Libya for Dummies: the lipstick doctrine

The Lipstick Doctrine

In the Victorian age, the British once sang – “We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do/ We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.” The Libyan intervention feels like a last reprise of that old tune, rather than a bold statement for a new age. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

The president seemed to provide little guidance for what position he would take in other, more vital nations in the region now roiled by an “Arab Spring” of popular uprising. Nor did Mr. Obama’s speech on Monday shed light on whether the president would use force in other trouble spots. - New York Times

David Seaton's News Links

We now have an "Obama Doctrine", which after Guantanamo and Afghanistan, might be defined, paraphrasing Groucho Marx,  "This is my doctrine, if you don't like it, I've got others".

This "doctrine" has all the rigor of something that doctors in British emergency rooms call the "Dirt Index", which is arrived at by multiplying the number of the patient's tattoos by the number of the patient's missing teeth, which gives us the exact number of days since the patient last had a bath. This is just a way of making a joke of a bad smell that has to be dealt with.

What is happening in Libya is very simple, but it is connected to some things that are quite complicated.

The simple part is that if we ignore all the R2P (Responsibility to Protect) drivel -- Congo, Bahrain, Syria, Myanmar  etc, need not apply --  perhaps it may be noted that, a short hop away, just across the Mare Nostrum from the wealthy European Union, which houses NATO, America's only real allies; outside the troubled Middle East; this side of the Persian Gulf; this side of the Suez Canal; far from energy-rich Russia; in a country with very few people and unchallenging geography; controlled by a very awkward character with no friends left; a hair-challenged tyrant who is opposed by a ragtag group of desperate and poorly armed nobodies, people who can be bought for a song; just waiting to become a UN protectorate, while they develop "democratic institutions"... lies a huge amount of oil.

"Low hanging fruit", you might call it.

As an anonymous commentator on my previous post suggested:

"At present prices, Libyan oil production is about $185 million a day. Amortizing the development costs of weapons that are mostly exported at $100 million a day for a month is a bargain if it gets you hooked up with $200 million a day for the next 3 decades."

So at least if we remove all the gooey humanitarian intervention cant and as long as almost none of our people get hurt, this operation does make some sense. Nothing particularly brave and noble about it all, but it makes sense.

The rest of the situation, like they say on Facebook, is "complicated".

The American media is full of rejoicing about the shared democratic values of the "Arab Spring", the president speaks soaringly about being "on the right side of history"... talk about your putting lipstick on a pig.

What the "Arab Spring" -- the empowering of the "Arab street" -- means is that America's position in the Middle East, if not totally collapsed, has been made infinitely more complicated. The last thing the USA has ever wanted is for Middle Eastern governments to follow the opinion of their subjects (oops, citizens), as the people of that region tend to frown on "Zionists and crusaders". Supporting "security states" has been America's modus operandi  in the Middle East for many years. The people who own stuff in the region have built their lives around those policies... and they are being left out to dry.

 

People who had been mainstays of American policies for decades and did our dirty work for us without question are being abandoned without ceremony.  Remaining power elites in the area and beyond have seen that being a lockstep ally of the USA is of little survival value when push comes to shove. And the new power elites that may arise, no matter what ideology they may profess, will have taken note of how little value we had  for their predecessors in their hour of need, and plan accordingly. 

A disaster. Instability in the Persian Gulf is practically guaranteed for many years to come... Certainly the European Union's access to Middle Eastern oil has been made more problematic.

Since it never rains but what it pours, this has all happened precisely at the moment when Japan's catastrophe has taken nuclear power off the menu of solutions for the energy shortfall.

The winner in this situation, is of course Europe's eastern neighbor Russia, which has all the oil and gas that the EU might need. 

Bottom line, the United States can no longer guarantee Europe's energy supply. 

Russia can. 

Russia abstained on the Libyan resolution.

Ironies of history: the USSR has disappeared and Russia has just won the Cold War.

Which takes us to another abstainer: Germany.

The Germans have been taking a lot of harsh criticism for their abstention from the UN Libya resolution, however it may prove to have been a brilliant move.

As far as France, Britain and reluctantly the United States is concerned this entire operation is predicated on the idea that as soon as his air force was destroyed Qaddafi would simply dry up and blow away, fly up his fundament and disappear. This doesn't seem to be happening. As I said in a previous post, Libya's "Brother Leader", is a very tough old bird and it very well may be that he cannot be defeated without the "coalition" putting "boots on the ground"... something they have repeatedly said they are not prepared to do and which the UN resolution doesn't provide cover for. If they do decide to use ground forces to bring down Qaddafi and control Libya the consequences could be dire for France and Britain...  As Max Hastings wrote in the Financial Times:

The Americans remain irritably aware that they have been bullied into participation in a speculative adventure, for which they are obliged to do the heavy lifting, because the British and French cheerleaders lack the firepower. For instance, of 112 cruise missiles fired at Libya on Sunday night when the offensive began, just three were British, and one of those got stuck in its launch tube.

It is obvious that to decisively defeat Qaddafi, bring the post-Qaddafi situation under control so that "free" Libya does not turn into a rest and recreation center cum cash cow for Al Qaeda, American military involvement will be needed indefinitely. Deeply indebted America cannot afford it and there is little or no public support for it. Horrible as he is, Qaddafi may still be the best option: he has been at the same time horrible and the best option for over forty years.

So, if Qaddafi wins his civil war, negotiations will have to take place in order to renew access to his oil (so near and yet so far). Guess which country is uniquely placed to lead those negotiations? The only European power that abstained... Germany, of course.

At this point Germany holds not only a possible key to the Libyan oil, its cooperation with Russia in the Nord Stream gas pipeline gives them a vital key to northern Europe's energy needs. This is added to the reality that as by far Europe's most powerful economy, Germany holds the keys to the survival of the euro and ultimately the European Union itself. So, without firing a shot, Germany has secured many of the objectives, certainly the "place in the sun", which it sought at the cost of ruin and devastation in World Wars One and Two.

As to NATO, if its founding mission objective was famously, to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" as of this moment it has failed, and this Libyan operation is the dramatization of that failure.

Sometimes in modern history these small, "colonial" incidents like  the "Fashoda Incident" of 1898 can be seen, with 20/20 hindsight, to mark a turning point in international relations. It may be that in a few years this Libyan adventure will be seen as such a turning point, the end of one paradigm and the birth of a new one, whose shape we can only see imperfectly now. DS

The Neo-Imperialism of a Future Failed State

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After World War Two, Europe's far-flung empires all collapsed within a few years. This was not because Britain, France and the Netherlands had suddenly lost their taste for their colonial possessions, far from it. Their empires collapsed because they could no longer afford to police them. The United States of America, drowning in debt, is looking at a similar dilemma today. 

The USA can simply not afford to continue in its role as "the world's policeman", if it does, there is a serious possibility that the country will go broke. The choice is between standing by watching helplessly as much of the the Third World runs amok or standing by watching helplessly as much of the USA itself runs amok.

The war to get rid of Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan fashion plate wreck, is already running $100 million a day. (...) But what's $1 billion when we owe China $1.3 trillion -- and the national debt meter keeps running at the rate of $4.12 billion a day, for a current total of almost $15 trillion. Federal spending is up to $3.5 trillion this year with a deficit of $1.3 trillion.  Arnaud De Borchgrave

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home. Bob Herbert's last column in the New York Times

In short, for the first time since the end of World War II, no country or strong alliance of countries has the political will and economic leverage to secure its goals on the global stage.  Nouriel Roubini

It would be a serious blow to western credibility if, having set out to remove Col Gaddafi, the allies failed to do so. But even success in achieving this will represent only a starting point for a voyage into the unknown.  Max Hastings - Financial Times

In today's globalized world, individual states, even powerful and democratic ones, are losing the ability to control events within their borders. Their citizens find themselves helpless, just like the inhabitants of the impoverished, anarchist-hells called "failed states". The term "failed state" is thrown around a lot these days, but how might we define it?

My definition is quite broad.

First I would say that the "state" exists to protect the lives and property of its citizens and to foster their well-being, so any state -- to the degree that it fails to fulfill that assignment -- is a "failed state".

The Oscar winning documentary, "Inside Job" whose trailer tops this page, is a portrait of what appears to be a rich man's "Somalia".  One is surprised by the degree of corruption at the highest level of American government both past and present and even a surprising level (for me at least) of corruption in the intellectual elite of America's most prestigious universities.

Could America ever become a failed state or is that something that only happens to the backward and the primitive?

Many readers will automatically think of  pirate-ridden Somalia, when the words "failed state" flash upon the screen, but "Wiemar Germany", might be a more relevant example of the dangers America and others in the developed world, might be facing going forward.

When studying  the rise of Nazism in the Wiemar Republic, people often attribute it to some diabolic genius on Adolf Hitler's part, genius being by definition exceptional, unrepeatable and therefore inexplicable. On the contrary, I think that what makes studying the Nazi period useful and interesting is that Hitler was anything but a genius.

Qaddafi, the new "Hitler du Jour"

I think that instead of being a genius, Hitler was a fool. What other word than "fool" could be used to describe somebody who would declare war simultaneously on both the USSR and the USA, when even a drooling idiot would know that to defeat one of them you would have to be an ally of the other. No, Adolf Hitler was no genius and I would maintain that the world is crawling with people like him:  strutting narcissists, filled with delusions of grandeur, creeps, who if all it took was to simply press a button, would kill millions of their fellow men and women several times a day with intense pleasure.

So, when the drums are beating for war and  the drummers compare Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi, or whomsoever it is this week, to Hitler, in a sense they are right, but the important thing is not in the similarities of their criminal bestiality to Hitler's or to a serial killer of prostitutes for that matter, but the dissimilarities between their tinpot countries and an intellectual, economic and cultural powerhouse like Germany.

The real question for me about Hitler's rise has always been: what objective social and economic conditions were required for a people who had produced Johann Sebastian Bach,  Dürer, Meister Ekhart, Goethe, Kant, Hegel and dozens of others of similar stature, to entrust their lives, fortunes and futures to a bizarre, chaplinesque, psychotic; a failed painter of watercolors: a foreigner from Vienna. In short, if it could happen in a country like that it could happen anywhere given similar conditions of collapse.

My view of this is that only some sort of  political Acute Immune Deficiency Syndrome could open the door to such a man as Hitler in such a country as Germany. It is that form of political AIDS that we have to worry about today, not the individuals who appear when the syndrome is rampant or even the precise ideology they profess when they appear. As I say, the streets are full of bizarre people with vicious fantasies, just as in the same way that our bodies are all infested with a myriad of exotic viruses and germs, which only our healthy immune systems manage to keep at bay. Even in the best of times America produces some very crazy people, so if the bottom ever falls out of the dollar... We are playing with fire.

The lesson of Nazi Germany is not the lesson of appeasement at Munich, but the lesson that every country, no matter how cultured or developed, nurtures its own "inner Somalia" and that when a state fails to protect and nurture its citizens any obscenity is possible. Protecting and nourishing its own citizens, so they don't do something crazy, could be America's fundamental contribution to world peace.

Does this mean that we can do nothing to stop violence around the world? No it doesn't.

There are two fundamental  and relatively economical things we could do that could help eliminate untold misery and violence.

Just as 19th century Britain outlawed the slave trade, we could outlaw the conventional military arms trade and just as they did, we could could use our power and influence to convince other countries to help enforce that ban around the world. That would be cheaper and simpler than firing cruise missiles to destroy those weapons later.

The next thing that America could do to make the world a safer, more law abiding place, would be to close all the tax shelters around the world, where the money from the drug and arm trades is laundered and where money goes to avoid the taxes to pay for public goods such as schools, hospitals and other vital infrastructure. I have often thought that instead of invading Grenada or Iraq, the USA should have invaded the Cayman Islands.

I am sure that just these two measures would remove more threats to peace than all the money poured down the drain in military expense over the last twenty years. DS

Iraq to Libya, from tragedy to farce?

MARCH 19, 2011
OBAMA: 'Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world'...

MARCH 19, 2003
BUSH: 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger'...(ht-Drudge)

David Seaton's News Links

Is anyone else as bored with this movie as I am?

The leader who has been making all the running in this fine little war is Nicholas Sarkozy and if there is one leader in the "international community" that I am more skeptical of than I was of George W. Bush it is Nicholas Sarkozy... Oh yes, and he is accompanied by British prime minister David Cameron, who is such a political dwarf that Tony Blair takes on Churchillian proportions when compared to him.

Compared to Iraq, this is like a remake of "Gone with the Wind" with Justin Bieber in the role of Rhett Butler.

Here is how Martin Rowson draws it in The Guardian:

All this is happening while demonstrators are being shot down in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen, but why go on? We have seen this movie so many times by now that pointing out all this stone faced hypocrisy over and over again is a waste of breath.

And what few commentators seem to realize is that the possibility of this turning into yet another fiasco are enormous. I don't think many people understand Qaddafi's most elementary mechanisms

He is enjoying all this. He is having fun. 

He has been waiting and preparing for this moment his entire life.

He is as nutty as a fruitcake, but he is a tough old bird and without boots on the ground, which nobody seems to want to put, certainly not the French, he will not simply cave in and disappear.

And they better be quick because if you enjoyed Wikileaks, they'll be nothing compared to Qaddafileaks. This character knows where all the bodies are buried (literally).

And if he holds out defiantly against a combination of the classic imperialists: the US, French and British, for even a few weeks, he'll have the whole third world on his side.

We may end up making him the most popular leader in Africa.

Like I said at the top, I don't know if anybody else is bored by this movie, but I sure am. DS

Er, President Obama sir.... is anybody home?

Jeez, what a month!!!... The only thing that hasn't happened yet is...

Forges - El País

In short, for the first time since the end of World War II, no country or strong alliance of countries has the political will and economic leverage to secure its goals on the global stage.  Nouriel Roubini

David Seaton's News Links

Even at the best of times, the Japanese apocalypse, something that insurance companies like to call an "act of God", would transfix the world with its reminder of how precarious life is, and how much pathetic optimism lies in the words, "see you later".  But now, in addition, the sinister and invisible, man-made horror of atomic radiation shows us more clearly still how fragile and vulnerable, how mysteriously complex our carefully constructed society is: we are living the terror of the sorcerer's apprentice.

And, of course, these are not the best of times.

The scale and terror of Japan's tragedy pushes things like the Saudi invasion of tiny Bahrain, the home base of the US Navy's 5th fleet, down to footnote size, but the potential of Saudi Arabia's actions to affect our lives could quickly become much greater than any tsunami imaginable. We might be looking at the "Sarajevo" of a war on the Persian Gulf that would paralyze the world economy at a moment when nuclear power is finished as an option. 

A Saudi led, Sunni crackdown on Bahrain's Shiites, could bring in Iran, Saudi Arabia's own Shiites, who are a majority in its oil provinces... and even Iraq to their defense. The situation that developed would no longer be about Iran's nuclear program, but about the rights of a persecuted majority... and where and how America could intervene in such a clusterfuck to any benefit is hard to see. There is a growing air, an odor, of powerlessness coming off of Washington.

Great power, the perception of that power, is there... and then it isn't.

American power was built around a large, healthy, well-fed population, great manufacturing capacity, cheap energy, good public education, solid money, a general national political consensus, a victorious military and a solid and growing middle class. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the USA has attempted to organize the affairs of the planet into a economic and military  "New World Order" based upon that power and in America's image... all of whose elements, except "large", are now, simultaneously, in crisis. 

And this is not just happening "out there somewhere".

What is happening in Michigan and Wisconsin, shows that in the US today, even middle-aged and middle-class Americans and not just the right-wingers or WTO "anarchists" appear ready to take their grievances "to the streets" in response to what is being called "financial martial law" and doing so in a manner nothing like the university-youth led anti-war protests of the prosperous, full employment 1960s. 

Whether in labor relations, or health or financial sector reform, or Guantanamo prison, or the wars in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or the Israeli settlement policies, or Egypt, or Libya, or Bahrain,  the White House appears frozen like a rabbit paralyzed in an oncoming car's headlights.

I suppose though that this ineffectual catatonia is to be preferred to the decisiveness and "moral clarity" of a fool like Obama's predecessor.

Let's face it, Barack Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize by simply not being George W. Bush... It is impossible to exaggerate how relieved the world, and most Americans with them, felt that the most powerful (or at least the most dangerous) country on earth was no longer governed by a murderous idiot.

Not being Bush is a wonderful thing, but it isn't really a solution to America's problem, because Bush wasn't the problem itself, only an outward sign, a symbol of that problem. The problem is still there... with bells on.

Obama is going to have to draw some clear red lines somewhere, sometime, but I think that is going to be difficult for him... it would be like Microsoft manufacturing airplanes... that is not how they got where they are.

My basic reading of Barack Obama and his difficulties remains more or less the same: he got where he is by appearing to be all things to all men.  In this he is a genius... I have never ever seen such footwork before. Comparing Obama's powers of triangulation to Bill Clinton's or Tony Blair's is like comparing Einstein to your high school algebra teacher. But finally, he is going to have to play the ball where it lies. To do that, however, would be to betray his very nature, his strategy of life, which is ambiguity.

He may soon find himself in a great war, plus a great depression, without ever really understanding how it happened to him. DS

Eleonore Weil's Alphabet

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I just ran up this video of my wife's art work. I hope all you newslinkers will enjoy it. DS

Arab Spring is 1989? Whose 1989?

Barack Obamachev

In the last decade, America has tried applying our individualistic narrative to the Middle East. Now, as the people in multiple countries there struggle to take greater control for themselves, we want to see our story play out in their efforts, and we worry that it won't. Sheena Iyengar - CNN

Recognize that the last few generations of America's bipartisan leadership have ruined the domestic economy and brought us to war at every turn overseas.  Regarding what is to be done about the Muslim world, we should bend every effort to fix our oil problem and then adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy toward the Muslim world. What we want is Muslims killing Muslims, and Muslims killing Israelis. A pox on both their houses.  Michael Scheuer - Washington Post

"The Arab Spring is also a Western Winter." 

Roger Cohen - New York Times

"Do we really want to adopt another Muslim country?"

Patrick J. Buchanan

“To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal”.
Henry Kissinger

David Seaton's News Links

Once, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was told that the execrable dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, was a S.O.B., he famously replied, "yes, but he is our S.O.B.".

I wonder if anyone but me has noticed that in the Middle East -- so well stocked with S.O.B.s of every type, size and condition -- it seems that only our S.O.B.s are losing their jobs. Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran are quiet and Qaddafi is showing little sign of going gracefully or even of going at all. No, it is the dictators called -- until the day before yesterday -- "moderates" whose thrones or whatever are seen to be shaky or up for grabs.... as Kissinger said, being an enemy of the USA can be dangerous for sure, but serving America's interests is worth bubkes when push comes to shove.

Quite a few commentators are comparing the "Arab Spring" with the collapse of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe in 1989... but they don't seem to realize whose empire is collapsing this time.

Americans live in such a media fog of self-referential "story telling", still envisioning themselves contrafactually as being universal paladins of democracy, that amidst all the gushing, twittering, stories of the "Arab Spring", this one awkward reality is being largely ignored: that those whose prestige consisted in great part of being identified with the USA are the ones going down, in trouble or already out, yet this may be the most significant element that ties all the disparate rebellions together, or at least as far as we are directly concerned. 

There appears a reluctance to see that the blood soaked but ineffectual interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq or America's inability to get even the most minor concessions from tiny Israel could be perceived as signs of weakness, of the loosening bonds of restraint among peoples repressed by dictators seen to be defending US interests in exchange for American protection.

And there also seems to be a reluctance to see that democracy is a path, not a goal, a means to self-realization not the end in itself, that different people will use democracy to express different things because their cultures and histories are different. In this respect I find the following paragraph from an article by former CIA al Qaeda specialist Michael Scheur  packed with common sense. 

Each new regime is likely to host a more open, religion-friendly environment for speech, assembly and press freedoms than did Mubarak and his ilk. So it will be easier for media-savvy Islamist groups - whether peaceful or militant - to proselytize, publish and foment without immediate threat of arrest and incarceration. Indeed, Washington and its Western allies will dogmatically urge the new governments to maintain such freedoms, even as the Islamists capitalize on them. 

Turkey offers a reassuring example here and at the same time a warning. The vast majority of Turkish people have always been pious Muslims and the American backed Turkish army kept the Islamists out of power for many years. However in order to apply for membership in the European Union, the army had to loosen their control and as soon as they were free to do so the Turkish people voted for the Islamists, who soon distanced themselves from American policies. Reassuring, because the Turkish Islamists show no sign of radicalism and at the same time a warning, because few of Turkey's ex-colonies in the Arab world have either the growing economy or the political stability that Turkey enjoys. Certainly it would be silly to think that Facebook and Twitter have had more of an influence on the Arab Spring than the example of Turkey's steady transition to democracy and prosperity and their sturdy refusal to follow US policy in Iraq or Iran or to bend their neck to Israel. Somehow few commentators see fit to pursue this obvious connection very far.

As America, though tirelessly meddlesome, proves increasingly unable to control events in its client states, the heretofore more timorous opposition to America's policies will begin to stick their heads out over the wall in every corner of the world. Soon inconvenient people and groups will be coming out of the woodwork everywhere. Ding, dong the witch is dead.

At the top of this post I have pictured Barack Obama as Mikhail Gorbachev. This is not a criticism of Obama or Gorbachev: president Obama is not responsible for starting the two wars in Muslim lands or for creating America's supine relationship with Israel, just as Gorbachev was not responsible for the condition that USSR was in when he took charge of it. Gorbachev's fatal error was to think that an "evil empire" could ever open its hand and survive and perhaps that is the same error that Barack Obama is making right now. DS

What the hell is Rupert Murdoch up to?

"Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle"
"Antisemitism is the socialism of fools"
August Bebel

David Seaton's News Links

I am coming to the conclusion that something very strange is going on. 

I come to that conclusion merely starting from the simple premise that a central reason for the world's most powerful media lord being so rich and powerful is that employees of Rupert Murdoch's vast empire are not allowed to do anything that is not productive for Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch, who besides owning Fox, owns The Wall Street Journal,The Weekly Standard,and many other assorted media in America and abroad, is consciously permitting his employee, Glenn Beck to tread rather heavily upon the toes of Jewish feelings; allowing him to cross red lines of perceived antisemitism, to commit transgressions that today would be career breakers for anyone without Murdoch's powerful backing. Following my original premise, Glenn Beck is no more responsible for the harm he does than a pit-bull is for mauling a child... it is the pit-bull's owner's fault, for unmuzzling him.  Beck's master is Rupert Murdoch.  

An example of how powerful the taboos that Beck is breaking are could be the nearly instantaneous defenestration of the fashion designer, John Galliano. 

Galliano is considered one of the world's most talented designers, credited with singlehandedly saving the house of Dior from oblivion, but a private, drunken, antisemitic diatribe in a Paris nightclub was enough to send him packing. Here is how a commentator on a NYT article about Galliano compared the two cases:

Too bad that doesn't get Glenn Beck fired here, where he doesn't just say anti-semitic remarks in a bar, but broadcasts them via television and radio to millions of people. We tolerate hate speech when the network has a highly rated host who is a puppet for the views of his bosses. No matter that he is a hate-monger teetering on the edges of sanity. Dior is more responsible than Fox or the FCC. -  "Ground Control" (commenting in the NYT about John Galliano's firing)

The people lining up against Beck are not chopped liver, here is a sample:

Prominent US conservatives have begun to distance themselves from Glenn Beck, the radio and television host, after outbursts warning of a looming caliphate in the Middle East and likening Reform Judaism to “radicalised Islam”.(...)  Mr Beck, a broadcasting and publishing phenomenon with an annual income estimated at $32m, was dubbed “the most disturbing personality on cable television” last week by Peter Wehner, who served in the last three Republican administrations.(...) Jennifer Rubin, who writes a Washington Post column called Right Turn, urged conservative groups and candidates to disassociate themselves from Mr Beck. “If they host, appear with or defend him they should be prepared to have his extremist views affixed to them,” she wrote. The comments follow an article by Bill Kristol, the conservative editor of the Weekly Standard, warning that Mr Beck’s “hysteria” in seeking to link “caliphate-promoters” with figures on the left of US politics was unhealthy.(...) “He’s marginalising himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s,” Mr Kristol wrote. Mr Beck dismissed Mr Kristol’s remarks as evidence that a Republican “fiefdom” had lost touch with conservatives and was set on preserving its own power. - Financial Times

But Glenn Beck keeps pushing the envelope. Murdoch has got Beck's back and Beck is as cool as a cucumber. Why?

Off the top of my head I can think of two reasons for Murdoch's evident blessing of Beck's flirting with antisemitism and I would love to hear other opinions, but these are the first two that occur to me for the moment. 

One is "reductionist" and the other one is big and fat, but they are not mutually exclusive.

The first one is simply that the extensive market research, focus groups and private polling that Murdoch's organization must certainly do in order to stay in touch with their readers and viewers may have turned up a tolerance or even a "market" for antisemitism in the conspiracy sodden American public, addicted as they are to wild theories of every stripe. In short, this behavior is profitable. I don't think that Murdoch would ever back up Glenn Beck this way for very long if something like that wasn't already on his radar.

This brings me to something fatter and juicier: the immanent collapse of America's traditional foreign policy in the world's oil-patch, the Middle East.

Here is how Thomas Friedman describes the situation in the New York Times:

Add it all up and what does it say? It says you have a very powerful convergence of forces driving a broad movement for change. It says we’re just at the start of something huge. And it says that if we don’t have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages all this change. Thomas Friedman - NYT

Imagine if you will, that a long, hard fought, Libya-like, civil war, broke out in Saudi Arabia, and its oil fields were paralyzed like Libya's as the country imploded and then morphed from a friendly, medieval monarchy into the "Islamic Republic of Mecca and Medina". A US invasion to prevent that, with pork eating marines patrolling the Kaaba, would probably set the entire Muslim world in flames and the "cure" could be much worse than the disease.  Riots and countless acts of terrorism, all over the planet for starters, would probably just be the "good news".

Any version this scenario would send the price of crude oil into the stratosphere, cause a world economic depression, possibly set off World War Three and for sure cost Rupert Murdoch, and all those who sail in him, a lot, but a lot, of money. My feeling is that Murdoch is moving to prevent that outcome.

How might all this fit in with Glenn Beck's strange, paranoid, fantasy world and the millions of viewers who devoutly follow his every program? How might his craziness fit into the surely ice cold calculations of Rupert Murdoch?

This is what occurs to me:

It may be too late, but perhaps the only thing that could shore up the regional prestige of the Saudi monarchy save their throne (and skins) and maybe cool off and distract the Middle East right now would be if the United States could encourage the Israelis to accept the Saudi Peace Initiative. The plan is considered by most observers as the only serious blueprint for true peace in the Middle East. This the resolution that was unanimously approved by the Arab League on March 27th 2002 and re-endorsed in 2007consists of the following:

(a) Complete withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the 4 June 1967 line and the territories still occupied in southern Lebanon; (b) Attain a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees to be agreed upon in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution No 194. (c) Accept the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since 4 June 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return the Arab states will do the following: (a) Consider the Arab-Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement with Israel, and achieve peace for all states in the region; (b) Establish normal relations with Israel within the framework of this comprehensive peace. Wikipedia

Now it is easy to imagine how much enthusiasm the Israeli right, those who govern Israel, feel about a plan that would mean dismantling all the settlements, giving back East Jerusalem and permitting a fully sovereign Palestinian state to exist in Judea and Samaria... and making some sort of settlement with the refugees of 1948. Of course in theory the United States has the power to make the Israelis accept the Arab Peace Initiative, but you can easily imagine the sort of pressure that AIPAC would bring to bear on the president, the congress and opinion makers to keep the US government from ever applying anything like the pressure necessary. But, if Saudi Arabia is hanging in the balance and with it the entire world economy, this is getting really serious. America depends on cheap energy, is addicted to it. Anything like a dramatic and prolonged rise in oil prices could take us directly to Kunstler and Orlov scenarios. I don't think that some people, in whose number I include Rupert Murdoch, would stop at anything to keep that from happening.

How could Murdoch make AIPAC an offer it couldn't refuse?

At this point we should let the air out of the vicious antisemitic canard which accuses the Jews of controlling the news media. Australian born, of Scottish ancestry, Rupert Murdoch, the world's most powerful media lord, is about as Jewish as a shrimp cocktail. Any support he might have ever given the Jewish people and Israel or ever will give them in the future has been and will be entirely contingent on his interests.

In my opinion Murdoch is using his creature, Glenn Beck, to fire a shot across the Israel lobby's bow. I can think of no other reason for him to allow an employee of his to offend the Jewish people in such a gross manner with such impunity.

The deal is, again in my opinion, either they don't rock the boat in the US establishment's efforts to maintain America's position in the Middle East by keeping Saudi Arabia afloat or Murdoch will send out Glenn Beck to stand in front of millions of American rednecks and Tea Partiers and with his funny little "professorial" glasses on, chalk in hand, go to his huge blackboard and diagram "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" for the folks.  You don't think he is capable of that? Antisemitism is the easiest, cheapest, shot of all, like falling off a log. As the August Bebel quote that tops this page says, "antisemitism is the socialism of fools": Beck's audience would eat it up. Then, if it is convenient for him, Murdoch will bow his head and hang Beck out to dry... but the damage will be done. DS

America: only one revolution to a customer

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Why is it that when you study the graph above and then read the quotes below, the graph seems so real and the quotes seem some sort of political science fiction, verging from the absurd and childish to the puzzled or even hopeless?

“What you are looking at in Tunisia, in Egypt … Libya, in Bahrain … what you see happening there … you’d better prepare because it will be coming to your door,”(Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis) Farrakhan said in a booming voice, thousands of followers cheering in his wake. Chicago BreakingNews

Meanwhile, in far-off Wisconsin, the protesters who massed for a huge rally Saturday evidently know instinctively which side of history they're on; unlike the Obama administration, they identify with those organizing the “days of rage” in the Middle East, not with its autocrats. American demonstrators may still be focused on issues of immediate self-interest, but remember, only yesterday no one thought a non-Tea-Party-type would ever again take to an American street shouting protest slogans. Tom Engelhardt

You can't fight something with nothing. But as long as Democrats refuse to talk about the almost unprecedented buildup of income, wealth, and power at the top - and the refusal of the super-rich to pay their fair share of the nation's bills - Republicans will convince people it's all about government and unions.  Robert Reich

The graph topping this post clearly shows an unhappy country with a crumbling infrastructure, poor schools, the grossest inequality imaginable in a developed country,  its masses struggling to make ends meet, an enormous prison population, many of its people without health care and even going hungry. All of this and yet the idea of great mass demonstrations on an Egyptian scale seems unthinkable... Why should this be? Is this truly the oft boasted "American exceptionalism"? That nobody cares enough to even set a few cars on fire?

We are taught in school, and have it endlessly drilled into our heads lifelong, that America is a nearly perfect democracy dedicated to promoting the general welfare of its citizens.  Perhaps though, in reality, it is a nearly perfect regime dedicated to promoting the interests of tiny, deeply entrenched, oligarchy and no matter how obvious that is, it appears that nothing will ever change, that an endless chain of presidential Tweedledees and Tweedledums in various sizes and colors and campaign fund starved legislators will make sure that the interests of that oligarchy are always efficiently served.

How does that work? How did that happen? How did America turn into a regime?

Recently I posted the BBC video, "The Century of Self", which tells the story of how Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays used his uncle's insight into the human psyche to create a propaganda machine (for which he created the euphemistic name of "public relations") in order manipulate and milk the desires and fears of the masses, whose intelligence he despised. "Engineering Consent" it was called, a political version of slipping a pill into girl's drink. This is no huge discovery on my part, quite a few people are perfectly aware of this, I heard it first from Noam Chomsky, but somehow, knowing the truth does not set us free. In fact America's slimiest, most cynically manipulative, barefaced, contemporary propagandist, Glenn Beck, can even have the chutzpah to denounce Bernays on his program, while using a textbook collection of Bernays' techniques in every broadcast himself; finally with what seems the  sole object of trashing Cass Sunstein. All on Fox News, the most popular mouthpiece of America's oligarchy. Adding insult to injury.

I remember back in the 1970s a Hungarian friend of mine describing the Communist regime in his country: "they control everything", he said, "you are helpless, powerless facing them, all you have is the company of your few trusted friends" (apparently Hungary was freer than East Germany, where you couldn't even let down your hair with your friends). But, thinking it over, it occurs to me that those regimes at least paid their people the compliment of being afraid of them. America's regime will let you say anything you want, because whatever you might say won't matter one bit.

Maybe someday the price of gasoline and the price of food will burn away this fog, but I wouldn't bet on it, I would say that the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis of America can rest easy, their fortunes are in safe hands. DS

Globalization and its discontents: a new paradigm

I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy (...). It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.  Dani Rodrik - Kennedy School Harvard

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In the Middle East -- and who knows where else next -- the masses are on the march and the mystery and the mystique of revolution unfolds once again.

There is a mixture of things, like a chemical formula, that leads to revolutions, here is a sample of  the mixture that is brewing up in the Middle East right now:

• Generally people are tired of being intimidated and resentful at being tortured and oppressed. 

• Then, thanks to modern medical advances and the lowering of infant mortality, there are huge numbers of young people and very few jobs for them.

• Thanks to advances in education, many of these young people are vastly overqualified for any jobs they might ever manage to get: the revolutionary leaven of dissatisfied intellectuals is well known. 

• Globalization (seen as neocolonialism) is offering growing opportunities for ruling cliques to get obscenely rich by privatizing the local economy in benefit of foreign multinationals. This causes discontent among mid-ranking army cadres, who are nationalist and among much of the local business community, who don't share in the pillage (remember the role of the bazaar of Tehran in the fall of the Shah). And to all this, 

•  Add food inflation, which brings the sans culotte into the street.

• Remember that the rising price of oil brought on by these disturbances adds exponentially to that food inflation.

Everybody has their own spin on Egypt's revolution and the word "freedom" is being thrown about a lot as if it were an end in itself instead of simply being a means, a precondition of action. Who is free? Free to do what? Free from whom? The question might be better expressed as: now that they are free, what are they going to express with that freedom?

Of course the American media inventively associates "freedom" with "free market capitalism" and as we saw in the previous post on the BBC video, "The Century of Self", this was an idea that cost American business a huge amount of money and time to sell to its first victims, the American people, and is not that deeply rooted in countries that were heavily exploited former colonies at the mercy for centuries of foreign interests and not their own..  I think that many commentators are neglecting the anti-imperialist angle in all of this: once free from the local "foreign client" dictator, the desire all these countries have for national independence and sovereignty and how that contradicts with America's brand of multinational corporate globalization.

Again, most commentators read the role of Islam in this struggle for freedom from foreign tutelage in a shallow manner. If American dominated globalization is seen as a dissolvent of this new freedom to "be themselves", then what ideology is robust enough to be indigestible by globalization. What set of ideas and customs can bullet proof these newly free societies from what the Chinese call "America's candy bullets"? Obviously Islam is well suited for that role, both nationally and internationally.

Sheik Qaradawi, a popular television cleric whose program reaches an audience of tens of millions worldwide, addressed a rapt audience of more than a million Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to celebrate the uprising and honor those who died. On Friday, he struck themes of democracy and pluralism, long hallmarks of his writing and preaching. He began his sermon by saying that he was discarding the customary opening “Oh Muslims,” in favor of “Oh Muslims and Copts,” referring to Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. He praised Muslims and Christians for standing together in Egypt’s revolution and even lauded the Coptic Christian “martyrs” who once fought the Romans and Byzantines. “I invite you to bow down in prayer together,” he said. He urged the military officers governing Egypt to deliver on their promises of turning over power to “a civil government” founded on principles of pluralism, democracy and freedom. And he called on the army to immediately release all political prisoners and rid the cabinet of its dominance by officials of the old Mubarak government.“We demand from the Egyptian Army to free us from the government that was appointed by Mubarak,” Sheik Qaradawi declared. “We want a new government without any of these faces whom people can no longer stand.” And he urged the young people who led the uprising to continue their revolution. “Protect it,” he said. “Don’t you dare let anyone steal it from you.”(...)  Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy. But he has made exceptions for violence against Israel or the American forces in Iraq. “You call it violence; I call it resistance,” said Prof. Emad Shahin of the University of Notre Dame, an Egyptian scholar who has studied Sheik Qaradawi’s work and was in Tahrir Square for his speech Friday. New York Times

And speaking of the Chinese and what  they call, "America's candy bullets". Quite a few people seem to think that China is a loser in all this business because it isn't a liberal democracy on the western model.  They miss a very important point: China does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries and does not lecture them on "values" or export revolution. America is guilty of all these sins and is an inveterate and unrepentant sinner. For any former colony of the west, be it a democracy or a dictatorship, China is a more comfortable business partner than the USA. I think China is finally going to be one of the biggest winners of the upheaval in the Middle East.

The United States has two principal objectives in the Middle East: to control the world's access to its oil reserves and to give political and military cover to the state of Israel, for reasons of purely domestic, American politics.

As to the role of the Israel Lobby in Washington, truly the joker in the deck, they have their work cut out for them, Americans may soon find themselves in the dilemma of being forced to choose between their undying love for Israel and their legendary addiction to cheap gasoline. Israel is a wonderful country, but you can't fill your gas tank with it and drive to a minimum wage job over American distances. This is a dilemma that could leave America's strained domestic peace in tatters. Oil at $200+ a barrel could bring America's sans culottes into the streets... Running, walking, but not driving.  DS

The Nephew from Hell: Edward Bernays and the science of American bullshit

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A couple of summers ago I read a lovely book called "The Metaphysical Club - A Story of  Ideas in America", a Pulitzer Prize winner, by Louis Menand.  The book is about a group of philosophers: William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, thinkers who grew out of the yeast culture of Emerson and Thoreau's Boston. The period in which these men worked, was the aftermath of the American Civil War, a time marked by an explosion of sordid robber barons and hucksters of every stripe whose patron saint might be P. T. Barnum, certainly not Saint Dismas, the "good thief".

At that time two America's coexisted, one dark and sleazy: the America of Jay Gould and Boss Tweed and another pure and bright: the America of James and Holmes. As different as they were, both of them, each in their way, were as real, as clearly drawn, as mordant and as "what you see is what you get" as the writings of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. 

While I was reading the book I kept getting the feeling that the sense of reality that permeated that era of America's past, has been almost entirely lost. I have experienced some of that reality myself in the person of my grandmother, who was born and raised in 19th century America, and the men and women she grew up with in the tiny Midwestern village, where I spent many of my summers as a small boy. I wondered, while reading, "The Metaphysical Club" when and how America had become such a sinkhole of spin and mendacious euphemism, storytelling and bullshit. I had no answer, only the feeling of a better, nobler, America that had been lost. An America I am much proud of, hardly recognizable in the bloated, deluded, self-indulgent America of today.  Who was responsible for wrecking it, when, how? I had no answer.

Then, the other day, a good friend sent me the link to the video that I have posted at the top of this piece and I suddenly was getting an idea when bullshit became America's native dialect. When I saw it, I thought it might have been some historical fiction dreamed up by Doctorow.

Here is the summary of the video.

BBC resume of "The Century of Self":

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.

His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

I am going to say some pretty strong and uncomplimentary things about Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, so before going any farther, I wish to make clear, that I consider Sigmund Freud himself as one of the noblest and most creative minds in western history, a man who dedicated his life to fearlessly exploring the darkest recesses of the human mind with an intent solely to heal and ameliorate the human condition. As a tiny, but revealing sample of Freud's nobility and humanity, this sample, his account of his meeting with William James, will have to suffice.

Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.

The video shows that it was Bernays' public relations skills that made a scientist like Freud and his very complex and esoteric theories a household word in middle class America on the order of Picasso and Charley Chaplin and led to today's enervating psychobabble and of course led to the insidious and Orwellian monster of American marketing. 

Where Freud saw knowledge for healing Bernays just saw money and he showed America's corporations how to mine humanity's dark side for profit. Pimping is an honest dollar compared to Bernays' game.

One of the great ironies of this video is to learn that Eddy Bernays, the man who taught American women to smoke, was also a major influence on an admirer of his, Joseph Goebbels, who used "Uncle Siggy's" insights into the levers and pulleys of human emotions to whip up a bestial  frenzy in the highly civilized German people, a frenzy that ultimately killed and "smoked" six million European Jews. Sigmund Freud fortunately died in the first months of the war and so never really learned what use his ideas had finally been put to. 

If you stop and think about it Bernays may be one of the most poisonous and evil men in history, certainly in America's history, nobody, not even Ayn Rand, can touch him.

It is an hour long with three more to follow, but it is a true treasure. Please watch this video. DS

A Valentine story

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I thought something romantic and sad was required for Valentine's day and thinking about it, up popped the saddest love story I remember. A story that if it wasn't true would be pure schmaltz.

This all happened when I was a little kid.  My stepfather was a doctor of musicology with a masters in psychology and was a pioneer in using musical therapy in the treatment of the mentally ill. He worked at a huge Veteran's Administration hospital on Chicago's North Shore. Those were fat days in the USA and the hospital had a huge orchestra and choirs and a "big band", all of this was my stepfather's turf.... He was the musical director of an insane asylum.

In those days there were none of the marvelous drugs they have today, which make it possible for people with severe bi-polar disorders, epilepsy or schizophrenia to live "normal" lives without needing to be confined to a hospital. I've heard that the hospital where my stepfather worked no longer exists, but in those days it had hundreds of patients. Among them was a man,  named Don, who certainly wouldn't be hospitalized today, because his particular cross in life was acute gran mal epilepsy, contracted while in military service, and he often suffered several seizures a day. Today this sort of thing is treatable, but in those days he had to under constant care, impossible then for him to be outside on his own.

He must have come into the world with strange karma, because aside from his illness, he had movie star good looks and a voice of operatic quality, all the way from baritone to lyric tenor. I remember that he was very charming and very sad.

Among the volunteers who worked at the hospital was a girl named Jesse, also beautiful and also with an enormous soprano voice of operatic quality. She gave voice lessons at the hospital. She was confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down from an automobile accident.

Don and Jesse were hopelessly in love. "Hopelessly" was the operative word.

I was a little kid, so I have had to figure a lot of this out later, at the time though I was aware that they were in love and this was all very sad.

I knew them quite well and not from hearsay because every so often my stepfather would check Don out under his responsibility and bring him home for dinner and to spend the night at our house, a huge three story Victorian pile near the Northwestern campus. On the way home he would pick up Jesse too.

I remember that after dinner, they would sing duets, while my stepfather played the piano, Italian and German opera mostly, but occasionally an old chestnut like "Ah Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I've Found You", where at least I could understand the words. I still remember the tableaux, my stepfather at the piano, Jesse in her wheelchair, Don standing beside her. They used to look into each others eyes while they sang. 

Soon it was my bedtime and I had to go upstairs to my bedroom way up on the third floor, the beautiful, powerful, voices followed me all the way up there and sang me to sleep.

What Don and Jesse did after I went to sleep, nobody ever told me, but there were lots of spare bedrooms in our house and I hope they got to be happy for a while.

My Valentine's wish is that all my readers should have love as rich and beautiful as Don and Jesse's, but less complicated. DS