Chris Hedges's Blog, page 69

Israel’s Embattled Netanyahu Wins by Landslide in Primary

JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday scored a landslide victory in a primary race for leadership of the ruling Likud party, giving the embattled leader an important boost ahead of the country’s third election in less than a year.

The strong showing by Israel’s longest-serving leader could give him another opportunity to form a government following the March election, after falling short in two previous attempts this year. By easily fending off Likud lawmaker Gideon Saar, Netanyahu also kept alive his hopes of winning immunity from prosecution after being indicted last month on a series of corruption charges.

“A giant victory,” Netanyahu tweeted early Friday, just over an hour after polls closed.

“Thanks to the members of Likud for the trust, support and love,” he added. “God willing, I will lead Likud to a big victory in the coming elections.”

In a tweet, Saar congratulated Netanyahu and said he would support the prime minister in the national election. “I am absolutely comfortable with my decision to run,” he added. “Whoever isn’t ready to take a risk for the path he believes in will never win.”

Official results released by Likud showed Netanyahu capturing 41,792 votes, or 72%, compared with 15,885 votes, or 28%, for Saar.

While removing any doubts about Netanyahu’s standing in the ruling party, the primary is likely to prolong Israel’s political uncertainty. Netanyahu will remain at the helm of Likud through the March elections, and his lingering legal troubles could again scuttle efforts to form a government after that.

In September’s election, both Likud and its main rival, the centrist Blue and White party, were unable to secure a parliamentary majority and form a government on their own.

The two parties together captured a solid majority of parliamentary seats, leaving a national unity government as the best way out of the crisis. But Blue and White has refused to sit in a partnership with Netanyahu when he is under indictment.

Opinion polls predict a similar outcome in the March election, raising the possibility of months of continued paralysis. The country already has been run by a caretaker government for the past year.

Netanyahu, who has led the country for the past decade, maintained his position atop the political right by cultivating an image as a veteran statesman with close ties to U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders.

His refusal to make any concessions to the Palestinians was rewarded after Trump took office, as the U.S. began openly siding with Israel on several key issues, validating Netanyahu’s approach in the eyes of many Israelis and adding to his mystique.

Netanyahu’s hard-line approach to Iran has also proved popular. He was a staunch opponent of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which has unraveled since Trump withdrew from the agreement. A wave of Israeli strikes on Iran-linked targets in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq has burnished Netanyahu’s claims to having protected Israel from its enemies.

His fortunes have nevertheless waned over the past year, after he was unable to form a government following the unprecedented back-to-back elections in March and September. His party came in second place in September, leading many observers to view the vote as the beginning of the end.

In November, Netanyahu was indicted on charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes, the culmination of three long-running corruption investigations. Netanyahu vowed to remain in office, dismissing the indictment as an “attempted coup” by hostile media and law enforcement.

Reuven Hazan, a political science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the victory for Netanyahu would have no impact on the general election.

“It simply means that he’s managed to maintain control of the party,” he said. “It just means that the faithful have circled the wagons. It means nothing for the elections except that he looks good. He looks strengthened.”

Netanyahu appeared rejuvenated in recent weeks as he hit the campaign trail, doing several live events a day where he rallied supporters in small gatherings and face-to-face meetings.

“The Likudniks have witnessed an astonishing event play out in the past two weeks, in which a 70-year-old leader who has had his fill of terms in office has thrown himself at every last registered party member,” Israeli columnist Ben Caspit wrote in the Maariv daily.

The approach appears to have paid off and may serve as a template for a more effective general election campaign. In the meantime, Israel will remain in limbo for at least another two months.

Netanyahu, who also served as prime minister in the late 1990s, is desperate to remain in office, where he is best positioned to fight the corruption charges. Israeli law requires public officials to resign if charged with a crime. But the law does not apply to sitting prime ministers.

As long as he remains in office, Netanyahu can use the position as a bully pulpit to criticize his prosecutors. He also can offer political favors in hopes of rallying a majority of lawmakers who favor granting him immunity from prosecution.

“His game is to be prime minister because that is a shield from indictment,” Hazan said.

Despite the victory, Netanyahu has many hurdles ahead.

The Supreme Court is set next week to begin considering whether an indicted member of parliament can be tasked with forming a new government. Its decision could potentially disqualify Netanyahu from leading the next government. It’s not clear when a ruling would be handed down.

The political uncertainty has led the Trump administration to delay the release of its long-anticipated Mideast peace plan.

The Palestinians have already rejected the plan, saying the administration is hopelessly and unfairly biased toward Israel. They point to Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to cut off virtually all aid to the Palestinians and to reverse longstanding opposition to Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has said Israel is on the cusp of securing U.S. support for the annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank — but only if he remains in power.

That would virtually extinguish the Palestinians’ hopes of one day establishing an independent state, but it would cement Netanyahu’s legacy as perhaps the most successful right-wing leader in the country’s history.

‘Bombshell’ Glosses Over the Horrors of Fox News

“You will be muzzled,” the lawyer for Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) warns her at the end of “Bombshell,” as the former Fox News anchor signs a $20 million settlement of a sexual harassment suit against her former boss, ex-Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. The lawyer could have been speaking about the movie.

Carlson sued Ailes in 2016, which led other women, including fellow anchor Megyn Kelly, to reveal that he assaulted them too. “Bombshell” unfolds over late 2015, in the lead-up to Carlson’s decision to go public, and continues through Ailes’ firing in 2016, telling the intertwined stories of three white, blond, perky women affected by Ailes’ abuse. They are Carlson, Kelly (Charlize Theron) and the fictional up-and-coming producer Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie), a savvy yet wide-eyed young evangelical who tells a manager that she wants to be “an influencer in the Jesus space.”

Theron’s Kelly is our first guide to the cable news channel. In a tight shot through narrow hallways, she leads a tour through the bowels of the Fox building. She breezily brushes off catcalls from male colleagues (“He’s not horny, he’s just ambitious”), but is clear-eyed in comments about the sexism at the heart of the network: the dress code, the short skirts, not allowing women to wear pants, and the clear desks that Ailes demands of his on-air talent. It’s reflective of the way in which the movie treats the channel: taking care to applaud the female employees for taking down a bad man while eliding Fox News’ promotion of racist tropes, the way it’s torn families apart and other non-admirable actions.

Theron nails Kelly’s voice, and her prosthetics work overtime to nail her jawline, clenched so straight and tight that even while smiling, it seems to be holding her entire body together.

A pivotal moment occurs during the first 2015 Republican debate, in which she sparred with then-candidate Donald Trump and became something of a feminist lightning rod for questioning his treatment of women. “You once told a contestant on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees,” Kelly began. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

Ailes first applauds her for the conflict that’s sure to bring the network good ratings but fails to fully support her when it comes to telling Trump to back off in the ensuing social media fight. Why would Ailes, when the Kelly-Trump back-and-forth brings ratings? Instead, Kelly is sent on vacation. A similar, sympathy-eliciting moment occurs for Carlson after she does a segment without wearing makeup. Ailes watches and is furious, bellowing, “Nobody wants to watch a middle-aged woman sweat her way through menopause.”

Kelly’s question to Trump during the debate was an important one, and she deserves credit for publicly challenging him Ailes’ reaction to Carlson’s segment was disgusting, and the makeup-less appearance was a brave choice. These rah-rah feminist moments, however, are not the full story of Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson as journalists, just as Roger Ailes is not the only rotten part of Fox News.

Carlson stoked about President Barack Obama and made multiple anti-gay and anti-trans comments. Kelly used precious network time to harangue viewers about Jesus and how Santa must be white, called a teenager assaulted by police “no saint,” and claimed Sandra Bland would be alive if she had complied with police, among other racist comments.

Fox News has a history of promoting Trump’s birtherism, among other conspiracy theories. A 2012 study from Farleigh-Dickinson University found that Fox News viewers were overall less informed on current events compared to non-Fox viewers. “Bombshell” alludes to these issues in the briefest of video clips but otherwise fails to grapple with the complexity of the characters it’s asking the audience to root for, without too much questioning. Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s owner, and any number of other executives and anchors are just as culpable as Ailes.

Much of Ailes’ heinous acts against women are spoken of, rather than shown, aside from a truly infuriating moment with Kayla. Ailes forces her to reveal her underwear in a meeting ostensibly about her career prospects, telling her it’s a visual medium. Lithgow’s performance is terrifying, his face full of jowls and eyes practically swollen with greed. He is not simply sleazy but frightening, especially when he forces her to sit down again afterward and pretend the past few minutes never happened.

Worse, when she attempts to tell Jess (Kate McKinnon), a fellow producer on Bill O’Reilly’s “The O’Reilly Factor” what happened with Ailes, Jess immediately shuts her down. She tells Kayla it’s better that she doesn’t get Jeff involved, because as she repeats, she’s “a lesbian at Fox News.” Jess is indeed that, and, as we find out earlier, a Hillary Clinton supporter. That she has to say that over and over again feels like a replacement for character development. (As an aside, O’Reilly in 2017 also was fired by Fox News, after court settlements of sexual harassment claims involving him and totaling tens of millions of dollars were reported).

The quickness with which Jess shuts Kayla down is one of the movie’s most telling and effective moments, illustrating the ways in which Fox News set up a culture that pitted women against each other. In fact, “Bombshell’s” more impactful moments occur while watching Carlson’s building frustration as she calls various current and former colleagues, trying to convince them to join her lawsuit or at least speak out, and finding out they would rather not. Ailes took their dignity and bought their silence. Kidman’s visible mix of sadness and anger as her smile turns downward, and the energy drains from her eyes, as woman after woman turns her down is a highlight of her performance.

Sexism and sexual harassment transcend political parties. Ailes was indeed a creep, who may have lost his job but still managed to walk away with a hefty settlement and few additional legal consequences. Kelly and Carlson rightly took down Ailes, and they also spent plenty of years being paid handsomely for spewing hate and for their silence. All of these can be true, and it’s not impossible for a movie to tell the story of Ailes’ downfall while looking holistically at Fox News and its place in American culture. “Bombshell” isn’t it.

Iraq President Offers to Quit After Rejecting PM Nominee

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s president refused on Thursday to designate a prime minister candidate nominated by the Iran-backed parliamentary bloc and offered to resign, plunging the country into further political uncertainty amid nearly three months of unprecedented mass protests.

President Barham Salih said in a statement issued by his office that he would not name the governor of the southern Basra province, Asaad al-Eidani, as the country’s next prime minister “to avoid more bloodshed and in order to safeguard civil peace.”

Al-Eidani’s name was proposed on Wednesday by the Fatah bloc, which includes leaders associated with the Iran-supported paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces. His nomination was promptly rejected by Iraqi protesters who poured into the streets Wednesday demanding an independent candidate.

Demonstrators first took to the streets on Oct. 1 to call for the overthrow of Iraq’s entire political class over corruption and mismanagement. The mass uprisings prompted the resignation of former Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi late last month. More than 450 people have been killed since October, the vast majority of them protesters killed by security forces firing tear gas and live ammunition.

Concentrated in Baghdad and the mostly Shiite-inhabited south, the protests have since evolved into an uprising against Iran’s political and military influence in the country.

Salih said he was prepared to submit his resignation to Parliament, as his refusal to designate al-Eidani could be construed as a violation of the constitution. He stopped short of actually stepping down, however, saying in a statement addressed to the Parliament speaker that he would leave it up to lawmakers to decide “as they see fit.” Shortly after issuing the statement, the president left Baghdad for his hometown in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah.

Under the constitution, parliament has seven days to accept or reject a president’s resignation before it automatically goes into effect. It was unclear how lawmakers would react, as Salih did not officially resign.

Signaling a hardline stance, the Fatah bloc slammed Salih’s decision to not name al-Eidani and called for his impeachment. “We call on parliament to take legal measures against the president for shirking his constitutional oath and breaching the constitution,” it said in a statement.

In Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which has emerged as a focal point of their demonstrations, protesters gathered to celebrate the president’s decision.

“This is a victory for the demonstrators and a victory for the blood of the martyrs,” said activist Hassanein Gharib. “Because of street pressure, the candidate of the (political) parties was rejected, and we will not accept and we will not return to our homes if the party candidate is nominated.”

A leading politician and former government official familiar with the latest developments said they presented a “real crisis that may lead to the collapse of the state.”

“The situation is very dangerous,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to divulge sensitive information.

According to Iraq’s constitution, the largest bloc in parliament is required to nominate the new prime minister, who then has to be designated by the president. A deadline to name a new prime minister has been missed twice over disagreements on which is the largest bloc in the parliament following last year’s elections.

There are two main blocs in the Iraqi Parliament: Sairoon, led by populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr; and Fatah, headed by Hadi al-Amiri. But the numbers in the blocs have continued to change since last year’s elections, with an unknown number of lawmakers leaving some blocs and joining others.

On Saturday, Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court provided guidance in a statement but stopped short of naming the largest bloc. It said the decision should be based on parliament’s first session after taking office last year. But the court also said it would accept the merger of two or more lists to become the largest bloc. The same day, President Salih sent the court’s response to parliament, asking the legislature to say which is the largest bloc.

A Facebook page close to al-Sadr commented on the president’s position saying: “Thank you, Mr. President, for rejecting the candidates that the people reject, a position that history, and the (Iraqi) people and the (Shiite religious) authority will record.”

American Cities Are Becoming Shell Companies for the Rich

America’s cities are being bought up, bit by bit, by anonymous shell companies using piles of cash. Modest single-family homes, owned for generations by families, now are held by corporate vehicles with names that appear to be little more than jumbles of letters and punctuation – such as SC-TUSCA LLC, CNS1975 LLC – registered to law offices and post office boxes miles away. New glittering towers filled with owned but empty condos look down over our cities, as residents below struggle to find any available housing.

All-cash transactions have come to account for a quarter of all residential real estate purchases, “totaling hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide,” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the financial crimes unit of the federal Treasury Department, also known as FinCEN – noted in a 2017 news release. Thanks to the Bank Secrecy Act, a 1970 anti-money-laundering law, the agency is able to learn who owns many of these properties. In high-cost cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, it’s flagged over 30% of cash purchases as suspicious transactions. But FinCEN also cites this bill to hide this information from the public, leaving the American people increasingly in the dark about who owns their cities.

For journalists, it requires undertaking a tremendous investigative effort to find the real owner of even one property, let alone millions.

“It reminds me of Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union: oligarchs running wild, stashing their gains in buildings,” James Wright, an attorney and former Treasury Department bank examiner, told me. He now helps foreign governments combat money laundering. “Back then, you’d walk down the street, and people would say, ‘That building is a washing machine.’ Everyone knew it. Today, America is not that different.”

The Census Bureau reports that nearly 3 million U.S. homes and 13 million apartment units are owned by LLC, LLP, LP or shell companies – levels of anonymous ownership not seen in American history. The proportion of residential rental properties owned by individuals and families has fallen from 92% in 1991 to 74% in 2015.

The lack of transparency not only represents an opportunity for money laundering, but it also has more prosaic implications. First-time homebuyers are denied the opportunity to buy affordable homes with bank loans because those properties already have been scooped up by shell companies. Tenants can’t figure out to whom to complain when something goes wrong. Local officials don’t know whom to hold responsible for code violations and neighborhood blight.

With anonymity comes impunity, and, for vulnerable tenants, skyrocketing numbers of evictions. It wasn’t until reporters from The Guardian and The Washington Post began to investigate, for example, that residents living in hundreds of properties across the South learned that they shared a secret landlord, hiding behind names such as SPMK X GA LLC: Fox News personality Sean Hannity.

“Among the tenants Hannity’s property managers sought to evict,” The Post reported, were “a double amputee who had lived in an apartment with her daughter for five years but did not pay on time after being hospitalized; and a single mother of three whose $980 rent check was rejected because she could not come up with a $1,050 cleaning fee for a bedbug infestation.”

But while the public remains in the dark, one part of the government knows the people behind these shell companies. Since 2016, FinCEN has issued geographic targeting orders requiring that the “beneficial owners” of residential real estate bought with cash be disclosed. The Treasury police started with six metro areas, then expanded to nine – running from Los Angeles to New York, Miami to Seattle.

Yet FinCEN insists on keeping that information secret.

In July, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on the “beneficial owners” of LLCs. We asked for the addresses of all residential real estate purchased with cash, where FinCEN was aware; the amount of money transferred; the name and address of the true, human owners behind each residential real estate purchase; the name of the person responsible for purchasing the property; and the individuals responsible for representing the purchasers – all information currently held by FinCEN but not collected under the Bank Secrecy Act.

In response, the government initially refused to even acknowledge that it has this information, saying it could “neither confirm nor deny the existence of the materials,” citing the Bank Secrecy Act. But when Congress passed that law in 1970, it never intended that it be used to keep the owners of residential real estate from the public. Without a doubt, financial institutions and the government have to keep some information secret – individual consumers’ Social Security numbers, for example. But the name of somebody who owns a building – that’s completely different.

Reveal appealed and lost. Then we requested the documents again. Our latest request has fallen into a bureaucratic black hole. In October, a top FinCEN official designated our appeal for “further processing.” Since then, months have passed with no response. Now, Reveal is going to court. In a complaint filed Monday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California by our general counsel, D. Victoria Baranetsky, Reveal argues that the government has “no lawful basis for declining to release the records” under FOIA.

“The public and the press have a clear and abiding interest in knowing who owns property in their communities,” the complaint states, “and keeping public officials accountable in their handling of this matter.”

There is no compelling reason to keep this information secret. Historically, in the United States, the true owners of residential real estate properties have been publicly available through county recorders offices. However, for more than a decade, the proliferation of all-cash buys by shell companies has begun to obliterate that transparency.

Countries around the world have addressed this problem head on. In Argentina, Australia, Israel, Jamaica and the Netherlands, any member of the public may request this information. In Russia and Ukraine, it is already online. Public disclosure is coming even to some notorious tax shelters, including the Cayman Islands, officials in the United Kingdom say, in 2021.

In the United States, we’re on no such path to disclosure. A bipartisan anti-money-laundering bill, which passed the House in October, would require banks to systematically disclose the true owners of shell companies to FinCEN but would keep the public in the dark, stripping out all “personally identifiable information,” including anything “that would allow for the identification of a particular corporation or limited liability company.”

That leaves us with the information the government already collects through FinCEN. There’s little reason it should remain secret. Healthy, vibrant communities aren’t created by the ghosts of offshore bank accounts. Americans deserve to know who their neighbors are.

The Afghanistan Papers Are a Case Study in Colonial Propaganda

In an earlier article (FAIR.org, 12/18/19) regarding the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19), I discussed how the Post’s exposé also exposed the Post as one of the primary vehicles US officials use to spread their lies, and why it’s impossible for corporate media outlets like the Post to raise more substantive questions about the deceptive nature of US foreign policy.

But those aren’t the only significant takeaways. The Afghanistan Papers should also be considered an excellent case study of contemporary colonial propaganda, and yet another example of corporate media criticizing US wars without opposing US imperialism.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of media coverage of the Vietnam War, in Manufacturing Consent, found that questions of the invasion’s “tactics and costs”—to the US—dominated the debate, because the media absorbed the framework of government propaganda regarding the “necessity” of military intervention, the “righteousness of the American cause” and the US’s “nobility of intent.” Decades later, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of corporate media is still a useful tool in understanding the Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

The Post advanced the centuries-old colonial narrative of the empire’s good intentions gone awry when it argued that the US “inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government,” and that this illustrated that “even some of the most well-intentioned projects could boomerang.” In fact, the Post dedicated a whole section of the Afghanistan Papers to propagating this standard colonial narrative, called “Stranded Without a Strategy,” which argued at length:

US and allied officials admitted they veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11. By expanding the original mission, they said they adopted fatally flawed warfighting strategies based on misguided assumptions about a country they did not understand….

Diplomats and military commanders acknowledged they struggled to answer simple questions: Who is the enemy? Whom can we count on as allies? How will we know when we have won?

Their strategies differed, but Bush and Obama both committed early blunders that they never recovered from, according to the interviews.

The Post is so eager to push this colonial narrative of noble incompetence that a later report (12/11/19) on “key takeaways” from the Afghanistan Papers claimed that US officials “failed to align policy solutions with the challenges they confronted,” having “strategic drift” in place of “coherent US policy for Afghanistan.” As noted earlier, one method of discerning whether US officials are being dishonest, not incompetent, is to check whether the pretexts for invading and occupying another country are constantly changing.

But the imperial utility of a cost/benefit or tactical “critique” of US wars is the implication that immoral and illegal invasions like the Afghanistan War are justifiable if the US can achieve its goals, and it enables future invasions, provided US wars are better fought next time. It’s an intentionally nebulous criterion, since there are always tactical and cost/benefit questions to be raised for any military endeavor, which is why this kind of critique can enable perpetual interventions in the service of US imperialism. Indeed, the Post actually admits this when it mentioned that the Afghanistan inspector general’s secretive “Lessons Learned” project was

meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

Furthermore, at several times the Post parroted statements from US officials claiming that some of the “lessons learned” about their “strategic failures” were that the US should have killed more people in Pakistan and threatened to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely—without any pushback.

The Post parroted claims that “Obama’s strategy” of imposing “strict deadlines” and promising to “bring home all troops by the end of his presidency” was “destined to fail,” because the Taliban could just “wait him out.” Why was Obama’s broken promise an “artificial” date for “ending the war before it was over”? If the US truly prioritized preserving taxpayer dollars and the lives of US troops and Afghans, the open secret is that the US could simply end the Afghanistan War any time it wanted to, by announcing an unconditional, unilateral withdrawal without negotiating with the Taliban.

In his December 2016 Lessons Learned interview, Crocker said the only way to force Pakistan to change would be for Trump to keep US troops in Afghanistan indefinitely and give them the green light to hunt the Taliban on Pakistani territory.In another “Lessons Learned” interview cited in the Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19), regarding the “strategic challenge” of Pakistan supporting the Taliban and sheltering their leaders despite receiving billions of dollars a year to “fight terrorism,” the Post uncritically cited a US official’s bloodthirsty support for indefinite occupation and killing Taliban members anywhere in Pakistan:

“It would allow him to say, ‘You worry about our reliability, you worry about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I’m here to tell you that I’m going to keep troops there as long as I feel we need them, there is no calendar.’

“ ‘That’s the good news. The bad news for you is we’re going to kill Taliban leaders wherever we find them: Baluchistan, Punjab, downtown Islamabad. We’re going to go find them, so maybe you want to do a strategic recalculation.’ ”

While pushing this colonial narrative, the Post actually tried to make the absurd case that some of the US’s strategic failures stemmed from being too generous to Afghans, and lying to the American public about not wanting to do “nation-building,” asserting that “nation-building is exactly what the United States has tried to do in war-battered Afghanistan—on a colossal scale.”

Americans praising their own generosity is a hallmark feature of American colonialism—which extended to framing atrocities like slavery, the displacement of Native Americans and the extermination of Vietnamese people as “generous”—and the Post continues this long tradition by parroting US officials who believed that “Congress and the White House made matters worse by drenching the destitute country with far more money than it could possibly absorb.” Apparently the problem is not that the US intentionally funnels money to enrich US investors and prop up puppet governments subservient to the US, but that the US engages in thoughtless charity:

The scale of the corruption was the unintended result of swamping the war zone with far more aid and defense contracts than impoverished Afghanistan could absorb. There was so much excess, financed by American taxpayers, that opportunities for bribery and fraud became almost limitless, according to the interviews.

The Post (12/9/19) claimed that “no nation needed more building than Afghanistan” following “continuous warfare since 1979,” when it was invaded by the Soviet Union. The Post cited frustrated statements from officials working for USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) complaining that the US was wasting too much money on nation-building for primitive people in a largely non-market society who “bartered for items” instead of using currency, and lacked the education and “technical expertise” necessary to maintain “huge infrastructure projects,” with officials claiming “We were bringing 21st-century stuff to a society living in a different time period.”

Left unmentioned were US efforts in 1979 to sabotage an indigenous Afghan Communist movement, that was making strides toward ostensible US goals like the education of girls, eradicating opium production and expanding access to healthcare, by “knowingly increasing the probability” of luring “the Russians” into their own “Vietnam War.” (Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later defended this ruthless strategy: “That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?”)

Nor was there any mention of USAID and the NED being corrupt propaganda arms of the US State Department to subvert leftist governments, often serving as a pipeline of taxpayer dollars into investors’ pockets under the guise of promoting “development” and “democracy.” Some US officials even argued that the rampant fraud and waste from American “aid” contractors were so parasitic that it would be better to funnel contracts to corrupt Afghans, who “would probably take 20% for their personal use or for their extended families and friends,” than “‘a bunch of expensive American experts’ who would waste 80 to 90% of the funds on overhead and profit.”

And despite the Post’s attempts to portray the US as “inadvertently” building a “corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government that remains dependent on US military power for its survival,” it’s hard to see how other candid statements about the US military and agencies like the CIA “giving cash” to “purchase loyalty” from Afghan government officials, religious leaders and warlords viewed by many Afghans as “cruel despots,” don’t contradict that assertion. In fact, Herman and Chomsky’s study The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism found that corruption is a primary feature of US client states—like the corrupt Afghan government—with US aid and a favorable foreign investment climate being negatively related to the condition of human rights in these countries. Hence the numerous reports of Afghanistan being “open for business.”

Tellingly, US officials in the Afghanistan Papers remarked that while the US actively replaced officials seeking to combat corruption, or knowingly “looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever,” and retained support for US-installed CIA assets like Hamid Karzai who committed mass voter fraud, US officials had a “dogmatic adherence to free-market principles.” This is supposed to explain why, despite their “good intentions,” they consciously imposed economic policies that enriched foreign investors and increased poverty, instead of policies that would help Afghanistan, because US officials considered them “incompatible with capitalism.” This is consistent with Michael Parenti’s study of US foreign policy (The Sword and the Dollar) finding that US commitments to “democracy” and “anti-corruption” are dispensable and easily abandoned (indicating insincerity), while commitments to opening countries like Afghanistan to foreign investment and free-market capitalism are uncompromisable.

But does the US have good intentions? Then what explains the Bush administration’s ultimatum to the Taliban on behalf of building a pipeline with the Unocal corporation to “accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,” informing the Pakistani and Indian governments at least five weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks that  it would attack Afghanistan “before the end of October”? Why install a former Unocal consultant like Karzai as Afghanistan’s new president after the invasion? What explains the refusal to put Afghanistan on the State Department’s list of states sponsoring terrorism—despite knowing the Taliban were sheltering bin Laden—other than the fact that it would prevent US oil and construction companies from entering into an agreement with Kabul to construct pipelines to Central Asian oil and gas fields?

The immediate construction of US military bases and the resulting private businesses servicing them generated massive corporate profits for the military/industrial complex, and served as guardians for US corporations extracting mineral wealth—indications of a planned long-term occupation and a launching pad for attacks within and beyond Afghanistan’s borders. Explicit statements from the Bush doctrine—which continued to guide the Obama and Trump administrations’ national security strategy—explained that “real freedom” means free trade, the “moral principle” that “if others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it.” These are the serious, logically consistent explanations for the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers and trove of documents are worth reading through, but it’s also a contradictory mess containing many distortions and lies by omission. The scandal of the Afghanistan War is not that the US entered into and prolonged an “unwinnable” war; the scandal is that the US empire’s invasion of Afghanistan is a war crime in violation of international law, and has inflicted imperial violence on the Afghan people, and it would remain a scandal even if the US accomplished all of its ostensible goals. Even as the Post’s scoop exposes US officials as liars—and highlights the danger of credulously accepting their ideological framework—because they rely so heavily on those officials’ narratives, the Afghanistan Papers still manage to propagate the old colonial narrative of the empire’s good intentions thwarted by backwards foreigners.

All the Political Revolts America Ignored in 2019

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – In 2019, the Middle East was shaken by a new round of street revolts. As the year began, Abdelaziz Bouteflika had announced a fifth run for the presidency of Algeria. Then the peaceful “revolution of Smiles” broke out and by April he had resigned. A small elite has for decades monopolized Algeria’s oil resources and has rewarded its supporters while marginalizing everyone else. On December 12, Abdelmadjid Tebboune was elected president, amid continued massive demonstrations in major cities and a protester boycott of the election itself. The crowds are clearly unconvinced that switching out one president for another, when both are lackeys of the small Oil elite, will actually change things.

As 2019 began, Omar al-Bashir was president of the Sudan, as he had been for 30 years. A brutal dictator implicated in genocide in Darfur he was widely considered a war criminal after an International Criminal Court ruling. By April 11, continued urban unrest and strategic rallies led by the leftist Sudanese Professionals Association and, behind the scenes, by mystical Sufi orders, had pressured the officer corps into making a coup against al-Bashir. Not satisfied with replacing one general with another, the crowds continued to pressure the military to step down in favor of a civilian government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE appear to have backed the military junta against the people, but could not forestall a compromise. In the end a form of cohabitation developed, with a new civilian government but continued military oversight and a promise of transition to pure civilian rule. Sudan lost the revenue for South Sudan’s oil in 2013 when that region became an independent country, and its elite floundered in finding a new business model. Inflation was running at 75%, hurting people on fixed incomes or who depended on imports.

In ordinary times, the fall of al-Bashir should have been a huge story in the US, where at least lip service has been paid to caring about his Darfur genocide.

As 2019 began, Adel Abdulmahdi was prime minister of Iraq. Although voters had indicated in the 2018 election that they were fed up with the handful of parties that has dominated Iraq since the Bush era, Abdulmahdi was nevertheless chosen as PM. He came out of the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council. Massive protests broke out at the beginning of October in Shiite cities like Nasiriya and in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. The Iraqi security forces and Shiite paramilitaries replied with deadly force, killing over 500 in October, November and December. Abdulmahdi was forced to resign. The crowds had demanded an end to corruption and to the party spoils system whereby the bigger parties in parliament were rewarded with government jobs for their supporters. They also wanted electoral reforms to block the dominance of the parties that keep winning the elections. Just last week, the Iraqi parliament moved away from the list system, in which you vote for a party list, and toward a system were voters can vote for individual politicians. Although Iraq is pumping 3.5 million barrels a day of petroleum, the billions in receipts that go to the government have not been invested in Iraqi jobs or infrastructure. Corruption runs so rife that the Iraqi treasury is said to be dry. All the $500 billion earned from oil sales since the Bush era seems to have just disappeared into the pockets of politicians. Crowds wanted more services and a share in the national oil wealth. Yesterday, Assad al-Eidani was nominated as prime minister. A member of the 2005- elite from the pro-Iran Islamic Supreme Council and the governor of Basra, his nomination holds out little hope of improvement of the sort the crowds demand.

As 2019 began, Saad Hariri was prime minister of Lebanon. On 17 October small street protests broke out against corruption, gridlock, lack of services, failure to collect garbage, lack of electricity, sectarianism and new taxes on the Whatsapp messaging program. By 18 December, Hariri had bowed out of consideration for another term as prime minister. The crowds are not mollified by simply switching out the prime minister for someone equally bad, and clearly intend to keep the government’s feet to the fire. Trump all this fall withheld military aid from Lebanon.

All four of these popular revolts caused a sitting prime minister or president to step down. All four demanded an end to corruption and an end to government inaction on providing jobs and infrastructure. Many wanted more and better jobs. All were nationalistic rather than fundamentalist in character. Sudan’s Association of Sudanese Journalists is a leftist organization.

Algeria, Sudan, and Iraq are all oil states where the distribution of oil proceeds was closely held by the state.

All the air in American politics seems to have been sucked up by Trump and his Power Tweets, so that cable television seemed to have little energy to spare for the big developments in the world that had the potential to affect the United States.

In 2011 the American public was mesmerized by the youth street revolts that overturned governments in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, and which plunged Bahrain into a further authoritarian miasma and kicked off an 8-year civil war in Syria. Yet they showed little interest in the similar movements this year.

West Coast Fishery Rebounds in Rare Conservation ‘Home Run’

WARRENTON, Ore. — A rare environmental success story is unfolding in waters off the U.S. West Coast.

After years of fear and uncertainty, bottom trawler fishermen — those who use nets to scoop up rockfish, bocaccio, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other deep-dwelling fish — are making a comeback here, reinventing themselves as a sustainable industry less than two decades after authorities closed huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean because of the species’ depletion.

The ban devastated fishermen, but on Jan. 1, regulators will reopen an area roughly three times the size of Rhode Island off Oregon and California to groundfish bottom trawling — all with the approval of environmental groups that were once the industry’s biggest foes. The two sides collaborated on a long-term plan that will continue to resuscitate the groundfish industry while permanently protecting thousands of square miles of reefs and coral beds that benefit the overfished species.

Now, the fishermen who see their livelihood returning must solve another piece of the puzzle: drumming up consumer demand for fish that haven’t been in grocery stores or on menus for a generation.

“It’s really a conservation home run,” said Shems Jud, regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean program. “The recovery is decades ahead of schedule. It’s the biggest environmental story that no one knows about.”

The process also netted a win for conservationists concerned about the future of extreme deepwater habitats where bottom trawlers currently don’t go. A tract of ocean the size of New Mexico with waters up to 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) deep will be off-limits to bottom-trawling to protect deep-sea corals and sponges just now being discovered.

“Not all fishermen are rapers of the environment. When you hear the word ‘trawler,’ very often that’s associated with destruction of the sea and pillaging,” said Kevin Dunn, whose trawler Iron Lady was featured in a Whole Foods television commercial about sustainable fishing.

Groundfish is a catch-all term that refers to dozens of species that live on, or near, the bottom of the Pacific off the West Coast. Trawling vessels drag weighted nets to collect as many fish as possible, but that can damage critical rocky underwater habitat.

The groundfish fishery hasn’t always struggled. Starting in 1976, the federal government subsidized the construction of domestic fishing vessels to lock down U.S. interests in West Coast waters, and by the 1980s, that investment paid off. Bottom trawling was booming, with 500 vessels in California, Oregon and Washington hauling in 200 million pounds (91 million kilograms) of non-whiting groundfish a year. Unlike Dungeness crab and salmon, groundfish could be harvested year-round, providing an economic backbone for ports.

But in the late 1990s, scientists began to sound the alarm about dwindling fish stocks.

Just nine of the more than 90 groundfish species were in trouble, but because of the way bottom trawlers fished — indiscriminately hauling up millions of pounds of whatever their nets encountered — regulators focused on all bottom trawling. Multiple species of rockfish, slow-growing creatures with spiny fins and colorful names like canary, darkblotched and yellow eye, were the hardest hit.

By 2005, trawlers brought in just one-quarter of the haul of the 1980s. The fleet is now down to 75 boats, said Brad Pettinger, former director of the Oregon Trawl Commission who was key in developing the plan to reopen fishing grounds.

“We really wiped out the industry for a number of years,” Pettinger said. “To get those things up and going again is not easy.”

In 2011, trawlers were assigned quotas for how many of each species they could catch. If they went over, they had to buy quota from other fishermen in a system reminiscent of a carbon cap-and-trade model. Mandatory independent observers, paid by the trawlers, accompanied the vessels and hand-counted their haul.

Fishermen quickly learned to avoid areas heavy in off-limits species and began innovating to net fewer banned fish.

Surveys soon showed groundfish rebounding — in some cases, 50 years faster than predicted — and accidental trawling of overfished species fell by 80%. The Marine Stewardship Council certified 13 species in the fishery as sustainable in 2014, and five more followed last year.

As the quota system’s success became apparent, environmentalists and trawlers began to talk. Regulators would soon revisit the trawling rules, and the two sides wanted a voice.

They met more than 30 times, slowly building trust as they crafted a proposal. Trawlers brought maps developed over generations, alerted environmentalists to reefs they didn’t know about, and even shared proprietary tow paths.

“All we could do on our end is make a good-faith offer, and I really credit the guys in the industry for taking that up,” said Seth Atkinson, an attorney with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “These were tough compromises.”

Last year, regulators approved a plan to reopen the 17-year-old Rockfish Conservation Area off Oregon and California, while banning future trawling in extreme-depth waters and making off-limits some habitat dubbed essential to fish reproduction, including a large area off Southern California.

“A fair number of fishermen thought it was a good deal and if it was going to happen, it was better for them to participate than not,” said Tom Libby, a fish processor who was instrumental in crafting the agreement. “It’s right up there with the best and most rewarding things in my career — and I’ve been at it 50 years.”

Some groups, like Oceana, wanted even more protections from bottom trawling, which it calls the “most damaging fishing method to seafloor habitats off the West Coast.” In a news release, the group emphasized that the agreement it did get safeguards 90 percent of the seafloor in U.S. waters off the West Coast.

Even so, with fragile species rebounding, trawlers could harvest as much as 120 million pounds (54 million kilograms) a year, but there’s only demand for about half that much. That’s because groundfish have been replaced in stores by farmed, foreign species like tilapia.

A trade association called Positively Groundfish is trying to change that by touring food festivals and culinary trade shows, evangelizing to chefs and seafood buyers about the industry’s rebound and newfound sustainability. They give out samples, too.

“We are treating this almost like a new product for which you have to build awareness — but we do have a great story,” said Jana Hennig, the association’s executive director. “People are so surprised to hear that not everything is lost, that not everything is doom and gloom, but that it’s possible that you can manage a fishery so well that it actually bounces back to abundance.”

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Follow Flaccus on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gflaccus

Can a New Counterculture Be the Elixir to Late Capitalism?

Though I was born about 30 years too late to have been a Flower Child, the Hippie era always loomed large in my life. Much of my family identified as Hippies (or Hippie-adjacent), and spoke lovingly of the Flower Power days. Unusually, my grandparents, born in the 1920s, were fairly bohemian in their inclinations, and thus enamored of the counterculture generation that assimilated their children. My grandmother — a fervent atheist more libertine than most Millennials — bemoaned the evangelical direction of the country during the Bush years. “In the ’60s, we never thought people would still be religious by the year 2000,” she lamented in 2004, just after Bush’s reelection. “We thought we’d all get more enlightened.” As a young progressive coming into his political conscience during Bush, her statement was as heartbreaking as it was unfathomable.

As a child I was inspired by the utopian faith in science and creativity that had been instilled in my family by the Hippies. Yet as I grew up, it became harder to see the Hippie movement as anything other than a failure, particularly in its ability to actually foment social change. Indeed, many of the cultural byproducts of the 1960s counterculture, however distorted by capital, seemed to have made the world a worse place. Notably, Silicon Valley — its corporate culture thoroughly infused with a degree of techno-utopianism learned from the Hippies — was viewed, until recently, as innately good. Hence, for far too long, the public and politicians gave the tech industry carte blanche to algorithmically destroy journalistic institutions and manipulate human thought on a mass scale with social media. All this in the name of a false utopian “progress,” as though technology and progress were synonymous — something that, as I’ve written before, Silicon Valley’s Hippie progenitors believed.

After reading Curtis White’s just-released book, “Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today,” I’ve started to wonder if my lack of faith in the Hippies was misplaced. White — a novelist, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Illinois State and Salon contributor — argues convincingly that the only way to save Earth, and to halt capitalism’s relentless scourge on life and the planet, is through a reinvigoration of the counterculture. His book made me think perhaps my idea of what the counterculture movement even was was slightly wrong, by virtue of never having lived it. As he writes in the book’s coda, being a part of the counterculture means “[setting] [our]selves counter to things that demand our loyalty: the nation, perhaps our own families . . . ” Maybe hearing stories from my family wasn’t enough for me to actually understand the era, and what it was like to live through it; particularly, understanding the connection between counterculture and the Romantics, something that White threads together quite nicely.

White was kind enough to explain his new book and his line of thinking in detail in an email interview. As usual, our words have been lightly edited for clarity.

I have the sense that the biggest objection that one might level at the proposal that the counterculture is the necessary salve for a dying capitalist empire is to point to the American 1960s counterculture as a counterexample. Though individually some Hippies were clearly radical in the leftist sense of the word, overall, the Hippies of the 1960s had an incomplete critique of society and economy, as evidenced by the fact that the spirit of the 1960s was folded into Silicon Valley’s worldview without the techies having any sense of contradiction. The “fun” workplaces of Silicon Valley and the sort of socially libertarian spirit that pervades their idea of what they do was a direct result of the Hippie relationship to computing.

I’m wondering, do you see the 1960s counterculture — particularly the American version — as having failed in its mission? How does a proposal of a revival of counterculture square with the cooptation of 1960s counterculture by capitalism? Feel free to disagree with any of my assumptions.

Curtis White: My attempt to “reimagine” counterculture begins with an insistence that the ‘60s counterculture was not about some self-contained bubble of cultural resistance that came, lived its short and unsuccessful life, and then disappeared. Instead, I remind the reader that the counterculture we are familiar with is part of a long tradition with its origin in English Romanticism.

Before the Romantics, you were born into a “station” — nobility, merchant class, or labor, people who “worked with their hands.” But beginning in the late 18th century with philosopher/artists like Friedrich Schiller, in Germany, and William Blake, the possibility of resistance to rigid class divisions took form. This resistance joined art and revolt, most critically in the essays of Friedrich Schiller, especially “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.”

Marx was deeply influenced by German Romanticism, as his early essays, like “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” reveal. This is often referred to as “Marxist Humanism,” but it would be more revealing to say it was Marxist Romanticism. Marx’s version of romanticism is most recognizable now in his famous declaration that in a communist society “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but people can … hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner.” How far is this from the Hippie call to “get back to the land”?

The idea that the counterculture of the ‘60s failed is the principle ideological conclusion of the corporate media. I think that the ‘60s — uneven though it was, flawed though it was in instances — was the triumph of Romanticism. The progressive social issues of the present were to a great degree made possible by that most recent flowering of counterculture. I mean, just count the ways. Ecological consciousness, the rebirth of “nature,” all of that was pushed radically forward by Stuart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalogue” and Earth Day, and reinforced by musicians and artists (as Joni Mitchell sang, “Pave Paradise, put up a parking lot.”) Agriculture? The ‘60s radically pushed forward the idea of self-sustaining, local, organic farming, something that is now taken for granted in every town with a Farmer’s Market or a whole foods grocery. Food? Whole grain, plant-based food was given to us by the ‘60s and, as you will know, it is growing larger every year. Feminism? The origin of modern feminism is in Romantics like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the first great beacon of modern feminism.

The ‘60s radically pushed feminism in the direction that the Romantics desired: gender equality generally but women’s sexuality particularly. You know, “Women of the world, stop shaving your legs!” Gay rights? The Castro district in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York found opportunity in counterculture and pushed it hard and effectively, leading to the more recent achievements of the LGBTQ+ community. Religion? Western Buddhism is the counterculture’s great spiritual gift to the West. Buddhist communities, or sanghas, are thriving and enlarging still. War resistance? That goes without saying. The ‘60s forwarded a general skepticism of federal and state government because of the fact that those powers seemed only to lie and create victims. That skepticism, powered by the Yippies and magazines like Ramparts, continues to this day. We learned that lesson well. When government speaks, we assume that they’re lying, or I do, witness the current president of the United States and his shameless Republican Party but also witness Joe Biden and his ilk.

So, you know, tell me that the ‘60s were a failure. It radically forwarded the Romantic politics of non-participation in mainstream ideologies and orthodoxies, especially that slough of despond we call patriotism.

As for the cooptation of the counterculture by bad actors like Steve Jobs and Apple, I wrote on that subject with Andrew Cooper in the March 9, 2014 edition of Salon. The essay, “Apple and Amazon’s Big Lie: The rebel hacker and hipster nerd is a capitalist stooge,” argues that corporate mindfulness projects like Google’s Search Inside Yourself Institute betray the resistant nature of Buddhism. Co-opting is the primary way in which the dominant culture restrains resistant culture. Capitalism knows that it will have enemies, but if it must have enemies it will create them itself and in its own image. Thomas Frank wrote a good book about it, “The Conquest of Cool.”

You mention “socialist survivalism” as what countercultures have been about historically and will be about in the future. How would you describe this to a layperson?

Well, the phrase is a bit of a joke because it joins two very unlike things—socialism and the whack jobs in the hills hoarding arms in readiness for some ultimate reckoning. But one of the more powerful reasons that I think we need to start thinking again in countercultural terms doesn’t have only to do with hoping that counterculture will provide a more human way to live compared with the alienated, consumerist life we live under late capitalism. The survivalist part of the phrase has to do with the likelihood that the doomsday survivalists are not entirely wrong — there may very well be a reckoning approaching, namely global climate disaster. Can nation-states and state governance survive the massive losses coming to insurance markets? Insurance companies are already trying to get the hell out of California because they don’t want to get stuck paying for the next couple decades of “fire tornados.” What’s left of home insurance if it no longer protects against fire?

Can the financial system survive mass migrations of climate refugees all over the world including the United States? As you know, coastal regions are densely populated, and yet those areas of the country are in denial about what are simply the laws of physics applied to climate. I mean, the financial system worldwide almost collapsed in 2008 from sheer stupidity and greed. What happens when there are actual reasons for the collapse? Of course, whatever the reason for collapse, we can safely assume that the champions of greed and stupidity will be there to amplify its effects.

So, we may not need socialism, but we will need social bonds in neighborhoods, cities, and regions. I don’t think the nation state has any interest in providing those bonds. But it is already clear that social bonds are a life-and-death matter, we just don’t choose to recognize that fact. Here in the Seattle area we take emergency preparedness very seriously, mostly because of the threat of earthquakes but also more and more because of rising ocean levels. Only last week I was sitting in a meeting of local climate activists, here in Port Townsend, as we considered just how long it would take until the downtown was deluged regularly by high tides. 2050 was the informed guess. Which would mean that the downtown area and its shops and restaurants, the port, and the paper mill would be gone or non-functional, ending most of the economic activity in town. As one person put it, “We should be busy moving businesses up hill now, not when the catastrophe arrives.” Of course, there is no moving a port or a paper mill up the hill.

We need, in short, to start reconsidering what the communalists of the ‘60s and ‘70s aspired to: small “d” democratic social organizations working for the mutual benefit of all its members. These organizations can provide the benefit not only of survival but also of a kind of happiness that we don’t experience under hi-tech, neoliberal capitalism. Tech workers won’t be housed in human abstraction in condo warehouses, Seattle’s version of Soviet “brutalist” architecture done in pastels. (I invite you to take a walking tour of Microsoft City in Redmond, Washington. I rode my bicycle through it recently, and it felt like I was in a colony on a distant planet. Data might be happy there, but it was difficult to imagine humans liking it.)

The good news is that we’re already working in the direction of new forms of social relations. The utter dysfunction of the federal government, the social paralysis caused by urban/rural polarization, our disgust with two centuries of civil war both hot and cold, all that has led us to “act locally.” In small towns of the midcontinent, this has become a requirement as supermarkets abandon depopulated areas and the people who remain have to create their own grocery stores. These towns are becoming countercultures of necessity. Perhaps they’d be relieved to see the supermarkets return, but they are also experiencing the happy realization that it is rewarding to be independent of corporations and newly dependent on neighbors. So, shouldn’t we on the city side of the urban/rural division also make virtue of necessity and try to create communities that are richly human? It’s not all about survival, it’s also about happiness.

I mean, wouldn’t it be better to work on these things now instead of mainlining Rachel Maddow and wondering, “Is it Joe? Elizabeth? Ahhh! Maybe Bernie?”

I’m thinking about historical leftist revolutions, say, in Cuba, China or the Soviet Union. Would you say that the presence and activity of a counterculture in either of these places was integral to their success?

Counterculture is not a revolution. It is an insurrection in the name of life. Counterculture is not interested in creating a new perfected nation state. It is not going to recognize the state’s unlimited authority. There are other things that counterculture does not recognize. It does not recognize the idea that the repayment of debts is a morality. In reality, debt has always been a form of social control as we are seeing in spades now with criminal levels of student debt. People in debt tend not to abandon their employment even if that employment makes them miserable. They “can’t afford to quit.” So, Bernie Sanders’s call to forgive student debt is also a call for the elimination of the morality of debt, or I hope it is. That morality has always been a scam.

The nation state question is: how do we learn to love something that does nothing but lie to us and put our lives at risk, put life itself at risk, in ways large, small, and innumerable. But to think that our patriotism is self-evident (“of course I love America!”), or to think that debt is a moral obligation, these things make us stupid. Capitalism has always needed workers who are “stupid-smart”: smart enough to do the chores that industry calls for, but stupid enough not to resent the deadly limits it imposes. Vietnam, Iraq, police violence, incarceration, poverty, epidemics of drugs, alcohol, mass loneliness, and suicide. Where is America’s “founding idea” in this mess? Where is its promise? I’m not going to defend it. It’s bad enough that I have to live in it. I’m not into self-mockery. Instead, I say let’s make civil disobedience a way of life.

Towards the end, you write that it is wrong to provide solutions, and rather it’s your duty to give the reader an opening to find their own possibilities. In the Coda Coda, for instance, you say that you encourage us to “set [our]selves counter to things that demand our loyalty: the nation, perhaps our own families…” and so on. If you don’t mind talking about your own life, I’m curious if you feel that you’ve been able to live up to these ideals.

For me, counterculture is a set of open possibilities led mostly by intuitions about what makes humans — and the natural world they live in — thrive. Counterculture is not interested in wasting life working futilely toward a socialism that promises but never delivers a perfected socialist state. In other words, counterculture does not believe in “fixing” the horrors of the nation state, or curing painful antagonisms between regions (our ongoing civil wars).

So, I don’t claim to know how we should live or where our intuitions should lead us. There are no rules for countercultural living that I know of and I don’t offer any here. It is all to be determined socially as it evolves and enlarges. The only crucial thing is that counterculture is a rejection of the reigning social order of corporate destructiveness and de-humanization. Happily, there is a rich archive of guides for us in the artist-anarchs of the last two-and-a-half centuries—including truculent rebels like Beethoven—and in the work of social critics like Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Paul Goodman, George W. S. Trow, and the architect Christopher Alexander. How we take that archive up and live it is not something that I have any interest in dictating.

For myself, anyone’s cultural resistance is compromised by the fact that we live in the belly of the beast. So, we have no choice except to live in compromise. We have no choice except to live in what Antonio Negri called the “sociality of money.” So, unless we are willing to live in the “mean streets,” homeless, we have to find ways to attach ourselves to the money circuit, you know, and get some of it to flow through our little nodes on the circuit, otherwise known as a bank account. When I was teaching I had a sign on my office door reading, “Refuse Work,” but I had a job, right? Whatever I taught in classes was always in conflict with the fact that I was also performing the task of sorting human beings into categories useful to the state and to future employers: these are the A students, these the B, and those over there are the failures. Use them accordingly. I certainly taught against the grain of the dominant culture, but I was always also complicit with that culture even if it was complicity under duress.

So, all of those inevitable limitations duly noted, I have lived the best I can in good faith with my own experience, an experience that for sure includes growing up in San Francisco in the ‘60s and feeling the warm and liberating flow of both psychedelia and the radical critique of the capitalist life-world. I was a student radical, draft counselor, war resistor, living in the Haight, but spending most of my time studying literature and writing fiction and taking the 5 McAllister bus to the Fillmore to hear, say, Albert King wail on “Born Under a Bad Sign.” I am still loyal to that experience. I am grateful that it saved me from whatever the East Bay suburb I grew up in had in mind for me.

Beyond that, I published my first book of stories not with a commercial house but with an authors collective called the Fiction Collective, which I eventually became responsible for, with Ronald Sukenick, under the logo “FC2.” FC2 is still around and very lively and I still read manuscripts for them and give them money from my ill-gotten gains as a retired professor with a pension. I was also very active in the larger small press movements of the ‘90s, mostly with Dalkey Archive Press. Beyond that, I have written books that I hope others have found useful and encouraging. In general, my purpose has been to provide self-understanding for kindred spirits.

You locate the larger social and civic problem of American life as lying in “civic narcissism,” meaning the various factions who want their politics to become universal do not realize the violence required to enact their vision. But what is the alternative? It’s hard for me to think of political factions that don’t possess this kind of narcissism among their constituents. (Besides, I suppose, mainstream Democrats’ liberalism, which is de facto compromising and bloodless.) Historically, isn’t it factionalists that helped build movements and ensure their success, from suffrage to the labor movement to civil rights?

Narcissism of whatever kind is undesirable, as Donald Trump shows us minute-by-minute 24/7. To say, “I think so highly of my political conclusions that I would have them imposed on everyone,” guarantees civil strife. Imposition, especially when enforced by the National Guard, is always a reason for resentment. Witness our ongoing Civil War with the South’s bigotry and its love for guns and its deformed Christianity. We can’t “fix” the South.

Similarly, trying to impose our sense of the good on capitalism will be bloody, and it will be mostly our blood since capitalism currently owns centralized government and its monopoly of legal violence. If Texas has its way, protesting at oil pipelines will soon be a felony with hard time, confiscation of property, making our prisons political gulags. Recognizing this and strategizing from these understandings is, for me, simply realism, and, people, we need to “get real.”

At the same time, I don’t exclude the pragmatism of issue specific resistance. At those rare times when Democrats have the presidency and both chambers, issues like health care can be addressed, just as Obama’s Affordable Care Act demonstrated. Political factions—what we have come to call “identity politics” — working on specific issues like environmentalism, or feminism, or racism, or Occupy’s righteous objections to the 1% — are not trying to fix anything larger than their own issue. They are looking for progress. And I say that’s fine, so organize, donate, go to rallies, sign petitions, and take to the street when necessary. I always have.

Worse yet, as we know now, the advances of the New Deal and ‘60s activism are being pushed back, if not pushed down our throats. That progress is being taken apart, and quickly. Enforcement of voting rights act? Gone. Food stamps? Radically reduced. Abortion rights? Not in Ohio. Unions? Not in right to work states. The Great Compromise between government, business, and labor is in tatters. The social achievements of the ‘60s are in retreat.

An old leftist saying explains why: “Money always returns to its rightful owners.” The oligarchs are taking it all back. Economic inequality now is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. So factional incrementalism can have its victories, but those victories are always marked for future destruction by the oligarchs. Eventually their money and their power come back to them, if they have any say in the matter, and boy don’t they have a say, a vastly disproportionate say.

Nonetheless, centrists argue that progress made in increments is the best we can do for now, and maybe that’s right, but it’s not the only thing we can do now. There is no good argument for asking people to devote their lives to partial struggles. As Emma Goldman famously said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” This “dance” is not to be taken literally. It is a figure of speech, a synecdoche, where “dance” is part of a larger thing: life. She did not advocate devoting our lives to the great “struggle.” Endless struggle and self-sacrifice is no way to live.

So, I’m asking in this book, “Why isn’t counterculture part of the conversation? Why isn’t counterculture’s anarchic politics of non-participation, the politics of refusal, relevant?”

Okay, that’s a lot of carrying on, to which some part of your readership is probably saying, “OK, Boomer!”

No One Is Dismissing Bernie Sanders’ Chances Now

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ recent surge in national and early-state polls, enthusiastic progressive base, and resilience in the aftermath of his heart attack have reportedly forced some within the Democratic establishment who were previously dismissive of the Vermont senator to concede—both in private and in public—that he could ultimately run away with the party’s presidential nomination.

“For months the Vermont senator was written off by Democratic Party insiders as a candidate with a committed but ultimately narrow base who was too far left to win the primary,” Politico reported Thursday. “But in the past few weeks, something has changed. In private conversations and on social media, Democratic officials, political operatives, and pundits are reconsidering Sanders’ chances.”

David Brock, a Democratic operative and long-time ally of Hillary Clinton who earlier this year discussed launching an “anti-Sanders campaign,” told Politico that Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden have “both proven to be very resilient.”

“It may have been inevitable that eventually you would have two candidates representing each side of the ideological divide in the party,” Brock added. “A lot of smart people I’ve talked to lately think there’s a very good chance those two end up being Biden and Sanders.”

Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said “people should take him very seriously,” referring to Sanders.

“He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a adviser to former President Barack Obama. “He could build a real head of steam heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

According to Real Clear Politics polling averages, Sanders is in a close second place in Iowa, first place in New Hampshire, and virtually tied with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for second in Nevada. A poll last week from the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies showed Sanders leading the Democratic field in California, a crucial Super Tuesday state.

Sanders’ polling strength, combined with the collapse of “other candidates with once-high expectations, such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Beto O’Rourke,” has begun to change the minds of Democratic insiders, according to Politico.

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, said figures within the Democratic establishment are not rethinking Sanders’ chances to win the nomination “out of the goodness of their heart.”

They are doing so, Shakir said, because “it is harder and harder to ignore him when he’s rising in every average that you see.”

Shakir went on to tell Politico that the campaign is eager to have a conversation about Sanders’ electability.

“We want that,” said Shakir. “I’d love to be able to argue why he stands a better chance to beat Donald Trump than Joe Biden.”

While Sanders has received significantly less attention in the corporate media than his Democratic rivals, Politico noted that a “series of TV segments around last week’s Democratic debate illustrate the shift in how Sanders is being perceived.”

“We never talk about Bernie Sanders. He is actually doing pretty well in this polling,” David Axelrod, a former Obama adviser, said on CNN following the debate. “He’s actually picked up. And the fact is Bernie Sanders is as consistent as consistent can be.”

Sanders’ campaign announced following the debate in Los Angeles that it raised more than a million dollars on debate day from tens of thousands of individual contributions.

“The fundraising total and number of individual donations,” the campaign said in a statement, “was the highest for Sanders’ campaign during a debate day in 2019, which is just the latest sign of the momentum his campaign is seeing all over the country.”

The Best Truthdig Arts & Culture Stories of 2019

This year’s top Arts & Culture stories include film reviews of must-see films like “The Irishman” and “Joker,” exclusive interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris and author Naomi Klein, and an account of the 2019 Venice Biennale, among others. To read the full stories, click on the hyperlinked titles. 

Martin Scorsese Closes the Book on the Mafia Genre

By CARRIE RICKEY

The scope of “The Irishman” is as big as the U.S., and the director delivers a hit that lives up to the hype—and then some.

Neoliberalism Is the True Villain of ‘Joker’

By LESLIE LEE

In its depiction of an austerity-wracked Gotham, Todd Phillips has made one of the most subversive and left-leaning major films of 2019.

Geena Davis Puts a Sexist Hollywood on Notice

By KASIA ANDERSON

In “This Changes Everything,” Davis and peers like Kimberly Peirce, Meryl Streep and Taraji P. Henson zoom in on their industry’s gender gap.

 

‘Mulholland Drive’ Is David Lynch’s ‘Ulysses’

By ALLEN BARRA

One of the filmmaker’s most compelling fever dreams deserves another look.

Naomi Klein: We Have Far Less Time Than We Think

By ILANA NOVICK

In a new interview with Truthdig, the author of “On Fire” explains why the next year could determine the future of U.S. climate policy.

 

Watch the CIA Get Away With Torture

By JORDAN RIEFE

Based on the 2014 Senate probe into the use of “enhanced interrogation,” “The Report” sheds light on a shameful chapter in U.S. history.

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Is Still Revolutionary at Age 100

By NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA and ROBERT SCHEER

The legendary poet, who is now 100 years old, can be described by nearly enough epithets for every year he’s been alive.

Venice Biennale Artists Foresee a World on the Brink

By DAVID MATORIN

The tangible effects of political concerns, ranging from mass displacement to climate change, are unavoidable at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Ellen DeGeneres and the American Psychopath

By JACOB BACHARACH

The talk show host’s sanctimonious defense for catching a football game with George W. Bush speaks to a disturbing national pathology.

 

Errol Morris Is as Scared as You Are

By JACOB SUGARMAN

The legendary documentarian opens up about his new film, “American Dharma,” his fear of Steve Bannon and what makes compelling propaganda.

 

The Most Horrifying Look at Monsanto Yet

By NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

Samanta Schweblin has terrified readers across the globe precisely because she tells familiar stories we should all dread.

‘Black Is Beautiful’: Identity, Pride and the Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

By JORDAN RIEFE

A new look at the activist impresario and photographer provides a positive guide for building community.