Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: ‘Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.’ That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.

E.g. David Brooks:

But you don’t have the power to transform the whole situation. Your discrete goods might contribute to an overall turnaround, but that turnaround will be beyond your comprehension and control.

With regard to war, however, conservatives always insist on the need to act, no matter what. If you don’t support their morally, legally, politically, and strategically questionable course of action they insist that inaction is not a possibility—daring you to offer up a slightly-less-horrible course of action instead.

E.g. Christopher Hitchens:

As we engage with the horrible idea that our government claims the right to add its own citizens to a death list that is compiled by methods and standards unknown, we must concede that no government on earth faces such a temptation to invoke what I suppose we could call a doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense. Those who share my alarm at the prospect of this, and of the ways in which it could be abused, are under a heavy obligation to say what they would do instead.

I think that I’m wary of the old left response of cynicism. “Oh well, the military took over and made it possible really…”"The West is busy sending helicopters in there. They’re just waiting for the opportunity to secure the oil field…” History does not work like a conspiracy. It’s not only to be judged in terms of what happens in the end. What happens on the way to the end always has and impact. It always leaves a trace behind. Things are never exactly as they were.

The Middle East, which has been the source of huge geopolitical instability for twenty or thirty years…Geopolitics cannot operate in the same terrain once the people say: “Well, you really helped to keep us down because you made of alliances with disgusting dictators. And you knew they were disgusting. And you knew that they didn’t deserve to be where they were according to your values. But you settled for self-interest instead.” And I hope the Americans, and the British, and Western Europe are asking themselves: “Well, how can we secure our interests in a world which has woken up to the fact that we have made alliances with the most dreadful people in order to accomplish our own success and hegemony in the world?” There will be consequences. I can’t tell you what they will be.

You knew 1968 the student revolts… everybody said, well of course it didn’t come to anything. They didn’t win. They didn’t win state power. They tried to win state power by allying themselves with the working class, by being supported by the Communist Party… Absolutely, no hope whatsoever. They didn’t win. Life since then has been profoundly transformed by 1968. It will never go back to what it was before that. Ideas of communitarianism, ideas of the collective, feminism, all sorts of things… Theoretical work? Transformed by the impact of a revolution which did not succeed! If you look back at the 19th century, 1848 is exactly the same. So, I don’t believe in judging the historical significance of events as they unfold in terms of our, usually faulty judgment, of where they may end up.

The “Sri Lanka option”:

In military circles around the world, the “Sri Lanka option” for counter-insurgency was discussed with admiration. Its basic tenets were: deny access to the media, the United Nations, and human-rights groups; isolate your opponents, and kill them as quickly as possible; and segregate and terrify the survivors—or, ideally, leave no witnesses at all.

It ain’t over till it’s over…

From the military’s perspective, the war continued. “The L.T.T.E. inculcation of the youth—this is a big problem for us,” he said. The Army needed to maintain a presence in the north to insure that Tamil radicalism never started again. To gather intelligence, another senior officer told me, it had infiltrated the Tamil population and installed electronic surveillance systems.

“China is probably our biggest single investor.”

In the not too distant future, Sri Lanka may be seen as an early skirmish in a new “Great Game” of influence between China and the United States and their proxies. “Sri Lanka has read the situation and seen that the West’s influence is diminishing,” Harim Peiris, a Sri Lankan political analyst, said. “So this government has made some strange friends: Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar, Russia, and Japan. China is probably our biggest single investor. These are ‘softies’—soft loans without pressure.

“When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.”

“Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty,” he wrote. “When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.”

If you can find a copy, it really is worth reading the whole thing…

Another running sore was the issue of Preah Vihar, an Angkorean temple on the border that was claimed by both Thailand and Cambodia (and eventually awarded to Cambodia by the World Court at The Hague in 1962). While the hardline anti-communist rulers in Bangkok and Saigon scarcely needed encouragement, Sihanouk suspected with good reason that the United States was egging them on and said that if Washington chose it could call them off. He stated publicly that US policy was unjust and ‘dangerous for peace in South-east Asia’ and moved further towards diplomatic rapprochement with the communist countries.

In short, it seems that the U.S. encouraged Thai claims on the Temple in order to bully Sihanouk to abandon his policy of neutrality during the Cold War, but the policy (like much U.S. foreign policy) backfired, pushing Sihanouk closer to the Communists.

There has been something of a debate among the American Left as to the true nature of the anti-healthcare reform movement. One position is that while there have always been crazies on the Right, the current era represents something new, in which the crazies have taken over the party, backed by unprecedented amounts of money, not to mention the corporate support provided by FOX News. Krugman, wistful for the Nixon era, when “leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy” puts it this way:

the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence.

A key part of this argument is that White racism against Obama is behind the crazy. From another Paul Krugman column:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

The other side of the debate emphasizes the similarities rather than the differences. For instance, Rick Perlstein, in the piece Krugman refers to, asks “crazier then, or crazier now?” Answering, that “the similarities across decades are uncanny.”

Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.

Perlstein here must be referring to the classic 1964 article by Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which Hofstadter argued that the crazy of McCarthy, Goldwater supporters, and the John Birch Society wasn’t anything new.

In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald compares the current crazy to that of the Clinton era, and finds that not much has changed:

Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker.

At one level, this debate seems to simply be a glass half-empty, glass half-full type of argument, with more than enough evidence for either side to choose from. Both sides agree that the Right has long used similar strategies, and both sides agree that the contemporary media environment has made it harder to ignore the crazies. But at another level there is an important difference in focus. By emphasizing the uniqueness of the contemporary situation critics simultaneously over-emphasize both the craziness of the protesters and the power of the corporate media. By focusing on the similarities of the current situation to what we have seen in the past, commentators like Hofstadter, Perlstein, and Greenwald allow us to focus on crazy as a political strategy and to begin to think about the best ways to combat it. Writing on this topic, Gary Younge says “we can beat them“,

These people gain the kind of purchase that shifts them from an irritant to an obstacle only when there is a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives. It is only under these conditions that they are able to cast unreasonable doubt in the reasonable minds of those who seek clarification, encouragement or a stake in any substantive change. This is precisely what has happened with the healthcare debate over the past few months.

Obama’s Health Care speech was a good start, but much more remains to be done.

Photo by Ereine

Former Clinton White House adviser and prominent blogger, Brad DeLong says: “We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” But critics of the Geithner plan are not saying he’s being too soft on the bankers because they want to see blood. They are saying it because the bankers are the problem and as long as they are calling the shots we won’t be able to revive the economy. Take a look at the following charts:

The charts come from an excellent article by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, who blogs at Baseline Scenario. If you are still trying to make sense of the financial crisis I recommend starting with his Financial Crisis for Beginners page (the radio programs he links to now have their own page as well). When Johnson worked for the IMF it was his job to tell countries what they had to do to get out of a financial crisis:

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work…

No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders… They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In short, the real solution to each of these crisis was to make sure the people who were responsible for getting the country into the crisis weren’t the same people put in charge of digging them out. DeLong’s stark choice, which implies that those who want to see the bankers punished should wait until the adults do their work and get the economy running again, is a choice which ignores the role of power in derailing the economy in the first place.

Anyone who wants to know how we got into this mess should read Robert Weissman’s article “12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown” which lays down, step-by-step, the process by which deregulation paved the way to ruin. A bit of this history can be found in  this NY Times piece on the 1999 decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which (after the Great Depression) had set up a barrier between banks and financial institutions. The late Senator Paul Wellstone, commented that Congress ”seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes,” but good old Lawrence Summers insisted it would “better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.” Does Summers get anything right?

The problem isn’t just that these are the same people who got us into this mess – its that the plan to get us out of the mess is based on the faulty logic that the all we have here is a crisis of confidence in the financial system. In other words, the government’s plan is based on the assumption that the bankers really do know what they are doing, and that the problem is with the rest of us who’ve lost faith. As Krugman puts it:

If you think it’s just a panic, then the government can pull a magic trick: by stepping in to buy the assets banks are selling, it can make banks look solvent again, and end the run. Yippee! And sometimes that really does work.

But if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls.

What we are essentially doing is encouraging these bankers to continue to make bad investments:

In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem. Or to put it another way, Treasury has decided that what we have is nothing but a confidence problem, which it proposes to cure by creating massive moral hazard.

And now here’s the thing: Despite all this, the economy might still recover. Not as quickly as it would if the administration had taken real leadership – but is still might recover in the end. Lets say in ten years instead of five, and after millions more jobs have been lost than might have otherwise, and after, when all is said and done, the government finally does what it has to do and takes over the banks. Maybe under President Palin. Doug Henwood believes this is a serious possibility:

There’s a more sinister possibility: the bailout will be funded by an austerity program. That is, all the trillions being borrowed to spend on bailouts and stimuli will save the financial elite, but at the costs of a fiscal crippling, and instead of raising taxes on the very rich to pay down the debt, there will be deep cuts in civilian spending. With the economy remaining weak, employment would stagnate and real wages fall—a prospect that would, by restricting consumption and therefore imports, bring the U.S. international accounts close to balance. Then we wouldn’t be dependent on Chinese capital inflows anymore—and the overprivileged wouldn’t have to give up lunching on $400 stone crabs.

Back in January 2008 it became clear that my candidate of choice, John Edwards, wasn’t going to win the primary. At that time I began to think about why his populist message didn’t have more resonance. Looking back in history to the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans who helped get F.D.R. elected I realized that even Edwards would only have offered token progressivism if there wasn’t a genuine grassroots movement pushing politics to the left. More recently, in response to the current crisis, Immanuel Wallerstein said something very similar:

In my view, the only sensible attitude is that taken by the large, powerful and militant Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil. The MST supported Lula in 2002, and despite all he failed to do that he had promised, they supported his re-election in 2006. They did it in full cognizance of the limitations of his government, because the alternative was clearly worse. What they also did, however, was to maintain constant pressure on the government–meeting with it, denouncing it publicly when it deserved it and organizing on the ground against its failures.

The MST would be a good model for the US left, if we had anything comparable in terms of a strong social movement. We don’t, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to patch one together as best we can and do as the MST does–press Obama openly, publicly and hard–all the time, and of course cheering him on when he does the right thing. What we want from Obama is not social transformation. He neither wishes to, nor is able to, offer us that. We want from him measures that will minimize the pain and suffering of most people right now. That he can do, and that is where pressure on him may make a difference.

In his article Simon Johnson called for change, citing Schumpeter to the effect that while “everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time.” It is very clear that the shift from Bush to Obama has changed a lot of things for the better, but one of them has not been a change in our elites. We are very much still in the hands of the same financial elite who have been in power since the eighties, and we stand at a crossroads: we can see the economy recover on the backs of American workers, or we can kick out the financial ruling class. It’s our choice.

UPDATE: Another chart, courtesy of 538.com:

In this clip ‘self-hating Jew’ Jon Stewart points out the obviously one-sided and mobius-strip like quality of mainstream American news coverage of the war in Gaza. Together with help from Kiven Strohm and other friends on Twitter and Facebook, I’ve compiled a list of resources about Gaza, with the aim of providing an alternative view. You don’t have to agree, but please take the time to look through the resources on our site.

I wasn’t happy with similar sites I found on the web, so I created a wiki to get the word out about some of the more disagreeable positions taken by the McCain campaign. The idea being that all the claims on the wiki are verifiable statements about actual policy positions taken by John McCain. They are not about his record or his personal life.

The site is password protected to limit vandalism, but if you’d like the password please let me know in the comments or by e-mail.

Reading Panaj Mishra’s NYRB article about Burma, “The Revolt of the Monks,” I was reminded of the KMT’s adventures in Burma, a remarkable episode in the inglorious history of Taiwan’s ruling party. After several pages discussing the brutal suppression of last year’s protest by Burma’s monks, Mishra turns to the political-economic foundation of military rule:

But the larger explanation of its strength and longevity lies in a much-ignored fact: that Burma has been in a state of uninterrupted civil war since independence in 1948, with dozens of ethnic-minority insurgent groups, which operate in or control between one quarter and one third of the country, ranged against a Burman-dominated state.

It is in the context of discussing the history of this prolonged civil war that he briefly mentions the story of the KMT in Burma. Curious to know more I turned to Google, and found this excellent chapter from McCoy’s 1972 book, The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia:

The precipitous collapse of the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) government in 1949 convinced the Truman administration that it had to stem “the southward flow of communism” into Southeast Asia. In 1950 the Defense Department extended military aid to the French in Indochina. In that same year, the CIA began regrouping those remnants of the defeated Kuomintang army in the Burmese Shan States for a projected invasion of southern China. Although the KMT army was to fail in its military operations, it succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan States’ opium trade.

… With CIA support, the KMT remained in Burma until 1961, when a Burmese army offensive drove them into Laos and Thailand. By this time, however, the Kuomintang had already used their control over the tribal populations to expand Shan State opium production by almost 1,000 percent-from less than 40 tons after World War 11 to an estimated three hundred to four hundred tons by 1962. From bases in northern Thailand the KMT have continued to send huge mule caravans into the Shan States to bring out the opium harvest. Today [1972], over twenty years after the CIA first began supporting KMT troops in the Golden Triangle region, these KMT caravans control almost a third of the world’s total illicit opium supply and have a growing share of Southeast Asia’s thriving heroin business.

When the KMT were driven out of the Shan state the trade was taken over by warlord Khun Sa (pictured above), whose death last year was noted by Mutant Frog’s Roy Berman. Berman also linked to to this Taipei Times article about the plight of “‘stateless’ descendants of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops.”

Further information: Wikipedia, China History Forum, Time Magazine.