In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration’s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a “privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ‘partnership’ in which one partner robs the other.” Professor Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating “control fraud.” High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by “mark to model” trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy’s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today’s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth – by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact, promoting their own special interests

People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of “liars’ loans.”

The first step toward today’s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks’ privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the industrial revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.

Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of “distorting” free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands.

The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system’s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate – the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating “balance sheet wealth” in this way is to load down the “real” production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs.

Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks’ balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense – some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for “free market” deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting “too big to fail” policy means making governments too weak to fight back.

The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats – of the banks’ own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society’s rulers.

The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector’s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive – and a financial oligarchy will rule.

The present debt quandary

The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today’s debt overhead is being kept in place – shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles – without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running.

The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity – worth less than the mortgages attached to it – and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today’s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression.

This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place – and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy’s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks – Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services – or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers – governments left these banks operating as part of the “casino capitalism” that has become their business plan.

There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“The Fair”) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars’ wealth, arresting them and putting many to death – not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators.

By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers – while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These “cash for trash” swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy’s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago.

So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today.

How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism

Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (“receivables”). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks.

It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint-Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Crédit Mobilier, founded by the Péreire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor’s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor’s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law.

Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France’s Third Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended.

Germany develops an industrial banking system

It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the “holy trinity” of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck’s “state socialism.” German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks “derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,” and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany’s “lack of capital … forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,” noted the financial historian George Edwards. “A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves. As a result, German banks “stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.”

When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany’s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy.

In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published 'Mitteleuropa,' describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long‑term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: “The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,” and “The Financing of Industry and Trade.” He endorsed Naumann’s contention that “the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.”

This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being “undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,” Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen’s 'The Engineers and the Price System' (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets.

Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long‑term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends – and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long‑term strategy.

German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them “the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.”

A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London’s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock.

In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. “As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,” complained Foxwell, “his enterprise ceases. ‘To him,’ as the Times says, ‘a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.’”

Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America’s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison’s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights.

In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit.

What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II.

The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I

The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job – or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive.

In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe’s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America’s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this.

And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that “a debt is a debt” and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America’s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this – or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the “budgetary problem”) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem.

Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany’s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation’s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States.

Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo’s lobbying for their perspective in Britain’s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude can and should be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy. Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate.

The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today’s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany’s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation.

Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany’s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay.

This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies.

Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation if it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe’s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task – and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard.

But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices?

How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s

Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 – not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services.

Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary – but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain.

This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income – making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be “capitalized” into bank loans increased the economy’s debt overhead.

Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income – so “pension fund capitalism” was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business – by more than technology was able to lower prices.

The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks

Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically – to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.

So the plan has backfired. When “hard money” policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.

For starters, the ECB’s €489 billion in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the “carry trade”) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market – after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price – gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.

How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today’s debt overhead in the first place?

Conclusion

Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit – leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay – indeed, impossible.

So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits – at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.

I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This “solution” relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.

Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive – just the opposite of what is promised.

Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.

This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.

Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the “real” economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:

* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?

* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?

* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?

Solving the Eurozone’s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the “unearned increment” of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.

A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents – along with interest – are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.

Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it “interferes” with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector’s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.

It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today’s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.

*This article also appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung.

 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg had a message to New York City's Muslim community: don't worry that the New York Police Department showed an anti-Muslim film to around 1,500 officers, because top cop Ray Kelly “probably visits more mosques” than many Muslims in New York.

Speaking at a press conference in Queens, Bloomberg continued his defense of Kelly: “He has reached out to this community as he has reached out to lots of other communities. We have things regularly at 1 Police Plaza for clergy people of each religion, including Islam. And we'll continue to do that.”  

But Muslim community leaders and activists, backed by a diverse coalition of allies, are having none of that. They want Kelly fired. And they say this latest incident shows how anti-Muslim sentiment has become institutionalized in the NYPD. 

A rejoinder to Kelly's defense was already on display at around the same time Bloomberg spoke, at a January 26 press conference on the steps of City Hall. Protesters held signs labeling Kelly a racist. Anger was in the air, and Muslim activists and allies repeatedly called for Kelly's resignation; for “corrective training” for the officers who viewed the film; and for independent oversight of the NYPD. As chants of “Kelly must go” rang through the air, some activists demanded state or federal oversight of New York City police. 

“This outrage is a violation of the honor of our city and those who protect it,” said Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations' New York chapter. 

The battle is centered around an Islamophobic film titled The Third Jihad, which was shown to police officers on a continuous loop during “the sign-in, medical and administrative orientation process,” according to police documents obtained by the Brennan Center for Justice. The film, which is filled with violent imagery and posits that mainstream Muslim groups are in fact secretly plotting to take over the U.S., was financed by the Clarion Fund, a right-wing organization with links to Israeli settlers. Compounding the NYPD and Bloomberg administration's problems is the fact that Kelly willingly agreed to sit down for a 90-minute interview for the film and that NYPD spokesman Paul Browne lied about Kelly's involvement and how many officers saw the film. 

This is hardly the first time NYPD's problematic relationship with the city's Muslims has come to light. But what makes the episode significant is the media firestorm it has created over the spokesperson's lies at a time of increasing awareness of police abuse due to Occupy Wall Street-related arrests and brutality. Muslim activists are looking to capitalize on that energy as they confront the NYPD in the weeks ahead. 

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the NYPD has had a fraught relationship with the city's 800,000-member Muslim community, one of the fastest growing religious communities in the city. Billions of dollars have been spent to make NYPD one of the most powerful forces in the fight against terrorism. But the NYPD has been routinely accused of harassing and entrapping Muslims in terrorism-related cases. The final straw for many Muslims came when an Associated Press investigative series published last summer exposed an arbitrary spying program, implemented with CIA help, that targeted virtually all of New York's Muslims. A “demographics unit” established at the NYPD has “monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs” in Muslim communities, as well as mosques, the AP reported. It was also revealed that the NYPD spied on Muslim student associations on college campuses.  

Revelations of the spying program dealt blows to a Bloomberg administration whose relations with the Muslim community were at a relative high note when the mayor defended the Park 51 mosque project near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.  

“These practices paint a dangerous picture of the ways in which law enforcement engages with Muslim communities under the banner of national security,” reads an August 25, 2011 statement from the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition. “These McCarthyite spying techniques threaten the civil rights of all Americans, and deepen the long-existing rifts between communities of color and police in the United States.” 

Then came the most recent revelation about the showing of The Third Jihad. Although the Village Voice first reported on the story last January, a Jan. 23, 2012 New York Times report, based on police documents obtained by the Brennan Center, has received a lot more attention due to the AP expose on the NYPD's spying program. 

“Seeing that propaganda like this is being used in training is almost logical in light of Associated Press reports on the NYPD's comprehensive and warrantless surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers,” said CAIR-NY's McGoldrick.  

After the most recent revelations broke, Browne's lies about the NYPD film screening became a hot media topic. The AP ran a January 30, 2012 article titled “New York Police Spokesman Comes Under Fire.” The two free daily papers in New York led with the story after it broke, and some city council members have called for more oversight of the NYPD as a result of the incident. Protests calling for Kelly's resignation have kept the story in the news, and an editorial, an opinion piece and a column in the New York Times were published in recent days criticizing the NYPD. 

A burgeoning alliance between black and Latino activists working against “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, Muslim activists and Occupy Wall Street could keep the momentum going. Jumaane Williams, a black city council member and OWS supporter whose own run-in with NYPD has turned him into an outspoken advocate against police abuse, spoke at the rally and denounced the NYPD's “corrosive culture.” 

The coming together of long-time anti-police brutality activists and OWS was chronicled in The Awl in a report by Michael Tracey. Titled “A Fresh Movement Against the NYPD's Culture of Misconduct,” the article detailed how OWS has reinvigorated New York's anti-police brutality movement. As Tracey shows, the alliance is natural given OWS' experience with police brutality—something communities of color have had to combat for decades. And OWS' attention to police brutality has also been a boon to Muslim activists. 

On October 21, 2011, a CAIR-NY-organized day of prayer was held in Zuccotti Park. Although it attracted little attention outside the anti-Muslim blogosphere, it was a sign of an alliance to come. 

“CAIR-NY’s endorsement of Friday Prayer at Occupy Wall Street stems from a conviction that many of the issues brought into the international spotlight by Occupy Wall Street affect Muslim communities disproportionately,” read a statement announcing the action. “Especially in light of the recently exposed NYPD surveillance in Muslim Student Organizations, we need to unite in our repudiation of government corruption and our rejection of the political effort to marginalize our voice.” 

A month of organizing followed the prayer action, and a much larger rally at Foley Square against the NYPD spying program was held in November with hundreds of people, including a contingent from OWS. Muslim youth broke into chants of “We are the 99 percent” as they marched to NYPD headquarters to make their discontent known.  

“It's really critical we create this broad-based movement,” said Faiza Ali, a community activist and organizer who attended the November rally. “On the whole there's a general distaste for the police department and the way they've been operating, especially recently given the police brutality issues being raised at Occupy Wall Street...All of these issues are connected, and [we have] the support of Occupy Wall Street on this issue.”  

Muslim activists like Imam Talib 'Abdur-Rashid, the spiritual leader of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem, say the public pressure on Kelly and the NYPD won't stop until corrective action is taken. Speaking at the January 26 press conference, Abdur-Rashid promised more public protests on these issues in the coming weeks and laid out the stakes.  

“We are facing the specter of a 21st-century COINTELPRO,” he told reporters. And activists say the fight is just beginning.   

“This is part of a long-term strategy,” Linda Sarsour, a prominent Palestinian-American activist in the NYC Muslim community, recently wrote. “We are not just reacting anymore.” 

The pomp and the platitudes. The champagne and the canapés. In the tony ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, the gemütlich gathering of global leaders for the World Economic Forum seemed like business as usual…five days of hobnobbing and male-dominated, Euro-centric jaw-flapping on the economic state of the planet. A rich and rewarding experience for the rich and rewarded.

But what about this year’s theme? Billed as “The Great Transformation,” the WEF promised sessions on rethinking capitalism, reducing inequality and solving Europe's financial crisis. Founder Klaus Schwab opened the forum with a wise observation that capitalism needs to be fixed "to serve society." Was it possible that these leaders wanted change? Had they opened their ears to the 99 percent?

Guess it depends on which society and what you mean by fixed. Because in reality, the brochure should have read: "The Great Retrenchment: with sessions on denying capitalism's failures, staying rich despite inequality, and dumping Europe's financial crisis onto the backs of ordinary people."

The Song Remains the Same

In the midst of a crippling European debt crisis, some 2,500 business leaders, intellectuals and politicians strolled among the five-star hotels and plush conference rooms of the WEF. There was much talk about how economic turmoil in Europe could spread to the rest of the world. There was much networking. Much giddy tweeting (Inspiration! Youth! Social entrepreneurs!) and much partying among ice sculptures.

Outside, Swiss police sprayed tear gas at demonstrators protesting youth unemployment, Occupiers camped in igloos protested the event’s elitism, and a group of Ukranian women decried the sexism by going topless and wielding signs that read “Poor because of you!”

Yes, there were some reports of elites feeling a bit “besieged” and security was accordingly beefed up. Strategies to maintain the status quo varied by industry and sometimes country. But when you start reading that bankers felt “cautious optimism” about how leaders were responding to their plight, you know that the 99 percent was never really part of the agenda. That Vikram Pandit, CEO of the global bank Citigroup, who blew up the company and sent the bills to taxpayers, was co-chair of this year’s forum spoke volumes.

The Davos Man

“Davos Man” is a nifty term that refers to the global elite of wealthy men whose members feel themselves to be part of a cozy fraternity where national affiliations mean little next to their membership in monied circles (see helpful phrenological chart for additional information on this species). Arriving from Zurich by private jet, the typical Davos Man enjoys the high altitude as a great place to look down upon the world’s woes -- and have another glass of bubbly.

You would not be surprised to learn that the foundation that puts on the WEF is funded by its 1,000 member companies, the typical firm being a global enterprise with over $5 billion in turnover. Representatives of small businesses and cooperatives, which constitute much of the global economy, are naturally unwelcome in Davos Man's habitat. You will be even less shocked to know that all of the 30 video messages from Davos co-chairs and partners posted ahead of the meeting featured men, most of them western and white. Columbia University’s Anya Schiffrin commented on the notable lack of female participants, saying, “I understand there are not a lot of women running hedge funds, but in that case change your category, maybe don't only have CEOs.” A bold idea. But a bit too innovative for Davos Man.

The takeaway of the 2012 Davos Man was that the eurozone was in trouble and that countries like Greece, and maybe Portugal, will be leaving. German chancellor Angela Merkel, a rare Davos Woman, spoke of the urgent need to restore confidence in Europe and improve “competitiveness” (read, screw workers in other countries) but admitted that Germany doesn’t want to put more money up to underwrite weaker countries (read: have-nots can continue to enjoy the fiscal austerity death-spiral).

At a time when, according to the Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the earnings gap between the rich and poor had reached its highest level in 30 years, non-elites got little airtime here, and when they did, they generally expressed dismay. Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo was on hand to call bullshit on the summit's "transformational" rhetoric, observing that "it's more about system recovery than system redesign.” And the system, as we know by now, is one designed so very carefully for the benefit of the 1 percent. So things like, for example, prosecuting financial fraud, redesigning incentives for corporate predation, and, well, reining in a capitalist system that is sucking the world's real economy dry, are just not on the table.

“We Don’t Realize What We Don’t Realize”

A session titled “Pundits, Professors, and Their Predictions” neatly encapsulates what went wrong at the WEF. Watch the video, and you will see six men on stage, including the moderator. They are: The New York Times’ conventional wisdom avatar Tom Friedman (taking a break from resurrecting 1 percent whisperer Adam Davidson); Yale economist Bob Shiller; NYU economist Nouriel Roubini; Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, and public policy expert Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore, the sole representative of a non-western country.

The moderator opened the session sagely acknowledging that in addressing the world’s ills, “We don’t realize what we don’t realize.”

You can say that again.

Not a single female voice could be heard in the entire hour. If you realized, for example, that women constitute half the world’s population, perhaps you would not be sitting there discussing its fate without finding out what they think. But this is the WEF, after all.

And how is the leadership class responding to current “global unrest"? asked the moderator. Noting that “top-down leadership is dumb and slow,” Friedman pointed out that global leaders have gone from having a one-way conversation to a two-way conversation. What about a two-gender conversation? In disgust, someone finally sent a tweet to the moderator: “Where are the women panelists? The Occupy panelists?” The moderator: “I don’t know, you’ll have to take that up with other people.”

“Other people” did not comment.

The panelists went on to talk about how leaders are “kicking the can down the road” in the Eurozone, which was helpfully described as a “slow motion train wreck.” And it was pointed out that elites were disagreeing on everything from monetary policy, fiscal policy, global climate change, international trade, and food security. But they were certainly in harmony with the notion that they would not be doing anything transformational, and thus 2012 was shaping into a do-nothing-useful year, concluded Roubini. But just wait until 2013, he warned, when things will really get ugly. Oh, and social media was really screwing up the ability of elites to get their plans implemented. And for all-male panels to come off without looking dumb and slow.

Truthfully, everyone looked a bit weary. But wait! There was that Google party happening across the way…and didn't someone say they have a dance floor and swordfish canapés? Cheered by this news, Davos Man could be seen to loosen his tie and get started on a long night of vodka spritzers and bringing back the White Man's Overbite.

Slow curtain. The End.

Ecuador must be one of the most exciting places on Earth right now, in terms of working towards a new development paradigm. It shows how much can be achieved with political will, even in uncertain economic times.

Just 10 years ago, Ecuador was more or less a basket case, a quintessential "banana republic" (it happens to be the world's largest exporter of bananas), characterised by political instability, inequality, a poorly-performing economy, and the ever-looming impact of the US on its domestic politics.

In 2000, in response to hyperinflation and balance of payments problems, the government dollarised the economy, replacing the sucre with the US currency as legal tender. This subdued inflation, but it did nothing to address the core economic problems, and further constrained the domestic policy space.

A major turning point came with the election of the economist Rafael Correa as president. After taking over in January 2007, his government ushered in a series of changes, based on a new constitution (the country's 20th, approved in 2008) that was itself mandated by a popular referendum. A hallmark of the changes that have occurred since then is that major policies have first been put through the referendum process. This has given the government the political ability to take on major vested interests and powerful lobbies.

The government is now the most stable in recent times and will soon become the longest serving in Ecuador's tumultuous history. The president's approval ratings are well over 70%. All this is due to the reorientation of the government's approach, made possible by a constitution remarkable for its recognition of human rights and the rights of nature, and its acceptance of plurality and cultural diversity.

Consider just some economic changes brought about in the past four years, beginning with the renegotiation of oil contracts with multinational companies. Ecuador is an oil exporter, but had benefited relatively little from this because of the high shares of oil sales that went to foreign oil companies. A new law in July 2010 dramatically changed the terms, increasing the government's share from 13% to 87% of gross oil revenues.

Seven of the 16 foreign oil companies decided to pull out, and their fields were taken over by state-run companies. But the others stayed on and, as a result, state revenues increased by $870m (£563m) in 2011.

Second, and possibly even more impressively, the government managed a dramatic increase in direct tax receipts. In fact, this has been even more important in revenue terms than oil receipts. Direct taxes (mainly corporation taxes) increased from around 35% of total taxes in 2006 to more than 40% in 2011. This was largely because of better enforcement, since the nexus between big business and the public tax administration was broken.

Third, these increased government revenues were put to good use in infrastructure investment and social spending. Ecuador now has the highest proportion of public investment to GDP (10%) in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, social spending has doubled since 2006. This has enabled real progress towards the constitutional goals of free education at all levels, and access to free healthcare for all citizens. Significant increases in public housing have followed the constitution's affirmation of the right of all citizens to dignified housing with proper amenities.

There are numerous other measures: expanding direct public employment; increasing minimum wages and legally enforcing social security provision for all workers; diversifying the economy to reduce dependence on oil exports, and diversifying trading partners to reduce dependence on the US; enlarging public banking operations to reach more small and medium entrepreneurs; auditing external debt to reduce debt service payments; and abandoning unfair bilateral investment agreements. Other efforts include reform of the justice system.

One exciting recent initiative is the Yasuní-ITT biosphere reserve, perhaps the world's first attempt to avoid greenhouse emissions by leaving oil underground. This not only protects the extraordinary biodiversity of the area but also the habitats of its indigenous peoples. The scheme proposes to use ecotourism to make human activity compatible with nature.

All this may sound too good to be true, and certainly the process of transformation has only just begun. There are bound to be conflicts with those whose profits and power are threatened, as well as other hurdles along the way. But for those who believe that we are not condemned to the gloomy status quo, and that societies can do things differently, what is happening in Ecuador provides inspiration and even guidance. The rest of the world has much to learn from this ongoing radical experiment.

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels.  The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats...”

The unit began its existence in mid-2009 -- around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States -- or might do in the future -- is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard.  “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the U.S.

Okay, so I made that up.  Sue me.  But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction.  After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet.  Yes, there is a new U.S. special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia). 

And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a U.S. “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast,” not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard.  And yes, most Americans, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that U.S. forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake. 

Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale.  Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the U.S. border.  Not in this world.  Washington wouldn’t live with it and it remains the military giant of giants on this planet.  By comparison, Iran is, in military terms, a minor power. 

Any Iranian forces on the Mexican border would represent a crossing of one of those “red lines” that U.S. officials are always talking about and so an international abomination to be dealt with severely.  More than that, their presence would undoubtedly be treated as an act of war.  It would make screaming headlines here.  The Republican candidates for the presidency would go wild.  You know the rest.  Think about the reaction when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas had contacted a Mexican drug cartel as part of a bizarre plot supposedly hatched by senior members of the elite Iranian Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant and possibly bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies as well. 

Though doubts were soon raised about the likelihood of such an Iranian plot, the outrage in the U.S. was palpable.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that it “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for.”  The Wall Street Journal labeled it “arguably an act of war,” as did Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.  Speaker of the House John Boehner termed it “a very serious breach of international behavior,” while House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers swore that it crossed “a very dangerous threshold” and called for “unprecedented” action by the Obama administration.

On the other hand, no one here would claim that a U.S. special operations team edging up to the Iranian border was anything out of the ordinary or that it potentially crossed any lines, red or otherwise, or was a step beyond what the international community accepts.  In fact, the news, such as it was, caused no headlines in the press, no comments on editorial pages, nothing.  After all, everyone knows that Iranians would be the equivalent of fish out of water in Mexico, but that Americans are at home away from home in the Persian Gulf (as in most other places on Earth). 

The Iranian “War” Against America

Nonetheless, just for the heck of it, let’s suspend the laws of political and military gravity and pile up a few more fairy-tale-ish details.  

Imagine that, in late 2007, Iran's ruling mullahs and their military advisors had decided to upgrade already significant covert activities against Washington, including cross-border operations, and so launched an intensification of its secret campaign to “destabilize” the country’s leadership -- call it a covert war if you will -- funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of oil money; that they (or their allies) supported armed oppositional groups hostile to Washington; that they flew advanced robot drones on surveillance missions in the country's airspace; that they imposed ever escalating sanctions, which over the years caused increased suffering among the American people, in order to force Washington to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and give up the nuclear program (military and peaceful) that it had been pursuing since 1943; that they and an ally developed and launched a computer worm meant to destroy American centrifuges and introduced sabotaged parts into its nuclear supply chain; that they encouraged American nuclear scientists to defect; that one of their allies launched an assassination program against American nuclear scientists and engineers, killing five of them on the streets of American cities; that they launched a global campaign to force the world not to buy key American products, including Hollywood movies, iPhones, iPods, and iPads, and weaponry of any sort by essentially embargoing American banking transactions. 

Imagine as well that an embattled American president declared the Gulf of Mexico to be off-limits to Iranian aircraft carriers and threatened any entering its waters with dire consequences.  In response, the Iranians promptly sent their aircraft carrier, the Mossadegh, and its battle group of accompanying ships directly into Gulf waters not far from Florida and then stationed a second carrier, the Khomeini, and its task force in the nearby Caribbean as support.  (Okay, the Iranians don't have aircraft carriers, but just for a moment, suspend disbelief.)

And keep in mind that, in this outlandish scenario, all of the above would only be what we knew about or suspected.  You would have to assume that there were also still-unknown aspects to their in-the-shadows campaign of regime change against Washington. 

Now, pinned to Iran, that list looks absurd.  Were such things to have happened (even in a far more limited fashion), they would have been seen across the American political spectrum as an abomination (and rightly so), a morass of illegal, illegitimate, and immoral acts and programs that would have to be opposed at all costs.  As you also know perfectly well, it is a description of just what we do know or suspect that the U.S. has done, alone or in concert with its ally Israel, or what, in the case of the assassination operations against nuclear scientists (and possibly an explosion that destroyed much of an Iranian missile base, killing a major general and 16 others), Israel has evidently done on its own, but possibly with the covert agreement of Washington. 

And yet you can search the mainstream news far and wide without seeing words like “illegal,” “illegitimate,” or "immoral” or even “a very serious breach of international behavior” applied to them, though you can certainly find sunny reports on our potential power to loose destruction in the region, the sorts of articles that, if they were in the state-controlled Iranian press, we would consider propaganda. 

While the other three presidential candidates were baying for Iranian blood at a recent Republican debate, it was left to Ron Paul, the ultimate outsider, to point out the obvious: that the latest round of oil sanctions being imposed by Washington and just agreed to by the European Union, meant to prohibit the sale of Iranian oil on the international market, was essentially an “act of war,” and that it preceded recent Iranian threats (an unlikely prospect, by the way) to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the planet’s oil flows.   

And keep in mind, the covert war against Iran is ostensibly aimed at a nuclear weapon that does not exist, that the country’s leaders claim they are not building, that the best work of the American intelligence community in 2007 and 2010 indicated was not yet on the horizon.  (At the moment, at worst, the Iranians are believed to be working toward "possible breakout capacity" -- that is, the ability to relatively “quickly” build a nuclear weapon, if the decision were made.)  As for nuclear weapons, we have 5,113 warheads that we don't doubt are necessary for our safety and the safety of the planet.  These are weapons that we implicitly trust ourselves to have, even though the United States remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, obliterating two Japanese cities at the cost of perhaps 200,000 civilian deaths.  Similarly, we have no doubt that the world is safe with Israel possessing up to 200 nuclear weapons, a near civilization-destroying (undeclared) arsenal.  But it is our conviction that an Iranian bomb, even one, would end life as we know it. 

Added to that fear is the oft-cited fact that Iran is run by a mullahtariat that oppresses any opposition.  That, however, only puts it in league with U.S. allies in the region like Bahrain, whose monarchy has shot down, beaten up, and jailed its opposition, and the Saudis, who have fiercely repressed their own dissidents.  Nor, in terms of harm to its people, is Iran faintly in a league with past U.S. allies like General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who launched a U.S.-backed military coup against a democratically elected government on September 11, 1973, killing more than died in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, or the Indonesian autocrat Suharto on whom the deaths of at least half a million of his people are usually pinned.

Washington At Home in the World

Here, then, is a little necessary context for the latest round of Iran-mania in the U.S.: Washington has declared the world its oyster and garrisons the planet in a historically unique way -- without direct colonies but with approximately 1,000 bases worldwide (not including those in war zones or ones the Pentagon prefers not to acknowledge).  That we do so, unique as it may be in the records of empire, strikes us as anything but odd and so is little discussed here.  One of the reasons is simple enough.  What’s called our “safety” and “security” has been made a planetary issue.  It is, in fact, the planetary standard for action, though one only we (or our closest allies) can invoke.  Others are held to far more limiting rules of behavior. 

As a result, a U.S. president can now send drones and special operations forces just about anywhere to kill just about anyone he designates as a threat to our security.  Since we are everywhere, and everywhere at home, and everywhere have “interests,” we may indeed be threatened anywhere.  Wherever we’ve settled in -- and in the Persian Gulf, as an example, we’re deeply entrenched -- new “red lines” have been created that others are prohibited from crossing.  No one, after all, can infringe on our safety. 

In support of our interests -- which, speaking truthfully, are also the interests of oil -- we could covertly overthrow an Iranian government in 1953 (starting the whole train of events that led to this crisis moment in the Persian Gulf), and we can again work to overthrow an Iranian government in 2012.  The only issue seriously discussed in this country is: How exactly can we do it, or can we do it at all (without causing ourselves irreparably greater harm)?  Effectiveness, not legality or morality, is the only measurement.  Few in our world (and who else matters?) question our right to do so, though obviously the right of any other state to do something similar to us or one of our allies, or to retaliate or even to threaten to retaliate, should we do so, is considered shocking and beyond all norms, beyond every red line when it comes to how nations (except us) should behave. 

This mindset, and the acts that have gone with it, have blown what is, at worst, a modest-sized global problem up into an existential threat, a life-and-death matter.  Iran as a global monster now nearly fills what screen-space there is for foreign enemies in the present American moment.  Yet, despite its enormous energy reserves, it is a shaky regional power, ruled by a faction-ridden set of fundamentalists (but not madmen), the most hardline of whom seem at the moment ascendant (in no small part due to American and Israeli policies).  The country has a relatively modest military budget, and no recent history of invading other states.  It has been under intense pressure of every sort for years now and the strains are showing.  The kind of pressure the U.S. and its allies have been exerting creates the basis for madness -- or for terrible miscalculation followed by inevitable tragedy. 

In an election year in the U.S., little of this is apparent.  The Republicans, Ron Paul aside, have made Iran the entrée du jour on the American (and Israeli) security menu, a situation that couldn’t be more absurdly out of proportion or more dangerous.  In fact, when it comes to “American security,” our fundamentalists are off on another rampage with the Obama administration following behind. 

Just as a small exercise to restore some sense of proportion, stop for a moment the next time you hear of American or Israeli plans for the further destabilization of Iran and think: what would we do if the Iranians were planning something similar for us?

It’s one small way to begin, individually, to imagine a planet on which everyone might experience some sense of security.  And here’s the oddest thing, given the blowback that could come from a blowup in the Persian Gulf, it might even make us all safer.

[Note:  The initial “Iranian” news article in this piece was taken, with a few small changes, from “New U.S. Commando Team Operating Near Iran,” a post by the intrepid Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog, an important place to keep up on all things military.  Let me offer a bow as well to Antiwar.com, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, and Paul Woodward’s the War in Context.  I don’t know what I’d do without them when it comes to keeping up.]

 An investigative series by the New York Times and a performance piece by Mike Daisey featured on This American Life have put the spotlight on Foxconn, the Taiwanese company whose massive Chinese factories manufacture some of the world's most popular consumer electronics.

As well as working with companies like Dell, Motorola, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, Foxconn assembles popular Apple products like the iPhone and iPad.

Here's a quick look at what we know about Foxconn. (The company disputes workers' accounts of abusive conditions. In a 2010 company report, Foxconn said it promotes "employee respect, an atmosphere of trust, and personal dignity.")

Working for Foxconn

1.2 million: number of workers employed by Foxconn in China, according to the New York Times.

40: Estimated percent of the world's consumer electronics manufactured by Foxconn.

7: seconds it takes Foxconn's workers to complete a single step of their work, according to a survey cited by the New York Times.

12: Hours in a typical work shift, according to interviews with Foxconn employees.

83.2: Average hours of overtime worked each month, according to a 2010 survey of Foxconn employee.

13: age of a Foxconn employee Mike Daisey interviewed outside the gates of a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen.

91: cases of underage labor found by Apple's audits of its suppliers in 2010, the year Daisey visited China.

3,000: number of workers Foxconn could hire overnight, according to Apple's former worldwide supply demand manager.

10-20: percent estimated monthly turnover in Foxconn's workforce.

$7,500: amount founder Terry Gou used to start the anchor company of Foxconn Technology Group in 1974, according to the company website.

$5.7 billion: Terry Gou's estimated net worth as of March 2011.

Living Conditions

230,000: number of workers at "Foxconn City" in Shenzhen, according to the New York Times.

13: tons of rice prepared each day at the central kitchen at Foxconn City.

$0.65: meal allowance for dinner at the Foxconn City canteen in 2010.

2: number of free swimming pools there, according to The Telegraph, which noted that the pools "are said to be quite dirty."

70,000: number of workers at Foxconn's Chengdu plant who live in company dorms, according to the New York Times.

20: number of employees sometimes packed into a three-room apartment.

200: Reported number of police officers who responded to a Foxconn dormitory riot.

Deaths

17: Number of reported suicides of Foxconn workers in China between 2007 and February 2011, according to Wired. Eleven workers died after jumping off buildings in the Foxconn Campus in Shenzhen, which were then draped with preventive netting. (Wired noted that the rate actually seems to be below China's national averages.)

70: number of psychiatrists employed by Foxconn to prevent suicides, according to a 2010 announcement by CEO Terry Gou.

100: Estimated number of employees at a Foxconn factory in Wuhan who stood on the roof of a factory building this month to protest working conditions and wages. Several threatened to commit suicide, according to the New York Times.

$450: monthly salary a worker involved in that protest said employees had been promised for moving from the Foxconn campus in Shenzhen to one in Wuhan.

34: continuous hours a Foxconn employee worked in 2010 before he collapsed and died, according to media reports.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbo will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Not many journalists can say they had a hand in getting a commanding general relieved of duty in the middle of a war. But Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings did just that when his 2010 story on Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, sent shockwaves through Washington and resulted in McChrystal being recalled to DC and uneremoniously fired by Barack Obama.

Hastings' report, “The Runaway General,” detailed how McChrystal and his top officers spoke of their civilian superiors with sneering condescension, and revealed that they didn't genuinely embrace the counterinsurgency strategy being sold to the public at home. The piece was a result of fortuitous circumstances. Hastings had at first been allowed only controlled access to McCrystal, but when European air-traffic was grounded following the eruption of the Eyjafjöll volcano in Iceland, Hastings ended up catching a bus to Berlin with McChrystal and his staff, who let down their guard during the extended ride.

The young journo is a veteran war correspondent who covered Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The McChrystal story wasn't Hastings' first significant report, and it wouldn't be his last -- in 2011, he broke a story about how David Petraeus, McChrystal's replacement in Afghanistan, was using military psy-ops units to influence visiting United States senators' views of the conflict.

Hastings' new book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan, draws on his extensive grounds-eye-view reporting from the decade-long conflict. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald, director of Rethink Afghanistan, caught up with Hastings to discuss his book and the ongoing war.

Robert Greenwald: Let me congratulate you on this book, it's an absolutely wonderful read. I felt like I was reading some combination of a detective story, a movie screenplay and Orson Welles all at the same time.

Michael Hastings: Thank you so much.

RG: One of the ideas that you talk about is that the “terrorist safe haven” is the “weapons of mass destruction” of the Afghanistan war. Why don't you explain how you came to that realization and why it's important.

MH: Well, I call it the "safe haven myth." And what that means is that this idea that the best way to protect ourselves from getting attacked in the United States by terrorists is to invade and occupy other countries – that's essentially what they mean when they say we can't accept terrorist safe havens. And the response to the safe havens has been to expend billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American troops to try to prevent something that is quite nebulous.

I mean, it's very clear a terrorist safe haven can be anywhere, and they are everywhere. So the notion that the best way to defeat them or to make yourself safer from a terrorist is by occupying countries always struck me as funny. How are 150,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan going to protect us from another terrorist attack? And the answer is they're not. That hasn't happened because all the other terrorist attacks we've seen, and attempted terrorist attacks, they're not coming from Afghanistan. The terrorists have moved.

Whether they're coming from Nigeria and Yemen or different parts of Pakistan or Connecticut, you know? The Times Square bomber, the foiled plot there, was hatched in Connecticut – is it a terrorist safe haven as well? No. And it gets to the larger point, which is that if you considered terrorism a law enforcement problem you were considered to be some sort of appeasing Neville Chamberlain type. But in fact, that's the way to defeat terrorists.

I mean, every study shows that the way to defeat terrorist networks is through law enforcement and intelligence gathering, it's not through invading and occupying.

RG: Yeah, I've read a lot of those studies and it couldn't be clearer that there are ways to get terrorists, and the way that's guaranteed to fail is to invade, occupy, kill lots of innocent people. So do you have a sense of how and why this theory came into being? I mean, is it completely driven by the politics of the Bush administration? The think tanks in DC? Some combination thereof? Because it's so far off the mark in terms of any rational notion about keeping us safer.

MH: I think it has to do with the original reaction to September 11. By going into Afghanistan where, at the time, Osama bin Laden was being given safe haven by the Taliban. It was a legitimate rationale -- "Okay, the Taliban government is protecting this terrorist and as a response to that we are going to punish this government for their actions."

And at that time, remember, there were warnings. In 2001 people were warning, oh, this could be a quagmire ... and again, they were laughed off the stage. So then, 10 years later when we were clearly in a quagmire, the military having kind of sunk their claws into the war find themselves in a situation where they need to justify all the tremendous outlay of resources.

And so the way they came up to justify what they were doing was to adopt these counterinsurgency tactics. Now, this is where counterinsurgency relates to the terrorist safe havens because General David Petraeus said, and I found this during the research, he said counterinsurgency is the framework we should view counterterrorism through. And that's not true, and everyone knows that's not true. But they had to come up with a justification to continue to pursue the policies that they wanted to pursue.

A general told me recently that the military is risk-averse and legacy obsessed. And I think that's interesting. Especially the legacy-obsessed part. Because once they started in Iraq, and once they sort of started on this project in Afghanistan, it's much less risky to keep doing what you're doing. Leaving is a risk. Staying and doing what you're doing, you know what the outcome is going to be because you've been doing it for 10 years.

And legacy-obsessed means they don't want to have a repeat of Vietnam. They want to be able to say -- the Pentagon wants to be able to say, General Petraeus and General McChrystal want to be able to say that they won. And so that's why they're going to keep doing what they're doing until they can convince everyone that they won.

RG: Now, I underlined so many things in your book that it would take a day to just quote them all. But one quote that stuck with me summed up the essential flaws in the thinking, the safe haven flaw, if you will: “Marja must be controlled in order to eventually control Kandahar. Kandahar must be controlled to control Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be controlled to control Pakistan. Pakistan must be controlled to prevent Saudi Arabia terrorists from getting on a flight at J.F.K. Airport in Jamaica, Queens.”

Did that revelation all come to you at the same time? Or how were you able to put that together and make it so crystal clear?

MH: Well, to me this was apparent in Iraq, but it's also apparent in Afghanistan: that nothing that we're doing on a daily basis -- by "we" I mean NATO and U.S. forces -- has anything to do with preventing another September 11. I mean, 99 percent of the people we killed over these past 10 years would never have posed a threat to the United States. I mean, that's a devastating indictment of our endeavors -- it's devastating.

RG: Well, when we began our work on Afghanistan, we did it at a time when the war was incredibly popular -- it was the right war – but a cursory look made it clear that the fundamentals made no sense. Iraq, you could argue -- obviously we were opposed to it – but you could argue they had weapons of mass destruction and therefore you should do something. It was a wrong but rational argument. In Afghanistan, I cannot find rational, logical arguments for doing what we're doing.

MH: In 2008, after my first trip to Afghanistan, I came back and did a story for GQ, and my editor said something -- and it's a line I've stolen from him – he said we're stuck in post-9/11 thinking. There was this whole period of time where you could be accused of pre-9/11 thinking, but what's happened is we're stuck in post-9/11 thinking. And these misconceptions that I think took hold quite early have become institutionalized. And institutionalized in a way that is meant to shut down debate.

Because you may say, well, we should get out of Afghanistan, and then the answer is, well, what about the terrorist safe havens? Grover Norquist actually made the argument that there's a reason why there's not a robust debate from the other side about Afghanistan – it's because they know how flimsy their argument is.

And we haven't even gotten to the fact that by being in these places – and with the trauma that we're inflicting on these societies while we're there – that's the way you create terrorists, it's not the way you defeat terrorists.

RG: Yes, well, with the exception of you and a few others we have allowed some of these folks to get away with outrageousness under the pretense that it's serious thinking. And I think the so-called liberal hawks have also done us an extraordinary disservice for which they have paid no public price. And you had a really good name for it -- "politically correct imperialism." And I just love that.

MH: It's really amazing to see. And the sort of liberal human-rights pro-war community, they only use these sort of human rights issues when it's to their advantage. The great argument is we can't leave Afghanistan because what about the Afghan women?

And the problem with that line of thinking is not that, oh, you know, I'm not concerned with the fate of Afghan women, it's that the U.S. government and the Pentagon is never going to be concerned with the fate of Afghan women. And the only reason these arguments are used is to put forth these sort of plans for constant war.

But I should rephrase that. It's not that they don't care, it's just not a priority. And all these human rights issues that get put out there as reasons to stay, are just, in my mind, again, it becomes a strange form of this politically correct imperialism. If the U.S. government were actually concerned about the fate of these native populations, then you clearly wouldn't want to invade them and raid their houses and detain tens of thousands of their citizens. Does anyone really think that we have any concern at all for the fate of Afghan women?

But again, that's taken as a serious argument. You know, people at the Council on Foreign Relations will argue strenuously that's why we have to be in Afghanistan.

RG: I want to move to a Colbert quote and talk about the Pentagon and the media. There's a great quote of his from the White House Correspondents dinner, whenever that was, 2006: “Let's review the rules, here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The press secretary announces the decisions, and you people of the press type these decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put them through a spell check and go home.”

It's common knowledge about Iraq, but I think the price that we've paid for the press being stenographers, or as you call it, the “media military industrial complex,” is significant. And I do not think it's a question of just sort of attacking some bad journalists, although that can be done, but I'd like you to talk about the institutional way that Pentagon approaches this.

MH: Well, one point on Stephen Colbert's speech: it's now considered sort of this amazing speech because it was, but at the time a lot of journalists panned it. Oh, they hated it because it hit too close.

I mean, look, there are a lot of excellent journalists doing great, great work. But the reason I called it the “media military industrial complex,” and one of the sort of insights that I have had is that they call it the Pentagon Press Corps, right? And you sort of think, oh, well it means the people who kind of watch over the Pentagon and perform the media's watchdog function, but no, it's an extension of the Pentagon. For the most part.

I mean, when was the last time anyone at the Pentagon broke a story that wasn't pre-approved? It's very, very rare. And the reason why it's so difficult -- and this gets to the information operations and the public affairs -- it's a very difficult story to tell because you're lifting up the curtain on what have become very common practices for journalists to do.

And I noticed this first in Iraq when things were going horribly -- this is in 2005, 2006, 2007 when I was there. And the spokespeople in the military public relations apparatus would just lie to your face. Every day they would lie. It was general Caldwell who was one of the spokes people there who I would sit next to at these briefings and he would say everything's fine, you know? And there might have been four car bombs that morning.

And what's been scary is that these sort of information operations tactics ... most journalists consider them no big deal. And when you try to point out, 'hey, this isn't right.' you get your head chopped off.

I did a story about this information operations team trained in psychological operations that was being asked to spin and influence visiting senators. Did the media respond by saying, 'let's launch an investigation, let's make sure we don't do this?' No, they responded by attacking the whistle blower and then at the same time saying, 'oh, it's no big deal, this is fine. Of course generals use their information operations psy-ops guys to put together material, it's not a big deal, it's just normal public relations.'

But wait a second here. This is not just normal public relations -- there are entire operations in the Pentagon whose goal is not just to influence the enemy's population but in fact the more important goal is to influence the U.S. population. And the line that used to be, or was supposed to have been the red line between public relations and information operations, meaning one you use on Americans and one you use on the enemy, they are tearing that firewall down. So you have generals with public media handlers and they have these contracting companies that are collecting data on who's tweeting what and they have different Twitter “sock-puppets” that they've put up to try to manipulate all these different social media.

And at some point they're essentially waging this global information war against their own citizens. So that, to me, is the most disturbing trend of it all. And General Petraeus at one point said the most important thing about Iraq was information operations, information operations, information operations. And in the context he was saying it, he meant in terms of convincing the Iraqi people that things were going well. But the real people he was convincing were back in Washington. That's who the target of all the spin really is.

RG: And when you said the people of Washington ... so you are talking about the decision-makers who get impacted by this, right?

MH: Yeah. I think there's a lot of really good reporting that's come out on the ground while you're over there. But you look at the reporting that comes out of Washington on some of this stuff and it's bonkers, it's just so far off base.

I haven't ever really looked at the numbers, but you count up the budget of every major news organization in Afghanistan, and I would guess American news organizations spend maybe 10 million a year, maybe 20 million to cover Afghanistan. The Pentagon itself is spending 5 million just to have one information operations unit there, and they have hundreds of them. So the actual military in Afghanistan is putting hundreds of millions of dollars of resources into manipulating the media. And the media is spending $10 -20million to try to find, in theory, the truth. So it's this huge power imbalance that you're always fighting against.

And God forbid you step outside the packet, as some journalists have done, and point this out. Yeah, we all know they're lying but you're not supposed to say it, you know? We know we're getting bullshit every day, but come on, man, don't point it out -- that's not classy.

RG: Right. So I know that it's systemic, but are there individual reporters whom you want to call out publicly for their sort of following the Pentagon line and not doing their job?

MH: Yeah. I saw a pretty egregious example with the New York Times Pentagon correspondent who literally just published the Pentagon spokesperson's anonymous quotes when he was reporting on my stories. And he didn't bother to call Rolling Stone for a comment, of course, because, well, he's got the official line from the Pentagon.

But I would also call out a group of very influential national security reporters who work at most of the major media outlets. And if you look closely at their resumes, they all belong or have been paid by, or have worked for very influential think tanks. Now again, what's the big deal? These think tanks -- Center for New American Security is sort of the most egregious example -- are funded by defense contractors. These think-tanks also employ a lot of retired generals. And,, more importantly, they are promoting very specific pro-war policies.

And so they put the guys on their payroll whose job it is to cover the policies they're promoting. And you go through the list, all of them – the New York Times, the Washington Post -- have had their guys on the payroll of these major influential think attention, again, funded by defense contractors, and then we expect them to cover their friends and colleagues very critically? They haven't.

One guy said to me, “I don't think that just the fact that they had a job or had a stipend or had an office space at these places impacts their coverage.” I said, “I don't know about that. They're all on the same team, you know, in this atmosphere.” And CNAS, amazingly enough, brags about the influence it peddles. They brag about all the big time journalists they have on their payroll and the influence that that brings.

And you can call it soft influence peddling, but I think it's more than that. Look, if you're a police reporter but you're working for a police officer association's policy network which is funded by the police groups, you would be called out for it. If you were a golf reporter and you're being paid by the PGA but writing for a national publication, you would be called out for it.

So the fact that they haven't ... well, they have been but it just doesn't stick because they're all complicit. I mean, that's the rub. And I understand that it's tough to make a living as a writer, and these institutions give you an office space, they give you time, they give you money to do more interesting projects, but what's the price of that? The price is that you have to pull a lot of punches. And you may not even be realizing you're doing it. But I think they do, I think they're just playing the game.

RG: Right, the club. Moving from that to the final question I wanted to ask you about. When you exposed what was going on with McChrystal and his team over there, you said you learned by going out in the field not at the K Street cocktail parties …

MH: Yeah, and that was a comment that endeared me to many of my friends in Washington, I'm sure.

RG: I'm sure it did. But an important one because it's a very clear dividing line, and a very clear perspective. You got quite viciously attacked. Was it organized? Was it the club? And how did you respond to those attacks? And have they had any lasting effect?

MH: Well, look, at first I was perplexed and thought, 'oh, these guys just don't get what I'm doing or they're confused.' But then I realized it was a little more pernicious than that. I'm trying to think of exactly how I should put this. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by it.But I was. I got a horrible review in the Wall Street Journal which was comical in many ways because it was written by a defense contractor, it was written by a guy who worked for General Petreaus and general Caldwell, and they didn't disclose that.

But this reviewer says, you know, 'Hastings is a fuck up because he follows in the tradition of Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, and not reporters who work for the New Yorker or The New York Times.' And why that was interesting to me was because, I agree, I totally agree with that analysis, but it's because Neil Sheehan and Dave Halberstam, their experiences were forged while they were in their 20s in Vietnam, you know? They were young reporters covering this stuff. So they saw the war not working first-hand. And that had a very profound impact on how they viewed everything.

And there's a number of journalists, of my contemporaries, who I would name but I don't want to get them in trouble, who also have seen these sort of same sort of things unravel in our 20s. And that's the most formative kind of experience for us. Now on the other hand, you have these kind of liberal hawks guys who their first big war was Iraq, and they were dead wrong about it, you know? They're these foreign policy experts who were just dead wrong.

And so how do you deal with that? How do you come to terms with that? And my answer to that would be I don't think they came to terms with it well. As you see when they lash out.

And you can't ever forget the impact of the complete failure of many of the top names in the media when it comes to the Iraq war. And we've never come to terms with it. They just can't. The guys who were the worst offenders cannot come to terms with their moral responsibility in terms of waging the war in Iraq. And in fact, again, you see them making statements today like, 'oh, well I didn't really support that,' or 'I was ambivalent,' or 'well, I didn't publicly support it.' And you think they would have learned with Afghanistan to question more and to not just cheerlead the whole thing.

The fact that every journalist in the Pentagon Press Corps wasn't standing up when they were going to escalate in Afghanistan and saying, 'are you guys fucking kidding me? We're going to escalate in Afghanistan? Are you guys nuts? Have you all gone mad?' But the majority just reported that some unnamed military official says McCrystal wants more troops, and Obama better give them to him. You know? It was pathetic. It was really, really pathetic.

RG: Which was worse: the reporting on Iraq or the reporting on Afghanistan?

MH: I don't know. I trash the media but in many ways you can actually be quite well informed if you read The New York Times and the Washington Post and all these places – again, I want to make the distinction between the reporting out in the field and the reporting that happens in Washington ... you can get a pretty good sense of what's going on, you know, from reporters in the field.

But unfortunately, in this warped Beltway view of the world, what happens on the ground matters much less than what happens in Washington. I mean, the great catalyst -- and this I write about extensively in the book – the great catalyst for the Afghanistan debate was not what was happening in Afghanistan, it was the fact that Bob Woodward published a report in Washington. It was the leak. That was the great catalyst of the Afghanistan debate in the first year of President Obama's administration.

Which is really incredible because it's not like Afghanistan was that much worse than it was six months or a year or two years earlier. I mean, it was a little bit worse but not, you know, not entirely noticeably worse. But it was the fact that it became a political issue in Washington that actually impacted the debate.

RG: Yes. Well, I think that's an important, and a good distinction. And we found that in our work also -- that talking to the reporters who were there in the war zones on the ground is like speaking a totally different language than those who were only at the cocktail parties.

I want to thank you for the book, and the work you've done, Michael, and encourage anybody reading this to get a copy. It's an important book, and it's a great read. And I keep pretty well informed, but there's all kinds of stuff that I didn't know about until I read your book.

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Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college.  It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds.  But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.”  Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.

If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant.  When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons.  In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.

Yes, we’re the world’s foremost “merchants of death,” the title of a best-selling exposé of the international arms trade published to acclaim in the U.S. in 1934.  Back then, most Americans saw themselves as war-avoiders rather than as war-profiteers.  The evil war-profiteers were mainly European arms makers like Germany’s Krupp, France’s Schneider, or Britain’s Vickers. 

Not that America didn’t have its own arms merchants.  As the authors ofMerchants of Death noted, early on our country demonstrated a “Yankee propensity for extracting novel death-dealing knickknacks from [our] peddler’s pack.”  Amazingly, the Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate devoted 93 hearings from 1934 to 1936 to exposing America’s own “greedy munitions interests.”  Even in those desperate depression days, a desire for profit and jobs was balanced by a strong sense of unease at this deadly trade, an unease reinforced by the horrors of and hecatombs of dead from the First World War.

We are uneasy no more.  Today we take great pride (or at least have no shame) in being by far the world’s number one arms-exporting nation.  A few statistics bear this out.  From 2006 to 2010, the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of the world’s arms exports, easily surpassing a resurgent Russia in the “Lords of War” race.  Despite a decline in global arms sales in 2010 due to recessionary pressures, the U.S. increased its market share, accounting for a whopping 53%of the trade that year.  Last year saw the U.S. on pace to deliver more than $46 billion in foreign arms sales.  Who says America isn’t number one anymore?

For a shopping list of our arms trades, try searching the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database for arms exports and imports.  It reveals that, in 2010, the U.S. exported “major conventional weapons” to 62 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen, and weapons platforms ranging from F-15, F-16, and F-18 combat jets to M1 Abrams main battle tanks to Cobra attack helicopters (sent to our Pakistani comrades) to guided missiles in all flavors, colors, and sizes: AAMs, PGMs, SAMs, TOWs -- a veritable alphabet soup of missile acronyms.  Never mind their specific meaning: they’re all designed to blow things up; they’re all designed to kill.

Rarely debated in Congress or in U.S. media outlets is the wisdom or morality of these arms deals.  During the quiet last days of December 2011, in separate announcements whose timing could not have been accidental, the Obama Administration expressed its intent to sell nearly $11 billion in arms to Iraq, including Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter-bombers, and nearly $30 billion in F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, part of a larger, $60 billion arms package for the Saudis.  Few in Congress oppose such arms deals since defense contractors provide jobs in their districts -- and ready donations to Congressional campaigns.

Let’s pause to consider what such a weapons deal implies for Iraq.   Firstly, Iraq only “needs” advanced tanks and fighter jets because we destroyed their previous generation of the same, whether in 1991 during Desert Shield/Storm or in 2003 during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Secondly, Iraq “needs” such powerful conventional weaponry ostensibly to deter an invasion by Iran, yet the current government in Baghdad is closely aligned with Iran, courtesy of our invasion in 2003 and the botched occupation that followed.  Thirdly, despite its “needs,” the Iraqi military is nowhere near ready to field and maintain such advanced weaponry, at least without sustained training and logistical support provided by the U.S. military.

As one U.S. Air Force officer who served as an advisor to the fledging Iraqi Air Force, or IqAF, recently worried:

“Will the IqAF be able to refuel its own aircraft? Can the Iraqi military offer adequate force protection and security for its bases? Can the IqAF provide airfield management services at its bases as they return to Iraqi control after eight years under US direction? Can the IqAF ensure simple power generation to keep facilities operating? Will the IqAF be able to develop and retain its airmen?... Only time will tell if we left [Iraq] too early; nevertheless, even without a renewed security agreement, the USAF can continue to stand alongside the IqAF.”

Put bluntly: We doubt the Iraqis are ready to field and fly American-built F-16s, but we’re going to sell them to them anyway.  And if past history is a guide, if the Iraqis ever turn these planes against us, we’ll blow them up or shoot them down -- and then (hopefully) sell them some more.

Our Best Arms Customer

Let’s face it: the weapons we sell to others pale in comparison to the weapons we sell to ourselves.  In the market for deadly weapons, we are our own best customer.  Americans have a love affair with them, the more high-tech and expensive, the better.  I should know.  After all, I’m a recovering weapons addict.

Well into my teen years, I was fascinated by military hardware.  I built models of what were then the latest U.S. warplanes: the A-10, the F-4, the F-14, -15, and -16, the B-1, and many others.  I read Aviation Week and Space Technology at my local library to keep track of the newest developments in military technology.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, I went on to major in mechanical engineering in college and entered the Air Force as a developmental engineer.

Enamored as I was by roaring afterburners and sleek weaponry, I also began to read books like James Fallows’s National Defense (1981) among other early critiques of the Carter and Reagan defense buildup, as well as the slyly subversive and always insightful Augustine’s Laws (1986) by Norman Augustine, later the CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin.  That and my own experience in the Air Force alerted me to the billions of dollars we were devoting to high-tech weaponry with ever-ballooning price tags but questionable utility.

Perhaps the best example of the persistence of this phenomenon is the F-35 Lightning II.  Produced by Lockheed Martin, the F-35 was intended to be an “affordable” fighter-bomber (at roughly $50 million per copy), a perfect complement to the much more expensive F-22 “air superiority” Raptor.  But the usual delays, cost overruns, technical glitches, and changes in requirements have driven the price tag of the F-35 up to $160 million per plane, assuming the U.S. military persists in its plans to buy 2,400 of them.  (If the Pentagon decides to buy fewer, the cost-per-plane will soar into the F-22 range.)  By recent estimates the F-35 will now cost U.S. taxpayers (you and me, that is) at least $382 billion for its development and production run.  Such a sum for a single weapons system is vast enough to be hard to fathom.  It would, for instance, easily fund all federal government spending on education for the next five years.

The escalating cost of the F-35 recalls the most famous of Norman Augustine’s irreverent laws: “In the year 2054,” he wrote back in the early 1980s, “the entire defense budget will [suffice to] purchase just one aircraft.”  But the deeper question is whether our military even needs the F-35, a question that’s rarely asked and never seriously entertained, at least by Congress, whose philosophy on weaponry is much like King Lear’s: “O, reason not the need.”

But let’s reason the need in purely military terms.  These days, the Air Force is turning increasingly to unmanned drones.  Meanwhile, plenty of perfectly good and serviceable “platforms” remain for attack and close air support missions, from F-16s and F-18s in the Air Force and Navy to Apache helicopters in the Army.  And while many of our existing combat jets may be nearing the limits of airframe integrity, there’s nothing stopping the U.S. military from producing updated versions of the same.  Heck, this is precisely what we’re hawking to the Saudis -- updated versions of the F-15, developed in the 1970s.

Because of sheer cost, it’s likely we’ll buy fewer F-35s than our military wants but many more than we actually need.  We’ll do so because Weapons ‘R’ Us.  Because building ultra-expensive combat jets is one of the few high-tech industries we haven’t exported (due to national security and secrecy concerns), and thus one of the few industries in the U.S. that still supports high-paying manufacturing jobs with decent employee benefits.  And who can argue with that?

The Ultimate Cost of Our Merchandise of Death

Clearly, the U.S. has grabbed the brass ring of the global arms trade.  When it comes to investing in militaries and weaponry, no country can match us.  We are supreme.  And despite talk of modest cuts to the Pentagon budget over the next decade, it will, according to President Obama, continue to grow, which means that in weapons terms the future remains bright.  After all, Pentagon spending on research and development stands at $81.4 billion, accounting for an astonishing 55% of all federal spending on R&D and leaving plenty of opportunity to develop our next generation of wonder weapons.

But at what cost to ourselves and the rest of the world?  We’ve become the suppliers of weaponry to the planet’s hotspots.  And those weapons deliveries (and the training and support missions that go with them) tend to make those spots hotter still -- as in hot lead.

As a country, we seem to have a teenager’s fascination with military hardware, an addiction that’s driving us to bust our own national budgetary allowance.  At the same time, we sell weapons the way teenage punks sell fireworks to younger kids: for profit and with little regard for how they might be used.

Sixty years ago, it was said that what’s good for General Motors is good for America.  In 1955, as Bob Seger sang, we were young and strong and makin’ Thunderbirds.  But today we’re playing a new tune with new lyrics: what’s good for Lockheed Martin or Boeing or [insert major-defense-contractor-of-your-choice here] is good for America.

How far we’ve come since the 1950s!

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here.  He welcomes reader comments at wjastore@gmail.com.

 Whether you view them as model aeroplanes for grown-ups or the handmaidens of the killer robot, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are taking off in earnest.

In the 1930s and 1940s the UK developed an unmanned, radio-controlled "Queen Bee" drone, a variant of the Tiger Moth, for target practice. But the United States and Israel have pioneered the use of drones on the battlefield, with the first operational armed strike by a drone taking place in Afghanistan in 2001. Since then, the use of drones in the military arena for surveillance and targeting has risen at a startling pace, and in 2012 we will see drones appearing closer to home. It is widely anticipated that they will be used as a security measure during the London Olympics, and pressure is mounting on the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to re-examine regulations governing UAVs in order to open up what military companies believe will be a valuable civilian market.

Philosophers and lawyers, encouraged and occasionally funded by the military-industrial complex, are swarming around the issue. The questions raised are manifold. Do drones lower the threshold of war, encouraging those who deploy them to be more bellicose? Can they or their operators sufficiently discriminate combatants from civilians in order to comply with international law? Are they proportionate, or so horrifically cruel as to qualify, along with anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, for prohibition? Does their cybernetic nature make them a biological weapon? What effect does their deployment have on the "hearts and minds" of civilians, or the morale of soldiers? Should we worry that Iran appears to have assumed control of a US drone, having kidnapped it out of the sky? And who is to blame when drones go wrong? The question of responsibility becomes even more central as scholars consider the implications of a future featuring autonomous drones.

Semi-autonomous weapons systems are already deployed in some contexts – such as in the demilitarised zone between South and North Korea – and the UK and US are both currently investing in the development of autonomous drones. In 1977 Michael Walzer wrote "If there are recognisable war crimes, there must be recognisable criminals", an argument that Australian bioethicist Robert Sparrow, co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, suggests presents the ethics of autonomous killer robots with an unsolvable problem.

Skirting over this problem in a recent paper commissioned by the US Army Research Office, Ronald C Arkin of Georgia Tech's Mobile Robot Laboratory argues that robots could be programmed to behave in line with international law, creating "systems that can perform better ethically than human soldiers do in the battlefield". This haunting idea – that autonomous robots, deaf to the fog of war or the need for self-defence, can behave more ethically than human beings – was recently repeated in a briefing on drone ethics to In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, by CalTech's Director of Ethics and Emerging Sciences, Dr Patrick Lin. The current debate appears to neglect Hannah Arendt's 1969 argumentthat only robot soldiers have the potential to reverse the ascendency of power over violence in the nuclear age, that is, that they "permit one man with a pushbutton at his disposal to destroy whomever he pleases".

The most pressing of the ethical and legal concerns surrounding drones lie in their use by the CIA for targeted killings in countries with which the US is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. This practice, the subject of extensive reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism last year , has led the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial Killing to foretell "a global war without borders, in which no one is safe". The American Civil Liberties Union, the US Centre for Constitutional Rights and Reprievehave all made attempts, some of which are ongoing, to legally challenge the CIA over this activity.

Meanwhile, the widespread domestic use of drones is on the horizon. In January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the US aviation regulator for information about the deployment of drones by law enforcement and other public agencies in the US. Drone Wars UKpublished the results of their Freedom of Information request to the CAA on the same issue at the end of 2011.

While we might get excited by the potential for the use of commercial drones by citizen journalists to live-stream powerful footage from protests, we are likely to be less thrilled once drones are in the hands of the paparazzi. M Ryan Calo of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society wrote recently of his hopes for drones acting as a "privacy catalyst", explaining that while we might be able to overlook the inability of current privacy law to protect us from technologies we cannot see, like the blanket retention of our communications data by internet companies for law enforcement, once the issue is buzzing overhead it will be harder to ignore.

 Are American politicians out of sync with the public when it comes to foreign policy?  There is considerable reason to believe so.

Throughout the scramble for the GOP presidential nomination, the major candidates have certainly been rabidly nationalistic.  In a major foreign policy address on October 7, 2011, Mitt Romney proclaimed that “the twenty-first century can and must be an American Century.”  Championing a vast military buildup, he argued that, to secure this “American Century,” the United States should have “the strongest military in the world.”  By contrast, he assailed the “shameful” role of the United Nations and other international institutions and declared that he did not see any reason to obey them—or the international law they represented—when it did not suit the U.S. government.

Romney’s newly-anointed top competitor, Rick Santorum, says nothing about the United Nations, international cooperation, or international law in the “10 Steps to Promote Our Interests Around the World” posted on his campaign website.  Instead, he argues that the United States is “intrinsically better prepared to lead than any other nation.”  He adds:  “I truly do believe that we are ‘the last best hope of earth,’” but, alas, under President Obama, “we have been weak where we should have been strong and we have been appeasing of evil.”  Naturally, then, Americans should be “increasing our military preparedness.”

By contrast, polls show that most Americans favor a more cooperative world order based on international law, a stronger United Nations, and a less dominant role for the United States in world affairs.

In a World Public Opinion poll of sixteen nations in 2009, 69 percent of Americans supported the view that nations are obliged to abide by international law even when doing so is at odds with their national interest.  Furthermore, a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found 82 percent of Americans favored ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (rejected by the GOP-dominated Senate in 1999), 70 percent favored participation in the International Criminal Court (rejected by President George W. Bush), and 67 percent backed a new international treaty to combat climate change.  In December 2008, a World Public Opinion poll found that 77 percent of Americans backed an international treaty abolishing nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, most Americans favor expanding the role of the United Nations in world affairs.  Polling in 2010 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that majorities of Americans favored creating a standing UN peacekeeping force (64 percent), giving the United Nations the authority to enter countries to investigate human rights violations (72 percent), creating an international marshals service with the power to arrest leaders responsible for genocide (73 percent), and empowering the United Nations to regulate the international arms trade (55 percent).

Overall, as public opinion studies show, Americans want a smaller—rather than a larger—global footprint for their nation.  According to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 8 percent favored the United States playing the role of the preeminent world leader, while 71 percent favored a cooperative approach.  Gallup polls have turned up similar results.  In 2011, Gallup reported that only 16 percent of Americans endorsed the option of the United States playing “the leading role” in world affairs.  According to Gallup, 32 percent of Americans favored “a minor role” or “no role” at all for the United States, while 50 percent wanted the United States to “take a major role, but not the leading one.”

Much of this opposition to U.S. dominance in the world is undoubtedly based on distaste for the overseas U.S. military intervention of the past decade.  In recent years, polls have found substantial public opposition to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In 2010, a poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 79 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “the U.S. is playing the role of world policeman more than it should.”

Of course, during the frenzy of an election campaign, it is tempting to whip up nationalist sentiment through high-flying rhetoric about an “American Century” and America’s allegedly unique virtue.  How many times have we heard, in these circumstances, that America is the greatest nation in the history of the world?  But, in the end, Americans might prove more committed to an internationalist policy than this year’s flag-waving politicians think.

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties. 

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one. 

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.

The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

We need a new way of looking at how the economy works if we want to solve our serious economic problems. The current policies and talking points, based on mainstream economics, are clearly not up to the task. It's time to re-envision our economy as an ecosystem in which each part plays a critical role. Progressives can start creating a framework that can help us to coordinate the entire system so that all the parts are functioning and thriving, with the government acting as a good steward. It won't be easy to break through thirty years of mainstream economic frames (we'll have to occupy the legislatures and the classrooms), but the first step is changing our language and lenses.

What's in a Metaphor?

Current economic policies, focused on balanced budgets instead of spending money to create jobs, are based on outmoded metaphors of the economy as a self-correcting system. In this misguided view, if something goes wrong, it will hopefully just get better on its own and the government doesn’t have to intervene. The government, according to the old Econ 101 view, can only make things worse. According to most mainstream economists, the market is so efficient that whatever happens must be the best of all possible worlds – and they are true believers, even after the disaster of the financial crisis of 2008.

In an ecosystem, on the other hand, each part, or niche, performs a particular task and the parts are dependent on one another. If we think of an economy this way, we see that manufacturing provides the goods that people use, and also the goods that the service industries are based on. For instance, services such as retail stores are selling goods that have been manufactured. The airlines are using planes that have been manufactured. Even the banks are using computers that have been manufactured.

For most of the 20th century, manufacturing anchored the American middle class. In 1968, manufacturing employed about 25 percent of the workforce, but by 2010 that number had shrunk to around 10 percent. Meanwhile, the income share of the top 1 percent almost perfectly mirrored the fall in manufacturing employment – taking 10 percent of income in 1968, and 25 percent in 2010. This happened because the ecosystem was imbalanced by shipping jobs overseas and firing American workers. Unions, which have been the champions for middle class advances for decades, declined in lockstep with the decline in manufacturing. This evisceration of manufacturing is the root of the decline of ordinary Americans. By taking an ecosystem-perspective, we can see that the core of a policy to revive the economy must be to revive manufacturing -- but we need to think about manufacturing in a new way, too.

Economies are Part of Nature

Beyond the decline of manufacturing, we face a grave ecological crises that threatens the foundation of the economy. The pollution of manufacturing and energy production threaten the climate and the viability of natural ecosystems. On top of this, oil and other essential materials are not limitless, and a civilization based on the assumption of a never-ending supply of these elements skirts disaster.

In order for the economic ecosystem to thrive, we have to rethink our approach to energy, transportation, and the way cities are designed. Currently, we have an energy sector that is extremely dirty, but we could create an energy economy that is very clean and emits no carbon. We can build hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels that will provide our electricity, and once we have these systems in place, we can power the rest of the system sustainably. But such a system, which will also need a well-thought out national electric grid, needs to be planned carefully so that the national electric system is always receiving wind or sun from somewhere, even though it may not be windy or sunny all over. This means that the government must design such a system.

If we have a renewable electrical system, we can then create a transportation system that is based on cleanly produced electricity, centered on electric trains such as high-speed rail, light rail, subways, and electric freight trains. We can use electric cars, but those cars will be low-speed and short-distance.

Remember, in an ecosystem, the nature of one part influences the other. As the traditional “dem bones” song goes, the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and the neck bone is connected to the back bone, and so on. A clean electric energy system enables us to have a clean electric transportation system; in order to have an electric transportation system, we need to change the density of our cities and towns so that public transit is efficiently utilized.

So let’s return to manufacturing. As we have seen, we could provide clean energy to factories– but what about the pollution? What about all the raw materials that need to be mined, which destroys ecosystems? While manufacturing used to reflect the image of smokestacks and dirt-encrusted workers – and still does in China – in the most developed manufacturing nations, such as in Germany and Japan, manufacturing is high-tech and can be very clean. It is possible to recycle and reuse the output of manufacturing – but only if the government steps in and helps companies to do so.

Assuming we can create a combination of energy, transportation, and city/town and manufacturing ecosystems that are clean, we still have to deal with another key aspect of our economy, our employment problem. How do we do that?  Well, the American manufacturing sector can create all of the wind turbines, solar panels, trains, and building materials that we need. Mainstream economists, however, can't think this way, and they tend to object that such policies violate the sacred tenets of free trade.

This is where an ecosystem approach can trump conventional wisdom. A properly functioning economy needs all of its parts, or niches, to work together. Contrary to what mainstream economists often tell us, it needs cooperation just as much as it needs competition. Any industry needs all of the industries on which it depends to be in close proximity. The automobile industry, for instance, needs thousands of suppliers, from fabrics to steel to electronics. Because all of the firms are close to each other, they can respond quickly to new needs, encourage the kinds of interactions that create technological innovations, and produce new firms and use the resources of old firms. Pulling this system apart makes as much sense as putting the trees and grass of a forest in one area, the deer and birds in another, and the bears and wolves in yet another.

The Government's Role

If we view the economy is an ecosystem, we can understand that government has a role to play somewhat like the Park Service has in managing a national park  For instance, the Park Service re-introduced wolves into Yellowstone Park to rebalance the ecosystem, just as the Federal government needs to rebuild the manufacturing system in the United States to rebalance the economy. The Park Service might protect particular parts of the Park from tourists in order to allow a part of the forest to revive. In the same way, the government may need to temporarily protect a particular industry, with either tariffs or preferably subsidies, until it gets back on its feet. For the most part, government lets the vast bulk of economic activity organize itself, in the best tradition of the free market. But where it needs to, the government intervenes to try to ensure that the economy as a whole, as a system, will not collapse but will thrive.

There is no reason to be cowed by mainstream economists or their conservative allies. Despite what Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher said, there is an alternative – in fact, there are many. Our middle class, the 99 percent, is our living biosphere. And it depends on our ability re-imagine our economy as an ecosystem.
 

Americans think an awful lot about sucrose -- table sugar -- but only in certain ways. We crave it and dream up novel ways to combine it with other ingredients to produce delectable foods; and we worry that we eat too much of it and that it is making us unhealthy or fat. But how often do Americans think about where sugar actually comes from or the people who produce it? As a tropical crop, sugarcane cannot grow in most U.S. states. Most of us do not smell the foul odors coming from sugar refineries, look out over vast expanses of nothing but sugarcane, or speak to those who perform the hard labor required to grow and harvest sugarcane.

Of course, sugar can be made from beets, a temperate crop, and more than half of sugar produced in the United States is. But globally, most of the story of sugar, past and present, centers around sugarcane, not beets, and as biofuels become more common, it is sugarcane that is cultivated for ethanol. What's more, some conscious eaters avoid beet sugar as most of it is now made from genetically modified sugar beets.

While I do not fool myself that sugar is "healthy," if I am going to satisfy my sweet tooth, I prefer cane sugar, maple syrup, agave nectar, or honey over the other choices: beet sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners. Of the bunch, most Americans can find only honey and perhaps maple syrup sustainably and locally produced, but cane sugar is often the most versatile product for baking.

As a major consumer of cane sugar, I was disturbed to learn the realities of cane sugar production when I visited a sugarcane-producing area in Bolivia.

Sugarcane grew as far as the eye could see on the degraded soils of the deforested industrial agricultural area in Bolivia's lowlands. At one point, the van I was riding in got stuck in a traffic jam of enormous trucks, each full of sugarcane, delivering their loads to a refinery. The area around the refinery smelled terrible, and the locals told us the smell came from oxidizing ponds that hold the refinery's wastewater. When the refineries are washed out, typically once a year, the wastewater is dumped into local waterways, resulting in fish kills. This spurred me to learn more about how sugar is made, both in the U.S. and around the world, and how it impacts the land and the people who produce it. Sadly, the story of sugar is also the story of the African slave trade. Today, sugar production still uses exploitative labor practices and can cause serious environmental problems.

Sugar's Rotten History

Nobody alive today remembers a day when sugar was not a cheap, ubiquitous food in our diets, but historically speaking, it's actually a relatively recent addition to the European diet, one very tightly intertwined with the African slave trade. As Sidney W. Mintz chronicles in his book Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, when cane sugar first appeared in England in the 12th century, only royalty could afford it, and even then, only in small quantities. This is hardly surprising, considering the journey sugar made to reach England.

Sugarcane, a fast-growing tropical grass that reaches 12 to 15 feet high at maturity, was domesticated around 8000 B.C.E. in New Guinea and was carried to India, the Philippines, and perhaps Indonesia some 2,000 years later. By 500 C.E., Indians were making sugar, a process that involves pressing the two-inch-thick cane to extract a dark green juice, rich with nutrients as well as sucrose, then boiling it down to remove liquid and crystalize the sugar. Various processes can be used to refine the sugar so that it is anywhere from a brown color to the chemically pure, white crystal we know today. Of course, until relatively recently, sugar refiners were never able to achieve a mass-produced commodity product so pure that it was completely white.

Europeans have the Arabs to thank for their introduction to sugar. Although the Spanish had nothing nice to say about the Moorish occupation of their land, it was the Arabs who introduced sugar production to the European mainland in the seventh and eighth centuries. Arab sugar production likely involved some slave labor, but never on the scale that European sugar production did. European crusaders discovered and took over Arab sugar plantations in the Middle Ages, and from that point forward, sugar production was a job done mostly by slaves.

As Europeans figured out more cost-effective ways to mass-produce sugar and transport it to their countries, sugar became within reach of the nobility and then later, within reach of the common people. Mintz tells how three bitter stimulants, each consumed with sugar, reached England at roughly the same time, in the third quarter of the 17th century: tea from Asia, coffee from Africa, and cacao from the Americas. "The success of tea... was also the success of sugar," writes Mintz, "That it was a bitter stimulant, that it was taken hot, and that it was capable of carrying large quantities of palatable sweet calories told importantly in its success."

On the production side, the sugar industry briefly moved to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, and it was here that the use of African slaves was firmly integrated into the business model. In the two decades before Columbus stumbled into the Caribbean, sugarcane production grew by a factor of more than 1,000 on the island of Madeira. There, sugar was produced with slaves.

But it was on the island of Sao Tome off the Western coast of central Africa, which harbors mosquitoes carrying both malaria and yellow fever, that resulted in the use of specifically African slaves (as opposed to slaves of other origins). Europeans who came to Sao Tome usually died quickly. And the land was divided into large plantations instead of small parcels. This solidified the model for sugar plantations that was then transferred in the New World and applied to other crops.

Columbus brought sugarcane to the Caribbean in 1493, and it was not long before Caribbean islands and Brazil produced sugarcane for export back to Europe -- with African slaves, of course. In 1619, the British brought both slaves and sugarcane to their colony in Jamestown, but sugarcane would not grow in Virginia. Determined to satisfy their sweet tooth with their own colony for sugar, the British took over Barbados soon thereafter.

These were also the years of England's industrial revolution, when much of the population transitioned from a peasant diet of eating what they grew to an urban diet of eating what was convenient and cheap, namely bread, accompanied by tea with sugar. Sugar dropped in price during the 18th century and lost its status as a luxury good. Sugar was eaten in tea or in pastries. And, by the 1870s, jam became an important food for the working classes. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, desserts were first introduced to the nobility and then gradually became standard as a sweet course at the end of the meal.

All in all, cane sugar consumption grew from an estimated 2 percent of the British diet in 1800 to an estimated 14 percent a century later. Sugar now makes up 20 percent of the American diet. Today most Americans see sugar as a necessity, but most of our ancestors lived entirely without it.

Legalized slavery is now long in the past, but sugarcane is still almost universally produced with unjust labor conditions, including modern-day slavery. In Brazil, a study found that, "Modern-day slavery ... is short in duration; the victims are treated as though they were commodities; total power is exercised over the victim, although only temporarily." In 2007, half of Brazil's 5,877 workers freed from slavery -- many of them indigenous -- worked in sugarcane cultivation. Harvesting sugarcane is so arduous that workers can become physically broken after just 10 or 12 years.

Whereas modern-day slavery might be the exception, backbreaking work with long hours, low pay, and few benefits (if any) is still the rule. When I visited San Mariano, Isabela, a sugarcane-growing area in the Philippines, the workers were paid as little as one-tenth minimum wage (for weeding) and as much as half of minimum wage for harvesting sugarcane, with a six-day work week and no overtime pay. One worker I met had been injured on the job with no worker's comp for his injury. At that time, he had been out of work and unable to walk for several months without any disability pay. Workers also complained of being compensated for harvesting only if they also loaded the sugarcane into a truck. Occasionally, no truck showed up when the harvest was done, and the workers were never paid for that day's work.

Globally, sugarcane covers an area larger than the state of Minnesota, and much of it is harvested manually, even though mechanized harvesting is possible. Sugarcane is a perennial, and plantations typically replant it every four or five harvests, as production declines after each harvest. Mechanical harvesting reduces future yields even further, so when cheap labor is available, it is often more cost-effective than a machine.

America Gets Its Fix

An overwhelming percent of world sugar production occurs in Brazil and India, but if you are an American, your sugar fix is likely satisfied by U.S. sugar, whether cane or beet. The U.S. has long had policies that limit sugar imports, keeping the U.S. price of sugar well above the world price -- often double or more. By setting a high tariff on all sugar imports over a set quota, the U.S. protects its own sugar industry (both cane sugar and beet sugar). Producers of high fructose corn syrup also support this system as it allows them to price their product below the cost of sugar, making it attractive as a cheaper alternative.

The U.S. can only produce it in a few states, mostly growing it in Florida and Louisiana, with a little bit in Hawaii and Texas. (Hawaii used to grow more before the high real estate prices drove most sugar out of the state.) Together, those four states produce sugarcane on an area just smaller than Rhode Island. Measured by area, this makes up just 1.5 percent of global sugarcane cultivation. Yet, as any discussion with Floridians familiar with the industry will reveal, the area impacted by sugarcane is far larger than just the land planted with the crop. The list of Floridians' complaints usually centers more around the Everglades than around labor issues. (Louisiana's sugar industry is not immune from environmental problems either, but lacks the national outcry to protect the Everglades that shines a spotlight on sugar in Florida.)

Sugar in Florida owes its existence to the draining of a large area of the Everglades. As recently as the 1800s, South Florida was dominated by a freshwater wetland the size of Delaware, much of it in the form of a 50-mile-wide shallow, slow-moving river. While it was first considered "wasteland," its agricultural potential was realized in the late 1800s, and humanity set to work draining areas using levees, canals and dams. But destructive and deadly storms in the first decades of the 20th century proved that more work was needed if this area was to be safely settled and put to "productive" uses. The Army Corps of Engineers set to work building even more levees, canals and dams to control the water.

Thus, by the 1940s, the original Everglades was divided into four areas: the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), Water Conservation Areas, Big Cypress National Preserve, and Everglades National Park. The Everglades Agricultural Area is home to Florida's sugar industry, and it sits between Lake Okeechobee (the largest freshwater lake in the U.S. after the Great Lakes and the source of the water in the Everglades) and Everglades National Park. Anything that goes into the water in the EAA then flows into Everglades National Park and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Most consequential is phosphorus fertilizer, which is needed to produce sugar but toxic to the Everglades ecosystem.

Americans, especially Floridians, are impacted by sugarcane production by the elevated sugar prices Americans pay, the taxes paid to drain the land and manage the water to meet the industry's needs, the taxes paid to clean up the industry's pollution, and by suffering the consequences of pollution that is not cleaned up at all. John Adornato, regional director of the Sun Coast Region of the National Parks Conservation Association, describes the combined impact of government intervention and the pollution by the sugar industry by saying, "Americans' waistlines are growing due to sugar but their pocketbooks are shrinking."

Interestingly, reducing the impacts of sugar production is a cause that both treehuggers and those motivated by economic self-interest can get behind together. Florida's economy revolves around tourism, and tourists flock to Florida because of its natural environment -- but environmental destruction from the sugar industry threatens that.

"People who live on the east and west coasts of Florida who live on a canal where there are regularly dead fish that surface... how do you sell your house?" asks Adornato. "How do you entice someone to come? How do you entice a retiree who wants to go fishing to come live on a canal where all they can smell and see are dead fish? You go to the beach on your vacation and the red tide on the west coast of Florida produces a stench -- the algae events that happen over there -- no one wants to go over there. You're destroying your fishery, you're killing off coral reefs. You're harming your water supply.

"These are direct economic effects at every level," he continues. "Over 6 million people, one-third of Floridians, get their water supply from the Everglades. If it's not clean, we are going to have to spend more money to clean it up. Those are the kinds of impacts that we need to deal with. Our economy is a tourism-based economy. If people don't want to come and sit in the beach or they don't want to go fishing, we have seriously harmed our future."

Sugar is not the only culprit in harming the Everglades ecosystem or the coastal ecosystems where water from the Everglades drains into the ocean, but it is a major cause of the area's problems along with the cattle and dairy industries situated north of Lake Okeechobee. Fortunately for the Everglades' wading birds whose populations have declined by 90 percent in the last century and a half, Floridians love the Everglades. Activist Tom Sadler noted that even Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott made an appearance at the recent Everglades Coalition Conference, "and he's not the type of person who would go out and hug a tree."

His appearance there denotes the political importance of Everglades conservation, if not Scott's commitment to actually achieving it. Sadler said Scott spoke at the conference, "professing his undying commitment to the Everglades although that didn't manifest in any money for the Everglades." That could be because of the enormous influence the industry has on politics. Virginia Chamblee of the Florida Independent reported that, "Big Sugar gave more than $4.2 million to federal candidates and party committees during the 2008 election cycle alone, 63 percent of which went to Democrats."

Chamblee writes about Florida Crystals, a subsidiary of sugar giant Flo-Sun: "Companies with ties to Florida Crystals (which has contributed nearly $4.5 million to campaigns since 1991) gave at least $100,000 to now-Gov. Rick Scott's gubernatorial campaign. The head of Florida Crystals also hosted a large campaign fundraiser for Scott only four weeks after he blasted the company's rival -- U.S. Sugar -- over its role in a planned Everglades restoration project."

Flo-Sun is owned by the Fanjul family, called the "First Family of Corporate Welfare" by CNN in 1998. The four Fanjul brothers use a failproof strategy for getting their way from politicians: playing both sides. Alfonso is a major contributor to the Democratic Party, and his influence earned him a role as co-chairman of Bill Clinton's Florida campaign in 1992. Meanwhile, Pepe Fanjul does the same for the Republicans. It cannot hurt that they are strategically positioned in Florida, one of the most crucial swing states in presidential elections.

But even the Fanjul's influence cannot dull the nation's love for the Everglades entirely. In 2000, Everglades restoration became a national cause, with the signing of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) by President Clinton. According to its official Web site, "The goal of CERP is to capture fresh water that now flows unused to the ocean and the gulf and redirect it to areas that need it most. The majority of the water will be devoted to environmental restoration, reviving a dying ecosystem. The remaining water will benefit cities and farmers by enhancing water supplies for the south Florida economy."

Naturally, the Everglades experiences a very wet rainy season from about May to November, and a very dry season during the rest of the year. In the wet season, wildlife like deer take refuge on "tree islands" to stay above the water; in the dry season, fish and other aquatic animals are concentrated into holes dug by alligators that retain water, providing a veritable feast for any predator looking for a meal. The Everglades needs these natural cycles, but the people of Florida need water year-round. With its drained agricultural land, the Everglades system now holds less water overall than it used to, sending any excess water out to tide. And since Florida lacks deep aquifers, the plentiful rainfall received in the rainy season is mostly not stored for use during the dry season.

Adornato feels that CERP is spending extra money on risky projects in order to store water without harming the sugar industry. He is critical of the plans to use Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) wells, which entail injecting water deep into the ground during the rainy season for use during the dry season. He prefers the approach of former Republican Governor Charlie Crist who, he says, "pretty much expended all of his political capital," in an effort to acquire the land of U.S. Sugar Corporation to use it for water storage and cleanup, delivering clean water to the Everglades.

Crist's plan, first announced in 2008, initially proposed purchasing 187,000 acres for $1.75 billion. By 2010, the area was reduced to 26,800 acres, or 14 percent of the original area, and the cost was down to $197 million. However, a 2010 New York Times article revealed that the deal might have helped U.S. Sugar Corporation as much or more as it helped the Everglades: "United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers."

The initial deal would have put U.S. Sugar, which was mired in debt, out of business by purchasing all of its land, but the downsized deal leaves it in business but sells off its citrus groves, which were not profitable for citrus anymore (and some say are useless for restoration) due to a plant disease epidemic. U.S. Sugar was represented in the deal's negotiations by Gunster, a law firm whose chairman, George LeMieux, was Governor Crist's chief of staff.

Understanding how various restoration schemes will affect both the Everglades and Florida's sugar industry (which enjoys a symbiotic relationship with both major American political parties) is complex, but even those who care deeply for the Everglades understand the issue in the context of believing sugar is a necessity. Adornato says that he does not simply have a sweet tooth, he has "sweet teeth," and sugar has to come from somewhere. "The bottom line is that sugar grown in Florida does not pay the consequences for its impact."

Sadler, who unsuccessfully campaigned to assess a penny per pound "polluter pays" fee on sugar companies, agrees, noting that if sugar is not grown in Florida, where we have some environmental and worker protections, it will be grown elsewhere in the world where conditions may be worse.

While sugar consumption is not a necessity, production is going up, not down, given the popularity of biofuels and the relative efficiency of sugarcane compared to other feedstocks. But perhaps the answer is not giving up sugar but reducing our intake to reduce its ecological footprint as well. Sugar ranks alongside factory farmed animal products as unsustainably produced foods that Americans eat in quantities greater than are healthy.

Likewise, both foods benefit from lax federal environmental standards that stick taxpayers with the bill to clean up pollution or simply force citizens to live with a mess that is never cleaned up, and producers of both foods benefit from federal commodity policies that make their products more profitable. Most of all, both tell of a broken political process in which the needs of the majority are overlooked as long as a powerful and wealthy few finance the political campaigns of both Democrats and Republicans.  

 Myrtha Jean-Baptiste was thirteen years old the first time that Jean-Claude Duvalier’s army arrested her. In August, 1979, a special intelligence unit based out of the Casernes Dessalines barracks on the grounds of Haiti’s Presidential Palace burst into Jean-Baptiste’s family home in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood and seized her, along with her mother, sister, three brothers, and a brother-in-law. 

The family crime was membership in the Haitian Christian Democrat Party which opposed Duvalier. Jean-Baptiste was interrogated and released, but the rest of her family stayed behind bars. Her brothers were held for over two years without ever going to court, and were beaten and tortured by army jailers until the young men bled from their ears. “When they came back, their bodies were broken,” Jean-Baptiste says. The brothers died within a few months after their release from prison. Jean-Baptiste herself was arrested again at age 15 and brought to the National Penitentiary, where she was held—also without trial—for one year and 21 days.

Stories like Jean-Baptiste’s were common in Haiti during Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s presidency from 1971 to 1986. After assuming control of the country at age 19 after the death of his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the son followed in a bloody family tradition.  The Haitian military and the notorious paramilitary tonton macoutes created by the senior Duvalier squelched dissent by jailing, torturing, and killing hundreds of political opponents and journalists. Investigations by groups including Human Rights Watch show Jean-Claude Duvalier was fully aware of and supported the abuses committed under his command.

 Newspapers and radio stations that dared to criticize the Duvalier government were shut down, and millions of dollars in government funds were diverted to Duvalier’s personal use. At one point in 1982, Duvalier’s own finance minister reported that $15 million per month in public funds was being directed to “extraordinary expenses,” including deposits to Duvalier’s personal Swiss bank account.  The finance minister was quickly fired, but increasing public outcry finally led to Duvalier fleeing into exile in 1986.

Twenty five years later, Myrtha Jean-Baptiste sits in the office of a human rights organization in Port-au-Prince recounting her memories from the era. Now a woman of 45, she has high cheekbones and wears a white lace blouse, but she is unsmiling and declines to be photographed. Her story gained renewed relevance on January 16, 2011, when Duvalier suddenly returned to Haiti. Although he has been charged with political and financial crimes and is periodically called in for questioning by an investigating judge, Duvalier enjoys a remarkably liberal definition of house arrest, meeting with political leaders and moving about the more expensive restaurants and clubs of Port-au-Prince. Jean-Baptiste is among many Duvalier-era victims who were stunned to learn that the former “President for Life” had dared to return to Haiti, and even more shocked to see that he remains a free man, with no trial set. “There is only one way to stop him,” she says in Creole. “Jije li.”  

Judge him.  

That is precisely the aim of the Haitian human rights organization Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, known as BAI. Along with its U.S.-based partner, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, BAI represents Jean-Baptiste and a group of other Duvalier-era victims who call themselves the Citizens Coalition for Prosecuting Duvalier. Employing the partie civile mechanism in the Haitian justice system, which allows crime victims to actively participate in the prosecution of an alleged criminal, the lawyers have filed several individual claims on behalf of Duvalier’s victims, and provided the investigating judge with piles of evidence of financial and political crimes.  “A Duvalier process and trial would mean so much for Haiti,” says attorney Mario Joseph, director of BAI. “It will help people believe in the system of justice if they see a defendant held accountable who stole our country’s money and killed and imprisoned people.”

Yet many within Haiti and in the international community believe Jean-Claude Duvalier will never be put on trial. Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, elected in April of 2011, is on record supporting amnesty for Duvalier and has several former “Duvalierists” in his administration and circle of aides, including the former president’s 28-year-old son, Francois Nicolas Duvalier. Most Haitians alive today are too young to remember much about the Duvalier era, and some even look back nostalgically at a time when the desperately poor country may have seemed a little less poor. In a few spots around Port-au-Prince, one can see graffiti spray-painted on concrete walls: “JC Duvalier. Nou tann pou ou”—we are waiting for you. The message is one of welcome, not vengeance.

If not quite as welcoming, the Obama administration’s reaction to Duvalier’s return to Haiti contains no note of disapproval, despite the U.S. record of vigorous support for prosecution of human rights violators from Slobodan Milosevic to Saddam Hussein. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have called on Haiti to prosecute Duvalier, the U.S., which provided significant financial support to Duvalier during the Cold War, has remained silent. When Duvalier returned to Haiti, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said “As to his [Duvalier's] status in the country and what happens, this is a matter for the government of Haiti and the people of Haiti.” 

One Capitol Hill official who agrees with the State Department stance defends the U.S. position. “People in Haiti need food, they need clean water, they need houses to live in,” the official said. “The new President needs a chance to succeed and our support in doing so. Wouldn’t you rather put U.S. pressure and resources into those essentials rather than a very difficult and complicated prosecution of someone who has not been in power for a quarter century?”

Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says this view is short-sighted. “If you look at the long term, Haiti is never going to become a successful and prosperous country until we have the kind of accountability that the Duvalier trial would allow us to have.” Concannon says. “It is accountability for political violence crimes, and perhaps even more important, it is accountability for stealing the Haitian people’s money. And if the lesson is that Duvalier, who did not even try to hide how he stole government funds, is allowed to be going around to the fancy restaurants and clubs in Petionville (the wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince where Duvalier now lives), that is a lesson to current officials that there are no consequences to stealing money.”

Human Rights Watch’s Reed Brody acknowledges the difficulty in prosecuting crimes that occurred decades ago, especially when that prosecution would be brought in a Haitian justice system weakened by neglect, underfunding, and the 2010 earthquake that destroyed so much infrastructure. But a Duvalier prosecution can be done, Brody insists, pointing to a previous Haiti prosecution also spurred by the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux that established a precedent for a leader to be held accountable for human rights abuses committed by others under his command. Plus, Brody says, there is plenty of international precedent for bringing a country leader to justice many years after the repression and corruption occurred. “Countries from Argentina to Uruguay to Bangladesh to Cambodia are prosecuting human rights crimes from decades ago,” he says. “There is no reason why Haiti cannot do the same.”

Raymond Davius hopes that is true. A broad-shouldered 55 year-old with a round face and receding gray hair, he leans out of his chair to mimic his hands being tied behind his ankles and a stick pushed between his legs and arms so that he is drawn into a ball, the preferred position for Duvalier’s army when they would beat him with a baton gayak, a two-foot long rod.  A former Haitian army officer, Davius left the forces in 1978 to join the same Christian Democrat party to which Myrtha Jean-Baptiste’s family belonged. He was seized by government officials soon after, the first in a series of arrests that would total seventeen in all, including imprisonment in the notorious Casernes Dessalines barracks and National Penitentiary. Davius was eventually able to escape to asylum in Venezuela. Now, he has some scars on his head from the beatings, but the deepest wounds are harder to see. “The effects of this are inside me all the time,” he says. The large man’s eyes fill as he talks about family and job troubles. “My comportment is not normal compared to other people, and I have problems in my life. People think I am crazy.”

He pauses to collect himself. “The problem is not as much about Duvalier himself as it is what he represents. If Haiti does not judge Duvalier, we have lost the opportunity to send a message to Haitian leaders who think they can kill whoever they want and steal whatever they want, and not be judged.

“We have a proverb in Creole: Si pa gen sitire pa ka gen vole.”

Translation: If there is no tolerance there would be no thieves. 

Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories, highlighting a form of control fraud (fraud in which the head of a company subverts it for personal gain) that criminology has identified but rarely discussed.  I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.  The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors.  Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud).

Anti-employee control frauds most commonly fall into four broad, but not mutually exclusive, categories – illegal work conditions due to violation of safety rules, violation of child labor laws, failure to pay employees’ wages and benefits, and frauds based on goods and loans provided by the employer to the employee that lock the employee into quasi-slavery.  Apple has just released a report on its suppliers that shows that anti-employee control fraud is the norm.  Remember, fraud is hidden and is often not discovered and Apple did not have an incentive to make an exhaustive investigation.  Apple calls its inquiries “audits” and it is apparent that most of its information comes from reviewing written and electronic records at its suppliers.  That is exceptionally revealing.  The suppliers know that they can defraud their employees with such impunity that they don’t even bother to get rid of records that prove their frauds.  Apple has resisted making public its suppliers and the report refused to identify which suppliers committed which violations – often for years despite repeated, false promises to end their anti-employee control frauds.  Two other facts are evident (but not reported).  First, Apple rarely terminates suppliers for defrauding their employees – even when the frauds endanger the lives and health of the workers and the community – and even where Apple knows that the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about these fraudulent and lethal practices.  Second, it appears unlikely in the extreme that Apple makes criminal referrals on its suppliers even when they commit anti-employee control frauds as a routine practice, even when the frauds endanger the worker’s and the public’s health, and even when the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about the frauds.  Apple’s report, therefore, understates substantially the actual incidence of fraud by the 156 suppliers (accounting for 97% of its payments to suppliers). From the New York Times:

The company said audits revealed that 93 supplier facilities had records indicating that more than half of their workers exceed a 60-hour weekly working limit. Apple said 108 facilities did not pay proper overtime as required by law. In 15 facilities, Apple found foreign contract workers who had paid excessive recruitment fees to labor agencies.

And though Apple said it mandated changes at those suppliers, and some facilities showed improvements, in aggregate, many types of lapses remained at levels that have persisted for years.

The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post articles on the Apple report are all lengthy, but none of them has any input from a criminologist and each of the articles misses most of the significance of the report. The most fundamental flaws have to do with why anti-employee control fraud is the norm at Apple’s suppliers and why the suppliers typically don’t even take the inexpensive efforts necessary to avoid holding a paper trail that makes the frauds obvious even to a not terribly vigorous audit that they know is coming.

If there is one single thing that drives us white-collar criminologists around the bend it is the implicit assumption that fraud cannot be common. There is, of course, no logical (or experiential) reason for this belief. Nevertheless, it is a common belief and among economists it is a virtually universal dogma. Economists have a tribal taboo against even using the word “fraud” to describe individual frauds. The surest way to be considered an un-serious economist is to use the “f” word to describe frauds by elite economic actors. Economists’ taboo is particularly bizarre because it is economic theory, developed by a Nobel Laureate that explains why fraud can become endemic. George Akerlof, in his famous article on markets for “lemons” (largely describing anti-customer control fraud), explained the perverse “Gresham’s” dynamic in 1970: "[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.”

Anti-employee control fraud creates real economic profits for the firm and can massively increase the controlling officers’ wealth. Honest firm normally cannot compete with anti-employee control frauds, so bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets. Companies like Apple and its counterparts create this criminogenic environment by selecting least-cost – criminal – suppliers who offer components at prices that honest firms cannot match. Effectively, they hang out a sign – only the fraudulent need apply to be suppliers. But the sign is, of course, invisible and cannot be introduced in court so Apple and its peers also get deniability. They are shocked, shocked that its suppliers are frauds that cheat their employees and put them and the public’s health at risk in order to make a few extra yuan or dong for the senior officers.

Fraudulent suppliers, therefore, have compelling incentives to locate in nations and regions in which they can commit fraud with impunity. The best way to evaluate the fraudulent CEOs’ view as to the risk of prosecution for their frauds is to observe whether they take cheap means of hiding their frauds. When the CEOs do not even bother to avoid creating a paper trail documenting their frauds one knows that they view the risk of prosecution as trivial. Nations that are corrupt, have weak rule of law, weak or non-existent unions, poor protections for workers, a reserve army of the impoverished, and have few resources devoted to prosecuting elite white-collar crime provide an ideal criminogenic environment for firms engaged in anti-employee control fraud. The ubiquitous nature of anti-employee control fraud (and tax fraud) in many nations explains why U.S. industries have been so eager to “outsource” U.S. jobs to fraud-friendly nations. Companies like Apple also discovered long ago that Americans often made poor senior managers in these nations because they objected to defrauding workers. Not a problem – there are plenty of managers from other nations that have no such ethical restraints. Foreign suppliers run by Asian managers are increasingly dominant.

The endemic nature of anti-employee control fraud also demonstrates an important technical point. The wages reported in the most fraud-friendly nations are substantially overstated because workers work far longer hours without receiving the compensation to which they are entitled. Their hourly rate is much lower than reported, which means that the wage gap between U.S. and the most fraud-friendly nations is significantly greater than reported. U.S. firms that have foreign suppliers in these nations are well aware of this data bias and make their outsourcing decisions based on the real (much larger) wage gap.

The Harm to Employee and Consumer Health is Grave

The NYT article notes that it was bad publicity in the U.S. that finally forced Apple to make greater disclosures about its suppliers’ frauds:

The calls for Apple to disclose suppliers became particularly acute after a series of deaths and accidents in recent years. In the last two years at firms supplying services to Apple, 137 employees were seriously injured after cleaning iPad screens with n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis; over a dozen workers have committed suicide or fell or jumped from buildings in a manner that suggests a suicide attempt; and in two separate blasts caused by dust from polishing iPad cases, four were killed and 77 injured.

The Washington Post article noted:

Apple found that 62 percent of the 229 facilities it inspected were not in compliance with the company’s maximum 60-hour work policy; 13 percent did not have adequate protections for juvenile workers; and 32 percent had problems with the management of hazardous waste.

One supplier was caught dumping wastewater at a nearby farm. Another had a total lack of safety measures, creating “unsafe working conditions,” the report found. Five facilities employed underage workers.

The company in the past had refused to divulge its full supplier list even as it became standard practice for multinational corporations to do so after the public outcry in the 1990s over labor problems at Nike factories in developing countries.

Apple’s change of heart follows a highly publicized string of factory worker suicides in 2010 and deadly explosions in two Chinese factories in 2011.

The WSJ emphasized this chilling finding:

The report also found 24 facilities conducted pregnancy tests and 56 didn't have procedures to prevent discrimination against pregnant workers. Apple said that at its direction, the suppliers have stopped discriminatory screenings for medical conditions or pregnancy.

The article does not make this point explicitly, but these firms conduct these tests in order to unlawfully coerce their pregnant employees to have undesired abortions in order to obtain and keep their jobs.

Foreign Anti-employee Control Fraud harms U.S. Workers

These frauds take place abroad, but they harm employees at home. Mitt Romney explains that Bain had to slash wages and pensions to save firms located in the U.S. who had to meet competition from foreign anti-employee control frauds. The damage from foreign anti-employee control frauds drives the domestic attack on U.S. manufacturing wages. Bad ethics increasingly drive good ethics out of the markets and manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. and into more fraud-friendly nations.

A final caution is in order because each of the major articles on the Apple report failed to mention it. CEOs who are willing to routinely defraud their workers and expose them to grave threats to their health are exceptionally likely to commit other forms of control fraud.

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Who in their right mind wants to talk about, think about or read a short essay about… civilian war casualties? What a bummer, this topic, especially since our Afghan Iraq and other ongoing wars were advertised as uplifting acts of philanthropy: wars to spread security, freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, etc.

A couple hundred thousand dead civilians have a way of making such noble ideals seem like dollar-store tinsel. And so, throughout our decade-long foreign policy debacle in the Greater Middle East, we in the U.S. have generally agreed that no one shall commit the gaucherie of dwelling on (and “dwelling on” = fleetingly mentioned) civilian casualties. Washington elites may squabble over some things, but as for foreigners killed by our numerous wars, our Beltway crew adheres to a sullen code of omertà.

Club rules do, however, permit one loophole: Washington officials may bemoan the nightmare of civilian casualties — but only if they can be pinned on a 24-year-old Army private first class named Bradley Manning.

Pfc. Manning, you will remember, is the young soldier who is soon to be court-martialed for passing some 750,000 military and diplomatic documents, a large chunk of them classified, to the website WikiLeaks. Among those leaks, there was indeed some serious stuff about how Americans dealt with civilians in invaded countries. For instance, the documents revealed that the U.S. military, then the occupying force in Iraq, did little or nothing to prevent Iraqi authorities from torturing prisoners in a variety of gruesome ways, sometimes to death.

Then there was that gun-sight video — unclassified but buried in classified material — of an American Apache helicopter opening fire on a crowd on a Baghdad street, gunning down a dozen men, including two Reuters employees, and injuring more, including children. There were also those field reports about how jumpy American soldiers repeatedly shot down civilians at roadsidecheckpoints; about night raids gone wrong both in Iraq and Afghanistan; and a count of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, a tally whose existence the U.S. military had previously denied possessing.

Together, these leaks and many others offered a composite portrait of military and political debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan whose grinding theme has been civilian casualties, a fact not much noted here in the U.S. A tiny number of low-ranking American soldiers have been held to account for rare instances of premeditated murder of civilians, but most of the troops who kill civilians in the midst of the chaos of war are not tried, much less convicted. We don’t talk about these cases a lot either. On the other hand, officials of all types make free with lusty condemnations of Bradley Manning, whose leaks are luridly credited with potential (though not actual) deaths.

Putting Lives in Danger

“[WikiLeaks] might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the release of the Afghan War Logs in July 2010. This was, of course, the same Admiral Mullen who had endorsed a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan, which would lead to a tremendous “surge” in casualties among civilians and soldiers alike.  Here are counts — undoubtedly undercounts, in fact — of real Afghan corpses that, at least in part, resulted from the policy he supported: 2,412 in 2009, 2,777 in 2010, 1,462 in the first half 2011, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan.  As far as anyone knows, here are the corpses that resulted from the release of those WikiLeaks documents: 0. (And don’t forget, the stalemate war with the Taliban has not budged in the period since that surge.)  Who, then, has blood on his hands, Pfc. Manning — or Admiral Mullen?

Of course the admiral is hardly alone. In fact, whole tabernacle choirs have joined in the condemnation of Manning and WikiLeaks for “causing” carnage, thanks to their disclosures.

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, also spoke sternly of Manning’s leaks, accusing him of “moral culpability.” He added, “And that’s where I think the verdict is ‘guilty’ on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences.”

This was, of course, the same Robert Gates who pushed for escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 and, in March 2011, flew to the Kingdom of Bahrain to offer his own personal “reassurance of support” to a ruling monarchy already busy shooting and torturing nonviolent civilian protesters. So again, when it comes to blood and indifference to consequences, Bradley Manning — or Robert Gates?

Nor have such attitudes been confined to the military. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Manning’s (alleged) leak of 250,000 diplomatic cables of being “an attack on the international community” that “puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.”

As a senator, of course, she supported the invasion of Iraq in flagrant contravention of the U.N. Charter. She was subsequently a leading hawk when it came to escalating and expanding the Afghan War, and is now responsible for disbursing an annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt’s ruling junta whose forces have repeatedly opened fire on nonviolent civilian protesters.  So who’s been attacking the international community and putting lives in danger, Bradley Manning — or Hillary Clinton?

Harold Koh, former Yale Law School dean, liberal lion and currently the State Department’s top legal adviser, has announced that the same leaked diplomatic cables “could place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals — from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security.”

This is the same Harold Koh who, in March 2010, provided a tortured legal rationale for the Obama administration’s drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemenand Somalia, despite the inevitable and well-documented civilian casualties they cause.  So who is risking the lives of countless innocent individuals, Bradley Manning — or Harold Koh?

Much of the media have clambered aboard the bandwagon, blaming WikiLeaks and Manning for damage done by wars they once energetically cheered on.

In early 2011, to pick just one example from the ranks of journalism, New Yorker writer George Packer professed his horror that WikiLeaks had released amemo marked “secret/noforn” listing spots throughout the world of vital strategic or economic interest to the United States. Asked by radio host Brian Lehrer whether this disclosure had crossed a new line by making a gratuitous gift to terrorists, Packer replied with an appalled yes.

Now, among the “secrets” contained in this document are the facts that the Strait of Gibraltar is a vital shipping lane and that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is rich in minerals. Have we Americans become so infantilized that factoids of basic geography must be considered state secrets? (Maybe best not to answer that question.)  The “threat” of this document’s release has since been roundly debunked by various military intellectuals.

Nevertheless, Packer’s response was instructive.  Here was a typical liberal hawk, who had can-canned to the post-9/11 drumbeat of war as a therapeutic wake-up call from “the bland comforts of peace,” now affronted by WikiLeaks’ supposed recklessness.  Civilian casualties do not seem to have been on Packer’s mind when he supported the invasion of Iraq, nor has he written much about them since.

In an enthusiastic 2006 New Yorker essay on counterinsurgency warfare, for example, the very words “civilian casualties” never come up, despite theircentrality to COIN theory, practice and history.  It is a fact that, as Operation Enduring Freedom shifted to counterinsurgency tactics in 2009, civilian casualties in Afghanistan skyrocketed.  So, for that matter, have American military casualties.  (More than half of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan occurred in the past three years.)

Liberal hawks like Packer may consider WikiLeaks out of bounds, but really, who in these last years has been the most reckless, Bradley Manning — or George Packer and some of his pro-war colleagues at the New Yorker likeJeffrey Goldberg (who has since left for the Atlantic Monthly, where he’s been busily clearing a path for war with Iran) and editor David Remnick?

Centrist and liberal nonprofit think tanks have been no less selectively blind when it comes to civilian carnage. Liza Goitein, a lawyer at the liberal-minded Brennan Center at NYU Law School, has also taken out after Bradley Manning.  In the midst of an otherwise deft diagnosis of Washington’s compulsive urge to over-classify everything — the federal government classifies an amazing 77 million documents a year — she pauses just long enough to accuse Manning of “criminal recklessness” for putting civilians named in the Afghan War logs in peril — “a disclosure,” as she puts it, “that surely endangers their safety.”

It’s worth noting that, until the moment Goitein made this charge, not a single report or press release issued by the Brennan Center has ever so much as uttered a mention of civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military. The absence of civilian casualties is almost palpable in the work of the Brennan Center’s program in  “Liberty and National Security.” For example, this program’s 2011 report “Rethinking Radicalization,” which explored effective, lawful ways to prevent American Muslims from turning terrorist, makes not a single reference to the tens of thousands of well-documented civilian casualties caused by American military force in the Muslim world, which according to many scholars is the prime mover of terrorist blowback.  The report on how to combat the threat of Muslim terrorists, written by Pakistan-born Faiza Patel, does not, in fact, even contain the words “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “drone strike,” “Pakistan” or “civilian casualties.”

This is almost incredible, because terrorists themselves have freely confessed that what motivated their acts of wanton violence has been the damage done by foreign military occupation back home or simply in the Muslim world.  Asked by a federal judge why he tried to blow up Times Square with a car bomb in May 2010, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad answered that he was motivated by the civilian carnage the U.S. had caused in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. How could any report about “rethinking radicalization” fail to mention this?  Although the Brennan Center does much valuable work, Goitein’s selective finger-pointing on civilian casualties is emblematic of a blindness to war’s consequences widespread among American institutions.

American Military Whistleblowers

Knowledge may indeed have its risks, but how many civilian deaths can actually be traced to the WikiLeaks revelations?  How many military deaths?  To the best of anyone’s knowledge, not a single one.  After much huffing and puffing, the Pentagon has quietly denied — and then denied again — that there is any evidence at all of the Taliban targeting the Afghan civilians named in the leaked war logs.

In the end, the “grave risks” involved in the publication of the War Logs and of those State Department documents have been wildly exaggerated.  Embarrassment, yes. A look inside two grim wars and the workings of imperial diplomacy, yes. Blood, no.

On the other hand, the grave risks that were hidden in those leaked documents, as well as in all the other government distortions, cover-ups and lies of the past decade, have been graphically illustrated in aortal red. The civilian carnage caused by our rush to war in Iraq and by our deeply entrenched stalemate of a war in Afghanistan (and the Pakistani tribal borderlands) is not speculative or theoretical but all-too real.

And yet no one anywhere has been held to much account: not in the political class, not in the military, not in the think tanks, not among the scholars, nor the media.  Only one individual, it seems, will pay, even if he actually spilled none of the blood. Our foreign policy elites seem to think Bradley Manning is well-cast for the role of fall guy and scapegoat. This is an injustice.

Someday, it will be clearer to Americans that Pfc. Manning has joined the ranks of great American military whistleblowers like Dan Ellsberg (who was first in his class at Marine officer training school); Vietnam War infantrymanRon Ridenhour, who blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre; and the sailors and marines who, in 1777, reported the torture of British captives by their politically connected commanding officer. These servicemen, too, were vilified in their times. Today, we honor them, as someday Pfc. Manning will be honored.