A pious Sunday school teacher confessing to lust in his heart but
swearing never to lie, he came to Washington to reestablish public faith
in government just when popular disgust at monstrous U.S. crimes in
Indochina had reached unprecedented heights. The big business agenda
during his term in office (1977-1981) was to roll back the welfare
state, break the power of unions, fan the flames of the Cold War to
increase military spending, engineer tax breaks for wealthy corporate
interests, and repeal government regulation of business. While
portraying himself as a peanut-farming populist, Carter delivered the
goods for Wall Street.
Having run as a Washington "outsider," he
immediately filled his administration with Trilateral Commission
members, hoping that a coterie of Rockefeller internationalists could
resurrect the confidence of American leaders and enrich business
relations between Japan and the United States.
His Secretary of
State was Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer and former planner of the
Vietnam slaughter. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown was Lyndon
Johnson's Air Force Secretary and a leading proponent of saturation
bombing in Vietnam. Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal was
the standard rich corporation president. Attorney General Griffen Bell
was a segregationist judge who disclosed that he would request
"inactive" status as a member of Atlanta clubs closed to blacks and Jews
[Carter himself stated that housing should be segregated]. Energy
coordinator James Schlesinger was a proponent of winnable nuclear war.
Transportation Secretary Brock Adams was a staunch proponent of
Lockheed's supersonic transport. National security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski was an anti-Soviet fanatic who said in an interview with the
New Yorker that it was "egocentric" to worry that a nuclear war between
the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would entail "the end of the human race." (Since
it was unlikely that every last human being would perish in such event,
Brzezinski recommended that critics of U.S. nuclear policy abstain from
narcissistic concern for the mere hundreds of millions of people who
would.)
In what William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple
(a study of the Federal Reserve Bank), called his most important
appointment, Carter named Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve
Bank. Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's assistant for domestic affairs said
that, "Volcker was selected because he was the candidate of Wall
Street." The Wall Street agenda became clear when Volcker contracted
the money supply and declared, "the standard of living of the average
American has to decline."
Wealth was funneled upward and wages
and production declined. Unemployment and bankruptcy rose, unions
shriveled and disappeared, Pentagon spending soared. For the first time
ever American white collar families couldn't save money. With urban
housing costs zooming, workers fled to remote suburbs, but the increased
commute expenses tended to cancel out cheaper mortgages. Moonlighting
and overtime work increased, but added income disappeared in eating out,
second commutes, and hired child care. As the cost of necessities
outpaced wage gains, only credit cards could fill the widening gap.
Hamburger stands and nursing homes proliferated while well-paid
manufacturing jobs fled to the Third World. The workforce of the future
was said to be a generation of superefficient robots.
Carter's
populist assurances simply whetted the public appetite for this kind of
dismal anticlimax. While making a few listless gestures towards blacks
and the poor, he spent the bulk of his energy promoting corporate
profits and building up a huge military machine that drained away public
wealth in defense of a far-flung network of repressive "friends" of
American business.
The heaviest applause line in his Inaugural
Address was his promise "to move this year a step towards our ultimate
goal - the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth." But
after his beguiling rhetoric faded away, he embarked on a program of
building two to three nuclear bombs every day. Although he had promised
to cut military spending by $5 to $7 billion, he decided to increase it
after just six months in office, and his 5% proposed spending increases
in each of his last two years in office were identical to those first
proposed by Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, having pledged to reduce
foreign arms sales, he ended up raising them to new highs, and after
speaking of helping the needy, he proposed cutbacks in summer youth
jobs, child nutrition programs, and other popular projects serving
important social needs. Similarly, though he had campaigned as a friend
of labor, he refused a request to increase the minimum wage and opposed
most of organized labor's legislative agenda while handing out huge
subsidies to big business. He made much ado about "human rights," but
returned Haiti's fleeing boat people to the tender care of "Baby Doc"
Duvalier, and when a member of the American delegation to the U.N. Human
Rights Commission spoke of his "profoundest regrets" for the C.I.A.'s
role in General Pinochet's bloodbath in Chile, Carter scolded him,
insisting that the C.I.A.'s actions were "not illegal or improper."
Carter
came to Washington proclaiming his desire for a comprehensive Middle
East peace, including a solution to the Palestinian question "in all its
aspects." Yet at Camp David he failed to grasp the root of the
problem, let alone propose a mature way of dealing with it. He assumed
that Palestinians were anonymous refugees whose nationalist aspirations
could be safely ignored. He supposed a peace treaty could be signed in
the absence of the PLO, world recognized as the Palestinians' "sole
legitimate representative." He offered no apologies for negotiating an
agreement that failed even to mention Jewish settlements in the West
Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. He did not protest Prime
Minister Menachem Begin's presentation of the Accords before the Israeli
Knesset as a "deal," one much more favorable to Israel than to "the
Arabs." He pretended not to notice that corralling Palestinians into
Bantustans was not simply a tactic of war, but constituted Israel's
boasted final product of "peace"! Finally, his much praised Camp David
accords were the death warrant for Lebanon, as Israel, its southern
border secure with the removal of Egypt from the Arab military alliance,
was freed to concentrate undivided attention on a long-planned invasion
across its northern border. It was this invasion (June 1982) that
convinced Osama bin Laden that only mass murder of Americans could ever
change U.S. foreign policy.
Carter was effusive in his praise
and blind support of the Shah of Iran, who was deeply unpopular in his
country due to policies of supermilitarization, forced modernization,
and systematic torture. By the time Carter arrived in the White House
the Shah's throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Iranian cities were
hideously unlivable with fifteen percent of the entire country crowded
around Teheran in shanty dwellings lacking sewage or other water
facilities. The nation's incalculable oil wealth reached few hands and a
restless student generation had no prospects. The country's bloated
bureaucracy was totally corrupt. While Shiite leaders rallied popular
support, the Shah's secret police threw tens of thousands of Iranians
into jail, the economy gagged on billions of dollars of Western arms
imports (mostly from Washington), and Amnesty International speculated
that Iran had achieved the worst human rights record on the planet.
Meanwhile, Carter declared that "human rights is the soul of our foreign
policy," though he added the following day that he thought the Shah
might not survive in power, a strange expectation if indeed the U.S.
stood for human rights around the world.
After the Shah was
overthrown, Carter could not conceive of U.S. responsibility for the
actions of enraged Iranian students who seized 66 Americans and held
them hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, demanding the return of
"the criminal Shah." (He had admitted the Shah to the U.S. for
emergency medical treatment for cancer, thus precipitating the "hostage
crisis.") To Carter, Americans were by definition innocent, outside
history, and he dismissed Iranian grievances against the U.S. as ancient
history, refusing to discuss them. In his distorted mind, Iranians were
terrorists by nature, and Iran had always been a potentially terrorist
nation, regardless of what they had suffered at U.S. hands. In short,
without the Shah, Carter regarded Iran as a land of swarthy and crazed
medievalists, what Washington today calls a "rogue state."
Having
"lost" Iran, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East, along with military
outposts and electronic eavesdropping stations used against the Soviet
Union, the Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic
fundamentalists, not making an issue of their having kidnapped the
American ambassador in Kabul that year (1979), which resulted in his
death in a rescue attempt. While U.S. officials condemned Islamic
militants in Iran as terrorists, they praised them as freedom fighters
in Afghanistan, though both groups drew inspiration from the Ayatollah
Khomeini, who was, in the eyes of official Washington, the Devil
incarnate. In a 1998 interview Carter's national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that the U.S. had begun giving military
assistance to the Islamic fundamentalist moujahedeen in Afghanistan six months before
the U.S.S.R. invaded the country, even though he was convinced - as he
told Carter - that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military
intervention." Among the consequences of that policy were a
decade-and-a-half of war that claimed the lives of a million Afghans, moujahedeen
torture that U.S. government officials called "indescribable horror,"
half the Afghan population either dead, crippled, or homeless, and the
creation of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist warriors dedicated to
unleashing spectacularly violent attacks in countries throughout the
world.
The list of disastrous policies can go on. For
example, Carter continued the Ford Administration's policy of backing
Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, which killed tens of thousands of
Timorese during Carter's years in office, and roughly a third of the
Timorese population overall between 1975 and 1979. In 1977-1978 while
Indonesia engaged in wholesale destruction in the form of massive
bombardment, wiping out of villages and crops, and relocation of
populations to concentration camps, the Carter Administration extended
the military and diplomatic support necessary to make it all possible.
In late 1977 Washington replenished Indonesia's depleted supplies with a
sharp increase in the flow of military equipment (Jakarta used
U.S.-supplied OV-10 Broncos, planes designed for counterinsurgency
operations) encouraging the ferocious attacks that reduced East Timor to
the level of Pol Pot's Cambodia. In a 1979 interview with the New York Times
Father Leoneto Vieira do Rego, a Portuguese priest who spent three
years in the mountains of East Timor between 1976 and 1979, said that
"the genocide and starvation was the result of the full-scale incendiary
bombing . . . I personally witnessed - while running to protected
areas, going from tribe to tribe - the great massacre from bombardment
and people dying from starvation." In May 1980 Brian Eads reported for
the London Observer
that "malnutrition and disease are still more widespread than in
ravaged Cambodia." Relating the comments of an official recently back
from a visit to Cambodia, Eads added that "by the criteria of distended
bellies, intestinal disease and brachial parameter - the measurement of
the upper arm - the East Timorese are in a worse state than the Khmers."
Another stellar achievement of the "Human Rights" administration.
Furthermore,
during Carter's brief reign he ordered production of the neutron bomb
(which his administration praised for "only" destroying people while
leaving property intact), endorsed "flexible response" and "limited"
nuclear war, lobbied for the radar-evading cruise missile, developed a
rapid deployment force for instant intervention anywhere, enacted
selective service registration in peacetime, and advocated the
construction of first-strike MX missiles for use in a nuclear shell game
along an elaborate system of underground railroad tracks proposed for
the Utah desert. While lecturing the Soviets on human rights, he
escalated state terror in El Salvador, crushed democracy in South Korea,
gave full support to Indonesia's near genocide in East Timor, and
maintained or increased funding for the Shah, Somoza, Marcos, Brazil's
neo-Nazi Generals, and the dictatorships of Guatemala, Nicaragua,
Indonesia, Bolivia, and Zaire. He refused to heed Archbishop Romero's
desperate plea to cut off U.S. aid to the blood drenched Salvadoran
junta, and Romero was promptly assassinated. Furthermore, he said
nothing at all when the London Sunday Times
revealed that the torture of Arabs implicated "all of Israel's security
forces" and was so "systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful
of 'rogue cops' exceeding orders." And though he presented himself as
sympathetic to those who had opposed the Vietnam war, he refused to pay
reconstruction aid on the grounds that during the devastating U.S.
attack on the tiny country, "the destruction was mutual." (Try arguing
that the Nazi invasion of Poland wasn't a crime because "destruction was
mutual.")
Carter turned domestic policy over to Wall Street,
refusing to increase the minimum wage and telling his Cabinet that
increasing social spending "is something we just can't do." According
to Peter Bourne, special assistant to the president in the Carter White
House, he "did not see health care as every citizen's right," though
every other industrial state in the world except apartheid South Africa
disagreed with him. He understood that liberals desired it, but, Bourne
notes, "he never really accepted it." Instead, "he preferred to talk
movingly of his deep and genuine empathy for those who suffered for lack
of health care, as though the depth of his compassion could be a
substitute for a major new and expensive government solution for the
problem." In point of fact, money can be saved under a government
funded plan, but Carter was uninterested. He insisted on controlling
business costs rather than providing universal coverage, neglecting to
note that under Medicare - universal insurance for the elderly -
administrative costs were a fraction of those charged under private
HMOs.
Carter simply could not comprehend the vast unmet social
needs that existed (and exist) in the United States. He thought there
was a way to maintain a global military presence, balance the budget,
and keep business costs low while adequately meeting social welfare
needs via reorganizing programs. When his Secretary of Health,
Education, and Welfare, Joe Califano informed him that without increased
funding many welfare recipients would be worse off after any
reorganization than before, Carter erupted: "Are you telling me that
there is no way to improve the present welfare system except by spending
billions of dollars? In that case, to hell with it!" In response to a
comment that his denial of federal funding for poor people's abortions
was unfair, Carter summed up the political philosophy that rendered him
hopelessly unprogressive: "Well, as you know, there are many things in
life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people
cannot."
Like political candidates who do their bidding.
Sources:
Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978)
Laurence H. Shoup, The Carter Presidency and Beyond, (Ramparts, 1980)
Samuel Bowles et al, After The Waste Land: A Democratic Economics For The Year 2000, (M.E. Sharpe, 1990)
Peter G. Bourne, Jimmy Carter - A Comprehensive Biography from Plains to Postpresidency, (Scribner, 1997)
Doug Dowd, Blues For America - A Critique, A Lament, And Some Memories, (Monthly Review, 1997)
William Blum, Rogue State - A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000)
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, (Common Courage, 1995)
Edward W. Said, Covering Islam - How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, (Vintage, 1997)
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, (Vintage, 1979)
Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East, (Knopf, 2005)
Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, (Bantam, 1986)
Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, (Black Rose, 1981)
Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism - Lessons From Kosovo, (Common Courage, 1999)
Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War - Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, (Pantheon, 1973-82)
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995)
Michael Parenti, Land of Idols - Political Mythology in America, (St. Martin's 1994)
Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin's, 1995)
Walter LaFeber, The American Age - United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, (Norton, 1989)
William Mandel, Saying No To Power - Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, (Creative Arts: 1999)
