David Seaton's Blog

An interesting take on the sheikh

2009-11-18T16:50:30Z

Innocent until proven guilty?

Read the following excerpts about the New York trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and see if they make sense to you.

I am posting them in case anybody reading feels up to rebutting their simple argument:

If we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.

When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.

(...) How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?

Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but told that his family would be killed and he would be waterboarded if he refused to talk? (...) And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence? What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?

I think these comments point out very efficiently and very graphically how contradictory the US culture of endless war is with our constitutional guarantees and how grotesque it can become when some sort of compromise between the two is attempted. I would find it very difficult to answer the questions this commentary evoke.

It looks to me as if the treasured constitutional traditions of the United States of America are going to be bent to the needs of a "show trial". That eventuality could end up doing worse damage to the republic, much worse, than anything Bush ever did.

This thing is so contaminated with politics that if English common law is still in force and if Johnnie Cochran were still alive, he probably could get KSM off. The trickiest, hungriest trial lawyers in the USA must be lining up to do this one pro-bono. Any shyster that could get KSM off will be the heavyweight champion of the lawyers.

And if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed walks the presidency of Barack Obama is toast.

If this is not a fair trial under our age-old rules than KSM will have done more damage to the USA through his day in court than he did with the airplanes.

What I also find interesting about the above comments is that they could easily come from the left, but in fact they come from the far, far, right, but not the neocon version, they come from the paleoconservative, old time, Father Coughlin, right: none other than Pat Buchanan.

Of necessity, I read a wide spectrum of opinion from left to right. I do this because we are all living in the same world and looking at the same reality, and like the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, different people catch hold of different parts of the elephant. This practice helps me to constantly recalibrate my thinking... such as it is.

To enjoy reading somebody, I only demand that the commentator be intelligent, lay their cards face up and make well constructed arguments that challenge my preconceptions. Buchanan fits that. Unlike the neocons, he isn't trying to fool anybody. You can see him coming from far off. He is an old fashioned, pre-Vatican-II, lace-curtain, Irish Catholic, antisemite and anybody with Irish family probably has at least a great uncle like this, but not as smart as Buchanan, most likely.

So here is this rather perfect argument out of the pen of someone most of my readers loathe and despise. Go on, take a shot at picking his discourse apart. I confess that I cannot find any fault in it and I wonder how the US government has gotten itself in such a precarious position and dumb a fix.

Europe in the world of the "G-2"

2009-11-17T11:20:28Z

"Living well is the best revenge"
George Herbert (1593 - 1633)

The Lisbon Treaty, the European Union's de facto constitution, is finally ready to roll out. For euroskeptics it is much too much and for many europhiles it is much too little. In my opinion it is just one more patient step toward European unity. All the phases of European Union dating back to the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, have been such small, patient steps. Lets look at what has been done up till now:

The EU has developed a single market through a standardized system of laws which apply in all member states, ensuring the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital. It maintains common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries and regional development. Sixteen member states have adopted a common currency, the euro, constituting the Eurozone. Wikipedia

The modern state is a European invention and the creation of the entities that became the states of Europe was far from instantaneous. The pooling of sovereignty, where powerful princes, wealthy cities and idiosyncratic regions, with all their traditional laws and privileges, submitted to be ruled by a single king didn't happen over night, or if it did it was usually accompanied by much blood; and even today there are quite a few regions in European states that feel restless. In states such as Spain, France and the United Kingdom, the powerful centrifugal forces that were amply demonstrated in the disintegration of Yugoslavia are often active under the surface. So European unity is a work in progress... and always will be.

The Roman empire, created European unity and maintained it firmly under their sandals at sword point: until it finally fell apart. More recently both Napoleon and Hitler attempted to unify Europe at the point of a gun and both of them failed in rivers of blood. Today's unity is first and foremost about peace. Peace itself is the greatest conquest of all.

Europe has never before been such a peaceful place as it is today.

Europe has been the scene of the world's most horrific wars, both religious and mercantile and any euro-chauvinist would do well to remember what Mahatma Gandhi answered when asked his opinion of European civilization: "It would be a good idea", Churchill's "naked fakir" replied.

Today's European Union came into being in order to solve a specific problem: how to end the "Great European Civil War (1914-1945)" which had destroyed much of Europe, caused it to lose its foreign possessions and killed, mutilated and displaced countless millions of human beings. In 1945 Europe was what the Spanish call a "broken toy". That was the defining problem of Europe and it has been solved with enormous success. Until that problem had been solved, nothing else of importance could be done.

Although the combination of the words, "peace" and "process" have been devalued like a Wiemar Deutsch Mark in the Middle East, the European Union is, in fact, the result of a successful and ongoing, "peace process". Those who are eager for the European Union to begin to act in the fashion of a classic nation state, super power or empire don't really understand this process, where it has come from and where it is headed.

The European Union is above all a stewardship, a husbanding of human resouces, of infrastructure, of culture, of wealth, health and perhaps above all an idea of the quality of human life... of what it means to live well in every sense: prosperity with social justice. That is a combination absent from every other part of the world... certainly absent from the "G-2", China and the USA.

There are many commentators that fear that Europe is going to become irrelevant as the USA and China divide up the world between them. Their fear of Europe's demise is premature. In fact, the EU may find itself "the last man standing".

China and America are entwined and tangled in an economic embrace that could damage both of them, if not beyond repair, enough to make them hardly recognizable for quite some time.

The Chimerican era is drawing to a close. Given the bursting of the debt and housing bubbles, Americans will have to kick their addiction to cheap money and easy credit. The Chinese authorities understand that heavily indebted American consumers cannot be relied on to return as buyers of Chinese goods on the scale of the period up to 2007. And they dislike their exposure to the American currency in the form of dollar-denominated reserve assets of close to $2 trillion. The Chinese authorities are "long" the dollar like no foreign power in history, and that makes them very nervous. Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick - NYT

So much for the intensely "relevant" USA and China.

It should not be forgotten that none of the great superpowers, not the USA, not China, nor Russia, is capable of building a decent automobile, something that Europe does splendidly, while simultaneously providing the workers who build the cars with a decent social net. Europe with its internal market of 450,000,000 people is still able to manufacture goods of a quality unmatchable anywhere except Japan and even Japan still cannot approach Europe in making high profit margin luxury goods: a Lexus, although a wonderful car, is not a Ferrari Testarossa.

The Americans now drown in debt, with deteriorating educational and transport systems, seemingly limited to what they apparently do best: killing people and blowing things up. The Chinese on the other hand, work day and night making cheap junk, without unions or health care and live like refugees from a Jacob Riis photograph. .

All the while Europeans make top quality goods and protect their workers, maintain their infrastructure and health and education systems... and while the dollar and yuan race each other to the bottom, the Euro is a solid measure of value.

There is something of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper in all of this.

At the same time European regulations have become the world standard. The handiest example of this is the cell-phone, but this ability of the "faceless bureaucrats" of Brussels to define things like "butter" and "kilo" , or "plastic", or "bag", so that the entire world knows exactly what a kilo of butter or a cell phone or a plastic bag that can be sold to 450 million people consists of is an achievement only rivaled by the law makers of ancient Rome. There is nothing irrelevant about this and certainly greater relevance is not gained by acting as the "tool kit" of an America struggling in the endless wars of its Götterdämmerung.

So Europe will continue its eternal round of boring committees, its purgatory of brain melting meetings that run into meetings and perhaps, someday, some dawn, the faceless bureaucrats of Brussels will stumble yawning out of another inconclusive meeting into the fresh air of a Belgian morning and suddenly realize that they have created the utopia that mankind has dreamt of since we trucked out of Eden.

Saturday morning noodles in Madrid

2009-11-14T20:52:02Z

The food pictured is a small plate or "tapa" of what is called "fideua", which is a Valencian paella made with saffron-colored noodles and little bits of chicken, pork and shellfish mixed in; the wine is a robust, Ribera del Duero red and the whole thing, standing up, went for €2.50, this very morning in the center of Madrid.

I thought that today, for a change, I'd rather write about this little meal than about all the crap that is going on in the world.

I had a camera with me because my wife and I were out collecting wall graffiti for her to use in her digital artwork, which she hangs on her web page.

I am trying to learn flash, but it's pretty heavy going. All I can do for now is to take a film made in Corel Video Studio and turn it into something that opens quickly and runs smoothly on the web page. I still have no idea how to construct all the lovely bells and whistles that morph as you move the cursor across them.

Getting back to the photo: although I like to cook, to eat and to drink, I'm no foody. Good food and good wine, without too much ceremony, in the informal atmosphere of a noisy Spanish bar, on a busy morning, is one of my pleasures. No big deal. That is important for me... that it be no big deal.

When people talk too much about food it makes me uncomfortable for some reason, like when people talk too much about sex and most dissertations about wine are insufferable.

Things that are better to do than to talk about.

The picture expresses some of that, I think.

Abbas outs out of the aba daba dab

2009-11-11T21:42:14Z

The "peace process" explained

All night long they'd chatter away,
All day long they were happy and gay,
Swinging and singing in their honky-tonkey way.
"Aba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab"
"Aba Daba Honeymoon"
Words and Music By: Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian authority, you know, the gray haired fellow with glasses that is always being photographed shaking hands with the Prime Minister of Israel or the President of the United States, or the the Secretary of State or all the visiting "envoys", which is basically all that he really does, has said that he has had enough.

Abbas had understood from Obama that he would force Israel to stop all settlement construction and then launch peace talks. (...) Taking his cue from Obama, Abbas made a full freeze of settlement construction a precondition for talks. But when the Americans backed down several months later after Netanyahu offered a slowdown but not a freeze, Abbas was left high and dry. JTA

Many think that Abbas's threat to resign is a bluff, but I take him at his word.

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So that Palestinian children don't point him out on the street and throw shoes at him when goes to pick up his pension.

However his threat to not continue has caught everyone by surprise and made them realize that the "two state solution", the idea of a free Palestine living in peace, side by side with Israel, is probably not going to ever happen.

The "peace process" has become so precarious that its existence is mortally threatened without Abbas there just to shake hands.

That is the status quo, Israel builds more walls, builds more settlements, builds more checkpoints, takes more water, evicts more Palestinians from their homes, cuts down more olive trees, etc, etc, while Abbas... shakes hands.

Many say that a two state solution is the only path that Israel can take in order to remain both a "Jewish state" and a democracy. This is not so, there is another path.

Let me explain.

The greatest danger to Israel, or at least to Bibi Netanyahu's version of it, is not Iran, it's a free, sovereign Palestinian state in "Judea and Samaria". Why?

Because, for those who call the occupied territories of the West Bank, "Judea and Samaria", those areas are an essential part of "Greater Israel", without which it would be mutilated, defaced, disfigured.

If an internationally recognized sovereign state called Palestine were recognized on that land, that "mutilation" would become permanent, eternal. This would be considered a heinous betrayal of the Israel Covenant. The treasonous, blasphemous betrayal of thousands of years of history, suffering and tribulations. Like Esau they would be selling their "birthright" for a mess of pottage. The children of Israel have not traveled this far, for so long, to settle for that... Or so the ultra-nationalists that govern Israel would think.

However, the majority of foreign observers and the Israeli left would rush to say that a one state solution would be either be the end of Israel as a Jewish state, because through its greater fertility the Arab population would soon outnumber the Jews, or the end of Israel as a democracy if the Arabs within its borders were denied their civil rights.

There is another path.

Perhaps Yasser Arafat's greatest achievment was to get the world to officially recognize the word "Palestine" and especially the word, "Palestinian".

This was not so before his struggle.

Here is how Golda Meir expressed it:

"It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

And she also said:

"How can we return the held territories? There is nobody to return them to."

That is what Arafat changed and that is a lot, but some things he couldn't change.

Moshe Dayan addressed the Palestinians prophetically, when asked for a solution for their problem:

"We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads."

But, they didn't leave and that is where the process has led. They exist, officially recognized by the entire world, including the United States, as a people, as people with human rights and rights as an occupied people, but they live like dogs... and they wont leave.

They resist, they wont leave.

There is another path: one that is not spoken.

Ethnic cleansing.

That is impossible, you say.

In normal times yes, but not in times of a general war in the Middle East.

When the "chessboard" of international affairs has been knocked over and the pieces scattered.

Israel and the occupied could only be ethnically cleansed in the midst of a general war, when thousands of refugees are fleeing death and destruction.

In my opinion that is what the entire Iran affair is leading up to: a casus belli to set the entire region alight and in the ensuing confusion, ethnically cleanse "Judea and Samaria".

The Iranian atomic bomb is simply a McGuffin to get the show on the road.

I see this coming very clearly and it makes me very sad: sad for the Israelis, sad for the Palestinians, but especially sad for the United States, because I know perfectly well that when the Israelis start their war and in the midst of it ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza, the Congress of the United States will pass a resolution backing them and if the UN security resolves to condemn the ethnic cleansing, the United States will veto that resolution. That makes me very sad.

I confess that I don't care a fig if Israel is a "vibrant democracy", or not, but I care quite a bit if the USA is one... and that is at risk here too, make no mistake.

Rupert Murdoch as seen in the UK

2009-11-10T08:16:36Z

Rupert Murdoch doesn't end in FOX "news" or "The Weekly Standard", his winning formula of neoconservativism and neofascism is a multinational phenomenon.

One of the jewels in his crown is the British tabloid, "The Sun".

Here is how The Guardian's 'take no prisoners' cartoonist, Steve Bell (may he live a hundred years) parodies this rag.

Those who consume Murdoch's American publications will notice the similarities, but will find Steve Bell's bare-knuckle treatment refreshing.

What Obama could learn from Bush

2009-11-09T21:16:49Z

Why is this woman alway laughing so hysterically?

I never thought I'd write the following words, but is it possible that Obama's handling of the I-P peace process might actually end up being worse than George Bush's? Stephen M. Walt

In his blog in Foreign Policy magazine, one of the sharpest critics of George W. Bush's policies in the Middle East, Stephen M. Walt, linked to a pair of devastatingly critical attacks on President Obama's treatment of the Israel/Palestine conflict by Tony Karon of Time magazine and by Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation.

Tony Karon summed up the general drift of both articles with this phrase:

The Obama Administration's bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze -- in no small part because President Barack Obama began his effort by saying settlement freeze.

And as we read in his quote above, Walt then compares Obama's handling of the Middle East unfavorably with Bush's.

And this brings me to the title of my post: "What Obama could learn from Bush".

]]> We could sum up George W. Bush's policy in the Middle East succinctly as: to let the Israelis do anything they wanted, no matter how outrageous and give them all the military aid they ever requested and give them diplomatic cover in the UN or any other international body wherever their behavior might be questioned, at the same time putting them off from carrying out a catastrophic attack on Iran... all the while wrapping this mishgoss up in a mixture of the language of Wilsonian democracy and the Book of Revelations.

What did he achieve by this?

Basically he kept AIPAC off his back and this allowed him to pursue his main goals without being disturbed.

What were those goals, if to the public eye everything he and his administration ever did reeked of failure?

Here we enter the perilous jungle of politic-fiction and have to speculate without access to any inside information.

In my experience the most valuable guides in doing so are, first, Ockham's Razor plus Sherlock Homes's rough and ready dictum of eliminating the impossible and whatever you see left... is what you get.

Using this method, I begin with a risky hypothesis: George W. Bush is not as stupid as he looks. Which I then follow with a simple observation of fact: Richard Cheney neither looks stupid nor is rumored to be stupid.

From there I make a huge leap toward a totally libelous and unprovable (for the moment) supposition: That they were both in it for the money.

Imagine for a moment that both Bush and Cheney received a commission of 0.3 percent in some numbered offshore bank account for every discretionary contract they awarded for the reconstruction of Iraq. That would add up to a pretty penny and suddenly everything we have lived through since 9-11 would make more sense. What to everyone else would appear a total failure would in fact be a huge -- if private -- success.

Now, I don't think for a moment that Obama is on the take, so what can he learn from Bush?

Bush's lesson, if my wacky, just for the sake of argument, hypothesis is correct, is that to succeed you have to keep your eye on the main chance and establish priorities so that all your projects don't start bumping into each other in the dark.

By giving Israel and AIPAC everything they wanted Bush was able to secure their support or indifference on a raft of domestic issues. It always seemed strange to me that despite his total incompetent bumbling he endured relatively little pressure until the economy tanked.

That is the lesson.

Bush learned it from his dad, who always believed that his attempt at a settlement freeze is what cost him his reelection, despite having won a war and with the economy recovering.

It goes like this:

To succeed in freezing the settlements you have to confront AIPAC, to confront AIPAC, you have to be so popular, so powerful that you can frighten the senators and congressmen more than AIPAC does and so popular that you can drown out AIPAC's echochamber, Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which is what empowers the AstroTurf, teabagger-type, movements, that somehow spring up so spontaneously.

So Obama has gotten it all backwards. First he should have left the Israelis alone while he passed health legislation and reined in Wall Street and reactivated Main Street and got people jobs and then with his popularity soaring, he might have had some chance of winning a fight with AIPAC.

Now, as it is, just to survive politically, just to have any chance of second term, he finally may have to let the Israelis invade Lebanon and Gaza again this spring to prepare the ground for a full scale war with Iran this coming summer. Make no mistake, Iran is the big one and Obama's power to control the situation and avoid a catastrophe is weakening by the moment.

The Fort Hood Massacre

2009-11-07T16:49:00Z

So much of this story defies simple common sense that it is difficult to get to grips with it.

I don't know who was crazier, the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, or the people that assigned someone with his profile the task of treating traumatized soldiers returning from fighting Muslims.

It seems to me pure sadism on the US Army's part.

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Imagine the dynamic:

Dr/Maj Hasan is a first generation Palestinian-American and a pray-five-times-a-day-type, devout Muslim, surrounded in the US Army by a disproportionate number of born-again-Christian, racist and red-neck-scotch-irish-southerners, many of whom consider his religion a form of satanism and his ethnic group little more than animals.

I would imagine that quite often in treating these soldiers that many of them, as part of their "therapy", would express extremely racist and hostile attitudes toward Islam and toward Muslims and narrate in great and explicit detail the atrocities they may have committed or the fantasies they might entertain of committing against Muslim men and women. Doing this would probably be a healing "catharsis" for the soldiers, but it might just have produced a malignant catharsis in Dr/Maj Hasan.

It may have been that Dr. Hasan became radicalized by this daily bombardment and had begun to identify with the Muslim suicide bombers that his patients pursued.

All said, what Hasan did was very American, he didn't strap on an explosive belt and go for the 72 virgins, he got a gun and went on a shooting spree.... American as apple pie.

We take our comfort where we can these days.

Another Bush video, just for Dickday

2009-11-05T14:36:02Z

If you cant see this video in MS Explorer, try clicking here:

Dickday, TPM's guiding light, liked my Bush video, "Alfred E. Newman from Hell," a lot so I'm posting this one just for him... I've got another one that is really gross that I'll post later, if he likes this one too.

*To see it full size just press the little square "full screen" thingy.

A reminder for gloating Republicans

2009-11-04T15:53:44Z

Alfred E. Newman from Hell
*If, for some reason, your browser doesn't show this video CLICK HERE to view it

There seem to be a lot of Republicans walking around with familiar smirks on their faces today.

This is entirely premature.

I know that Americans are famous for their short memories and even shorter attention spans, but only one year has passed since a great affliction and a daily humiliation was extirpated from our "hearts and minds".

I made this video over three years ago and I am reviving it in case there are any Republicans who think that people are going to soon forget what they have inflicted on the country and mankind.
Alfred E. Newman from Hell

A Republic, if you can keep it

2009-11-01T19:41:29Z

Good King Michael the First?

"Well, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?"

"A Republic, if you can keep it."
Reply attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787

Right off the bat let me assure my readers that this is not a personal attack on the billionaire Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. The word is that Bloomberg is a very fine mayor, one of the best that New York has ever had.

This is more like a riddle,

Question: "When is a republic not a republic?
Answer: "When it's for sale."

I am convinced that the principal problem of the United States more than its endless wars, more than the devastation of climate change, more than anything else, is the way that its politics are financed.

The foundational idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people is completely short circuited at every turn by way US politics is financed today.

Bloomberg is a product of this system, not its cause. He has simply taken it to its logical conclusion.

Like ABC: Government in the USA is for sale and Bloomberg has bought some.

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Bloomberg, the richest man in New York, has simply cut out the "middlemen", the political parties, which are at bottom machines for raising campaign money, and has decided to run things himself financing his campaigns with his own money, massively outspending the opposition.

Now, this may be rather quixotic on Bloomberg's part, I imagine most rich people would prefer to simply buy or rent office holders instead of taking the trouble of administrating public affairs themselves; much in the same way that they have a gardener to tend their gardens and a chef to cook their meals; easier and cheaper too, although some may like to potter around the roses on weekends or try their hand at a souffle now and then.

In his enthusiasm for politics, Bloomberg apparently has taken it in to his head to cook everybody's meals and manure all the roses.

The eccentricity of wealth? Thirst for power? Noblesse oblige?

It is even said that Bloomberg is going to buy the New York Times.

Of course, if this were just about New York it wouldn't matter that much, but Hizzoner probably will end up taking a shot at the White House and I think he'll have a very good chance of taking it... as an independent.

The Republican party is now and perhaps irremediably in the hands of its nut fringe: the Bible thumpers and the teabaggers. It appeals only to white people, but not to all white people and it has become poison for nearly everyone whose complexion is not pinkish-gray or whose name ends in a vowel.

And unless employment surges dramatically from here to 2012 and the wars end in something less than a rout, etc, etc, etc, Obama may only be attractive to voters if the only alternative is crazy, stupid republicans of the Sarah Palin variety.

At this point a man with a brilliant record of achievement, both in the private sector and in one of America's most demanding and politically sensitive public jobs, who is obviously every bit as intelligent and hip as Barack Obama is, who, just by reaching in his pocket can raise much more money than the president's fabled Internet operation, might have a very good chance of being the first independent ever elected President of the United States.

From the point of view of how he might carry out his duties once in office this probably wouldn't be a tragedy because Michael Bloomberg has never given any indication of being a crooked slime bag like Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, but the idea of a man with a huge private fortune and a powerful communications empire also controlling the levers of American political power directly, the same way that Berlusconi does Italy's, makes me nervous.

In my innocence I always thought that democracy was about stopping powerful men like Michael Bloomberg, no matter how talented and well intentioned they might be, from having too much power over us little folk, less they end up oppressing us. Silly me.

Essences

2009-10-29T17:48:22Z

"We lost the fight, we didn't lose the argument" Noemi Klein

If you have IE Here is the URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgcFN3JBeKk

If you don't speak Spanish, the video featured above will probably seem like a spirited rendition of gibberish, but in fact the song "La Muralla" (The Wall) is one of the battle hymns of Salvador Allende's Chile.

The words of this song were written by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillen and set to music by the Chilean folksingers Quilapayún.

Quilapayún and Victor Jara sang the songs that still identify the Salvador Allende period.

In the video, "La Muralla" is sung by the post-Allende Chilean folk group "Ventiska", and "the special guest star", singing lead (the old guy with the beard) Ricardo Venegas, is one of the original Quilapayún.

When Pinochet lowered Chile into the "night and fog" of the torture chamber, the mass grave and the Chicago School of economics, the members of Quilapayún managed to escape, but Victor Jara didn't... he was arrested, tortured and killed.

The song, "La Muralla" became an instant classic. It is sung at every memorial to Salvador Allende (they fall on September 11th) and in itself has become a hymn of the Spanish speaking left, both in all of Latin America and Spain itself. In any concert where it is sung it brings the audience to their feet.

To anyone who lived through that period in the Spanish language it brings back memories of a time when young people believed that a better world was possible and were ready to sacrifice their lives to make it happen. Thanks to the Chicago School of Economics and the CIA, many of them did.

Now that George W. Bush, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher have crashed and burned it is time for the left to crawl out of the rubble, dust itself off and get busy.

The left has been buried under the rubbish that neoconservatism has dumped on it for so long that many people, including (especially?) many people of the left have forgotten what the left is.

This is where poetry can help.

Poetry exists in the place where the heart and the mind speak fluently to each other.

Guillen's verses express in a very few words what the left is about: human beings joining together to defend their humanity and all the simple, humble things that make life human, against the people, things and situations that make being human impossible. "Solidarity" is a clumsy word for brotherhood.

The song expresses these ideas, but more than anything else it expresses the emotion that is felt when these ideas are put into practice

I've translated Guillen's poem into English as best I can, unfortunately in the process I've destroyed the cadences of its beautiful Spanish.

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The Wall - Nicholas Guillen
To make this wall, bring me all the hands:
From the Blacks, their black hands, from the Whites, their white hands.

A wall to go from the sea to the mountains, from the hills to the sea,
all the way to the horizon...

- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?
A rose and a carnation ...

- Open the wall!

- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?
The Colonel's sword ...

- Close the wall!

- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?
The dove and the bay leaf ...

- Open the wall!

- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?
The scorpion and the centipede ...

- Close the wall!

The heart of a friend, opens the wall;
the poison and the dagger, closes the wall;
the myrtle and mint, opens the wall;
the tooth of the serpent, closes the wall;
the nightingale in the flower, opens the wall ...

Let's raise a wall
joining all our hands;
The Blacks, their black hands
The Whites, their white hands.
A wall to go from the sea to the mountains, from the hills to the sea,
all the way to the horizon...

Here it is in Spanish just in case anybody wants to sing along:

Para hacer esta muralla,
tráiganme todas las manos:
Los negros, su manos negras,
los blancos, sus blancas manos.
Ay,
una muralla que vaya
desde la playa hasta el monte,
desde el monte hasta la playa, bien,
allá sobre el horizonte.

--¡Tun, tun!
--¿Quién es?
--Una rosa y un clavel...
--¡Abre la muralla!
--¡Tun, tun!
--¿Quién es?
--El sable del coronel...
--¡Cierra la muralla!
--¡Tun, tun!
--¿Quién es?
--La paloma y el laurel...
--¡Abre la muralla!
--¡Tun, tun!
--¿Quién es?
--El alacrán y el ciempiés...
--¡Cierra la muralla!

Al corazón del amigo,
abre la muralla;
al veneno y al puñal,
cierra la muralla;
al mirto y la yerbabuena,
abre la muralla;
al diente de la serpiente,
cierra la muralla;
al ruiseñor en la flor,
abre la muralla...

Alcemos una muralla
juntando todas las manos;
los negros, sus manos negras,
los blancos, sus blancas manos.
Una muralla que vaya
desde la playa hasta el monte,
desde el monte hasta la playa, bien,
allá sobre el horizonte...

That ought to get it.

What I like about a long war in Afghanistan, or why America desperately needs a quaqmire

2009-10-28T16:14:51Z

Possibly the world's most valuable political analyst?

We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.(...) The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries and to defeat their internal foes. Thomas L. Friedman - NY Times

My dad once told me about an interesting fellow he worked with in a large rug company. When the CEO was choosing new rug lines this guy's input was vital because... he was always wrong: not sometimes, always.

If this man saw some new prototype just in from the design department and showed any enthusiasm for it, experience had taught the top management that nobody anywhere would ever buy it and conversely if he thought the proposed product was a dog, they would go into night shifts to flood the market with the rug.

My father considered his colleague to be a veritable phenomenon of nature and one of the most valuable men in his organization.

My father assured me that to be always wrong is as rare and wonderful as to be always right. His wise words have stayed with me.

Among political analysts, Thomas L. Friedman is that man.

]]> Just to refresh my reader's memory, lets have a little peek at his record on Iraq:

During the lead up to the war he said,

"The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war."

After no WMD were found he said,

"The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument... The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity."

AND

"The right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification."

Finally in August of 2006 he wrote,

"Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, democracy is not emerging in Iraq, and we can't throw more good lives after good lives"

His scrambling to maintain some reputation as an analyst and pundit led him to a series of statements that have come to be known as the "Friedman Unit", a period of six months, where if his suggestions were followed, everything would turn out fine. Here is a sample of Friedman units ripped from Wikipedia:

"The next six months in Iraq... are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time" November 30, 2003.

"What we're gonna find out... in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war." October 3, 2004.

"I think we're in the end game now.... I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear" September 25, 2005.

"I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse" December 18, 2005.

"I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding" January 23, 2006

"I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq." March 2, 2006

"we're going to find out... in the next year to six months - probably sooner - whether a decent outcome is possible" May 11, 2006.

Today his message is:

Let's finish Iraq, because a decent outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.

His reason seems to be because:

My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world.

So now from

"democracy is not emerging in Iraq, and we can't throw more good lives after good lives"·

We arrive at "we can't throw more good lives after good lives in Afghanistan" because...

"Iraq matters".

In my opinion this is all shorthand for, "if the US armed forces are tied down in Afghanistan, we wont be able to use them anywhere else".

Where might that "anywhere" be?

My bet would be against Iran.

A lot of perspicacious analysts have always thought that in invading Iraq the real object was Iran. That is why Afghanistan was considered such a boring distraction. You probably remember how all the neocons in those euphoric days were talking up, "real men go to Tehran".

All the neocons have ever really cared about is Iran because it is Israel's bête noire and Thomas L. Friedman is the smiling face of neoconnerie.

With the United States armed forces enmeshed and maxed out in Afghanistan, a full scale war with Iran? ... fuggedaboutit.

The Russians know it, the Chinese know it, the Iranians know it, and most of all the Israelis know it.

So the bright side of the war in Afghanistan is that a war with Iran would be a total disaster with hundreds of thousands of dead and might cause a worldwide depression as oil prices skyrocket and would only serve Israel's and a few corrupt sheik's interests, certainly not America's. And as Friedman says,

"We simply don't have the surplus we had when we started the war on terrorism"

So, if a low intensity endless quagmire-nightmare is the only thing standing between the USA and the abyss of war with Iran, the only excuse we can hand AIPAC for not going to war with Iran, then the president is right, Afghanistan is the "good" war.

Thomas Friedman, like my dad's colleague, is the most reliable bellwether that America is on the right track in Afghanistan.

So Mr. President, send the troops, the more the merrier: Afghanistan is the best excuse we'll ever have for blowing off the Israelis and hey, we are still fighting terrorism, aren't we?

India holds up a mirror for America to see itself

2009-10-26T11:23:27Z

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim." Ayn Rand"

The other day in my perusings I stumbled upon this troubling jewel

Not only do Indians perform more Google searches for (Ayn) Rand than citizens of any country in the world except the United States, but Penguin Books India has sold an impressive number of copies -- as many as 50,000 of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead each since 2005, a number comparable to sales there by global best-seller John Grisham. And that's not counting the ubiquitous pirated copies of her works that are hawked at rickety street stalls, sidewalk piles, and bus stations -- an honor that Rand, a fierce defender of intellectual property rights, probably would not have appreciated. Foreign Policy

To put this information into some perspective I would ask you to read a paragraph from Wikipedia:

The World Bank estimates that 456 million Indians (42% of the total Indian population) now live under the global poverty line of $1.25 per day (PPP). This means that a third of the global poor now reside in India.(...) India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three (46% in year 2007) than any other country in the world.

Now into that context, to see what Indians are so eagerly googling, let's mix in the following sayings of Ayn Rand, which though few, hopefully give the full flavor of her "Objectivist" philosophy:

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.

Now you may ask yourself, what possible attraction could this sort of paen to sociopathic selfishness have for the countrymen of that paragon of selflessness, Mahatma Gandhi? How can you revere one and also revere the other?

You can't. Rand is in, Gandhi is out.

How is this put together?

Again from Wikipedia:

A disproportionally large share of poor are lower caste Hindus. According to S. M. Michael, Dalits constitute the bulk of poor and unemployed. Many see Hinduism and its subsidiary called caste system as a system of exploitation of poor low-ranking groups by more prosperous high-ranking groups. In many parts of India, land is largely held by high-ranking property owners of the dominant castes that economically exploit low-ranking landless labourers and poor artisans, all the while degrading them with ritual emphases on their so-called god-given inferior status.

"Dalit" is a politically correct term for "untouchable"; to put this into clearer focus, let's hear from Mahatma Gandhi on the subject:

Removal of untouchability means love for, and service of, the whole world and thus merges into Ahimsa. Removal of untouchability spells the breaking down of barriers between man and man and between the various orders of Being."

Now it is obvious that the Dalits (untouchables) and the rest of India's 456 million poor, living on less than $1.25 a day, are not the ones who are googling Ayn Rand, isn't it? It would be safe to assume, I imagine, that the googlers belong to what the paragraph above calls the "more prosperous high-ranking groups".

The mechanism at work here is also obvious. The extreme poverty of India has always been a great embarrassment to Indian yuppies when speaking to foreigners and the cruelty of its ancient caste systems is universally condemned throughout the world by all the other belief systems. Till now untouchability and the extreme poverty of India have been intellectually indefensible. How to rephrase them for the globalized world, a place where India's elites are hot to trot?

At this point, along comes a prestigious American, a major cult-figure, Ayn Rand, the guru of Sri Alan Greenspan no less, someone who with her indifference to suffering, with the clockwork logic of her exposition and the elaborate intellectual edifice constructed around what boils down to, "bugger you, I'm alright Jack", justifies their system in all its time-hardened egotistical racism.

Not only do they have the absolution of their ancient religious traditions, they now have the apostolic blessing of one of the guiding lights of ultra-modern, western, anarcho-capitalism.

Gotta be a hit.

Something that is fun and often productive is to run things backwards and see what turns up. Let's try that on Ayn Rand in India.

Here is the scenario: Ayn Rand is a big hit with high-cast Indians, who would like to ignore India's racism and justify their indifference to its poverty, but long before she made it in India, she was a big hit in the USA: could it be for the same reasons?

Could Ayn Rand's popularity in India hold the key to her popularity in the United States?

Could India be holding up a mirror for us to contemplate ourselves?

Are we looking to Ayn Rand for the same absolution she gives the Indians?

If you stop to think about, since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

It is curious to observe the relation Rand's "thinking" and her followers to our present predicaments.

"If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject." Ayn Rand

"You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost." Milton Friedman

"Left to their own devices, it is alleged, businessmen would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings. Thus, it is argued, the Pure Food and Drug Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the numerous building regulatory agencies are indispensable if the consumer is to be protected from the `greed' of the businessman. But it is precisely the `greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer." Alan Greenspan in a 1963 article, ``The Assault on Integrity'' for "The Objectivist" magazine - quoted by Ayn Rand in her 1967 book, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal''

One of the upsides of our present predicament has been the defenistration of luminaries like Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan and fellow travelers. This from the Financial Times:

The Washington Consensus, the organizing idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried.(...) The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. Phillip Stephens - Financial Times

Or this from BusinessWeek:

The cost included a Hobbesian view of business -- nasty, brutish and every man for himself -- and a rejection of the idea that ultimately we're all in this together. Which is precisely what we do not need at this time of increasing global interdependence. (...) In this worldview, "business ethics" is an oxymoron, not because of bad behavior but because ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else. Subordinating everything to shareholder value is, literally, anti-ethical. Charles H. Green - BusinessWeek

Here, Charles Green, an MBA from Harvard, has gone straight to the heart of the whole matter when he says, "ethics can't even exist apart from some notion of a "relationship" to something or someone else".

That is really what human life is all about. Nothing is more defenseless and miserable than an isolated human being.

Our terror of being the only human on earth is the romance of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe's joy at encountering Friday, saving his life and becoming his friend is one of the most powerful metaphors in literature.

The human being is a social anthropoid, whose phenomenal success as a species is due to its unique capacity for empathy, altruism and sacrifice for the common good. If selfishness were such a survival plus, then the common house cat would be the "master of the universe" and not human beings.

Since we wandered over the African savanna in small groups of hunter-gatherers, naked, without even fire, in fear of lions and hyenas, a sprained ankle or a broken bone, during those hundreds of thousands of years, the "common good" existed. If humans hadn't recognized it and sacrificed for it we wouldn't be here today.

Over most of our history that was our life, only of late have we taken a sinister detour. That wandering togetherness is what our brains, inhabiting spirits and digestive tract are built for and look where we are now.

Over a relatively few millennia we have woven ourselves into hell.

Selfishness is precisely the least human of our traits and that it has become a driving force in our world is perhaps the central problem we face... our paradox: humans that dehumanize themselves.

Certainly, unless we can recreate the essence of our cooperative origins on a mass scale within our present technological development, there seems to be no solution in sight to this hell we have created.

Ayn Rand is probably (with Milton Friedman) the most profoundly immoral and destructive thinker that America has ever produced. Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator and Rand believed that selfishness was. Both considered what western civilization has traditionally marked as deadly sins as virtues not defects. Their followers are legion and we live among the wreckage they and their "virtues" have created.

Afghan slam bam, thank you mam

2009-10-21T05:36:34Z

"I can't sing and I can't dance, but I can lick any SOB in the house.".
Jack Dempsey - AKA reality

"He is a very smart fighter; when he's fighting he is thinking all the time. But, all the time he was thinking I was hitting him."
Jack Dempsey

At this point in time the media are full of talk about the agonizingly thorough decision making process underway in the White House as President Obama analyzes his options in Afghanistan and decides whether or not to send the 40,000 extra troops that General McChrystal has requested.

A lot of people are waiting for his decision:

Those Afghans who have thrown in their lot with the United States are waiting for his decision.

All of the NATO allies who are keeping troops there against the public opinion of their voters are waiting for his decision.

The men and women of the United States armed forces who are already there or may be on their way there soon and their families are waiting for his decision.

This decision should be easy, because no decision the president takes will magically pull America's chestnuts out of the South Asian fire or provide anything like a happy ending.

Why do such miserable alternatives simplify things?

Because, sometimes the more screwed up things become the simpler they are to deal with.

When no solution is really any good, getting to "less bad" is often not rocket science.

The solution is to send the troops.

The bottom line is that this war is no longer about oil pipelines or democracy or Afghan women's right to wear miniskirts and to learn how to read or supporting "moderates" or about defeating terrorism or catching Osama... it certainly is no longer about winning.

OK, so what is the war in Afghanistan now all about?

The war in Afghanistan is now about salvaging what little is left of America's "bella figura".

"Bella figura" (beautiful face) is Italian for looking good as opposed to "brutta figura" (ugly face) which is Italian for looking like a "schmuck", which is Yiddish for "dumb asshole".

After eight years of Bush the United States has been left with a bruttissma figura. Absurd, ugly, sinister, incompetent... mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Terrible for business.

Restoring America's bella figura was what electing Barack Obama was all about and, as I have already pointed out, was the reason that the Nobel Committee, at the risk of universal ridicule, awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

America's bella figura is what is known as a "public good", it represents a factor of stability in a turbulent world. It is going to diminish, but it should do so in an orderly fashion, not with people trampling each other on the way out the door.

My "inner Lenin" may be tickled to see this stability crumble, but my "inner poor slob just trying to make it to the end of the month" is horrified.

America will have to withdraw from Afghanistan, it is a hopeless cause, but the withdrawal must maintain some scrap of dignity and the troops that are already serving there must not be seen to be hung out to dry, to be exposed to uneccesary danger, because there are not enough of them to hold the ground.

No matter what is done, it is going to be ugly and cruel... it is too late for it to be any other way. Less ugly and less cruel are better than more ugly and more cruel... that is as good as it gets.

This is where intuition, "zen" or the sixth sense of one who is called to lead comes in.

To be perceived to be indecisive is the death knell of a leader.

Leaders are chosen for their ability to decide.

Much criticism was leveled at George W. Bush AKA "the decider", for his taking decisions "from the gut", but the problem wasn't that Bush acted on impulse, the problem was that he had such stupid intestines.

Mr. president, you have done your homework.

All the options stink.

Just hold your nose and do it.

Obama's Nobel Prize is richly deserved

2009-10-12T18:09:09Z

There has been much controversy swirling around president Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, which I wont bore my readers by recapping. Basically the well intentioned criticism -- we can discount the ill intentioned -- boils down to, "why so soon, he hasn't done anything yet". They are all missing the point.

First, we should take a step back from the prize... it is very much a creature of the moment it is given. It is not some sort of universal "Mount Rushmore" of the good and the great: Mahatma Gandhi never received it and Henry Kissinger (a war criminal) and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat (terrorists) did.

So the Nobel Peace Prize is not like being made a Saint in the Catholic Church and getting your own office in heaven.

What the prize does is to send a message.

If you look at the Nobel Peace Prizes awarded since 2001 you can see a pattern:

2001 - United Nations, Kofi Annan

2002 - Jimmy Carter

2003 - Shirin Ebadi(first Muslim woman to win the prize)

2004 - Wangari Maathai (African woman ecologist)

2005 - International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei

2006 - Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank (micro-credit)

2007 - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore

2008 - Martti Ahtisaari (UN diplomat and peacemaker)

The thread running though it all being, "the Nobel Committee abjures George Walker Bush and all his works".

So, Bush has gone, you say, why give the award to Obama so soon?

Bush is gone, but not what he did.

George W. Bush pulled the mask off the United States of America and Barack Obama is putting the mask back in place and that is why he has been given the prize.

What do I mean by "mask"?

Well, for anyone who has been reading Noam Chomsky for some time and paying attention, or who has recently read Naomi Klein's dot-connecting masterpiece, "The Shock Doctrine", it is no surprise to see the USA portrayed as a "rogue state": it has acted as one for decades.

In short: behind its mask of benevolent defender of democracy and human rights, the USA had been attacking and invading other countries and torturing people for a long, long, time.

But for much of the western world this was an "inconvenient truth"... unthinkable, bad for business and bad for morale, something not mentioned in polite, moderate-centrist, company.

From the vantage of international law, the USA is "like unto a whited sepulcher", which, to quote the King James Bible's protagonist, "indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness".

What changed?

Bush made Noam Chomsky a main-stream, best-selling author.

In the year 2001 destiny crossed 9-11 with George W. Bush and Bush in all his arrogant, incompetent, ignorant, meanness ripped off America's mask and kicked the top off the sepulcher and what was behind the mask was too ugly for the world to face every day on the news and all the maggots that came crawling out of the sepulcher stank unbearably.

And then the economy collapsed.

What Madelene Albright called "the indispensable nation" turned out to be "the unspeakable nation" and the corner stone of the world system turned out to be a grave stone... and no alternative is sight.

Well, you say, Iraq and Afghanistan are still at war and the USA is still killing civilians; Guantanamo and Bagram prisons are still in business, the international currency of reference, the US dollar, appears headed for collapse, even golden California is bankrupt. What has changed?

The magic of Obama has put the mask back on.

Air Wick has been hung in the sepulcher and Glade has been sprayed.

And all in only nine months.

However, the powerful forces that lay behind that which we chose to call "Bush" are mobilizing the AstroTurf of birthers and teabaggers and yet unknown McVeighs and Oswalds conspire against this mild attempt, this pretense of normalcy, and so the horrid face behind the benign mask is reappearing at the edges... and downwind the sepulcher still has quite a breath on it.

So the Nobel Committee is rushing to do its part in propping up the idea of an imagined return to a pre-Bush America: A certain idea of the civilized world.

If, in the future, having replaced the mask and chased the worms back into the sepulcher, President Obama actually manages to change some of the underlying reality itself, he will rank up there with M. K. Gandhi and require no further prize, for then he will be able to hand out the peace prizes, not a roomful of Norwegians.