James van Luik
Publisher & Editor
& Compiler
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Tuesday, February 15th,
2005
Volume 4, No. 3
4Articles, 12 Pages
[Editor's
note: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population
across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit
countries, while denying it any employment in our country….
Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor
must be carried out discretely and circumspectly." Theodor
Herzl, 1895.
Editor's
note: "I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the
final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for
a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for
instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of
America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a
wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger
race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it
that way, has come in and taken their place." Winston
Churchill, 1937.
Editor's
note: "I favor partition of the country because when we
become a strong power after the establishment of the state, we
will abolish partition and spread throughout all of
Palestine." David Ben-Gurion, 1938.]
1. The Clash
of Fundamentalisms
3. Budget
Attacks America's Majority
1. THE CLASH OF FUNDAMENTALISMS
BY
TARIQ ALI
Tragedies
are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but
actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and
global. The events of 11 September 2001 are no exception. There
exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about who ordered the
hits on New York and Washington or when the plan was first
mooted. (Editor's note: This in spite of the fact that all
the major and minor intelligence services in the world examined
the possibilities.) A torrent of images and descriptions has made
these the most visible, the most global and the best-reported
acts of violence of the last fifty years.
I
want to say something of the setting, of the history that
preceded these events, of a world that is treated virtually as a
forbidden subject in an increasingly parochial culture that
celebrates the virtues of ignorance, promotes a cult of stupidity
and extols the present as a process without an alternative,
implying that we all live in a consumerist paradise. A world in
which disappointment breeds apathy and, for that reason, escapist
fantasies of every sort are encouraged from above. The growing
crisis in Argentina, a symbol of the dead-end that
market-fundamentalism had reached, came to a head on 5 September
2001. It was ignored. A multi-class uprising followed. Four
presidents fell within the space of fortnight.
The
complacency of this world was severely shaken by the events of 11
September. What took place – a carefully planned terrorist
assault on the symbols of US military and economic power –
was a breach in the security of the North American mainland, an
event neither feared nor imagined by those who devise war-games
for the Pentagon. The psychological blow was unprecedented. The
subjects of the Empire had struck back.
I
want to ask why so many people in non-Islamic parts of the world
were unmoved by what took place and why so many celebrated, in
the chilling phrase of Osama bin Laden, an 'America struck by
almighty Allah in its vital organs'. In the Nicaraguan capital,
Managua, people hugged each other in silence. In Porto Alegre, in
the deep south of Brazil, a large concert hall packed with young
people erupted in anger when a visiting Black jazz musician from
New York insisted on beginning his performance with a rendering
of 'God Bless America'. The kids replied with chants of 'Osama,
Osama!' The concert was cancelled. There were celebrations on the
streets of Bolivia. From Argentina the Mothers who had been
demonstrating for years to discover how and when the local
military had 'disappeared' their children refused to join the
officially orchestrated mourning. In Greece the government
suppressed the publication of opinion polls that showed a large
majority actually in favour of the hits, and football crowds
refused to observe the two-minute silence.
In
Beijing the news came too late in the night for anything more
than a few celebratory fireworks, but in the week that followed
the reaction became clearer. While the Politburo dithered for
over twenty-four hours, Hsinhua, the official Chinese news
agency, put out a short video of the 11 September footage
complete with Hollywood music so that the moment could be
relished at leisure. A second video mixed images of the events
with footage from King Kong and other disaster movies.
Beijing students interviewed by the New Yorker spoke
openly of their delight. Some of them reminded the shocked
journalist of the lack of response in the West when NATO planes
had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Only six Chinese had
been killed compared to the three thousand in New York, but the
students insisted that for them the six were as important as the
three thousand.
The
necessity to explain these reactions does not mean justifying the
atrocity of 11 September. It is an attempt to move beyond the
simplistic argument that 'they hate us, because they're jealous
of our freedoms and our wealth'. This is simply not the case.
We
have to understand the despair, but also the lethal exaltation,
that drives people to sacrifice their own lives. If Western
politicians remain ignorant of the causes and carry on as before,
there will be repetitions. Moral outrage has some therapeutic
value, but as a political strategy it is useless. Lightly
disguised wars of revenge waged in the heat of the movement are
not much better. To fight tyranny and oppression by using
tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and
ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless,
will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful
democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.
Capitalism
has created a single market, but without erasing the distinctions
between the two worlds that face each other across a divide that
first appeared in the eighteenth and became institutionalized in
the nineteenth century. Most of the twentieth century witnessed
several attempts to transcend this division through a process of
revolutions, wars of national liberation and a combination of
both, but in the end capitalism proved to be more cunning and
more resilient. Its triumph has left the first of these worlds as
the main repository of wealth and the principal wielder of
uncontrolled military power. The second world, with Cuba the only
exception, is governed by elites that either serve or seek to
mimic the first. This closure of politics and economics produces
fatal consequences. A disempowered people is constantly reminded
of its own weakness. In the West a common response is to sink
into the routines that dominate everyday life. Elsewhere in the
world people become flustered, feel more and more helpless and
nervous. Anger, frustration and despair multiply. They can no
longer rely on the state for help. The laws favour the
rich: to the more desperate amongst them, in search of a more
meaningful existence or simply to break the monotony, begin to
live by their own laws. Willing recruits will never be in short
supply. The propaganda of the deed – the homage paid by the
weak to the strong – will endure, It is the response of
atomized individuals to a world that no longer listens, to
politicians who have become interchangeable, to corporations
one-eyed in the search for profits and global media networks
owned by the selfsame corporations and locked into a relationship
of mutual dependence with the politicians. This is the
existential misery that breeds insecurity and fosters deadly
hatreds. If the damage is not repaired, sporadic outbursts of
violence will continue and intensify.
Acts
of violence depend neither on the will of an individual leader,
however charismatic, nor on the structure of a single
organization, the existence of one country or the fanaticism of a
sinister religion, its believers fuelled by the vision of a
glorious afterlife. The violence, unfortunately, is systemic. It
assumes varied forms in different parts of the globe. Nor is it
the case that the bulk of this violence is direct against the US.
Religious fanatics of all hues often brutalize co-religionists
whose purity is suspect or who are not as vigorous in their
search for God and, as a result, are more critical of
superstitions or empty and meaningless rituals.
There is a universal truth that pundit and politician need to acknowledge: slaves and peasants do not always obey their masters. Time and time again, in the upheavals that have marked the world since the days of the Roman empire, a given combination of events has yielded a totally unexpected eruption. Why should it be any different in the twenty-first century?
Just
to move the subject to that of remembering since I've written an
entire book which concludes with the September 11th
tragedy I would like to add that my background was a fortunate
one. So to avoid all possible misunderstandings, a brief
confession is in order. Religious beliefs have played no part in
my own life. From the age of five or six I was an agnostic. At
twelve I became a staunch atheist and, like many of the friends I
grew up with, have remained one ever since. But I was brought up
in that culture and it has enriched my life. It is perfectly
possible to be part of a culture without being a believer.
The
historian Isaac Deutscher used to refer to himself as a
non-Jewish Jew, identifying himself with a long tradition of
intellectual skepticism, symbolized by Spinoza, Freud and Marx. I
have thought a great deal about this and have, on occasion,
described myself as a non-Muslim Muslim, but the appellation
doesn't quite fit. It has an awkward ring to it. This is not to
suggest that the House of Islam lacks its secular intellectuals
and artists. The last century alone produced Nazim Hikmet, Faiz
Ahmed Faiz, Abdelrehman Munif, Mahmud Darwish, Fazil Iskander,
Naguib Mahfouz, Nizar Qabbani, Pramoeda Ananta Toer,
Djibril Diop Mambety amongst many others. But these are poets,
novelists, film-makers. They have no equivalents in the social
sciences. Critiques of religion are always implicit. Intellectual
life has become stunted, making Islam itself a static and
backward-looking religion.
I
was raised in Lahore with its narrow streets and lanes and
bazaars which specialized in different commodities and wares
including food. During the partition no members of my family were
killed. We were the lucky ones. I never heard screams or saw
blood, and as for the stories, they all came later.
Jawaharlal
Nehru's romantic nationalism portrayed independence as a
long-delayed 'tryst with destiny', but even he never imagined
that the tryst would drown in blood. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the
founder of Pakistan, genuinely believed that the new state would
be a smaller version of secular India. Jinnah was shaken by the
orgy of barbarism though Gandhi alone paid the price. He was
assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic. That past is
corroding the present and rotting the future. The political heirs
of the hanged Godse have shoved aside the children of Nehru and
Gandhi. Today they exercise power in New Delhi. Politics is being
enveloped by the poisonous fog of the religious world. History,
unlike the poets of the subcontinent, is not usually prone to
sentiment.
The
price of separation was high. Two million dead. Eleven million
refugees. Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the most gifted Urdu writers
of the subcontinent, wrote a four-page masterpiece entitled
"Toba Tek Singh', set in the lunatic asylum in Lahore
at the time of Partition. When whole cities are being ethnically
cleansed, how can the asylums escape? The Hindu and Sikh lunatics
are told that they will be transferred to institutions in India.
The inmates rebel. They hug each other and weep. They have to be
forced on to the trucks waiting to transport them to India. One
of them, a Sikh, is so overcome by rage that when the border is
reached, he refuses to move and dies on the demarcation line
which divides the new Pakistan from old India. When the real
world is overcome by insanity normality only exists in the
asylum. The lunatics have a better understanding of the crime
that is being perpetrated than the politicians who agreed to it.
A
year later, in 1948, a different but comparable process was to
transform the Arab world. Another confessional state, Israel, was
brought into being. Once again the particularist defeated the
universal. In the case of both Pakistan and Israel, the founding
fathers were far removed form confessional politics. Mohammed Ali
Jinnah was a known agnostic, who broke most the taboos of his
religion. Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self proclaimed
atheists. Yet religion was used as a central motif in the
creation of these two states against the wishes of
fundamentalists. The Jamaat-e-Islami and its Jewish counterparts
opposed the formation of these states. The former rapidly
adjusted its position. The latter has remained hostile and often
shown a far greater sympathy for the dispossessed Palestinians
than its secular counterparts.
The
scale of deaths in Palestine was not the same as in South Asia,
but the aggressive and ruthless brutality utilized to drive the
Palestinians out of their villages and off their lands created a
wound that could never heal. Despite the horrors of Partition,
none of the refugees were left stateless or homeless. They were
accommodated in India or Pakistan, and in many cases received a
degree of compensation for lost property.
The
Palestinians expelled by the Zionist settlers became people
without a state, destined to spend their lives in exile or in the
debilitating conditions of refugee camps. None of this had much
impact in Pakistan till the triumph of Gamal Abdel Nasser in
Egypt. It was when Israel joined Britain and France to invade
Egypt in 1956 that I first registered what this new state in the
Middle East meant for the region. Till then memories of Judeocide
had led one to ignore or underplay the plight of the
Palestinians.
I
became aware of the scale of the catastrophe for the first time
while visiting the Palestinian camps in Jordan and Syria in 1967,
a few weeks after the Six Day War. I was deeply affected by the
wounds inflicted on Palestinian children, the conditions in which
the refugees were compelled to live and the stories that poured
out of the mothers, sisters and wives. None of the women with
whom I spoke at the camps was veiled and only a few had covered
their heads. It was then that I thought seriously for the first
time of the dual tragedy that had taken place. The sufferings of
European Jewry, from the pogroms in tsarist Russia to the
slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Treblinka, were the
responsibility of bourgeois civilization. The Palestinian Arabs
were being made to pay for these crimes, while the West was
arming Israel and paying it 'conscience money'.
Years
later I was recording a conversation with Edward Said in New
York. We agreed that 1917 had been the year that defined the
twentieth century. For me the formative event was the Russian
Revolution, for him the Balfour Declaration. The collapse of the
first and the triumph of the second were somehow also linked to
what took place in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001.
BY
ROBERT O'HARROW, JR.
AMY
GOODMAN: Well this is quite a frightening book, No Place to
Hide. Why don't you start at the beginning? What exactly is
happening today?
ROBERT
O'HARROW, JR. Well, we will start at the beginning. It starts, in
a sense, in the 1990s. It goes along with the explosion in
computing power. Everybody knows how cheap and fast and powerful
our home computers have become. The same thing happened probably
at an even more accelerated rate in the information industry, so
that in the 1990s, these private companies were able to collect
literally billions of records. It's hard to believe, but it's an
amount of information that few people can really reckon. And they
did it supposedly – well, actually – primarily to
target us for better marketing, to make services efficient and
convenient for us. And to jump forward a little bit, after 9/11
when the government was anxious to prevent another terror attack
and we really didn't know what was going to happen next, the
information services jumped into the fray, and offered their help
and the government reached out to them. And so we had a marriage
of the data revolution in which is what I call it, and the
Homeland Security initiatives. The result was, in effect, the
jump-starting of a national surveillance system, or a security
industrial complex if you will.
AG:
Bob O'Harrow, talk about what the government and companies know
when you use your cell phone?
RO:
Well, the way this works is that as we go through our lives we
leave more and more – we're like comets in a way, we leave a
long trail of data behind us. Most of us won't, don't worry about
it or think about it, because it's routine and the information
seems banal because who cares about us, right? When you use your
cell phone, you leave a record of when you made the call, who you
called, how long you were on the phone, and where roughly you
were at the time. The location of the cell phone is becoming more
and more precise. So, in some places it might be up to a mile. In
some cities it might be a few blocks. But there's a general
location When you use your ATM card, you're leaving a record
obviously where you were, when you used it, the fact that it was
you. There's often a video camera shot of you at that location
which we'll get back to in a little bit. But more than that, the
banks , as a result of the PATRIOT Act, have a legal mandate.
They're required to watch that transaction, and so they are using
artificial intelligence to check whether that's really you using
it, to check whether you have ties to unsavory people, to look,
at the patterns of your financial activity to see if maybe you're
trying to perpetuate money laundering, or if you have ties to
terrorism finance. So if there are any suspicious signs at all,
they're sending reports to a very little known branch of the
Treasury Department, which is creating data mine of all of the
reports. There are many, many of them now. And they share them
with law enforcement across the country, local, state, and
federal law enforcement as well as intelligence agencies.
When
you go to the grocery store and use the discount card when you go
through an automatic toll booth ; when you call online to get a
sweater or pair of jeans; or if you have an adventurous marriage
and you buy something fun to use privately with your spouse or
your mate, believe it or not, all of that stuff is swept up
somewhere, and more and more is available to the information
companies to get to know you better, so to speak, or to share or
resell.
Now,
the government doesn't really care about all I that, but it is
routinely tapping billions of records about where you have lived
in your entire adult life. I mean, I'm talking every house and
apartment, all of the phone numbers that you have had, the cars
that you have owned. It can find links between you and me, for
example. These can show, by looking into these billions of
records, how we're related. If we know somebody who knew somebody
that shared an apartment with somebody we have in common. And
they're using these systems really, I believe, earnestly, to
protect us. I have talked to – I have spent time with Viet
Dinh, the author of the Patriot Act, John Poindexter, lots of
counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence guys, as well as with
these private company officials. And I do honestly get the
feeling that there is an earnest desire to tap all of this
information to protect us. But we all know, we have either heard
the great Brandeis quote directly or we know this in our guts,
which is that we shouldn't necessarily trust rulers – we all
fear evil-minded rulers, but the real threat in many ways comes
from people who are earnest or zealous, but not necessarily
completely aware of the ramifications of what they're doing.
AG:
You mentioned John Poindexter, Total Information Awareness, that
people pretty much beat back, or so people thought. There was
such an open revolt across the political spectrum, the idea of
John Ashcroft and John Poindexter recruiting 20 million Americans
to spy on each other, the Fed Ex person the person who delivers
your mail to take a sneak and peek, and if you see something
funny, report back. But when did this actually start, and in
fact, are they really doing it just by another name?
RO:
I did spend a lot of time with John Poindexter, and in No
Place to Hide, I think people will be surprised at my
finding, and I like to think of myself as a pretty tough-minded
guy, there's a human person here. He is very, very earnest
about trying to help the US, but of course, he is a deeply
zealous patriot, and he has a view of the world that included
thinking about privacy. But in any case he's a human person,
somebody that I think we need to take on as human, not sort of as
the boogeyman that a lot of people made him out to be. What
happened with the Information Awareness Office that he headed at
the Defense Department was that people sort of recognized the
scope of the ambition of the government, and as a consequence,
congress undercut the funding, because they didn't trust him
because of his role in Iran Contra and the Reagan administration.
And I won't go into details about that, but I think people
recognized the scandal And they also didn't trust the idea that
there was going to be this all-seeing office collecting
information about people around the world with what they felt was
very little oversight. Now, the thing that's really interesting
here is that I have spoken to somebody that was working very
closely with John Poindexter at a private company called SAIC.
This guy was actually the fellow who invented the concept of
Total Information Awareness, and it happened back in the Clinton
administration in 1999. And this guy on the record in the book
and on tape for that matter, said that in fact, after Poindexter
left the post that interest in the intelligence community
actually increased, and that he was giving more briefings than
ever on the concepts and technology that lay behind their
thinking of this system.
That's
one thing and the other thing is that the program may be gone, as
I say, but it's not forgotten. Components of it are very much
alive in the black world, in the classified world. And there are
components of it that were killed but continue in other agencies
so that you see there's a program called HS-ARPA, (Homeland
Security Advance Research Projects Agency.) They're pursuing
exactly some of the same things that Poindexter was. There's a
data mining operation at the FBI that very people have paid
attention to. The CIA has a program that's similar, and of
course, the NSA is pursuing a program that involves massive
amounts of data. So, I would say that the notion of Total
Information Awareness being dead, a lot of people have talked
about it, it's still alive, but in fact, I think I have
documented pretty clearly for the first time the extent of the
research continuing.
AG:
I've read in your book about embedding chips in people's bodies;
is this really, really so?
RO:
Yeah. There are R.F.I. – People will recognize that their
dogs have these R.F.I.D. chips in them in case they go missing.
And in some places it's a requirement. You have to have this
thing, and it's injected in, and it's a chip that's embedded
under the skin. Well, there's a company that has started doing
this now for a number of different reasons. And it's kind of
funny, they argue that it's to contain medical information and
they argue that it – if you put it in your children, if they
go missing, that it will help you find them more quickly. But
their reality is – and I know this because I've reported on
it, is that it's moving toward a general identity system where,
if you have that on your – embedded in your skin or on an
i.d. card, you're going to be able to get through the line
whether it's at work or the airport and such eventually more
quickly than the people who choose not to do it just as you chose
not to have this radiation infusion, whatever that was. That cost
you time. It made things inconvenient, because you'd opted not to
do it. In the same way, if you choose not to have the R.F.I.D. on
a card or embedded in your skin, you're not gong to get through
the fast line.
Now
biometrics. It's the same sort of thing. I would argue in our
lifetimes, we're going to have to share our fingerprints on i.d.
cards and electronically to get into facilities, to go through
the airport, to get into buildings. And that's just a fact of
life. It's – a biometric is an immutable characteristics
like a fingerprint, your face, your voice. These are things that,
for the most part, people can't mimic. And it's an identity
system. And the question isn't the use of the biometric, because
the reality is biometrics could actually help prevent identity
theft because it's hard to imitate someone's face to take on that
identity. But once you have an identity system like that, that
– where a biometric is used universally whether it's your
fingerprint or face print, once again it, makes – it creates
enormous opportunities for private companies to track you, or to
watch you for – you know, mercantile purposes in ways that
weren't' possible before.
My
argument is: How can we adopt the one which could help us without
having rules to limit the use of the other which is the tracking
part of it? Why do I say that? It's a very simple, a very
old-fashioned idea. In a free society, we want people to be as
nonconformist as possible. We want people to sort of feel free to
express political opinions that are unpopular. We want them to be
artistic. We want them to, you know just be themselves. When you
have a sense of being watched, a watched society where biometrics
are used to watch everywhere you go, where your data is picked
up, at some point we begin to realize in a way that we haven't to
date how much we're being watched and there'll be the people who
don't care, and they'll do whatever; but the reality is that the
rest of us are going to feel this chill that maybe if we misstep,
we could be taken away for questioning, that – you know it
might be recorded that we did something foolish. And so, to avoid
embarrassment or those kinds of questions, or the sense that
we're somehow suspect, we're going to all become a lot more
conformist, which I think – I know it seems amorphous, but I
find that tragic idea.
AG:
Robert O'Harrow tell us who is Hank Asher?
Well,
Thank you for asking about Hank. I spent a fair amount of time
with him, and he's an amazing character. Just in purely in terms
of readability (to kind of plug the book here for a second) we
ended up talking about computers and data and government power
and all of that, but at root here is you have these amazing
characters, and their stories that help understand this data
revolution that we're going through. Hank Asher was a data
pioneer. And he invented two systems now that have helped change
the landscape of law enforcement surveillance and the delivery of
information about Americans. He created the system called D.B.T.
that was sold to Choicepoint that was used in the Florida
election. And he started out with almost nothing in the early
1990s and created a system that collected – when he sold his
system and became wealthy in the late 1990s, it had 8 billion
records. Well, now, D.B.T. is part of Choicepoint which of
course, has something like 19 billion or 20 billion records.
He
also, after 9/11, had a company called Seismic Intelligence. Its
name was Seisint, and it created a system called the matrix. A
lot of people would have heard about the matrix, because it,
for the first time to my knowledge, combined criminal
investigative records and confidential investigative records from
police and law enforcement and driver records and photographs
with these 20 billion records that, you know, showed where we
lived and the cars we owned and the assets that we have; and it
did it in a way where I could make a query, if I were a copy,
that had a partial license plate, a description of, you know,
that I'm a white guy with – six foot with brown hair, and a
general location, and come up with everybody that fit that
description within the snap of a finger. It was an amazing,
amazing system. Now, Hank Asher is an especially interesting
character, because in interviews with me, he acknowledged that in
the early 1980s for a short time, he was a drug smuggler, and
flew to and from South America and Central America with drugs.
He
didn't specify, but I obtained records under Freedom of
Information that showed that the drugs, according to police,
appeared to be cocaine and lots of pot. Hank Asher said that that
was a short period of his life, he was an adventurer, and that he
hadn't done it since, and there's nothing to indicate that he
has. What's interesting is that after he built the matrix system,
spending at least $10 million and perhaps as much as $20 million
of his own money, he was invited to the White House and escorted
there by the President's brother, Jeb Bush, to demonstrate this
system, which, in fact, from what I can tell, is a mind-blowing
technology for Vice President Cheney, for soon to be Homeland
Secretary Tom Ridge, and for others in the White House in the
Roosevelt room.
And
after that he received funding from Homeland Security to help
expand the use of this. Now, the matrix system is one of those
things that a lot of people think was killed because a number of
states dropped out both for concerns about privacy and the
intrusion, as well as the cost. But the reality is, some states
are still using it, and more importantly, last summer, Hank
Asher's company was bought by Lexus-Nexus, this giant company
that nobody thinks of really in this realm because we all use
them to get newspaper clips: but in fact, Lexus-Nexus is one of
the main players in the war on terror, and is sharing its
information under contract with the government. Now, they bought
the matrix system and Hank Asher's company, Seisint for
three-quarters of a billion dollars. And it's a sure thing that
the matrix technology is now being used for homeland security.
And I would argue (I'm betting. I don't know this for sure.) that
it's going to be interwoven into the much larger, vastly larger
company, Lexus-Nexus which has a – you know, a global scope
because it's based out of the U.K. And so, it just becomes this
incredible fascinating story that sounds like science fiction or
Hollywood, but, in fact, is truer than most people probably want
to recognize.
(Editor's
note: I've included this article, above, for its content; I
find the opinions indigestible.)
3. BUDGET ATTACKS AMERICA'S MAJORITY
BY
NOAM CHOMSKY
(Interviewed by Adam
Porter)
If
you were poor, a Native American, a small farmer or an ecologist,
you probably did not vote for George W. Bush.
It
is therefore not so surprising to find that all these sectors of
society have come under attack, from the republican
administration's new fiscal budget.
However,
if you were an army veteran you may have expected to escape
spending cuts. But even this slice of American society, one that
largely voted for Bush, finds itself the subject of financial
"rollback".
Noam
Chomsky, speaking exclusively to Aljazeera, put it like this:
"There
is a very simple principle that goes a long way towards
explaining decisions of the Bush administration. If some policy
is beneficial to wealth, privilege and power, it should be
promoted.
"If
some policy is beneficial to the large majority of the population
but of no particular concern (or even marginally costly) to
wealth, privilege and power, it should be undermined."
Foreign
Adventures:
The
overall budget actually weighed in at $2.5 trillion. Defence
spending is increased across the board, both internally in the US
and for its foreign adventures.
There
is a 4.8% increase on defence, plus larger increases for Homeland
Security (7%) and counter-terrorism which shoots up to 17%. In
total since becoming president Bush has increased military and
defence spending by just 40%. Chomsky sees the budget not as a
series of cuts but rather "to reorient (spending), so that
it is even more focused on the interests of extreme wealth and
power than before".
Before
these spending hikes the US already spent more on its military
than the next 15 biggest national armies combined together. Even
nuclear weaponry is set to get a boost to defend the US against
"new threats, terrorism, failed states: as outlined by
Condoleezza Rice in her Paris speech.
President
Bush also said that his budget was going to control the US
national budget deficit. However, even Alan Greenspan, chairman
of the US Federal reserve, has now admitted that the imbalances
in the US economy are worsened partly by tax cuts created by
Bush's administration.
Equity
Extraction:
In
a low-key speech last week Greenspan admitted that US consumption
has been driven by tax cuts and "equity extraction".
This is the practice of taking on more debt on the back of rising
house prices.
Indeed,
the Bush administration predict that by 2010 the US current
account deficit will have amounted to a cumulative $1,257
trillion. By the same year the Bush administration tax cuts, as
estimated by them, will have amounted to a cumulative $1.290
trillion.
Public
debate between a choice of tax cuts or social security are off
limits, says Chomsky, as "the US (administration says it)
must dismantle a very efficient Social Security programme which
faces, at worst, trivial financial problems that could easily be
overcome by measures that cannot be contemplated and are never
discussed.
Most
simply, by raising … the outrageously regressive payroll
tax, which means that Bill Gates pays nothing beyond the first
roughly $90, 000 of income".
The
new budget is also based on some premises that are open to
question. On the one hand Greenspan was warning that "market
pressures" will come to "readjust" the US economy.
On the other administration officials basing their tax and
deficit predictions on rises of 3.5% for spending, turning into
an extra 6.1% in revenues for the government.
Fragile
Consumer:
This
at a time when the share of the turnover of the US from consumer
spending has risen to an all-time high of just under 71%.
Yet
the fragile US consumer may be about to see an end to the
counter-deflationary measures of Greenspan, low interest rates
and tax cuts. These were needed after the recession of 2000-2002
to bolster the flagging US market.
But
now correctional "market pressure" could lead to a
decrease in consumer spending not a 3.5% increase. Any
simultaneous popping of the housing bubble will only exacerbate
these problems.
Of
course such realities already exist for the Bush administration.
They were prepared to attack spending yet this has tended to be
aimed at groups not traditionally part of the 30% of the US
population who voted Republican.
Chomsky
sees the budget as following the tradition of the Reagan
administration in the 1980s – deficits, tax cuts and
spending rollback "guided by the same general principles,
but (now) far more extreme and brutal".
"It
should be recalled that for about 25 years, wages have stagnated
or declined for the majority … and incomes have been
sustained only by work loads far beyond the norm in the
industrial world, while the top few percent have become enriched
beyond the dreams of avarice."
Schemes
Cut:
While
public education is to be scaled back by 1%, $2 billion is to
come from high schools. Programmes to help poor and ethnic
minority students gain university places have been scrapped.
So
has the 'Even Start' programme which teaches reading and writing
to children of parents who cannot read and write. Anti-drug
programmes have also been cut, saving around $500 million.
The
US health system known as Medicaid, primarily for the elderly
poor, is also to come under scrutiny. The current US government
has called for a $60 billion reduction in the next 10 years.
Training
medical staff has taken a huge hit, with a specific 33% reduction
in the training of some paediatric doctors.
"A
completely fraudulent 'Social Security crisis' has been
manufactured," says Chomsky. "With a very impressive
level of brazen deceit a huge public-relations campaign has
succeeded in convincing many people, especially young people,
that the system is crashing into an iceberg."
America's
native population, the weakest in society, are also seeing in
excess of $100 million worth of cuts, 5%. Around 250,000 people
will no longer be eligible for food stamps.
Death
Knell:
Child
care is to be frozen at current levels. Meanwhile the death knell
is sounding for America's small farmers as subsidies to them are
to be slashed by $8.2 billion opening the way for giant
agribusiness farms to swallow them whole.
Nuclear
clean-ups, the Environmental Agency and National Parks are to see
their budgets cuts. Even energy bill assistance for the poor is
to be cut by over 8%. This at a time when many Americans are
finding it hard to pay their current demands, on average 22%
higher than twelve months ago.
But
perhaps most surprising are the cuts in assistance to US military
veterans, some of whom will see a 114% increase in their
long term drug bills, plus a one-off $250 subscription fee.
Also,
there will be a reduction in the number of nursing home places
held for them. Do these cuts fit with the idea of opponents
coming under fiscal attack?
"The
administration's opponents are the large majority of the US
population," says Chomsky. "the general 'starve the
beast' strategy is hardly concealed, though few are willing to
tell the truth. Namely, that the 'beast' they have in mind is the
'great beast', to borrow the phrase of the Founding Fathers, the
dangerous public."
BY
JON CARROLL
Let
us consider the Rapture Index. This is a real thing prepared by
serious people. If it makes you laugh, you have not gotten the
memo. You probably have not read any of the 12 volumes of the
"Left Behind" series, the best-selling books in America
today.
Those
Left Behind are those who did not experience the Rapture, which
is an instant in time when all the truly holy people are taken
directly to heaven, leaving their clothes in small neat piles
behind them. The rest of the ungodly losers are left to deal with
natural disasters and wars and the armies of the Antichrist,
after which they die in various colorful ways while the ranks of
the saved watch with compassion tempered with an understandable
sense of satisfaction.
The
Rapture Index, as of this writing, stands at 153. Anything over
145 is labeled by the Rapture Actuaries as "Fasten your seat
belts." In other words: Repent for the End is Near. You may
see all this for yourself at www.raptureready.com/rap2.html,
should you think I'm making it up.
The
Rapture Index is based on 45 prophetic categories, things like
drought, plague, floods, liberalism, beast government and mark of
the beast. "Beast government" is apparently the
European Union; the news that the EU is looking for a new
president is seen as a sign that the end time is drawing nearer.
The latest "mark of the beast" is a plan by the
Antichrist that will result in said mark being implanted in the
right hand or forehead of unbelievers. The relatively high number
of this indicator is explained thusly: "Wal-Mart is falling
behind in its plan to bar code all products with radio
tags." There are some parts of this belief system I
have not yet grasped.
The
Rapture is a good thing, and therefore floods, famine, drought
and all that are also good things because they portend the coming
of end times. Even liberalism is a good thing, because there
needs to be a lot of Christ-deniers for the end times to come.
(Among the prophesied Christ-deniers: the pope. That part is
pretty much played down in the pamphlets.)
The
end times begin when Russia (also known as the ancient nation of
Gog) and Iran join forces to attack Israel. Before this can
happen, however, the old temple must be rebuilt. Peace between
Israel and the Palestinians is necessary for that to happen, so
the Rapture Index sees the peace talks as a good sign. Not as
good as the tsunami, but definitely positive.
I
am not the first one to notice this. The environmental Web site www.grist.org has been covering
it; Bill Moyers also wrote a column about it. Alas, the quote
attributed to James Watt, the secretary of the interior under
Ronald Reagan ("after the last tree is felled, Christ will
come back"), is not verifiable, although it's been
reported many times. Probably the liberal media again., taking
time out from promoting the homosexual agenda.
So
read the Rapture Index. Consider its implications: One of George
Bush's core constituencies is actively praying for environmental
degradation. Its members are in fact praying for the end of the
world, because the end of the world is the beginning of the fun
part of salvation.
Let's
look at the new budget through this lens, which is (I emphasize)
neither fanciful nor satirical. Money for clean water: down.
Money for the cleanup of old nuclear sites, including the massive
job at the Hanford (Wash.) Nuclear Reservation: way down. Number
of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management acres open for
logging: up. Amount of territory in Alaska declared OK for oil
drilling: way up.
You
might even consider the impact of the Rapture on deficit
financing. Who cares how much debt we accrue? Christ will come
and forgive it all. Why not borrow against the future to pay for
the present? The future is gonna be a whole different deal. We're
just placeholders for God's own totalitarian state.
For
us secular humanists, us gay-marrying, porn-reading,
prayer-mocking harbingers of doom, all this seems incredible. We
are still in the reality-based paradigm; we have not yet crossed
over into the faith-based paradigm. In the faith-based world, the
apparent inconsistencies within the Bush administration fade into
nothingness.
Millennial
Christians have somehow convinced themselves that the founding
fathers would have approved of all this because they were all
old-time Christians following that old-time religion. Because
Rapture theology was mostly cobbled together in the 19th
century based on very selective readings from parts of the New
Testament, it is unlikely that the founding fathers believed
anything of the sort. Not important: Once again, I'm indulging in
reality-based thinking.
Like
the prophet said: Fasten your seat belts.
The
thing about the Rapture Index is this: If you're part of the
problem, you're part of the solution, because it's no good
smiting sinners if there are no sinners to smite.