Post by Bozur on Jan 1, 2013 17:38:26 GMT -5
The Social Crisis in the US
By Andre Damon
Global Research, November 25, 2012
World Socialist Web Site 24 November 2012
Region: USA
Theme: Poverty & Social Inequality
84 19 88 336
Thanksgiving Day 2012.
As President Barack Obama and Congress prepare to slash trillions of dollars from social programs that keep vast numbers of people out of destitution, the prevalence of hunger and poverty in the United States has reached rates unseen in decades.
The figures are staggering.
The number of Americans receiving food stamps reached a new record in August this year, at 47.1 million people, according to the latest figures from the Department of Agriculture. This is up by one million from last year, and up by more than half since October 2008, when the figure was 30 million. In Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, and the state of Mississippi, more than one-fifth of residents now receive food stamps.
The average monthly food benefit per person is $130, or about $4.33 a day, less than the price of an expensive coffee in lower Manhattan. Yet a bill now being debated on the floor of the US Senate would slash billions from the program over ten years, throwing an untold number of children, elderly and disabled people into poverty. There are already some 50 million food insecure people in the US, a jump from 36 million in 2007; 17 million of the hungry are children.
The official poverty rate, which severely understates the real level of social deprivation, has likewise hit a new record. There are now some 49.7 million people living beneath the poverty line in the United States, or 16.1 percent of the total population, according to the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure released this month. In 2006 there were 37.3 million people in poverty and the official poverty rate was 12.5 percent.
The supplemental report revises poverty statistics by taking into account the effect of government programs and regional costs of living. In particular, the report found extraordinary rates of poverty in states with a high cost of living.
By the new measure, California had a poverty rate of 23.5, i.e., nearly one in four residents in the nation’s wealthiest and most populous state is poor. California, home to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, as well as garment sweatshops and migrant farm labor camps, has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the US.
Meanwhile the Census data revealed that median household income in America, adjusted for inflation, fell by 1.5 percent from the previous year. The figure was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007 and 8.9 percent lower than its high point in 1999. The income of the typical US family in 2011 fell for the fourth straight year and sank to levels last seen in 1995.
The high levels of poverty and social misery caused by the economic crisis have been exacerbated by continual cuts to social programs.
Government antipoverty programs keep nearly 50 million people out of poverty. Without them, the poverty rate would be twice as high, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In 2011, unemployment insurance helped 26 million workers, points out the National Employment Law Project (NELP), and lifted 2.3 million people, including more than 600,000 children, above the poverty line.
In 2010, about two-thirds of people counted in the government’s unemployment figures received unemployment benefits. By 2011, however, that number had fallen to 54 percent. This year it fell to only 45 percent, according to George Wentworth, NELP Senior Staff Attorney.
Now, extended unemployment benefits, implemented because of the economic slump and the growth of long-term joblessness, are due to end by December 31. Unless the program is renewed, two million people will be cut off, and in no part of the country will the unemployed receive more than 26 weeks of jobless pay after being laid off.
If the program is allowed to lapse, according to Wentworth, it would mean that only a quarter of those who are officially unemployed would receive any form of benefits.
From the point of view of the mass of the people, the 2012 elections came and went without ever addressing their real concerns and needs. The political and media establishment in America is indifferent to the social devastation their system has produced and hostile to any measures that would tackle it.
The word “poverty” virtually never appears in the speeches and comments of President Barack Obama, elected to the highest office in a country where half the population is poor or near poor. The Obama administration epitomizes the callousness of the financial aristocracy and its political servants.
With the November voting out of the way, the Democrats and Republicans have turned single-mindedly to attacking entitlement programs and whatever remains of the social “safety net.” For such programs, “There is no money.” Meanwhile the politicians’ multimillionaire backers gorge themselves on record profits and Wall Street stock market bonanza.
Thanksgiving Day 2012.
That abject poverty and misery should exist side-by-side with the most extravagant and senseless wealth is accepted as natural and a fact of life by both big-business partners and all the purveyors of political wisdom in the US. The population, however, which was never consulted on this, seethes with anger, confused though it may be. American society, sclerotic, unjust and unequal, is heading inexorably toward social upheaval.
www.globalresearch.ca/the-social-crisis-in-the-us/5312915
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Political Extremism in the Technocratic Order
By Prof. James F. Tracy
Global Research, December 07, 2012
Region: USA
Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism', Police State & Civil Rights
43 20 101 305
“Extremists have taken over and they’re the ones who run the foreign policy and have convinced us to go along with all these wars.”—Congressman Ron Paul[1]
The alleged bogey of “extremism” has become a prominent element of public discourse particularly since the mid-1990s. The assumed terroristic tendencies of ordinary Americans is a preoccupation of many mainstream and liberal intellectuals apparently more concerned with moral guardianship than the growing police state and continued wartime economy. These conditions underline a campaign to promote paranoia that only intensified following September 11, 2001. As the specter of deviant commoners helps validate accelerated repressive measures, the state’s genuine extremism of illegal wars and evisceration of most civil liberties falls from public purview.
The 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building set the stage for the creation of an imaginary extremist other—“bitter clingers” in today’s parlance–purportedly emerging from a noxious combination of Bible study, country music, and gun collecting. Against this and similar “extreme” archetypes a normality is defined where the broader population is encouraged to confirm a tentative political identity and rationalize the support of intensified social control measures.
The often strange and misunderstood instances of probable state-sponsored terror—of which the Oklahoma City incident is the most well known and incontestable —alongside the prominence of well funded establishment-oriented quasi-intelligence and disinformation outlets such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League misleadingly conflate political thought, extremism and terror together in the public mind with dangerous implications for meaningful open debate and the preservation of important civil liberties.
In the months leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing Senator Joe Biden and subsequently the Clinton Administration laid the legislative groundwork for the 2001 PATRIOT Act that criminalized political thought and undermined the Posse Comitatus Act.[2] September 11, 2001 merely provide the pretext for the law’s ratification. Subsequent decrees including the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act further established such measures by giving the president the power to kill or imprison US citizens for suspected terrorism.
With this in mind the creation of a political other serves two closely related purposes. First, it provides the basis for a mechanism through which such draconian measures outlawing “extremist” ideas and activity may be put into practice.
Second, the relentless political balkanization of the public psyche and the reinforcement of this process through the creation of an extremist other deflects attention away from those in public office and, more importantly, the global power brokers who pull their strings.
The overall result is that while public attention is riveted toward would be extremist bogeys, genuinely verifiable and truly dangerous extremism of socio-economic and political elites proceeds apace with little notice. Those exerting control from above through technocratic means maintain their sovereignty by dividing the population, as the British colonialists did in India, Ireland and the Middle East. “The desires of the people were manipulated and turned against each other,” author and psychiatrist Joel Kovel observes,
so that in many cases the rulers were able to appear as philosopher-kings, high above the violent and unruly passions of their subjects. A similar mechanism applied to the manipulation of racial divisions among the working class in the U.S. Racist violence then seemed to belong to the dispossessed rabble, such as the Ku Klux Klan, while the liberal-technocratic state presented itself as having a monopoly on justice and rationality.[3]
Nowhere is this liberal technocratic rationality more on display than in the academy where police state policies are imparted the veneer of disinterested inquiry and foresight.
Nebulous Extremism and “Crippled Epistemologies”
In the era of endless war the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) own literature makes no distinction between “extremism” and “terrorism.” The volume, Investigating Terrorism and Criminal Extremism: Terms and Concepts, for example, collapses the ideas and terminology of Al Qaeda, environmental activism, the patriot-Constitutional movement, and neo-Nazism together “for criminal justice professionals to effectively combat terrorism/extremism.”[4]
Along these lines overt rhetorical efforts are made to connect political thought with violent behavior. In August 2011 the Obama Administration issued a directive, ”Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States.” The policy instructs authorities in local communities and even families to take countermeasures “radicalization that leads to violent extremism.”
“This strategy commits the Federal Government to improving support to communities,” President Obama asserts in the document’s preamble, “including sharing more information about the threat of radicalization; strengthening cooperation with local law enforcement … and helping communities to better understand and protect themselves against violent extremist propaganda, especially online.”[5]
The fruits of authoritarianism never fall too far from the given society’s knowledge-producing tree. In this regard Cass Sunstein, the well known Harvard law professor and former chief administrator of Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, figures prominently in the creation of the extremist bogey. Sunstein’s 2009 treatise Going To Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide codifies a set of principles that would be very much at home in Plato’s Republic. While the scholar’s ideas have been sufficiently panned elsewhere,[6] they are important contributing elements to the domestic extremist archetype and thus revisited here.
For Sunstein, a significant portion of the public is simply not capable of exercising the critical thought necessary to discern between fact and fantasy. Many individuals are thus susceptible to taking on the wrongheaded beliefs of cult leaders and demagogues who manage to physically or psychologically isolate unsuspecting converts and subject them to a strict regime of information control. This results in “group polarization” that could lead to extremism (a key term Sunstein never defines, to which I return below).
Akin to Obama’s 2011 policy announcement, an underlying motif steadily links popular activist causes with aberrant thinking and potentially “extremist” activity. For example,
If you hear that genetically modified foods pose serious risks, and if that view is widespread in your community, you might end up frightened. If you hear nothing about the risks associated with genetically modified food, except perhaps that some zealots are frightened, you will probably ridicule their fear. And when groups move in dangerous directions—toward killing and destruction—it is usually because the flow of information supports that movement.[7]
While Sunstein characteristically champions the intrinsic relationship between democracy and a free marketplace of ideas throughout, his argument rests on the elitist assertion that those potential “extremists” are mentally incapable of partaking in investigation and independent thought.
In such a Jonestown-style milieu, where unwilling subjects blithely advance toward the brink of extremism, they tend even more toward unsound information and opinion that confirms their already warped worldviews. Such individuals “suffer from a ‘crippled epistemology’,” Sunstein concludes, “in the sense that they know very few things and what they know is wrong.”
In instances of such willful informational deprivation “conspiracy theories” tend to gain a foothold, as such individuals are easy prey for “conspiracy entrepreneurs” who author popular tracts extending unsettling observations about 9/11, the origins of AIDS, and the Kennedy assassinations.[8]
Yet the path to extremism is not as easily traveled by anti-GMO advocates in California or 9/11 Truth activists in New York as it is by Al Qaeda forces in the Middle East. “In a democracy … the existence of ample information, with some kind of marketplace of ideas, is more likely to defang terrorists,” Sunstein asserts, “simply because their accounts can be shown to be implausible.”[9]
Sunstein’s own ideas on how such a “democratic” marketplace of ideas should take shape cannot stand the light of day. If scathing condemnation of his thoughts and proposals across the internet were not enough, in May 2012 the 9/11 truth activist and journalist Luke Rudkowski asked the law professor about his 2009 paper, “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” advocating COINTELPRO-style subversion of research communities rejecting the US government’s claims concerning the 9/11 attacks.[10] Sunstein’s disavowal of the piece and Nixonesque departure suggests a great deal about his own integrity and designs for short-circuiting the public sphere.
Nevertheless, sharing the mindset of imperial enterprise and maneuver, Sunstein’s argument and broader project fit alongside those of Gustav Le Bon, George Santayana, Walter Lippmann, and Edward Bernays, all of whom speak to a traditional elite concern over the threat of the masses. Sunstein and the US government take this once step further by erroneously linking objectionable thought (i.e. observations that are often true and verifiable) with criminal action.
Extremism of the Elite
The term “extremism” is routinely used for rhetorical effect without any explanation as to its true meaning. Since this is something Sunstein and like-minded thought police curiously spend little time on it is especially deserving of consideration.
When the term extremism is invoked by agencies of the federal government or their intellectual foot soldiers it is meant to signify the violation of a norm, belief, or practice deemed reasonable by those with inordinate power to influence public opinion. Yet a more universally applicable definition might conclude that extremism denotes actions that deprive an individual of the freedom to partake in and derive joy from life, health, free association with others, and private property.
Under such a definition, and in contrast to genuine extremism, the extremism the technocratic state underscores is almost entirely mobilized to instantiate and confirm the corporatized politics of imagined opinion.[11] Such nuanced propaganda directed at law enforcement and the general public alike polarizes the psyche much more so than the efforts of demagogues or isolated political groups.
Indeed, the obsession with “extremism” is an especially curious and unusual diversion when one considers how most Islamic fundamentalism associated with terror groups is the product of Western intelligence-backed political parties or movements.[12] Further, virtually every terrorist event in the US since September 11, 2001 has involved the US government’s cultivation and entrapment of dupes and fall guys.[13]
Genuine extremism is practiced by individuals and institutions that evade scrutiny while the false political bogeys they create take center stage. Those who devote their intellectual energies to serving the police state by designing select notions of “extremism” vis-à-vis acceptable modes of thought have made a substantial contribution to this longstanding wall of mirrors. All the while the true extremists proceed with their self-designed “war on terror”—what is in fact a war on the pursuit of truth and the continued possibility of civic life.
Notes
[1] Ginger Gibson, “Ron Paul: Glee in Administration After 9/11,” Politico.com, December 8, 2011.
[2] “Joe Biden Drafted the Core of the Patriot Act … Before the Oklahoma City Bombing,” Washingtons Blog, December 10, 2011.
[3] Joel Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror, Boston: South End Press, 1983, 129.
[4] Bureau of Justice Assistance/US Department of Justice, Investigating Terrorism and Criminal Extremism: Terms and Concepts, Tallahassee FL: Institute for Intergovernmental Research, 2005-2009, 3. Available at publicintelligence.net/doj-terrorism-and-criminal-extremism-terms-and-concepts-guide/
[5] “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” August 3, 2011, 6, n.p. Available at publicintelligence.net/white-house-strategy-for-countering-violent-extremism-in-the-united-states/
[6] For example, David Ray Griffin, Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, Northampton MA: Olive Branch Press, 2011.
[7] Cass R. Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 23.
[8] Sunstein, 109-111.
[9] Sunstein, 116.
[10] We Are Change, “Obama Information Czar Cass Sunstein Confronted on Cognitive Infiltration,” Youtube, May 1, 2012,
[11] James Tracy, “The Politics of Imagined Opinion,” Global Research, March 10, 2012.
[12] Michel Chossudovsky, America’s “War on Terrorism”, Ottawa: Centre for Research on Globalization, 2005.
[13] “FBI Agents Responsible for Majority of Terrorist Plots in the United States,” Project Censored, October 10, 2012.
www.globalresearch.ca/political-extremism-in-the-technocratic-order/5314530
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Individualism and the Failures of Liberalism in America
By Dr. Robert P. Abele
Global Research, December 03, 2012
Region: USA
Theme: Culture, Society & History
32 4 12 196
There is a common question being asked today in liberal and activist circles: “Why, in the face of all the deeply immoral actions engaged in by the U.S. government regarding its domestic and foreign actions, can liberals not organize themselves enough to push back against the economic-political managers of the totalitarian surge of the U.S. government?” This essay is an attempt to answer this question, at least in part.
There is a common denominator between traditional liberals and conservatives that engages one camp and immobilizes the other. That common denominator is the philosophy of individualism—i.e. subjective relativism. In its extreme form, it is the adolescent level of narcissism, in which one is concerned with only oneself. When one combines this individualism with the moral relativism of a capitalistic philosophy which denies the objective moral values that would limit individual desires (in this case, the desire for money), one finds a philosophy that is shared by both traditional liberals and conservatives. Both are combined in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who makes a virtue of selfish individualism, the “all for me and my interests” syndrome. For example, in her book The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand says that “the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action” (p. x).
Even more, it is positively irrational for actors not to be selfish/self-interested. Traditional liberals themselves participate in this philosophy when they attempt to stand alone with their own opinions and the philosophy of “this is right for me,” or “I do what I want or think is best for my interests,” or “no one can tell me what is right, true, etc.” Any one of these fits nicely into the traditional Lockean-Libertarian understanding of human nature, in which humans by nature are selfish and desirous (see John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, Chapter IX). In general, liberals follow the Randian philosophy when they put their own self interests ahead of*general principle or general set of principles concerning what is right, true, just, etc. To put it as de Tocqueville did: “in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very puny object, which is himself” (Democracy in America, Chapter XVIII).
Even worse, some academics and intellectuals support this type of primacy of the individual and/or its accompanying cognitive and ethical relativism by finding ways of justifying it, all with the end-game in mind to deny the importance of the normative dimension of human reason and its relation to ethics, by maintaining the primacy of the non-rational and non-normative dimension to human cognition. This is exemplified today by one such attempt to reduce beliefs to mere metaphors or “frames.” When irrationalism of this type is said to found human reason or morality, it inevitably produces (or at the very least contributes significantly to) an ethical relativism which, when combined with individualism, results in a noteworthy blow to the cause of rational normative thinking, such as the political norms of “justice for all” (i.e. justice as a universal precept) or “equality barring none,” to say nothing of the notion of community.1
Some commentators have attempted to pin this development in American individualism at least in part on Freud, with his understanding of the primacy of the id (e.g. see Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, for a good early example of this kind of argument). However, Freud’s recognition of primary/animal instincts is complemented by his recognition of the rise of a control mechanism for them (see The Future of an Illusion, Chapter II). But whereas Freud’s control mechanism is generated by social taboo, rationalist and Enlightenment understanding of control and corrective for base impulses comes from rational autonomy.
This means that individuals have an intrinsic mechanism for normative, rational moral thinking. But with the American redefinition of autonomy as unconstrained individual liberty, when it is combined with the view of humans as slaves to their base impulses/passions, or whose thoughts are determined by their metaphor, then autonomy as normative, self-conscious self-control is surrendered to in-fighting among groups for social control of what constitutes taboo (that Edward Bernays made a career out of manipulating such social control is by now nearly common knowledge; see his Propaganda, Chapter I). But if this view remains the dominant view of how human cognition operates (or worse, the defining characteristic of the human person), then humans are reduced to lower-levels of brain function, which has shown itself to have the potential to take us all the way back(ward) to the adolescent narcissism of self-indulgence and its concomitant suspicion of any corrective challenges made to it. Thus, the individual/internal self-corrective mechanism is replaced by a simple channeling of the fulfillment of self-desire in various socially-acceptable ways, those ways being controlled by the reigning social group. This devaluing of both rational reflection and self-control amounts to the devolution of humans to lower-brained image-based (i.e. metaphorical) maneuvering among and between alternatives for self-fulfillment. This is the “low road” view of humanity and the shutting down of higher-level (i.e. late-developing) brain functions of normative thinking—i.e. ethical and rational.
Contrary to this “freewheeling individualism,” many if not most contemporary philosophers, along with the new field of cognitive science, demonstrates quite convincingly that there are clear rational and moral structures that are implicit in human thought and language. So even though a cognitively and ethically relativistic culture (like California, which I would argue leads the nation in this view) attempts to deny this by reducing human thought to a foundation in images and metaphors, it ultimately is not only a bad philosophy because of its reductionism, but can explain a lot in terms of liberal inability to push back. The reason is that it underscores the selfish desire- fulfillment that liberalism has devolved into, by denying any intrinsically normative dimension to human thought and by rejecting the notion of universally-binding ethical principles, expressed by such norms as “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” When this principle is reduced to an individual ethical preference, as it so often is, it implies “tolerance” of other viewpoints, and that would include “tolerance” of an attitude (not a principle) that says “I’ll do what I feel is best for me (at all times),” or at its worst, “I am my own authority.” It is this relativism that defines liberalism today, and explains in part why liberals can’t unify and thus organize themselves.
Among those who recognize this issue are Chris Hedges (“America is in Need of a Moral Bailout”) and Morris Berman (Why America Failed). However, the angle at which they each approach this issue is a bit different from mine. Hedges focuses on America’s moral nihilism, in particular in post-WWII America and even more specifically as it applies to our elites. Berman argues that the type of individualism discussed here is essentially nothing new in America; that individualism connected particularly with monetary acquisitiveness has been in the American character from the beginning (see Chapter One of his book).
Note that I am not saying that individualism and/or relativism is the sole reason for lack of liberal unity today. There are social and psychological factors involved in answering this question as well, such as a demoralized people, economically strapped, living in fear losing of their jobs, and thus feeling powerless to control their own destinies. But even fear and demoralization must be overcome if there is to be any response to the fascistic direction that our country has taken, a direction that promises to continue under an Obama second-term presidency (e.g. drone warfare; presidential assassinations; attacking government whistleblowers, warrantless electronic surveillance, etc.). Individualism and relativism offer no way forward from this quandary; hence, traditional liberalism has no solution to the issues that plague us today.
There is another possibility for traditional liberal inactivity today, and that is the possibility that liberalism has been institutionalized in the Bill Clinton-Barak Obama regimes as distinctively bourgeois liberalism—i.e. the solidly middle-class liberal with good education and good job who is willing to surrender a firm and activist commitment to universal principles or the common good for a comfortable existence accepted and protected by the very governmental institution composed of bourgeois liberals like him/herself who share their constituents’ self-interested desires to be left alone to pursue their individual bliss. Due to their socio-economic position in society, they feel free to pass off the responsibility for a better tomorrow for everyone to the political leader who at least in word espouses the same general values. Even if this is the case, it is still individualism in a significant way: the “leave me alone; I’ve got mine” attitude by which one absents themselves from society and responsibility for the good of others.
Thus, whatever the situation, it is a change in fundamental philosophy that is required to set liberal values on a new path. This will require self-reflection and rational-moral thinking, not wallowing in human “feeling” or “frames.” One approach that I do not think will work in changing philosophical direction, however, is the attempt to reduce human existence to a social dialectic, as has been an approach regularly advocated in attempting produce change for the last ten years. There are several reasons for this. First, individualistic relativism is too enshrined in American culture to simply advocate a dialectical turnaround. It would be more productive to begin with individual cognition, since the individual is the primary base of American cultural philosophy. Second, I believe the reduction of human existence to social interchange is ultimately intellectually hollow and politically short-sighted: intellectually hollow because it gives no consideration of intrinsic and rationally supported normative thinking; politically shallow because its materialism gives humans no legs on which to regain their distinctively human autonomy as a normative and self-conscious choice of action. Without this, there can be no human rights to begin with—something Karl Marx recognized in his rejection of human rights (in Critique of the Gotha Programme).
So the conclusion to our analysis is that traditional liberals can’t organize a push-back against the wave of totalitarianism coming at us in America today because they can’t unify! To unify, they would have to let go of both prongs of lived liberalism today (i.e. individualism and relativism), and that would entail a revolutionary shift of their positions. But until that happens, one can only expect traditional bourgeois liberals to support center-right presidents like Obama. This is where the Occupy Wall Street movement represents for us a breath of fresh air: focused on the issues and on collective response to them, it provides a needed corrective to traditional liberal individualism. However, even OWS will not be a solution until they recognize spokespersons and hierarchical organization of some sort. To reject that need is to reject something that is endemic to any organized movement. But at least they are on the right track. So now let us assist the movement by providing needed rational legs to it, and we can follow the lead of the OWS generation as they work to extricate us from the results of our own cultural and philosophical undoing.2
Notes
1 The recognition that this notion of metaphor and “framing” produces a philosophical relativism is a fairly straightforward process. Although the point of this paper is not to demonstrate that, one can see it by means of a quick example. What is the difference between John Boehner and Paul Ryan repeating, ad nauseam, “You’re not going to grow the economy if you raise tax rates (on the top two rates),” and George Lakoff advocating his traditional liberal followers to repeat over and over again that “The private depends on the public”? [This line and the strategy of repetition with the goal of (simply) “changing frames” was advocated by Lakoff at a talk he gave to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in September, 2012] Unless there is a standard beyond metaphor itself by which to assess these two slogans, the only consequence of this recognition can be that different viewpoints are simply a propaganda battle to hold the dominant metaphor—i.e. a relativistic philosophy. 2
I should add here that this is not an “America-can-be-saved-if-only-we-do-this” argument. Personally, I do not think America can change its current course of spiraling toward the self-destruction of its political-cultural system in a slow-motion death dance. What I am hoping is that we might bring about a better humanity out of the recognition of the vacuous nature of individualism and relativism that America manifests as its national philosophy, both conservative and—as this paper argues—liberal.
Dr. Robert P. Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University He is the author of three books: A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); Democracy Gone: A Chronicle of the Last Chapters of the Great American Democratic Experiment (2009). He contributed eleven chapters to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice, from The Hague: Springer Press (October 1, 2011). Dr. Abele is an instructor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, located in Pleasant Hill, California in the San Francisco Bay area.
www.globalresearch.ca/individualism-and-the-failures-of-liberalism-in-america/5313830
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American Immorality Is At A Peak
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and Chris Floyd
Global Research, November 13, 2012
paulcraigroberts.org
Region: USA
Theme: Crimes against Humanity
96 25 51 245
When Chris Floyd is at his best, as he is below, he puts things in perspective for readers that they otherwise never confront. Obama has won reelection, and his supporters think that somehow things are going to be different. Fat chance.
While evil continues to envelop America, the public is focused on CIA director General Petraeus’ resignation. The FBI spied on him and found that he was having an affair with his biographer, a woman 20 years younger than his 60 years.
What is it with Americans and sex? Why is an illicit affair the ONLY reason for removing someone from political office? Why is it that government officials, presidents and vice presidents included, can violate US statutory law and torture people, spy on Americans without the necessary warrants, murder US citizens without due process, confine US citizens to dungeons for life without evidence and due process of law, start multi-trillion dollar wars on the basis of contrived allegations that have no basis in fact, murder civilians in seven countries, overthrow legitimate governments, and all of these massive crimes against humanity can be accepted as long as no one in Washington gets any sex out of it? Is this feminism’s contribution to American morality?
Has the United States, the hero of the cold war, become in its behavior and motivations the enemy it overcame? Why does Washington want hegemony over the world? Why does Washington want this hegemony so badly that Washington is willing to murder women, children, aid workers, husbands and fathers, village elders, anyone on earth including its own American heroes?
What is the evil that drives Washington?
How can the evil that drives Washington be contained, stamped out, prevented from destroying the human race?
What does the world do when it confronts unbridled evil, which is what Washington
_____________________________________
The Reality of the “Lesser Evil”
Is This Child Dead Enough for You?
by Chris Floyd
To all those now hailing the re-election of Barack Obama as a triumph of decent, humane, liberal values over the oozing-postule perfidy of the Republicans, a simple question:
Is this child dead enough for you?
This little boy was named Naeemullah. He was in his house — maybe playing, maybe sleeping, maybe having a meal — when an American drone missile was fired into the residential area where he lived and blew up the house next door.
www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/photos-pakistan-drone-war/?pid=999
As we all know, these drone missiles are, like the president who wields them, super-smart, a triumph of technology and technocratic expertise. We know, for the president and his aides have repeatedly told us, that these weapons — launched only after careful consultation of the just-war strictures of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas — strike nothing but their intended targets and kill no one but “bad guys.” Indeed, the president’s top aides have testified under oath that not a single innocent person has been among the thousands of Pakistani civilians — that is, civilians of a sovereign nation that is not at war with the United States — who have been killed by the drone missile campaign of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
Yet somehow, by some miracle, the missile that roared into the residential area where Naeemullah lived did not confine itself neatly to the house it struck. Somehow, inexplicably, the hunk of metal and wire and computer processors failed — in this one instance — to look into the souls of all the people in the village and ascertain, by magic, which ones were “bad guys” and then kill only them. Somehow — perhaps the missile had been infected with Romney cooties? — this supercharged hunk of high explosives simply, well, exploded with tremendous destructive power when it struck the residential area, blowing the neighborhood to smithereens.
As Wired reports, shrapnel and debris went flying through the walls of Naeemullah’s house and ripped through his small body. When the attack was over — when the buzzing drone sent with Augustinian wisdom by the Peace Laureate was no longer lurking over the village, shadowing the lives of every defenseless inhabitant with the terrorist threat of imminent death, Naeemullah was taken to the hospital in a nearby town.
This is where the picture of above was taken by Noor Behram, a resident of North Waziristan who has been chronicling the effects of the Peace Laureate’s drone war. When the picture was taken, Naeemullah was dying. He died an hour later. [http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/photos-pakistan-drone-war/?pid=998]
He died.
Is he dead enough for you?
Dead enough not to disturb your victory dance in any way? Dead enough not to trouble the inauguration parties yet to come? Dead enough not to diminish, even a little bit, your exultant glee at the fact that this great man, a figure of integrity, decency, honor and compassion, will be able to continue his noble leadership of the best nation in the history of the world?
Do you have children? Do they sit your house playing happily? Do they sleep sweetly scrunched up in their warm beds at night? Do they chatter and prattle like funny little birds as you eat with them at the family table? Do you love them? Do you treasure them? Do you consider them fully-fledged human beings, beloved souls of infinite worth?
How would you feel if you saw them ripped to shreds by flying shrapnel, in your own house? How would you feel as you rushed them to the hospital, praying every step of the way that another missile won’t hurl down on you from the sky? Your child was innocent, you had done nothing, were simply living your life in your own house — and someone thousands of miles away, in a country you had never seen, had no dealings with, had never harmed in any way, pushed a button and sent chunks of burning metal into your child’s body. How would you feel as you watched him die, watched all your hopes and dreams for him, all the hours and days and years you would have to love him, fade away into oblivion, lost forever?
What would you think about the one who did this to your child? Would you say: “What a noble man of integrity and decency! I’m sure he is acting for the best.”
Would you say: “Well, this is a bit unfortunate, but it’s perfectly understandable. The Chinese government (or Iran or al Qaeda or North Korea or Russia, etc. etc.) believed there was someone next door to me who might possibly at some point in time pose some kind of threat in some unspecified way to their people or their political agenda — or maybe it was just that my next-door neighbor behaved in a certain arbitrarily chosen way that indicated to people watching him on a computer screen thousands of miles away that he might possibly be the sort of person who might conceivably at some point in time pose some kind of unspecified threat to the Chinese (Iranians/Russians, etc.), even though they had no earthly idea who my neighbour is or what he does or believes or intends. I think the person in charge of such a program is a good, wise, decent man that any person would be proud to support. Why, I think I’ll ask him to come speak at my little boy’s funeral!”
Is that what you would say if shrapnel from a missile blew into your comfortable house and killed your own beloved little boy? You would not only accept, understand, forgive, shrug it off, move on — you would actively support the person who did it, you would cheer his personal triumphs and sneer at all those who questioned his moral worthiness and good intentions? Is that really what you would do?
Well, that is what you are doing when you shrug off the murder of little Naeemullah. You are saying he is not worth as much as your child. You are saying he is not a fully-fledged human being, a beloved soul of infinite worth. You are saying that you support his death, you are happy about it, and you want to see many more like it. You are saying it doesn’t matter if this child — or a hundred like him, or a thousand like him, or, as in the Iraqi sanctions of the old liberal lion, Bill Clinton, five hundred thousand children like Naeemullah — are killed in your name, by leaders you cheer and support. You are saying that the only thing that matters is that someone from your side is in charge of killing these children. This is the reality of “lesser evilism.” [http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/to-honor-value-of-single-life-first.html]
***
Before the election, we heard a lot of talk about this notion of the “lesser evil.” From prominent dissidents and opponents of empire like Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky and Robert Parry to innumerable progressive blogs to personal conversations, one heard this basic argument: “Yes, the drone wars, the gutting of civil liberties, the White House death squads and all the rest are bad; but Romney would be worse. Therefore, with great reluctance, holding our noses and shaking our heads sadly, we must choose the lesser evil of Obama and vote accordingly.”
I understand that argument, I really do. I don’t agree with it, as I made plain here many times before the election. I think the argument is wrong, I think our system is so far gone that even a “lesser evil” is too evil to support in any way, that such support only perpetuates the system’s unconscionable evils. But I’m not a purist, not a puritan, not a commissar or dogmatist. I understand that people of good will can come to a different conclusion, and feel that they must reluctantly choose one imperial-militarist-corporate faction over the other, in the belief that this will mean some slight mitigation of the potential evil that the other side commit if it took power. I used to think that way myself, years ago. Again, I now disagree with this, and I think that the good people who believe this have not, for whatever reason or reasons, looked with sufficient clarity at the reality of our situation, of what is actually being done, in their name, by the political faction they support.
But of course, I am not the sole arbiter of reality, nor a judge of others; people see what they see, and they act (or refrain from acting) accordingly. I understand that. But here is what I don’t understand: the sense of triumph and exultation and glee on the part of so many progressives and liberals and ‘dissidents’ at the victory of this “lesser evil.” Where did the reluctance, the nose-holding, the sad head-shaking go? Should they not be mourning the fact that evil has triumphed in America, even if, by their lights, it is a “lesser” evil?
If you really believed that Obama was a lesser evil — 2 percent less evil, as I believe Digby once described the Democrats in 2008 — if you really did find the drone wars and the White House death squads and Wall Street bailouts and absolution for torturers and all the rest to be shameful and criminal, how can you be happy that all of this will continue? Happy — and continuing to scorn anyone who opposed the perpetuation of this system.
The triumph of a lesser evil is still a victory for evil. If your neighborhood is tyrannized by warring mafia factions, you might prefer that the faction which occasionally doles out a few free hams wins out over their more skinflint rivals; but would you be joyful about the fact that your neighborhood is still being tyrannized by murderous criminals? Would you not be sad, cast down, discouraged and disheartened to see the violence and murder and corruption go on? Would you not mourn the fact that your children will have to grow up in the midst of all this?
So where is the mourning for the fact that we, as a nation, have come to this: a choice between murderers, a choice between plunderers? Even if you believe that you had to participate and make the horrific choice that was being offered to us — “Do you want the Democrat to kill these children, or do you want the Republican to kill these children?” — shouldn’t this post-election period be a time of sorrow, not vaulting triumph and giddy glee and snarky put-downs of the “losers”?
If you really are a “lesser evilist” — if this was a genuine moral choice you reluctantly made, and not a rationalization for indulging in unexamined, primitive partisanship — then you will know that we are ALL the losers of this election. Even if you believe it could have been worse, it is still very bad. You yourself proclaimed that Obama was evil — just a bit “lesser” so than his opponent. (2 percent maybe.) And so the evil that you yourself saw and named and denounced will go on. Again I ask: where is the joy and glory and triumph in this? Even if you believe it was unavoidable, why celebrate it? And ask yourself, bethink yourself: what are you celebrating? This dead child, and a hundred like him? A thousand like him? Five hundred thousand like him? How far will you go? What won’t you celebrate?
And so step by step, holding the hand of the “lesser evil,” we descend deeper and deeper into the pit.
Chris Floyd is an American writer based in the UK. His blog, “Empire Burlesque,” can be found athttp://www.chris-floyd.com.
www.globalresearch.ca/american-immorality-is-at-a-peak/5311661