A Colossal Wreck (52 page)

I was the final speaker. It had been over two hours, and the crowd was much depleted. I said, “we are united by one common desire: LUNCH.” Big applause. I talked about the war, about 9/11/73, the coup against Allende in Chile, as the starting gun for the Empire’s counterattack amid defeat in Vietnam. I talked about the current political situation, and even the prime story of the hour—unmentioned hitherto—the Foley scandal, which may well turn the House of Representatives over to the Democrats. Let’s hope so. We need gridlock. My speech went down well with the seventy or so survivors in the parking lot (and the prisoners in the jail maybe).

October 22

Tony Judt, the liberal writer for the
New York Review of Books
, has just discovered the realities of criticizing Israel. Here’s a message he released in early October:

I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGOs, academics, etc., from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.

I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote). They caved and Network 20/20 were forced to cancel. Whatever your views on the Middle East I hope you find this as serious and frightening as I do. This is, or used to be, the United States of America.

Judt’s disclosure elicited a few stories, including one in the
Washington Post
by Michael Powell, who wrote:

The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling. “This is serious and frightening, and only in America—not in Israel—is this a problem,” he said. “These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.”

The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing “wild conspiracy theories” about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.

“I think they made the right decision,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s taken the position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.”

It’s good that Judt is making a fuss about the ghastly Foxman, but I do have to smile wryly at his sudden discovery that criticizing Israel can be an edgy business. Actually, it was far, far riskier twenty or even ten years ago. It’s much easier now, as Chomsky indicated in his note to me and as I and Jeffrey St. Clair have found with talks promoting our book
The Politics of Anti-Semitism
.

Not so long ago, when Chomsky went to a town to talk, the ADL would trail him and file minute by minute reports on his movements and statements. Someone once sent him anonymously one such dossier. On the front page of the Xerox was written “for Alan Dershowitz.” Chomsky told me long ago that he and Dershowitz were scheduled to have a debate in a week or so, and evidently the file was being sent to Dershowitz, for him to cull the usual slanders and lies.

The ADL had spies everywhere, sending back feverish reports,
mostly hysterical fabrications, about what they claimed to have heard in meetings. That was a joke. Not a joke was what happened at UCLA and Cambridge where there were undercover cops at Chomsky’s meetings because they’d picked up serious threats. And that was nothing compared what Edward Said had to live with.

Or Norman Finkelstein. What Judt faces isn’t a minuscule fraction of what Norman faces regularly—e.g., being condemned by the
Progressive
(
sic
) as a Holocaust denier or by its editor as a “Holocaust minimizer” on the grounds that he accurately quoted Raul Hilberg.

The difference now is that some of these efforts to crush debate get reported. That wouldn’t have happened ten or twenty years ago, at least in the
Washington Post
or Reuters.

November 7

Let me direct you to a recent series of polite coughs, reminiscent of a sheep quietly clearing its throat somewhere on a fog-bound hillside in the north of England. The aforementioned coughs emanated at the start of this week from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), a body set up under the purview of the British Treasury a few years ago to monitor financial markets and protect the public interest by raising the alarm about shady practices and any dangerous slide towards instability. In a briefing paper under the chaste title, “Private Equity: A Discussion of Risk and Regulatory Engagement,” the FSA raises the alarm:

Excessive leverage: The amount of credit that lenders are willing to extend on private equity transactions has risen substantially. This lending may not, in some circumstances, be entirely prudent. Given current leverage levels and recent developments in the economic/credit cycle, the default of a large private equity backed company or a cluster of smaller private equity backed companies seems inevitable. This has negative implications for lenders, purchasers of the debt, orderly markets and conceivably, in extreme circumstances, financial stability and elements of the UK economy.

Translation: “It’s about to blow!”

The duration and potential impact of any credit event may be exacerbated by operational issues which make it difficult to identify who ultimately owns the economic risk associated with a leveraged buy out and how these owners will react in a crisis. These operational issues arise out of the extensive use of opaque, complex and time consuming risk transfer practices such as assignment and sub-participation, together with the increased use of credit derivatives. These credit derivatives may not be confirmed in a timely manner and the amount traded may substantially exceed the amount of the underlying assets.

Translation: “The world’s credit system is a vast recycling bin of untraceable transactions of wildly inflated value.”

November 10

Lame duck—“A White House controlled by an unpopular, highly partisan lame duck …” Wherever you look, there’s lame-duck Bush limping across the White House lawn, or hobbling out to give a press conference.

According to Brewer’s ever-useful 1910
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
“a lame duck in Stock Exchange parlance means a member of the Stock Exchange who waddles off on settlement day without settling his account. All such defaulters are black boarded and struck off the list. Sometimes it is used for one who cannot pay his debts, one who trades without money.”

November 28

There are plenty of real conspiracies in America. Why make up fake ones? Every few years, property czars and city officials in New York conspire to withhold fire company responses, so that enough of a neighborhood burns down for the poor to quit and for profitable gentrification to ensue. That’s a conspiracy to commit ethnic cleansing, also murder.

It’s happening today in Brooklyn, even as similar ethnic cleansing and gentrification is scheduled in San Francisco. Bayview Hunters Point is the last large black community in the Bay Area, sitting on
beautiful bay front property. So now it’s time to move the black folks out. As Willie Ratcliff, publisher of
SF Bay View
writes, “If the big developers and their puppets, the mayor [Democrat Gavin Newsom] and his minions win this war, they’ll have made what may be the largest urban renewal land grab in the nation’s history: some 2,200 acres of San Francisco, the city with the highest priced land on earth.”

That’s a real conspiracy, even as many in the Bay Area left meander through the blind alleys of 9/11 conspiracism.

Machiavelli points out that every conspirator you add to the plot has less chance of preserving secrecy than the previous one. The 9/11 group in fact did tell people about their plans in various ways but the prevailing belief that Arabs couldn’t do it prevented any of the revelations from being taken seriously. The view that a bunch of Arabs with box cutters weren’t up to it was precisely the cover they needed.

The conspiracy virus is an old strand: The Russians couldn’t possibly build an A bomb without Commie traitors. The Russians are too dumb. Hitler couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across Eastern Europe and half of Germany. Traitors let it happen. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Oswald—it had to be the CIA. There are no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, the Viet Cong, the Japanese, etc., etc. couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians. It’s all pathetic but it does save the trouble of reading and thinking.

It’s easy enough to proclaim one’s readiness “to speak truth to power,” as the self-regarding tag line goes. As yet, that’s not a very perilous thing to do, here in America, at least on the part of the folks who like to use the phrase. But to speak truth to people overwhelmed with a sense of powerlessness and hence ready to credit Bush and Cheney with supernatural powers of efficient evil—that’s one of our functions at
CounterPunch
. There’s no point in marching forward under the banner of illusions.

December 8

The slithery junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, is ensuring himself a steady political diet of publicity by refusing to take his
name out of consideration as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. We’re entering the time frame when all such aspirants have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite money and political base for a run. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided that he can’t, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into the weakness of the left these days.

It’s a no-brainer for Obama to excite the political commentators by waving a “maybe” flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital, whatever he decides to do in the end.

It’s depressing to think that we’ll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come: a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with homilies about putting factionalism and party divisions behind us and moving on. I used to think Senator Joe Lieberman was the man whose words I’d least like to be force fed top volume if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think Obama is worse. I’ve never heard a politician so careful not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

A couple of weeks ago Obama unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike mush about Iraq to an upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming to new realities, he’s now talking about a four-to-six-month time frame for beginning withdrawal from Iraq. Don’t mistake this for any real agenda. It’s a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a rubber mask from a Christmas stocking.

December 27

I bid a sad adieu to Gerald Ford. It has always been my view that Gerald Ford was America’s greatest President. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford’s tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. He finally pulled the US out of Vietnam. Now, “not doing harm” for an American President has to be a very forgiving phrase. True, on his watch, with a US green light, Indonesian troops invaded East Timor.

As a visit to the Ford presidential library discloses, the largest military adventure available for display was the foolish US response to the capture of the US container ship
Mayaguez
by the Khmer Rouge on May 12, 1975. As imperial adventures go, and next to the vast graveyards across the planet left by Ford’s predecessors and successors, it was small potatoes.

Ford was surrounded by bellicose advisors such as his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger; his Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller; his Chief of Staff, and later Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld; and his presidential assistant, Dick Cheney. The fact that this rabid crew was only able to persuade Ford to give the green light for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor—an appalling decision to be sure—is tribute to Ford’s pacific instincts and deft personnel management. Unlike George W. Bush, Ford was of humane temper and could mostly hold in check his bloodthirsty counselors.

Kissinger was part of the furniture when Ford took over, after Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974. With latitude to choose, Ford made sensible selections, none more fruitful than his Attorney General, Edward Levy, who in turn prompted Ford to nominate John Stevens to the US Supreme Court, where he has long distinguished himself and dignified Ford’s choice by being the most humane and progressive justice.

As a percentage of the federal budget, social spending crested in the Ford years. Never should it be forgotten that Jimmy Carter campaigned against Ford as—this is Carter—the prophet of neoliberalism, precursor of the Democratic Leadership Council, touting “zero-based budgeting.”

If Ford had beaten back Carter’s challenge in 1976, the neocon crusades of the mid to late 1970s would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.

Instead of a weak southern Democratic conservative in agreement with almost every predation by the military industrial complex, we would have had a Midwestern Republican, thus a politician far less vulnerable to the promoters of the new cold war.

Would Ford have rushed to fund the Contras and order their training by Argentinian torturers? Would he have sent the CIA on its most costly covert mission, the $3.5 billion intervention in Afghanistan? The nation would have been spared the disastrous counsels of Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.