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Sexual Harassment At Yale

April 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

You've got issues.

A recent New York Times article on allegations of sexual harassment and rape at Yale by male students raises some serious questions.  Why would highly intelligent male undergraduates who beat out countless other applicants make public utterances of an obscene nature to female undergraduates?  How many authentic cases of rape have been either unreported or ignored by the administration because of a lack of proof?

But underlying these issues is something profound about the nature of Yale itself.  The majority of undergraduates at Yale are now female. The dean of the college is a woman who has pledged that certain male behavior at the college is unacceptable and needs to be punished.  But more than punishment is needed.

Rape is a crime, so there need be no dispute as to the proper remedy.  Is there something special about Yale at the heart of this problem?  I would suggest that there is.   Rape is never about sex.  It is about power.  Yale was once the most masculine of the Ivy League institutions, with stories such as “Stover At Yale” and the “Frank Merriwell” series leading to a mystique of the athlete-scholar that characterized the institution.  What appears to be the feminization of Yale has undermined this image and some men on the Yale campus resent it.  If some fraternity obliges its pledges to make obscene remarks to female undergraduates as part of its ritual, there is an underlying anger that is at the root of this behavior.

I would submit that there is a sense amongst heterosexual white males at Yale that they are somehow being marginalized.  The response to this has, to a certain degree, been infantile.  But Yale is not unique in this regard.  There have been reports of similar behavior at Harvard and Princeton, particularly at the elite final clubs and eating clubs at these institutions.   A legacy of privileged masculine status is gone, undermined by both political correctness and immaturity.   Young men have sensibilities that are not being addressed.  The inability of young male undergraduates to express their emotions in a civilized way should be cause for concern.  When male bonding becomes a basis for puerile and offensive behavior, something terribly wrong is going on.

Because there is a fundamental Puritanism in America, there is a lack of discourse about sexuality and relations

Sex? Err, uh...

between the sexes. The Puritanism  manifests itself in forms of counter-behavior that display sexuality in harmful and destructive ways.   A lack of civility at a university as great as Yale reveals the underlying tensions of a society that has lost its way.  The country and the world are in great crisis, creating a sense of hysteria that no one is acknowledging.  Yale undergraduates need to face the realities that produce inappropriate conduct.  For one thing, there needs to be more balance in admissions so that the college is divided equally between men and women.  If Yale men are angry, they might do well to rally around a “fifty-fifty” admissions objective.  But to display anger in an uncivilized manner is a form of self-humiliation.

Seven years of college down the drain...

When I was at Princeton, it was all male and the social life was distorted.  Women were sex objects and very little else.   All the normal aspects of human sexuality were compressed into weekends of debauchery and drunkenness.  There was very little real joy.   Now that all of the best colleges and universities are co-ed, it would appear that not much progress in the relations between the sexes has taken place.  There is, most of all, a lack of sophistication, a callowness that is unbecoming.  The immaturity that has always been a disturbing factor in American life needs to be addressed at Yale and dealt with in a serious manner. There needs to be dialogue and discourse in an open and frank manner. Without that, the value of a Yale education will be diminished, a tragedy when one considers the plight of the globally disadvantaged who are struggling to achieve a life of dignity while the privileged at Yale waste their education.   The great universities of America are the country’s most admirable accomplishment.  What a pity that so many take that for granted instead of celebrating it.

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Egypt and 9/11

February 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I hate Mubarak... Mubarak = USA... I hate USA.

After 9/11, commentators speculated on the motives of Mohamed Atta, a brilliant Egyptian with a bright future who was studying in Germany. Was it sexual repression caused by the Puritanism of Islam?  Was it inflammatory rhetoric in the Koran?  Was it self-loathing because he was secretly gay?  At the time not many Americans were aware of the hatred many Egyptians, particularly among the young, felt for Hosni Mubarak who ruled Egypt with an iron first.  Egyptians like Atta, who hated him, deeply resented America for propping him up and giving him billions in aid. They also resented the rampant corruption in his government, which America tolerated.

Atta was not the only Egyptian in Al Qaeda who hated Mubarak. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s deputy, was a heart surgeon in Egypt. The police threw him in jail in one of those festering cells where prisoners were packed like sardines.  A member of the Moslem Brotherhood, he was one of hundreds the police rounded up after the assassination of Sadat. Convicted of gun trafficking, he served three years and left the country for Saudi Arabia where he practiced medicine. He went to America and gave fiery sermons at mosques in California under an assumed name.  After reconstituting Egypt Islamic Jihad, he joined forces with Bin Laden, launching World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders and becoming the real brains of Al Qaeda.

Realizing that a coup in Egypt was not possible, he turned to terrorism to achieve his objectives: getting rid of Sadat’s successor, Mubarak, and punishing the United States.  9/11 was in many ways spawned by hatred of a corrupt and tyrannical Egyptian whom the Brotherhood opposed.  Atta was able to recruit the young Saudis to be martyrs in the cause of throwing America out of the Middle East and getting rid of Mubarak, who openly dealt with Israel on friendly terms.

In America, people had a benign view of Mubarak, our friend and ally who was keeping the  peace in the Middle East

Some feel The Hulkster is not so awesome.

and upholding the peace treaty with Israel. That his friends and cronies were making fortunes by selling natural gas to Israel was something the American media never focused on.  Americans have difficulty understanding how people outside the country feel about us.  A recent poll reveals that some fifty-eight percent of the population believes that America is the leader of the world and that other countries should follow our lead. But people in the Middle East do not agree.

In the Middle East, where a legacy of colonialism lingers, the posture of the United States engenders fears and resentment over what is perceived as neo-colonialism, even in Saudi Arabia.  I remember quite vividly meeting Prince Saud al-Faisal in Cambridge, who explained that he was going to Princeton rather than Cambridge, that England no longer mattered.  America ran the world, he stated, and he needed to know their mentality.  Saud became the Saudi foreign minister, a post he still holds.

It took ten years before the young opponents of Mubarak in Egypt began discussing how to get rid of him. Gene Sharp, an American academic who is the world’s leading authority on non-violent revolution and the author of a 70-page how-to manual outlining his strategy, came to Egypt where he met with some students.  They became convinced that he was right and studied the manual.

During the nineteenth century there was a violent uprising against British rule in India that was put down with astonishing brutality.  Gandhi learned from this.  He told his followers that armed struggle against Britain would not work because of their military superiority.  He taught them his strategy of non-violent resistance which, in the end, prevailed.  Britain gave India its independence and withdrew peacefully.

Sharp studied Gandhi and used him as his model.  The young Egyptians were sophisticated enough to realize that Atta and al-Zawahiri had failed.  All they had accomplished was to strengthen Egypt’s ties to America. Learning from Sharp, they began to organize secretly. When a woman inspector slapped a Tunisian college graduate who was running a vegetable stand without a permit, he set himself on fire. But he had set a much larger fire. The country rose up and deposed a despotic ruler, long supported by the United States and France.

Revolutions will NOT spread in the Middle East or my name isn't Robert Kaplan... D'oh!.

Writing in an Op Ed in The New York Times, journalist Robert Kaplan argued that this phenomenon would be limited to Tunisia and would not spread to Egypt where the people were placid and the secret police powerful.  But only a few days later the Egyptians took to the streets and the rest is history.  Atta should have been amongst them. Instead he had participated in the mass destruction of 9/11, accomplishing nothing apart from the death of three thousand innocent people as well as himself and his crew of so-called martyrs.  Mubarak and his government are gone and peace has returned to Egypt. Nobody knows how this will end, but for now the future of Egypt is in the hands of the Egyptian people where it belongs. If America refused to support corrupt tyrants such as Mubarak, perhaps Mohamed Atta would be just another reveler waving the Egyptian flag in Tahrir Square. And our towers would still stand.

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The Council On Foreign Relations

February 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Richard Haass confidently predicts a stable Egypt under Mubarak for years to come... D'oh!

As I was watching events unfold in Egypt, I concluded that this was once again a gigantic failure by the American intelligence and foreign policy Establishments.  Obama sent State Department diplomat Frank Wisner to tell Mubarak to shape up and, instead, he announced that Mubarak was a bastion of stability in the Middle East.  Obama evidently blew his stack at this disobedience and before long, Mubarak was toast. On impulse, I sent an email to Richard Haass, the Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, to give him my observations. Haass has been president of the Council on Foreign Relations since July 2003, prior to which he was Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State and a close advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Senate approved Haass as a candidate for the position of ambassador and he has been U.S. Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan.  In other words, he is a foreign policy Establishment type of the first order.  This is what I wrote in my email to him:

“I have often been puzzled by the membership. Who gets invited to join? What are the qualifications?  It seems to me that the Council is often a bit behind the curve.  When I was a professor of international law at the Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, I was the only one who said there would be a revolution against the Emperor.  After I wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times about it when I was teaching at the University of the West Indies in Barbados, there was an uproar.  How could I say such a thing? The several publishers approached by my agent about doing a book, returned my proposal in a panic.  It was only years later that I learned that the Nixon administration had told American publishers that it didn’t want any books published on Ethiopia!  Incredible.  Of course, everything I predicted happened. There was a revolution and the country went Communist.

“One of my closet friends is Hussein Hassouna, currently the ambassador from the League of Arab States to the United States.  He is Egyptian and was at Cambridge with me, where we both did our doctorates.  I have always said that there would be a revolution in Egypt but even he disagreed.  Now,we learn that Mubarak and his family are worth billions of dollars.  When I was a lawyer for USAID, I had to draft an aid agreement for Jordan for a road that went into the desert.  William McComber, the head of the NESA region, explained to me that it was for the king, so he could drive his Cadillac convertibles out into the desert at night.  We have pandered to these Arab leaders to the detriment of their subjects, most of whom live wretched lives.

“I don’t believe I would ever want to be a member of the Council but you should, I think, ask dissenters to join, people who have experience living and working with the young of Third World countries.  I have the same degrees and experience of your usual Establishment types, Princeton, Columbia Law School, Ph.D. Jesus College Cambridge, but when I was in Ethiopia, something clicked.  It was during the Vietnam War and my students, who mostly admired America, hated its policies, including support for the autocratic and corrupt Emperor.  This sort of thing has gone on for ages now.  I have written extensively against the war in Iraq in various publications, including The American Conservative, predicting that our actions would end up giving Iran power in the country.  I was right.  No one listened.   I predicted a major terrorist attack in America.  No one listened.   I predicted what was going to happen to the ANC in South Africa.  No one listened.

“I think my friend Andrew Bacevich, is right.  In his book, The Rules, he explains how foreign policy orthodoxy works, how if you do not follow the rules, you will get nowhere.  It seems to me you really need some powerful voices to combat this mentality.  It is not working and never will.”

Of course, I never heard from him.  Several days later, Nicholas Kristof, in a column in The New York Times, argued

John 'Shaggy Dog' Bolton recently seen taking the 5th when asked where he got that hair piece.

that America needed better intelligence and that the only way to get it in a place like Egypt was to “hang out” with the locals.  Now, whom would the State Department get to do that?  Or CIA for that matter.  Americans these days get their intelligence from Glenn Beck, who, frothing at the mouth, declared the Egyptian revolution to be part of a great conspiracy of Communists and Islamic extremists in a plot to take over the world.  John Bolton, W’s ambassador to the United Nations, was seen on television sounding just like Beck, and he would most likely become Secretary of State should a Republican be elected president in 2012.

The foreign policy and intelligence Establishments are like the Bourbons.  They learn nothing and they forget nothing, as it was once observed of the French royal family that lost its collective heads during the French Revolution.  The world is going one way and the Americans are going the other way.  This is no longer a country fit to lead.

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Egypt – Why Is This News?

January 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A message to Wall Street, the CIA, the New York Times and Robert Kaplan.

Stocks have been taking a hit after news of the anti-government demonstrations in Egypt launched a sell-off that began on the Egyptian stock market and is now spreading worldwide.  The question is, why was everyone so surprised?   Financial types never believe anything like this will happen. They assume that dictators like Mubarak, even though he is in his eighties, will be there forever and that the people will suffer in silence as his police state keeps the lid on.  That the CIA missed this should come as no surprise either, considering they missed the Ethiopian revolution, the Iranian revolution and the Tunisian revolution.  The revolution is spreading throughout the Arab world, exactly the opposite of what Robert Kaplan predicted in his New York Times Op Ed piece declaring the uprising in Tunisia to be an isolated case that would never spread to Egypt or anywhere else.

To be an expert in this country is to be a complete idiot.  When my wife, Mary, and I got off the plane in Addis Ababa in 1967 we looked at each other with the same thought:  When does the revolution start?  The Americans, CIA included, considered Haile Selassie to be a permanent fixture, beloved and admired throughout the world.  They had their heads in the sand.  I told anyone from the embassy who asked that the students were fed up with the emperor and with America for supporting him. All I ever got was a shrug.  When I wrote an Op Ed in The New York Times predicting the revolution, the powers that be went bananas, going so far as to suppress a book I had proposed to several publishers at their request.  Then, when it was happening, that overrated jerk, Henry Kissinger, told Nixon to send more arms to the emperor.  Actually, what I knew that few others did, was that Nixon had already sent combat troops to Ethiopia to stop the insurgency.  I knew this because I had seen them with my own eyes at a remote airport. There was another Vietnam in the making, stopped only by Nixon’s impeachment and resignation.

True, I may be wrong about everything, but I make up for it by having this fantastic accent!

If one considers that there are more than 250,000 students at Cairo University alone, it ought to be pretty obvious that anti-government sentiment has got to be seething beneath the surface.  Egypt was once a wealthy country until Britain robbed it blind when it was a colony. Under Mubarak, poverty has increased dramatically, assuaged only by the one-cent cost of a loaf of bread the government makes possible through subsidies.  There are no jobs, there is an arrogant and rich elite and the country is virtually an American colony. Why would these young Egyptians put up with this?  At a certain point, they were bound to risk everything because they had nothing to lose.  Yet the idiots at Davos were shocked by events, with Tony Blair blathering about the need to “manage change.” The entire notion that things can be run interminably from the top whilst millions of people get the shaft is so dumb as to defy the imagination.  And yet it persists–the British when the colonists rose up, the monarchy and the aristocrats in France when the revolution overwhelmed them, the Czar, his family and the Russian elite when Kerensky and then Lenin toppled them.

I have always wondered if these things happen because the leaders are stupid or just greedy and without compassion.  After all, justice is ultimately a matter of self-interest if you want to save your own skin.  When I watch the Republicans setting out to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid whilst they give tax cuts to the wealthy during wartime, I am amazed at their arrogance.  They keep believing that the dumb goyim will keep going along like sheep as long as they feed them the same stuff about the dangers of socialism.

I have to admire, in a way, Jamie Dimon’s chutzpah.  Boss of JP Morgan Chase, he recently proclaimed indignantly that he was tired of people criticizing the banks. He just paid himself $17 million as salary, not counting bonuses. This is the guy who blamed the entire financial meltdown on the mortgage holders who had to default. He had nothing to do with this?  This would be a farce were it not so tragic.

At what point will there be a critical mass in America, when a sufficient number of people refuse to accept the new normal of high

We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!

unemployment and a great disparity of  wealth? Perhaps it will be young people coming out of college burdened by debt and unable to find a job, fed up with the interminable wars and the huge profits made by cutting payrolls even as banks are awash in cash that they will not lend.  I saw a young Egyptian demonstrator shout into the camera. “We are angry! We are fed up!”  As they used to say in Ireland,  “Up the rebels!”  Wherever they may be.

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The Most Annoying Americans

January 26, 2011 By 4 Comments

With so many annoying people out there, it’s difficult to compile one’s own list.  Others have engaged in this exercise, each with his own conception of who is annoying and and why. This is The Burning One’s contribution, but feel free to add your own in the comments section.

Number one on anyone’s list should be Joe Lieberman.  Every time I see him on television, pontificating in his slimy sanctimonious manner, I cringe.  Where did this malicious troll come from?  How he has succeeded in politics is beyond comprehension.  His hypocritical piety is enough to make one ill.  Somehow, he got through both Yale and Yale Law School.  They invited him to join Skull & Bones.  Am I missing something here?  We have to endure him for two more years before his term expires and he retires from the Senate, but I can see him getting appointed to some major position like Secretary of Defense.  There is just no getting rid of him, one of the great mysteries of American history.

My number-two spot goes to David Brooks, the unctuous New York Times columnist who manages to be wrong about everything. This total opportunist started out on the left at the University of Chicago until William Buckley offered him a job at National Review. Buckley had read a satire of himself written by Brooks.  In no time flat, Brooks was waxing conservative in his smarmy prose as a pundit.  His columns for the Times elicit enraged letters to the editor pointing out his contradictions and inaccuracies, but he remains at his pulpit with no end in sight.

Ann Coulter has got to be high on anybody’s list.  This anorexic termagant has become a total parody of herself as she spouts her humorless clichés of right-wing babble. She was once funny, but that was long ago.  Her act has grown stale yet she plods on, her long blonde hair and manner of dress incongruous now, as though she is condemned to be an ever-aging undergraduate. The drivel that comes out of her mouth that passes for wit is insufferable, yet she, too, endures.  Is there some kind of conspiracy to inflict these people on us?

Barney Frank makes it onto my list.  He had his moment in the sun during the financial crisis and managed to offend just abouteverybody.  He got his name on the financial regulation bill aimed at stopping the very policies he urged, yet he remains a hero of the liberals.  Barney’s insufferability lies is his sense of entitlement to keep his seat in Congress forever, confident that his district will never turn him out. What are they thinking?

Charlie Rangel is so insufferable that even the Democratic Party turned against him when the Democrats in the House all voted to censure him for his corrupt activities.  He is a monument to mediocrity who holds up his heroism in the Korean War as a defense for all of his arrogant behavior.   Challenged in a recent primary, he trounced his opposition and handily won reelection.  We will be rid of him only when they carry him out of Congress in a box.

Glenn Beck stands out for his annoyingness.  With his puffy lips and watery eyes, he lectures on topics about which he knowsnothing, while scribbling on a blackboard as though he were a learned professor.   You can read right through him as he panders to the dumb goyim who watch his show, hanging on his every word.   This total nobody commands an audience in the millions and has gotten rich by virtue of the stupidity of vast swaths of Americans, yet he remains even more annoying than his followers.

Rush Limbaugh, the obnoxious fathead, who bellows for hours on the airwaves while waving his arms, is annoying to such a degree that he is in a class by himself.  Every day in hysterical rhetoric he warns of the coming Communist takeover by the liberals.  Given a chance to be a television football commentator, he claimed that the only reason the Philadelphia Eagles made Donovan McNabb their quarterback was because he was black.   I am bewildered constantly by his power and its source. He manages to have a voice as fat as his body; he paid Elton John a million dollars to perform at his latest wedding; he lives in a gigantic, ugly mansion, eats and drinks to excess and smokes expensive cigars even as he denounces the poor for dragging the country down.

The last name I will add for now is Sarah Palin, without explaining why.  If you can’t figure out why she deserves to be on this list, you believe in the proverbial tooth fairy.

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Floyd Abrams, Julian Assange and the Banks

January 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A recent op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal by civil liberties attorney Floyd Abrams attacking Juilan Assange and comparing him unfavorably with David Ellsberg raises profound questions about the relationship between corporate power, politics and journalism.  Abrams is also a partner in the global corporate law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel.  His bio on their site describes Abrams’ work:

“Most recently, Floyd prevailed in his argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of Senator Mitch McConnell as amicus curiae, defending the rights of corporations and unions to speak publicly about politics and elections in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Floyd’s clients have also included The McGraw-Hill Companies, The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and others.”

The part about the unions is nothing but cover because they have nowhere near the money that Corporate America has.  It is a sop to Abams’ former liberal allies. In fact, the Cahill firm, of which Abrams is a partner, represents a Who’s Who in the world of banking and finance.  In its description of its practice, it makes this statement:

“Leading commercial and investment banking firms trust our experience and ability to deliver solutions-focused advice and deal execution, especially when the factual and legal issues are challenging and/or the financing structures are complex. That is one reason why we have long and close working relationships with banking firms such as BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, CIBC, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, UBS and Wachovia. We are also designated underwriters’ counsel for dozens of companies.”

And one of them, Bank of America, the biggest American bank by assets, is in a panic because

"Remain calm, all is well!" -Bank Of America

Julian Assange has said that he intends to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an  “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive.  Since then, Bank of America has had a team of top officials led by its chief risk officer poring over thousands of documents to see which might make them vulnerable. But unlike in the past, shredding is not likely to be helpful because now we have the internet and hard drives with damaging information.  Having settled with the SEC  in several major cases and being sued for fortunes because they palmed off worthless mortgage-backed securities, Bank of America has made itself a target.  It has just  resolved disputes with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by agreeing to pay more than $2.6 billion to settle claims that it sold loans based on faulty information. And that’s just the start of it. The price of its shares keeps tumbling and if Assange can deliver on his promise, he could indeed bring down the bank and the financial system with it.  If a small operation like Lehman Brothers could do it, imagine the consequences of a Bank of America meltdown.

Moreover, the link between these banking giants opposed to financial regulation and Mitch McConnell should be obvious.  They wanted the right to make unlimited contributions to the Republican Party without having to disclose their connections to the Republicans.  It was Abrams who developed the argument that corporations are persons and as such are protected by the First Amendment.   Cahill’s wealthy clients wanted this result and got Mitch McConnell to file anamicus brief on his own behalf. He wanted this result to get those contributions that paid for the Republicans’ vast campaign effort impugning the motives of the Democrats as sinister and sweeping thir party to victory in the 2010 elections, wihich gave them control of the House and more seats in the Senate.  The Roberts Court produced this result because of its pro-business posture. There has not been one case the Court has decided since Roberts became Chief Justice that has not favored big business.  The five conservative Republican justices, all appointed by conservative Republican presidents, have aligned themselves with their party’s interests, closing the circle of power of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the Federal Government.

Having won this case for the banks and the Republican Party, Abrams predictably attacked Assange on the grounds that he failed to withhold documents related to diplomacy while Ellsberg did not.  He omits the fact that Assange withheld far more documents related to diplomacy than Ellsberg, who is a supporter of Assange. Abrams argued as well that nothing WikiLeaks revealed showed the American government in a bad light.  But here are a few things we have learned from WikiLeaks:

- A US Army helicopter gunned down journalists and civilians indiscriminately in Iraq while soldiers watched and laughed.

- The US Army handed over detainees to Iraqi forces knowing full well they’d be tortured.

- The Pentagon deliberately low-balled Iraqi casualty figures by about 15,000 deaths.

- Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy on UN officials.

- Obama hooked up with Republicans in the Senate to quash a Spanish investigation of Bush-era abuses.

- The US is conducting air strikes in Yemen, despite repeated avowals that the Yemenis are doing it.

- The US is conducting secret ops in Pakistan.

- Despite the reassurances of the White House and the military, Afghanistan is going down the tubes.

The banking giants and the corporate clients of the Cahill firm must certainly know that they are likely WikilLeaks’ new targets.  Indeed, Bank of America has announced that it will stop processing WikLeaks payments, part of the Establishment attempt to close it down, and if possible, send Assange to prison.  It should come as no surprise then that Floyd Abrams would denounce Assange on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, even though Slate and other publications have expressed their bewilderment at Abrams’ article for being so out of character.

But was it?  The point is that it was not.  Money talks, and Floyd Abrams certainly knew what he was doing when he joined Cahill.   That business about not being able to serve God and Mammon actually has some merit.  In serving Mammon, Abrams has enabled the most reactionary forces in America to triumph.  He may say he is just making a living, but he is doing it at the expense of the country. This is not the same Lloyd Abrams who defended The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and who at one time represented The Nation. He has no shame. He belongs in the same Who’s Who of louts as Henry Kissinger, yet another turncoat in America’s descent into the abyss of avarice.

"Yes, it's true, I have no shame... But that said, corporations are people too!"

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Ron Paul – Enfin Un Homme

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

When Andre Malraux first met Charles DeGaulle during the Resistance in the Second World War, his words were, “Enfin un

Un homme: Ron Paul.

homme.”  That translates, “Finally, a man.”  Such is the case with Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who in five minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives spoke in defense of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.  Not since Emile Zola wrote “J’Accuse” has any pubic figurer risked so much to speak the truth.

Dr. Paul, in precise language and in a methodical manner utterly devoid of histrionics, explained that both the Vietnam and Iraq Wars were based on lies, the first on the lie that North Vietnam had fired on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and the second on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  He does not accept the excuse that George Tenet of the CIA, Bush, Cheney or Colin Powell sincerely believed that the WMDs were there. Both the Tonkin Resolution and the resolution of Congress giving Bush authority to take military action against Iraq led to disastrous wars, the deaths of many of our troops and the plundering of our national treasure.  Over fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam for no reason and thousands have died in Iraq, a country that is still in disarray and now largely in the hands of Iranian sympathizers.

Paul argues that had there been a WikiLeaks at the time the decisions were being made to launch those wars of aggression, the people would have known the truth and the wars could have been stopped.   Assange, Paul insists, is a working journalist protected by the First Amendment. Even if his vehicle of publication is the Internet, he does the kind of work the mainstream press does not.  Quite right.

The New York Times pressed for the overthrow of President Diem of South Vietnam at a time when he was negotiating with the North Vietnamese to create a federated republic. Anyone who wants to know the truth about this can read an amazing but sadly neglected book, THE YEAR OF THE HARE by Francis X. Winters.  The cables and memoranda surrounding that decision reveal a casual disregard for the consequences of that action, a failure to recognize that there was no one else capable of leading South Vietnam at the time and that the ensuing chaos would undermine the entire American effort.

As for Iraq, The New York Times was complicit in propagating the lie that Saddam Hussein had WMDs through the specious articles of its top reporter, Judith Miller, and through the pro-war position of Bill Keller, the Times Executive Editor and son of former Chairman and CEO of Chevron, George M. Keller.  The Washington Post took identical positions with regard to both the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.

I hate to tell you, but I told you so.

Paul described the four wars in which America is currently involved–Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen–as wasteful and pointless.  The real reason for the wars, he insists, as well as for the thousands of U.S. troops stationed around the world, is what he bluntly describes as America’s “empire.”  The determination to maintain this empire, Paul laments, is behind the tragic and disastrous foreign policy that has burdened America for decades. It is an empire that has brought virtually no benefits to the people but only to what Eisenhower referred to as the “Military-Industrial Complex.” He left out another major component of America’s militarism at that time, the unions, for whom the defense industry provided countless jobs.  As Ted Morgan revealed in A COVERT LIFE, his biography of AFL-CIO ‘s head of its international division Jay Lovestone, Lovestone was a CIA operative under the supervision of CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton.

The myth of America’s independent press is just that, a myth, and the essence of Ron Paul’s message is that only through the efforts of Assange and people like him can Americans learn what is really going on.  Of course, The Times, in its arrogant attempt to margnalize him as some sort of quack, did not give space to his address in the House. Well, that “quack” is now about to become chairman of the House sub-committee on financial services in which position he will be in charge of oversight of the Federal Reserve and will seek transparency of the Fed’s activities.  Only recently has it come out that during the financial crisis, the Fed handed out trillions of dollars to the banks and other corporate entities, some of them foreign.  Benjamin Bernanke says most of the loans have been repaid, but if Assange had been able to get the truth about the Fed, the full reality of its activities might have come to light by now.

For his efforts, Paul’s detractors on the right have called him “Al Qaeda’s best friend in Congress.”  The pro-war liberals call him an unrealistic “isolationist.”  But he is neither.  As one listens carefully to what Ron Paul says, the only proper reaction is, “Enfin un homme.”

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David Brooks, What Are You Talking About?

November 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

"The Patriot"

In his column today, David Brooks predicts a groundswell of patriotism amongst Americans that will lead to a solving of the nation’s problems before it officially goes bankrupt and no one will buy the country’s bonds any longer.  He thinks that patriotism will oblige previously selfish people to give up their tax cuts for the benefit of the country.

He obviously has never spent any time in the Hamptons, where the Wizards of Wall Street hang out.  They have an entrenched mind set that what is good for them IS good for  the country, in the spirit of Eisenhower’s Secretary  of the Treasury, Charles  Wilson, who once famously proclaimed, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”  According to that logic,  the federal government should be bailing all of us out.

The fanatic devotion of the Republicans to tax cuts, particularly for the wealthiest Americans, defies logic.  This has been tried before and it failed.  David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s director of the budget, opined in the New York Times that Republican policies from Nixon on have destroyed the American economy.  It was Reagan who refused to reappoint Paul Volker as head of the Fed (Jimmy Carter had appointed him in the first place), replacing him with that ultimate charlatan, Alan Greenspan, phony PhD and all.  Now, in control of the House with their eyes on the Senate and the White House, the Republicans propose to balance the budget by continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy under the same trickle down philosophy that they have maintained over the years.  The problem with this is that it will add a trillion dollars to the deficit over time and do nothing to stimulate the economy because the wealthy will simply invest this  money  and not spend it.

So where does  that leave us?  It leaves us in the hands of Bernanke, who is  pumping six billion dollars from the Fed into the economy by buying US Treasuries, a policy designed to drive the dollar lower so American can pay off its debt with cheap money, the way the Germans did after the First World War.  That led to  the hyperinflation which led  to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  Personally, I have no idea what David Brooks is talking about.  Why should there be such an outburst of selfless patriotism when the country is still decidedly self-absorbed.  The Balshazar’s Feast of capitalism is over only no one has told the corpse.

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