Reagan Officials on Winnable Nuclear War

" . . . it is possible for any society to survive [a nuclear war] . . . nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem."

-----Charles Kupperman Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA)

Senator Pell: "My question is, in a full nuclear exchange, would a country survive?"

Eugene Rostov (ACDA): "The human race is very resilient, Senator Pell."

"You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you."

-----Vice-President George Bush on how to win a nuclear war

"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around. Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."

-----T. K. Jones Deputy Undersecretary of Defense

"The United States must possess the ability to wage nuclear war rationally."

-----Colin Gray Arms Control Adviser

"It would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn't be unmanageable."

-----Louis Giuffrida Federal Emergency Management Agency

Question: Would democracy and other institutions survive nucear war?

"I think they would eventually, yeah. As I say, the ants eventually build another anthill."

-----William Chipman Federal Emergency Management Agency

Ronald Reagan's Reactionary Dream Team

Secretary of State - Alexander Haig

A career soldier who revered obedience above all else, Haig dutifully transmitted President Nixon's orders to wiretap journalists and colleagues to the F.B.I., masterminded the carpet bombing of Cambodia and the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi, and helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile. At his Senate confirmation hearings he remarked that a "rigid legalistic preoccupation" with international law should not prevent the U.S. from getting rid of governments threatening "American interests."

Attempting to explain the rape and execution-style killings of four American Maryknoll missionaries in El Salvador, he testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the nuns "may have tried to run a road block" and that there "may have been an exchange of fire." He conceded, however, that he had never met any "pistol-packing nuns."

Secretary of Defense - Caspar Weinberger

Harvard and Oxford educated, Vice-President and general counsel for Bechtel Corporation, a crafty, stubbornly combative anti-Communist who regarded detente as a failure for the West, he believed in the end of the world as predicted in the Book of Revelations.

Calling for unrestrained war spending and an accelerated push for first-strike nuclear weapons, he said in his first press conference that the U.S. would "probably want to make use of" neutron bombs in Europe.

Interior Secretary - James Watt

For Watt there were two broad classes of people in the U.S. - liberals and Americans.

An enthusiastic partisan of big business, Watt opposed strip-mining regulations, advocated oil drilling in wilderness areas, and supported the use of motorized rafts in the Grand Canyon.

At his confirmation hearings he assured the Senate that he was capable of balancing economic development and conservation, but left many doubts by adding that he did "not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns."

U.N. Ambassador - Jeane Kirkpatrick

A devoted defender of the Salvadoran junta that killed some 70,000 Salvadoreans between 1979 and 1994, Jeane Kirkpatrick won the heart of Ronald Reagan with her article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," in which she advocated supporting neo-fascist regimes on the pretext that they were only "moderately authoritarian," while governments allied with the U.S.S.R. were "totalitarian."

She believed that South African apartheid had some "good elements" in it, and rejected the international consensus describing the West Bank as occupied territory. She also dissented from the view that the 1932 Salvadorean matanza, in which the ruling oligarchy slaughtered tens of thousands of peasants, was a singularly traumatizing event: "To many Salvadoreans the violence of this repression seems less important than the fact of restored order and the thirteen years of civil peace that ensued."

Budget Director - David Stockman

Once a student anti-war activist, he abandoned radical politics following the revelation that "the left was inherently totalitarian." Freed of delusions of social justice this chain-smoking number-cruncher transferred his crusader's zeal to slashing social spending.

Stockman opposed the ideals of the Enlightenment, rejected equality as a moral principle, and denied that citizens had any right to government services.

White House Counselor - Ed Meese

A rigid law-and-order man, he called the A.C.L.U. a "criminals' lobby" and rated Joseph McCarthy a great Senator.

As assistant to Governor Reagan in the 1960s, Meese sent helicopters to drop tear gas on the U.C. Berkeley campus. During the pitched battles over People's Park, police killed James Rector, a young black man. Reminiscing about the event during the 1980 presidential campaign, Meese declared nonchalantly that, "James Rector deserved to die."

Attorney General - William French Smith

Formerly a U.C. Regent, he supported Governor Reagan's decision to gas student protesters in Berkeley in 1969, and later led the successful fight to fire Communist Party member Angela Davis from U.C.L.A.

He owned farmland managed by Blue Goose, a firm that flouted immigration laws, paying undocumented Mexican workers substantially less than the minimum wage, while holding them in conditions without housing, toilets, or drinking water. Just in case they got any ideas about collective advancement, his law firm specialized in union busting.

The highest law enforcement official in the country, Smith's goals as Attorney General were to eliminate the Freedom of Information Act, have more right-wing judges appointed, roll back affirmative action, cut food stamp aid, and punish evaders of peacetime draft registration.

Vice President - George Bush

Newly sworn in, he signed a contract in a land deal in Texas stipulating that his lot not "be sold, leased or rented to any person other than of the Caucasian race, except in the case of servant's quarters."

Director of the C.I.A. when the U.S. gave the green light to Indonesia's mass murder campaign in East Timor, Bush never met a right-wing dictator he didn't like. In Manila, he admiringly toasted Ferdinand Marcos'"adherence to democratic principle," charitably overlooking Amnesty International's report that torture was "widespread and systematic" under his rule.

Treasury Secretary - Donald Regan

Ex-Marine, member of the Business Roundtable, Chairman and chief of Merrill Lynch, professional salesman Regan professed a "sled dog theory" of business, which held that "in order to get ahead, you don't just need a team of strong dogs, you also need a puppy - to throw to the wolves."

Ronald Reagan in His Own Words

"Now we are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we're going to succeed."

-----GOP fundraiser, 1982

"We think that we are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador."

-----Reagan on the death squad government that achieved one of the worst human rights records in the world (March 6, 1981)

"Well, I learned a lot. . . . I went down [to Latin America] to find out from them and [learn] their views. You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries."

-----reporting a geographic revelation, December 6, 1982

"We should declare war on North Vietnam . . . We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas."

-----October 10, 1965

"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the [Vietnam] war than the people have been told."

-----October 10, 1967, a few months before the Tet Offensive demonstrated that the U.S. was doing far worse than the American people had been told

Question: "Do you think there could be a battlefield exchange [of nuclear weapons] without having buttons pressed all the way up the line?"

Reagan: "Well, I would - if they realized that we - if we went back to that stalemate, only because our retaliatory power, our seconds, or our strike at them after their first strike would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off."

-----October 17, 1981

"Those [nuclear weapons] that are carried in ships of one kind or another, or submersibles, you are dealing there with a conventional type of weapon or instrument, and those instruments can be intercepted. They can be recalled."

-----Reagan on how to stop a nuclear war after it's started, May 13, 1982

"Incidentally, the first man who proposed the nuclear freeze was in February 21st, 1981, in Moscow - Leonid Brezhnev."

-----December 10, 1982

"You have to remember, we don't have the military industrial complex that we once had, when President Eisenhower spoke about it."

-----January 5, 1983

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."

-----TV speech, October 27, 1964

"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources."

-----September 10, 1980

"Air pollution has been substantially controlled."

-----Press release, October 8, 1980

"Isn't it substantially under control? I think it is."

-----Time, October 20, 1980

"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"

-----Sacramento Bee, March 12, 1966

" . . . a faceless mass, waiting for hand-outs."

-----Description of Medicaid recipients, 1965

Source: Mark Green & Gail MacColl, There He Goes Again - Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error, (Pantheon, 1983)

When Bonzo Went to Washington - Remembering Reagan on The Centennial of His Birth

He had but the foggiest idea what the policies of his own administration were. When not programmed by his staff he talked nonstop about Hollywood or whiled away the hours watching T.V. Bored with his duties, he came to work reluctantly, amusing himself doodling and nodding off in cabinet meetings. His solution for every problem was a dismissive one-liner accompanied by an amiable grin.

The first telepresident in history, he came alive only for the camera, and appeared coherent thanks to the constant assistance of a Teleprompter. Unchoreographed moments left him babbling like a small child. With curious vehemence and farcical regularity his aides announced that he was in charge and understood what was going on.

He thought by anecdote and debated with sentimental homilies. Inconvenient facts were blotted out with self-justifying stereotypes: of Soviet beachheads, of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, of voluntary ghettos, of Communist hordes descending on Texas, of rich kids getting free school lunches, and of educational loan recipients turned stock brokers. To mobilize support for unpopular budget cuts, he cited anonymous letters from altruistic blind, elderly, and disabled citizens, who urged him to slash their benefits for the good of the country.

His political convictions seemed the product of a creative catatonia. He insisted trees were a major cause of air pollution. He believed Trident nuclear missiles were recallable after firing, and dubbed the first-strike MX missile a peacekeeper. He claimed Karl Marx had invented the progressive income tax. Returning from his first trip to Latin America, he exclaimed that they're all individual countries, which was apparently a revelation to him. He once addressed Samuel Doe, Liberian head of state, as "Chairman Moe."

Carrying out a devastating array of reactionary policies, he slashed social spending and transferred the "savings" to the Pentagon. In the twelve years of Reagan and George Bush I administrations, the U.S. spent $3,700,000,000 on military spending. Major emphasis was placed on an intensification of the Cold War, especially a massive build-up in nuclear weapons and a corresponding elaboration of nuclear war-fighting strategies and ideology. In October, 1981, the Reagan administration called for 1000 warheads on 100 MX missiles, 100 B-1 bombers, the development of an advanced, radar-proof Stealth bomber, the deployment of larger and more accurate D-5 missiles on Trident submarines, and more than 3000 cruise missiles on B-52s and B-1s (plus several hundred more on submarines), the rebuilding of the command and control systems, and a civil defense program outlining procedures to evacuate 150 million American citizens from 400 cities and build blast shelters to protect "essential workers." In its five year Defense Guidance Plan of 1982, the administration revealed plans to fight and win a protracted nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Citing the Bible to justify his massive military build-up, Reagan dismissed the overwhelmingly popular Nuclear Freeze Movement as a Kremlin-instigated fraud. Instead of a freeze, he called for a space-based missile defense system popularly known as Star Wars (in hopes of making a U.S. first-strike more credible by being able to withstand a retaliatory strike). Jauntily, the Great Communicator invited U.S. scientists to plant lasers in the heavens and usher in world peace.

With the exception of a brief period at the beginning of his first term, these policies proved quite unpopular, with the U.S. public preferring social spending to military spending by a wide margin, even if it meant an increase in taxes. Reagan ignored the irrelevant public (his view) and ran roughshod over his critics with generous doses of red-baiting, charging that "pro-Soviet agents" were disseminating "disinformation" to the media and Congress.

He claimed Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev invented the U.S. Nuclear Freeze movement, and he dismissed West European anti-nuclear activists objecting to his plans to have a "limited" nuclear war on their soil as "bought and paid for by the Soviet Union." He expressed disappointment at the demise of the House Un-American Activities Committee, dispatched the FBI to harass those who disagreed with his terrorist policies in Central America, and gave the FBI and CIA broad powers to conduct domestic surveillance, while reviving the McCarran Act to prevent critics of U.S. policy from entering the country. He also insured that films criticizing the U.S. were banned as "anti-American," such as one depicting the life and work of anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott.

Overall the Reagan agenda was to redistribute wealth upward by attacking the limited welfare system, busting unions, reducing wages, and expanding public subsidies to high-technology industry through the Pentagon system. These measures seriously weakened the New Deal social contract, causing a marked decline in social welfare.

Homelessness, AIDS, and antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis surged out of control, alongside an absence of national health insurance, while the Pentagon budget mushroomed to stratospheric levels (now far exceeded by George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama), with allocations reaching $1 trillion in Reagan's first term and continuing to climb thereafter. Meanwhile, tax cuts for the rich caused a rapid ballooning of the federal deficit, an orgy of consumption by the rich, unrestrained speculation and financial manipulation, deterioration of the social safety net for the poor and middle class, reduction in occupational safety, and increased environmental degradation, among other predictable consequences of the blind pursuit of short-term gain for the few. Naturally, the workers burdened with paying off the sea of red ink saw their real incomes decline.

The sharp note of class warfare was sounded from the first days of Reagan's initial term, when he destroyed PATCO - the air traffic controllers union - hiring permanent replacement workers to take jobs away from striking workers, one of many measures taken to undermine labor and impose a Third World model on the United States. A General Accounting Office survey subsequently revealed that Reagan's crush-the-workers hostility had emboldened the private sector to act in a similarly vicious manner. Between 1985 and 1989 private companies resorted to the threat of permanent replacements in one-third of all strikes. Not surprisingly, the decade witnessed a precipitous decline in union membership, a rise in anti-labor decisions from the National Labor Relations Board, and the virtual collapse of OSHA.

A study released by the Economic Policy Institute on Labor Day, 1992, confirmed the details of Reaganomics' dismal aftermath: a majority of Americans were working longer hours for less pay and substantially less security than in the late seventies, and the "vast majority" were "in many ways worse off" than they had been then. Since 1987 wages had been in decline even for the college-educated. "Poverty rates were high by historic standards," said the report, and "those in poverty in 1989 were significantly poorer than the poor in 1979." A 1991 congressional report disclosed that hunger had grown by 50% since the mid-1980s, to include some 30 million people. By the early 1990s, the number of hungry children at Boston City Hospital's malnutrition clinic had jumped so dramatically that the staff had resorted to triage. The worst occurred in winter months, when poor families confronted the choice of starving or freezing.

As inequality widened, the impoverished were demonized with renewed viciousness and blacks were portrayed as undeserving recipients of affirmative action largesse. By the close of the Reagan era, the gap between rich and poor reached alarming proportions, (though relatively tame by today's standards), surpassing Rwanda in the global inequality index. While in 1980 the CEOs of major corporations had earned forty times as much salary as the average factory worker, by the end of the decade they were garnering 93 times as much, a lopsided extreme found nowhere else in the industrial world.

After a 70-year rise to become the world's leading creditor, the U.S. had plunged to number one debtor by the end of the Reagan era. David Hale, chief economist of Kemper Financial Services, estimated that the Reagan years had bled the U.S. of $1 trillion, a then unprecedented financial record, leaving behind a nation with "a pervasive backdrop of economic gloom," and "seemingly awash in a sea of red ink." The "fundamentals are sound," commented a clueless Reagan as the stock market crashed in 1987.

As bad as things were on the home front, the really massive suffering attributable to Reagan was inflicted abroad. Seeking to "excise the cancer of communism" (Reagan), the U.S. murdered upwards of 200,000 Central Americans in counterinsurgency wars against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, the landless peasants of El Salvador, and the immensely popular Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Salvadoreans and Guatemalans were killed to keep them from making revolution, while Nicaraguans were killed as punishment for having already done so.

The official crime of the Sandinista government was Communism, a technical term in U.S. national security parlance meaning government for the benefit of ordinary people instead of local oligarchs and foreign elites. To correct these priorities, the CIA organized Somoza's ex-National Guard and a handful of other disaffected rebels into a proxy army that launched torture and destruction from secure bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, supplied by Oliver North's mafia via El Salvador. Remarkable Nicaraguan improvements in health care, literacy, nutrition, and other aspects of social welfare were met by terror, embargo, pressures on international institutions and U.S. allies to withhold aid, a huge demonization campaign, intimidating U.S. military exercises and overflights, the mining of harbors and blowing up of oil refineries, all designed to get the revolutionary government to "cry uncle," to cite Reagan's memorable rendition of a playground thug.

Large swathes of Central America were turned over to rampaging death squads trained at the U.S. School of the Americas, popularly known in Latin America as the "school of coups." While the Catholic Church warned that Guatemalan security forces razing entire villages to the ground were guilty of genocide, Reagan retorted that presiding dictator General Efrain Rios-Montt was getting a "bum rap," and was "totally dedicated to democracy." Similar policies were carried out in neighboring El Salvador, where tens of thousands of civilians were murdered in the Reagan years, many after brutal torture. A typical case occurred in 1981, when the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion arrived in El Mozote, robbed the town, raped the women, and killed two hundred men in church, many beheaded, then dragged the bodies toward the sacristy, where they piled up the bloody remains. As a final insult, they burned a group of children alive inside a house. Unfortunately, such grotesque events were far from isolated incidents. A U.S. mercenary explained the rational basis for such appalling brutality: "The army is not killing communist guerrillas, despite what is reported. It is murdering the civilians who side with them. It's a beautiful technique. By terrorizing civilians the army is crushing the rebellion without the need to directly confront the guerrillas. Attacking civilians is the game plan . . . Kill the sympathizers and you win the war."

To justify its predatory acts, the Reagan administration went beyond all previous records for absurdity in propaganda. Upon assuming office it warned of Libyan assassination squads roaming the U.S. at the behest of Libya's "mad dog" (Reagan's words) leader Moammar Qaddafi. This was part of Reagan's announced "war on terror" (twenty years ahead of George Bush junior). After years of demonizing Qaddafi, Reagan ordered the U.S. Navy and Air Force to bomb Tripoli, killing dozens of civilians, while F-111s attacked Qaddafi's desert compound, killing his infant daughter. The French Embassy was also destroyed in this raid, which the Reagan White House termed "self defense against future attack" - the standard excuse of aggressors throughout history.

Reagan also dispatched 241 Marines to their doom in occupation of Lebanon, and gave the Green Light to Israel's disastrous 1982 invasion of that country, which killed roughly 20,000 people (including the victims of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres) on a surge of Pentagon arms deliveries, and inspired Osama bin Laden to plot brutal revenge. Interimly, however, the Reagan administration supported bin Laden and his foreign Islamofascist (the preferred term of Reagan's heirs today) network dedicated to keeping Afghanistan in the political dark ages. Nearly one million Afghans were killed while their country was torn apart by U.S. and Soviet intervention, followed by almost two decades of terrorism and war under rival factions of Islamic fanatics.

For good measure, the Reagan administration also backed the white South African regime ("constructive engagement"), declared Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and supported apartheid as it went on the rampage in Southern Africa, killing some million-and-a-half people in a doomed effort to preserve white supremacy.

These are but a few of the memorable achievements of the United States' 40th president, whose claim to fame is often said to be that "he made us feel good."

Sources:

Galeano, Eduardo, Upside Down: A Primer For the Looking Glass World, (Metropolitan Books, 2000)

Chomsky, Noam, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues (South End, 1993)

Chomsky, Noam, Turning the Tide - U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle For Peace (South End, 1985)

Chomsky, Noam - The Fateful Triangle - The United States, Israel & the Palestinians, (South End, 1983)

Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy (Hill and Wang, 1992)

Chomsky, Noam, On Power and Ideology - The Managua Lectures, (South End, 1987)

Mayer, Jane and Doyle McManus, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988 (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)

Caldicott, Helen, Missile Envy - The Arms Race and Nuclear War (Bantam, 1986)

Wittner, Lawrence - Cold War America - From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978)

Kopkind, Andrew The Thirty Years' Wars - Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994 - (Verso, 1995)

Zinn, Howard - A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present (Harper, 1995)

Parenti, Michael - Democracy For The Few, Sixth Edition, (St. Martin's, 1995)

Scheer, Robert, With Enough Shovels - Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, (Vintage, 1983)

Dugger, Ronnie - On Reagan - The Man & His Presidency, (McGraw Hill, 1983)

Green, Mark & Gail MacColl, There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error, (Pantheon, 1983)

Binford, Leigh, The El Mozote Massacre, (University of Arizona, 1996)


-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire," both from Common Courage Press.

Clinton In Mexico

Clinton Voices U.S. Support of Mexico in Trip

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came here on Monday to deliver a message of solidarity with President Felipe Calderón and to rebut public doubts about persistent violence.

She solidified relations between the U.S. and Mexico by hiring a gardener and a cleaning woman and a body guard for the cleaning woman. She said the cleaning woman might need protection from some, uh, man who might be, uh, hanging around the, uh, vicinity of her home.

Does "Change" Mean Anything?

"What is government if words have no meaning"     Jared Loughner

Two years ago Americans voted for change. Two years later Americans again voted for change. This voting ritual is generations old but the only change we’ve seen is in the skin tone, ethnicity, gender or sexuality of those selected by one minority to be elected by another. The word has no meaning. Absolutely nothing has changed about the substance of our problem:

 A dysfunctional system is destroying democracy, faith, sanity, morality and the natural environment in which they all exist.

The recent tragedy in Arizona was a direct result of that social dysfunction but ignorance purveyors have used it to indict only that state, or small groups, or individual personalities, finding them guilty of creating a frustrating climate easily manipulated to bring angry division to the American public, thereby making that public easier to control.

The people at the top of a political economy that exports costly jobs while importing cheap labor remain secure while scapegoats are blamed for being unemployed natives, employed illegals or overburdened taxpayers. The wars that have cost thousands of lives, billions of dollars and created threats to Americans that never existed before are expanding to new nations. Those bloody actions are opposed by a majority, which also calls for tax increases on the richest Americans, but government consistently rules against them and for its minority owners.

The corporate state provides brainless entertainment to help control the national consciousness, and news and political commentary that make the entertainment seem brilliant by comparison. We are all but guaranteed misguided reaction at best, and homicidal lunacy at worst. If the Arizona terrorist had chosen broadcasting instead of violence, he might have had his own show on Fox, CNN or MSNBC.

The present congress will be even worse than the previous group that was of the ineffectual president’s own party. He no longer has the majority with which he did nothing but obey his corporate employers, so he can be even more bipartisan and further enrich billionaires and their servants who privately profit from all our public loss. No less a teacher of capitalist economics than Bernie Madoff reminded his investors that a profit on one side always means a loss on the other. He practiced what he preached to create fabricated billions and was sent to prison, but those who locked him up are still doing it to create fabricated trillions. Instead of being in jail, they are running the global empire. Their private profits are our social loss. Meanwhile, we are distracted by self-serving and often near imbecilic ravings that pass for political democracy as our society disintegrates while creating new billionaires.  Is it any wonder that some people seem to be losing their minds?

The minority leading us to social degradation will maintain control until the majority creates a truly democratic state. In the short term that may seem as likely as visits from extra terrestrials, but there may not be a long term unless we transform the morally perverse and environmentally poisoned corporate empire that threatens all life on earth.

Right now we’re still attacking scapegoats within, or fighting outside forces non-existent until we create them. Mind managers label our problems as creeping socialism or stalking fascism, with little understanding of what those words mean. The bitterness of language is countered by attempts to make certain words criminal, with charges of “hate speech” leveled by supporters of alleged “free speech”. A nation committing hate crimes of mass murder all over the globe has its citizens despising one another and paying little attention to the systemic roots of their problem.

Just as corporate capital’s White House cheerleader has done nothing to change the economy, the new congress will do nothing to change the relationship of the USA to Israel. That sordid union with a racial supremacist nation held in contempt almost everywhere but in the American government has billions of our dollars and thousands of our lives expended in wars for its support. And the president and congress will continue raising the budget for private banking by cutting the budgets for public service. The problems that outrage millions are blamed on everything but their source and so distressed Americans helped elect the new congress. But the change they are offered by the right is as much language distortion as the change previously offered by what passes for a left. The problem is that politicians who supposedly represent competing parties are united as employees in support of the minority-controlled system. That system is what must be changed, not simply the hired hands administering its needs at public expense.

The popular big government versus small government argument disguises the reality of a corporate state owned by a tiny minority, with political factions fighting to share in its wealth. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not served at all but are in fact robbed in this false debate that results in continued damage inflicted no matter which faction operates on behalf of its wealthy minority controllers.

We suffer financial inequality so blatant it’s a full time public relations job for consciousness controllers to keep us dulled into believing their tales of outside terror and inside socialism. Looking at America objectively would make it easy to assume that most of us are ignorant, stoned, drunk and homicidal. But majorities oppose the wars and support taxing the rich, while a substantial minority is growing in resistance to the uncritical relationship with Israel. As soon as we stop blaming those below us and start dealing with those above us we may give real meaning to the words government and democracy. We are slowly joining the world in  a  global revolution to transform reality and not continue endlessly re-branding failure. We’re  just not doing it fast enough to give it meaning. We need to speed up the process.

Presidential Elections and the Supplicant Mentality

by Michael K. Smith

It is nothing short of amazing that so many apparently well-meaning people are still prepared to argue that an Al Gore presidency in 2000 would have changed the course of history, avoiding the disaster of the 2003 Iraq War and guiding us to a saner 2011.

As with matters of faith in general, the way they know this is from sheer personal conviction. According to this romantic scenario, in the wake of 911, with Republicans screaming about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the hands of Islamofascists and demanding Saddam Hussein's head, Al Gore, described by his own mother as "a born conformist," would have struck out on an independent path for the first time ever and refused to invade a country that was already being continually bombed by the U.S. with (then Vice-President) Gore's hearty approval. Maybe, but given Gore's record, the conclusion is something less than totally obvious.

Gore is the man who caved in to the Miami Cuban fanatics insisting that Elian Gonzalez had an inalienable right to live with his kidnappers forever; the man who reached the House of Representatives on a platform of guns, God, racism, and states rights; the man who marched in lockstep with the NRA and supported the Hyde Amendment denying government-funded abortions to poor women, even voting against an early version of the bill that would have made an exception in cases of rape. Gore supported Ronald Reagan's war on tiny Nicaragua (which the World Court ruled was international terrorism), the disastrous deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, the 1991 Gulf Slaughter, and the bombing attacks on Libya, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. He approved of the C.I.A's arming and training of moujahedeen guerrillas and declared he wouldn't "hesitate to overthrow a government with covert actions."

Gore worshipped Israel, at whose prompting Washington invaded Iraq, and was insulted at Papa Bush's initiative to withhold $10 billion in loan guarantees until the Holy State talked to the PLO. When Jesse Jackson stood up for Palestinian rights Gore was first to insist that it was racist to not attack him for defying the consensus of the white candidates in the race. Since the white candidates were agreed that indigenous Arabs had no rights in Palestine, they were obligated to not let sympathy for downtrodden blacks in America lead them to find fault with Israel's campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

Gore was also an arms dealer's wet dream. He voted for the neutron bomb, the B-1 and B-2 bombers, the Trident II missile, the MX missile, the Midgetman, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and mini-Star Wars. After backing a nerve gas missile called the Big Eye, he asked President Reagan to phone his mother in hopes the Great Communicator could explain his vote.

Gore was a long-time supporter of the Clinch River breeder reactor, which manufactures plutonium, a millionth of a gram of which is sufficient to induce lung cancer when inhaled, and was an enthusiastic proponent of the free market theology that treated nature as a boundless sewer. While advancing the agenda of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, he billed himself as the Green Prince of the Environment.

This is the man on whom hopes for a decent future allegedly depended. He was so bad he couldn't even carry his home state of Tennessee. Of course, that's not the fault of Gore's appalling politics, but rather, of Ralph Nader's ill-advised presence in the 2000 presidential race. Damn egomaniac!

It's a reasonable surmise that a Gore presidency would have been a disaster, just like every other 20th century Democratic administration was (see posts for 8/20/09, 7/3/09, 6/25/09, 5/11/09, 4/27/09, 4/15/09, and 4/1/09 for a review of the seven Democratic administrations of the 20th century). Yes, there are differences between the GOP and the Democrats. No, exploiting those differences will not lead us away from the precipice of human extinction, a matter allegedly of some concern to "progressives."

Barack Obama was supposed to be an obvious improvement over George Bush. He hasn't been. He has increased the Pentagon budget, extended the Bush tax cuts, escalated pilotless drone attacks, endorsed assassinating American citizens, expanded the "war on terror" into Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia, continued torture and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, backed Jewish apartheid, given trillions of dollars to looters on Wall Street, and presided over the worst unemployment situation in 80 years, with millions of Americans losing their careers, their homes, and their pensions. His single legislative achievement - health care "reform" - keeps the HMO profiteers in control, guaranteeing that thousands of Americans will continue dying every year due to undiagnosed and untreated illnesses.

It is long since time we questioned our allegiance to the crackpot realism that makes a God of expedience and demands nothing more from us than quadrennial ratification of the evil of two lessers. Over the course of time the choice becomes not Gore or Bush, but Gore and Bush, not to mention Carter-and-Reagan, Nixon-and-Clinton, and Ike-and-LBJ. The point is that calls for capitulation easily masquerade as political pragmatism, making subservience a way of life.

This may come as news to the "let's go down on our knees and fight like hell" crowd, but the reality is that there was no more practical value to the Warsaw ghetto revolt than there has been to Ralph Nader's repeated presidential campaigns. Doomed to failure from the start, it needlessly claimed the lives of German security forces who had been assigned the task of ethnic cleansing for Hitler. So if the "let's be practical" logic of the Nader-phobes is correct, the Jews who rose up to defy Nazi power were egomaniacs pointlessly committed to self-serving theatrics.

It should be clear what's wrong with that picture.

Those who would make an argument for cowardice ought first to declare themselves cowards. If we cannot stomach this, we should stop babbling about microscopic differences between Israel-worshipping corporate candidates, and mount a popular challenge to Zionized capitalism that will make the Tea Party look like, well - a tea party.

Otherwise, we have no one else to blame but ourselves.

Source:

Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair, "Al Gore: A User's Manual" (Verso: 2000)

-----Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire" both with Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com