Bye, Bye America

Putin Leads BRICS Uprising

Posted By Mike Whitney On July 10, 2015 @ 2:05 am In articles 2015

There’s been a virtual blackout of news from this year’s seventh annual BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia.  None of the mainstream media organizations are covering the meetings or making any attempt to explain what’s going on.  As a result, the American people remain largely in the dark about a powerful coalition of nations that are putting in place an alternate system that will greatly reduce US influence in the world and end the current era of superpower rule.

Let’s cut to the chase: Leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) realize that global security cannot be entrusted to a country that sees war as a acceptable means for achieving its geopolitical objectives.  They also realize that they won’t be able to achieve financial stability as long as Washington dictates the rules, issues the de facto “international” currency, and controls the main levers of global financial power. This is why the BRICS have decided to chart a different course, to gradually break free from the existing Bretton Woods system, and to create parallel system that better serves their own interests. Logically, they have focused on the foundation blocks which support the current US-led system, that is, the institutions from which the United States derives its extraordinary power; the dollar, the US Treasury market, and the IMF. Replace these, the thinking goes, and the indispensable nation becomes just another country struggling to get by.  This is from the Asia Times:

“Leaders of the BRICS… launched the  New Development Bank, which has taken three years of negotiations to bring to fruition. With about $50 billion in starting capital, the bank is expected to start issuing debt to fund infrastructure projects next year. They also launched a foreign-exchange currency fund of $100 billion. 

The two new endeavors are statements that the five largest emerging markets are both looking out for each other and, simultaneously, moving away from the western financing institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. 

“The BRICS states intend to actively use their own resources and internal resources for development,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “The New (Development) Bank will help finance joint, large-scale projects in transport and energy infrastructure, industrial development.”…..Birthing the two initiatives in Russia had been Putin’s top priorities.” 

(“Russia’s Putin scores points at Ufa BRICS summit“, Asia Times)

Can you see what’s going on? Putin has figured out the empire’s vulnerabilities and he’s going straight for the jugular.  He’s saying: ‘We’re going to issue our own debt, we’re going to run our own system, we’re going to fund our own projects, and we’re going to do it all in our own currency. Kaboom. The only thing you’re going to be doing, is managing your own accelerating economic decline. Have a good day.’ Isn’t that the gist of what he’s saying?

So can you see, dear reader, why none of this is appearing on the pages of US newspapers or on US television.   Washington would rather you didn’t know how they’ve bungled everything by alienating the fastest growing countries in the world.

The Ufa conference is a watershed moment. While the Pentagon is rapidly moving troops and military hardware to Russia’s borders, and one bigwig after another is bloviating about the “Russian threat”; the BRICS have moved out of Washington’s orbit altogether.  They are following the leadership of men who, frankly speaking, are acting exactly like US leaders acted when the US was on the upswing. These are guys who “think big”; who want to connect continents with high-speed rail, lift living standards across the board, and transform themselves into manufacturing dynamos. What do America’s leaders dream about: Drone warfare? Balancing the budget? Banning the Confederate flag?

It’s a joke. No one in Washington has a plan for the future. It’s all just political opportunism and posturing.  Check this out from The Hindu:

“China and Russia have described BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as the core of a new international order… 

Russian President Vladimir Putin said… “There is no doubt — we have all necessary premises to expand the horizons of mutually beneficial cooperation, to join together our raw material resources, human capital and huge consumer markets for a powerful economic spurt.” 

Russia’s Tass news agency also quoted Mr. Putin as saying that the Eurasian continent had vast transit potential. He pointed to “the construction of new efficient transport and logistics chains, in particular, the implementation of the initiative of the Silk Road economic belt and the development of transportation in the eastern part of Russia and Siberia. This may link the rapidly growing markets in Asia and Europe’s economies, mature, rich in industrial and technological achievements. At the same time, this will allow our countries to become more commercially viable in the competition for investors, for creating new jobs, for advanced enterprises,” he observed.”…. 

The summit also acknowledged “the potential for expanding the use of our national currencies in transactions between the BRICS countries.”   (“BRICS, SCO, EAEU can define new world order: China, Russia“, The Hindu)

The dollar is toast. The IMF is toast. The US debt market (US Treasuries) is toast.  The institutions that support US power are crumbling before our very eyes. The BRICS have had enough; enough war, enough Wall Street, enough meddling and hypocrisy and austerity and lecturing. This is farewell. Sure, it will take time, but Ufa marks a fundamental change in thinking, a fundamental change in approach, and a fundamental change in strategic orientation.

The BRICS are not coming back,  they’re gone for good, just as Washington’s “pivot to Asia” is gone for good. There’s just too much resistance. Washington has simply overplayed its hand, worn out its welcome. People are sick of us.

Can you blame them?

Article printed from www.counterpunch.org: http://www.counterpunch.org

URL to article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/10/putin-leads-brics-uprising/

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--Joe

Suck It Up - Suckers

A demonstration in non-cooperation.

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WEEKEND EDITION APRIL 17-19, 2015

Group Hug in Hell

The Election that Matters will Take Place in the Streets

by ROB URIE

Be Gone Labor, Environment

Whether it is broadly perceived at present or not, an economic bomb was just dropped on the loose coalition of political and economic interests— Black Lives Matter, the $15 minimum wage movement, the residual of Occupy and the immigrants’ rights movement, by the political Party that a half-century or so ago nominally represented like issues, the Democrats. With President Barack Obama getting ‘fast-track’ authority for the uber-corporate friendly, anti-labor and anti-environment TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and establishment candidates Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush the likely contenders for President in 2016, both mainstream political Parties are doubling down on the neoliberal, neoconservative status quo.

As Mr. Obama most certainly understands, the ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions of the TPP render ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ civil labor and environmental proposals moot— issues like a minimum wage and what type of fuels U.S. utilities can burn will be decided by corporate lawyers in tribunals outside of civil jurisdiction. Appeals to Hillary Clinton to oppose the agreement— Jeb Bush and Congressional Republicans have already signaled their support; illustrate the folly of political ‘lesser-evilism.’ Ms. Clinton is a committed neoliberal and any opposition she might offer would most certainly be an election ploy. Given the ‘political capital’ that Mr. Obama is expending to get the TPP passed, it is reasonable to assume that it represents the culmination of the neoliberal takeover that has consumed the Democrat Party for the last half-century.

Informing modern political theory, in the late nineteenth century the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey developed the ‘telos of becoming,’ the purpose (telos) that becomes evident through subsequent history. When applied to American politics a trajectory from Jimmy Carter’s neoliberal resurgence to Bill Clinton’s social capitulation accompanied by NAFTA and deregulating the banks led to Barack Obama’s current push for the TPP. With polls consistently showing the American public well to the left of mainstream Party policies, modern Republicans lack the finesse for the political long con. With the TPP as soon-to-be-accomplished fact, from bank bailouts to the revived unitary Presidency, from extra-judicial drone murders to endless wars, Barack Obama is the gifted salesperson for a new corporate totalitarianism.

The Rationale

By accounts Mr. Obama does have a rationale for his support of the TPP, a ‘strategic vision’ that illuminates the interests at stake— as well as the utter irrelevance of the electorate and the broader American people in the ‘deal.’ The logic goes approximately like this: multinational corporations— banks, arms manufacturers, oil and gas companies and various and sundry industrialists already rule ‘the world.’ The choice from this point forward is between ‘our’ corporations and Asian, mainly Chinese, state-sponsored corporatism. The problem for the rest of us is that this is an updated eighteenth century European ‘royalist’ view— it is neutron bomb politics where the 99.9% of us who also occupy the planet, and the planet itself, have been assumed away. The ghettoization of the political and economic ‘leadership’ classes has facilitated a deeply delusional internal logic in policy ‘circles.’

From within this view the rest of Mr. Obama’s policies make sense. The bailouts of banks and bankers were to keep the ‘real’ players in the game. U.S. sponsored chaos across the Middle East is a contest for regional, and global, dominance where the lives of the ‘little people’ who are its casualties are irrelevant to the ‘higher purpose.’ Obamacare expands the proportion of the domestic population tied to the corporate model of social relations. Domestic surveillance is the hierarchical model of corporate control applied to a network of engineered social relations— technology defines the realm of social possibility through the inclusion and exclusion of broader social possibility. Left apparently unconsidered is that this unchecked corporatism seems at present the quickest path to mass extinction of most living things on the planet.

Group Hug in Hell

For Democrats in particular the election cycle revives the preference for religious imagination with increasingly toxic results. This imagination has been joined with the capitalist idea of progress through embedded history presented as the new and improved product line. If only we elect a ______ to the Presidency the world will be right. Had these aspirations ever borne meaningful relation to actual outcomes the conceit might make some sense. Margaret Thatcher demonstrated that a woman can force a hard-right turn as well as any man. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court because he proved himself useful to the institutional hard-right by throwing tens of thousands of hard-fought anti-discrimination lawsuits by the poor and disenfranchised into the dustbin without review. Absent a miraculous end-of-term conversion the neoliberal, neoconservative Barack Obama is set to make Jimmy Carter into a retrospective Democrat hero.

It is more than a bit ironic that in a country with nominally democratic aspirations the quest for a leader who will deliver ‘the people’ from their bonds becomes abdication, infinite ‘progress’ that never quite relates last year’s savior to this year’s bonds. Coincident is the want for more emotionally satisfying incantations, better explanations for the facts that are their opposite. Neocons and neoliberals are statespersons and responsible economists when the Blue Party is in office and war-mongers and readers of economic goat entrails when the Red Party is in office. The totality of the ideological distance between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton can be found in the few names that don’t overlap on their contributor lists. The pragmatists hoping for ‘a seat at the table’ don’t appear to have realized that they are once again on the menu.

The root of this electoral delusion lies in the contradiction between political and economic democracy. Posed as compatible, even complimentary, American democracy was conceived in plutocracy and slavery, in the three-fifths a chattel person slaves accrued to those who owned them. Two centuries before the Supreme Court’s ‘Citizen’s United’ ruling the owner of fifteen slaves held the political ‘personhood’ of nine slaves (3/5 = 0.6 X 15 = 9) plus himself. Fealty to legislative and judicial precedence has antique white guys in fact and spirit communing with the social facts of past centuries that have been so skillfully reconstituted in modern social technologies. ‘Private’ contributions to political campaigns approximate the distribution of income. Representative democracy has the same representatives representing the interests of factory owners and ‘their’ employees. Labor leaders who are paid like bosses act like bosses.

The recurring ritual of liberal and progressive commentators pleading with Democrat candidates to consider their policy prescriptions conveys the well-padded chairs in well-appointed offices that will greet their ritual humiliation once the votes have been counted. Self-important distinctions between REDBLUE voters and the ‘irrelevant’ left will be on public display until the first Presidential ‘compromise’ hits the news. The first few compromises will be ‘pragmatic,’ a signal that HILLBUSH wants to ‘reach across the aisle’ to accrue political capital for the important votes. The next few will be accedence to the Conservative / Christian temperament of the voters whose divided vote called for small ‘c’ change. And the next few still will signal the inability for transformative organization by the liberal-left until the current savior needs to rouse the troops for the next election.

The (Corporate) People Will be Heard

For those occupying less hospitable environs, a/k/a the overwhelming preponderance of persons on / in the world, the pageantry of radical irrelevance which is electoral politics retains some entertainment value from the distance. The perpetual chide that not voting accedes political power to those who do accepts at face value that political power is gained at the ballot box. The only major Democrat to win in the 2014 mid-term elections, Pennsylvania’s Tom Wolf, just put forward the most radically neo-liberal state budget in modern history. While ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) has been partially exorcised from the utterly corrupt Pennsylvania state legislature due to bad press, Democrat Wolf’s election victory brought back the ALEC platform without the political baggage. Who says voters don’t have a voice?

While Tom Wolf is but one Governor and Pennsylvania but one state, the tie between the mainstream political Parties and impossible-to-dislodge political and economic interests transcends local politics. The class dynamic at work in Pennsylvania is mirrored nationwide: a group of moderately literate, self-interested neoliberal opportunists are using the residual agrarian / urban, state / city frame to enrich themselves by looting the cities under the cover of neoliberal ideology. How many privatized school cheating scandals, misbegotten student debts and industrial sewers that used to be town water supplies need exist before the distance between words and deeds is obvious?

The political dynamic being brought to the fore is rapidly increasing class antagonism. Those either too busy or disinterested to understand exactly how far down the neoliberal rat hole the Democrat Party has descended will be seeing it in their paychecks and health insurance premiums in coming weeks and months. With fortune (Machiavelli’s ‘fortuna,’ not banker script) in play, the TPP may be Hillary Clinton’s undoing. It places the Democrat Party so decisively in the pockets of the corporate-totalitarian right that the more prescient forces of the liberal-progressive establishment might choke on their continuing support for Democrat policies. Republicans are ‘worse’ in the sense of being less skilled at selling corporate interests as those of ‘the people.’ But given that the actual policies of both Parties are close to identical, the political choice is either for the existing system or against it without the faux distinctions of Party politics.

The present amorphous coalition of Black Lives Matter, the $15 minimum wage movement (why not $21 plus benefits?), the residual of Occupy and the immigrants’ rights movement embody the political with economic issues that sum to true political opposition to the heavily cloistered political mainstream. Crude materialist theories of political interests, the first ______ President, etc., have been the tools of cynical political opportunists selling similar policies with carefully circumscribed difference for some decades now. Barack Obama has his reasons for pushing the TPP. But if you believe that they are ‘your’ reasons you haven’t read the fine print. The only politics likely to matter in the next few years will be decided in the streets, not at the ballot box. -- Via CounterPunch.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. The images that accompany this piece are his iteration of previously existing images. This approach derives from a social theory of art.

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--Joe

Netanyahu in Congress - Deferring Sanity

This article is mirrored from CounterPuch.

MARCH 03, 2015

Deferring Sanity

Netanyahu in Congress

by JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

The special US-Israeli relationship is as secure today as it has ever been. There is no danger that Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress will have a “destructive” effect on our commitment to Israel’s “security”. After listening to National Security Adviser, Susan Rice’s, speech to AIPAC this evening, I shut off the television and realized, to my chagrin, that, if anything, Israel may even benefit from the international media soap opera touched off by Netanyahu’s hubris: shame on our political leaders, news commentators and spin doctors for allowing the personal animosity between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, divert us, yet again, from the real issues.

Bypassing President Obama, Netanyahu accepted an invitation by Senate Majority Leader, John Boehner, to address the US Congress on the topic of Iran. It would hardly surprise me to learn that this invitation was deliberately engineered to humiliate Obama publicly; to bolster the mainstream Republican agenda on Iran; and to elevate Netanyahu’s standings in the upcoming Israeli elections this March 17th. Whether his speech to Congress will, in fact, have a positive effect on the latter is arguable and depends, to some extent, on just how outrageous and duplicitous the content of Netanyahu’s lecture turns out to be.

A few things remain unclear: either Netanyahu doesn’t read the news, he is hoping that nobody else notices Israel’s de facto alliance with ISIS, or he is more concerned with poking Obama in the eye publicly than in the future of his country, a fact that would not surprise me. Focusing on the dangerous forces lurking in his “neighborhood”, Netanyahu singles out Iran, Lebanon (by which he presumably means Hizbullah), Syria, and Hamas. Unlike most Americans, Netanyahu views the potential of a nuclear capable Iran as a greater threat to regional stability than the spread of ISIS and extremist groups, such as al-Qaida.

With even Saudi Arabia, fearing Blowback, reversing course on its official policy toward ISIS by making it illegal for its nationals to fight in foreign wars (an about face from the nation whose extremist, fundamentalist form of Islam — Wahhabism — has been among its leading exports for over 40 years, and certainly its deadliest) it is that much more disturbing to note the silence echoing from Tel Aviv.

Instead Netanyahu has regaled us with tirade after tirade on the ramifications of an Iranian nuclear bomb and the existential threat it poses little Israel — ironic since Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has categorically stated that his country doesn’t want one.

Why would he lie? A nuclear-armed Iran would be its country’s suicide note to the world before being “obliterated” (to use former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s, word) by the United States. Iran would like to acquire nuclear technological know-how – not an atomic arsenal – the sanest possible acquisition in a ‘neighborhood’ where the only nuclear-armed power, Israel, threatens Iran’s destruction almost daily, and has wreaked havoc on the region routinely for nearly 7 decades. How else might Iran succeed in deterring Israeli militarism, and how else might Iran – a country whose conventional armed forces barely allow a defensive capability – move forward into a future in which it is not bullied and brow-beaten into submission, preferring instead to seek the option of independent energy efficiency, and freedom from a regional hegemon whose godfather already enjoys unrivaled authority over most of that hemisphere?

All speculation aside, what strikes me as the most obvious piece of information to re-emerge from the tempest now brewing in Washington is that Benjamin Netanyahu is an unscrupulous, scheming, vile man who has taken the meaning of “chutzpah” to new heights in his display of unseemly and undiplomatic behavior. That no world leader has yet demanded that he and his regime be made to answer for its brutally criminal, scandalous policies time and again compels us to recognize how grievously weak and flawed the ‘international community’ is, and by extension, how depraved those leaders are whose actions are considered most synonymous with it. It takes the unknown human rights organizations on the ground in the Gaza Strip, the Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestine Center for Human Rights, to have to beseech the world repeatedly, day after day, to compel Israel and the United States to adhere to the most fundamental precepts of international law and accepted standards of humanitarian and diplomatic behavior.

What we are watching today, and have been a party to for the past few weeks is yet another media-political circus for the sake of narrow sectarian interests. A genuine rift in US-Israeli relations would manifest itself in long overdue concrete policies the US would demand of its client regime: an immediate end to the building of illegal Jewish settlements on all occupied Palestinian land; recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state; a full moratorium on the on-going theft and use of natural resources outside the boundaries of the Green Line, or borders that existed prior to June 4th, 1967; a complete withdrawal of all military checkpoints and barriers within occupied Palestinian land; an immediate halt to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the withholding of tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority, and the closure of crossing points into and out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

It would mean the end to all restriction of movement by Palestinians to and from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, and the right of any Palestinian to return to that land now recognized by a majority of the world’s nations as a Palestinian state.

In short, a genuinely ‘destructive’ rift in US-Israeli relations would suggest at the very least a beginning to the end of America’s unconditional support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It would commence the end to an occupation whose accompanying militarization and brutalization has had ramifications for countries as far away as Iran and that will continue to contribute to the growing havoc and destruction Western colonial and United States’ imperial history have wrought on the region we know as the Middle East.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a human rights activist and faculty associate in Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

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Some additional information on this subject from Noam Chomsky.

--Joe

Obama's Way of Preemptive Murder

From how the police and the military to the government operate. For example:

Exposing the lives of one’s troops was never considered good, but historically it was believed to be necessary. Therefore dying for one’s country was deemed to be the greatest sacrifice and those who did die were recognized as heroes. The drone wars, however, are introducing a risk-free ethics of killing. What is taking place is a switch from an ethics of “self-sacrifice and courage to one of self-preservation and more or less assumed cowardice.” 

Chamayou refers to this as “necro-ethics.” Paradoxically, necro-ethics is, on the one hand, vitalist in the sense that the drone (or police officer) supposedly does not kill innocent bystanders while securing the life of the perpetrator. This has far-reaching implications, since the more ethical the weapon seems, the more acceptable it is and the more readily it will likely be used. On the other hand, the drone advances the doctrine of killing well, and in this sense stands in opposition to the classical ethics of living well or even dying well. [Emphasis added.]

A classic example in Eureka was when the Eureka Police Department, without any admittedly demonstrable threat to either the police or anyone else, gunned down Tommy McClain with total impunity September 17, 2014. It's called Preemptive Murder.

--Joe

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This copy is mirrored from CounterPunch.

WEEKEND EDITION JANUARY 23-25, 2015

The "Humanitarian" Weapon

Drones and the New Ethics of War

by NEVE GORDON

This Christmas small drones were among the most popular gift under the tree in the U.S. with manufacturers stating that they sold 200,000 new unmanned aerial vehicles during the holiday season. While the rapid infiltration of drones into the gaming domain clearly reflects that drones are becoming a common weapon among armed forces, their appearance in Walmart, Toys “R” Us and Amazon serves, in turn, to normalize their deployment in the military.

Drones, as Grégoire Chamayou argues in his new book, A Theory of the Drone, have a uniquely seductive power, one that attracts militaries, politicians and citizens alike. A research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Chamayou is one of the most profound contemporary thinkers working on the deployment of violence and its ethical ramifications. And while his new book offers a concise history of drones, it focuses on how drones are changing warfare and their potential to alter the political arena of the countries that utilize them.

Chamayou traces one of the central ideas informing the production and deployment of drones back to John W. Clark, an American engineer who carried out a study on “remote control in hostile environments” in 1964.  In Clark’s study, space is divided into two kinds of zones—hostile and safe—while robots operated by remote control are able to relieve human beings of all perilous occupations within hostile zones. The sacrifice of miners, firefighters, or those working on skyscrapers will no longer be necessary, since the collapse of a tunnel in the mines, for example, would merely lead to the loss of several robots operated by remote control.

The same logic informed the creation of drones. They were initially utilized as part of the military’s defense system in hostile territories. After the Egyptian military shot down about 30 Israel fighter jets in the first hours of the 1973 war, Israeli air-force commanders decided to change their tactics and send a wave of drones. As soon as the Egyptians fired their initial salvo of anti-aircraft missiles at the drones, the Israeli airplanes were able to attack as the Egyptians were reloading.

Over the years, drones have also become an important component of the intelligence revolution.  Instead of sending spies or reconnaissance airplanes across enemy lines, drones can continuously fly above hostile terrain gathering information. As Chamayou explains, drones do not merely provide a constant image of the enemy, but manage to fuse together different forms of data. They carrytechnology that can interpret electronic communications from radios, cell phones and other devices and can link a telephone call with a particular video or provide the GPS coordinates of the person using the phone. Their target is, in other words, constantly visible.

Using drones to avert missiles or for reconnaissance was, of course, considered extremely important, yet military officials aspired to transform drones into lethal weapons as well. On February 16, 2001, after many years of U.S. investment in R&D, a Predator drone first successfully fired a missile and hit its target. As Chamayou puts it, the notion of turning the Predator into a predator had finally been realized. Within a year, the Predator was preying on live targets in Afghanistan.

A Humanitarian Weapon

Over the past decade, the United States has manufactured more than 6000 drones of various kinds. 160 of these are Predators, which are used not only in Afghanistan but also in countries officially at peace with the US, such as Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.  In Pakistan, CIA drones carry out on average of one strike every four days. Although exact figures of fatalities are difficult to establish, the estimated number of deaths between 2004 and 2012 vary from 2562 to 3325.

Chamayou underscores how drones are changing our conception of war in three major ways. First, the idea of a frontier or battlefield is rendered meaningless as is the idea that there are particular places—like homesteads—where the deployment of violence is considered criminal. In other words, if once the legality of killing was dependent on where the killing was carried out, today US lawyers argue that the traditional connection between geographical spaces—such as the battlefield, home, hospital, mosque—and forms of violence are out of date. Accordingly, every place becomes a potential site of drone violence.

Second, the development of “precise missiles,” the kind with which most drones are currently armed led to the popular conception that drones are precise weapons. Precision, though, is a slippery concept. For one, chopping off a person’s head with a machete is much more precise than any missile, but there is no political or military support for precision of this kind in the West. Indeed, “precision” turns out to be an extremely copious category. The U.S., for example, counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence proving them innocent posthumously.  The real ruse, then, has to do with the relation between precision and geography. As precise weapons, drones also render geographical contours irrelevant since the ostensible precision of these weapons justifies the killing of suspected terrorists in their homes. A legal strike zone is then equated with anywhere the drone strikes. And when “legal killing” can occur anywhere, then one can execute suspects anywhere—even in zones traditionally conceived as off-limits.

Finally, drones change our conception of war because it becomes, in Chamayou’s words, a priori impossible to die as one kills. One air-force officer formulated this basic benefit in the following manner: “The real advantage of unmanned aerial systems is that they allow you to protect power without projecting vulnerability.” Consequently, drones are declared to be a humanitarian weapon in two senses: they are precise vis-à-vis the enemy, and ensure no human cost to the perpetrator.

From Conquest to Pursuit

If Guantanamo was the icon of President George W. Bush’s anti-terror policy, drones have become the emblem of the Obama presidency.  Indeed, Chamayou maintains that President Barak Obama has adopted a totally different anti-terror doctrine from his predecessor: kill rather than capture, replace torture with targeted assassinations.

Citing a New York Times report, Chamayou describes the way in which deadly decisions are reached: “It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals… Every week or so, more than 100 members of the sprawling national security apparatus gather by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and to recommend to the president who should be the next to die.” In D.C, this is called “Terror Tuesday.” Once established, the list is subsequently sent to the White House where the president gives his oral approval for each name. “With the kill list validated, the drones do the rest.”

Obama’s doctrine entails a change in the paradigm of warfare. In contrast to military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, who claimed that the fundamental structure of war is a duel of two fighters facing each other, we now have, in Chamayou’s parlance, a hunter closing in on its a prey.  Chamayou, who also wrote Manhunts: A Philosophical History, which examines the history of hunting humans from ancient Sparta to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants,  recounts how according to English common law one could hunt badgers and foxes in another man’s land, “because destroying such creatures is said to be profitable to the Public.” This is precisely the kind of law that the US would like to claim for drones, he asserts.

The strategy of militarized manhunting is essentially preemptive. It is not a matter of responding to actual attacks but rather preventing the possibility of emerging threats by the early elimination of potential adversaries. According to this new logic, war is no longer based on conquest—Obama is not interested in colonizing swaths of land in northern Pakistan—but on the right of pursuit. The right to pursue the prey wherever it may be found, in turn, transforms the way we understand the basic principles of international relations since it undermines the notion of territorial integrity as well as the idea of nonintervention and the broadly accepted definition of sovereignty as the supreme authority over a given territory.

Wars without Risks

The transformation of Clausewitz’s warfare paradigm manifests itself in other ways as well. Drone wars are wars without losses or defeats, but they are also wars without victory. The combination of the two lays the ground for perpetual violence, the utopian fantasy of those profiting from the production of drones and similar weapons.

Just as importantly, drones change the ethics of war. According to the new military morality, to kill while exposing one’s life to danger is bad; to take lives without ever endangering one’s own is good. Bradley Jay Strawser, a professor of philosophy at the US naval Postgraduate school in California, is a prominent spokesperson of the “principle of unnecessary risk.” It is, in his view, wrong to command someone to take an unnecessary risk, and consequently it becomes a moral imperative to deploy drones.

Exposing the lives of one’s troops was never considered good, but historically it was believed to be necessary. Therefore dying for one’s country was deemed to be the greatest sacrifice and those who did die were recognized as heroes. The drone wars, however, are introducing a risk-free ethics of killing. What is taking place is a switch from an ethics of “self-sacrifice and courage to one of self-preservation and more or less assumed cowardice.”

Chamayou refers to this as “necro-ethics.” Paradoxically, necro-ethics is, on the one hand, vitalist in the sense that the drone supposedly does not kill innocent bystanders while securing the life of the perpetrator. This has far-reaching implications, since the more ethical the weapon seems, the more acceptable it is and the more readily it will likely be used. On the other hand, the drone advances the doctrine of killing well, and in this sense stands in opposition to the classical ethics of living well or even dying well.

Transforming Politics in the Drone States

Moreover, drones change politics within the drone states. Because drones transform warfare into a ghostly teleguided act orchestrated from a base in Nevada or Missouri, whereby soldiers no longer risk their lives, the critical attitude of citizenry towards war is also profoundly transformed, altering, as it were, the political arena within drone states.

Drones, Chamayou says, are a technological solution for the inability of politicians to mobilize support for war. In the future, politicians might not need to rally citizens because once armies begin deploying only drones and robots there will be no need for the public to even know that a war is being waged. So while, on the one hand, drones help produce the social legitimacy towards warfare through the reduction of risk, on the other hand, they render social legitimacy irrelevant to the political decision making process relating to war. This drastically reduces the threshold for resorting to violence, so much so that violence appears increasingly as a default option for foreign policy. Indeed, the transformation of wars into a risk free enterprise will render them even more ubiquitous than they are today. This too will be one of Obama’s legacies.

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation. He can be reached through his website.

A shorter version appeared in Al Jazeera.

The Right of Self-Defence, The American Way

This copy is reposted here specifically for the police and people of Humboldt County. Make your own comparisons, draw your own conclusions. Impunity is its own sin and brings its own sanctions. The empirical value of life or lack thereof speaks to the decadent moral character and to the truth of our dying society.

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 26-28, 2014

An Unaccountable Army

Police Violence and Violence Against the Police

by RON URIE

On March 31, 2004, one year after the launch of the U.S. war against Iraq, four U.S. military contractors, mercenaries, were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and their charred corpses were hung from a bridge. The indignation expressed by the American political leadership and senior military officials was that their imperial privilege had been challenged— how dare the people whose country they had illegally invaded and substantially destroyed and whose relatives, neighbors and friends they had murdered fight back? The city of Fallujah was surrounded; women and small children were told to leave and then the slaughter began. White phosphorus and depleted uranium shells were dropped until thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Iraqi boys and men in Fallujah had been murdered.

Left unsaid at the time was that most Americans subjected to an illegal war, invasion and occupation would respond largely as the citizens of Fallujah had done. Self-defense against invading hordes is as close to a natural right as the term could convey. The real crimes committed in / on Iraq were the war and occupation launched by the Americans and Brits. And the collective punishment visited upon the male citizens of Fallujah very closely resembled the acts that led to collective punishment being designated a war crime in the first place— the group slaughters regularly meted out by the Nazis in WWII for acts committed by unrelated individuals or groups. Today the Americans and Israelis (against Palestinians) are the main global keepers of the war crime tradition of collective punishment.

Picture (1) above: An NYPD motorcycle cop gratuitously rides his motorcycle over the leg of an NLG (National Lawyers Guild) legal observer at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. The role of the police as armed thugs protecting the privilege of connected kleptocrats on Wall Street is framed in the language of the radical right as protecting ‘the public’ from over-privileged, elitist kids disrupting the public order. When former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who made his early career prosecuting Wall Street criminals, says that the police are concentrated in ‘high crime’ areas he fails to mention that any concentration of police in the financial districts of major U.S. cities is to protect financial criminals from being held accountable for their crimes. Source: Washington’s blog.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made explicit the military role of the police when he bragged that he had ‘the seventh biggest army in the world,’ the NYPD. Mr. Bloomberg claimed the NYPD to be ‘his’ army in 2011 as he was violently repressing the Occupy Wall Street movement. A short time after the comments were made the NYPD participated in a coordinated national assault against lawfully assembled protestors that included the total destruction of the Occupy library, kitchen and associated infrastructure. Through an ongoing campaign of violence, infiltration, disinformation, ‘pre-emptive’ kidnappings and legally dubious arrests the Occupy movement was effectively destroyed. Mr. Bloomberg made his fortune from Wall Street and he used ‘his’ army to prevent it from being held legally and socially accountable for its crimes.

When Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in self-proclaimed revenge killings for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner spokespersons for the NYPD and the PBA (Police Benevolent Association) were quick to personalize the victims while using the language of belligerent militarism to politicize the broader context of growing public resistance to police violence. What wasn’t expressed by NYPD spokespersons was any regret for the unjustifiable murder of Eric Garner or any number of other black and brown youth, for participation in systematic racial repression like stop-question-and-frisk or for the acting as an occupying army in poor neighborhoods of color. What was affirmed through the words of spokespersons for the police was that black lives don’t matter but that cop lives do.

Picture (2) above: The NYPD applies an illegal choke hold in the murder of Eric Garner. The allegation against Mr. Garner was that he was selling ‘loosey’ cigarettes, individual cigarettes on which applicable taxes were not paid. In the run-up to the Great Recession Wall Street made dubious, in many cases fraudulent, mortgage loans of over one-trillion dollars. The economic calamity that resulted cost millions of families their homes and millions more their jobs and life savings. The everyday business of U.S. corporations is avoiding hundreds of billions per year in tax liabilities through sham transactions. Eric Garner could in theory have sold loosey cigarettes for the next 500,000 years and not neared the annual tax avoidance of Apple Computer or General Electric had the police not murdered him. Source: ABC News.

The loss of any life through violence is tragic, which makes the police practice of casual, consequence-free, assault, murder and harassment so worthy of public condemnation. The contention put forward by PBA spokesperson Patrick Lynch that those protesting police violence have ‘blood on their hands’ leaves unaddressed the reasons why protestors are protesting— around the country heavily armed, militarized police routinely assault and murder people, largely black and brown youth, with impunity and largely without conscience. Seventy-six unarmed black and brown youth have been murdered by the police since 1999 and it is only the murder of two cops that raises the moral outrage of the police. And here lies irony— the protestors by-and-large have great sympathy for the families of the slain cops whereas, as best can be determined by the words and actions of the police, courts and political leadership, the imperial privilege of police to murder with impunity remains intact.

Picture (3) above: it has been nearly fifteen years since unarmed Amadou Diallo was murdered by the NYPD in a hail of bullets. In the intervening years the police across the country have murdered seventy-six unarmed people of color (link above), have been increasingly militarized, given the right to rob people of their possessions at will, made immune from prosecution for crimes committed and dedicated to systematic race-based repression like stop-and-frisk. The failure of the political leadership and the judiciary to hold the police accountable at any level demonstrates the political role that the police fill— that of an army of the rich existing to protect the ruling class from social accountability. Source: Life Magazine.

The existence of a heavily armed, highly militarized, wholly unaccountable army to protect a class and race based social order is totalitarian by degree— those on the side being repressed bear the brunt leaving the illusion of justice for those not paying attention. The one-sided response of the political leadership and police spokespersons to the tragic murder of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos is evidence of the social order being protected. Left entirely unaddressed is the historical role of the police in maintaining an unjust race and class based social order from slave patrols to convict leasing to mass incarceration and for-profit prisons to class and race-based enforcement of selectively repressive laws. And to be clear, it is the political leadership that has designated and so-armed the police to be the quasi-military force they now are.

The mainstream press is claiming that the murders of Messrs. Liu and Ramos have reframed the protests against police violence to be against violence. Without disarming the police and changing their role from militarized guardians of ruling class interests to servants of all of the public it is difficult to see how opposing violence without opposing the existing role of the police is politically coherent? And reduction of the idea of justice to the will of the police is to accept the role they have been given in protecting class and race interests by a political leadership that straightforwardly answers to economic interests. Put differently, if fealty to the law had anything to do with the current role of the police then areas with high levels of criminal activity could be found in the financial towers of lower Manhattan and on Park and Madison Avenues just north of Forty-Second Street. As of a few days ago the NYPD was nowhere to be found enforcing the law in these locations.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is forthcoming.

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--Joe

A Warning - Militarizing the American Police

What you can expect if you can't take a stand for LAW and don't speak out. Henry Siegman's "A Slaughter of Innocents": a Venerable Jewish Voice for Peace, on Gaza expresses my thinking extremely well on Democracy Now, where he identifies the main issue conflicting all humanity, that of "public silence," "allowing evil to prevail"  -- in a Democracy, a disease as deadly and virulent as the Ebola plague.

"I always thought that the important lesson of the Holocaust is not that there is evil, that there are evil people in this world who could do the most unimaginable, unimaginably cruel things. That was not the great lesson of the Holocaust. The great lesson of the Holocaust is that decent, cultured people, people we would otherwise consider good people, can allow such evil to prevail, that the German public—these were not monsters, but it was OK with them that the Nazi machine did what it did. Now I draw no comparisons between the Nazi machine and Israeli policy. And what I resent most deeply is when people say, "How dare you invoke the Nazi experience?" The point isn’t, you know, what exactly they did, but the point is the evidence that they gave that decent people can watch evil and do nothing about it. That is the most important lesson of the Holocaust, not the Hitlers and not the SS, but the public that allowed this to happen. And my deep disappointment is that the Israeli public, precisely because Israel is a democracy and cannot say, "We’re not responsible what our leaders do," that the public puts these people back into office again and again." [Emphasis mine.]

All you get on these blogs are people rehashing their brainwashed propaganda. Or attacking someone with their personal lies and invective. No one stands up for the Law or the truth. And if you dare speak about the evil and the evil incarnates, they enforce their evil upon you with a vengeance. These people are NOT the "decent people" Henry Siegman is talking about. They are the very "Nazi machine and Israeli policy" "monsters" in action.

Well, if what Cosme Caal says below, doesn't scare the hell out of you, nothing will. Personally, I think it is way too late to do anything about what has happened to America. Certainly not any peaceful solution.

The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces

August 27, 2014

by COSME CAAL

Guatemala City.

From Guatemala City I have been keeping up with the events in Ferguson, Missouri and my heart goes out to those United States citizens who are actively resisting a brutal local police state. I sit awake at night and contemplate how one of the greatest nations in the world has become militarized and despotic. Impunity is now normalized in most police departments across the United States and in the minds of many Americans. I did not know I would live to see this phenomenon, yet, the more I peruse online news feeds, the more evident it is to me that Americans, especially minorities, are in great danger of militarized suppression as a matter of state policy.

From our experience in half a century in Latin America I can tell you that, once the human rights of a minority are compromised, it is only a matter of time before they are compromised for an entire nation. From that same experience I can tell you it will take decades before they can be regained. Militarized police forces take on a life of their down, at the expense of the society’s well-being. The social contract that gives the state the duty to organize police forces itself becomes obsolete, almost a joke. Citizens begin to obey agents of the state not out of respect or cooperation, but out of fear of those sworn to protect them. Eventually, the militarized power of the police reaches such magnitude that political leaders lose all ability to rein them in. We experienced this USA-backed militarized transformation of the police in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. What the U.S. helped do to Latin America, it is now doing to itself.

Even when there will officers who want to adhere to the law, militarized policing organizations become an unstoppable and despotic force. The very ideologies that give them life become obsolete, as do all existing laws that protect citizens. Central American dictatorships backed and armed by the United States government in the 1970’s built police forces, outfitted them with military gear, and allowed them to brutalize and kill with impunity. The murder or incarceration of progressive democratic leaders who resisted this transformation was sanctioned by United States intelligence agencies.

I call out to white United States citizens, and those police officers that believe in democracy and the rule of law, to unite with racial minorities who are now being suppressed, and to resist the catastrophic militarization of police forces across the United States. For white Americans to think that their race makes them immune to police brutality is a mistake that cannot be afforded. Central American urban mestizo masses ignored the genocide of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. They saw these massacres as not their problem. Today we all suffer militarized suppression. Racial division was our greatest weakness.

We must not shy away from the reality of a racialized United States of America. We must face our racial diversity, embrace its beauty, and unite as one democratic and leading nation. We are not divided at heart or by nature. Media pundits play with our emotions by telling divisive stories of racial conflict. Recently they have trained many white Americans to fear Central Americans who have courageously made it to our borders, escaping undeclared and unstoppable internal conflicts. These are murderous conflicts born out of the very militarization of Central American nation-states by the United States. In Guatemala alone more than 800,000 citizens have been murdered since the peace accords were signed in 1996, after a thirty-six year internal militarized conflict.

But militarized police are not the only problem. Since the 1980’s, government, from Washington D.C. to the states and cities, has been poisoned with inept and cynical politicians who play a racist card to keep Americans divided. And this is a necessary part of a militarized state equation. In fact, 21st century United States politics follows a developing path in place in much of Latin America for half a century. I call it the Latinamericanization of the United States. This path includes politicians selling society to the highest bidder, eradicating laws that protect civilians against poverty, disease, job insecurity, and police brutality.

In Guatemala, for example, politicians have no economic or politics training, or educational experience to hold powerful and influential government office. Social breakdown is such that the average citizen is in danger of death by warring gangs, extortion mafias, or the police. Politicians have carved out the legislative and executive branches in such a way that the military and the police state serves their safety, and that of their families and friends. The police also guard the great fortunes and economic interests. Everyone else must suffer insecurity, poverty, prison, and sometimes, random death. Protests are now officially terrorist acts. Meanwhile the United States continues to provide weapons and military training to these Guatemalan elites.

We can no longer argue that the United States is a country where civil liberties and human rights are protected. While an elite class remains immune to political and police corruption and militarization, this does not hold truth for the majority.

Part of my family escaped to the United States in the 1980’s. We escaped Guatemala’s poverty, racism, and a raging internal conflict, in hopes of a better life. Our story is not new; it is the same story told millions of times over in the last two centuries by earlier migrants. We ended up in Los Angeles, California. I was blessed with my mother’s support to educate myself while she toiled away in underpaid jobs. That did not matter to her. It did not matter to me. We Mayans have been toiling at staying alive for the last five centuries. We are the continuation of that struggle for survival.

I was taught to love the United States by my teachers, and to work hard to contribute to a nation that held so much promise. I did. With great effort and dedication I became a sociologist and historian. I wanted to understand the social fabric that sustains us as Americans and sustains me as a survivor of genocide.

Although pockmarked with racism, my experience in graduate school was one of support by white professors, fellow graduate students, and my beloved students. I learned to have hope in the white American society. I strove to teach my students to understand and take advantage of their privilege to help us make of the United States a better racial democracy.

But living in South Los Angeles in the last decade also revealed to me the parallels of militarized Latin America to many pockets of the United States, and it gave me front row seat to observe the fast militarization of police departments in the United States. African Americans and Latin@s are on lock down in that part of Los Angeles. LAPD will kill anyone in South LA with impunity. Their impunity is now part of the Californian political structure, just as in Latin America. No overseeing agency, citizen watchdog or Californian political coalition can realistically reform the LAPD. For decades people have been suffering. The LA riots of 1992 were an example of that suffering.

In the Rampart scandal police officers sworn to crack down on gangs became a murderous gang themselves. This is a familiar pattern seen across Latin America, where police forces were encouraged to take on tougher tactics to combat the products of mass poverty and severe inequality. Extortion mafias now have Guatemala and El Salvador societies on their knees. Their militarized police forces are riddled with corruption, ineptitude, and seemingly ubiquitous violence. Violence is everywhere. America seems to be heading this way.

Let us not think we will not experience this in the United States. The footage from Ferguson shows the frightening militarization of police officers, playing war against civil society. They will not stop. The governor of Missouri will not stop them. Perhaps he can’t.

I call out to all white Americans, to unite with suppressed minorities who are incarcerated daily, killed in the streets, and who hold little political power against these militarized police forces. It is in their utmost interest to understand that, just as in Latin America, when the white peoples, the mestizos of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, stood aside as indigenous peoples were massacred, subjugation for all is certain once militarized monsters awaken, learn to walk, and find their own developmental path.

Cosme Caal is a community activist and scholar from the Americas. His interests include political mobilization of Mayans in Guatemala and Los Angeles, and the Pachakutik indigenous political organization in the Andean region.

Illegitimate Egg-Suckers Galore

I asked you the question, "Is your neighbor a threat? What about that local lying, racist blog-neighbor that fronts themselves as 'good citizens'?"

Welcome to the American Gaza and why it is important for the Elitist Rulers and their militarized police to force a complete capitulation to their will and judgments. The only way they can justify their existence is to enforce this judgment on everyone else: "Beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

This is why these Elitist Facist are dead souls as exemplified by "Zionism's original sin." They compromised away their humanity and took what did not belong to them. They are illegitimate bastards, without credibility or value. A fact established in history regarding the Jews as a people and recognized by Miko Peled's:

Gaza reminds us of Zionism’s original sin

Non-cooperation and resistance

Listening to this, I was reminded of Jewish communities under the Nazi regime who believed that if they cooperated and showed they were good citizens then all would be well. But the road from cooperation to the concentration camps and then the gas chambers was a direct one.   

**** 

So why the fear? Why the constant, six-decade-long campaign against Gaza? Because Palestinians in Gaza, more so than anywhere else, pose a threat to Israel’s legitimacy. 

Israel is an illegitimate creation brought about by a union between racism and colonialism. The refugees who make up the majority of the population in the Gaza Strip are a constant reminder of this. 

They are a reminder of the crime of ethnic cleansing upon which Israel was established. The poverty, lack of resources and lack of freedom stand in stark contrast to the abundance, freedom and power that exist in Israel and that rightfully belongs to Palestinians.

Read the complete article. 

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AUGUST 19, 2014

Half-truths, Omissions and Distortions

Palestine, Israel and CNN

by ROBERT FANTINA

Filthy Mouth

What's with the filthy mouth? More typical low-class, filthy, scummy hypocrisy of a Brownshirt blog and their enablers.

If "Nobigdeal" was to respond to the filthy personal assault in his or her defence he or she would be censored, deleted and block from further participation on the blog for violating "comment rules." This kind of action is perfectly alright with the TE people just as long as they agree with the personal assault - someone defending them and their Brownshirt policies.

This is an issue for two reasons. One, it establishes the total loss of credibility and defines and identifies the purpose or reason for the blogs existence. And two, this is where this kind of worthless opinionated atrocity starts and is justified.

Editor Defends Decision to Drop George Will After Rape Column

“We had a lot of readers very angry and very hurt,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch's op-ed chief explains

And this:  St. Louis Paper Drops George Will Column After ‘Offensive’ Rape Piece

Actually he was dropped because his column was "controversial."

Eric Kirk used the same justifications for censoring and blocking people on his blog. In a Democracy EVERYONE needs to hear and see controversial points of view and understandings. Observations are not the same as worthless opinions. Yet we have people accused, judged and put to death on totally worthless unsubstantiated opinions. That lawlessness and corruption has its roots in these kinds of hypocritical actions and justification. They are all a net negative to the community.

This is just one example:

Nobigdeal

June 21, 2014
1:35 pm

It isn’t a scoop when you scanner jump and call the police before a press-release is issued. Police need to take care of business instead of calling the blogs.

The police did say they were investigating if there was gang involvement.

All LOCO does is reprint press releases and the Times-Standard labels press releases as breaking news.

All TE does is take stuff and twist it to suit your political agenda. You are just Heraldo regurgitated.

For original news, try the Northcoast Journal.

Liked by you

Reply

• 

  likeshank

  June 23, 2014
  1:40 pm
  A scoops a scoop asshole. Bitter much?

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[Emphasis mine] -- And if for some reason you have a problem understanding what I just said then read this, because if these Brownshirts get their way this is what's coming to America:

JUNE 24, 2014 - by JONATHAN COOK
You Can’t Force-Feed Occupation to Those Who Hunger for Freedom
Israel’s New Abyss

--Joe