Deadly Democracy: Lancet Study Confirms Millions Died From Capitalist "Shock Therapy"

The world has become so inured to mass death, perhaps the following will merit little comment or outrage among our political punditry, even if the story did make the back pages of the New York Times.

A new Lancet study, "Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis," confirms what has been known but little discussed in the past eight to ten years: millions of people, mostly men of employment age, died as a result of the effects of the "shock therapy" transition from a collectivized to a privatized economy in Russia and other formerly "communist" states in East Europe. According to the Times article, by 2007 "the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985."

Back in 2001, a UNICEF-IRC study had already claimed 3.2 million unnecessary deaths due to capitalist restoration. The Lancet study cites other figures, with up to "10 million missing men because of system change." As a result, adult mortality rates soared, up almost 13% in Russia, with much of the increase attributable to the mass unemployment that followed the collapse in state enterprises. The study noted, "the Russian population lost nearly 5 years of life expectancy between 1991 and 1994."

Other factors affecting the disastrous increase in the death rate included poor health care, rising HIV rates, higher alcoholism and drug addiction rates, as well as the effects of acute psychosocial stress, massive corruption, impoverishment, rising social inequalities, and social disorganization.

The effects of neo-liberal "shock therapy" on Russia and other East European countries (Russia being the hardest hit) were also felt by the children of the region. According to the UNICEF-IRC study noted above, tuberculosis rates rose by 50%; 150,000 children were added to the public care rolls (while overall population was dropping by millions); there were high levels of child malnutrition, and the number of children under age 5 fell by one-third.

This was not just a jolt of "shock therapy," it was a social tsunami that devastated the region. According to the Lancet, the more rapid the rate of privatization, the higher the death rate.

Radical free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed policy was called shock therapy, with three major elements: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause an irreversible shift to a market-based economy....

Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.

As the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of free-fall, due to the unbridled policies of financial deregulation, and an evisceration of the tax base through so-called "trickle-down" economics with its massive tax cuts to the very rich, we should all ponder, with awe and great sadness, the final denouement of the Cold War, with its frenzy of capitalist restorationist policies in the old Soviet Union, and the tremendous human cost it involved.

It is also important in understanding where Russia is politically today, i.e., what were the social circumstances that produced the Putin regime. Ever since the contrived Georgia-South Ossetia conflict last summer, it has appeared that the military-industrial complex of the U.S. is looking to find new "enemies," should the public taste for the "Global War on Terror" lessen with an Obama administration, and fatigue over the fruitless and largely fictional "hunt" for Osama bin Laden and the crimes and disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps most of all, the sheer horror of the loss of life, the human tragedy of the return of "democracy" (in its free enterprise garb) to the former Soviet Union, is what we need to ponder. The truth behind the privatization policies of economists like Harvard-educated Jeffrey Sachs -- now head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University -- has been hidden for years now behind glibly optimistic statements of economic progress in now-capitalist Russia. Take for examine this summary of a 1997 article in the Journal of Comparative Economics on "Bank privitization in post-communist Russia", typical of the way the changes in Russia have been reported by the dominant social and educational Western elite:

The privatization of Zhilsotsbank of Russia demonstrates that the process of privatization can contribute to the eradication of the government's role in the corporate governance of banks. Incumbent bank managers obtained control rights over new private banks following Zhilsotsbank's decentralized privatization. The swift eradication of government from direct ownership of numerous banks, combined with broad licensing rules, has enabled the Russian banking industry to be over 75% private. Mosbusinessbank, a big commercial bank formed from 26 Zhilsotsbank branches, is one of the most profitable banks the old state banking system has produced.

There is not a word on the social cost of this increased profitability. In fact, the social disaster in Russia due to privatization and the restoration of capitalism in Russia is barely known or understood in the U.S., outside a sense that gangsterism was increased thereby.

The truth about world history since the end of World War II has largely been kept from the U.S. population, e.g. the recruitment of Nazi war criminals into U.S. government research programs, including the intelligence agencies, the mass murders in the 100,000s by U.S. allies in Korea (with U.S. connivance), the budget of U.S. intelligence agencies and the extent of the latter's covert actions around the globe, and the CIA's mind control project with its enlistment of top levels of social, medical and psychological personnel throughout the 1950s-1970s, and the secret medical experiments upon these programs involved.

The level of trust in what the U.S. government says is very low right now, thanks to the crimes of the Bush administration. The incoming Obama administration is sending mixed messages about what it intends as regards the past record of the United States. On one hand, the Obama people promise an open government and transparency; on the other hand, Obama himself says he intends to look forward and not backwards when it comes to former administration crimes, applying this standard even to such crimes as torture.

As we consider the pressing need to hold the U.S. to account, no matter what administration is in power, we might reflect upon the famous words of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Shakespeare made essentially the same point hundreds of years earlier: "What’s past is prologue."

More Government Fear-mongering: "The World at Risk"

The world has been at risk since the reckless U.S. rulers decided to unleash the atomic bomb on tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, they have built the most mighty arsenal of destruction as the world has ever seen. But then, this short essay is about the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism.

As the BBC reported:

The bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism was set up after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Its report is due to be presented to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday, but its contents have already been widely reported in the US media.

It says terrorists are "likely" to stage a nuclear or biological weapons attack somewhere in the world in the next five years.

Without urgent action, "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013," the commission says.

The sharp analysts at Moon of Alabama noticed that the cracker-jack folks who put together the report, to be delivered today to Jack Bauer of CTC Vice-President-elect Joe Biden, forgot to provide corroborating evidence for their claims about near-term terrorist attack.

The 132 pages include not one paragraph or line which makes a calculation, quantitative or qualitative, that would allow one to come to the conclusion that the executive summary asserts....

It makes for scaremongering headlines as the media, like usual, do not care to really look into these issues.

Good headlines... and paperback book sales! Vintage Books, a division of Random House, has announced an "instant" book will be published of the report. At $10.95, it will only be, uh, $10.95 more than the free version published online.

Better reading than the report are the commissioner and staff biographies of those who worked on this document. They are almost all drawn from the orbit of the defense and intelligence industries. A fair number have personal or organizational ties to the GOP, Paul Wolfowitz, and right-wing think tanks. Here's a sampling:

Chair: Republican Senator Bob Graham, a 10-year member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Vice Chair: Republican Senator Jim Talent, an eight-year member of the House Armed Services Committee, and currently "a Distinguished Fellow at the Washington, DC, based Heritage Foundation where he specializes in military readiness issues and welfare reform"

The other commissioners include Robin Cleveland, "a former close advisor to Paul Wolfowitz," and caught up in the Wolfowitz World Bank Scandal; Henry Sokolski, who "worked on nonproliferation issues under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz"; former GWB assistant secretary of state Stephen G. Rademaker, and also "Policy Director for National Security Affairs and Senior Counsel for Sen. Bill Frist".

Of course, there are some Democratic Party types, drawn from its Clinton-centrist wing, like Ambassador Wendy Sherman, and former Congressman Tim Roemer, a former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and now president of the Center for National Policy.

The work of these commissions is really done, as everyone knows, by staff, and it is worth perusing who some of these staff members were (not inclusive):

Evelyn Farkas, Ph. D, Executive Director
Former Professional Staff Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Associate Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University.

Eric Fanning, Deputy Director
Former Senior Vice President for Strategic Development at Business Executives for National Security, and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Raj De, General Counsel
Partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the international law firm Mayer Brown LLP. Former Counsel to the Special Bi-Partisan Staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the “9/11 Commission”)....

Stephen Heil, Professional Staff Member
Senior Intelligence Officer for the Counterproliferation Support Office at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Joseph Helman, Ph.D., Director for Intelligence
Member of the Senior National Intelligence Service in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Adam Jones, Professional Staff Member
Former Chief Speechwriter in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Abraham Kanter, Staff Assistant
Former research consultant for Department of Defense-funded analysis research institute. Served with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Neal A. Pollard, Director for Counterterrorism
Former Dynamic Planning Branch Chief and Deputy Group Chief, Global Engagement, National Counterterrorism Center. Adjunct Professor of Microbiology, and former International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Co-founder and former Board Director, Terrorism Research Center....

William Reed, Professional Staff Member
Analyst and Presidential Management Fellow in the Department of Homeland Security Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. Former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.

Constance T. Rybka, Chief of Security
Detailed from the Intelligence Community. Former senior chemical and biological warfare analyst. Retired U.S. Army Officer.

Wade R. Sharp, Security Officer
Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, providing security support services to the Office of Security & Counterintelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Gathered from the intelligence and security/defense worlds, populated by right wing Republicans and centrist and right-wing Democrats, the outcome of the commission's "report" was foreordained. To have expected anything different or unbiased from this crew -- whose paychecks depend on the perpetuity of the "war on terror" and fear-mongering -- would be akin to an expectation that the foxes would vote themselves out of the hen-house.

The timing of the publication of this report, set as December 2008 some time ago, was meant to both escape influencing the presidential election, but also to orient the incoming president, whoever that was to be, about what his or her marching orders were to be when it came to financing and staffing the myriad departments, offices, and committees whose existence depends on keeping the mighty U.S. war and intelligence industries chugging along.

A major section of the report describes the problem of nuclear proliferation. No major change in policy is noted, as the report argues for greater cooperation with Russia on the issue. It also argues that Iran and North Korea nuclear weapons programs, whatever they may be, constitute a serious danger and must be stopped. (When it comes to terrorism, Pakistan is marked as the most dangerous state.)

If you want a short-hand version of how the U.S. elites see the world, this is an interesting report. If you want to know about how the world really is, and who or what constitutes a threat, then don't read this fairy tale. You'll find nothing in it about threats of NATO expansionism even further into the former Soviet Union, about placing forward missiles in Poland, or advanced radar systems in the Czech Republic. You'll read nary a word about the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world, and held by a country, furthermore, that has shown a readiness to use them.

But you can read about it here:

The United States has produced about 70,000 nuclear weapons of 72 major types since their invention. At the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States had an active arsenal of some 23,000 weapons of 26 major types. Since that time actual nuclear warhead production has been completely shut down in the U.S., although warhead modification, retrofit, and maintenance activities continue. Much of the original nuclear weapons manufacturing infrastructure has been dismantled, and the focus of the remaining nuclear infrastructure has shifted to maintaining and extending the life of the remaining weapons, as well as dismantling surplus weapons.

The only strategic arms treaties still in force between the U.S. and the Russian Federation is the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions (also called "the Moscow Treaty," the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT) and the START I treaty, which will expire in December 2009....

Actual production of new warheads halted in 1989. In January 1997, the first new weapon modification since the production shutdown entered service - the B61 Mod 11 (B61-11) ground penetrating ("bunker busting") bomb. This was a modification of B61 Mod 7s that were already in the stockpile. Remanufacture and updating of subsystems of existing weapons is on-going as part of a stockpile Life-Extension Program (LEP).

Of course, the nuclear weapons programs of Russia, Great Britain, France, Israel, Pakistan and India -- and now North Korea -- remain dangers to the world, though the size of the U.S. arsenal and its newer "tactical" weaponry, like the bunker-buster nuclear device, remain among the most dangerous proliferation weapons in the world. The smaller states have nowhere near the number of weapons as the U.S. and Russia, but remain dangerous nonetheless.

It's U.S. policy to be supreme in warfare (masqueraded by the word "defense"), and that includes nuclear weapons. As long as the world political system is made up of competing nation-states, based on an exploitative system that ensures the perpetuation of mass poverty, and human nature remains what it is, the destruction of the world through nuclear war remains the number one threat to humanity, and much of life on earth. While only a whisper of a hope at this point, the idea that the world will forgo competition and take up a cooperative transnational socialist system with a planned economy, and the aim of enhancing the lives of all of earth's denizens, remains our only hope. But the elites will never simply forgo profits and the insanity of power. Ultimately it will have to be taken from them, and only a mass democratic socialist party will have the power and wherewithal to do that. And that still remains, as previously noted, a whisper of a hope, wrapped in a dream.

Boom and Bust, from a Notable Economist

While many of us find ourselves swallowed up by the panic stimulated by 24-hour news cable services and the dying daily press, when we consider the current credit crunch and threats of doomsday, it is important to get some perspective on what is really happening.

History provides us that perspective. The following description of the famous economic panic that followed the collapse of the speculative bubble that surrounded railway expansion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century presents an illustrative example.

The economist writing here looked back at this famous economic collapse and drew some serious conclusions. The parallels between then and now are striking, even if "then" was over 150 years ago (emphases added):

The years 1843-5 were years of industrial and commercial prosperity, a necessary sequel to the almost uninterrupted industrial depression of 1837-42. As is always the case, prosperity very rapidly encouraged speculation. Speculation regularly occurs in periods when overproduction is already in full swing. It provides overproduction with temporary market outlets, while for this very reason precipitating the outbreak of the crisis and increasing its force. The crisis itself first breaks out in the area of speculation; only later does it hit production. What appears to the superficial observer to be the cause of the crisis is not overproduction but excess speculation, but this is itself only a symptom of overproduction. The subsequent disruption of production does not appear as a consequence of its own previous exuberance but merely as a setback caused by the collapse of speculation....

In the years of prosperity from 1843 to 1845, speculation was concentrated principally in railways, where it was based upon a real demand, in corn, as a result of the price rise of 1845 and the potato blight, in cotton, following the bad crop of 1846, and in the East Indian and Chinese trade, where it followed hard on the heels of the opening up of the Chinese market by England.

The extension of the English railway system had already begun in 1844 but did not get fully under way until 1845, In this year alone the number of bills presented for the formation of railway companies amounted to 1,035. In February 1846, even after countless of these projects had been abandoned, the money to be deposited with the government for the remainder still amounted to the enormous sum of 514 million and even in 1847 the total amount of the payments called up in England was over £42 million of which over £36 million was for English railways, and £5 1/2 million for foreign ones. The heyday of this speculation was the summer and autumn of 1845. Stock prices rose continuously, and the speculators' profits soon sucked all social classes into the whirlpool. Dukes and earls competed with merchants and manufacturers for the lucrative honour of sitting on the boards of directors of the various companies; members of the House of Commons, the legal profession and the clergy were also represented in large numbers. Anyone who had saved a penny, anyone who had the least credit at his disposal, speculated in railway stocks. The number of railway journals rose from three to twenty. The large daily papers often each earned £14,000 per week from railway advertisements and prospectuses. Not enough engineers could be found, and they were paid enormous salaries. Printers, lithographers, bookbinders, paper-merchants and others, who were mobilized to produce prospectuses, plans, maps, etc; furnishing manufacturers who fitted out the mushrooming offices of the countless railway boards and provisional committees — all were paid splendid sums. On the basis of the actual extension of the English and continental railway system and the speculation which accompanied it, there gradually arose in this period a superstructure of fraud reminiscent of the time of Law and the South Sea Company. Hundreds of companies were promoted without the least chance of success, companies whose promoters themselves never intended any real execution of the schemes, companies whose sole reason for existence was the directors' consumption of the funds deposited and the fraudulent profits obtained from the sale of stocks.

In October 1848 a reaction ensued, soon becoming a total panic. Even before February 1848, when deposits had to be paid to the government, the most unsound projects had gone bankrupt. la April 1846 the setback had already begun to affect the continental stock markets; in Paris, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Amsterdam there were compulsory sales at considerably reduced prices, which resulted in the bankruptcy of bankers and brokers. The railway crisis lasted into the autumn of 1848, prolonged by the successive bankruptcies of less unsound schemes as they were gradually affected by the general pressure and as demands for payment were made. This crisis was also aggravated by developments in other areas of speculation, and in commerce and industry; the prices of the older, better-established stocks were gradually forced down, until in October 1848 they reached their lowest level.

Perhaps, if you read all the way through, you would have guessed the economist in question was Karl Marx, writing in November 1850 for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue. His analysis of how the boom and bust cycles of capitalism persist was worked out a long time ago now. But, of course, "Marxism" is relegated to the dustbin of history by the triumphant U.S. rulers, who believed that the fall of the Soviet Union meant the eclipse of Marxist socialism.

But no great thinker or scientist has to worry that their ideas will be lost. The earth revolves around the sun, and gravity affects all celestial bodies, no matter how much the Roman Catholic Church had condemned Galileo. The anti-evolutionists can pillory Darwin, but evolution continues nevertheless, every day, as the continuing crisis over evolving bacteria and the problem of finding new antibiotics to combat them makes clear.

And capitalist cycles of overproduction, speculation, and economic recession/depression continue no matter how much free market ideologues produce diatribes (with a twinkle in their eye) over the demise of Marxism, denouncing either its error, or its lack of contemporary relevance.

Yet today, the failure of the capitalist system looms as a mighty sword of Damocles above the heads of billions, living as we do in a very interlocked world of economic ties. We depend on each other now more than ever. Yet antiquated systems, whether they are based on religious doctrines or Harvard Business School economic models, threaten the survival of us all.

Even more, these antiquated national systems form the basis of an international organization of nation states existing in competition with each other. The ruling class fetishizes competition as something good, until the irrationality of individuals -- or at another level, of individual nation states -- seeking gain at the expense of others degenerates into economic collapse, evoking the nightmare of the war of all against all, producing, perhaps, a third and devastating world war.

The defeat of the bailout plan in Congress early this week saw a temporary alliance of free market ideologues, eschewing state intervention (falsely) as "socialism", and a nascent populist or leftist opposition opposing a giveaway to the richest speculators and capitalists who got us in this position in the first place.

Neither group has yet grasped what was widely known only a generation or so ago: capitalism is doomed to create these cycles, and with it untold suffering. The effort to create socialist states and an alliance of same in the world met with horrendous defeat in the 20th century, victim of unremitting attack by the non-socialist world, and of its own internal weaknesses and irrationalities (e.g., trying to believe socialism could be created in a single country, irrespective of the rest of the world's organization or economy, which was the program of Stalinism).

Oh disbelieving reader, ask yourself this: if Marx could accurately predict the kind of scenario we are seeing today over a century ago, perhaps there is far more of value in Marxist analysis than you thought. Today, it is a scary thing still to be called a "communist," just as it was in Marx's time. The epithet persists as a form of unconscious recognition that something terrible is amiss in our world. It is not like being called someone who believes in the divination of the future by means of examining animal entrails; it is not an object of humorous ridicule. It is something to be feared. There is force, yet, in the word. That's because it represents something repressed. It represents the eruption into modern consciousness of a necessary truth. And the time has come to grab that truth again and wrest it into the world as a tool against the exploiters.

Lenin's Chickens Roost in Paulson's Attic

Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell..., it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it. -- Lenin, State and Revolution

The cascade of financial failures on Wall Street -- the sure result of a decade or more of unregulated, unrestrained capitalist speculation -- has shaken the world capitalist system with a sudden, shuddering spasm of fear. But with fear comes opportunity, and the ruling elite now sees an opportunity to cast off the shackles of messy public oversight and control entirely.

If one were looking for the utmost in financial irresponsibility, allowing the system to implode/explode, paving the way for socialist revolution (or failing that, a fall into post-Roman-Empire-like darkness), then you'd put Bush and his cronies, like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in charge of a supposed "bailout" plan for Wall Street. That's because the Bush-Paulson plan, by turning over unrestricted control of nearly a trillion dollars of a running tab, while handing the gargantuan bill over to an already deficit-weary taxpayer, will totally eviscerate the public sector of the economy, and pave the way for the complete impoverishment of the wide spectrum of the society. (Naomi Klein has described this process accurately in her widely-read book, The Shock Doctrine.)

As one commentator put it:

[T]he cost is still unknown, but there is no way that the taxpayers will profit. My initial estimate is that the direct costs of the Paulson plan will be $700 billion to taxpayers. That is about double the cost of the S&L; crisis (compared to GDP).

....The plan only limits the Treasury to "$700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time", so the total purchases can exceed $700 billion.

It's a running tab of almost a trillion dollars! Furthermore, this tab is run explicitly without any oversight or regulation. In the words of Paulson's own plan:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. [Emphasis added]

There are plenty of others well versed in economics and financial arcana who can describe much better than I the inadequacies of this bill... nay, it's sheer inanity, representing, as it does, a total heist of an unknown hundreds of billions of dollars. Here's Mike Whitney's take (at Counterpunch):

Most people don't understand what happened on Thursday, but the build-up of bad news on the Lehman default and the $85 billion government takeover of AIG, triggered a run on the money markets and a freeze in interbank lending. The overnight LIBOR rate (London Interbank Offered Rate) more than doubled to 6.44 per cent. Bank of America reported overnight borrowing rates in excess of 6 per cent. Longer-term LIBOR rates also rose sharply. On Wednesday, jittery investors removed their money from money markets and flooded short-term US Treasuries for the assurance of a government guarantee on their savings even though interest rates had turned negative which means that their balance would actually shrink at the date of maturity. This is unprecedented, but it does help to illustrate how raw fear can drive the market.

The TED spread (the TED Spread measures market stress by revealing the reluctance of banks to lend to each other) widened and the credit markets froze in place. Borrowing three-month dollars on the interbank market and the U.S. Treasury's three-month borrowing costs widened five full percentage points. That's huge. The banking system shut down.

What does it mean? It means the Federal Reserve has lost control of the system. The market is driving interest rates now, and the market is terrified. End of story....

The problems cannot be resolved by shifting the debts of the banks onto the taxpayer. That's an illusion. By adding another $1 or $2 trillion dollars to the National Debt, Paulson is just ensuring that interest rates will go up, real estate will crash, unemployment will soar, and foreign central banks will abandon the dollar. In truth, there is no fix for a deleveraging market anymore than there is a fix for gravity. The belief that massive debts and insolvency can be erased by increasing liquidity just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics....

The malfunctioning of the markets and the freeze-over in the banking system are the outcome of a massive credit unwind instigated by trillions of dollars of low interest credit from the Federal Reserve which was magnified many times over via complex derivatives contracts and extreme leveraging by speculative investment bankers. This has generated the biggest equity bubble in history. That bubble is now set for a "hard-landing" which is the predictable result of an unsupervised marketplace where individual players are allowed to create as much credit as they choose.

Bush-Nero Resurrects Marx

It was Karl Marx who first recognized that the bust and boom cycles of capitalism was not an evil to be extirpated but an inherent feature of the system. It is beyond tragic that it is going to take the immiseration of millions to bring us back to Marxism, and the road to true socialism. It has already cost humanity many millions of deaths, but still the insanity of organizing the world according to proprietary nation states -- run by elites who own the bulk of their own nation's wealth, and continue to steal any newly created wealth, hiding their crimes behind clouds of fear and hideous war waged on either internal or external "enemies" -- remains unquestioned. I shudder to think whether that lesson can ever be learned.

The past seven years has been excessively gory and greedy, even by typical historical standards. Bush is like Nero. He's taken the excrescences of empire to heights that his predecessors could never have contemplated, stealing billions... even trillions of dollars, it seems, right out in the open. And the mainstream politicians, even the liberals like Obama and Pelosi, are, with some populist protest, conducted in a minor key, dancing with the rest of the rotten bunch the macabre dance around the death of their own system.

I'd say, if you were a revolutionary, you'd have to be grimly satisfied to see the capitalist chickens come home to roost. Except I don't think any critic of this system would want to see so many suffer. But suffering people are, and suffer they will, while the rich and super-rich have their government to keep them safe.

Class warfare means this: the 400 richest individuals in the United States divide among them $1.57 trillion dollars in net worth -- that's almost $4 billion per person! And how many of you reading this are wondering if you can keep your house, pay your rent, put your child through school or send them to college? It's class warfare all right, but it's war made by the rich on YOU!

Sometimes class warfare is fought with bullets and bombs, sometimes with legislation and foreclosures.

Here's a short program to "fix" the economy: expropriate the banks and energy industries and nationalize them; no money for the rich owners of these industries who have ripped off the public for trillions. End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and begin the process of military withdrawal from the countries that have a U.S. presence.

I can think of no better way to close this piece than with the words of Harold Pinter, who used his Nobel acceptance speech to speak the unuttered truth about the United States and its actions in the world. He emphasized the use of bullets and bombs in spreading U.S. predominance over the globe, but I think the points are just as relevant to the economic bomb our lords and masters are dropping on our heads right now:

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis....

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

Is Bush Planning a Blitzkrieg Attack on Iran?

There are a number of diaries over at Daily Kos -- one by Maccabee, one by Clammyc, and another by MLDB, among others -- that cull from various news and personal reports a scary amount of evidence that the Bush/Cheney administration is planning a massive air strike against Iran in the very near future. War rumors have been floated for months, and now the London Sunday Times is reporting a "Pentagon 'three-day blitz plan for Iran".

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said....

Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

This is a war we must do everything politically possible to stop. An attack on Iran, with blitzkrieg style "shock and awe" would be another massive war crime, branding the United States as a rogue, war-crazy nation. We will suffer from this for generations.

Complicity by the Democrats in Congress will seal their fate as any kind of legitimate opposition. We will be looking into the abyss. The American people will be tested as never before.

Will they sit by passively as the country degenerates into a frank out-and-out military dictatorship, run by a modern czar/Ceasar? I know a lot of people are hoping this latest Iran war scare is just more saber-rattling by the bellicose Bushies. But in any case, with 100,000s dead in Iraq, with cholera now unleashed in the chaos of Iraq refugee camps, and sectarian civil war continuing unabated, with torture continuing in U.S. run prison camps around the world, we are already very far down the road to barbarism.

Political lessons seem always to be harsh. The insane dismissal of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle -- with the latter smothered under the ruins of Stalinism and the descent of nationalist struggle into sectarianism and revanchist genocide around the world -- is bringing about a world wide catastrophe. Out of the ashes of George W. Bush's militarist imperialism will come the rebirth of a new socialist battle, as the pretense of "democratic" capitalism is revealed for what it really is: a cover for naked aggression for national wealth and power.

By the way, for more on the Nixon Center (NC), whose spokesman is quoted in Times article above, check out SourceWatch. For one thing, NC's "honorary chairman" is none other than Henry Kissinger, and its Board of Directors includes Robert F. Ellsworth, Nixon's old ambassador to Nato, later Deputy Secretary of Defense under Ford; Conrad Black; Leslie Gelb; Pat Roberts; Brent Scowcroft; and -- oh, looky see, main Democratic Party caucus member and screaming right-wing hawk Joseph I. Lieberman.

For his part, Alexis Debat used to be a senior desk officer for the French Ministry of Defense. He moved to the U.S. in 2003, and has become a "senior terrorism consultant" to ABC News. He also works for the intelligence community here, as a contractor for the Rand Corporation.

The earmarks of the Pentagon and the intelligence community are all over this Iran war campaign. It will take everything American society has to push back against the militaristic clique that run this country.

Despair at Sayyida Zeinab: Iraqi Refugee Crisis at Crossroads

The war in Iraq was an illegal boondoggle. Hundreds of thousands have died or been terribly injured and/or maimed. Thousands have been tortured. And, barely reported on the television screens and front-pages of America, hundreds of thousands -- well over a million -- refugees have fled Iraq for the dismal "safety" of refugee camps in Syria, the only country that will take in refugees from the Iraq War. Jordan, which had taken in over half a million refugees fleeing the Americans and the sectarian civil war, not to mention the criminal lawlessness that has plagued much of the country, has now closed its borders to refugees from Iraq.

Hugh Naylor, at the foreign service desk at the San Francisco Chronicle, has written a compelling story on the crisis, drawing upon wire service stories and the like: Refugee Crisis in Syria Enters New, Dire Phase. (For another look at the Iraq refugee crisis, see the Washington Post's article earlier this year, "Iraq Refugees Overwhelm Syria".) Naylor writes:

For the first few years of the war, many of the estimated 1.4 million refugees eked out a living from savings and remittance payments from families still living in Iraq. But savings are rapidly drying up.

Forbidden to work in Syria, the refugees find that money coming from Iraq is all but gone, now that family members there have lost jobs and sold off their valuables.

"The situation has escalated," said Laurens Jolles, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees representative to Syria.

Last May, Maccabee wrote a diary giving Frank Rich's analysis on the growing humanitarian disaster. Quoting Rich:

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave "God’s gift of freedom."

It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins.

Naylor's story concentrates on the refugee camp at Sayyida Zeinab in Syria, "a dusty warren of dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of Damascus where hundreds of thousands of Iraqis now reside." Naylor's article describes the hundreds or thousands of human beings dragging themselves around the camp, still sporting bullet wounds and other injuries from the war, too poor or too isolated to get medical attention, putting off medical care for major illnesses and wounds in order to scrape together a little food for their families.

But it's not as if they could go to their nearest emergency room. Ten thousand or more souls are pouring over the Syrian border every week, and there's almost nothing there for them. Of a $60 million budget for the entire region, only $14 million has been allocated to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for Syria.

During several interviews, Iraqi refugees complained that they haven't seen U.N. personnel for months. One woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said many have given up on international humanitarian organizations.

"There is no point, they aren't even providing basic health care here," she said. "Only around 100,000 of the official 1.4 million Iraqis are registered with the UNHCR.

Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress play at opposition, with all the courage of a man risking a sleepless night. The GOP... well, forget it. They are totally engulfed in the web of the infallible leader(s), which is George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, take your pick.

Millions Made Into Miserable Pawns

Reuters reports that over 2 million Iraqis have fled the country since the war started, and approximately another 2 million are internally displaced. The same article shows that Iraqi refugees are quickly turning into the pariahs of the refugee world. The once social democratic European countries, who claimed to oppose the American war, have come under intense criticism from some human rights groups:

The campaign group Human Rights Watch on Tuesday criticised Germany's move earlier this year to revoke the refugee status of over 18,000 Iraqis, saying Iraq was still too violent and unstable to send people back there....

[While Swede's] migration board decided last week that Iraqis seeking asylum must prove they face personal risk in their homeland to avoid being sent back.

The Palestianians have lived in refugee camps for decades, the pawns of an intractable political conflict between different nationalist groupings and the Israeli state. Now, millions of Iraqi refugees are being thrown into the maw of endless war, nationalist and sectarian rivalry and power-grabs, and an imperialist striving for supremacy. Even the religious fundamentalists must realize how weak they must seem among their putative followers.

Only a socialist perspective, that seeks to unite the toilers and oppressed of all religions, nationalities, and nations, stands a chance of winning over the disaffected and posing a new hope of another way. It's less than a generation since the fall of the sclerotic Stalinist Soviet state, which had fought against a world-wide socialist order for decades. Now maybe we are ready to reconsider unfolding the banner that called for the oppressed and weak of the world to unite against all their oppressors.

Feels too radical? Well, the non-socialist perspective is becoming clearer and clearer: more death, more religious fanaticism, more displaced people, more invasions, more torture, more war.

How You Can Help

In the meantime, if you want to help, check out the website of the UN Refugee Agency, and donate if you can. Or donate to your local refugee center, or torture relief agency. Speak out against the criminal Iraq war. Read. Educate yourself. And put maximum pressure on this do-nothing Democratic Congress. Think of the thousands of suffering children at Sayyida Zeinab and camps just like it.

The invisibility of this issue from the everyday U.S. press is astounding. I am reminded of the lyric from Bob Dylan's classic song, Hurricane:

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties / Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise

How much suffering do the struggling people of this planet have to stand before the American people bring their corrupt and venal leadership to the dock of universal justice, until they begin to ACT with the integrity of a great people, and not like the denizens of a degenerate empire?

Is there no hope? (a threnody on Korea and Mosul)

It is enough to point out that even though there is an overwhelming amount of public information that Bush started an aggressive war based on lies and blatant propaganda, nothing is done to bring this criminal to the bar. Or that his administration countenances torture, openly, and is treated with deference by all mainstream authorities.

I have given this much thought, but we are finished as a civilization, and certainly as any progressive force in history. Humanity itself is very unlikely to survive the coming world war. This war is guaranteed due to the irrational insistence on nation-state production and competition for international markets and raw materials (including competition over labor as a production input).

It could be a chicken-or-egg dilemma, but the other side of this is the epidemic of narcissistic self-indulgence and self-reference that ridicules knowledge and stubbornly refuses to learn from humanity's mistakes. In this sense, America has gotten the president it deserves in George W. Bush, a narcissistic, sociopath-type, who sees the end of his party's rule (or his class's rule) as coterminous with an apocalyptic end of days.

The anti-intellectualism of U.S. society has poisoned any reasoned discourse, drenched as it is in anti-Marxist, triumphalist ideologies that are shallow in the extreme, and ridiculous in the concrete.

Mistake after mistake, crime after bloody crime, mass murder after mass murder, from Korea and Vietnam to the sectarian killing fields of Iraq, the U.S. and its impressionistic train of pundits, media stars, would-be critical bloggers, and brainless idiots full of the certainty of their own mentalistic creations, pontificate, bluster or excuse the disaster that has been U.S. foreign policy. They have nothing to replace it with. Liberals wash their hands of Iraq, crying crocodile tears over civil war, leaving moral posturing about democracy and a better life to the vicious GOP, who have no intention of helping anyone, unless it means lining their own pockets and bringing billions into the coffers of American corporations.

Meanwhile, revelations come out, about torture, about U.S. mass murder of civilians in Korea, about sectarian killings, and the response is inured neglect. A collective shrug of the shoulders. What outrage is possible is displaced onto meaningful but lesser atrocities, like the firings of the U.S. attorneys. (And I've written on the latter myself, so this is not aimed at anyone in particular).

The Korean revelations, as written up [at Daily Kos] by OneCrankyDom (see link above), or by Stephen Soldz at his blog, can be read in more detail at the AP story, "Declassified documents confirms U.S. killed civilians during 'Korean War'".

POHANG BEACH

A declassified U.S. Navy document confirms that on Sept. 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army's request, opened fire on a refugee encampment on a beach near the southern South Korean port of Pohang. Survivors say 100 to 200 refugees — mostly women and children — were killed.

KOKAN-RI SHRINE

... 83 were killed, including many children. Declassified documents show that commanders of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division, operating in that area, had issued orders two weeks earlier to shoot civilians found in the war zone.

YOUNGCHOON CAVE

As many as 300 refugees were killed, many suffocated, on Jan. 20, 1951, when U.S. warplanes dropped apparent napalm firebombs at the entrance to a cavern where the South Koreans were sheltering 90 miles southeast of Seoul, survivors say....

DOON-PO STOREHOUSE

Also in January 1951, south of Seoul, U.S. warplanes killed 300 South Korean refugees as they jammed into a storehouse at the village of Doon-po, survivors say....

SANSONG VILLAGE

In another napalm attack that month, U.S. warplanes struck Sansong village, 125 miles southeast of Seoul, killing 34 villagers, a declassified U.S. military document said. It quoted U.S. officials saying Sansong villagers had helped North Korean troops, who kept supplies there, but it also reported "no enemy casualties" in the strike. Survivors denied they had aided the enemy and said they had no warning to evacuate.

And then there's the 21 Yazidis pulled off a bus near Mosul and lined up and shot. It was a reprisal killing by Muslims for an earlier barbaric death by stoning of a Yazidi woman, whose crime was falling in love with a Muslim and converting to Islam. The stoning death was reportedly put onto the Internet. Here's one of many press stories covering this tragedy.

Finally, there's the insanity of nation-states fighting each other over the world's finite markets and resources. Some diaries at Daily Kos went mano a mano over this issue, while missing the main point: capitalist production and an insistence on holding world productive capacities to an organization by nation state or regional alliance is certain to lead, as it did previously in 1914 and 1939 to a new and massively horrific world war.

People who know absolutely nothing about history, but love the sound of their own voices and worship their own thoughts, sneer at the promise of socialism. The corpses of the millions killed by Stalin and Mao fertilize their well-meaning sermonizing (giving them the benefit of the doubt), while their consciences seem not to blanch at the millions killed by imperialist conquest and rivalry in World War I and II (and numerous other wars, or by the sectarian and nationalist conflicts of which Iraq and Bosnia are only two well-known recent examples). The shadow of Hiroshima seeps ominously into what's left of our souls.

No, there is no hope. Humanity is inexecrably stupid and cruel. This does not, irrationally enough, mean that I will abandon all hope myself. It is nobler to act as if the universe were moral, that good can triumph, that reason will achieve a revolution in human manners and civilization, that the very being of humankind will evolve into something higher and finer.

How calmly does the olive branch
observe the sky begin to blanch,
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair!

Poem link