'Yessir, Mr. Potter! Dat sho' is fright'nin'!'

(Part of the credit for this vile construction goes to my wife, who will steadfastly deny it if confronted.)

There’s a little* firestorm brewing over the above photo.   What does it mean?  Why would these men pose with such an infamous martial symbol?

I have a theory that gives them the benefit of the doubt: these men are making a point about what they’ve been sent to do in a foreign land.  More on this in a moment.

The men in the photograph are trained killers, their training paid for by our tax dollars, and our elected representatives sent them to the foreign land to do exactly what they do.  They are U.S. Marines, the best killers in the world.  I don’t say this to be laudatory, sarcastic, or ironic; I’m merely pointing out the obvious.  So when we send these men to Afghanistan to kill, we can expect that’s what they’ll do and do very well.  Whether or not they enjoy what they do, or find dark humor in what they do, or hate what they do, it’s their job.  Whatever brought them to the doorstep of the U.S. Marine Corps, they all took an oath to defend this nation.  Their oath doesn’t come with an a la carte menu; they don’t get to decide** which deployment fits the definition of their oath and which is a clear violation.

So I say it doesn’t matter why the men in the photograph decided to put a Schutzstaffel flag underneath the U.S. flag.  Whether or not it was their intention, the men hanging the SS flag are sending a clear moral message about the nature of what they’ve been ordered to do in Afghanistan.  If you are outraged by what you see in the photograph, then you need to ask yourself why; because SS flag or no SS flag, the killing is continuing.

Again, the men in the photograph, or thousands like them, are still over there doing what they were trained and deployed to do.  If what they are doing is wrong, then we all ought to be more offended by the presence of the Stars and Stripes than we are of the other flag; which one, after all, is supposed to be drenched in innocent blood?  On the other hand, if we’re happy or content with what the men are doing, then we shouldn’t complain about the SS flag, unless maintaining hypocritical fiction is more important to us than doing the right thing.

That last clause brings us to the core of this little controversy.  What’s more important: emotional reaction to the imagery, or the moral weight of the reality?  In November 2008, roughly 98% of U.S. citizens who voted chose a presidential candidate who had promised to continue the war in Afghanistan.  So you all got what you wanted, and the men in the photograph are the ones sent to do it for you.  Don’t condemn them for showing you the moral reality of what you asked for.

*I say ‘little’ to make clear my view that the firestorm would have been much larger had the photo been taken and released during the Bush administration.  I’ll leave it to Glenn Greenwald to explain that bit.

**In the strictest, most literal sense they do get to decide, assuming they’re willing to accept the consequences for such a potentially contrary decision– and some have heeded their consciences and accepted the consequences– but just imagine the chaos if every individual military person suddenly began to individually decide which deployments and which missions he or she believed worthy of execution.  In some ways we might think this a good thing, but it would still be moving the cart by pulling it sideways.

To me, hope is something that exists for only two classes of people.  The first class is by far the largest, and it consists of suckers, idiots, the morally weak, and others who don’t want to put in the work of actually trying or sacrificing.  I know that description sounds harsh, and I mean it to.  It’s one thing to say ‘I hope the Cubs win today’; it’s a meaningless thing, really, perhaps except for the small emotional lift a Cubs fan might receive from an otherwise futile and pointless outcome.  When there’s something important on the line, however, one does not resort so easily to hope; one does not look at the economic and foreign policy mess created by eight years of Bush (and eight years of Democratic capitulation) and say ‘I’m going to hope this smiling black Democrat with the Harvard education and the good diction will help make things better.’  No, one doesn’t do that.  One looks long and hard at all the available candidates on the ballot and one decides which one will be most likely to get on that bully pulpit and take that vastly expanded executive power and fight back against the creeping fascism and casino capitalism and rampant imperialism.  One doesn’t use ‘hope’ as a starting point.

But enough about my disgust with the voting habits of the vast majority of my fellow citizens.  We can drone on about that later.  I really sat down to discuss the other class of people for whom hope exists.  This class is small enough to be statistically insignificant.  It consists of persons who see the struggles they have before them; they weigh their options, and they exhaust all human energies and possibilities in their various fights.  These are the few who earn hope.  I am not one of these people, and I don’t know that I’ve met more than a few.

I want to tell you about one whom I never had the chance to meet, but whom I’ve been fortunate to learn about.  First, though, let me tell you why.

About four years or so ago, my union, Local 2, worked out a deal with the City of Chicago that gave all the city’s firefighters and paramedics access to a very expensive full-body scan at HeartScan of Chicago.  Thousands of us took advantage, and I know personally of a few whose lives were saved by the discovery of potentially catastrophic conditions they never would have caught otherwise.  The only item of interest on my scans was a translucent nodule, no bigger than a nickel, on the upper lobe of my left lung.  Not a big deal, or so thought the HeartScan physician who pointed it out to me.  Still, she recommended I take the scan info to my own doctor, which I did.

Dr. Sean D. O’Connor, a cool and competent physician whom I’m lucky to have stumbled across, had the same reaction as the HeartScan doctor.  He didn’t make a big fuss, but recommended letting the experts around the corner at Robert H. Lurie take a look.  I was sent to a particular doctor, an excellent one who’s since severed his affiliation with the Lurie Center and whose name I can’t recall.  That doctor thought it might be nothing, but advised keeping an eye on the nodule; he recommended I return to the center every six months to a year for a fresh scan to watch for any changes.  The case was eventually handed off to a Dr. de Hoyos, who began to discuss the possibility of surgical removal of the nodule.

About nine months or so ago, a Dr. Malcolm DeCamp took over.  The first scan I received under the watch of his team showed a slight increase in the opacity of the nodule, and a slight change in its shape if not its size.  It was time to cut the sucker out.  So I agreed to the surgery, let my wife know what was going on, and so forth.  The surgical plan was as follows: I’d be anesthetized, and then three or more holes would be cut through the left side of my rib cage.  With the assist of a video camera and other tools I can’t imagine, the lung would be deflated and folded over, and a wedge of it containing the offending nodule would be removed.  While I was still out on the table, the wedge would be transported down to a lab for a biopsy to determine if it were cancerous.  If not, I’d be sealed up, reinflated, and sent home either that night or the next morning, and probably back to my normal activities within two weeks.  If it were cancerous, then the surgery would continue with the removal of the top twenty percent of the left lung along with the lymph nodes that drained into that segment.  It would mean a couple more nights in the hospital and a longer recovery, but I’d be technically cancer-free and back to normal eventually.

I tell you this entire story because I want to illustrate that I’m very fortunate.  I have excellent insurance, for one thing; it’s a dirty shame that one has to say that in so wealthy a country, but there it is.  Because of that insurance, and because of having a good union (how many workers can say that, too?  Another shame), I was able to get really expensive early detection of a decidedly non-aggressive cancer; I was able to have the cancer monitored; and finally, I was able to have the cancer removed and have my recovery supervised by one of the finest medical staffs in the world in one of the finest facilities in the world.

So you see, I got off easy, and I got to come home to the same love and support that helped me get through my brief stroll in the park past a cancer that waved hello but was walking briskly and texting and didn’t have time to stop and chat.

Unfortunately, though, early detection and excellent medical care are often not enough, even for some who might have access to some of the material advantages that I’ve had.  I don’t know the percentages, but not all cancers are so fittingly lacking in ambition as was mine.  There’s a reason the word ‘cancer’ can immediately plunge one into mortal fear or at least into thoughts of morbidity.

Now I want to introduce you to Hank Schueler.  I never met Hank, though I was fortunate enough to meet his family.  Hank’s dad Matt told me Hank’s story, and I honestly can’t write this part without weeping from the memory of Matt Schueler telling that story.  So I won’t ruin the story by trying to tell it myself.  I’ll leave that to others who’ve done a much better job of it.  I will say in closing that I’m glad to have met Hank’s family; I’m also grateful to have once been a tiny part of helping raise money in the fight against diseases related to pediatric cancer, grateful because it was a chance to pay tribute to a kid who earned hope, and to the family that earned it with him.

Henry Schueler 41 & 9 Foundation

Ignite the Spirit’s Henry Schueler Tribute

This is me.  This is you.  I’m not referring to the people on the ground being mercilessly and gleefully beaten and stomped.  I’m referring to those administering the wanton abuse.  Sure, they are part of an organization that has received billions of dollars of U.S. ‘aid’ over the years.  Sure, while we were toppling a government that provided its citizens with one of the highest standards of living in the Eastern world, and the most freedom to its female population, we were letting the violent tyranny represented in the video go unchecked.

That is all true, and we as U.S. citizens are partly responsible for that behavior, but the nasty, discouraging thought had little to do with events so far removed.  Behavior such as this has been meted out to dissenters right here in the U.S.  Much of it has been hidden from the masses by the complicity of our corporate media, but enough has gotten through the wall of silence and obfuscation that most of us should understand what’s been done in our name (but on behalf of a very slender segment of the population).

Even the violence and oppression handed out to the Occupy movement isn’t precisely what I’m referring to.  After all, it isn’t anything new.  The ‘Miami Model‘ has been in effect for roughly a decade now, at least.  In fact, the nasty thought piqued by the video above refers to an application of the Miami Model which is now being arranged for my own city next spring.

On a recent day at work, I heard talk of generous amounts of overtime to be offered to a number of fire and police personnel.  There will be federal and probably some military deployments as well, to be sure, as the G20/G8 Summit and the NATO Summit will be held a week apart in Chicago in May.  I’m sure much of the city center will be turned in a police-state fortress, all so that undemocratic organizations can shield themselves from the nonviolent anger and dissatisfaction of representatives of the majorities they refuse to represent.

Our city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is a dear friend of the elite financial interests represented by the G20/G8 contingents, and a close ally and fellow traveler of the neoimperial interests represented by NATO.  So Emanuel will have no trouble securing the many millions of dollars needed to pay for the temporary fortress (even though there’s no money available anywhere to pay our unionized public school teachers).  Even that nastiness isn’t what I find discouraging.

What I find discouraging is that all this money will be spent, all the intimidation and, if possible, violence, will be handed out, and the local and national corporate media will sell it as necessary business as usual.  And you and I will sit there and buy it.  Some of you are my colleagues, some of you are my allies on the street (police officers); you will be the worst, because some of you will put on your uniforms and whatever riot gear and collect the overtime and go out intimidating the protesters and cracking their skulls, and for what?  To defend the interests of some wealthy assholes who are just waiting for the right time to fuck you out of your pensions and benefits?  But you won’t be alone.  The rest of us will sit there, while the kind of brutality in the video above is either implied or acted out before our eyes, and we won’t do shit about it.  In fact, most of us will probably line up a few months later to elect some of the same assholes who have brought us to this point.

We suck, and we deserve what’s happening to our country.  I would like to be able to say that the human race deserves better, but I seriously doubt that.  We may think we can get away with ignoring the brutality being meted out to our fellow human beings, but Planet Earth is warming up to give us what we deserve, even as we shop and entertain ourselves and pretend there’s no price to pay for our catastrophic irresponsibility.

Gingrich was taking your Harley out for a weekend, nothing more

These rubbers are, as you can imagine, largely Republican. They are definitely the sort of people who find the Tea Party compelling; I’m guessing that many motorcycles since I’ve moved have been updated with “Don’t Tread on Me” logos, as well as more Confederate flags, as a talisman to keep the reality that we elected a black President from penetrating their consciousness.

Amanda’s focus on reactionary Harley riders called to mind something I saw during the summer, when I was working at the firehouse near Wrigley Field.  One of my colleagues parked his shiny Harley against the firehouse, and on his vehicle at least two of those black POW/MIA decals were prominently displayed.  If I recall correctly, he was wearing some article of clothing that also bore the logo.  This is a topic I like to revisit periodically, because it is a stark reminder of the amount of vile bullshit that gets elevated to sacred, totemic status in our society.

In Chicago, and I’m guessing in the entire U.S., you are unlikely to pass two or three government buildings (of any level of government)– be they firehouses, post office branches, libraries, or others– without finding at least one flying the POW/MIA flag.  Given the satanically odious motives behind the original POW/MIA campaign, and the epic dishonesty that the campaign and its symbols represent, there are few items more symbolic of our terminal national political illness.

Vietnam & Other American Fantasies

review by Christian Parenti

For example, there’s this.

Then there’s the following, from a Chicago Reader report (by our always excellent local journalism gems, Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky) about local political reluctance to decriminalize marijuana:

The mayor said he was considering policy changes but had concerns about decriminalization. “Other cities that have done this have then had to go back and do corrections because it’s created its own set of problems,” Emanuel said.

A reporter asked him what sort of problems he was talking about. The mayor declined to detail them.

“I’m not going to get into hypotheticals,” he said.

(Emphasis mine.)  Note his first statement, wherein he offers a direct, unambiguously defined reason for his “concerns” (‘concerns,’ a word used by the reporters, here connotes reluctance).  Emanuel mentions “cities,” and he mentions “problems” that required “corrections”; these are common nouns that denote more specific, detailed definitions.  When asked to add such details to his clearly defined construction, the mayor characterizes such specifics as “hypotheticals.”

Now, if you’ve read more than one or two posts of this humble blog, and you’re reasonably fluent in English, and you’ve never been married to me, then chances are you’re going to accept that I’m not completely stupid.  I’m going to give you, dear reader, that same benefit of the doubt.  I’m also going to accept that Rahm Emanuel is not so ignorant of the English language that he can’t tell the difference between hypothesizing and providing specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction. 

If you ask me if I think the sun will rise tomorrow, based on my observation of the sun’s behavior on previous days, then you’re asking for a hypothesis.  If I tell you I know of some days in the past where the sun rose but it was obscured by cloud cover, and you tell me provide a list of such days, you are requesting specifics to a clearly defined evidential construction.  See the difference?

Mayor Emanuel signals his reluctance and offers a clear reason, one that is lacking in specific details.  He declines to give those details, citing a wish to avoid “hypotheticals.”  So that leaves us with three possibilities here: 1) a smart, educated man and skillful politician displayed ignorance or laziness with his use of a very specific noun; 2) he’s skipping a rhetorical step, assuming that listing the problems he’s vaguely cited would lead to a ‘hypothetical’ discussion which he would rather avoid; and 3) he’s being evasive.  I’m leaning toward 3 while recognizing that it’s not mutually exclusive of 2.

Is the mayor’s veracity important here?  If you read the rest of the article, and keep in mind that Emanuel is a highly skilled and seasoned politician who’s worked directly with two of our nation’s most beloved presidential dissemblers, maybe you’ll agree that it is.  Why would Emanuel trouble himself to make a public statement about an important political issue if he weren’t going to actually do anything substantial?

Why, indeed.

America is today the leader of a world-wide antirevolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests.  She now stands for what Rome stood for.  Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.

Arnold Toynbee, 1961[1]

There are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.

Naomi Klein[2]

Coercive violence is a fundamental element of globalization.  Failure to adequately address the phenomenon of coercive violence could result in a reification of globalization’s worst conceivable outcomes.

In order to analyze the integral nature of coercive violence to globalization, it is necessary to place the phenomenon of globalization in its proper historical context.

The analysis will begin with a brief overview of the regional and imperial histories of globalization, and discuss the transition from the last self-identified imperial power—Great Britain—into the Anglo-American/Western European aggregation of nation-states that currently dominates much of the political and economic sphere.  The analysis will proceed to the present, where the U.S. and its Western allies have brought coercive global violence into a new phase.

Definitions of terms

Globalization can be characterized in many different ways, depending on one’s value judgments of the phenomenon.  For the sake of this analysis, a generic, value-neutral definition will suffice:

It is a term used to describe the changes in societies and the world economy that are the result of dramatically increased cross-border trade, investment, and cultural exchange (“Globalization”).

Coercive violence, in the context of this analysis, is a general description of the practical application of organized force.  It can apply to wholesale, industrial levels of violence, such as a Roman invasion and pacification of a rebellious vassal kingdom.  It may also describe a transnational beverage firm collaborating with local paramilitary forces to guard its assets and kill labor organizers (Ruggie).

It is important to stress that these two concepts have evolved not only concurrently, but also integrally.

History of Coercive Violence in Globalization

Rome and the imperial economy

In the 21^st century conception, the Roman Empire is more precisely considered a regional power, not a world power.  There was at least one contemporary regional power that Rome did not command, namely China.  However, allowing for contemporary levels of technology, the reach and grasp of Rome was impressive enough to merit closer examination.

First, it is important to establish a working definition of empires, namely, that they are “political systems based on the actual or threatened use of force to extract surpluses from their subjects” (Woolf 283).  Furthermore, it is important to take only a finite view of Roman history, namely the economic implications that proceed from Woolf’s definition of empire.

As a pre-industrial empire, Rome lacked the capacity to maintain large government institutions.  The economies it ruled were agrarian, and the military and communications technologies it deployed were relatively primitive.  This necessitated time and labor intensive processes.  Given these relative physical limitations, Rome secured power by “promoting a community of interest among elites within the empire, and a sense of imperial membership based on participation in ruler worship and adherence to imperial cultural and symbolic systems” (Woolf 283).  This arrangement was enforced by the one of the most formidable contemporary war machines in recorded history.

This does not mean that the Roman world sustained an integrated market economy akin to that of the global North and West of the 21^st century.  Woolf draws upon historical consensus to theorize that the Roman world probably contained a loosely integrated system of regional economies, and that for most of the empire’s history organized, long-distance exchange was not the norm (283).  Most exchange rarely occurred beyond the regional level (Woolf 289).  However, as Woolf informs,

… the rare degree of integration achieved by the Roman economy in the last two centuries BC was created by imperialism, not the infrastructure of a stable empire…(290).

Great Britain and the Boston Tea Party

“The principle that technologies of work and war move in tandem is well established” (Pieterse 5).  Throughout the history of the British Empire, developments in technologies of transportation, communication, and warfare went through several generations of evolution, as did British innovations and conventions in governance and commerce (“British Empire”).  This analysis will confine its scope to a specific episode in British imperial history.

The 1773 Tea Act allowed “the world’s largest transnational corporation—the East India Company—full and unlimited access to the American tea trade, and exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies” (Hartmann, “Boston Tea Party”).  Since the local importers and small merchants among American colonists were forced to pay the old, high taxes on any tea imported and sold, this granted the East India Company a virtual monopoly.  In addition, the colonists had no say over the passage and implementation of the Tea Act, which promised financial benefits to the Company’s shareholders (including the King and the wealthy English elite).

Thus the famous slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ can be seen to have concrete, economic motivations in addition to more abstract political and ethical foundations.  According to Hartmann, the colonists resented being used as objects of economic exploitation, and they were aware that this was a previously established pattern in America and in other British colonial holdings.  According to George R.T. Hewes, a participant in the ‘Boston Tea Party,’

Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men (qtd. in Hartmann, “Boston Tea Party”).

Hewes goes on to reference a catastrophically lethal famine in Asia that was caused not by drought or a poor harvest, but by the rapacious and oppressive policies of the Crown and the Company.  This perspective lends an existential weight to the insubordinate and militant actions of the colonists, actions that included the destruction of Company inventory as it sat in the harbor.

According to Hartmann, this episode helps explain this clause of the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.”  The revolt against the Tea Act was resistance to transnational corporate hegemony.  When the British attempted to maintain this political and corporate dominance with military force, the colonists fought back.

Cold War and ‘Shock Therapy’: a spectrum of coercion

William Blum writes that its proponents generally present U.S. Cold War foreign policy as “a moral crusade against…a malevolent International Communist Conspiracy” (17).  Throughout the Cold War, certain aspects of the U.S. government deliberately exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union (Blum 18).  Furthermore, it was standing policy to rebuff any Soviet advances at dialing down the simmering hostility (Blum 19).

These policies were enacted in a world gradually digging its way through the mess of post-WWII political and economic upheaval.  There were many people agitating and organizing against miserable living conditions, conditions that were often maintained by governments supported by the U.S. or erstwhile European colonial powers.

Blum compiles a list containing scores of specific U.S. interventions, all involving applications of violence, designed to subvert local governments deemed incompatible with U.S. or Western interests or to prop up U.S.-friendly governments unpopular with local populations (pp. 163-220).  Not every intervention on Blum’s list had a direct economic agenda.  However, they can all be seen as part of a larger trend, a loosely structured program of promoting and enforcing a preferred economic, social, and political global order.  The order preferred by elites in the U.S. and Western Europe was rarely the order preferred by majorities of the populations upon which it was being imposed.  Thus the interventions always required some measure of coercion, either directly or by proxy.

Naomi Klein describes this link between violence and globalization as a logical extension of an economic theory of Milton Friedman.  Friedman argued that, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces change” (qtd. in Klein 6).  Thus it was the duty of capitalism’s architects and custodians to develop alternatives to popular policies, and be ready to implement them when “the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”  It is no coincidence, then, that Friedman put his theory in practice in his capacity as adviser to General Augusto Pinochet, who came to power as part of a 1973 U.S.-sponsored overthrow of Chile’s left-leaning, democratically elected government (Klein 7).

Klein calls Friedman’s prescription “the Shock Doctrine,” and illustrates how many in Chile and the rest of Latin America saw a solid link between the economic “shocks” that mired millions in poverty and the epidemic of violence, oppression, and torture that was directed against those who believed in another way (7).  She quotes Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock” (7)?

As the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, and the U.S. by default became the world’s only remaining superpower, this ‘Shock Doctrine’ would be applied in new ways to a new, and in some ways familiar range of targets.

Maintenance of Western Hegemony

The 1980s were a transitional period for globalization.  As the Soviet Union entered its death throes—marked most dramatically by its disastrous involvement in Afghanistan—the U.S. under the Reagan administration put its designs for global economic hegemony into overdrive.

The original Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization) were given important philosophical changes to their global economic missions.  As it was, U.S. government and corporate influence had dominated the institutions, drawing them away from their original mission of fostering global economic stability and toward furthering U.S. corporate power (Juhasz 52).

Under the influence of the ‘free trade’ disciples of the Reagan era, the World Bank and the IMF moved away from being economic aid organizations and toward being dictatorial neoliberal syndicates.  In the early 1980s, nowhere was this new shift more evident than in the struggle over control of fossil fuels.  According to Antonia Juhasz, “Reagan used the World Bank to force countries to change their laws so that U.S. corporations would gain direct access to their oil (65).”

This heavy-handed approach was by no means wielded solely against oil-producing nations, but nowhere has it been more militantly and brutally applied.

The U.S. conquers Iraq

Behind the translucent veneer of the Bush administration’s stated reasons for invading Iraq was a set of priorities Juhasz labels “the Bush Agenda.”  She sums it up thusly:

The Bush administration used the military invasion of Iraq to oust its leader, replace its government, implement new economic, political, and oil laws, and write a new constitution (7).

The oil revenues of the Middle Eastern countries had largely shielded them from the necessity of signing the demanding and often debilitating trade agreements visited upon developing nations.  The Bush administration’s actions in Iraq demonstrated a willingness to use decisive, wholesale violence to enforce its will.  Several Middle Eastern governments subsequently signed on to trade agreements (Juhasz 8).

Writer Michael Parenti notes that under what Juhasz calls “corporate globalization” (Juhasz 4),

What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws (Parenti 46).

Iraq became an experiment in executing this process on a national scale.  After the initial bombardment of human life and infrastructure was completed, and the military defenses of Iraq were smashed, the process of economic conversion began immediately.  The new U.S. viceroy, Paul Bremer, instituted a regime of economic laws that completely transformed Iraq’s economy.  Overturned and replaced were “existing laws on trade, public services, banking, taxes, agriculture, investment, foreign ownership, media, and oil, among others” (Juhasz 7, 8).  The civil chaos that ensued, and the inability of the shattered, occupied country to repair the catastrophic damage of the invasion, were a direct result of the instability fostered by these new laws.

U.S./NATO overthrow the Libyan government

As of this writing there are conflicting reports, or at least differing accounts, of the nature of Moammar Gaddafi’s overthrow in Libya.  Mahmood Mamdani places the intervention in the larger context of Western involvement in Africa; he claims that Western powers are using an increasingly militarized approach to their attempts to wield political and economic influence on the continent; he offers the contrast of China and India, whose involvement consists primarily of economic and infrastructure investment; he implies that remaining autocratic leaders seek to solidify their positions by entering into strategic military alliance with Western powers while still attempting to engage China economically (DemocracyNow).

Michel Chossudovsky compiles statistics indicating that prior to the uprising Libya boasted some of the highest living standards—measured by food and clean water availability, literacy and education, poverty rates, etc.—and far better conditions for women than other Arab countries.  “Libya is considered to be the Switzerland of the African continent…” (de Vito, qtd. in Chossudovsky).

Now that much of Libya’s renowned public infrastructure—including the Libyan Central Bank—has been damaged or decimated by NATO firepower, the World Bank and the IMF have been asked to “examine the need for repair and restoration of services in the water, energy and transport sectors…and…to support budget preparation and help the banking sector back on to its feet” (Chossudovsky).

Samir Amin suggests that the U.S. and its Western allies seek to establish the U.S. military command for Africa (Africom, currently headquartered in Germany) in Libya, since African countries had refused to allow its establishment on the continent (cited in Ahmed).  James Petras submits that the ‘Arab Spring,’ the recently initiated series of popular rebellions against autocratic Arab governments, encouraged the U.S. and NATO to overthrow Gaddafi as “a message from the imperialists to the newly aroused masses of North Africa, Asia and Latin America: The fate of Libya awaits any regime which aspires to greater independence and questions the ascendancy of Euro-American power” (qtd. in Ahmed).  The two preceding views are not mutually exclusive, and the available evidence supports them.

This developing episode in Libya represents not a departure so much as an adaptation.  The Obama administration has chosen to enforce Western economic hegemony without directly occupying the country; it has sought and obtained the direct material and diplomatic support of other Western powers; it has been careful to limit (or at least obfuscate) its armed footprint on the ground.  In this sense, the overthrow of Gaddafi is a synthesis of Cold World proxy interventions and the overt militancy of the ‘Bush Agenda.’  It is an evolution of coercive violence in service of global economic and political goals, and the lack of official international resistance may well be interpreted as a green light for more of the same.

Violent Coercion on the Home Front

The ‘Miami Model’

In November 2003, as trade ministers from dozens of countries met to plan the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, tens of thousands of protesters from around the world gathered about the city of Miami.  Those largely peaceful protesters were met with an organized response of oppressive and excessive police violence as law enforcement jurisdictions from across the state of Florida had been assembled and organized under the auspices of securing the conference.  Fittingly, the budget for the security apparatus was covered with $8.5 million from an $87 billion Iraq spending bill (Scahill).  According to independent journalist Jeremy Scahill, protesters and “non-embedded” journalists were subjected to brutal police violence, often when assembled with the expressed consent of the very law enforcement authorities that gave the order to assault them.

This episode is not unique.  Similar security apparatuses accompanied nearly every major subsequent U.S. political event (“Miami model”), often with similar outcomes.  At the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, the police apparatus was particularly brutal.  The excuse for the heavy-handed tactics was the violence of alleged ‘anarchists.’  However, photographic evidence and numerous eyewitness accounts suggest that the ‘anarchists’—known as the ‘Black Bloc’—were predominantly if not exclusively undercover police agents (Burrows).  Furthermore, the majority of police violence occurred at times and places where the supposed anarchists were not active.

The willingness of states to apply such violence against their own citizens—often in response to actions staged to justify the response—is not a new phenomenon.  It bears scrutiny, however, given the context (organized resistance to corporate globalization) in which it is regularly applied.

Other Viewpoints

Not everyone accepts or recognizes the strong correlation between globalization and coercive violence.  Griswold claims that the global liberalization of trade promotes democracy.  However, his analysis relies upon specious evidence and wishful thinking.  For example, he submits the following:

During the decades of the Cold War, Republican and Democratic presidents alike in the United States advocated international trade as a necessary tool for promoting human rights and democracy abroad, and ultimately a more peaceful world (25).

This construction may be technically true; U.S. presidents may well have been vociferous in their advocacy of the utopian benefits of liberalized international trade.  However, beyond a strictly literal interpretation of ‘advocacy’ there are significant chunks of history (including the Vietnam War and the long list of interventions cited by Blum) that contradict Griswold.

Griswold also claims that thirty years of economic liberalization have brought democracy to Latin America (28).  This turns history on its head, ignoring the brutal, U.S.-sponsored subversion and suppression of democracy that was normally applied as a foundation for implementing widely unpopular liberalization schemes.

Erich Weede conducts an exhaustive analysis of the links between trade liberalization and peace.  He claims that democracies, by virtue of their superior transparency and institutional constraints, are far less likely than autocracies to initiate war, if for no other reason than to avoid crushing debt (29).  He also claims that high per capita incomes (an assumed byproduct of successful trade liberalization) promote democracy (31).

The parameters of Weede’s analysis (interactions between sovereign states) leave a multitude of Cold War interventions (such as cited by Blum and Klein) outside of scrutiny.  Furthermore, his theory is jeopardized, if not completely inverted, by the U.S. enterprise in Iraq.  A wealthy democracy (the U.S.) waged war on a non-offending smaller state for primarily economic ends and incurred colossal debt; for all of this democracy’s purported transparency, a majority of its citizens believed the blatant falsehood—promoted by agents of the state and repeated faithfully in corporate media—that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (USA Today).

Conclusions

There has been a wealth of discussion and study aimed at improving, democratizing, and bringing more transparency and fairness to the various processes that compose globalization.  In February 2004, the World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization released an exhaustive and comprehensive report on the current and developing state of globalization, and it offered a detailed set of guidelines for improving the process (“A fair globalization”).

Within these groundbreaking diagnoses and prescriptions must be recognition that the current incarnation of globalization is dominated by a natural outgrowth of imperialism (Parenti 46).  It has used and will continue to use coercive violence to protect, maintain, and expand itself even as it evolves.

C.K. Prahalad warns that, “all the development models we’ve used in the West are inappropriate for dealing with global development in the long term.”  The advances in communications technology will allow billions of emerging consumers to see what another billion has been enjoying, and this knowledge will alter their aspirations and consumption patterns (Prahalad).  In addition to the ecological strain of such growth, it is logical to presume that it will lead also to widespread social and political unrest.

The political and economic elites of the world have clearly established a propensity for protecting the status quo through coercive violence; it is vital that citizens of all countries recognize the danger of this and work to demand more productive policies from their governments.   The World Commission’s prescription for emphasis on democracy, social equity, respect for human rights and the rule of law should be the central, guiding ethos (“Module 5”).

WORKS CITED

“A fair globalization: creating opportunities for all.” The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, Apr 2004. Web. 5 Oct 2011. <http://www.ilo.org/fairglobalization/lang–en/index.htm>.

Ahmed, Rahnuma. “NATO bombings, al-Qaeda and the Arab Spring.” Shahidul News. N.p., 09 Oct 2011. Web. 9 Oct 2011. <http://www.shahidulnews.com/2011/10/invasion-of-libya-i/>.

Blum, William.  Rogue state: a guide to the world’s only superpower.  Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2005.  Print.

“British Empire.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire>.

Burrows, Terry. “The Toronto G20 Riot Fraud: Undercover Police engaged in Purposeful Provocation.” GlobalResearch.ca. Centre for Research on Globalization, 27 Jun 2010. Web. 26 Oct 2011. <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19928>.

Chossudovsky, Michel. “Destroying a Country.” globalresearch.ca. Centre for Research on Globalization, 20 Sep 2011. Web. 8 Oct 2011. <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26686>.

“Globalization for Better or for Worse: Civilization and the Environment .” Photograph. C.K. Prahalad. 2007. Web. 19 Oct 2011. <http://fora.tv/2007/07/06/Globalization_and_the_Environment>.

Griswold, Daniel T. “Globalization promotes democracy.” Globalization. Ed. David Haugen and Rachael Mach. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2010. 22-36.

“Human rights and transnational corporations.” Video. John Ruggie. New York: United Nations, 2009. Web. 21 Oct 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th88pvZYa-4>.

Johnson, Chalmers. Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

Juhasz, Antonia. The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. 1. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. 1st. ed. New York: Metropolitan, 2007. Print.

“Mahmood Mamdani on Libya, an African Union in “Crisis” & the Outlook for South Sudan.” DemocracyNow. 14 Sep 2011. Web. 25 Oct 2011. <http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/14/mahmood_mamdani_on_libya_an_african>.

“Miami model.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model>.

“Module 5.” A fair globalization: creating opportunities for all. The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, Apr 2004. Web. 16 Oct 2011. <http://www.ilo.org/legacy/english/fairglobalization/download/toolkit/module5.pdf>.

Parenti, Michael. “Globalization undermines democracy.” Globalization. Ed. David Haugen and Rachael Mach. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2010. 37-49.

“Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link.” USA Today 06 Sep 2003. n. pag. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. <http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06-poll-iraq_x.htm>.

Scahill, Jeremy. “The Miami Model.” CounterPunch. N.p., 24 Nov 2003. Web. 25 Oct 2011. <http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/11/24/the-miami-model/>.

Weede, Erich. “Balance of Power, Globalization, and the Capitalist Peace.” Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Liberty: Philippine Office. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Oct 2011. <http://www.fnf.org.ph/downloadables/Balance of Power, Globalization and Capitalist Peace.pdf>.

Woolf, Greg. “Imperialism, Empire, and the Integration of the Roman Economy.” World Archaeology. 23.3 (1992): 283-93. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/124763>.

I’ll let Morris Berman say the smart words at which I’m only hinting:

As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.”

Read the whole thing; it’s priceless.

Anyway, in my Facebook meanderings I found this article:

Private Prisons Spend Millions on Lobbying to Put More People in Jail

JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.

According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.

This is really bad, and it reminded me of this:

‘Cash for Kids’ judge took $1 m kickback from private jail builder to lock children up

A former judge has been convicted of taking a $1million kickback from the builder of a juvenile jail in the notorious ‘cash for kids’ scandal.

Mark Ciavarella sent hundreds of children and teenagers to the private prison for minor crimes after being given the money by the company which ran it.

Some of the children jailed were as young as 10 and at least one killed themselves because the excessive sentences ruined their lives.

If you read the whole article, you’ll learn that this piece of shit judge got only 13 years for what he did.  Thirteen measly years, of which he’ll probably serve only a fraction in some minimum-security country club facility.  This for ruining the lives of dozens if not hundreds of middle-class white kids.  Is it any surprise that what the private prisons are doing is not only legal but probably very popular among the 1%?  (After all, the inmates the lobbying prison owners expect to receive are going to be predominantly brown and black, and decidedly un-middle class, so why should any political backlash be expected?)

Morris has more to say about the ‘hustling’ ethos:

Consider the fact that every religion, and every civilization worth the name, has as its central tenet the notion that you are, in fact, your brother’s keeper. But the ‘hustling’ way of life enshrines just the opposite: it says that virtue consists of personal success in an opportunistic environment, and that if you can screw the other guy on your way to the top, more power to you.

To where might this lead?

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.”

…

Unless the Wall Street protests manage to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They eat each other” is going to be our epitaph.

I juxtapose the story of the corrupt judge and the for-profit prison lobbying for a reason: the former is clearly not legal, though the perpetrator got away with it so long because it was just a degree away from the latter, which is legal, and he probably might not have been caught, or at least not criminally charged, had he not been so greedy and arrogant to exploit a demographic that most of the public would clearly identify as having been wronged.

All this takes place in a society– such as it can be called a society– that still glorifies the accumulation of wealth without scruples, and even passes laws and regulations to make the most brazen and blatant thievery legal.  Even in the wake of the real material devastation this culture of legalized theft has wrought, there can’t be found the political will to eradicate or even curb it.   This is because, as Morris Berman cites John Steinbeck, ‘in the United States the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”’  If I support a system that penalizes that rich asshole for stealing the system blind, then I won’t get my chance to steal.  It’s a formula for certain death.

Is the Manufactured Crisis at the Post Office a Push Toward Privatization?

I’ve mentioned this before somewhere in the past, but I believe it more relevant now: I once heard a joke, told to my face, by a white colleague at a former job.  It goes as follows:

Q: What do Florsheim Shoes and the U.S. Postal Service have in common?

A: 20,000 pairs of black loafers

So if you’re wondering now if I am fixated on race, if I’m imputing racial motivations to an issue that is more generically political and economic, allow me to clarify.  I’m not suggesting that the move to destroy the unionized, lower-middle-class labor force of the USPS is entirely racially motivated.  I’m suggesting the saboteurs understand that racial politics make the destruction an easier sell.

While we must never forget that racism is a core element of conservative politics, I don’t believe this dynamic excludes putative liberals.  They may not use the word ‘nigger,’ not even in their thoughts, but when they see this USPS story in corporate media, what do you think will stand out in their minds?  The letter carrier they rarely if ever see, who delivers their mail day in and day out, faithfully upholding the United States Postal Service creed?  The workers they’ll never see, tirelessly sorting mountains of mail for hours on end (or something like that)?  Or will they envision the sassy black bitch who didn’t smile at them after they waited twenty-five minutes in line trying to mail a package in late December?

My money’s on the latter.  While the efforts of the Wall Street protesters are vital and admirable, I believe that the majority of putative liberals are Oprah-liberals and hedge fund Democrats.  This doesn’t mean most of them are wealthy, but it does mean they’ve bought into the same ‘free market’ nonsense as have the right-wingers.  As reflected in their voting choices, they are unwilling to seriously challenge the neoliberal bipartisan oligarchy that runs our country.  A few are deeply invested in it, yes, but the rest are just hanging on for the diminishing consumerist ‘benefits.’  So when they don’t see massive, nationwide prosecutions of mortgage fraud or securities fraud or the like, they don’t even shrug.  Conversely, when they see thousands of hard-working public employees being scammed out of their livelihoods by a craven Congress beholden to reactionary antilabor interests, they don’t blink.  Serves those ‘black loafers’ right, I guess.

"Don't cry, sis. At least we're not niggers."

Americans turn on themselves first, and then on each other.  What we have is worse than learned helplessness.  It’s learned self-loathing.  To put it crudely, we are taught to hate not just the nigger over there, but also the nigger within.  Ironically, and almost paradoxically, it is this largely racially motivated self-hatred– ‘you’re okay as long as you’re better than a nigger’– that precipitates the paralysis or the badly misdirected activism (e.g. teabagging)*: the fear and loathing of all things black, including the internalized states of mind and being that have morphed out of the concept of the despised and feared African descendant, creates a cognitive dissonance that prevents people from rising up against their true systemic antagonists.  The term ‘class warfare,’ so bluntly wielded by right-wing mouthpieces, is an example of the exploitation of this dynamic.  To suggest that the majority of working people (i.e. non-wealthy whites) should organize against their betters (i.e. predominantly white rich people) is to suggest that those working people must also identify with others who have been put upon (i.e. non-wealthy brown and black people).  In other words, to fight against the traditionally white power structure, they must become niggers.  For at least a healthy plurality of working white people, that is a sin worse than remaining enslaved to a worsening status quo that is manipulated against them by the traditionally white power structure.
Keep in mind that most people (especially those most involved in its perpetuation) would probably not articulate this phenomenon in such stark terms as I’m using here, and I’m not suggesting that the phenomenon is purely racial in structure and character.  I’m just trying to cut to the core in as few words as possible.  You know how difficult that is for me.

*It’s also part of what drove countless thousands of poor, put-upon Southern laborers to take up arms to protect the profits and bloated lifestyles of their aristocratic Confederate countrymen, instead of uniting with their black fellow laborers to overthrow the plantation economy and culture.