A Gentleman’s view.

Armchair Warriors: Why Are Conservatives the Biggest Warmongers?

The following is Part 2 of an excerpt from Corey Robin’s book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” You can find Part 1 here. 

What is it about being a great power that renders the imagining of its own demise so potent? Why, despite all the strictures about the prudent and rational use of force, are those powers so quick to resort to it?

Perhaps it is because there is something deeply appealing about the idea of disaster, about manfully confronting and mastering catastrophe. For disaster and catastrophe can summon a nation, at least in theory, to plumb its deepest moral and political reserves, to have its mettle tested, on and off the battlefield. However much leaders and theorists may style themselves the cool adepts of realpolitik, war remains the great romance of the age, the proving ground of self and nation.

Exactly why the strenuous life should be so attractive is anyone’s guess, but one reason may be that it counters what conservatives since the French Revolution have believed to be the corrosions of liberal democratic culture: the softened mores and weakened will, the subordination of passion to rationality, of fervor to rules. As an antidote to the deadening effects of contemporary life—reason, bureaucracy, routine, anomie, ennui—war is modernity’s great answer to itself. “War is inescapable,” Yitzhak Shamir declared, not because it ensures security but “because without this, the life of the individual has no purpose.” Though this sensibility seeps across the political spectrum, it is essentially an ideal of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which found its greatest fulfillment during the years of Fascist triumph (“war is to men,” Mussolini said, “as maternity is to women”)—and is once again, it seems, prospering in our own time as well.

Nowhere in recent memory has this romanticism been more apparent than in the neoconservative arguments during the Bush years about prewar intelligence, how to prosecute the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and whether or not to use torture. Listening to the neocon complaints about U.S. intelligence during the run-up to the war, one could hear distant echoes of Carlyle’s assault on the “Mechanical Age” (“all is by rule and calculated contrivance”) and Chateaubriand’s despair that “certain eminent faculties of genius” will “be lost, and imagination, poetry and the arts perish.” Richard Perle was not alone in his impatience with whatSeymour Hersh calls the intelligence community’s “susceptibility to social science notions of proof.” Before he became secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld criticized the refusal of intelligence analysts to use their imaginations, “to make estimates that extended beyond the hard evidence they had in hand.” Once in office, he mocked analysts’ desire to have “all the dots connected for us with a ribbon wrapped around it.” His staffers derided the military quest for “actionable intelligence,” for information solid enough to warrant assassinations and other preemptive acts of violence. Outside the government, David Brooksblasted the CIA’s “bloodless compilations of data by anonymous technicians” and praised those analysts who make “novelistic judgments” informed by “history, literature, philosophy and theology.”

Rumsfeld’s war on the rule-bound culture and risk aversion of the military revealed a deep antipathy to law and order—not something stereotypically associated with conservatives but familiar enough to any historian of twentieth-century Europe (and, indeed, any historian of conservative thought more generally). Issuing a secret directive that terrorists should be captured or killed, Rumsfeld went out of his way to remind his generals that the goal was “not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” Aides urged him to support operations by U.S. Special Forces, who could conduct lightning strikes without approval from generals. Otherwise, they warned, “the result will be decision by committee.” One of Rumsfeld’s advisers complained that the military had been “Clintonized,” which could have meant anything from becoming too legalistic to being too effeminate. (Throughout the Bush years, there was an ongoing struggle within the security establishment over the protocols of machismo.) Geoffrey Miller, the man who made “Gitmo-ize” a household word, relieved a general at Guantanamo for being too “soft—too worried about the prisoners’ well-being.”

By now it seems self-evident that the neocons were drawn into Iraq for the sake of a grand idea: not the democratization of the Middle East, though that undoubtedly had some appeal, or even the creation of an American empire, but rather an idea of themselves as a brave and undaunted army of transgression. The gaze of the neocons, like that of America’s perennially autistic ruling classes, does not look outward nearly as much as it looks inward: at their restless need to prove themselves, to demonstrate that neither their imagination nor their actions will be constrained by anyone or anything—not even by the rules and norms they believe are their country’s gift to the world.

If Torture, Sanford Levinson’s edited collection of essays, is any indication of contemporary sensibilities, neocons in the Bush White House are not the only ones in thrall to romantic notions of danger and catastrophe. Academics are too. Every scholarly discussion of torture, and the essays collected in Torture are no exception, begins with the ticking-time-bomb scenario. The story goes something like this: a bomb is set to go off in a densely populated area in the immediate future; the government doesn’t know exactly where or when, but it knows that many people will be killed; it has in captivity the person who planted the bomb, or someone who knows where it is planted; torture will yield the needed information; indeed, it is the only way to get the information in time to avert the catastrophe. What to do?

It’s an interesting question. But given that it is so often posed in the name of realism, we might consider a few facts before we rush to answer it. First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other prisons in America’s international archipelago has been tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb. Second, at the height of the war in Iraq, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of American-held prisoners there either were in jail by mistake or posed no threat at all to society. Third, many U.S. intelligence officials opted out of torture sessions precisely because they believed torture did not produce accurate information.

These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism. The essays in Torture pose one other difficulty for those interested in reality: none of the writers who endorse the use of torture by the United States ever discusses the specific kinds of torture actually used by the United States. The closest we get is an essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which she writes:

Is a shouted insult a form of torture? A slap in the face? Sleep deprivation? A beating to within an inch of one’s life? Electric prods on the male genitals, inside a woman’s vagina, or in a person’s anus? Pulling out fingernails? Cutting off an ear or a breast? All of us, surely, would place every violation on this list beginning with the beating and ending with severing a body part as forms of torture and thus forbidden. No argument there. But let’s turn to sleep deprivation and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category as bodily amputations and sexual assaults? There are even those who would add the shouted insult to the category of torture. But, surely, this makes mincemeat of the category.

Distinguishing the awful from the acceptable, Elshtain never mentions the details of Abu Ghraib or the Taguba Report, making her list of do’s and don’ts as unreal as the ticking time bomb itself. Even her list of taboos is stylized, omitting actually committed crimes for the sake of repudiating hypothetical ones. Elshtain rejects stuffing electric cattle prods up someone’s ass. What about a banana [pdf]? She rejects cutting off ears and breasts. What about “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees”? She condemns sexual assault. What about forcing men to masturbate or wear women’s underwear on their heads? She endorses “solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.” What about the “bitch in the box,” where prisoners are stuffed in a car trunk and driven around Baghdad in 120° heat? She supports “psychological pressure,” quoting from an article that “the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself.” What about threatening prisoners with rape? When it comes to the Islamists, Elshtain cites the beheading of Daniel Pearl. When it comes to the Americans, she muses on Laurence Olivier’s dentistry in Marathon Man. Small wonder there’s “no argument there”: there is no there there.

The unreality of Elshtain’s analysis is not incidental or peculiar to her. Even writers who endorse torture but remain squeamish about it can’t escape such abstractions. The more squeamish they are, in fact, the more abstractions they indulge in. Sanford Levinson, for example, tentatively discusses Alan Dershowitz’s proposal that government officials should be forced to seekwarrants from judges in order to torture terrorist suspects. Hoping to make the reality of torture, and the pain of its victims, visible and concrete, Levinson insists that “the person the state proposes to torture should be in the courtroom, so that the judge can take no refuge in abstraction.” But then Levinson asks us to consider “the possibility that anyone against whom a torture warrant is issued receives a significant payment as ‘just compensation’ for the denial of his or her right not to be tortured.” Having just counseled against abstraction, Levinson resorts to the greatest abstraction of all—money—as payback for the greatest denial of rights imaginable.

If the unreality of these discussions sounds familiar, it is because they are watered by the same streams of conservative romanticism that coursed in and out of the White House during the Bush years. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s warrants and Levinson’s addenda, the essays endorsing torture are filled with hostility to what Elshtain variously calls “moralistic code fetishism” and “rule-mania” and what we might simply call “the rule of law.” But where the Bush White House sought to be entirely free of rules and laws—and here the theoreticians depart from the practitioners—the contemplators of torture seek to make the torturers true believers in the rules.

There are two reasons. One reason, which Michael Walzer presents at great length in a famous essay from 1973, reprinted in Torture, is that the absolute ban on torture makes possible—or forces us to acknowledge the problem of “dirty hands.” Like the supreme emergency, the ticking time bomb forces a leader to choose between two evils, to wrestle with the devil of torture and the devil of innocents dying. Where other moralists would affirm the ban on torture and allow innocents to die, or adopt a utilitarian calculus and order torture to proceed, Walzer believes the absolutist and the utilitarian wash their hands too quickly; their consciences come too clean. He wishes instead “to refuse ‘absolutism’ without denying the reality of the moral dilemma,” to admit the simultaneous necessity for—and evil of torture.

Why? To make space for a moral leader, as Walzer puts it in Arguing about War, “who knows that he can’t do what he has to do—and finally does” it. It is the familiar tragedy of two evils, or two competing goods, that is at stake here, a reminder that we must “get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do,” that “the dilemma of dirty hands is a central feature of political life.” The dilemma, rather than the solution, is what Walzer wishes to draw attention to. Should torturers be free of all rules save utility, or constrained by rights-based absolutism, there would be no dilemma, no dirty hands, no moral agon. Torturers must be denied their Kant and Bentham—and leave us to contend with the brooding spirit of the counter-Enlightenment, which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of “eternal principles,” as Isaiah Berlin put it, “by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free.”

But there is another reason some writers insist on a ban on torture they believe must also be violated. How else to maintain the frisson of transgression, the thrill of Promethean criminality? As Elshtain writes in her critique of Dershowitz’s proposal for torture warrants, leaders “should not seek to legalize” torture. “They should not aim to normalize it. And they should not write elaborate justifications of it . . . . The tabooed and forbidden, the extreme nature of this mode of physical coercion must be preserved so that it never becomes routinized as just the way we do things around here.” What Elshtain objects to in Dershowitz’s proposal is not the routinizing of torture; it is the routinizing of torture, the possibility of reverting to the “same moralistic-legalism” she hoped violations of the torture taboo would shatter. This argument too is redolent of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which always suspected, again quoting Berlin, that “freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even committing crimes.”

But if the ban on torture must be maintained, what is a nation to do with the torturers who have violated it, who have, after all, broken the law? Naturally the nation must put them on trial; “the interrogator,” in Elshtain’s words, “must, if called on, be prepared to defend what he or she has done and, depending on context, pay the penalty.” In what may be the most fantastic move of an already fantastic discussion, several of writers on torture—even Henry Shue, an otherwise steadfast voice against the practice—imagine the public trial of the torturer as similar to that of the civil disobedient, who breaks the law in the name of a higher good, and throws himself on the mercy or judgment of the court. For only through a public legal proceeding, Levinson writes, will we “reinforce the paradoxical notion that one must condemn the act even if one comes to the conclusion that it is indeed justified in a particular situation,” a notion, he acknowledges, that is little different from the comment of Admiral Mayorga, one of Argentina’s dirtiest warriors: “The day we stop condemning torture (although we tortured), the day we become insensitive to mothers who lose their guerrilla sons (although they are guerrillas) is the day we stop being human beings.”

By now it should be clear why we use the word “theater” to denote the settings of both stagecraft and statecraft. Like the theater, national security is a house of illusions. Like stage actors, political actors are prone to a diva-like obsession, gazing in the mirror, wondering what the next day’s—or century’s—reviews will bring. It might seem difficult to imagine Liza Minnelli playing Henry Kissinger, but I’m not sure the part would be such a stretch. And what of the intellectuals who advise these leaders or the philosophers who analyze their dilemmas? Are they playwrights or critics, directors or audiences? I’m not entirely sure, but the words of their greatest spiritual predecessor might give us a clue. “I love my native city more than my own soul,” cried Machiavelli, quintessential teacher of the hard ways of state. Change “native city” to “child,” replace “my own soul” with “myself,” and we have the justification of every felonious stage mother throughout history, from the Old Testament’s rule-breaking Rebecca to Gypsy’s ball-busting Rose.

What Immigration ‘Crisis’? By Eugene Robinson

Now that the immigration “crisis” has solved itself, this is the perfect time for Congress and the president to agree on a package of sensible, real-world reforms.

Yeah, right, and it’s also the perfect time for pigs to grow wings and take flight.

Perhaps this week’s most significant news was a report from the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center showing that net migration from Mexico to the United States has slowed to a halt and may actually have reversed. That’s right: There may be more people leaving this country to live in Mexico than leaving Mexico to live here.

End of the “crisis”—which wasn’t really a crisis at all, except in overwhelmed border-state cities such as Phoenix. There’s no longer the slightest excuse for histrionics about the alleged threat to our way of life from invading hordes intent on—shudder—working hard and raising their families.

Why the turnaround? The report cites “many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and broader economic conditions in Mexico.”

To me, all of that makes perfect sense. Whether they have papers or not, immigrants are rational. As a general rule, they don’t come here to commit crimes; they could do that at home if they wanted. They don’t come here to laze around and enjoy government benefits because, well, what benefits would those be? They come to work.

But the U.S. economy fell off a cliff, meaning there is less work to be had. Mexico’s economy, while not unscathed, is improving. And the Obama administration has dramatically stepped up border enforcement while carrying out a record number of deportations. Suddenly, both for Mexicans who considered immigrating legally and those who might have been tempted to come without documents, the risk-reward equation has changed.

According to the Pew report, there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States; six out of 10 are Mexican. The number of immigrants without papers has actually been falling. Wouldn’t this be a perfect time to take a deep breath and start talking about reasonable ways to engineer a more rational immigration policy?

Yes, it would, but don’t hold your breath. Apparently, we’re going to have a lot of shouting without actually trying to find a solution. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of Arizona’s “driving while brown” law that instructs police to challenge and, if necessary, apprehend anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. The law forbids racial profiling, but the truth is that it effectively guarantees profiling.

The administration argues that the state law usurps the federal government’s prerogative to set immigration policy. The court is expected to decide the case this summer, and the ruling’s impact may be less practical—since illegal immigration, I repeat, is already on the decline—than political.

Democrats will react with thunderous outrage if the court upholds the Arizona law—but if you stand outside the back room where the pollsters and campaign strategists work, you might hear the slapping of high fives. Anything that draws attention to the Republican Party’s extremist position on immigration will only reinforce a tendency that Mitt Romney recently characterized as “doom”—the headlong rush of Latino voters into a waiting Democratic embrace.

Barack Obama won a remarkable two-thirds of the Latino vote in 2008. This year, according to the polls, he’s running even stronger among the biggest minority group in the country. If Republicans don’t find a way to win more Latino support, Obama will be hard to beat. In the long term, if Latinos become a more-or-less permanent Democratic constituency as African-Americans have, the GOP will inexorably go the way of the Whigs.

So that is what this year’s immigration “debate” will be about: how to reap political gain and avoid political loss.

What should our elected officials be talking about? I’d suggest they start with the obvious solution.

We don’t need to build a giant wall along the Rio Grande; Obama has already “hardened” the border. We need a Reagan-style amnesty that would allow the great majority of undocumented immigrants to stay, along with reforms that give Mexicans and others a realistic hope of being able to come here someday.

Assuming they want to.

Using ALEC Playbook, Bobby Jindal Radically Reshapes Public Education By Julianne Hing

Bobby Jindal has transformed public education in Louisiana and education advocates have deep concerns about who’s going to benefit.

Reprinted with permission of Colorlines.com. For more news from a racial justice perspective, sign up to receive weekly Colorlines Direct.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has remade the Louisiana public schools system with impressive speed over the past legislative session. Last week, he signed into law a suite of landmark reform bills that will likely change the direction of public education in Louisiana forever. But not all change is good, and critics say both Jindal’s agenda and the strategy to move it come right from the playbook of conservative advocacy group ALEC, in an effort to revive Jindal’s national political profile.

Louisiana is now home to the nation’s most expansive school voucher program. Charter school authorization powers have been broadened. And teacher tenure policies have been radically transformed. Louisiana already had something of a reputation as a radical-reform state, thanks to the post-Katrina educational climate in New Orleans. But not all change is good, and education advocates have deep concerns about the efficacy of Jindal’s overhaul, and the interests that have push it.

“With these laws Gov. Bobby Jindal has sold our kids out for his political aspirations,” said Karran Royal Harper, a Louisiana parent activist and education advocate.

The bills all sprinted through the state legislature. Committee hearings were conducted at a breakneck speed, Democratic lawmakers complained, and members were asked to vote on amendments they didn’t actually understand. When the House took up a bill changing teacher-tenure rules, it ran the session past midnight, refusing to break until they called for a vote.

“There’s just so much more here than what our group can handle,” said Minh Nguyen, executive director of the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans, a community advocacy group. “We don’t even have the capacity to handle all the bills that are being proposed right now and it’s been really challenging to us.”

ALEC’s 2010 “Report Card on American Education” (PDF) suggested that lawmakers overwhelm their opposition in exactly this manner. “Do not simply just introduce one reform in the legislature—build a consensus for reform and introduce a lot,” the report authors told ALEC members.

“Across the country for the past two decades, education reform efforts have popped up in legislatures at different times in different places,” the report authors wrote. “As a result, teachers’ unions have been playing something akin to ‘whack-a- mole’—you know the game—striking down as many education reform efforts as possible. Many times, the unions successfully ‘whack’ the ‘mole,’ i.e., the reform legislation. Sometimes, however, they miss. If all the moles pop up at once, there is no way the person with the mallet can get them all. Introduce comprehensive reform packages.”

One new law Jindal moved in this fashion will make Louisiana among the most aggressive states in the nation for pushing charter schools and publicly funded vouchers for private institutions. It also includes a “parent trigger” provision, where parents whose children are enrolled in a failing school can hand the school over to Louisiana’s Recovery School District if a majority choose to do so. However the key provision expands New Orleans’ current pilot voucher program so that now, students from high-poverty families enrolled in schools that have been rated a C, D or F by the state may move to a private school at the state’s expense.

More than half of Louisiana’s student population, or around 380,000 students, are expected to qualify for the voucher program, according to the Jindal administration. Only 4,000 vouchers will be available in the first year, experts estimate, but the law makes Louisiana’s program the most expansive in the nation.

Jindal’s set of reforms hews closely to the model reform legislation set out by ALEC, which advocates for the privatization of traditionally public services, like health care, prisons and education. ALEC and Jindal’s school agenda is driven by a conservative ideology that believes private markets can help introduce efficiency and healthy competition into public institutions. As ALEC’s education report card in 2010 laid out, “Families need a market for K-12 schools. The market mechanism rewards success, and either improves or eliminates failure.”

ALEC and Jindal have kept close ties for some time now, education watchers in the state say.

“This is really ALEC at work. It’s a feather in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s cap—he has spent a lot of time traveling around the country lining up donor money and now he can say Louisiana is one of the few states that has a large choice environment,” said Harper, who pointed out that many of the key committee members who supported the legislation are ALEC members or have received campaign contributions from groups with ties to ALEC. Indeed, at its annual meeting last August, ALEC recognized Jindal with its coveted Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award for “outstanding public service.”

“It was a huge defeat for us,” said Damekia Morgan, the statewide educational policy and campaign director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.

Public ‘Accountability,’ Private Free-for-All

Critics say the rushed process hampered conversation on the bills. The voucher bill in particular is still light on specifics about implementation. The state has yet to create a plan for evaluating the private schools that take public vouchers. Evaluation wasn’t even mentioned until a vague amendment that calls for “an accountability system for participating students at participating schools” to be hammered out by the state board of education by Aug. 1.

The lack of an accountability plan is telling, says Morgan. The standards that are devised don’t need to come again before the public before they are codified. “This is all supposedly about demanding accountability for public schools and here we’re handing off our students to private schools without any checks,” Harper also said.

In addition, the parent trigger provisions are also too vague, education advocates say. In California, the lack of specificity around that state’s parent trigger law led to protracted court battles when a community first made use of the law.

These sorts of bills have an undeniable appeal for parents, especially poor parents of color who’ve been locked out of decision making circles and feel like their concerns have often gone ignored by public school administrators. Yet education advocates say that these bills provide only the veneer of choice for parents, while removing parents’ avenues for demanding accountability via collective action.

The parent trigger portion of the new Louisiana laws, for instance, allows for public schools to be converted only to charter schools. The laws give parents no avenue for re-triggering a failing charter school, of which there are many. And while lawmakers hope that parents feel empowered by school vouchers, their options for where they can place their children will be limited to the private school options on the table.

“Clearly these options are not full choice for parents,” said Andre Perry, associate director of Loyola University’s New Orleans’ Institute for Quality and Equity in Education. Perry said his concern was that these reforms, while bold, don’t get to the heart of how educational inequity is created in the first place. Instead, what lawmakers are voting for, Perry said, “is a belief in a philosophy that’s being applied in the name of choice.”

“It’s a catch-22 for parents,” said Morgan. “Parents are desperate for change. But as a parent myself, I know that the more money we take away from public education systems to go to private entities, the less control I have over what public education looks like.”

Hijacking Obama’s Agenda

These days, the push to deregulate public education is a popular, bipartisan issue. Many of the states that have passed school reform overhauls in recent years did so to become eligible for the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion competitive grants program Race to the Top.

“Republican governors, shrewdly, jumped all over it and packed on their version of choice,” Perry said. “That’s how you see what we have now, where many different political bedfellows are coming together in a strange way.”

Indeed, Jindal spoke the language of the Obama administration last Wednesday when he touted his reform package as a way to help Louisiana children better compete in the global economy.

“[Louisiana children] are going to be competing with kids not only from Texas, Georgia, and other states, but they’re going to be competing for jobs with kids in China and other countries around the world,” Jindal said. “That is why it is so important we give every child in Louisiana a great education.” It could have been a line out of one of President Obama’s own education speeches.

This is one of the reasons why Perry says the presence of ALEC in the school reform policy arena isn’t reason enough for an outcry. Not only is ALEC not the only conservative group pushing for a free market approach to public education, but “there are pillars of each party that push the agenda.”

“The question is more about: what is so compelling about their arguments that is helping advance their agendas? Again, Jindal has been able to usher this through partly because the traditionally based system has failed in many ways. And that’s just the reality.”

Church & State Magazine / By Rob Boston

Right-Wing Religion’s War on America

Many in America’s Catholic leadership and on the evangelical right claim there’s a war on religion. In fact, they are waging a war on individual liberties.

From a posh residence in the heart of New York City that has been described as a “mini-mansion,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan is perhaps the most visible representative of an American church empire of 60 million adherents and vast financial holdings.

Dolan and his fellow clergy move easily through the corridors of political power, courted by big-city mayors, governors and even presidents. In the halls of Congress, they are treated with a deference no secular lobbyist can match.

From humble origins in America, the church has risen to lofty heights marked by affluence, political influence and social respect. Yet, according to church officials, they are being increasingly persecuted, and their rights are under sustained attack.

The refrain has become commonplace: There is a “war on religion.” Faith is under assault. The administration of President Barack Obama has unleashed a bombardment on religion unlike anything ever seen.

The average American would be hard-pressed to see evidence of this “war.” Millions of people meet regularly in houses of worship. What’s more, those institutions are tax exempt. Many denominations participate in taxpayer-funded social service programs. Their clergy regularly speak out on the issues of the day. In the political arena, religious leaders are treated with great respect.

Furthermore, religious organizations often get special breaks that aren’t accorded to their secular counterparts. Houses of worship aren’t required to report their income to the Internal Revenue Service. They don’t have to apply for tax-exempt status; they receive it automatically as soon as they form. Religious entities are routinely exempted from employment laws, anti-discrimination measures and even routine health and safety inspections.

Unlike secular lobbies, religious groups that work with legislators on Capitol Hill don’t have to register with the federal government and are free from the stringent reporting requirements imposed on any group that seeks to influence legislation.

Religion in America would seem to be thriving in this “hands-off” atmosphere, as evidenced by church attendance rates, which in the United States tend to be higher than any other Western nation. So where springs this “war on religion” talk?

Twin dynamics, mutually related and interdependent, are likely at work. On one hand, some religious groups are upping their demands for even more exemptions from general laws. When these are not always extended, leaders of these groups scream about hostility toward religion and say they are being discriminated against. This catches the attention of right-wing political leaders, who toss gasoline on the rhetorical fires.

A textbook example of this occurred during the recent flap over coverage of contraceptives under the new health care reform. The law seeks to ensure a baseline of coverage for all Americans, and birth control is included. Insurance firms that contract with companies must make it available with no co-pays.

Houses of worship are exempt from this requirement. But religiously affiliated organizations, such as church-run hospitals, colleges and social service agencies, are dealt with differently. The insurance companies that serve them must make contraceptives available to the employees of these entities, but the religious agencies don’t have to pay for them directly.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) attacked this policy and insisted that it violates the church’s right of conscience. Furthermore, the hierarchy insisted that all private employers should also have the right to deny any medical coverage that conflicts with their beliefs – no matter what the religious views of their employees.

The issue quickly became mired in partisan politics. Claims of a “war on religion” expand on long-held Religious Right seasonal claims of an alleged “war on Christmas.” The assertions of yuletide hostility paid great dividends to the Religious Right. They boosted groups’ fund-raising efforts and motivated some activists to get involved in politics.

Religious Right leaders and their allies in the Catholic hierarchy are hoping for a similar payoff through their claims of a war on religion.

With the economy improving, Republicans may be on the verge of losing a powerful piece of ammunition to use against Obama. The party’s Religious Right faction is eager to push social issues to the front and center as a way of mobilizing the base.

Many political leaders are happy to parrot this line. For the time being, they’ve latched on to the birth control issue as their leading example of this alleged war.

To hear these right-wing politicians tell it, asking a religiously affiliated institution that is heavily subsidized with taxpayer funds to allow an insurance company to provide birth control to those who want it is a great violation of “religious liberty.”

In mid February, House members went so far as to hold a hearing on the matter before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, stacking it with a bevy of religious leaders who oppose the rule on contraceptives. Among them was Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., who heads up a new Catholic lobbying effort on this and other social issues.

Americans United submitted testimony to the committee, but Republicans on the panel denied the Democrats’ request to hear testimony from Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown Law School who supports the contraceptive mandate, thus leaving the panel stacked with religious figures – mostly men – who are hostile to contraceptives. (See “No Fluke,” April 2012 Church & State.)

The idea was to create the impression that the religious community – and by extension the American public – is up in arms over the regulation. In fact, the religious figures who spoke at the event were from ultra-conservative traditions that represent just one segment of religion in America. Many religious leaders and denominations support access to contraceptives, and several polls have shown support for the Obama administration’s position hovering at around 65 percent. (Polls also show that many American Catholics disagree with the church hierarchy on this issue.)

This isn’t surprising in a country where use of contraceptives is widespread. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 98 percent of women who engage in sexual activity will use at least one artificial form of birth control at some point in their lives.

Contraceptives are also often prescribed for medical reasons, such as shrinking ovarian cysts or relieving menstrual pain. Americans respect religious liberty, but most believe it can be maintained while safeguarding access to needed medications.

Most Americans, in fact, understand the need to balance rights. Religious organizations have the right to believe and preach what they want, but their ability to rely on government to help them spread these views is necessarily limited.

In addition, valid social goals can override an overly broad definition of religious liberty. In some states, fundamentalist Christian parents have been ordered by courts to take their children to doctors. The theory is that a child’s right to live free of sickness and disease outweighs the parents’ religious liberty concerns.

In addition, religious liberty has not traditionally been construed as license to trample on the rights of others.

“People who cry moral indignation about government-mandated contraception coverage appear unwilling to concede that the exercise of their deeply held convictions might infringe on the rights of millions of people who are burdened by unplanned pregnancy or want to reduce abortion or would like to see their tax dollars committed to a different purpose,” wrote Erika Christakis, an early childhood educator and administrator at Harvard College, on a Time magazine blog recently.

The courts have long recognized this need to balance rights. In the late 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down plural marriage, which was then practiced by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon practice, the court held, was disruptive to society and had no roots in Western tradition; thus it could be banned.

In the modern era, the court devised a test whereby government could restrict religious liberty if it could demonstrate a “compelling state interest” and that it had employed the “least restrictive means” to meets its goals.

That standard was tightened even further in 1990, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case known as Employment Division v. Smith. The decision, written by arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, held that government has no obligation to exempt religious entities from “neutral” laws that are “generally applicable.”

Since then, many religious groups have turned to the political process to win exemptions from the law. Generally speaking, they’ve been very successful. In a ground-breaking 2006 New York Times series, the newspaper chronicled the various exemptions from the law granted to religious organizations covering areas like immigration, land use, employment regulations, safety inspections and others.

The Times reported that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into Congressional legislation….” The paper noted that other breaks “have also been provided by a host of pivotal court decisions at the state and federal level, and by numerous rule changes in almost every department and agency of the executive branch.”

But religious groups, like any other special interest, don’t get everything they want. On occasions when they’ve failed, some religious organizations have been quick to complain that discrimination or a hostility toward religion did them in. In fact, political leaders might have simply concluded that certain demands of religious groups are not in the best interests of larger society.

Is there any evidence that Obama is stingier with exemptions than past administrations or that the president has it in for religious groups? Not really.

Under Obama, the “faith-based” initiative, an idea that goes back to the days of George W. Bush, has continued to flourish. Obama even stepped back from a vow he made while campaigning in 2008 to require religious groups that receive support from the taxpayer to drop discriminatory hiring policies.

Mother Jones magazine reported in February that if Obama is hostile to religion, he has an odd way of showing it.

“But all the outrage about religious freedom has overshadowed a basic truth about the Obama administration: When it comes to religious organizations and their treatment by the federal government, the Obama administration has been extremely generous,” reported Stephanie Mencimer for the magazine. “Religious groups have benefited handsomely from Obama’s stimulus package, budgets, and other policies. Under Obama, Catholic religious charities alone have received more than $650 million, according to a spokeswoman from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where much of the funding comes from.”

Obama’s Justice Department hasn’t always pleased religious conservatives, but it has hardly been hostile to faith. The department sided with the state of Arizona in defending at the Supreme Court a private school tax-credit scheme that overwhelmingly benefits religious schools, going so far as to assist with oral arguments before the justices. When a federal court struck down the National Day of Prayer as a church-state violation in 2010, the administration criticized the ruling and quickly filed an appeal.

“If Obama is ‘warring’ against religion, he’s doing it with a popgun and a rubber knife,” Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, told The Washington Times recently. “On core religious freedom issues, they have been moderate, to a fault…. It’s not much of a war.”

Other observers note that in a nation where the government’s regulatory touch over religiously affiliated institutions is exceedingly light, it’s hard to take claims of a war on religion seriously.

“People who claim the government is hostile to religion are either insincere or uninformed,” said Steven K. Green, director of the Center for Religion, Law and Democracy at Willamette University. “Religious entities enjoy a host of benefits and advantages that their non-religous counterparts lack.

Green, who was legal director at Americans United during the 1990’s, added, “At the same time, many religious entities that enjoy exemptions from neutral regulations receive subsidies from the government for their operations. Rather than there being a ‘war on religion,’ the government surrendered its regulatory forces a long time ago.”

Robert Greenwald on the New Film “Koch Brothers Exposed” — the 1% at Its Very Worst

Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation debuts their feature-length film, an exposé of the right-wing brothers’ massive reach.

Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation will tonight debut their feature-length film, Koch Brothers Exposed, in New York. (The DVD is available here.) Koch Brothers Exposed weaves together a series of short films produced over the course of the last year or so as part of an online video campaign of the same name. As principals of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in America and one of the nation’s top polluters, the Koch brothers have grown notorious for their funding of think-tanks and astroturf organizations that aim to deregulate business and scale back government programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the new healthcare reform law.

Koch Brothers Exposed zeroes in on several aspects of the Kochs’ impact by focusing on the people most affected by the brothers’ use of their billions to buy politicians and ignore regulators. In North Carolina, we meet high school students whose lives would have been gravely impacted had Koch-allied politicians succeeded in undoing the desegregation of the Wake County school system. In Arkansas, the filmmakers take viewers to a community that is riven with cancer, the likely result of toxic dumping by a Koch-owned paper plant. We meet voters in Missouri and Texas who find themselves disenfranchised by a voter-ID law pushed by an organization funded with Koch money.

Before becoming an activist filmmaker, Robert Greenwald enjoyed a long career in the world of commercial film and television, directing the feminist classic, The Burning Bed, and earning a Peabody Award for Sharing the Secret, a 2000 made-for-TV movie about a teenager with an eating disorder. He also directed the cult classic, Steal This Movie, about his late friend, Abbie Hoffman — which may speak to where his heart was all along. The advent of Fox News launched Greenwald into the role of an activist when his Brave New Films launched with Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Since then Brave New Films and Brave New Foundation have produced a torrent of video shorts and films, including Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Rethinking Afghanistan and Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.

AlterNet sat down with Greenwald to discuss the value of storytelling as an organizing tool — and to explore just what makes the Koch brothers “the 1 percent at its very worst.”

AlterNet: What drew your interest to the Koch brothers as a vehicle for a broader story? These guys are your poster boys, but they’re poster boys for something even larger than themselves. 

Robert Greenwald: What we always try to do with Brave New Foundation films is to connect the dots. I think it’s very important that people understand how whole systems work — and that it’s not a question of a rotten apple, be it Wal-Mart, or be it war profiteers, or be it the Koch brothers. In all these cases, they are representative of the fact that there are structural and systemic inequities in our society.

The Koch brothers, as you say today, are perfectly out of Central Casting [as typecasts for] rich, arrogant, conservative billionaires. But they’re not the only ones. What drew my attention to it was Jane Mayer’s brilliant piece in The New Yorker, and articles by Lee Fang and [AlterNet's] Addie Stan — and the realization that this was an opportunity to do what we do, which is build narratives. Now we can’t, and shouldn’t, do everything. There are certain issues that should absolutely remain in the hands of policy folks, or think tanks or position papers. But the Kochs are breathing, human representatives of the worst of the 1 percent — and it’s the way they use their money to advance their economic self-interest and their ideology. And that’s important.

It’s not just about having money; it’s the use of the money, the use of the power — it’s the use of the money and power to impress and take advantage of others. And it’s the fact that they are fighting tooth and nail to make sure that capitalism has absolutely no restraints on it. And capitalism without restraints is a very ugly beast.

A: You embarked on this initially as a series of shorter films. What led you to that approach? Each of these films dealt with very different aspects of the Koch brothers’ activities. When you set out to make these shorter films, did you have a longer film in mind?

RG: When we started the Koch Brothers Exposed campaign, we were not thinking — or I was not thinking — of a longer film. It was similar to our work around Afghanistan, were we learned — you know, one of the things that’s exciting about working in digital media is how quickly everything changes.

A: One of the challenges, too.

RG: Oh, my god! We could have a long session just on the changes on YouTube, which has been phenomenal in a short period of time. But we realized with the Afghanistan work — and there we did it because we really had no choice; we had no money and no funding at the beginning, so we were only able to do a couple of short pieces. But with each short piece, we found that we were building an online community, and so we used that same approach with the Koch brothers.

And so, one piece was around Social Security, one piece was around environment, one piece was around Wisconsin, one piece was around education — and what we were doing was we were reaching an audience with particular interests in that aspect of the Koch work. And, frankly, very strategically reaching out to audiences so they could see how the issue they care about most profoundly was being attacked by the Kochs. And then a couple of months into it, we realized that there was an opportunity for a full-length film here.

We fortunately were able to raise some money to allow us to take the short pieces — we went online, we asked people for help, we had a very strong response from thousands of our small donors and some wonderful larger donors and a foundation or two who said, We think this is important. We think it’s important because it’s talking about the structure, it’s talking about the way the system works, and it’s connecting the dots between these various issues: Social Security, resegregation, buying up politicians, buying up college professors. And, overall, it’s the money in politics frame. This is what you can achieve when you have money, when you have power, when you have access and you’re willing to use it for your own narrow self-interest.

A: By doing this film in these pieces that look at all different aspects of what these guys are up to because of their broad reach, do you inadvertently build a coalition? One piece of the film that is so moving is about an African-American community in Arkansas that is decimated by cancer because of the apparent dumping of toxic waste by a plant owned by Koch Industries. You have the environmental community galvanized by parts of your film. You have the voting rights community targeted by another part of the film. 

RG: Definitely. And as we realized the size and scope of what the Kochs were doing, it became very intentional. One of the problems in the progressive movement, all too often — and, you know, people have talked about this endlessly — the separate silos, the single-issue folks who are both focused and funded to do a single issue — but how do you encourage and work so that the issue people come together and see the importance of the fact that the people who are attacking the environment are attacking Social Security, are attacking public education, are attacking and buying politicians, are attacking an African-American community, etc., etc.

[The Koch brothers] are a perfect example of the interlocking interests of the 1 percent, and how they are using, again, their money, their power, their access on a series of issues. And woe unto us if we do not see that and if we do not connect those dots, and if we do not bring all of those communities together. I’m actually thrilled that we have more than 40 groups working with us on this — from the NAACP to Greenpeace to DFA (Democracy for America) to a whole series of unions. And it’s been very exciting to see and be a part of building and growing that coalition.

A: Social media has been your primary means of distribution, particularly on the short films. Koch Brothers Exposed is being made available on DVD, but how else do you plan to distribute it?

RG: There will be the 40-plus groups — and they’ve been critical to every undertaking we do. There will be progressive media, led by AlterNet, which have been, as on every single film, extraordinary partners. [Progressive] radio stations and televisions and the Huffington Post — there’s been all kinds of places where attention has been given to the specific campaigns [such as Rethinking Afghanistan and Wal-Mart]. Then there is the very, very active Facebook presence, and lots of work using Twitter, of course. And then in what’s gonna be a major breakthrough, we’re going to be in somewhere between 50 and 60 million homes with streaming and video-on-demand (via cable and satellite networks). That doesn’t mean that all 60 million people are going to watch it, but it’s going to be an option.

A: Are there times when you find yourself surprised by who you’re actually reaching? For instance, in Addie’s research, she stumbled upon an opera blog that featured your video on the North Carolina school board takeover by Koch-sponsored advocates of resegregating the school system. The link there is that David Koch is a significant patron of the New York City opera, and this blogger was issuing a warning to other opera buffs about tainted Koch money.

RG: One of the things that people often don’t understand about digital media online is that they’ll say, you know, you’re only reaching people who agree with you: You really should do an op-ed in the New York Times. And I kind of smile to myself and think, the only people who read an op-ed on a certain subject in the New York Times — and I love the New York Times — are a very self-selected group of people. But when you put narrative content on digital platforms the possibilities are limitless because — and the opera blog is a perfect example, because that’s gonna reach opera audiences. It’s not going to reach red, white or blue; it’s not gonna be defined by Republican or Democrat; t’s going to be defined by opera.

And similarly, with some of the health folks that we are reaching with this because of the cancer in Arkansas. The fact that religious communities are spreading these around because they see a moral and religious issue around the Kochs. The fact that older people are spreading and using some of the Social Security stuff, which, again, we know cuts across Republican or Democrat. So that’s the beauty of the potential with the digital platforms. And video is a perfect way to do that — video passed on by friends, relatives, even coworkers, is among — and the advertising agencies have tested this — the most effective and impactful ways [to convey a story].

Because people don’t trust 30-second [television] spots. You can show me all the data in the world about how many homes [are reached by] the 30-second spot. But the impact is the real key, because regardless how many homes it’s in, how many silence it? How many are watching on Tivo and fast-forward through it? And how many, particularly 35 and under, just don’t trust TV ads? Versus something forwarded to you from an opera blog, or from a member of your church.

A: Returning to the Arkansas segment of Koch Brothers Exposed — the story of a small town that is riven with cancer, apparently because of toxic dumping by a Koch Industries Georgia Pacific factory. The rest of the film — in very different ways and in very different circumstances — mostly highlights the Kochs’ involvement in government or politics, whether it’s the attempt to resegregate the Wake County school system in North Carolina, or the voter ID laws passed by state legislatures across the country, or attempts to scale back Social Security.

Then we go to this community in Arkansas, where way too many people are dying of cancer, and it’s a very poignant story. The scenes in the cemetery are just gut-wrenching. What made you decide to use that story, and how did you decide where to place it in the film?

RG: What I’ve tried to do in as many of the films as possible is to make the personal political, so that people understand it’s not them as individuals, and it’s not even their fault or a result of the alignment of the stars, but it’s the way the system works. Whether it’s the individuals in Wal-Mart, whether it’s the individuals in Iraq for Sale, it’s always important to find those people who exemplify what we’re talking about. Because otherwise the discussion is too abstract; it’s an abstract discussion about ideology and its consequences. But if you see people bleeding and hurting and paying a price, then it brings it home. So that’s the overview.

In this particular case, a couple of things that i read came together. One, that Koch [Industries] was one of the worst 10 polluters. Two, that David Koch was a cancer survivor himself. And, three, that [the Koch brothers] spend enormous amounts of money trying to fight regulations that would protect people from getting sick from their own factories and plants. So putting those three ideas together… [Brave New Foundation filmmakers] Jeff [Cole] and Natalie [Kottke]  spent five months on this — a story, by the way, just as an aside, one would hope the corporate media would be undertaking, but they’re not, partly because they don’t have the resources, and partly because they don’t care about a poor, black community somewhere getting screwed over. So, because we had the support from the people we did…Natalie was able to put months into finding the community and the people, building a level of trust, going and visiting,and then getting their agreement and encouragement and support for us to be able to go forward.

A: Progressives and liberals — we know our facts. We like to think we can convince the world to see things our way through reason and facts. But you can’t convey the facts without storytelling and narrative, and despite the great number of artists and creative people who identify themselves as either liberal or progressive, the right often does a better job at creating a narrative — often a narrative with which facts do not comport. What do you have to say to AlterNet readers about the importance of storytelling and narrative?

RG: This is a very important discussion; it’s very critical, because many wonderful, committed, passionate progressives really believe that if we can turn out one more white paper with 17 points about how to fix Problem X, the the world and the axis would shift. And they truly believe that because they are in a distinct minority of people who function primarily with their rational brain. But there’s all kind of scientific evidence, psychological evidence, that that’s not primarily the way you reach people; it’s not the way you move people. It’s not the way a great majority of people make their decisions. And what we do at Brave New Films and Brave New Foundation always, and this comes from my commercial background in storytelling, is, you reach the heart first. And if you reach the heart first, then you can access the brain — and you can access change and movement. But if you start with the multifaceted position paper, it’s very hard to move people.

So narrative becomes important, because that’s the way that you touch people, that’s a way that you get them feeling something, and then you open up their brain so that you can change their position, so that you can encourage them to think differently.

A: We’re in the throes of a political season that is one of the angriest we’ve seen in a good, long while. Given that context, how would you like to see people use Koch Brothers Exposed?

RG: Probably the most exciting thing of all in doing these films is that people find all kinds of ways of using them that we at the Brave New Foundation would never dream about. I mean, the most creative and inventive ways. People have shown them in bowling alleys, in church basements, on college campuses. I think the primary thing is that with the films, with the digital media, everybody can do something. Everybody can get a copy of the movie and do a screening. Or everybody can get a copy of the movie and donate it to the library. Or everybody can get a copy of the movie and give it to a church or a social group — or show it at any one of the many places today that have TV screens.

And that’s another reason that we do these films but do not focus on getting them into theaters, where the bar to entry is high — $9, $10, $11. No — put them in every possible place where people congregate, because where they congregate today, there’s almost always a TV screen. You know the ultimate goal is organize, organize — and then, organize.

But the Koch brothers don’t care about being taken seriously by the smart set in Washington. They care only about one thing: winning. And left to maneuver behind the scenes, they just might do it. Now, is everybody paying attention?

Corporations Have No Use for Borders By Chris Hedges

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

Deconstructing a Demagogue By TIMOTHY EGAN

Democrats have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again. Will that change?                                    Robert Parry

There is a reason why governments refuse to give in to demands from hostage-takers: because otherwise it encourages more hostage-taking. That is an obvious lesson, but it seems it has taken Democrats many years to learn it, as they have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again.

Yet on those rare occasions when Democrats do stand up – such as against House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s government shutdowns in 1995-1996 and against House Speaker John Boehner’s blockage of a payroll tax cut extension this week – the Democrats usually prevail politically.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from sliding back into submission the next time the Republicans do it. That’s because standing up to hostage-takers often involves absorbing some short-term pain, like seeing more Americans thrown out of work or watching the U.S. credit rating damaged.

Knowing that the Democrats are hesitant to take those hits, Republicans have held the U.S. economy hostage to extract concessions from President Barack Obama on GOP priorities. Indeed, the practice began immediately after the Republicans won the House majority in 2010.

The Republicans vowed to block extension of long-term unemployment insurance and other recession-related programs unless Obama agreed to continue George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich for two more years. Obama gave in, but he also failed to insist on including a rise in the debt ceiling for government borrowing.

Obama explained that he left the debt ceiling out of the 2010 deal because he didn’t believe anyone would be so reckless as to risk forcing the U.S. government into default. However, in summer 2011, Republicans did just that, holding the debt-ceiling bill hostage unless they got more concessions, which Obama again agreed to grant.

The Republicans understood that by holding the U.S. economy hostage, it’s pretty much a win-win for them. Either they extract more political ransom from Obama or they allow unemployment to stay high in which case they can count on the U.S. news media and the public blaming Obama. That, in turn, improves their chances of winning the White House and Congress in November 2012.

So, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise this past week when House Republicans balked at a short-term extension of payroll tax cuts for 160 million working Americans and long-term unemployment insurance for those looking for work. This was just one more opportunity to grab hostages, demand more concessions and make the economy scream.

Yet, by taking his jobs plan to the public – a strategy that Obama has been pursuing since the debt-limit fiasco last summer – has Obama finally been able to make the Republicans pay for their hostage-taking strategy. Faced with national outrage, Speaker Boehner sounded retreat on Thursday, although more hostage-taking can be expected early in the New Year when a longer term extension is negotiated.

The Nixon Legacy

After all, this hardball Republican approach to politics did not begin in 2010. The pattern can be traced back to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign of 1968 when his political team, in essence, took the half-million American soldiers in Vietnam hostage.

According to documents and audio recordings that have surfaced over the intervening decades, it is clear that Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks by getting the South Vietnamese leadership to boycott the negotiations in exchange for Nixon’s promises of a better deal once he was in the White House.

In October 1968, the peace talks were on the verge of ending the conflict which had already claimed more than 30,000 U.S. lives and a million or so Vietnamese. However, Nixon feared that a last-minute settlement of the war would likely give Vice President Hubert Humphrey the boost he needed to win the election. So, Nixon’s operatives made sure that didn’t happen.

Johnson learned of Nixon’s gambit, which the President called “treason” in one phone conversation. Johnson even confronted Nixon over the phone about the sabotage, but Nixon simply denied the accusations, leaving Johnson with the choice of whether to release the evidence before the 1968 election.

Johnson consulted with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford on Nov. 4, 1968. Both advised against going public out of fear that the evidence of Nixon’s treachery might reflect badly on the United States.

“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said in a conference call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”

So, Johnson relented, agreeing to stay silent for the “good of the country,” while Nixon exploited the stalemated peace talks for the edge that ensured his narrow victory.

However, since Nixon’s side had promised South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal than Johnson was offering, Nixon had little choice but to continue the war – for four more years, with the deaths of 20,000 more U.S. soldiers and a million or so more Vietnamese. [See “The Significance of Nixon’s ‘Treason’.”]

Madman and Watergate

Desperate to show some results from the additional years of war, Nixon also tried out a version of his hostage-taking strategy on the North Vietnamese, devising what was called the “madman” theory of letting Hanoi think that he was crazy enough to use nuclear weapons unless they gave in. In effect, he was taking their whole country hostage.

However, the North Vietnamese called his bluff and ultimately negotiated a peace accord in Paris in 1972, along the lines of what Johnson had hammered out four years earlier. (In 1975, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies routed Thieu’s South Vietnamese army, with him going into exile in the United States.)

Still, Nixon’s political success in 1968 encouraged him to continue pushing the envelope of what he could get away with, apparently trusting that when push came to shove the Democrats would retreat as Johnson did. Nixon’s political hubris finally undid him in the Watergate political spying scandal.

Yet, despite Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Republicans were not inclined to change their ways. The imprint of Nixon’s “scorched-earth” brand of politics had been burned deeply into their psyches, evidenced in their harsh rhetoric, their questioning of other people’s patriotism and a readiness to coerce adversaries.

As longtime Democratic congressional aide Spencer Oliver observed years later: “What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate was not ‘don’t do it,’ but ‘cover it up more effectively.’ They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal.”

In other words, the Republicans got to work building their own media infrastructure and expanding their activist organizations to make sure that if the Democrats called the Republicans out on a future political scandal, it would be the Democrats who suffered more, that the Republicans would have their flanks covered.

It’s also important to realize that even though Nixon left the White House in disgrace, he remained an important adviser to Republican politicians, including a young “bomb-thrower” from Georgia named Newt Gingrich. Nixon often urged Republicans to play the sort of hardball games that he had perfected.

Sinking Carter

In 1980, Nixon and some of his key aides, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were background figures in what looked like a reprise of Nixon’s 1968 gambit, when President Jimmy Carter’s reelection was held hostage by Iranian radicals holding 52 Americans hostage.

Over the past three decades, some two dozen witnesses – including senior Iranian officials, top French intelligence officers, U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives, the Russian government and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat – have confirmed the existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter’s efforts to free the hostages.

In 1996, for instance, during a meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told former President Carter that senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1980 with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in the hostage release.

“You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections,” Arafat told Carter, according to historian Douglas Brinkley who was present. [Diplomatic History, Fall 1996]

Arafat’s spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif said the GOP gambit pursued other channels, too. In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam indicated that Arafat learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the Iranians had made other arrangements for a delay in the hostage release.

“The offer [to Arafat] was, ‘if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO’,” Bassam said. “I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages.”

In a little-noticed letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17, 1992, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican hostage initiative in July 1980. Bani-Sadr said a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker and CIA asset, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and to Casey’s business associate, John Shaheen.

Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: Republicans were in league with elements of the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding Iran’s help.

Bani-Sadr said the emissary “told me that if I do not accept this proposal they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals.” The emissary added that the Republicans “have enormous influence in the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.”

Bani-Sadr said he resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was accepted by the hard-line Khomeini faction. The American hostages remained captive through the Nov. 4, 1980, election which Reagan won handily. They were released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981. [For more details, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Though some Carter advisers suspected Republican manipulation of the hostage crisis, the Democrats again kept silent. Only after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 – and witnesses began talking about its origins – did the 1980 story, known as the October Surprise case, get fleshed out enough to compel Congress to take a closer look in 1991-1992.

Again, however the Democrats feared that the evidence could endanger the fragile political relationships of Washington that enable governing to go forward. Once more, they chose to ignore the GOP machinations and, in some cases, literally hid the evidence. [For instance, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden.”]

Teaching Gingrich

By caving in on the October Surprise investigation in early 1993 – out of a desire for political comity and bipartisanship – Democrats, in effect, set the stage for more Republican hardball strategies directed against President Bill Clinton.

The Republicans showed that their growing media machine – though built for defense against Democratic investigations – could play offense equally well. The machine could manufacture “scandals” about Clinton as easily as it could disassemble threats to Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush.

Indeed, the strategy to undo Clinton was egged on by Nixon himself. On April 13, 1994, just four days before the stroke that would lead to his death, Nixon spoke to biographer Monica Crowley about how Clinton’s Whitewater real-estate deal could be used to take the Democratic president down.

“Clinton should pay the price,” Nixon said. “Our people shouldn’t let this issue go down. They mustn’t let it sink.” [See Monica Crowley’s Nixon Off the Record.]

Of all Nixon’s protégés perhaps none took his teachings more to heart than did Newt Gingrich who was determined to apply Nixon’s lessons in overturning long-term Democratic control of the House of Representatives.

Gingrich, who won a seat in Congress in 1978, already was inclined to use whatever means necessary to achieve his goal. In a speech to the College Republicans, he said, “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Nasty would soon become Gingrich’s trademark.

Four years later, in 1982, Gingrich turned to the grand master of “nasty” for advice. Over dinner, Nixon advised Gingrich that the press could ignore the House Republicans because they were “so boring,” according to an account in Gingrich’s book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way.

Embracing Nixon’s advice, Gingrich set off to ensure that the House Republicans would no longer be “boring.” Led by Gingrich, the hard-line GOP faction – dubbed the Conservative Opportunity Society – became famous for over-the-top attacks on adversaries: questioning people’s patriotism, challenging their ethics and making inflammatory remarks.

The Nixon/Gingrich no-holds-barred tactics became the M.O. of the modern Republican Party. Republicans in the Nixon/Gingrich mold would say or do whatever was necessary to advance their causes, especially the goal of tearing down Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The Democrats often found themselves in a defensive crouch, trying to protect the functioning of government, even as the Republicans followed Reagan’s credo that “government is the problem.” Thus, Republicans were inclined to take the government itself hostage as Democrats pleaded for its survival.

After using a minor ethics scandal to destroy Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright’s career and benefiting from a rash of “Clinton scandals,” Gingrich engineered the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, leaving President Clinton to insist that he was still “relevant.”

The Clinton Wars

Gingrich’s megalomania knew no bounds, however. So, he continued to press his political advantage, taking the Congress into showdowns with Clinton that led to government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996, with Clinton finally standing his ground and sticking the blame on the Republicans. Clinton’s success enabled him to win reelection in 1996.

However, Gingrich and the Republicans had not changed their ways. They simply escalated the political wars, collaborating with right-wing special prosecutors to hound Clinton and many of his senior aides. Finally, Clinton’s lying to protect an extramarital affair with former intern Monica Lewinsky became the opening the Republicans seized to destroy and disgrace him.

In a lame-duck session in late 1998, the House voted to impeach a U.S. president for only the second time in history. Clinton was forced into a humiliating Senate trial in 1999. The entire process had the appearance of taking the dignity of the U.S. government hostage.

Though Clinton managed to survive the trial and serve out his term, his impeachment stained Vice President Al Gore, who sought to succeed Clinton in Election 2000. A hostile news media (both mainstream and right-wing) made Gore into Clinton’s whipping boy, giving him a public beating as a kind of stand-in for the media-disliked President. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

The harsh media treatment of Gore tamped down his election numbers, though he still out-polled George W. Bush by a half-million votes nationally and would have carried the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes had been counted.

However, the Republicans were not about to accept defeat, even if that required taking the U.S. political process hostage. So, they staged ugly rallies in Florida to intimidate vote-counters and eventually turned to five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Florida’s counting of votes.

Rather than go into the streets to battle for a full and honest vote tally, the Democrats again surrendered to the Republican hostage-takers. Just as with Nixon “treason” in 1968, there was much handwringing among Democratic leaders about the possibility that a public battle would somehow impinge on Bush’s “legitimacy.”

Now, the same pattern has come to dominate the Obama years. The Republicans use whatever means necessary – from endless filibusters of jobs bills to obstruction of vital legislation like the debt-ceiling bill – to achieve their political goals. And the Democrats usually succumb for “the good of the country.”

The question now is whether President Obama and the Democrats have finally internalized the folly of giving in to hostage-takers and will use Election 2012 to punish the GOP for these tactics – or whether they will return to form when the short-term payroll tax cut extension expires in two months and agree to pay another Republican ransom.