative showing that Latinos in the United States have a crime rate no higher than that of whites once you adjust for age. That’s because Unz’s thesis, which both he and Alex think is new and original, is in fact well-known. Even I, no sociologist, was aware of it. I’m glad that Unz, a multi-millionaire best known for pushing California’s successful 1998 referendum banning bilingual education, is challenging anti-immigrant right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck. (For reasons I still don’t understand, The Nation published a piece by Unz in support of his referendum, causing me to resign my largely ceremonial title as associate editor.) But it’s annoying when conservatives take credit for work liberals have been doing for much longer and far more seriously. It’s even more irritating when a leftist is so eager to bash liberals, he joins the parade.

A little research–some internet searches, a few e-mails, maybe (gasp) a phone call or two–would have shown how empty Unz’s claims to originality are. But facts would have interfered with Alex’s theory that “foundation liberals” left the research undone because they sympathize unconsciously with racism due to their obsession with “population control.” Or something like that.

Let’s go through Alex’s claims.

Has Ron Unz discovered something new? No. The low crime rate of Latinos has been studied by social scientists for over a decade now. It’s part of the much-studied “Latino paradox,” the numerous ways in which Latinos in the US do better than their poverty would lead one to expect. (Low infant mortality and normal birth weights are others.) Numerous scholars have written on Latino non-crime. Among the more prominent are Robert J. Sampson at Harvard, Ruben Rumbaut at UC Irvine, Philip Kasinitz and John Mollenkopf of the CUNY Graduate Center, and Florida International University’s Ramiro Martinez, whose “Latino Homicide: Immigration, Violence, and Community was published by Routledge way back in in 2002. (“I’m amused by [Unz’s] “discovery” of something I’ve been writing about since the last millennium,” Rumbaut wrote in a long e-mail to me laying out the recent literature in considerable detail.) Unz even cites Rumbaut in a footnote, although the only scholars he cites in the body of his text are the co-authors of a paper challenging federal statistics on imprisonment of immigrants, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Douglas Besharov, who, Sampson told me in an e-mail, is basically rehashing in a New York Times op-ed, an argument Sampson made a year earlier (that the increase in immigration was linked to the drop in crime.) Here’s a handy list of recent articles, including those mentioned below, but by no means complete.

Has this academic work received support from “liberal foundations” ? Yes. Sampson and Rumbaut have both received major support from the MacArthur, Mellon and Russell Sage foundations. Martinez has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Mollenkopf and Kasinitz have been funded by Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Mellon and Ford. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Big foundations fund think tanks, policy institutes and even other foundations. The Public Policy Institute of California, which in 2008 published “Crime, Corrections and California: What does Immigration Have to Do with It,” by Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, lists a slew of foundations among its funders, including Ford, Gates, Hewlett and the Pew Charitable Trusts. The National Immigration Forum, another NGO which has done work in this area, was co-founded by a Ford trustee and has received grants from just about every big “liberal foundation” you can think of. To say that foundations have steered clear of this area is just false, or as Rumbaut put it, ‘laughable to the max, squared.”

Has the story of Latino non-crime been publicized in what Unz calls the “very supportive mainstream media”? Yes. That is how I knew about it. To mention just a few relevant pieces, Sampson had an op-ed in the New York Times in 2006 “Open Doors Don’t Invite Criminals.” That same year, Eyal Press, a frequent Nation contributor, had an excellent and I would have thought quite noticeable article, “Do Immigrants Make Us Safer?,” in The New York Times Magazine. The Latino “crime wave” has been debunked in Time, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. Unz was even scooped by other conservatives. Both David Brooks and Linda Chavez got there way before him.

If the myth of Latino crime persists, it’s not because nobody debunked it before Ron Unz came along. Nor is it because liberal foundations have shown no interest in establishing the truth. It’s because lots of Americans have racist and anti-immigrant feelings that are resistant to factual information. As Sampson told me when we spoke on the phone, “There’s a long link in the popular mind between the perception of immigrant presence and the perception of disorder.” Sampson thinks the research is getting traction, though. “It takes time for the information to penetrate, because of people’s prejudices. But I think it’s changing.”

You could even say that Ron Unz’s article shows the word has gotten out–apparently, even to Alex.

Nothing more easily elicits roars of assent across a good slice of the political spectrum than the hoarse alarums that wave after wave of brown-skinned illegals continually flood across the border, plunging neighborhoods and whole cities into an inferno of crime, overwhelming cops and prosecutors, clogging the justice system, cramming the prisons.

Lou Dobbs is pondering a political run powered by a thousand pop-eyed commentaries catering to this fear. “A third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens,” he shouts. Glenn Beck screams about “an illegal alien crime wave.” The panic is by no means confined to the nutball right. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, launching his commendable plan for a National Criminal Justice Commission last year, invoked the specter of organized Mexican gangs that supposedly threaten “hundreds” of American cities. “There are an estimated 1 million gang members in the United States, many of them foreign-based,” Webb wrote. “Every American neighborhood is vulnerable. Gangs commit 80% of the crime in some locations. Mexican cartels, which are military-capable, have operations in 230+ U.S. cities.”

It’s all nonsense. There’s no crime wave swollen by brown gangbangers to city-destroying proportions. If you want a lucid walk through the data you can turn to… The American Conservative, whose March issue features a cover story by the magazine’s publisher, Ron Unz. There’s a photo of a tattooed gangbanger, and the title “HisPANIC,” then the subtitle: “The Myth of Immigrant Crime.”

Yes, this is the magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, whose physical form I last clapped eyes on at the Republican convention in the Houston Astrodome in 1992, roaring to a climactic fist-shake against the black and brown hordes who had recently rioted in Los Angeles: “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country!”

Unz comes to statistical analysis of populations and crime data with decent credentials–he majored in theoretical physics at Harvard, then went on to physics graduate study at Cambridge and Stanford before swerving into very successful software work on Wall Street and now a busy life in Silicon Valley, fostering ideas on both sides of the political aisle. I should add that I count him as a discriminating friend, supportive of left ventures such as CounterPunch as well as The American Conservative, whose tiller he took over in 2007.

At the heart of Unz’s essay is the matter of age-weighting. Most serious crime is committed by young males, especially those between 18 and 29. Now, the age distribution of Hispanics and whites in the overall population is markedly different. The median age for Hispanics is around 27; for whites it’s above 40. But to get useful comparisons you need to look at the relative criminality of Hispanics and whites of the same age; you need to sift out immigration-related offenses (more than half of all federal prosecutions) from state-prosecuted crimes such as robbery, rape, murder, burglary, assault and theft; you need to review comparative data state by state, since there are very significant regional differences in the way justice systems are administered, hence significant variations in incarceration rates.

Unz’s bottom line: “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.” Since poverty and crime have an intimate connection, and since America’s Hispanics are advancing economically, the Hispanic crime rate will most likely drop more. An important further point: Unz uses Census figures for all the states, with a total estimate in 2008 of around 45 million Hispanics. But there’s a widespread view that illegal immigrants are significantly undercounted. So if there are, as some “brown tide” scaremongers allege, 25 million unreported Hispanic illegals above Census numbers, then the true Hispanic crime rate is 35 percent lower than Unz estimates. Almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, white crime rates nationwide are significantly higher than Hispanic ones. Senator Webb needs to refocus his Threat Assessment.

But what about Los Angeles, allegedly the dystopian HQ of immigrant crime, half Hispanic in population, many of them poor and illegal? All crime rates in LA, Unz explains, have been dropping for two decades. Homicides plunged 18 percent last year. Violent crime is roughly the same in LA as in Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in America, the same as it was in the lily-white LA of the early 1960s. But the gangs? Ah, yes. You see, the feds dole out hundreds of millions each year for gang prevention. Pay a city to find a gang problem and the city will oblige.

Unz had a question for me: “Pro-immigrant advocacy organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in this exact subject area. So if my theories were correct or even just remotely plausible, wouldn’t such a vast army of paid researchers have long since discovered the same evidence and blasted it out to the four corners of the earth via a very supportive mainstream media?”

My answer: remember that mainstream NGO liberalism–starting with Rockefeller and particularly saturating every environmental foundation–is built on the bedrock of demographic panic about the pullulating poor, particularly the brown and black and yellow hordes. Every billionaire setting up his foundation almost invariably has population control in his mandate. Shoulder to shoulder with hysteria about immigrant crime waves rides fear of the fecund darker races. So I think we can surmise an instinctive racist bias among foundation liberals, their likely belief that Hispanics do commit more crimes and hence their desire to steer clear of all data that they fear might ratify this instinct.