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progressive books 6/20/2011

Juan Gonzalez on America's role in Latin America

I think the central theme of my book is that the — you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States unless you understand America’s role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire. It is the result of more than a century of domination of many of these countries. And in fact, those countries that were most dominated by the United States are the ones that have sent the most migrants to this country. And Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Salvador, Guatemala, these are the countries that have provided the bulk of the migration from Latin America, largely many of them fleeing from the civil wars, as in the cases of Guatemala and Nicaragua and El Salvador, in which the United States government played a key role in backing one side or the other, others coming here as a result of the needs of American businesses that established migration and recruiting, actually recruited people to come here to fill jobs — that’s more so in the case of the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans. And so, in essence, the migration flows, the mass migration flows of Latin Americans to this country were a direct response to the needs of the empire. Most Americans are not aware of that, because most Americans don’t even think of our country as an empire. - Juan Gonzalez, from a DemocracyNow! interview. permalink comments

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progressive books 5/13/2011

Adam Hochschild on how World War I began

The interesting thing about this war, which really remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way — it killed some 20 million people, military and civilian; the way it ended guaranteed the rise of the Nazis and the second even more destructive war — was that in all of the countries involved, there were people who felt the war was madness and shouldn’t be fought. They didn’t prevail, unfortunately, but I nonetheless wanted to write their story, because it seemed to me that when we usually write about wars, we describe them as a contest between one side and the other, whereas I was more interested in this conflict between people who saw the war as a noble and necessary crusade and people who saw it as madness.

I focused on England, because that’s where this antiwar movement was strongest. More than 20,000 British men of military age refused to go into the army when they were drafted. Many of them, as a matter of principle, refused the alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, like driving ambulances at the front or, you know, working in war industries. More than 6,000 went to prison, under very harsh conditions — the largest number of people who had been imprisoned, up to that point in time, for political reasons in a Western democracy. And they were a remarkable group of people. And happily, for me as a writer, they wrote letters. They kept diaries. They published clandestine prison newspapers. And they had interesting relationships with friends and family members who felt differently about the war and, in some cases, were at the front fighting. - Adam Hochschild, from a DemocracyNow! interview. permalink comments

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progressive books 2/2/2011

Edward Herman and David Peterson on Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles

By an historical coincidence, both Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles were brought before Western courts around the same time in late 2010 and early 2011—Assange in Britain and Posada in the United States. The contrast in their treatment by the U.S.-Anglo system of justice and in their handling by the Western establishment media is enlightening.

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

"The CIA taught us everything," Posada told the New York Times in 1998. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada was a star pupil. But as a longtime CIA asset and, until the past decade, the "most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground," the U.S. justice system has never charged Posada with a crime related to terrorism or the death of civilians, even though a former FBI counterterrorism expert who investigated the Cuban airliner bombing claims that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in its planning. Surely this is because his killings and bombings were carried out against targets of U.S. policy, and because he almost certainly would have implicated the CIA.

In fact, the U.S. justice system never charged Posada with any kind of offense until early 2007, when a federal grand jury indicted him with the ludicrously lesser charges of making false statements during his naturalization interview two years earlier. After Posada had slipped into Miami's anti-Castro Cuban-exile community in March 2005, he filed for political asylum but then quickly withdrew his application when he recognized that in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush's "War on Terror," his past activities made him a "hot potato."

But before he could disappear again, he held a news conference in Miami, and Department of Homeland Security agents grabbed him—and ever since he has faced a series of on-again-off-again perjury charges related to his original interview.

With his current trial now underway in a U.S. District Court in El Paso, things have not moved beyond this point, leading one observer, Jose Pertierra, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who represents the Venezuelan government, which since 2005 has sought Posada's extradition to stand trial for the Cuban airliner bombing, to conclude that "all parties are waiting for a biological solution to this case.”

As U.S. prosecutor Timothy Reardon told the court at the start of this trial, Posada "can do anything he wants to the Cuban regime." But he lied during his naturalization interview, and one "must play by the rules and tell the truth to become a citizen."

Julian Assange, by contrast, has not killed anybody, or so far even broken any law, and key U.S. military officials have denied claims that information released into the public realm via WikiLeaks has resulted in anybody's death...

- an excerpt from Mixed Media: Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. Herman and Peterson are coauthors of the new book The Politics of Genocide published by Monthly Review Press. permalink comments

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progressive books 9/20/2010

Tariq Ali on "The Obama Syndrome"

What has really changed since Obama replaced Bush in the White House. Very little, argues Tariq Ali in his latest book, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender At Home, War Abroad, apart from the mood music.

I know some of his supporters might feel it’s a little harsh, but I think that we’ve had two years of him now, Amy, and the contours of this administration are now visible. And essentially, it is a conservative administration which has changed the mood music. So the talk is better. The images of the administration are better, the reasonable looks. But in terms of what they do—in foreign policy, we’ve seen a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies, and worse, in AfPak, as they call it, and at home, we’ve seen a total capitulation to the lobbyists, to the corporations. The fact that the healthcare bill was actually drafted by someone who used to be an insurance lobbyist says it all.

Let’s look at it concretely. Bush had promised exactly the same withdrawal pattern from Iraq: by this time, we will be out. Obama has followed it. They’re not going out. What is essentially happening, they’re reducing the presence of combat troops and eliminating it in the big cities, and building six huge military bases all over Iraq, in which they’ll keep between fifty and sixty thousand soldiers, ready to act when the need be—just like the British did when they occupied Iraq in the '20s and ’30s of the last century. And the British were then driven out by a violent upheaval and revolution in the ’50s. So the US is keeping these bases in, (a) to control Iraq, and (b) as a warning to Iran. And I think there's going to be trouble.

The war isn’t over at all. We’ve seen, just a few days ago, huge explosions in Baghdad and Fallujah. It’s a total disaster and a mess. And to present that as somehow "mission accomplished part two" is a joke. That country has been wrecked, a million Iraqis dead, its social infrastructure destroyed. And in Afghanistan, they are now going from bad to worse. They know, and General Eikenberry knows and says, we cannot win this war militarily. They can’t lose it, but they can’t win it, either. So, political solution is the only way out, and that means that they have to have an exit strategy. Obama isn’t even talking about that, because that might be construed as a sign of weakness. But by who? The army knows what’s going on. They can’t stay there forever. - Tariq Ali, speaking to Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow!

In Cairo, at West Point, at Oslo, Obama has treated the world to one uplifting homily after another, each address larded with every euphemism that White House speechwriters can muster to describe America’s glowing mission in the world: ‘Our country has borne a special burden in global affairs’; ‘Our cause is just, our resolve unwavering.’ The model for this variant of imperial presidency is Woodrow Wilson—no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it... - Tariq Ali, from The Obama Syndrome. permalink comments

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progressive books 8/31/2010

Former U.S. Senator James Abourezk on Leaders in Hiding

Those of us who have read some history also know what happened to the Irish when they first came to America. We also remember how Jews were assaulted, both in the press and in person, until the remainder of the country put a stop to it by making it unpopular to isolate a community so they could be demonized.

Now, it's the turn of the Arabs and the Muslims to receive the same treatment that blacks, the Irish, and the Jews did before that treatment became unpopular.

How similar is the assault on the Muslims and Arabs when compared to what happened to other ethnic groups in our shady past. Where the similarity ends is how the media is treating the entire "mosque" at ground zero. The proposed building is neither a mosque, nor is it at ground zero. It is a community center that, among other activities, includes a prayer room. I know of no one who would build an eleven-story mosque, and I know of no mosque that would allow a swimming pool and recreation center to be built in it, or even above it.

So what we have here is a political football that leaves it open for the gaggle of demagogues and hustlers -- I'm thinking specifically of Newt Gingrich, Rick Lazio and Sarah Palin -- to try to reap some kind of political popularity from denouncing the project.

It used to be that both political leaders and the media would denounce this kind racism, and that such denunciations would soon bring such demagoguery to an end. But not this time. Most of the media, MSNBC being the major exception, has ducked its head, being content to just report on the onslaught against the Islamic Center, but not denouncing the demagoguery.

So far, this has resulted in someone setting fire to the construction of a real mosque in Tennessee. This usually follows acts of violence against Arabs and Muslims in different parts of the country. We've seen it before.

All this won't stop unless and until all the political leaders--now silent--come down hard on what is happening, when the haters begin themselves to feel isolated. Cheers to President Obama and to Mayor Bloomberg, who have tried to lead the way, but who lost Howard Dean and Harry Reid in the process. The rest of the political leadership--both Republican and Democratic--predictably are in hiding. - an excerpt from Give Me That Old Time Racism by former U.S. Senator James Abourezk. permalink comments

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progressive books 8/23/2010

David Kirby on something else we feed chickens

David Kirby on why chickens grow faster when fed arsenic With the chickens that we eat, so-called broiler chickens, they often add arsenic into that feed to make the birds grow faster and to prevent intestinal diseases...The theory is that when you poison a chicken, it gets sick, so it eats and drinks more, consumes more, to try to get the poison out of its body. That makes a chicken grow faster, and it prevents intestinal parasites. The risk to humans, there have been studies done, and they have found residue of arsenic in some chickens. The real threat is in the litter that comes out the other end of the chicken. When that gets spread on farmland, people breathe in that arsenic dust. And there’s a town in Arkansas where cancer rates are just through the roof. There’s been over twenty pediatric cases in this tiny town of Prairie Grove with just a couple of thousand people...

Something else we feed chickens that people don’t realize is beef products. And when those chickens eat that beef product, some of it falls into their litter. Well, we produce so much chicken litter in this country, because of these factory farms, and it is so rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, its land application uses are limited. So you have surplus chicken litter and nothing to do with it. What do they do with it? They feed it to cattle. So we feed beef cows chicken crap. That chicken litter often contains bits and byproducts of cattle. So we are actually feeding cattle to cattle, which is a risk factor for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. We actually feed cattle products to cattle in three different ways: chicken litter, restaurant scraps, and blood products on dairy farms. And all the mad cow cases in this country came from mega-dairies where, when that calf is born, they remove it from its mother immediately, because that mother’s milk is a commodity, it’s worth money, so instead they feed that calf a formula that includes bovine blood products, and again increasing the risk of mad cow disease. - Two excerpts from a DemocracyNow! interview with David Kirby. permalink comments

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progressive books 8/5/2010

Andrew J. Bacevich on How to Dismantle the American Empire

The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?

The Afghanistan decision was his [Obama's] opportunity to begin to chart a new course on national security policy, to begin to break away from this pattern of behavior that we’ve adhered to for the past sixty or so years. And he blew it. I can’t pretend to look into his heart and understand what factors caused him to make the decision he did. I suspect that a political calculation may have weighed more heavily than a strategic calculation or a moral calculation. And I find that deeply upsetting, because I, and I think many of us, felt that here, finally, was a public figure who—whose decisions would not be influenced primarily by political calculations... My guess is the President probably right now has a case of buyer’s remorse and is wishing that he hadn’t actually made the decision that he did, but it has become Obama’s war. I mean, he finds himself in a circumstance now where, having bought the war, it’s going worse now than it was last year. And he’s basically facing a reelection campaign right around the corner. Unless David Petraeus, our new commander, truly pulls a rabbit out of the hat, then President Obama will run for reelection in 2012 with this war still very much ongoing and, in all likelihood, with no end in sight.

But you asked the question, where does the pressure come from? And the pressure comes from what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. The pressure comes from the national security apparatus. There are people in institutions who are deeply invested in maintaining the status quo. There are budgets, there are prerogatives, there are ambitions, that ostensibly get satisfied by maintaining this drive for American globalism, again, backed by an emphasis on military power. So I don’t discount for a second that the President would have had to, you know, shove aside some fairly stubborn resistance to make that course change on Afghanistan, and he chose not to do it. - Andrew J. Bacevich from a DemocracyNow! interview.

There exists an alternative tradition to which Americans today could repair, should they choose to do so. This tradition harks back to the nearly forgotten anti-imperial origins of the Republic. Succinctly captured in the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” this tradition is one that does not seek trouble but insists that others will accord the United States respect. Updated for our own time, it might translate into the following substitute for the existing sacred trinity.

First, the purpose of the U.S. military is not to combat evil or remake the world, but to defend the United States and its most vital interests. However necessary, military power itself is neither good nor inherently desirable. Any nation defining itself in terms of military might is well down the road to perdition, as earlier generations of Americans instinctively understood. As for military supremacy, the lessons of the past are quite clear. It is an illusion and its pursuit an invitation to mischief, if not disaster. Therefore, the United States should maintain only those forces required to accomplish the defense establishment’s core mission.

Second, the primary duty station of the American soldier is in America. Just as the U.S. military should not be a global police force, so too it should not be a global occupation force. Specific circumstances may from time to time require the United States on a temporary basis to establish a military presence abroad. Yet rather than defining the norm, Americans should view this prospect as a sharp departure, entailing public debate and prior congressional authorization. Dismantling the Pentagon’s sprawling network of existing bases promises to be a lengthy process. Priority should be given to those regions where the American presence costs the most while accomplishing the least. According to those criteria, U.S. troops should withdraw from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia forthwith.

Third, consistent with the Just War tradition, the United States should employ force only as a last resort and only in self-defense. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war -- the United States bestowing on itself the exclusive prerogative of employing force against ostensible threats even before they materialize—is a moral and strategic abomination, the very inverse of prudent and enlightened statecraft. Concocted by George W. Bush to justify his needless and misguided 2003 invasion of Iraq, this doctrine still awaits explicit abrogation by authorities in Washington. Never again should the United States undertake “a war of choice” informed by fantasies that violence provides a shortcut to resolving history’s complexities.

Were this alternative triad to become the basis for policy, dramatic changes in the U.S. national security posture would ensue. Military spending would decrease appreciably. The Pentagon’s global footprint would shrink. Weapons manufacturers would see their profits plummet. Beltway Bandits would close up shop. The ranks of defense- oriented think tanks would thin. These changes, in turn, would narrow the range of options available for employing force, obliging policy makers to exhibit greater restraint in intervening abroad. With resources currently devoted to rehabilitating Baghdad or Kabul freed up, the cause of rehabilitating Cleveland and Detroit might finally attract a following.

Choosing

President Lyndon Johnson had hoped that an ambitious domestic reform program known as the Great Society might define his legacy. Instead, he bequeathed to his successor a nation that was bitterly divided, deeply troubled, and increasingly cynical.

To follow a different course would have required Johnson to depart from the Washington rules. This he -- although not he alone -- lacked the courage to do.

Here lies the real significance -- and perhaps the tragedy -- of Barack Obama’s decision, during the first year of his presidency, to escalate the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. By retaining Robert Gates as defense secretary and by appointing retired four-star officers as his national security adviser and intelligence director, Obama had already offered Washington assurances that he was not contemplating a radical departure from the existing pattern of national security policy. Whether wittingly or not, the president now proffered his full-fledged allegiance to the Washington consensus, removing any lingering doubts about its durability.

In his speech of December 1, 2009, while explaining to the cadets at West Point why he felt it necessary to widen a war already in its ninth year, Obama justified his decision by appending it to a much larger narrative. “More than any other nation,” he declared, “the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades -- a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down, and markets open, and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress and advancing frontiers of human liberty.” Obama wanted it known that by sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to fight in Afghanistan his own administration was carrying on the work his predecessors had begun. Their policies were his policies.

The six decades to which the president referred in his artfully sanitized rendering of contemporary history were the years during which the American credo and the sacred trinity had ascended to a position of uncontested supremacy. Thus did the president who came into office vowing to change the way Washington works make known his intention to leave this crucially important element of his inheritance all but untouched. Like Johnson, the president whose bold agenda for domestic reform presaged his own, Obama too was choosing to conform - an excerpt from WASHINGTON RULES: America's Path To Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich. permalink comments

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progressive books 8/1/2010

Stacy Malkan on Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

Last month Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced legislation that would toughen safety standards for beauty products and require regular government testing for hazardous ingredients. DemocracyNow! hosted a debate between Stacy Malkan, founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, and John Bailey, chief scientist at the Personal Care Products Council and a spokesperson for the cosmetics industry. We feature some excerpts from Stacy Malkan's comments:

I actually was a lover of makeup when I was a teenager. I used lots of products. And I was using about twenty products a day. So that was shampoos, lotions, hair gels, all kinds of makeup. And for the book, I went back, and I actually looked up all of those products that I had been using as a teen and learned that I had been exposing myself to 230 synthetic chemicals every day, you know, before even getting on the school bus. And that’s pretty typical kind of exposures for a teenage girl.

So, in that mix were seventeen carcinogens, chemicals linked to cancer. There were dozens of hormone-disrupting chemicals, many parabens, which can act like estrogen in the body. Lots of these products, as we know from the product tests we’ve conducted at Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, are contaminated with carcinogens like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane, that are not listed on the label. We found those chemicals in dozens of top-selling children’s bath products.

There are two huge loopholes in labeling laws. The companies don’t have to tell us what’s in fragrance, and that can be a dozen or more chemicals that are in any shampoo or conditioner with a fragrance, for example. They also don’t have to tell us about contaminants or byproducts, and those are some common ones that typically get into products from the chemical processes that are used. So, formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane would be examples, nitrosamines. Those are carcinogens. We find lead in lipstick. We’ve done tests of kids’ face paint and found low levels of lead, as well as other heavy metals like nickel and chromium.

So, contaminants are very common. The industry knows about them. FDA knows about them. But there are no limits. And the only way to find out if your product contains them is to send it to a lab and spend a couple of hundred dollars to test it.

So the problem with cosmetics, as I was saying about my own daily exposures, it’s the mixture of low levels of hazardous chemicals that we’re exposed to continually, day after day after day. And the companies always say, and I’m sure John will say, it’s just low levels, it’s just a little bit, just traces of1,4-dioxane and formaldehyde. But, you know, these are chemicals derived from oil products with known toxicities, and they’re mixed together. So a typical baby in a tub could be exposed to formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane from the shampoo, the bubble bath, the body wash. The same chemicals are used in laundry detergent, dish soap. So the exposures are continual. And there’s no need for it. There’s absolutely no reason on earth for baby shampoos to contain carcinogens. The companies already know how to make products without those chemicals, and that’s what they should be doing. - Stacy Malkan from DemocracyNow!. permalink comments

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progressive books 7/10/2010

Joy Gordon on the Invisble War, the United States and Iraq Sanctions

Joy Gordon, author of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, discusses the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s that killed 500,000 children, the US led effort to literally starve Iraq by cutting off food importation, how the Gulf War and subsequent sanctions destroyed Iraq’s modern infrastructure and prevented rebuilding, contradictory US and UN policies on rewarding compliance of Security Council resolutions and how the US “reverse veto” power guaranteed the sanctions would never be lifted while Saddam Hussein remained in power. Listen to Scott Horton's interview of Joy Gordon on Anti-war Radio.

It is important to remember that the U.S. presence in Iraq, and the harm done by the Unted States to the Iraqi population, did not begin in 2003. Starting in August 1990, the United States was instrumental in imposing the cruelest sanctions in the history of international governance. While the United Nations (UN) Security Council was within its mandate to respond to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the sanctions regime it imposed, in conjunction with the massive bombing campaign of 1991, destroyed nearly all of Iraq's infrastructure, industial capacity, agriculture, telecommunications, and critical public services, particularly electricity and water treatment. For the next twelve years the sanctions would prevent Iraq from restoring any of these to the level Iraq had achived in the 1980s and would devestate the health, education, and basic well-being of almost the entire Iraqi population... - from Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. permalink comments

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progressive books 6/26/2010

Tom Engelhardt on the American Way of War

"The reality of modern war, from the early twentieth century on, is that what we call collateral damage has increasingly become the central damage of the war. Collateral damage means damage to civilians. But as war has progressed into our time, you could really say that the soldiers, increasingly, on either side, are the collateral damage, and increasingly, the civilians are the central damage of any war." We have bombed about seven wedding parties, says Tom Engelhardt on DemocracyNow! "I find this shocking. But we are incredibly detached from the wars that we fight. And as long as we are thinking in terms of our own safety, we think very little about wedding parties, funerals, baby naming parties... If you’re going to fight from the air—and that is part of the American way of war—you are going to kill civilians, period. And you’re going to probably kill them in greater numbers than any other way. That’s just a fact of war." - Tom Engelhardt, from DemocracyNow!

Listen to Tom Engelhardt discuss his new book, The American Way of War, with Scott Horten on Antiwar Radio. On the trillion-plus-dollar war budget: “Of course the striking thing…is that [these wars] in essence never end. If there were ever a victory, it would kind of get in the way of the American style of warfare. Basically, our wars no longer result in victory; they just go on and on and on.”

Author Tom Engelhardt is also the creator and editor of the website TomDispatch - "essential reading...a one-stop-shop where you can find the most provocative thinkers writing the most eloquent and hard hitting articles about the most pressing issues of the day. Read, get mad, and take action" - Howard Zinn on Tom Dispatch. permalink comments

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