Basically, I said what is Off the Table is far more important, and more dangerous, than what the parties are arguing about.
Dixon looks back to the post-Civil War era as a comparable era of malign consensus:
Too much agreement between Republicans and Democrats has always been bad news for those at the bottom of America’s class and racial totem poles.
Back in 1875, Frederick Douglass observed that it took a war among the whites to free his people from slavery. What then, he wondered, would an era of peace among the whites bring us? He already knew the answer. Louisiana had its Colfax Massacre two years earlier. A wave of thousands upon thousands of terroristic bombings, shootings, mutilations, murders and threats had driven African Americans from courthouses, city halls, legislatures, from their own farms, businesses and private properties and from the voting rolls across the South. They didn’t get the vote back for 80 years, and they never did get the land back. But none of that mattered because on the broad and important questions of those days there was at last peace between white Republicans and white Democrats — squabbles around the edges about who’d get elected, but wide agreement on the rules of the game.
Like Douglass, the shallow talking heads who cover the 2012 presidential campaign on corporate media have noticed out loud the remarkable absence of disagreement between Republican and Democratic candidates on many matters. They usually mention what the establishment likes to call “foreign policy.” But the list of things Republicans and Democrat presidential candidates agree on, from coddling Wall Street speculators, protecting mortgage fraudsters and corporate wrongdoers to preventing Medicare For All to so-called “foreign policy,” “free trade,” “the deficit” “clean coal and safe nuclear power” and “entitlement reform,” is clearly longer and more important than the few points of mostly race and style, upon which they disagree.
Garry Wills, who is a smart man, is really mad at Roberto Unger and others who are tempted to stray from the two-party system.
All these brave “independents” say that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, and claim they can start history over, with candidates suddenly become as good as they are themselves. What they do is give us the worst of evils.
Long sad sigh.
First, no one ever said there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the candidates. Some of the points Wills makes are valid, and a reign of Romney, especially one combined with Republican control of Congress, would be a dark age indeed.
But for the overwhelming majority of Americans, and millions living in countries unfortunate enough to be “strategically important” to Washington, so was the Bush era. And so are the Obama years. Yep, Romney would be worse, but as David Swanson’s tweet below says, our choices are calamity and catastrophe. Definitely there is a difference, but forgive us for not getting excited about it.
The Obama years have taught me (and I am slow to learn, though not as slow as some) that what binds the parties is more important than what separates them, and that the areas of agreement, the issues that aren’t even on the table, are a bigger problem that the things the parties fight about. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote recently, “the political press mostly covers whatever arguments Republicans and Democrats are having, a tendency that effectively outsources judgment about what’s important to partisans.” Or, to be a little less polite, party hacks.
I have been trying to summarize these commonalities with a catchy little acronym. I’ve been stuck on WASP for some time (War, Austerity, Surveillance and Prisons) but it left a lot of things out. This week, I had a breakthrough. Tossing on a hot sleepless summer night, this came to me: our politics, it’s like those old Bud commericials, you know: WASSUP!
So. WASSUP? No matter who wins the 2012 presidential election we will get:
WARS, lot of them, declared and un-, fought with armies, swarthy special forces spooks, and robots. Wars fought in particularly dirty ways, like bombing wedding parties, and targeting first responders who come to the aid of first strike victims. And those are only the ones we know about.
SURVEILLANCE: Your right to privacy went out the window in September 2001. That’s the story and both parties are sticking to it.
SECRECY, for the gubmint, not for us. See above. I mean, who saw this coming? You couldn’t have been more skeptical about Obama than me, and yet I’m shocked on a daily basis that the man who ran as the transparency candidate has been an absolute nightmare on that front. And don’t get me started on whistleblower persecutions, especially as that would mess up the WASSUP.
UNDEREMPLOYMENT, and (bonus letter) UNAFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE (and education).
PRISONS, and prisoners, inside the United States, at Guantanamo, and God knows where else. An area where the USA can proudly and truthfully claim We’re Number One. Not just in the number of people incarcerated, but in the staggering variety of cruel and unusual punishments a true growth industry can create when motivated: from Supermax to the pure evil of the death penalty system, to mandatory long sentences for the pettiest of crimes.
More on this latter, but all I have to say is (wait for it) WASSUP with that? WASSUP?! WAZZZZZAAAAPPPPPP!!?????
And to get back to the Gary Wills thing. It’s a little disappointing. I expect, and usually get, sophisticated analysis from him. That NYROB piece is a bit lazy, based on straw men and oversimplifications, and as a bonus perpetuates the canard that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000.* How tedious have arguments been over that very point for the past dozen years?
The 2012 election will make that argument seem as brilliant as the repartee in Gertrude Stein’s salon. Yeah, Obama’s been appalling, but Romney would be worse. Can’t WAIT to rehash that simple proposition in all its permutations for the next six months.
And I don’t disagree. But … calamity/catastrophe. Not exactly stoked about the choice.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late about budget cuts undermining America’s Defense capabilities. Google the term “budget cuts undermine military” and you’ll come up with 2,970,000 results. That is a LOT of hand-wringing.
Is it possible that the situation isn’t nearly as dire as we have been led to believe? That the military-industrial complex that towers over the rest of the world’s combined military might might just be able to squeeze by?
After all the chatter, some of it still quite hysterical, about “defense cuts,” I find no cut; I find “defense spending” (defined generically) going up by $8.2 billion, from $986.1 billion to $994.3 billion.
Given the rhetoric we hear out of Washington about “devastating” cuts that fail “to adequately address threats” you have to wonder how much more than $1 trillion do these people want to spend?
A footnote: It’s slightly a case of apples and oranges, but for some time the War Resisters’ League has been pointing out the vast disparity between what the Government says and what it does in its “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes” pie chart.
What to make of the fact that last month the Senate voted 100 to zero (!!!!) to impose a new sanctions package on countries dealing with Iran’s Central Bank. (The House at least had a whopping twelve “no” votes and a smattering of “presents”).
On learning that bit of news in December, my takeaway was not particularly sophisticated, I must admit. There is no hope for Congress when such a craven, demagogic act of bullying (and a possible prelude to another war) is met with pretty much unanimous approval. Our lawmakers are simply not serious people, and certainly are not acting in the interests of their constituents.
But I’ve thought that for a while.
Fortunately, there is Pepe Escobar to bring a more nuanced analysis to bear on the despair-inducing “crisis” (is it still a crisis if it goes on for decades?).
The Myth of “Isolated” Iran: Following the Money in the Iran Crisis at TomDispatch makes a strong case that, in spite of Washington’s wishful thinking and best efforts, Iran is hardly isolated. It is in fact, says Escobar, “more connected than Google” and has been continuing arrangements with long-term (measured in millennia) partners like China and Russia, and is forging new ones with Latin America, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Japan and Korea are already “begging for exemptions” from the new sanctions package scheduled to go into effect in June.
The gist of the article is a little difficult to summarize fairly, so I will leave you with a few paragraphs in which Escobar encourages us to “follow the money”:
That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles — a similar move to ones already made in its trade with China and Japan. As for India, an economic powerhouse in the neighborhood, its leaders also refuse to stop buying Iranian oil, a trade that, in the long run, is similarly unlikely to be conducted in dollars. India is already using the yuan with China, as Russia and China have been trading in rubles and yuan for more than a year, as Japan and China are promoting direct trading in yen and yuan. As for Iran and China, all new trade and joint investments will be settled in yuan and rial.
Translation, if any was needed: in the near future, with the Europeans out of the mix, virtually none of Iran’s oil will be traded in dollars.
Moreover, three BRICS members (Russia, India, and China) allied with Iran are major holders (and producers) of gold. Their complex trade ties won’t be affected by the whims of a U.S. Congress. In fact, when the developing world looks at the profound crisis in the Atlanticist West, what they see is massive U.S. debt, the Fed printing money as if there’s no tomorrow, lots of “quantitative easing,” and of course the Eurozone shaking to its very foundations.
Follow the money. Leave aside, for the moment, the new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it’s the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.
It’s been spearheaded by Iran and it’s bound to translate into an anxious Washington, facing down not only a regional power, but its major strategic competitors China and Russia. No wonder all those carriers are heading for the Persian Gulf right now, though it’s the strangest of showdowns — a case of military power being deployed against economic power.
In this context, it’s worth remembering that in September 2000 Saddam Hussein abandoned the petrodollar as the currency of payment for Iraq’s oil, and moved to the euro. In March 2003, Iraq was invaded and the inevitable regime change occurred. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar both as Africa’s common currency and as the currency of payment for his country’s energy resources. Another intervention and another regime change followed.
Washington/NATO/Tel Aviv, however, offers a different narrative. Iran’s “threats” are at the heart of the present crisis, even if these are, in fact, that country’s reaction to non-stop US/Israeli covert war and now, of course, economic war as well. It’s those “threats,” so the story goes, that are leading to rising oil prices and so fueling the current recession, rather than Wall Street’s casino capitalism or massive U.S. and European debts. The cream of the 1% has nothing against high oil prices, not as long as Iran’s around to be the fall guy for popular anger.
As energy expert Michael Klare pointed out recently, we are now in a new geo-energy era certain to be extremely turbulent in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. But consider 2012 the start-up year as well for a possibly massive defection from the dollar as the global currency of choice. As perception is indeed reality, imagine the real world — mostly the global South — doing the necessary math and, little by little, beginning to do business in their own currencies and investing ever less of any surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds.
Of course, the U.S. can always count on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates — which I prefer to call the Gulf Counterrevolution Club (just look at their performances during the Arab Spring). For all practical geopolitical purposes, the Gulf monarchies are a U.S. satrapy. Their decades-old promise to use only the petrodollar translates into them being an appendage of Pentagon power projection across the Middle East. Centcom, after all, is based in Qatar; the U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain. In fact, in the immensely energy-wealthy lands that we could label Greater Pipelineistan — and that the Pentagon used to call “the arc of instability” — extending through Iran all the way to Central Asia, the GCC remains key to a dwindling sense of U.S. hegemony.
If this were an economic rewrite of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Iran would be but one cog in an infernal machine slowly shredding the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Still, it’s the cog that Washington is now focused on. They have regime change on the brain. All that’s needed is a spark to start the fire (in — one hastens to add — all sorts of directions that are bound to catch Washington off guard).
Remember Operation Northwoods, that 1962 plan drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terror operations in the U.S. and blame them on Fidel Castro’s Cuba. (President Kennedy shot the idea down.) Or recall the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, used by President Lyndon Johnson as a justification for widening the Vietnam War. The U.S. accused North Vietnamese torpedo boats of unprovoked attacks on U.S. ships. Later, it became clear that one of the attacks had never even happened and the president had lied about it.
It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation). Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by President Obama in which the focus of Washington’s attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S. Navy.
So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran’s nonexistent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?
Not that it’s in any way likely, but let’s ask: What happens under President Paul?
Specifically, would there be any reduction in the number of innocent bodies crushed or blown to bits under U.S. bombs and missiles, or hacked to death by the minions of regimes we support?
Paul supports a number of positions that put him beyond the pale of progressive or even civilized thought. But his appeal is real, and cuts across ideological boundaries, because more and more Americans really do see the pointlessness or malign effects of having our military spread across the globe, at war or threatening it, in too many countries to count. Paul, as this excellent “Imagine” ad promises, will do something about that.
There is a serious effort afoot to shame or scold liberals/progressives who have good things to say about Paul. Katha Pollitt, especially, goes to town on any progressive who might consider straying. “Man-crush”–the ultimate insult. That is so grad-school in the eighties (and I know from experience!)
For what it’s worth, in Pollitt’s exasperated contempt for Paul I see echoes of her review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, a genuinely radical and important book that painted sympathetic portraits of pacifists and nonviolent activists in the years leading up to World War Two. Her main response, stated up front: “fury at pacifists.”
Because of course, World War Two produced 60 million corpses, a permanently militarized and aggressive United States, and the specter of nuclear annihilation for the planet forever. Only an asshole (or a man) would try to revisit the run-up to such a war and try to imagine alternative scenarios, right?
Is it possible that after everything we’ve learned about America’s low, dishonest wars since the Good War ®, liberals cling to the idea that U.S. bombs and boots on the ground in foreign lands are a force for good? That establishment liberals are not dismissing Paul in spite of his non-interventionism, but because of it?
It’s a partisan thing, partly. Democrats are as good as, or better than, the other guys at starting wars. A combination of the Wilsonian streak and, in recent years, a byproduct of domestic political battles, whereby the Democrats always feel compelled to prove they’re not “soft” on communism, or terror (only the Muslim kind, of course).
Supporters of the the current administration should be forced to confront just how Paul’s positions on foreign policy and war make conventional progressivism/centrism/liberalism (the three conflated in a bewildering way in the current president) look compromised, corrupt, and downright evil.
So, finally, to the point of all this: a consideration of Freddie De Boer’s It’s not about Ron Paul: It’s about you, which uses the case of historic and ongoing U.S. support for Indonesian repression as a representative instance of the liberal establishment’s complicity in barbarism.
When confronting establishment progressives with the reality of our conduct and how much it has cost some of the poorest and most defenseless people on earth, the conversation never stays about our victims; it inevitably changes to those attempting to talk about them, a knee-jerk defense that progressives have made an art form. That’s why Ron Paul is so perfect, for establishment liberals. He is an open invitation to change the subject. The United States keeps killing innocent people, keeps propping up horrific regimes, keeps violating international law, keeps trampling on the lives of those who lack the power to defend themselves– but Ron Paul is a racist, and believes in the gold standard, and opposes abortion, and in general supports some of the most odious domestic policies imaginable. What I insist, and what people like Glenn Greenwald keep insisting, is that Ron Paul’s endless failings shouldn’t and can’t exist as an excuse to look away from the dead bodies that we keep on piling up. What I have wanted is to grab a hold of mainstream progressivism and force it to look the dead in the face. But the effort to avoid exactly that is mighty, and what we have on our hands is an epidemic of not seeing.
Even though De Boer doesn’t allow comments, he does share Robert Farley’s response in an update, which I think takes a useful (theoretical) look at what would be different under President Paul.
And so this brings us to assumption the second, which is that a President Paul would somehow have done something to make all those Indonesia people not dead. I suppose it’s possible that a President Paul would have refrained from supporting the Suharto coup, although it’s also certainly possible that Paul’s free market commitments would have made anti-communist activity attractive; I don’t know enough about Paul’s early career attitudes regarding the USSR, the Sandinistas, etc. I guarantee you, however, that President Paul would have lifted not a finger to assist all the Indonesians killed in the wake of the coup, or in the various statebuilding projects later engaged in by the Suharto and post-Suharto governments. President Paul might not have engaged in a direct military relationship with Indonesia, but he would not have prevented American private military firms from contracting with the Indonesians in training and advisory roles; he would not have prevented the Indonesian military from purchasing all the military equipment that it could afford from US defense corporations; he would not have prevented US corporations with interests in Indonesia from calling (publicly or privately) for violent defense of their extractive and labor interests; and he would not have supported any robust international action to condemn or isolate the Indonesian government.
I would have to point out that all the private military activity is a direct byproduct of America’s armies and navies and air forces having spent the past half century spread out across the planet. How many of these private military contractors are ex-U.S. military? Most? Nearly all?
And yet even if Paul does make radical reductions to America’s military, Farley is right. There will still be plenty of Yanks and plenty of U.S.-made munitions, ships and aircraft. And I don’t imagine Paul would be aggressive in stopping American BUSINESSMEN from doing American BUSINESS, would he? As long as they’re not supported by the tyranny of taxation, that is.
Not that any of this has a snowball’s chance in hell of happening. Paul’s role has been at least partly constructive in this campaign because he has asked hugely important questions and, yes, imagined an alternative. But unless he mounts a third-party run, he’ll be out of the race soon, and the entire debate on “defense” will be reduced again to the moronic question of which party Keeps Us Safe ®. America will continue to be sucked dry by its military no matter who gets elected, and we’ll return to the alternate universe where slight reductions in the rate of the Pentagon’s budget growth are looked upon as brave (or treasonous) major cuts.
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.
-Joan Didion, Insider Baseball, 1988
This caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.
If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate it likes best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.
-Matt Taibbi, Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins, 2012
Apart from an incredibly sketchy plot, the details of which seem skimpier by the hour, has anything changed regarding the Persian Menace ™ since last August? No, not really.
Why bother, then, writing something new? This recycled story, centering on the brilliant reductio ad absurdum of the whole “table” business from Fafblog, remains as sadly relevant as it was last year (or basically any year since 1981).
Always with the tables
By timmuky, on August 20th, 2010
Few turns of phrase demonstrate the unquestioning dimwittedness of America’s public discourse than “All options are on the table” when it comes to Iran. As far as I can tell, it first came into broad use during the Dubya Administration. Bush’s successor, Mr.Changey Changey, didn’t see anything worth changing in the formulation. In fact, he rather seems to like it. His Secretary of State is pretty fond of it, too.
At least a quarter of the tax savings will go to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.
The wealthiest Americans will also reap tax savings from the proposal’s plan to keep the cap on dividend and capital gains taxes at 15 percent, well below the highest rates on ordinary income.
And negotiators have agreed that the estimated $900 billion cost of the cuts will simply be added to the deficit…
In fact, the only groups likely to face a tax increase are those near the bottom of the income scale — individuals who make less than $20,000 and families with earnings below $40,00.
The basic outlines of American economic policy and foreign policy remain the same, even as Congress and the White House change hands. The changes promised by progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans are quickly discarded after the elections.
The changes that do take place are often the opposite of those that majorities of Americans want. Most Americans want Social Security to be strengthened and American manufacturing protected. But the conversation among elites inside the Beltway-New York bubble is about cutting Social Security and more one-sided “free trade” deals with mercantilist nations that, unlike the U.S., protect and promote their domestic industries.
Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.
PS And on that one tiny sliver of something that might, in a pinch, be called progressive, the “extension” of unemployment benefits, another case of false, or at least deceptive advertising:
Just to be clear, the “extension of the unemployment benefits” is an extension of the qualifying dates for the various tiers of benefits, and not additional weeks of benefits. There is no additional help for the so-called “99ers”.
