Jimmy Carter Dies, Leaves Horrifying Legacy

 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)

Musk Enrages MAGA Denouncing Racist "Crackheads"; Trump Sides With Elon

Even before even being inaugurated, Donald Trump faces raging internal conflict in his MAGA coalition, especially between Ramaswamy-Musk and the Trump base, who are going to war over immigration.  

 

The nationalist base does not wish to concede to investor privilege. Ramaswamy, who made his millions as a Wall Street huckster carrying out pump-and-dump stock schemes, believes the U.S. is culturally deficient for promoting mere "normality" over academic and scientific excellence. Musk, an engineer with a talent for exploiting others, prefers to import "top" technical talent, rather than rely on the U.S. labor market. The MAGA base, for its part, wants America First to count for something, especially in employment, as there are plenty of unemployed American engineers who could use the jobs Musk awards to foreign workers.

 

From a worker standpoint, there is more to be said for the MAGA base side of the argument than for the Musk/Ramaswamy side, which as both Steven Bannon and Ann Coulter have pointed out, is simply a policy aimed at acquiring "indentured servants" by issuing H1B visas (while at the same time operating as a "brain drain" in the countries they come from). Many make substantial salaries (but less than U.S. workers would cost) but they are instantly deportable if they don't please their employers' every whim, a characteristic form of exploitation under capitalism, "populist" pretensions notwithstanding.  

 

Con-man that he is, Donald Trump has already sided with his tech-bros, saying he likes the H1B visa, which gives special consideration to technically savvy immigrants. However, it is the extra control over the imported talent that matters most, not the technical know-how. All that remains to be done at this point is for the MAGA base to rationalize the kick-in-the-face as somehow consistent with Trump's "populist" essence, as they have done on similar occasions many times in the past. 

 

The entire discussion bears on assumptions about what constitutes an American. For the Trump base, being born and raised in the image of the European founders of the republic represents Americanism in its purest form and counts for everything. For wealthy elites like Musk and Ramaswamy "excellence" is a distinctively American trait wherever it is found, and legal American visas extended to such talent are merely confirmation of that fact. Not to extend such visas in preference for a consumer culture of mediocrity is, for them, an insult to common sense and a kind of treason to the national essence.

 

Both groups overlook the possibility that achievement in making the U.S. less horrendously unjust may be the most praiseworthy element of the national character, and one would think we had already conceded this point by declaring Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday.

In any event, Musk outlined his feelings about the H1B visa on X:

 

"The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built Space X, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B," he wrote to user Steve Mackey, who had criticized the visa. Overcome by indignation at "ungrateful" MAGA types, he lapsed into a semi-coherent rant: "Take a big step back and Fuck Yourself in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend." Steve Bannon, responding for the base, called Musk a "toddler."

 

Ramaswamy was more composed, incongruously calling for a culture of excellence from his extra-constitutional DOGE position granted him by the proudly ignorant Trump, world famous for being the quintessential "ugly American":

 

"Trump's election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America," he implausibly announced, "but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity, hard work over laziness."

 

He neglected to mention that Trump's "excellence" is in repeatedly taking companies into bankruptcy for his own benefit, and fomenting sectarian warfare with an unflagging barrage of mental diarrhea that inflames ugly passions and pushes us towards a second Civil War.

 

If he is to be the measure of our national greatness, he should change his slogan to, "Make America Rubble Again."

Capitalist Media Coverage of Ukraine: Hopelessly Propagandistic From The Start

Sampling a long lecture series on the history of Ukraine provided by Yale University professor Timothy Snyder, author of "Bloodlands" and said to speak ten languages, one can easily get the impression that years of study are necessary before being able to judge the proxy war currently being fought in Ukraine. But shortcuts can help. Jumping ahead to lecture 20 by Marci Shore, an apparent colleague of Snyder's at Yale, it becomes apparent that hers is the perspective on Ukraine that Americans get night and day in the capitalist media, with everything romanticized as glorious self-defense against dark, oppressive Russia, replete with quotes from Polish Solidarity activists of old in an apparent attempt to convince us that Stalin is still in power in Moscow.

 

What we don't get from this and badly need, is a Russian nationalist perspective, which could teach us that Russia, no less than Ukraine, has its own inspiring, self-sacrificing heroes and noble acts, dedicated to rectifying outrages against its national sovereignty. In short, the United States is getting at most only half the story on Ukraine.

 

Everyone should be able to guess what would have happened if, following WWII, Mexico and Canada had been taken over by pro-Communist governments with Communist military bases placed right on the U.S.border, after which Communist incursions were launched into Texas, killing Anglos and banning English, even burning a few dozen American patriots alive in a Walmart for good measure. Would the U.S. have refrained from using force at that point? Of course not. Washington would have nuked Russia and China off the map long before matters go to that point. What accounts for Putin's restraint in not doing the same to the U.S.? This is a badly under-investigated question in the West.

 

Judging by the steady expansion of BRICS it appears that more and more of the world is well aware of U.S. hypocrisy, whatever it may think of Vladimir Putin.

 

Timothy Snyder series available via link below.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz_1Mx1MaO6sw_

We Are Looking For Palestine

The sun rises and moves around.

It sets to visit other places.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

The birds wake up and look for food.

They chirp on the blossoming trees, laden with fruit, 

with peaches, apples, apricots, and oranges.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

The sea waves lap against the shore.

They glitter and dance with the fishers' boats.

And we, we are looking for Palestine.

People travel to relatives and friends. 

They book round-trip tickets, stuff their suitcases

with gifts and books and clothes.

And we, we are still looking for Palestine.

Sir, we have no airports and seaports;

no trains, or highways.

We have no passable roads, sir!

We do have crutches and wheelchairs,

Young men with one or no legs, 

no longer able to work, as if there was work.

We travel to the West Bank or Egypt for surgery, 

even to set a broken leg.

But we need a permit to enter.

We stuff our suitcases with pictures and memories.

They feel very heavy on the ground; 

we can't carry them, neither can the roads.

They scar the surface of the earth.

We get lost in the past, present, and future.

When a child is born, we feel sad for him or her. 

A child is born here to suffer, sir!

A mother feels the great pain in labor.

A child cries after leaving her dark place.

In Palestine, our dark is not safe.

In Palestine, children always cry.

If we want to travel, we leave many times.

In Gaza, you leave via either Erez or Rafah,

a hard escape to make,

so we search for the visa interview.

Cairo, Istanbul, Amman? (But not in Palestine!)

We don't have embassies, sir!

The one in Jerusalem is farther

than the Andromeda Galaxy.

Andromeda is 2.5 million light years.

But our years stay heavy and dark.

It would take trillions of years.

Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.

Only cemeteries don't mind our bodies.

We no longer look for Palestine.

Our time is spent dying.

Soon, Palestine will search for us,

for our whispers, for our footsteps,

our fading pictures fallen off blown-up walls.

----Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise

Perverse Incentive Structure of Capitalism Responsible for UnitedHealth Executive's Assassination

The incoming Trump Administration is preparing to compel obedience to capitalist health care that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year by labeling lack of sympathy for the recently slain UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson as "terrorism." 

And they do not mean sympathy for him for having fallen into the tragedy of getting rich by denying people needed medical treatment, a form of legalized killing far more deadly than Luigi Mangione's lone act of assassination. They mean the mawkish sentimentality of treating Thompson as a selfless leader, dedicated father, and enviable success story without regard for the immense destructiveness of the productive role he willingly embraced. Who cares, in other words, for the vast numbers of Americans injured and killed by a Profit Care system that considers them mere collateral damage in the feverish quest for limitless private gain.

Philosopher Irami Osei-Frimpong (see his wonderful podcast - The Funky Academic) has a helpful suggestion for dealing with this grotesque situation. Noting that the upcoming Mangione Trial is sure to dominate the national attention in 2025, he recommends we take advantage of popular anger to form a universal public health care party that will directly challenge for-profit health care at the ballot box, similar to how the abolitionists formed the Republican Party to challenge the collaborationist Whigs in the 1850s. In those years new states were admitted to the Union in pairs, one slave and the other "free," as though the persistence of slavery didn't cripple everyone's freedom. Today we are assigned to Profit Care if we are under 65 and Public Care (Medicare) if we are seniors, as though the superordinate goal of profit didn't cripple the quality of health for everyone.

The United States remains the only developed country that doesn't provide free health care at the point of service, and the only one in that group that still tolerates medical bankruptcies. In fact, inability to pay medical bills is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. To the grief of illness and death is added the grief of economic ruin.

According to President Trump and his team, anyone who has a problem with this is a terrorist.

Assassinated Health Care Executive Was Paid $10 Million A Year To Reject Claims

"There are very few people in the history of the U.S. healthcare industry who had a bigger positive effect on American healthcare than Brian."

-----UnitedHealth Care CEO Andrew Witty on assassinated executive Brian Thompson, who increased the rate of rejected health care claims for the company, after it had already achieved the highest rejection rate in the industry 

Source: "Bill Burr GOES OFF on United CEO Killing," Breaking Points (podcast), December 9, 2024