Tag Archives: Democracy Now!

When war is always the answer

As I write this, we appear to be inching towards that thing we always say we don’t want but nearly always opt for. The difference this time is that we’re flirting with a conflict that, at minimum, will send the global economy into yet another tailspin, and, at maximum, will result in terminal nuclear conflict. Neither seems to me a good option.

I have written about this previously, of course – as has nearly everyone. My hope has been that we would begin to back away from the breach, but that hasn’t happened yet. This past week, French President Macron met with Putin and seemed to come away with assurances that the Russians wouldn’t escalate the situation. Somewhat encouraging, though it is a slender thread from which to dangle the fate of this insane world.

Mutually supporting motives

This threatened conflict has brought the art of Kremlinology back with a vengeance, which must please Putin no end. In truth, the practice never entirely went away. But now there’s something like a cottage industry in supposition about what’s going on between Vlad’s ears. I guess people have to keep themselves busy somehow as we wait for the world to explode like a firecracker.

One of the most informed discussions along these lines took place on Democracy Now! on Monday. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen and Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute talked about the simmering conflict threatening to boil over. Lieven sees overriding considerations of national security interests in what Russia is doing; Gessen sees it more as an expression of Putin’s anxiety over his waning hold on leadership.

I actually think they’re both right – the two theories are not mutually exclusive. Putin is dead set against NATO membership for Ukraine, as I’m sure any Russian leader would be. He also likes to play to his base – basically that large population of Russians who want their country to be a world power and not be pushed around by the West.

Good memories for bad things

There’s no justification for military aggression, and I have never been a fan of Putin, as I’ve said many times. But the strongman leader thing is a direct outgrowth of the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet state back in the nineties. In America, people see this as a time of triumph and vindication, as well as a lot of back-slapping.

During the 1990s, while the U.S. was helping to midwife the new capitalist Russia, the country went through a Great Depression-like economic failure resulting in loss of income, pensions, and something like five million excess deaths. This remains a fresh memory in the minds of many Russians. Somewhat like the North Koreans, whose country was destroyed by U.S. munitions in the 1950s, they know the consequences of letting the West get the upper hand.

Looking for an off-ramp

As Americans, our problem is a simple one. We can’t stand to see other countries do with impunity what we ourselves have repeatedly done with impunity. When the Russians were using hysterical firepower in Syria, it was all over U.S. media. Now that our bombs are killing even more Yemenis, you barely hear about the place. After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, what standing to we have to tell others to play nice?

That said, it seems only reasonable for us to make every effort to keep this conflict from happening. For the sake of the Ukrainians and Russians that could die as a result, it is in no way worth it to anyone.

luv u,

jp

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Cop out.

Overwhelmed by all the mainstream news coverage of the COP conference in Katowice, Poland? I thought not. It’s possible that the international climate negotiations in Poland have been covered in passing by the evening news shows, etc., but I haven’t seen a single mention of them on the various talk shows, most notably on MSNBC, which is purported to be the centrist-liberal network. Their constant obsession is the Mueller probe, and while I can understand the temptation to follow such a strongly narrative-driven story, to do so to the exclusion of all other news is craven on the part of any organization that lays claim the mantle of investigative journalism.

Old King Coal.Probably the best source on what’s happening at Katowice is DemocracyNow! – Amy Goodman and her crew have been broadcasting from Poland all week, covering the activities of the American delegation. Yes, there is an official U.S. delegation, even though our lord emperor Trump the first has chosen to withdraw from the weak as dishwater (but better than nothing) Paris Accord. The delegation is headed by former Priebus aide Wells Griffith, who ran a failed campaign for congress in Alabama recently. Goodman chased Griffith around the hall at one point, asking him to comment on the administration’s hallucinogenic policies on climate change – he refused, walked faster, practically ran to get away from them. (Worth a look.)

What are they doing there? Same thing the conference is doing in Poland – making every effort to legitimize coal as a usable energy source. Recall that Trump’s EPA administrator is a coal industry lobbyist (I would add “former” to that title, but honestly, he still is). Poland’s government, too, is a big promoter of coal – that’s why they are hosting COP 24 in a building designed to look like the inside of a coal mine. Not too subtle. Though it has announced its intention to leave the Paris Accord, the U.S. government is doing all it can to steer the negotiations away from any serious effort at attacking this problem, teaming up with other bad global actors and hawking its extractive industries. It’s not all that different from Obama’s ridiculous “all of the above” policy, except that Trump’s all of the above doesn’t include renewables.

Mind you, this meeting has been going on for 24 years and we are still waiting for serious action on the greatest threat to confront us in the history of humankind. That’s why the corporate media pays no attention – they no the intention is to do nothing while looking like you’re doing something. Unacceptable.

Not Too Soon. I think Greg Grandin did a great job of remembering George H.W. Bush in all of his patrician glory in last week’s Nation. Check it out.

luv u,

jp

The fallen.

Four special forces soldiers were killed in the African nation of Niger earlier this month, and the Trump administration doesn’t want to talk about it. There’s been no discussion of what our policy is in Niger or more broadly in that region of Africa, no information on the circumstances of the men’s deaths, no nothing. It’s a bit reminiscent of the Yemen raid that went bad just a couple of weeks into Trump’s tenure, except that they HAD a story for that one and it turned out to be as bogus as a Linkletter million dollar bill.

Another thing the Niger incident echoes somewhat more dimly is the Benghazi attack back in 2012. You know, four dead Americans, questions about how much support they received from Washington, and so on. So I imagine Trey Gowdy will start holding hearings on this quite soon, right? (Trey? Are you out there, Trey?)

What they DON'T want to talk about.Okay, so, the thing MSNBC has latched onto is Trump’s call to one of the relatives of the lost soldiers in Niger and his comments surrounding presidential condolence calls in general. This seems like a red herring. The fact is, Trump radiates a sense of not caring about anything that happens to military people. This just points to what I’ve contended for some time now; that Trump is all of our worst tendencies balled up into a big, fat, greasy wad of nothing. He doesn’t care about lost soldiers in much the same way that most Americans don’t care – at least, not enough to step away from their televisions or to put their forks down. Sad, as Trump would tweet, but true.

Do Americans wonder why our military is operating in places like Niger, Chad, etc.? My guess is that they don’t, since both the government and the media are not taking a close look. One freelance journalist working in that region, Amanda Sperber, commented on Democracy Now! that she found it surprising that Americans weren’t aware of our presence in Niger; that we have, among other things, a drone base in that country. Why? Because we the people don’t make it our business to question these deployments. We don’t have to pay (at least, for the time being) and we don’t have to fight, so we essentially don’t give a fuck.

We will become a civilized people the moment we start treating our service personnel as if they were members of our immediate family. When we get to that point, maybe Trump will adjust his behavior … or, even better, be sent home.

luv u,

jp

Bodies count.

Though you probably didn’t hear about it on the evening news or NPR, the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (of which Physicians for Social Responsibility is a member) released a report on casualties of the so-called “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The toll is conservatively estimated at 1.3 million in total, with 1 million in Iraq killed as a result of our 2003 invasion. Anyone familiar with the figures breezily tossed around by the last two administrations might be surprised by this total. (I recall W. Bush casually offering 30,000, as if guessing the number of marbles in a jar.) Actually, the number is roughly in line with what the Iraq Study Group estimated in 2005-06.

This is what hegemony looks likeNo matter – this wasn’t worthy of comment, except on Democracy Now! That’s not surprising. We can’t acknowledge the magnitude of our own crimes, only those of our official enemies. Assad is an execrable mass murderer, right? Sure he is. But has he killed as many as we have over the past fifteen years? Not nearly. How about ISIS? Killer crackheads, to be sure. But pikers next to us. Absolute freaking amateurs. We have a long tradition of outdoing those we criticize. No one denounced the Russians for their invasion of Afghanistan more than we did; and yet here we are, 14 years into our own Afghan war, no end in sight. Noble mission vs. international crime. Curiously, the former has a higher body count.

This is nothing new. We’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of our invasion of South Vietnam – the arrival of the first contingent of combat units in the country. If they think about it at all, most Americans generally think the number of dead in the Vietnam war as being in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps – maybe 300,000. Given that millions were killed, millions more gravely wounded, this is akin to holocaust denial. Kind of sickening. It’s estimated that about 40,000 Vietnamese have died since the war due to unexploded ordinance alone – see this recent article in the Nation.

Unless we come to terms with this as a people, we will be condemned to repeat it. We already have, and we will again. But we don’t have to. It’s up to us.

luv u,

jp

What’s up with Doc.

As is typical for me, I’m going to roll through a couple of topics. Who knows where we’ll land, eh?

Haiti redux. Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Haiti last week, a fact treated as something of a curiosity by the mainstream media. Sure, they referenced the fact that he killed thousands during his 15-year tenure, picking up the club left by his departed “president for life” father (who was himself removed from office via the only constitutional means available to such a leader). But they didn’t examine the circumstances of Baby Doc’s arrival very deeply at all. All Things Considered did a piece on it Thursday night, and they basically navigated around any suggestion of political maneuvering. (They also managed to avoid mentioning the fact that Lavalas, the largest party in Haiti, was excluded from participating in the recent election.)

The most plausible explanation for his return was suggested by Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté on Democracy Now! this past Wednesday. With his return, pressure is being put on René Preval to allow the U.S./French – favored Duvalierist candidate to participate in the run-off for the now disputed Presidential race. Baby Doc is there to rally his supporters, in case Preval hasn’t been getting the message. In as much as there has been talk of sending Preval into exile, I have to think he’s feeling more than a bit pressed. Ives points out that, after having been supine before the demands of the U.S., France, and Canada, Preval is facing deportation over his first disagreement with the international community overlords he has so faithfully served. This is independence?

What’s just as sick is the fact that the 2004 coup, supported wholeheartedly by the United States and France, has been dropped into the memory hole as far as the mainstream media is concerned. The All Things Considered piece, for instance, simply said that Aristide left on an American plane in 2004. True… but hardly “all things considered”. The invented story about his choosing to go into exile has stuck. If these reporters and editors had any integrity, they would provide the crucial context that a.) the country is being ruled by those congenial to the 2004 coup, and b.) the only legitimate mass-based political party in Haiti is banned because it is not sufficiently subservient to the interests of the United States and its allies. Honestly…. if Baby Doc can come back to Haiti and Aristide cannot, there is a political reason for that.

Okay, that’s one topic. And that’s all I’ve got. In all honesty, this irks the hell out of me, so it’s just as well.

luv u,

jp